Hey all! Loving the site overall, and I wanted to say thank you for taking quick action when Free RPG Day Bundle purchasers started receiving emails they weren’t keen on. That keeps people from blocking emails from RPG Trader, and that’s in everyone’s best interest!
Now that the immediate issue is resolved, I’d like to propose an alternative solution. As a Creator, when I sell hundreds of copies of a game for pennies, I primarily do that to gain access to people who really want to hear from me! I want to offer them a deal on a related game, tell them about the upcoming crowdfunding for the same game, and more! It feels bad as a creator that only the bundle owner gets that access. It seems like it would make it difficult to get people to join future bundles, and that’s a no-win scenario!
Many platforms handle this by giving Customers both granular (at the creator level) and blanket (all creators) access to opt out of receiving emails. They also make it easy to opt out of a particular creator’s marketing via a link in the email. This feels like the best possible user experience for both personas.
Thanks for considering! I’m open to other solutions too, but I would definitely like to be able to contact people who’d like to hear from me! Seems like that would also lead to more sales on the platform
Thanks for this and for sharing your thoughts on it.
We’ve been thinking about that principle and how we can cater to it as effectively as possible, and while we don’t want to allow creators to email everyone who bought a bundle they were included in, we do want to enable creators to contact people who are interested in their work.
The current behaviour allows creators to email anyone who directly purchased their products. What we’re looking into is expanding that to also include anyone who directly downloaded their products. That would mean if someone bought a bundle with 200+ products, they would be able to receive emails from anyone whose products in that bundle they downloaded directly.
This fits with the intention of allowing creators to email people who have shown interest in their work, as both buying and downloading show intent and active interest.
It would also keep us from getting into a position where excessive unwanted emails become a problem again, without providing overly complex email preference options for users.
In addition to that, another update we’re looking into is to allow opting out of emails from specific creators. So by default you can receive emails from creators whose work you have purchased or downloaded, or who you have followed, but you can also opt out of receiving any emails from individual creators, regardless of your purchase/download history or anything else.
I think your idea for bundle contributors is a thoughtful approach that I can definitely get behind! That would prohibit the worst offenses and enable a reasonable solution to the actual problem I presented.
I do think it’s brilliant to also allow purchasers to opt out of email by creator. It provides the right incentive for creators not to abuse the privilege and allows people who are very inbox conscious to manage things more granularly at the source without a blanket block.
