A Slack-Door Approach To Building Your Email List

As an administrator of several Slack communities (including Learn Slack, I was excited recently to discover a hidden ability to send an email newsletter to all the members of a Slack community (note: only if you are an admin).

It does require you to sign up for Hamster Pad, then connect the Slack community you are in. (That’s a excellent free service to join even if you are not a Slack admin.)

Then you can go to Hamster Pad and send a newsletter to your community members.

It got me thinking…could building active Slack communities and then using the Hamster Pad newsletter functionality actually be a “Slack-door” way to build your *real* email list? You could easily direct people to click on another link to check out an offer, get a free resource, etc.

My caveat would be, any links you share should be relevant to the community you are in…and not viewed as spam or a waste of people’s time…that would be uncool.

There are limitations to this Hamster Pad email functionality:

• As the sender, you cannot directly access members’ email addresses (probably a good thing, as this could lead to email scraping)
• Recipients can’t reply to the sender
• There are no typical email analytics (opens, clickthroughs, list segmentation, etc.)
• You can’t schedule emails
• There is not a public, web-based view of the email messages (unless you are logged into Hamster Pad and a member of the community that sent it)

Still, overall I see a lot of potential for thoughtful Slack community managers to add value through the Hamster Pad newsletter functionality, which in turn could lead to increased opt-ins for your company or cause.