Announcement Email - Anyone have experience?

If it is true that only people that opt-in beforehand will receive your first issue of the newsletter, I would definitely send this out 1 week prior to your first publication. Tuesday morning the week before would be ideal to get your potential subscribers used to the future schedule and Tuesday mornings is a great day/time to send email for most industries. While most will open your email in the first 24 hours, there are many latecomers that will sign-up during the week you have provided prior to distribution.

However, If you plan to send this first newsletter to everyone regardless if the opt in or not, I don’t think this pre-announcement is necessary. In fact it may send a mixed message to opt-in, but people that didn't do an opt-in, receive the issue of the Newsletter anyhow... I wouldn’t risk confusing them by not matching the expectations you are establishing by asking for an opt-in, then seemingly ignoring those non-responses.

I have to agree with Bwitter... Is there a strategic reason for the pre-announcement? We recently rolled out a newsletter, and announced within the newsletter itself the purpose and frequency. Opt-out was really low, open rate fairly decent.

Yes there is a strategic reason for the announcement. The reason is because this division of our business (Bank) is highly based on the partnership aspect of the relationship between not only our company but the individual sales representatives they work with. The main goal of the newsletter (outside of providing great value add infomration) is to drive referrals. This will launch to a specific Bank partner we have, so it will currently be exclusive to them as valued partners.

With that, I thought it best to announce this great new value add piece previously so they are not "blind sided" and wondering why all of a sudden they are getting this newsletter from us.

The second part of the strategy is that although this will not be a true Opt-In only newsletter (which I would have preferred but did not win that battel) they will have the opportunity to Opt others in. So if Im a Bank person and getthis newsletter I can direct my coworker to an opt in page to recieve the newsletter as well.

I hope that all makes sense?

I do understand, and agree with your points Bwitter. Unfortunatley I didn't win the Opt In only battel. However I still think the announcement will be beneficial to the audience so they have the awareness of why they are reciving the newsletter. The content of the announcement will be phrased as not to mislead them and highlight why we are sending it to them as a new value added item that they can opt out of if they choose.

The more I think about it I think a 1 week wait is the best. This will allow the people who are going to recieve it a week to referr others to opt in, and then they still get the awareness that the newsletter will be sent to them the following week.

Thanks for all the feedback, this was very helpful!
- Stacy