Yes, I appreciate your concern but even for a small author website, a weekly notification is not great! When I used the Mailchimp plugin on another site (an author networking site, non profit-making) we got an email notification every time someone signed up. It just means someone has to go in and check every day to see if there have been any new subscribers. In this case, my author friend wants to give away a free book every time someone signs up as an incentive. So say he gets 5 new subscribers on Monday & Tuesday – then doesn’t get notification until Sunday. That is potentially 4-5 days those people will be kept waiting.
It took a while to get the form on the sidebar to work properly and even then we had to set up all sorts of permissions to get it showing on every page.
It was difficult to link it to a mailchimp account too. Obviously we would prefer if it if we could set up a different account for this so it doesn’t conflict with the other one. So we did this with a new mailbox – yet I was unable to test it. The author wanted this live for the weekend, but without being able to test it properly it is very hard! Neither of us have seen a single email to check what is coming through.
From the two test ones we did to sign up ourselves, we got nothing (i.e. no welcoming email) which is a bit rotten. I personally don’t think the author will get much from this in the course of a year so it seems a bit wrong to suggest he spends ￡72 a year just for a handful of subscribers.
