Listening and learning

When someone unsubscribes from the e-Newsletter, they are prompted to a survey that asks them why. More often they are only changing email addresses, and removing the old one. The next most frequent reason is that the person either died, or has otherwise checked out, perhaps going on a long trip.

The purpose of the survey is to hopefully find out when we have messed up bad enough to where the person no longer wants to receive Scuttlebutt. Here were a couple of recent ones:

“The time it is delivered wakes me every night on my blackberry! Change from 3am and I will re-subscribe.”

Note: Our 6pm PT delivery time is to allow for evening reading in North America if desired, and morning reading in Europe.

“Email newsletter format is a 3rd grade level. Too much hassle reading with broken up lines & paragraphs, good content, excellent website. Sorry, a simple link to readable version would be enough.”

Note: We’d like to do an HTML version with photos and fancy formatting, but then we’d have to hire staff and either sell subscriptions or increase ad rates, and we fear neither would work. The e-Newsletter does have a link at the top for anyone who still wants the email reminder, but then prefers to click through to the website.

“Too much, way too much, America’s Cup-related crap. This stuff leads 4 out of 5 newsletters, for heaven's sake. I suspect you run this stuff because it’s easy, it's cheap, it's sordid, and because you’ve become fundamentally lazy. Scuttlebutt has become just another source of bacon.”

Note: Agreed, it is pretty easy to find ACUP stories, so we seem to spend our time either finding the best ones, or writing our own. The rest of our time is spent seeking non-ACUP stories, and always appreciate any/all help that is provided.

“The Curmudgeon’s Observation about different sports being for different racial groups seemed cruddy. I was looking for something more easy going.”

Note: It was a joke by Tiger Woods. However, we shouldn't have been surprised by this comment, as we learned long ago that our content should avoid Politics, Religion, Sexism, and Racism. We thought this one was safe... guess not.

Fortunately, most of the comments are like this one, which we tend to get when someone is changing email addresses:

“ I can''t live without it. Awesome reporting and great fun to read. The highlight of my day.....”

Keep em coming, and we’ll do what we can on our end.