Subscribers and notifications

You’ll need: Subscribers, Outbound notifications — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Two different things leave your business by message, and they are worth keeping straight: a digest people opted into, and notifications sent because something happened.

Subscribers

A subscriber is somebody who gave you their email on your public site. The record holds their email and name, whether they are still subscribed, and their preferences: digest time, digest timezone and digest language.

The part that surprises people: subscribing happens when someone logs in on your public pages. There is no separate sign-up form to build, and the reader does not fill in a second thing.

Just as important — a subscriber is not a contact. They are not in your shared address book, they are not a customer, and they are not a member. They are an email address that agreed to hear from you. Keeping that boundary is why a hundred casual readers do not silently become a hundred entries in the address book your sales team works from.

The digest

Subscribers receive a periodic digest of what you published, in their language, at their chosen time. It is generated from the updates you already wrote — there is no newsletter to compose separately.

The consequence is worth sitting with: publishing is sending. A post you put up to “get it ready” is a post that may go out. If it is not finished, do not publish it yet.

Outbound notifications

Notifications are the other kind: a message sent to a specific person because something happened to their order, booking or invoice. The record holds the channel, the notification type, who it went to, the subject and body, what it was about (the related record), its status and when it was sent.

  DIGEST                        NOTIFICATION
  -------------------------     -------------------------
  opted in, periodic            triggered by an event
  everybody on the list         one named recipient
  what you published            what happened to their order
  marketing-ish                 operational

Because notifications are records, they are searchable and auditable. “Did the customer ever get told?” is a question with an answer, which is a better position than most businesses are in.

Respect the unsubscribe

subscribed going false is a decision, not a data error. Do not switch it back, and do not move someone into your contacts to keep mailing them by another route. Beyond the law, it is the fastest way to train people that your emails cannot be escaped, which is how you end up marked as spam.

Try it