Mark: We thought we'd record our meeting for all for all our of our Linguist members and all of our English link listeners. So with that I think the first thing is we have just switched email and newsletter service providers so we'll no longer be using I Make News for a variety of reasons but we really didn't like I Make News so now we're switching to Aweber. Steve: I just might point out to some people who aren't familiar, I Make News, that is the brand name of one email service and what do you call the other one? Mark: Aweber.
Steve: Aweber. Will those people who have been receiving these, will they notice a difference Mark: The first thing that will happen is that we will have to reconfirm all of our existing subscribers so anybody who is now subscribed for our newsletter or Lesson of the Day will get an email asking them to reconfirm or to confirm their wish to receive email from us and that will come from Aweber. Then after that the emails that you receive probably won't look much different than what you have been receiving but they should actually be more consistent because at I Make News we were unable to Jill: Have a template. Mark: Have a template and do consistent things and this way we're more flexible to create the stuff we really want to create and send it as is. Actually I think this Aweber is so much better, so much cheaper and so much more convenient that it's really night and day. Having said that, Sean and I have looked at it. Jill you've been away so you haven't seen it at all. We can show you, obviously you can take a look at it after we talk here but what I thought we would do is, because the emails now will have to be created as html emails, Sean will create them and obviously The Lesson of the Day Sean is creating now so he'll create them the same. He'll upload them and, Steve: The Lesson of the Day. Mark: The Lesson of the Day, yeah, the Lesson of the Day will then be, he'll put the Lesson of the Day into Aweber and you can put in how ever many you make, you can put them in ahead of time and schedule them to be sent when we want them to be sent. Because in the past whenever we go to send something out we kind of just randomly just sent stuff out to everybody but I think it probably makes sense to have a bit of a check on things that go out and so here if you put them in, check them and then have Jill send them out so that Jill then checks them again. I think that's probably a good thing to do for Lesson of the Day and for any other emails that we, mass emails that we send out. I think that's probably a good idea to have a check because that's our face to the customer. If Jill's not here then I'll look at them but that's basically Sean: So they'll be scheduled to go out every day, Jill: At a certain time. Sean: like we'd say maybe we'd put them on at 11 o'clock at night and then you'd check them in the afternoon or something like that? Mark: We could. Because too actually, it doesn't really matter when they go out but to actually have them go out, somebody has to push the Queue Now button. Jill: The person who looks at it.
Mark: So you can set the time, yeah so you would set the time and check and make sure it's right, let Jill know so she can go in, check it. If it looks good she presses the Queue Now button and that's when it will go. Sean: Ok.
Mark: Make sense? (Everyone in agreement) So that's the Lesson of the Day. The newsletter right now I think we were going to send out an issue next week so we'll try and send it out with Aweber which means that we will, Sean you're going to have to recreate this or the same format that we have been using I guess? Sean: Right, I should be able to do that with what I've done so far because I scraped all of the files off of I Make News on to our local machine and now I'm just making sure all of the links match up and for the one that's coming up so quickly, because it is coming up next week, we can just delete what's in one and make a quick template and then next month we can have a look that's the same as all of the other emails going out now. Mark: Ok. So just to reiterate for everybody that hasn't already got an Aweber subscription confirmation they will be getting one and they will have to confirm otherwise they won't get our newsletter. Steve: That's always a problem isn't it when you ask people say, who have been receiving something and actually are very happy to receive it when you are going to ask them, because now we have to for this software program, please reconfirm that you want to receive it, a lot of people will not reconfirm so they will stop receiving it. What do those people do then if they want to receive it? Is there some kind of a Mark: In the future they would have to come back to our site and give us, submit their email address again to sign up for our newsletter which at the present time we don't actually offer on our home page because we switched it to the Lesson of the Day but I think we will put it back there shortly. Sean: In our meeting this morning we talked about putting that in.
Steve: So that on the home page you'd have both the newsletter sign up and the Lesson of the Day sign up? Sean: Right.
Was there a third one as well?
Mark: We talked also about this free test drive sign up which we can sort of expand upon later. We don't have to talk about that now. Sean: No, we'll have the Tips too shortly but those are automatic when you sign up now. Or they will be.
Mark: The, we'll talk about that as well here. Those are like the new member training series or whatever you want to call it.
Steve: One question I have. There is a fine line between sending reminders and useful information to people regularly which stimulates them to do things, to study, to come to our website and then sending too much information. To what extent can people control what's coming at them or to what extent are we risking irritating people? Mark: Well, we don't have that much stuff because now another good thing with Aweber is we can subscribe people to different lists so that you can be receiving the newsletter but not receiving the Lesson of the Day or not receiving the Tips or whatever the case may be whereas when I make news we kind of have, Steve: Everybody got everything. Mark: Well, it was just a big pain to try and filter different groups and the filters.
Jill: Didn't work properly. Mark: Just didn't work well. Jill: Yeah.
Sean: Now people who are getting Lessons of the Day are people that aren't members, people that get the newsletter are usually people that are members. Mark: Interesting enough, if you look at our Lesson of the Day list a lot of them are members.
Jill: Really?
Mark: Yeah.
Steve: Well, people like to be reminded to do something. You respond to it. I do. Anyway.
Sean: The Lesson of the Day gives some school structure to it.
Steve: It gives a little bit of structure but it's mostly a reminder. Sean: Right.
Steve: Because people are busy, they are doing all kinds of different things and perhaps without the reminder they wouldn't go to the web site and take another content and study it but this, bingo, it's like a little bit of a back of a hand or something. Mark: I think we should also but I think probably they do, they read it and they listen to it and think oh it's kind of neat and I think most of our members are quite positively disposed towards us so if this is something we're putting out, oh that's neat, I'll get that too. Sean: This is what I like about the whole RSS feed thing where you don't have to remember to do it everyday because it comes to you. Steve: But you know Sean, I don't understand RRS feed. Sean: RSS.
Steve: Whatever. I don't understand it all. We should have a separate discussion some time to explain it.
Sean: Right it's also something that's integrated with the system which makes it so we can, for the people who are familiar and using RSS as you will be very shortly, it, they can click on one button and they'll get it every day on their RSS reader. Steve: See, my approach to all this stuff, I don't understand it, ask Sean. He explains it to me and then I forget. Then I ask him again.
Mark: But at least you're not asking me. Steve: That's right. Ok, what's next? Mark: So, yeah, I think the newsletter, we've covered it. Oh, the other interesting thing actually with Aweber is that we may be able to run the newsletter off a blog which means that we don't have to create a separate newsletter. We can just post our articles to our community blog and Aweber will grab those articles and automatically create the newsletter and send it out. So that may happen. We are going to have to experiment a little more with that. One way or the other that's how the newsletter will go out. Sean: And, it will force us all to do blog entries.
Mark: That's right. Steve: Well, we're doing blog entries. We get more mileage from the blog entries too.
Mark: Exactly and it won't involved creating a separate web page which we are going to have to do now if we recreate what we're doing in our current newsletter. Ok, so we've covered the newsletter and the Lesson of the Day. I think the next thing is Steve: Should I, one thing I think might be worth pointing out; the purpose of the Lesson of the Day was not to provide a lesson of the day to our existing users. The purpose of it was because we have certain sites which are promotional sites where people come and see what we have and they don't really understand what it is, they don't have a tutor, they're not writing, they are not really connected to our system Mark: Not just for other sites but for our home page too. Steve: And for our home page. So we have these people who are trying to sniff around, don't really understand what it is even though we have lots of explanation. So, the Lesson of the Day is to give them a very concrete example of the kinds of things they can do so it's really not directed at our learners even though as you say, some of our learners use it, it's more directed, it's part of our effort to get more people to sign up and do the full integrated learning experience with The Linguist including tutors and writing correction and so forth. Sean: Right.
If you did it every day you would learn from it but if you are doing it every day you should just sign up because obviously you are serious enough to do it.
Steve: Well that's right and it has very limited functionality and has no interaction with tutors and so forth. Ok.
Mark: And obviously in terms of marketing, any time that you can capture a potential customer's email address and mail him something every day that he's happy to receive that's keeping your name in front of him five days a week and hopefully he'll like it and eventually come back and join. So, that's really, really what it's there for but there are current learners there using it and that's great too.
