[HN Gopher] I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchim...
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I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
Author : luu
Score : 61 points
Date : 2022-01-02 07:57 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (guzey.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (guzey.com)
| ncmncm wrote:
| Mail from Mailchimp is typically indistinguishable from a
| phishing attempt.
|
| A company so clueless about internet security as to send out in
| bulk what are indistinguishable from phishing attempts clearly
| cannot be trusted to help manage your login/signup process.
|
| And, any company seen to trust an outsourcer as clueless as
| Mailchimp cannot be trusted with your personal information, never
| mind your banking or stock transactions.
|
| For particular example, Carta, a stock certificate management
| site, uses such an e-mail outsourcer.
| medion wrote:
| I switched the other way - Buttondown to Substack. I did this in
| theory for growth, because I thought Substack may provide some
| better discoverability.
|
| It did not and I regret the move!
| funerr wrote:
| You didn't move to substack you mean? And how do you know if it
| was regretful?
| fragmede wrote:
| I think they moved to substack but did not receive the
| promised growth/discoverability, thus they regret the move.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I've never thought of using substack as a way to manage my
| startup's email list, but seeing this comparison made me consider
| it. I don't like mailchimp and find the pricing to be atrocious
| for my purposes (emailing 5k people once or twice a year). How
| odd would it be to get an update from a company via a substack
| email? Does anyone else do this?
| krn wrote:
| > I don't like mailchimp and find the pricing to be atrocious
| for my purposes (emailing 5k people once or twice a year).
|
| Have you looked at MailerLite[1]?
|
| [1] https://www.mailerlite.com/
| depereo wrote:
| This looks like it's _slightly_ cheaper than MailChimp for
| transactional emails, at least for the 'starter' level
| subscription.
| ubac wrote:
| Email Octopus[1] are great, and 50% cheaper again than
| MailerLite
|
| for 5k-10k people, on monthly plan:
|
| Mailchimp: $80
|
| MailerLite: $50
|
| EmailOctopus: $24
|
| [1] https://emailoctopus.com
| fideloper wrote:
| I would be suspicious about how the services report clicks and
| (especially) open rates. They are notoriously inaccurate.
|
| Buttondown just may just be more generous (less rigorous) in
| detecting false positives.
|
| Deliverability is also partially on you (versus the provider) and
| is not necessarily easy to get right (nor is it necessarily
| consistent between email blasts).
| tremdog wrote:
| Why not use Klaviyo?
| jordansmith wrote:
| This was my thought too. Mail chimp is probably the worst ESP
| so all options are going to beat it
| ldoughty wrote:
| An interesting experiment, had to look in the comments to see how
| the group was distributed, and looks sufficiently random for a
| simple test
| civilized wrote:
| I don't know. If the experiments were perfectly random, the
| Buttondown-Substack difference is a 3-sigma effect, so the
| difference is unlikely to be random chance. But why? What's so
| special about one vs the other?
| smthngwitty wrote:
| Buttondown is less known, so it's trackers are less likely to
| be blocked
| ubac wrote:
| so my instinct for a while has been that Substack have been
| damaging their sender reputation by offering unlimited free
| sending to unlimited recipients, with the upshot that they
| attract a lot of people sending low-open-rate, marked-as-spam
| or marked-as-promotional emails. (They also, to my knowledge,
| won't let senders use their own email addresses, all emails are
| sent from Substack).
|
| I realise it's much more complicated than this, that within a
| given ESP there are multiple bundles of senders and that better
| customers get moved to a better bundle etc, but my guess is
| that for any given level within Substack you're being bundled
| with an unusually-bad group of peers and therefore getting
| lower open rates -- I would love to know if this is an accurate
| understanding, or if there's any accurate way to test this from
| outside Substack.
| civilized wrote:
| Good theory. Even my Substack subscriptions land in
| Promotions on GMail.
| leros wrote:
| Open rate should really only be affected by the content, though
| it's possible the platforms have different deliverability/spam
| rates.
| sosborn wrote:
| This is a very strange comment from the article:
|
| >37% of openers clicked a link (I think this is because
| Mailchimp's links are black rather than blue and it's easy to
| miss them)
|
| IMO, if they aren't doing anything to customize the appearance of
| their emails then this experiment isn't worth much. It also makes
| it sound like the emails weren't completely identical, which
| makes click rate comparisons invalid.
|
| Some of the bullets are helpful, but I wouldn't take this as any
| kind of gospel.
| kixiQu wrote:
| It's reasonable to go about an experiment that includes within
| its experimental parameters the mailers' default appearances,
| since part of the reason folks use these services is to have
| that all done up without too much manual intervention.
| sosborn wrote:
| I guess, but at least with Mailchimp, there are a large
| number of "default appearances," which one did they choose? I
| would have appreciated screenshots of each email to see what
| was being compared to what.
| thih9 wrote:
| > 37% of openers clicked a link (I think this is because
| Mailchimp's links are black rather than blue and it's easy to
| miss them)
|
| I wonder if these results can be replicated. Is there a detailed
| description of the process? I'm now especially interested in
| seeing the emails that were delivered to the users.
| exolymph wrote:
| Very surprised that Buttondown didn't respond to a couple of
| support emails. I used Buttondown for a while (now on Ghost) and
| always received excellent, fast support.
| hamiltonians wrote:
| substack sends too many emails. i had to unsub from a blog for
| that reason.
| skybrian wrote:
| It does, but there are settings to turn some email
| notifications off (such as for comments). You can also use the
| RSS feed instead.
| ubac wrote:
| wait, is Substack sending notifications for comments by
| default now? That's wild....
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