Subscribers and notifications

Before you start, open these pages: Members / Subscribers and Operations / Outbound Notifications.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

Two different kinds of message go out of your business, and it is worth keeping them straight.

A digest, which people asked for. And notifications, sent because something happened.

Subscribers

A subscriber is somebody who gave you their email on your public website.

The record holds their email and name, whether they are still subscribed, and their preferences: what time they want the digest, which timezone, and which language.

Here is the part that surprises people. Somebody becomes a subscriber when they log in on your public pages. There is no separate sign-up form for you to build, and the reader does not fill in a second thing.

Just as important: a subscriber is not a contact.

They are not in your shared address book. They are not a customer. They are not a member. They are an email address that agreed to hear from you.

Keeping that line is why a hundred casual readers do not quietly turn into a hundred entries in the address book your sales people work from.

The digest

Subscribers get a regular digest of what you published, in their language, at the time they picked.

It is built from the updates you already wrote. There is no newsletter to write separately.

Sit with what that means. Publishing is sending.

A post you put up to “get it ready” is a post that may go out. If it is not finished, do not publish it yet.

Notifications

Notifications are the other kind. A message to one particular person, because something happened to their order, their booking or their invoice.

The record holds the channel, the type, who it went to, the subject and body, which record it was about, its status, and when it was sent.

  DIGEST                        NOTIFICATION
  -------------------------     -------------------------
  they asked for it, regular    something happened
  everybody on the list         one named person
  what you published            what happened to their order
  marketing                     operational

Because notifications are records, you can search them and audit them.

“Did the customer ever get told?” is a question with an answer. Most businesses cannot say that.

Respect the unsubscribe

Somebody turning off subscribed is a decision. It is not a mistake in your data.

Do not switch it back on. And do not move them into your contacts so you can keep emailing them another way.

Leaving the law aside, it is the fastest way to teach people that your emails cannot be escaped. That is how you end up marked as spam.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, log in on the public site with an email address. Then look at the subscribers list in the app.

Watching yourself appear is the clearest possible demonstration of where your list comes from.