Daniel replied to our newsletter, seemingly unhappy at its contents. His criticism touches upon an issue I am actually very sensitive about.
He wrote:
Dear ToolGuyD:
It’s a pretty dumb idea to include the Home Depot Deals of the Day (2/5/2016) in this weekly update — since it expired 3 days before the e-mail was sent !
First, I’m sorry that you seem disappointed about this.
As an aside, how do I make it clearer that this is ToolGuyd, and not ToolGuyD? Someone wrote in recently, Hello D. This is a very common thing, indicating that the problem is possibly with how I wrote ToolGuyd, leading it to be read as ToolGuyD or ToolGuy’D.
Anyways…
I wouldn’t say it’s dumb for a weekly newsletter update to have expired deals. It is less than ideal, but unavoidable.
You see, our daily and weekly newsletters automatically draw headlines and content from our RSS feed. This is how we have always done it.
And when you sign up for our newsletter, the daily and weekly email update newsletters options are described as automatic.
I try my best to get time-sensitive deal posts up before 11am ET, because that’s when the daily newsletters go out. Weekly newsletters go out on Mondays, same time.
As they’re automatically composed, weekly newsletters will include time-sensitive and even expired deals from the previous week.
There’s nothing that could be done about this.
Well, I shouldn’t say nothing. Technically, I could hire someone to be ToolGuyd’s newsletter guy (or gal), and task them with manually curating post update emails every week. But I’m not going to.
Besides, there’s still value in reading through an expired deal post, and the discussion that often follows in the comment section.
I try to include timing info for limited time deals in headlines, and sometimes the excerpts as well, which should help prevent any confusion. If you see a headline saying “deals of the day” and a past date, it’s reasonable to expect that the deal is over.
Even if you check ToolGuyd daily or several times a day, there’s a chance you could miss out on a limited time deal. The Ridgid pin nailer, from the other day’s deal of the day, had sold out quite early.
P.S. I’m still working to establish a regular custom-content newsletter, but it’s been slow to get the format and structure just right. Subscribe to our newsletter!! Once the look is coded to my liking, it’ll be easier and quicker to create custom newsletters on a regular basis. I think it’s been years since the last custom newsletter, hopefully the next one will be coming soon.
And if you have requests, complaints, or criticisms, please let me know. A lot of the time, reader feedback is the only way to know something needs to be fixed, tweaked, or added to the site.