No way to export newsletter opt-ins? Really, Paypal?

Paypal has a nice feature that allows you to put a little tickbox onto your checkout page, asking whether a buyer would like to receive promotional emails.


(In case you're wondering, this option is hidden under 'Profile' - 'More Options' - 'My Selling Tools' - 'Custom Payment Pages' - and finally 'Options')

Free newsletter signups? Great! I love being able to keep in touch with my previous buyers. I enabled this feature, months and months ago, and promptly forgot about it. After all, I wasn't being notified that these people were opting in to my list...

While working on my newsletter today, I remember having set this up. 'Well,' thought I, 'I could have hundreds of new members to my newsletter! I must dash to Paypal and export this data immediately.'

I went to Paypal. I looked around. I Googled. No luck - I could not find my email list anywhere. Paypal was so kind to collect these emails for me - where oh where could they be??

The answer was hiding right under my nose, but oh how I wish I could report different news.
In short: There is no list.
There is only a notification on each individual transaction details page.

That's right, Paypal lets us collect these emails, but doesn't let us export them. Instead, I went through six months' worth of transactions, checking them one by one to see if they opted in. If they have opted in, there is an extra line on the Details page that says 'Promotional emails: Subscribed' with the buyer's email address.

This line is in a larger font than the other details. It was the least Paypal could do, I guess.

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How much traffic does $20 bring you?

I just read a fascinating series of blog posts from Sodaware - about advertising, and how much traffic you can get for $19.95.

He examined a whole slew of different advertising and marketing methods, both free and pay - for the pay ad services, his budget was $19.95, and for the free marketing, he set a time limit of a half hour. This was a smart way to compare services, because as they say, nothing is free - your time is worth something too. A lot of times, it's more efficient to just pay for advertising than to spend hours on fruitless "free" ads.

Read part 1, the introduction and part 2, the results.

Many of Sodaware's results were as to be expected, but some lessons are worth repeating - like good targeting is key to successful ads. You'll get better results with ads on a well-targeted, medium-traffic side, than poorly-targeted ads on a huge-traffic site.

It's interesting to see the variety of uses and traffic that each ad service can bring - Stumbleupon users are low-attention-span, high-bounce visits that can spark a viral wave of traffic, while a well-targeted ad placed on a highly relevant site can bring in newsletter subscriptions and loyal readers. Which type you choose is up to you, or it could behoove you to diversify your tactics to get both loyal readers and viral bursts.

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