I love great tool deals, and I know many of you do too.
I’ve been meaning to post about what makes a tool deal good enough to post about, but that’s a story for another time. Today, I’ll be talking about the best way to ensure you don’t miss any of the deals I post about.
I suppose there’s an option for browser notifications, but quite frankly I hate those pop-ups from other websites and always opt out.
In addition to being featured on the ToolGuyd.com home page, headlines are pushed to our Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as our RSS feed. For the savviest of RSS users, there’s a “DealGuyd” feed (RSS) where you can set up your own notification services.
Newsletter subscribers have complained over the years about time-sensitive tool deals ending by the time they receive an automatic ToolGuyd newsletter email the next day. This led to a cut-off threshold of 11am ET.
I sometimes missed the cut-off.
After a couple of complaints I implemented manual overrides. Let’s say it’s Cyber Monday and a new “deal of the day” post goes out at 3:30pm ET. I can override the 11am ET timing and push an email out to daily subscribers at 4pm.
Daily newsletter subscribers should have received yesterday’s deal post, which emphasizes part of a larger deal I posted about several day earlier, at 1pm ET.
Here is what ToolGuyd’s newsletter subscription form looks like:
Special newsletters are rare, but I set the form to automatically toggle this option for you. Then, there are daily automatic updates and weekly automatic updates.
In addition to when you first subscribe, each email will have a link at the bottom where you can opt into daily newsletter emails.
This morning, a reader emailed in, complaining that they received an email after the mentioned tool deal was already over.
I’m sorry, but if you’re only subscribed to weekly automatic update emails, you’re going to miss out on a lot of time-sensitive tool deal posts.
There’s not much I can do about overriding weekly emails. You get a once-a-week email Monday morning at around 11am ET, and that’s it.
Daily email subscribers will typically see 5 or 6 emails a week, more if time-sensitive tool deals justify it.
I am open to feedback and suggestions. This is maybe the second time someone wrote in complaining that they missed out on a deal, but I feel the blame is unfair or at least misdirected.
If you want tool deal notifications emailed you to a timely manner, the easiest way is to opt into a daily automatic updates email subscription.
There has never been a need for me to offer an intermediate email frequency between daily and weekly newsletters, and even then, bi-weekly or tri-weekly subscribers are still bound to miss out on deals.
I suppose I could set up a separate tool deals subscription option, but I treat tool deals as regular content, and so the frequency varies widely between once in a while and multiple times a day, depending on the time of year.
With all that said, if you’ve missed out on tool deals because you received our email newsletter late, I would like to remind you that:
- We have both daily and weekly newsletter options
- I am always open to suggestions as to how to better reach you about new tool deal and post notifications
I get it, sometimes a subscriber signs up for emails and doesn’t remember their preferences later on, or sees that they can update their preferences from the bottom of every newsletter email.
If signing up for daily emails fulfills your needs and wants, that’s great! And if it doesn’t, I am open to alternate or additional options and am in need or ideas or suggestions. With deal notifications and pretty much all aspects of the ToolGuyd.com user experience, I can’t fix a problem or serve a need I’m not aware of.
