I’ve spent some time today fine-tuning some new features for our Prince of Travel email list, which I’m pleased to share with you here.
As a reminder, I currently send out the following emails to our subscribers:
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Sunday newsletter: A roundup of the new content on Prince of Travel over the past week, as well as the latest news and announcements, soon-to-be-expiring deals and opportunities, and any other commentary I may have about the Miles & Points landscape. Delivered to your inbox on Sunday mornings, to be enjoyed over a cup of coffee.
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Welcome emails: When a new subscriber joins the email list, they receive a sequence of emails over the course of two weeks letting them know what Prince of Travel is all about, telling them a bit of the story behind the website, and equipping them with some basic Miles & Points knowledge. While every new subscriber receives these welcome emails by default, they may unsubscribe from the sequence at any time and choose to only receive the Sunday newsletters instead.
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Insider emails: If you’ve joined the Insiders list, then you’ve basically given me carte-blanche access to dip into your inbox at any time with breaking news, time-sensitive deals (like mistake fares), and other musings or scattered data points that may not warrant a full blog article of its own, but that I still think you’d find useful. Generally, I try to keep these to 1–2 times per week at most, and if you’ve joined Insiders but change your mind about it, you can always unsubscribe and choose to only receive the Sunday newsletters instead.
Now, one of the most common pieces of feedback I receive from readers is that it can be hard to keep track of the new blog content that gets posted on Prince of Travel on a regular basis.
These days, you can expect 7–8 new posts on the blog per week, and I can definitely see how it can be easy to miss out on some posts here and there if you’re a busy individual who doesn’t check the homepage on a regular basis.
Some readers use a service like Feedly to pick up on the blog’s RSS feed, but by and large, I’ve found that not all users will be familiar with RSS and/or be in the habit of using an RSS reader to follow their preferred publications.
That’s why I’ve created a new feature for our email list, which essentially tracks the RSS feed in email form and is designed to notify you every time a new post is published on Prince of Travel. Shortly after a new post goes live, you’ll receive a nicely dressed-up email as follows inviting you to check it out:
I’d expect only the more dedicated readers to make use of this feature, as I’d certainly hate to be sending anyone 7–8 emails per week if it wasn’t welcomed or appreciated.
Therefore, if you’re already on our email list, you won’t be added to the Blog Post Notifications by default. Instead, you’ll be able to subscribe to the feature through one of the following ways:
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Clicking through a designated link in tomorrow’s Sunday morning newsletter;
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Clicking through at the bottom of any weekly newsletter going forward;
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Re-entering your email in the box below, ticking the box for “Receive email notifications for every new blog post”, and clicking Submit.
And if you haven’t joined our email list yet, you may also use the box below to join if you’re interested in joining 10,000+ other readers in doing so (make sure to tick the boxes based on your preferences):
Remember, if you’ve joined the extra features but change your mind about it, you can always unsubscribe from those and choose to only receive the Sunday morning newsletters.
Advanced: Customize Your Blog Post Notifications
I’ve also received some feedback from readers who would like to be updated as soon as possible about specific topics that they care about. Readers may now combine the new Blog Post Notifications with specific filters in their email client to achieve exactly this.
Most major email clients allow you to set up filters that will highlight, archive, or otherwise mark incoming emails in a certain way according to certain rules. If you’d prefer to receive instant notifications only for certain topics, you can set up these filters accordingly.
For example, if you use Gmail and have subscribed to Blog Post Notifications, you could click the down-arrow in the search bar at the top of their screen and set up the following filter:
Click “Create Filter”, then tick “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)”, followed by “Create Filter” again.
Gmail will now examine every Blog Post Notification email that arrives in your inbox, and if it contains the key topics you’re interested in (which means that we’ve just published a new post about that topic), then the email will remain in your inbox; otherwise, it will be archived and you won’t see it.
Similarly, Outlook users would go to Settings, followed by Rules, where they can set up a Rule as follows:
As you can see, the rule would archive all the Blog Post Notification emails, with the exception of the major topics that you’ve specified which should be kept in the inbox.
If you primarily care about credit card deals and tips, then you could include all of the names of credit card issuers in your keywords; if you’re mostly here for the fancy travel reviews, then you could include “Review” as one of your keywords. No matter what specifically piques your interest, setting up an email filter will allow you to tailor our Blog Post Notification emails to only the subjects that matter to you most.
I hope some of you find this new feature useful, and that keeping up with the Prince of Travel blog posts will feel less like a “treasure hunt” (as one reader recently put it) going forward!
And as always, I’d love to hear from you if you have any other feedback on navigating the website, efficiently finding the content you’re looking for, or anything else that will make your experience more enjoyable here at Prince of Travel, so feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below or by getting in touch.
