Site News: Transitioning to a new email platform

We have been using Google’s Feedburner email service to deliver our daily DealsLetter since we’ve started posting Flight Deals. As our mailing list has grown, there are a few challenges using Feedburner for our subscribers:

  • Lack of dependability with delivery — on most days, it comes around 3PM Eastern but there have been times where it is delayed by hours or doesn’t get delivered at all.
  • Subscribers not receiving their DealsLetter — they would initially receive it and then it just stops and never see it again. We have no way of telling whether it was delivered or not.
  • Inability to change subscriber preferences — let’s say you subscribed with your Hotmail address and want to switch to Gmail, the only way to make the change is to unsubscribe then re-subscribe again.

Since Feedburner cost us nothing, we really couldn’t complain too much.

Freddie_OG

But, to better serve our subscriber base, we migrated off Feedburner yesterday to Mailchimp, a leading email service provider. The benefits are:

  • Ensures delivery
  • Better metrics — did our subscribers receive their daily DealsLetter?
  • Provides a more visually engaging DealsLetter
  • Better segmentation and future improvements — if we want to deliver this in real time or if we want to have a city based DealsLetter, we can provide that.

The trade-off for us is that Mailchimp isn’t cheap for the volume of emails we are sending. In order to offset the costs, we plan to:

  • Send marketing messages that are de-coupled from our Daily DealsLetter. We will only send travel related marketing offers and not more than ONCE per week.
  • The Daily DealsLetter may include banner ads in the future.

(If you unsubscribed using the old unsubscribe link after the transition, you are still receiving our DealsLetter because we migrated the list around 3PM Eastern yesterday. Please unsubscribe again. We apologize for that)

As always, if you have any feedback on anything we do, feel free to reach us on Twitter, Facebook or shoot us an email at the email address found on the About Us page.

Thank you for your continuing support,

The Flight Deal Team

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The Flight Deal does not sell travel products or services. We provide you with information about third-party travel suppliers’ offers, and link you to their sites. The information posted by The Flight Deal is valid at the time of publication. However, we have no control over the suppliers, and we therefore do not warrant or guarantee that their offers will not change or become unavailable. Nor are we responsible for their products, services or site content. Please see their sites for their most up-to-date offer information and all applicable terms and conditions.

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Comments (9)

  • MEDC 9 years ago Reply

    Can you change the font color for the headlines? The light blue is really hard to read against a white background.

  • Grant 9 years ago Reply

    I just got the new email, looks nice and I am sure I will learn to love the layout. I received the email today at 10:00am PST, is this the time that all future emails will be sent out at?

    Lastly, you guys need to set up a PayPal donate button since I would gladly donate a few bucks to help pay for the mailchimp service 🙂

    The Flight Deal 9 years ago Reply

    @Grant – today is special — its just in case we ran into issues and could revert back to Feedburner. Tomorrow will be back at 3PM Eastern / 12PM Pacific. As for donate button, no plans for it.

    Grant 9 years ago

    Thanks for the update. Will Fare Deal Alerts be on MailChimp as well? All I know about MailChimp is that they sponsored the Serial podcasts 🙂

    The Flight Deal 9 years ago

    @Grant – We will migrate Fare Deal Alert over in the future.

  • Dave 9 years ago Reply

    “you are receiving this email because you are awesome…”
    You all rock, btw.

  • Cathy H 9 years ago Reply

    Very difficult to read the light blue links against the white background. Please consider changing these colors. Also, it would be nice to continue reading the continuation of the article using a link with this: […] rather than scrolling up to the top of the page to click the link. Hope you don’t mind a little feedback on the switch!

    The Flight Deal 9 years ago Reply

    @Cathay H – we are making the colors darker. Should see it in tomorrow’s newsletter. As for making […], we figuring out how to do that. Thanks for the feedback

  • Lucy Z. 9 years ago Reply

    The light blue lettering on the email was very hard to read. You guys should make it darker. Thanks…

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