The popular offerings

The first thing I did was to search around to see what software people were using for this. I wanted to avoid having to write my own form here, mostly because I really hate writing forms. No idea why, they’re just something I avoid if I can. A few common ones popped up. Mailchimp, MailerLite, Braze, etc. I knew if I was going to actually implement this, it had to meet a few basic criteria:

• I really don’t want my website to become annoying to use, so it had to be non-invasive. No auto pop-ups, nags, etc. Just manual interaction if someone actually wants to sign up.
• It had to be free or at least offer a fairly large number of free subscribers. I make no money from my site and can’t really justify spending hundreds per month on emails.
• It had to have separate category support. I have many readers who only want to read Minecraft posts, and many readers who want to read everything but Minecraft posts. I don’t want to spam people with stuff they don’t care about.

I trialled a few of these platforms for a day or so each. Most did meet the latter two requirements, but the first one was really hard to meet. Not to call out any brands in particular, the least invasive I found was one that let me only show a popup when someone scrolled to the bottom of the page, with no other annoying nags. This was however, still more than I wanted. Ideally, people would only see the form if they actively wanted to see it. I also found some other general usability issues and UI bugs with that option, so I kept looking.

The more DIY offerings

Giving up on my aversion to writing forms, I decided to look into more DIY solutions rather than ones very heavily targeted towards marketing teams. Ones that basically just offer an API for signups, and then a system to send out emails to people on the mailing list. This meant I’d have complete control over the form and any interactions people had with it on my site, with the downside that I’d have to give in and write a form.

The one I found most recommended was Loops, but the good part about most of these mailing list services is that they allow exporting the CSV of all subscribers. So if you do end up moving to a different service you can take your existing subscribers with you, so I’m not too worried about making the wrong choice. As long as something works at the time, I’m happy to stick with it.

The one that I’ve settled on as of writing gave me a basic form template already written with JSX to copy/paste into my site. With some tweaks to add category selection and styling changes to make it better fit the overall design of my site, it ended up integrating so much better. It looks better, it performs better, and it doesn’t require adding any third-party JavaScript to my site. Most importantly, it gives me full control over when users actually see the form.

I also took the opportunity to add some quality-of-life features to it, such as automatically suggesting signing up to the category of the article that it was opened from, which wasn’t feasible to do with any of the more automated systems I found.

Conclusion

This is a fairly short article, mostly to just write about my thoughts on this topic and to provide a deeper reply to the many people who’ve suggested a mailing list to me over the past few weeks. I’m still not sold on the concept of a mailing list, but it’s worth a go.

In general, it does feel that most public offerings for this kind of service are heavily leaning towards the “maximise conversions at all costs” approach, rather than providing unintrusive mailing lists for free websites. This does make sense, as businesses would be more likely to pay for a service with better conversion rates. Given doing this fully DIY gets more difficult as time progresses (GDPR, privacy, email bouncing, etc), an API-only service feels like a good middle ground.

Is this the solution to the growing threat of AI Search Engines on non-commercial informative content? I’m not sure, but it can’t hurt. I feel like the area most hit is initial discovery, and mailing lists only really help build repeat readers. It likely will improve reader counts long term, but I feel something else will still be needed to make up for the rapidly reducing number of people finding sites via Google.