Your inbox has probably been filling up this week with emails from everyone from big multinational companies to individual bloggers and makers like me, getting in touch with you about updating your newsletter settings. As you probably know, this is because there's some new EU data protection legislation (GDPR) which came into effect today and we all need to make sure our mailing lists comply with the new rules.
I've been busy behind the scenes getting ready for the new legislation (which covers lots more things than newsletters!) which has felt a little like doing my tax return - quite boring, rather complicated, a bit stressful, but very important!
I used to use a service called TinyLetter to send my email newsletters. TinyLetter was lovely and simple to use but when I looked at how best to manage my mailing list to comply with GDPR I realised I needed to switch to a service with a few more features.
So, I've moved my newsletter to TinyLetter's parent company: MailChimp. I know it's a bit of a faff for my current readers to have to resubscribe to a new service but I'm quite excited about the possibilities offered by MailChimp (well, as much as it's possible to be excited by newsletters, anyway).
I've set up four different newsletter options, so you can choose how often you want to hear from me and about what topics. You can subscribe to just one, or all four, or any combination you like, and easily manage your subscriptions at any time in the future via the handy links which will be at the bottom of every email I send.
For example, I love writing my chatty weekly-ish newsletters and sharing lots of links with you guys but I know not everyone wants to hear from me that often! Now you can choose if you want a weekly-ish update about everything I'm up to or just get emails when I add new products to my shop and/or run sales and other special offers.
I'm also making my monthly free patterns a separate newsletter that you can subscribe to without having to receive any of that other stuff. This month's free pattern is a tutorial for sewing the felt flowers pictured at the top of this post.
As well as giving you guys more choice about what you subscribe to (and me more tools behind the scenes to help me manage my lists and comply with the new legislation), MailChimp has lots more tools to help me make my newsletters look nice - hurrah! They might be a bit funny-looking for a few weeks/months as I get my head around all the settings, but hopefully my newsletters will soon be lovely and bright and colourful.
The new service will also give me lots more room to grow my mailing list long-term: I'm not sure if I would ever have actually outgrown TinyLetter's 5K subscribers limit (I just hit 500 subscribers on my old list this week, which felt like a pretty huge amount to me!) but a girl can dream, right??? It's always important to have goals to work towards, haha.
Still interested after all that newsletter-related waffle? Click here to see the new newsletter options and subscribe.
P.S. I've also added a new Privacy Policy to my blog this week, giving you more info about how I collect, use, and protect your data here on my blog and throughout my business.
UPDATE: That felt flower design is now available as a sewing pattern in my shop! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns
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