Thanks for posting about this, Damian.
Email is an incredibly important part of the marketing mix for mainstream online businesses, but it's rare to see someone write about using email in the adult marketplace, and to write about how to use it in an ongoing, responsible manner is more rare still.
I've used newsletter marketing since 1999 and you hit a lot of important nails on the head in your post. When we had our sponsor program we used newsletters to attract new members, to retain members, and to encourage members who'd left to return.
Double opt-in permission-based marketing works very well in adult, and you're correct that it does take time to build trust with readers. Now that we market other people's sites we see that even more than when we were working to build trust in our own site. While even the simple process of sending out some pics and a video each week will eventually yield signups, I did want to mention that we've found that using more text works best with our lists. Long copy vs short copy tests seem to indicate that while many people may not like to read, a lot of those who like to read also like to join.
While we get a good amount of RSS feed subscribers, we certainly get more surfers signing up for our newsletters. One thing we've done is to mention our feed URLs in our newsletters, where we can devote a little space to explaining how to read a feed. Also, we use Dada Mail (which you mentioned) and it provides an additional RSS feed for the newsletter itself, which we can promote both in the newsletter and on our sites.
Anyway, thanks for posting about this topic. I haven't gone to any shows in some years, but if I do go sometime I'll be sure to look for the magic Brit at the bar.
