Last year I asked what people wanted to see in our "GDNet Direct" email newsletter and got some good feedback.

Now we've been working at implementing some improvements and I'd like more feedback. For anyone who isn't signed up but wants to give it a go, you can sign up from the homepage (unless you're on mobile) -- you should find it in the right-hand sidebar below the spotlight box and an ad unit.



If you want to have a look but haven't signed up I've attached an image (excuse the poor effort of stitching the image together) of the most recent newsletter.


Our current newsletter always includes:

• A quick introduction. This is usually fairly generic, but I'll often customise it slightly, sometimes providing different links.
• The most recent top screenshots from the screenshot showdown.
• A selection of current forum topics. These are currently automatically generated, but I'm planning to start manually tweaking and adding to them to make sure we're linking to interesting topics.
• Our 7 most recently published articles.

...and in the most recent few newsletters I've been adding some custom content including:

• Hand picked links to good off-site resources on some particular topic. For examples, one of last week's newsletters linked to some marketing resources, and our most recent newsletter linked to some A* pathfinding resources.
• "Meet the members" or "meet the moderators" interviews. Last week we included an old mini interview with Servant of the Lord and this week one with Cornstalks. There will be fresh interviews with different members and moderators in most newsletters going forward.

Is this the type of stuff people want to see? Anything we should change or improve? What else could we add? I'm putting together and sending these in very limited free time, so I'd like to avoid excessive manual work, but I'll consider any suggestion.


Thanks for any feedback!

There is a newsletter. I have only ever heard rumours of such a thing existing. I have never witnessed, myself, a page to which I could sign up for it.

:o

news letter CONFIRMED!

Next on my list, Big foot.

Good feedback -- we probably need to make signup easier and more prominent! :)

Any thoughts on the content?

Personally, I rarely scroll on emails (I use windows live program thingie)

This is usally the extent I go to when I 'read' newsletters:

So maybe there should be the 'trending'/popular items at the top, say one interesting forum post, an article and a screen shot. Then you could have (like you already do) a list of the featured ones further down

___

and yes, I am at nearly 20,000 unread emails :)

and yes, I am at nearly 20,000 unread emails

I signed up a while ago but never got any of the newsletters... it turns out the email address I used when I signed up was one I had with my ISP at the time, and it hasn't been active for years. Oops.

I've updated to my current email address so hopefully I'll get the next one that goes out.

Good stuff LennyLen, there's one going out later today! Let me know what you think of the content! :)

Personally, I rarely scroll on emails (I use windows live program thingie)

Interesting, I'll have a play with layout options and see about what might work to grab the attention of people who are only viewing a preview pane. I probably won't try this one for a newsletter or two until I've had time to experiment with options. Thanks! :)

Anyone else, or any further feedback from those of you who have already replied?

I like how you dialled down the frequency of the newsletter, I think it's perfect now. I like the addition of the 'meet the members' section, it's nice to get more background information on our community members. I can't really give you much feedback on the rest of the newsletter, because I frequently visit GDNet so it's mostly old news.

Oh, maybe some funny quotes out of posts/chat at the end of each newsletter, I love newsletters that do that :P.

Anyone else, or any further feedback from those of you who have already replied?

I didn't actually end up getting that last one, even though I'd updated my email address before it went out. I've now gone through the subscribing process again, just in case the email address for the newsletter is stored separately from the main account email address.