As of today, our winner of last months JetPens.com $25 gift card has not claimed their prize.  A few changes are going to come out of this since there seems to be an ongoing trend here.  First though, I’ll give the April 30th winner until May 15th at 11:59 PM Eastern to contact us in order to claim his prize.  If that doesn’t happen, the prize will be doubled to a $50 gift card for the next winner to be announced for the JetPens prize, so PLEASE be sure to check your emails from us…but even more importantly:

There are always reasons why people don’t open emails and I do not fault anyone for that, there are plenty I don’t open myself.  So in order to encourage opening of emails, I’m going to try my best to improve the quality of content for the one news story I share twice a month.

Now for the part that impacts those of you subscribed.  When the next email goes out on the morning of May 16th, I will be using that as a benchmark for deleting inactive email subscribers.  What this means is that if you have not opened an email or clicked a link in the emails since January 1st of this year, I’ll be deleting you from the email list and by default this will remove you from the two monthly giveaways we do, the $25 JetPens gift card, and the big Goldspot.com giveaway where you pick a fountain pen, ink, and notebook.  This is a purge process that we will probably do once every few months to make sure we maintain a list of active subscribers.  The reason for deleting users is two fold:

1. It just isn’t fair to users that are signed up and actively checking the emails to see if they were a winner.  When someone wins and they aren’t even checking, we are missing out on the opportunity to give the prize to someone that is really interested in winning and putting it to good use.

2. Quite frankly, it costs us money to have a big email list, so when there are literally 100s of folks we are emailing that don’t ever open the emails, it is costing us an extra $25 or so per month.  By not spending this money on email list management services, we can put it to better use by doing more giveaways and reviews.

If you ever have any feedback or suggestions regarding the emails, feel free to click on that reply button and let us here it…good, bad, or otherwise feedback is always a good thing as far as we are concerned.

I hope that all doesn’t sound rude, pushy, or irrational.  The goal here is to improve the situation for our active supporters when it comes to winning prizes, and to always keep things open and transparent to everyone that supports the site.

If you are reading this thinking to yourself, what email list and contest are you even talking about, head over to our Email Subscription and Giveaway page to read more about it and subscribe.

©2015, Brian Greene. All rights reserved.