would it be benefitial to have you paying customers optionally be able to recieve a newsletter from your company talking about upcoming games, and maybe some other games big in the industry, and to just share the resources amonst a set of 20 developers or whatever... each one cross promoting other companies games to people that have already BOUGHT their game... so it wouldnt really detract sales.... would this work?

good idea or bad? has it been done and failed?

I tried this about two years back.

Of the 20 or so developers I contacted, mailing list size varied hugly, from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand - definitely not a situation those with the larger lists were happy about. You'd have to look for developers with similarly sized lists, which can be difficult to do (I only got three together at the time, so it wasn't really a big success).

Since then the Spam issue is also much bigger - so you really need to be careful what you send out to people. Even if it is a legit e-mail, you might lose subscribers if they don't like the content of your newsletters, so that's another thing to consider.

Be very careful with newsletters. Be very friendly, tell them why they are getting it, tell em you love them :-), and give very clear opt out instructions. Be triple careful promoting someone else's site or product. If cranky customers see emails that they don't recognise or plain old forgot about you they may report spam abuse complaints causing all sorts of potential problems.

When you say "optionally receive", do you mean :

1) They get it whether they like it or not, but they can "optionally" choose not to receive it any more.

or :

2) They're invited to join ( possibly attached to your order confirmation email ) and then choose if they want to "optionally" start receiving it



If you mean 1) I think you're on thin ice. As has been mentioned, you can get your emails reported as spam, you can irritate customers, it's probably more trouble than it's worth.

If you mean 2) then why limit it only to people who've bought the game? If it's a generic sign-up newsletter, the more the merrier, surely? Let everyone sign up if they want, whether they've bought something from you or not.

Maybe I haven't quite grasped the finer points of your idea.

Oh by optionally I mean, when they buy the game it just gives them a link to where they can sign up to hear about more great games... they would never be automatically put on the list...only if they requested it...

and I said only paying because developers probably wouldnt want someone coming, downloading there demo then getting a newsletter that makes them buy some other developers game :P