Hobby Email Spam. Problem?

[jamescutts 6924xp 1]

As the summer, if you can call it that, has picked up I’ve taken a bit of a step back from the hobby, I’ve been less involved to an extent in the beasts of war community, ocasionally chipping in on discord now and again, reading the forums here and there but I have been following the news quite closley.

One of the other ways I keep up with the hobby is through the usual email newsletters, the likes of warlord wednesdays, wargames atlantic fridays, the perrys supprise new releases (so tempted by those prussians) and various news letters from the smaller independent traders.

The latter has become somewhat of a problem for me (and i expect them), over the last year as more ordering has gone online I’ve tried to spread my purchases around the smaller traders, avoiding just using the big players (wayland games, who to my great suprise i did order from last week and had a package arrive the next day!). I’ve done that for a few reasons, sometimes these smaller traders do have really good deals, they also sometimes have some obscure ranges that you dont see until you find the trader and finally I’ve wanted to help support the smaller players, if it costs me a few extra £ in postage thats thankfully no big deal.

When I’ve bought from these I’ve generally subscribed to news letters, Its nice to get updates from some of these smaller traders, you ocasionally get introducted to a new range and you also get some good deals. In most cases this is great all round, I get offers and updates, they potentially get sales.

Whats becoming a problem for me is the saturday morning wave as I call it, those traders that stock GW products that spam every saturday morning with the latest wave for age of sigmar or 40k releases. If your into this, and you cant way to pre-order the latest thing before it sells out and never returns i suspect this is great. If like me you have no intrest in this then its super annoying, take this morning for example 10-15 emails all with basically the same content.

Whats more of a problem is these saturday wave emails still do have some other hobby content im interested in, if you scroll down far enough and read through them all. However this staturday wave of GW is slowly causing me to unsubscribe from newsletters for traders I would otherwise be interested in and want to support, i really dont want to read a load of emails all selling me the same thing.

To me this feels like a problem for these traders, there loosing a potential customer simply because of their content (admitidly GW may be a big part of their sales).

Is it just me with this problem or are others feeling it too?

 

P.S. I dont want this to turn into a tread on GW’s release process.

[panzerkaput 33943xp 1]

I so know what you mean about the bombardment of Saturday emails, get this GW pre-order, get that and I get it but like you @jamescutts I have started to unsubscribe from them too, not because GW is some hateful monster in the industry but rather it doesnt interest me and I dont need to get the same offer from GW and a dozen other retailers telling me about it.

I tend to subscribe to those smaller companies newsletters not or North Star Figures as I find I get messages I want to get.

As for taking a break @jamescutts I understand and know what you mean and it is a good thing, because you need to recharge, detox or what even. However, I would love to see you back on the chat show that Sundancer and myself do as your input is invaluable, thoughtful and very stimulating.

All the best mate

[tankkommanderParticipant 6421xp 2]

My guess is that they automate most of the content, linked to the store software. It might be difficult for small shops to set up multiple newsletters, or allow people to set preferences.

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 2]

I think it would be an inevitability that the more independent retailer’s email lists you subscribe to the more you will see ‘repeats’ of news and new releases. It’s going to be a fair number of GW things for retailers that sell GW product simply because they have a large portion of the market and can also have a more consistent release schedule (and that’s as far as I’ll take that point). But I think that’s always going to be the case with the larger companies. For that reason I tend to subscribe to news letters from the producers of the minis so that I only get one (though through some glitch in the system I get 2 from GW) from each company. It makes it easier to just say ‘not interested in GW this week’ and just delete that one, or do the same for any or all.

I would also say that at the moment it does feel a bit more oppressive, though that is a feeling rather than a reality. When a Warlord email comes in, for example, I quite often think ‘I looked at you yesterday’ but it was a week ago since I got the last email from them…but my perception of time is just a little bit warped these days…

[limburger 21704xp 1]

I suspect most of these small webshops are glad that they can do newsletters at regular intervals at all.

I doubt they have the manpower to filter them by interest of their audience, because although that would make them more effective it also might mean there’d be no news at all for them to post. Time vs effort is unlikely to be worth it.

I prefer to not subscribe to newsletters because there’s unlikely to be anything I ‘need’/’want’ in any of them. Manually visiting the shops when I feel like buying anything is much more productive (and it’s still not a replacement for visiting a real shop and stumbling upon new things).

Heck … I’ve got one newsletter from a webshop that has ‘personal’ recommendations, but because I’ve only bought one or two things 99% of those things were bizarre and useless, which proves that automation of such things is unlikely to produce good results unless you buy at regular intervals.

btw :
Whatever happened to the BoW/OTT newsletters ?

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