Quintus
commented
8 years ago Bugsbane notifications@github.com writes:
To grow the community, we need to grow our reach. That means getting a way to increase the number of people we can stay in touch with about the game
Let us for a moment assume your strategy is highly effective and hundreds of people sign up for the TSC newsletter. What benefit will this wealth of read-only subscribers give to the TSC project? I have doubts that this will attract more coders or artists to contribute to the project.
This is not to disagree with your suggestion. It is an honest question I have; I have not yet made up any opinion pro or contra this.
To build a mailing list though, we really need a landing page […] I'm talking about a list where the only emails that come from it are official TSC announcements (new versions, news etc).
This is technically called an announcement mailinglist (surprise!). I have seen other projects using them. The Postfix project (an SMTP mail relaying daemon) for example provides both an announcement-only mailinglist and a discussion mailinglist. I am subscribed only to the announcement mailinglist, because I need to be up-to-date with regard to security releases, but I don’t have time to participate in the use and development discussion of Postfix.
http://lists.secretchronicles.de quite frankly is confusing and offputting to anyone clicking on it who just wants to get project news with a minimum of fuss.
This is because http://lists.secretchronicles.de is not intended for distributing project news. The site gives instructions on how to subscribe to the developer discussion mailinglist. You are only expected to read that page if you want to actively contribute to the project. tsc-devel as such is intended to be a place for discussion, not for bare announcements.
The official way to distribute read-only news about TSC currently is the RSS feed on the main website. I would be okay with adding an announcement-only newsletter for that purpose, as long as the RSS feed continues to exist.
I would suggest any of the free to download and use templates from: http://www.leadpages.net/the-ultimate-list-of-free-landing-page-templates/
They indeed look nice.
Vale, Quintus
!/sbin/quintus
Blog: http://www.guelkerdev.de
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xet7
To grow the community, we need to grow our reach. That means getting a way to increase the number of people we can stay in touch with about the game. Even in the age of social media, the most effective way to do this is email (you need an email address to join any of these social networks, in the first place, and the social networks are all moving to burying posts that don't pay to be promoted).
To build a mailing list though, we really need a landing page which is clean, simple and lets visitors opt in to receiving emails about TSC and gives them an immediate benefit of doing so (5 free bonus tsclevels, not available elsewhere?). Yes, I'm aware of http://lists.secretchronicles.de/ but this is nowhere even close to what I mean. Firstly, I'm not talking about getting people onto lists that include them in every random discussion anyone else on the list might think to post to it. I'm talking about a list where the only emails that come from it are official TSC announcements (new versions, news etc). Also I'm thinking of a landing page where the only writing on it, is about what they'll receive for signing up and a field to enter (just) their email address. This is how high conversion opt-in pages work. http://lists.secretchronicles.de quite frankly is confusing and offputting to anyone clicking on it who just wants to get project news with a minimum of fuss. It has instructions for all kinds of things they just don't care about.
I would suggest any of the free to download and use templates from: http://www.leadpages.net/the-ultimate-list-of-free-landing-page-templates/
They're basic self contained HTML with some javascript and can be customized and uploaded very easily. I can help with needed graphics / copywriting. The opt-in form would just need to be integrated with wherever we're storing people's email addresses.
The nice thing is, when you have one of these pages, instead of needing email opt-in forms all over the site, it's possible to just make simple banner images that link there. Direct marketing research actually shows a higher percentage of people will enter their email when clicking on an image going to an email opt-in page, than if you actually embed an opt-in form all over the place.