Improved newsletter + a couple of Gmail tips

Hullo! How are you doing in this fine Thursday? I say fine when really I mean grey because it's been raining all morning. Enough with the rain already. And there was a bit of drama in our garden this afternoon, two cats were having it out. First they were on the fence meowing at each other then onto the roof of the shed from which the fell down as one big cat ball with bits of fur flying everywhere. Yikes.

Right, well, I wasn't actually going to talk about the weather or crazy cats. Nope. I'm going to talk about my Polka & Bloom newsletter. Do you subscribe to it? If not you can subscribe here. :-)

I have to be honest, though, the past few months I've not been a very good newsletter writer and that has been bothering me. In fact, I've felt my mojo lacking in a lot of areas - but that's a subject for a different post, I think! ;-)

Oh before I forget, two other things:
I have an idea in my head and by answering a few questions your input could help me a lot to shape it. Thank you! :-) 

And just a heads up: Barnes & Noble have an offer where you can buy one book and get a second one half price. Stitched Blooms, my book, is included in that offer, woop.

Ok, back to the newsletter! I have ideas for adding more content that is useful or fun so the newsletter will become a resource of sorts. I'm also planning on sending the newsletter out every week instead of once a month(ish) like I have been doing so far. I'm committing to making the newsletter better and I think I will get better at that if I do it more frequently.

The new version if my newsletter will have stitchy tips, a freebie from time to time as well as telling you about new things in my shop and other fun things I think you might like.

One thing I will mention is the weekly offer. This is a new thing I have started for my shop. Every week there will be a new special offer, for example a pattern that's greatly reduced. This week my Dala Horse and Matryoshka Doll set is only $7.00 which means you're basically getting two patterns for the price of one. Nice. :-) I won't mention the weekly offer on the blog every week, but it will be in the newsletter and in the shop you can't miss it.

A practical thing about the newsletter: if you use gmail then you may have noticed the new tabs they have implemented, one of them is the 'promotions tab where you will find things like newsletters, so if you're subscribed to my newsletter and haven't received it in quite a while, it may be in that tab. You can turn off the tabs so all mail will be in your main inbox. Or you can select emails to go into your primary inbox. See below for some tips.

Another practical thing about newsletters (not just mine) if you don't want to receive it any longer, for whatever reason, just click the 'unsubscribe link which can usually be found at the bottom of the newsletter. No one will get mad at you. If you don't want to receive a newsletter any longer, please don't mark it as spam if it is from a legitimate person/company or whatever. Just because the newsletter is no longer relevant to you, doesn't mean it's spam. Just unsubscribe and all is well. :-)

Gmail tabs tips
Making sure you see all emails from certain senders in your primary inbox:
Select the Promotions tab, then click and drag a Polka & Bloom newsletter email (or any other email your want in your primary inbox) to the primary inbox. Gmail will then ask you if you'd like all future emails from that sender to go in that folder. Just click yes and you're good to go.

If you want to turn off the tabs in Gmail:
Next to the rightmost tab in your inbox, there is a +, click on this. Uncheck all tabs except Primary and click Save. The tabs will now be gone.

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