[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push th...
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Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
So many blogs promote their newsletter, often before I even start
reading their article. I run a content-based website, and many of
my competitors push their newsletter. What is the rationale behind
it? I don't subscribe to a single newsletter myself, so I'm a bit
puzzled about the benefits of running one.
Author : nicbou
Score : 162 points
Date : 2022-08-01 10:20 UTC (12 hours ago)
| cheschire wrote:
| I read newsletters fairly regularly and I go search for them too
| sometimes.
|
| While I appreciate using RSS to get a taste of the spectrum of
| current events, newsletters tend to be more curated, sometimes
| carrying a theme, and have the feeling of quality.
|
| I used to flip through the weekly ads in newspapers but oh boy
| there was nothing quite like getting a company's sales catalog.
| The feeling is similar for me.
| escapedmoose wrote:
| I don't use social media, so I subscribe to newsletters to follow
| sources I like. They're easy to manage, easy to unsubscribe, and
| feel more personal than the mass blast of competing socials. If
| you don't have a newsletter, you fall off my radar completely.
|
| Obnoxious newsletter notifications as soon as one enters a
| website are extremely grating though. If I care enough to want a
| newsletter from you, I'll find it myself.
| bilekas wrote:
| I've signed up for a few pre-launch subscriptions as I know I
| woulnd't remember to check back and have found that extremely
| useful.
| mobilene wrote:
| I have a blog in which I publish six days a week, plus a
| newsletter I publish once a month. Some people prefer (and
| subscribe to) one over the other for various reasons. A
| multichannel strategy just lets me reach more people who are
| interested in what I'm doing.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Web notifications are like the new search-engine windows toolbar
| spam. Probably some companies use these notifications
| responsibly, but half way through day 1 I turned them off and
| have been blocking them ever since. If I visited your news site
| once to read 1 article which may or may not have disappointed me,
| I'm not turning notifications on.
| sharemywin wrote:
| Even if you use it to let people know about new articles. I don't
| see why it wouldn't be a win.
| jasode wrote:
| _> So many blogs promote their newsletter, [...] What is the
| rationale behind it?_
|
| A website (and also RSS) -- that is not hard paywalled with
| account login -- is a _" pull"_ by anonymous webbrowser clients.
| The website's content creator doesn't have a _direct_
| relationship with readers because you 'd only have web browser IP
| addresses or aggregate statistics with Google Analytics, etc.
|
| In contrast, newsletters can be _" push"_ by content creators
| because you have collected email addresses that want the
| newsletters and therefore have a more _direct relationship_ with
| readers. Building the audience via email addresses is valuable
| because it works outside centralized platforms like Youtube,
| Patreon, etc.
|
| My previous comment dissecting example of Tim Ferris website-vs-
| newsletter : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27716442
| rubenbe wrote:
| For a small sports club: yes.
|
| We announce events there, so it has added value for the end user.
|
| Main reason to do so: social media platforms (read: instagram and
| certainly facebook) burry your posts if you don't pay up for
| "promotion".
| meibo wrote:
| Yes, they work and people do actually check their emails. Even if
| you have a 20-30% click rate, that's 30% of people that may read
| your headline, click through to your blog post, product
| announcement, etc.
|
| If you're smart about your strategy (don't spam, think twice
| about when to send a mail, lead with interesting content,
| visually appealing), a mailing list can be a huge asset to any
| business. People tend to not want to follow companies on Twitter
| or Instagram, if they want to stay up to date, a lot of them
| might want news in their easily filterable inbox, in my
| experience.
| MrDunham wrote:
| > People tend to not want to follow companies
|
| Also many companies got burned thinking the smorgasbord of free
| traffic on social platforms would never end.
|
| It turns out that when your primary business model is selling
| traffic (via ads), giving it away for free is antithetical to
| your margins.
|
| Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok (sometime soon)
| started off giving creators (and businesses) tons of free
| traffic only to eventually suppress it to push people towards
| paying to reach the followers they worked so hard to get.
|
| On the other hand, once someone has given you permission to
| email them then it really doesn't matter if you do it from your
| own mailserver, mailchimp, or anything else... They are still
| expecting you to be in their inbox (hopefully delivering great
| value).
|
| Source: I was reading the internal newsletter in the bathroom
| of a major social network's office ~6 years ago when they were
| announcing (in celebration) that they had suppressed organic
| reach to sub 5%
| bdlowery wrote:
| Following a giant company on social media is pointless. A
| large majority of their posts are dumb memes, or clever ways
| to be funny. It's never anything of substance.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Most businesses I've bought things from online (notably not
| Amazon) want to send me at least one email a day and it is more
| than I can keep up with.
|
| In the beginning for instance I would get emails from Best Buy
| that often had good offers, but at some point it got like
| ArsTechnica's dealmaster and the offers became insipid. Even if
| the offers were compelling I couldn't buy something every day.
| blowski wrote:
| Normally, click rates are more like 0.1%.
|
| But it's also about brand recall. Having someone's email
| address lets you put an ad (subject line) in front of them for
| almost free, as often as you want, without having to go through
| the algorithms of the social networks.
| franze wrote:
| Managed and initialized a few newsletters. With CTR >40%.
| It's all about value and expectation. i.e.: If you send out a
| vegan recipe every sunday to people who have subscribed to
| get vegan recipes on sunday - and you constantly deliver
| reoccurring value to these users, it works like a charm.
|
| From all traffic channels Newsletters are my most favorite
| ones.
| blowski wrote:
| For boutique newsletters in small niches, sure, you can see
| much higher click-through rates.
|
| But if you're New York Times, Walmart, AllRecipes - you're
| sending a daily email to > 10 million uniques, and your
| click-through rates will be < 0.1%.
| jeromegv wrote:
| How would you know? Have you seen their data? It's closer
| to at least 1% for most ecommerce sites.
|
| It's not just for small niche that newsletter works. It's
| often considered the most reliable marketing tool (and
| cheap!), year after year after year.
| blowski wrote:
| > Have you seen their data?
|
| Yes, for similar sized brands and types of campaign. I
| worked for quite some time in email marketing for blue
| chips.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Normally, click rates are more like 0.1%._
|
| Some email campaign stats from Mailchimp (which may be self-
| serving but does match other numbers I've seen) ... says _"
| open rate"_ is about 20% - 30% and _" click-through-rate"_
| (of a link embedded within the email) is about 2% - 5% :
|
| https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-marketing-benchmarks/
|
| If people are not tricked into email newsletter signups via
| dark patterns (e.g. a default check box on an ecommerce
| shopping checkout), a lot of readers do actively open and
| click on emails they voluntarily signed up for. In such
| cases, click rates will realistically be much higher than
| 0.1%.
| eli wrote:
| Your example click rate is about an order of magnitude higher
| than the average.
| brk wrote:
| I think it depends on the content and audience. I routinely
| get open rates in the mid 20% range when I send out a
| newsletter email.
| [deleted]
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Selecting an email to delete it in the Apple mail.app also
| opens it. Doesn't mean I'm actually reading it.
| chudi wrote:
| I thing that the average is for generic marketing campaigns,
| At my work we have between 5-15 ctr on emails, just because
| the content is noteworthy
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I think it's trivial to see it "works" in the sense that it costs
| nothing and generates at least some positive revenue. The
| expected value of doing it from the producer end is greater than
| zero.
|
| Does that mean you should do it? That's the more interesting
| question. Panhandling works. Spamming works. Direct mail
| campaigns, sending out mass texts to lists you buy from states
| that sell voter records all work. Standing on the street corner
| asking random passersby if they want to buy drugs works.
|
| But you're ruining a commons. Mail, SMS, and email are nearly
| useless communication channels now because the signal to noise
| ratio is so low. They're major annoyances you spend more time
| deleting and curating than actually getting value from as a user.
| It's understandable that producers don't see it that way or don't
| care. From their perspective, they have some unique value
| proposition that is just so great for their users that they need
| to keep them informed. The problem is there are millions of other
| producers who feel exactly the same way, and the net downpour is
| so overwhelming on the consumer side that it doesn't matter. I
| don't care how high value these information streams are. There is
| a limit to what I can consume in a day, and I would rather select
| and curate myself, on a pull model, and some days consume nothing
| at all, rather than have it all pushed at me. If you haven't
| heard from me in a while as a customer? Guess what? That means
| I'm probably happy. I bought your product, I'm using it, and I'm
| satisfied with it. I don't need another. When I do, I'll come
| back, but that might be years in the future. Deal with it. I
| can't buy something from every vendor I've ever done any business
| with every week for the rest of my life.
| posix86 wrote:
| > I think it's trivial to see it "works" in the sense that it
| costs nothing and generates at least some positive revenue.
|
| How does it cost nothing??
| asicsp wrote:
| They do work to some extent (which is greater than zero). I have
| a newsletter to share links related to Python, Linux, Regular
| Expressions, Vim, etc. 38 issues later, I have close to 500
| subscribers (I don't do pop-ups, but thanks for the reminder - I
| should at least add them in the footer of my blog posts, been
| promoting mostly to my readers on Gumroad/Twitter).
|
| Based on Gumroad stats, open rates are above 40%. I send 10-15
| links per week, and the total link clicks average around 150 (not
| sure if adblockers affect such stats). I try to optimize links to
| share based on interest shown in topics so far.
|
| And as others have commented, one of the reasons to start a
| newsletter is to have your own platform for sharing content.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| One of the difficulties encountered with newsletters and email
| promotion, is that your email sending service (MailChimp,
| Keap/Infusionsoft, SendGrid, etc.) rates you on your customers'
| Spam Complaint Rate. If you exceed 0.1% complaints, you can lose
| your account.
|
| Recipients at some of the more naive addresses (Yahoo, AOL,
| Hotmail, MSN) have a habit of clicking on the prominent "Spam"
| button (instead of the "Unsubscribe" link) when all they want to
| do is unsubscribe. You get tarred with the wrong brush. Very
| frustrating.
| jlarocco wrote:
| Call it naive if you want to, but I purposely flag all
| marketting emails as spam when I unsubscribe.
|
| If it weren't spam, I wouldn't be unsubscribing.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| On the other hand, spammers... I mean advertisers use many many
| dark practices to get users to subscribe to their spam.. i
| mean, ad e-mails. Some even subrscribe you by default. Some
| give you 30+ different checkmarks to untick to get rid of the
| spam. So yeah... clicking "spam", makes it easier for the rest
| of the people who got scammed the same way.
| wgx wrote:
| It's "push" instead of "pull" for content authors. A casual
| visitor my read one of your posts, then never visit your site
| again. If they sign up, you can send them monthly content.
|
| I get it, but I do wish sites would give it a rest with the
| Newsletter pop-ups.
| mkl wrote:
| That doesn't hold up to me. Why would a casual visitor sign up
| to a newsletter after reading half a paragraph of the article?
| Surely the bottom of the article would be a better place to ask
| if that was the purpose.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Doesn't matter what holds up for you. What matter is the
| conversion rate. If someone gets 1% conversion from that
| Popup, then they'll keep it because 1% is higher than 0%.
|
| For sure some websites are more sophisticated and wait for
| the 2nd visit, or later in the article, etc. But most people
| install a basic Popup app that triggers right away as a
| default setting and that's what ends up happening. Not the
| best user experience but they rather have the subscribers
| than not having them and yes some people still fill that
| Popup.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _What is the rationale behind it?_
|
| Grab an audience that does not know about RSS/Atom news
| aggregators?
| letmeoknmmm wrote:
| Newsletters are getting a revival because people don't have a
| news reader and sites stopped pushing RSS.
|
| Basically the only unintermediated contact.
| godmode2019 wrote:
| Yes they do work,
|
| Its the only way to actually own your audience. Rather than
| asking permission to access someone else's audience.
|
| For example, I get emails from some people for the last 10 years.
| I would have forgotten about them many times over.
|
| Having a Facebook page with a lot of likes use to mean you could
| get on their feed, now you are lucky to get any views without
| paying for them.
| mjoneill wrote:
| > Do newsletters work?
|
| Marketer here. Yes, they work very well...unless you're pumping
| out a crappy newsletter that nobody wants, doesn't provide value,
| etc.
|
| Not all products are the same, and not all sales funnels are
| identical... but generally you want lower commitment asks that
| can help you build your audience of potential customers far out
| in advance of them being in a position to buy. In a B2B world,
| investing in high-value content that helps people do their jobs
| better regardless of whether or not they own YOUR software is a
| great way to build your audience so that your product is front
| and center when it is time to buy/consider.
|
| For some products, the opportunity to replace an entrenched
| solution with your own may only come up once a decade. For
| others, it might be an annual or monthly ask. Content Marketing
| is the only thing worth a damn that builds trust and relationship
| so that you can better convert these opportunities when the time
| is right.
| [deleted]
| exodust wrote:
| They work and don't work. Today I received this email from a
| camera store I purchased from previously. Subject: "we miss you"
| body: "We haven't seen you in a while! Need to kickstart your
| inspiration? Our expert staff can get you started. CHAT NOW."
|
| No products, no specials, nothing else in email.
|
| Funny how they're shouting at me to 'chat now' about my
| inspiration. For me this is newsletters not working. Another bad
| habit is the full page sign-up prompts seconds after visiting
| site. Like the cookie consent form pop-up wasn't enough, let's
| slap them again with newsletter prompt.
| ivanche wrote:
| I would be seriously tempted to call them and then saying
| "Howdy, I want to talk about kickstarting my inspiration."
| mkl wrote:
| I think it might be a filtering thing, like Nigerian scammers
| including things that make them look dodgy to make sure they've
| got someone particularly gullible on the hook. The people who end
| up subscribed to the newsletter are the easiest to get money
| from, sell junk to, con into buying cryptocurrency, scam,
| whatever.
| avip3d wrote:
| I believe it offers a way for companies to hook a customer in
| once, then get their attention for free for months (via
| weekly/monthly emails).
| awillen wrote:
| I run an ecommerce dog treat company, and I typically send out
| about one email a week. I try to keep those to 50% or less emails
| that offer discounts, and I try to make the discounts product-
| specific, so people don't just get used to getting a 20% off
| coupon twice a month.
|
| For the non-discount emails, I'll just send something about the
| company or the products. If I was on a morning show talking about
| the company, I'll send out the video. If I don't have anything
| else out, I just remind people of the fact that it's very hot,
| and we sell frozen dog treat mix.
|
| Each email goes out to about 3500 people and generates 3-15
| sales. Discount emails do better than non-discount, but some non-
| discount (like good press coverage) do very well. New product
| launches and sales for major holidays when people are looking to
| shop (e.g. Memorial Day, BFCM) do over 15 sales.
|
| I've tested doing it less often, and ultimately doing one email a
| week barely affects unsubscribes and easily generates enough
| extra revenue to be worth it.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Tangent: do web push notifications work?
|
| A lot of websites ask if I want to be notified via a web push,
| which I personally find very annoying and have never tried it.
| But perhaps people (consumers/users and sellers/creators) find
| them useful?
|
| Bonus question: are you subscribed to any web push notifications?
| Which ones and why do you like web push vs. a newsletter or RSS?
| l72 wrote:
| I have enabled web push notifications for a few sites,
| specifically Slack and Help Lightning. But those are both
| communication tools where I often use a browser instead of a
| native app and want immediate message notifications.
|
| I have never, nor would I ever enable web push notifications
| for any sort of marketing or newsletters. I am still a huge RSS
| reader fan, and use imapfilter to automatically format and send
| certain emails directly to my RSS service (freshrss) [1].
|
| I am big on zero-inbox, so I _hate_ having non important stuff
| in there. But for some reason, having a backlog of RSS feeds
| doesn't bother me! I wonder if part of it is that I find mobile
| email clients and web email clients so limiting when it comes
| to filtering and managing messages/threads.
|
| [1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-
| email...
| RobbieGM wrote:
| I find the ones on lichess quite useful. As for whether they
| work for ads, I'm not sure, IIRC you'll need to have your
| browser open or at least running in the background to get push
| notifications, so my hunch is that they wouldn't be good for
| that.
| lock-the-spock wrote:
| I believe they are intended to support effective webapps but in
| practice are just used to confuse and abuse non-techy users
| that suddenly get 100s of notifications for random websites
| which they don't know how to turn off. Same as notifications
| from all the spam addiction-based-and-not-actually-fun free-to-
| play apps.
| ellisv wrote:
| IMO a huge part of the problem for users is not really knowing
| what they're agreeing to since you don't really know what
| notifications you're going to get until they're turned on.
| tjansen wrote:
| I guess many people hate them, but subscribe without thinking
| about it and don't know how to unsubscribe. For the websites I
| would expect them to be quite useful, because they will get a
| lot of extra traffic and returning customers. Even if people
| don't like the volume of notifications, they will still click
| on them if the headline sounds interesting enough.
|
| Bonus answer: I think they are quite useful for web
| applications (mail, calendars, slack etc) and I usually prefer
| enabling notifications to installing a native client.
| toast0 wrote:
| Yep, my MIL had accidentally subscribed to several, and when
| I next saw her laptop, the notifications came in all the way
| up the right side and were pretty disruptive.
| kixiQu wrote:
| My grandmother thought her computer had a bunch of viruses
| because of how Windows 10 showed them.
| mitchellst wrote:
| A data point: Amazon has Amazon Smile, where 0.5% of your
| purchase price will be donated to a charity of your choice. You
| use it on web by going to smile.Amazon.com.
|
| On the app, though, you can enable it... but only if you enable
| pushes to your phone. So Amazon has determined that they work
| well enough to be worth half a percent of e-commerce revenue.
| vlod wrote:
| I realize this may be a pain for some, but doing a force quit
| on the amazon app (once you're done) will stop the
| notifications.
| tiberriver256 wrote:
| I have never allowed any notifications.
| salzig wrote:
| Me neither. IHMO the best option is to check "Block new
| requests asking to allow notifications" in Firefox (Settings
| -> Privacy -> Notifications -> Settings).
| saos wrote:
| Newsletters work because email will never ever die. Email is the
| one constant that will exist forever. So if you can reach a
| persons inbox you can reach their attention
| codeptualize wrote:
| It's a "push". If I go to your website because I see an
| interesting article on Hacker news or Twitter I'm unlikely to
| return for newer articles, even if I'm interested I will simply
| forget. However if you get my email you can push content to me.
|
| If you have enough people in your newsletter you can increase
| your traffic and keep it more consistent, more traffic is more ad
| revenue. You could even get your newsletter sponsored and make it
| a source of revenue.
|
| I have not worked on newsletters specifically but I can attest
| that sending emails is generally very effective.
| michalu wrote:
| My company sends a newsletter once a month. We're selling roasted
| coffee. This single day account for 20-30% of our monthly
| revenue. In fact email is our single best performing channel.
| Hope this info helps.
|
| EDIT: I should also add that we're combining every newsletter
| with some "offer" e.g. we make a new blend or roast couple of
| bags of some coffee we don't typically stock. We're also keeping
| it very personal - it's literally just a plain text email (we've
| got this new thing on stock, here's what we've been up to and
| here's some new content on blog - have a great month.)
| pdksam wrote:
| What service do you use for templatizing amd sending the
| emails? Are they personalized?
| michalu wrote:
| We simply send emails using gmail API. They are personalized
| a bit, I run everything from jupyter notebook. Not a big fan
| of services like mailchimp. We keep personal approach so I
| prefer to land in primary inbox vs "promotions" as most
| customers are businesses and we've had exchanges over the
| email. We're just under 2k which is the daily limit for
| gmail, will start using SMTP with it since that gets you 10k
| emails a day.
| bfors wrote:
| I'd be very interested to hear more details about your
| jupyter notebook setup for sending emails
| nicbou wrote:
| What's wrong with MailChimp?
| real-dino wrote:
| I really like MJML. It's an abstraction layer that targets
| most email providers.
|
| You still need to test with a service like Litmus, but it
| gets you 90% of the way there.
| lancesells wrote:
| Sounds like you should switch to sending two a month.
| argiopetech wrote:
| Not in the coffee business, but I doubt those who like coffee
| enough to receive a coffee newsletter need to purchase twice
| a month. It's very likely that doubling the touch points with
| consumers would lead to ad fatigue.
|
| This said, it's possible that once a month isn't the right
| interval. 3 weeks or 5 might be better. Analysis would need
| to be done.
| legitster wrote:
| Are you my VP of marketing?
| wil421 wrote:
| If you send annoying emails to my inbox I'm ignoring them and
| eventually will unsubscribe or mark them as spam.
| layer8 wrote:
| I know an online retailer who sends a newsletter every day,
| if not multiple newsletters per day. It's insane. Apparently
| they have enough customers who don't unsubscribe that it
| works for them.
| bsedlm wrote:
| sounds like you want more better faster for less cheaper and
| quicker.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| You are management material
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| This is how it starts. Before you know it, they are spamming
| their mailing list every day.
| dawnerd wrote:
| As a consumer, please no. Way too many places go from sending
| one email to once a week to suddenly every single day... and
| some local restaurants decided multiple per day would work.
| atoav wrote:
| I have _one_ company that I like to receive mails from and it
| is because I actually _care_ about the content in their mails
| -- it is actually interesting stuff, not marketing bs.
|
| If they sent me an email twice a week I would unsubscribe
| after a month.
|
| Every company that tries to waste my time like that looses a
| bit of my respect, period.
| michalu wrote:
| So far we found once a month to be our sweet spot. Majority
| of customers buy their monthly supply in one shopping session
| and this is a way to prompt some of them + reactivate old
| customers / staled customers and convert blog subscribers.
|
| I think the next step is to segment our customer/subscriber
| base and send at various frequency. But it's also a "side-
| hustle" so it takes effort :)
| StevePerkins wrote:
| I assume that returns are diminishing, and turn negative past
| a certain point.
|
| If a company that I'm interested in sends me an email once
| per month, then I generally don't mind it. I might even
| appreciate it.
|
| Send it every two weeks, and you're training me to tune out
| and usually click the "Delete" button without looking at the
| content.
|
| Send it weekly, and you've irritated me enough to have the
| motivation to unsubscribe. Maybe just flag you as spam if the
| "Unsubscribe" link isn't immediately easy to find. Certainly
| tarnished my view of your brand.
|
| I don't know where the "sweet spot" is, but monthly sounds
| about right.
| judge2020 wrote:
| One thing i'd like to see is links at the top of emails
| asking the user if they want to change their receive
| frequency; I know many newsletters already have a "change
| how often you get these" button, however, needing to go to
| that page and then enter & submit a form is tiresome and
| tends to not be worth it when the newsletter isn't that
| important to you. Indicating that you can change to
| 'monthly' in a single click/tap is probably much better UX.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Agreed, but depends on the content. For things like this,
| I'm assuming they can tell what people who do buy actually
| buy, and we might assume it's enough coffee for a few weeks
| or so.
|
| I do get some newsletters weekly and do not mind at all,
| because the info is new/fresh/useful. For 'buy some stuff',
| unless I'm buying every week (which I don't beyond food)
| likely less is more.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Really, it just depends on a the value you provide in
| your emails. If Apple sent me 40% discount promo codes,
| I'd LOVE weekly emails. Ha!
| mbesto wrote:
| > I assume that returns are diminishing, and turn negative
| past a certain point.
|
| Which is why you should test it.
|
| Jan '22 -> once a month
|
| Feb '22 -> twice a month
|
| Mar '22 -> thrice a month
|
| Jan '23 -> once a month
|
| Feb '23 -> twice a month
|
| Mar '23 -> thrice a month
|
| Compare and contrast for both unsubscribe rate and
| conversion.
| n4bz0r wrote:
| Fries a month seems like the sweet spot. Especially with
| a drink. And a burger. Where do I subscribe?!
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| No, just no. AB testing how much you can squeeze out of
| the channel has a huge negative backlash. A customer
| driven "send these more often" or "send these less often"
| offer in the email will give the customer the ability to
| set the level of engagement that works best for them and
| avoid both rage quits and user hostility to being
| "worked."
|
| A friend of mine was hired by Peet's to try to clean up
| the mess they caused by doing this to their previously
| loyal fan base, it has been a lot of work and expense.
| mbesto wrote:
| > A friend of mine was hired by Peet's to try to clean up
| the mess they caused by doing this to their previously
| loyal fan base
|
| Clean up what? You test it once and if it works, it
| works, if it doesn't you revert back. You're not going to
| get a huge backlash of brand loyalty for increasing a
| monthly newsletter to 2x/month. And if you get ANY
| backlash you simply revert back. Most people wouldn't
| even notice.
|
| I think you're overthinking my recommendation.
|
| > A customer driven "send these more often" or "send
| these less often" offer in the email will give the
| customer the ability to set the level of engagement that
| works best for them
|
| You should have this option regardless of what techniques
| you use.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > And if you get ANY backlash you simply revert back.
| Most people wouldn't even notice.
|
| The people who dropped the newsletter after it became
| spam definitely won't notice that you reverted back to
| the expected behavior.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| It depends on the size of that group and their
| sensitivity. I've found that consumers generally don't
| think as much about it as tech people - it's much more
| random than we like to think.
|
| If your test costs 2% of newsletter receipients who were
| 2 emails away from unsubscribing, it might be worth it.
|
| As always, know your audience.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| This works until the people who get 3 emails a month
| unsubscribe. Don't break it if it works.
| [deleted]
| antisthenes wrote:
| I work for an ecommerce company.
|
| The unsubscribe rate doesn't really change, it's fairly
| constant at 0.3% of the audience every time.
|
| There are obviously diminishing returns on the revenue
| with frequencies. Our business is moderately seasonal, so
| the numbers are not that accurate on the revenue side.
| kbelder wrote:
| I think a majority of people don't unsubscribe; they just
| mark your emails as spam and ignore them. That lowers
| your credibility with email providers, and if that
| happens enough, you start seeing your emails being
| considered as spam and you get entirely blocked off the
| ISP.
|
| Also, it may be a mistake to attribute all of your
| revenue from the email to email. By its nature, emails
| are going to the segment of your audience most interested
| and most likely to purchase. Only a portion of revenue
| from it is actually incremental; a large part probably
| would have ordered anyway, and the email gets credit only
| because they're _also_ clicking through the email.
|
| Of course, it depends on what offers are in the email,
| etc. If you want to test, the best bet is as was
| mentioned elsewhere in this thread, segment out a set of
| customers and change the frequency of emails over the
| long term, and track their _total_ sales.
| antisthenes wrote:
| You're talking in general, and most of your points are
| correct, but they don't apply to our business fully.
|
| For example, our newsletters are always offering a time-
| limited discount for the purchase. They're also not
| segmented out to people "most likely to purchase",
| because we don't have that data. It goes out to 100% of
| our audience every time, unless they made a very recent
| purchase.
|
| If we knew who the people are that are most likely to
| buy, it sure as hell would make the business easier to
| run.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Yep, you need to track your open rates too. If you have a
| 20% open rate, run a daily spam trial, and find you had a
| 0.3% unsub rate but your open rate is now 10%... You
| actually had a 50% unsub rate, your customers just aren't
| letting you know they've unsubscribed
| hedora wrote:
| Isn't open rate obfuscated / blocked by most clients now?
| How do you measure it?
|
| (I've been blocking them for 25+ years; might be out of
| touch...)
| jacobobryant wrote:
| Probably better to use a split test. Segment the list
| into two segments (via random assignment). Send one
| segment two emails per month, send the other one per
| month. Compare the segments.
| mbesto wrote:
| True. I would then test that over a 6+ month interval.
| Depending on the volume of subscribers the results may
| not be correlative.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| My experience is that diminishing returns happen, but the
| big question is when they happen. I've run a few medium
| sized email and postal campaigns, and evenly time we were
| shocked at the response rate by contact #10. It was always
| higher than we expected.
| livelace wrote:
| Email is a great thing, I use it heavily. Why newsletters doens't
| work for me:
|
| 1. I don't want to give my email. 2. I don't want to receive
| spam. 3. I don't like long letters with massive amount of
| different news (even in single domain).
|
| In my view newsletters/digests take more time to read and I
| prefer to receive small pieces of topics more often (what I'm
| interested in specifically, not whole the editor choice) than to
| recevie bunch of them on weekly basis.
| kroltan wrote:
| 1&2: Get yourself a domain, hand out randomhash@myself.com
|
| Bonus points, you get independence from your email provider, so
| if Google or whatever decides to delete your account spuriously
| you don't die digitally.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I think it really depends on the content. I have a software
| product that manages all kinds of data. To raise awareness, I
| also have a newsletter that I send out a couple times a month. In
| the newsletter, I try to educate people about data issues and how
| computers process data. I try to make it interesting to people
| who might never even try out my software
| (https://didgets.substack.com/). While the purpose of the
| newsletter is to get people interested in looking at my product,
| I try not to push it too much. I don't enjoy newsletters that are
| nothing more than a sales pitch.
| tedmcory77 wrote:
| There are three types of traffic: Paid, Earned, Owned.
|
| Paid - PPC and the like
|
| Earned - Press, News Coverage, etc. Basically, causing a way to
| get yourself in the news cycle
|
| Owned - Email is the best example. You, for the most part,
| control this and it's the easiest way to control your future. By
| getting newsletters people begin to know, like, and trust you and
| become more likely to buy.
| franze wrote:
| Channel Hedging
|
| If you depend on SEO, SEA, Adsense you depend on Google.
|
| If you depend on Facebook, Insta, you depend on Meta.
|
| If you depend on Linkedin, you depend on Linkedin.
|
| If you depend on Newsletters, you depend on Spamfilters.
|
| Every channel has its risk. So hedging your traffic channels is
| the best thing you can do. And Newsletter is the least annoying
| one, as Google and Facebook maximize for ad-spendings.
| Spamfilters don't.
| svnpenn wrote:
| > Newsletter is the least annoying one
|
| That's not saying much. Those are still highly annoying, to the
| point where I will often permanently cancel service with
| companies that do it.
|
| Don't email me ads for shit, unless I told you to do that.
| franze wrote:
| least annoying (in regards of the dependencies) for the
| publisher
| mooreds wrote:
| > Channel Hedging
|
| Love that concept. Really sums up the value in newsletters as
| an alternative means of capturing attention.
| r1ch wrote:
| It's also a way to get an email address that you can retarget ads
| to.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Yes, they absolutely do work. I regularly get 40-60% open rate on
| my newsletters. As long as you're not spamming them daily with
| useless messages. Email is the most engaged medium. With Twitter,
| FB or Instagram, you're lucky if even 1% of your followers read
| your message.
| suprfsat wrote:
| Fun fact, Apple Mail "opens" the email asynchronously, for
| privacy reasons.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I built email tracking once and sometimes, very randomly,
| Gmail would fetch images in emails before they were ever
| actually opened by a human. This was a couple years ago
| massysett wrote:
| Yes. Email is a primary way I gather news. I get a bunch of daily
| emails from various news sources. Some are news organizations,
| while others are from government agencies or officials. I also
| get emails from vendors. I filter these into a "shopping" folder
| so that if I'm looking for a deal I can rummage through there.
|
| I get a few random things that just make me happy, like a daily
| email from a guy who travels the world and sends one photo a day
| - he might make his money on guidebooks or itineraries or
| something.
|
| I suppose some might use Facebook or Twitter for this but I use
| neither.
| n0ts0gr33n wrote:
| I'd be interested to know which news sites and government
| agencies send you this by email.
| massysett wrote:
| I'm in Maryland USA. There are two non-profits that cover
| Maryland news and send daily newsletters. The county
| executive (chief executive person for the county) sends a
| weekly email with various county service news, and the county
| council sends regular emails. Of course this stuff is self-
| promoting but it does let me know what is happening as press
| coverage at this level is minimal at best. The parks send a
| weekly mail with events, as do other local agencies. Most
| government agencies around here do this and they usually have
| sign up links at the bottom of every webpage, in the pile
| with all the other links that don't get noticed much.
|
| Unfortunately it seems to me the big newspapers like NY Times
| are intent on sending mails with daily commentary and
| "analysis" rather than just high-level digests. I do get
| digest emails for my work - Washington legislative stuff that
| doesn't get a lot of public attention - and those are much
| more useful than the "analysis" NY Times likes to send; I
| really wish they would do more of a straight daily news
| summary.
|
| C-span also has a great daily email with video clips from the
| day - just politicians in their own words, rather than
| "analysis" which always just means commentary and opinion.
| The Economist does some commentary in its daily emails but
| it's brief and has a good survey of world news and it's
| always worth reading.
| rozenmd wrote:
| I ran a newsletter for https://maxrozen.com in the lead up to
| releasing a book on React's useEffect hook, for about a year.
|
| It was no extra work, since I was writing articles anyway, so
| this gave me another channel to let folks know a new article was
| out.
|
| When I eventually released the book, email subscribers were 5x as
| likely to buy the book than people coming in via Google search.
|
| Effectively, it's about building an audience to sell to, and it
| works.
| baby wrote:
| I don't believe they "work", but IMO as a company you want as
| many way to push information to your customers. Today it's
| principally emails or notifications. And so this is why you see
| newsletters form and every apps under the sky seems to ask to
| enable push notifications on your phone.
|
| Another way is RSS feeds, but many companies seem to consider
| that there's not enough users for the trouble.
| jimbost wrote:
| It's also not just about the newsletter; it also unlocks
| abandoned cart/checkout emails, low inventory for recently
| viewed, back in stock emails, etc.
| bwb wrote:
| Newsletters are something you own and control. Google, FB,
| Twitter, and all those things are outside your control. It is so
| important as it is the only thing that can't really be taken away
| by the big guys.
| mooreds wrote:
| A number of reasons:
|
| * Because other platforms own you, but you own your newsletter.
|
| * Not everyone opens a newsletter, but everyone checks their
| email. So if they don't open the newsletter, at least they see
| something from you.
|
| * It's near zero cost.
|
| I don't like it when sites push their newsletter constantly, but
| I do like educational content pushed to where I often am (my
| inbox).
| tomp wrote:
| What do you mean "you own your newsletter"?
|
| Your newsletter is owned by a massive corporate platform such
| as Mailchipm, which will ban you for wrongthink/wrongspeak just
| like other massive corporate platforms like Facebook.
|
| Just the first news story I found:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1017221 - keep in mind
| that "antivaxxer" doesn't mean what it used to mean but could
| simply mean you're pointing out that vaccines aren't 100% safe
| or 100% effective which is absolutely true but was considered
| fake news by mainstream propaganda a year or so ago. Besides
| the point but I expect I'll get some replies so just noting
| preemptively.
| [deleted]
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| You're conflating the medium (newsletter) with its
| distribution mechanism (mass mailing). If you have the
| content and the destination addresses, it's trivial to switch
| to another provider.
| tomp wrote:
| Other providers can still ban you.
|
| Switching providers sometimes requires all existing
| subscribers to "opt in" again.
|
| Regardless you're _still_ owned by _a_ platform. Gmail
| ain't gonna let you deliver 1000s of emails yourself.
| kylecordes wrote:
| Others can ban you, but if the first band was bogus, the
| others probably won't ban you.
|
| Others could require everyone opt in again, but most of
| the email providers don't require this.
|
| People move their list to another provider all the time;
| very starkly different from a bunch of followers on a
| social platform.
| klelatti wrote:
| > You're still owned by a platform.
|
| There is a clear difference between lock in to a single
| provider and their commercial interests and strategy and
| the possibility that your content might fall foul of a
| number of providers.
|
| For many email is a much less risky option than
| alternatives. Do you have a better option?
| lrae wrote:
| Then you just move to another ESP / newsletter service with
| your mailing list? Or even run it yourself with something
| like listmonk.
| mooreds wrote:
| Sure, you might get kicked off a newsletter provider
| platform. It's a risk.
|
| But you have far far more options to take your subscriber
| list and go to a different provider (substack, tinyletter) or
| even build your own solution using something like mailgun or
| AWS SES. (Yes, that latter option would be quite a bit of
| work, but if you had, say, 20k email subscribers, it might be
| worth it.)
|
| If you get kicked off twitter or facebook or even a place
| like HN or Lobste.rs, you have exactly zero ability to export
| the contact info of people who knew you and want to continue
| to hear from you.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It took me about four hours to build an SES based mailing
| system. With dynamodb, lambda and the API gateway it is
| almost trivial. Put docker in the mix and it's more like
| going to the moon.
| davewritescode wrote:
| SES to handle transactional email is completely
| reasonable. Doing bulk email sends using SES is asking
| for trouble and you'll consistently lag way behind the
| big marketing ESPs (MailChimp, Constant Contact, Active
| Campaign) on delivery rates.
|
| Making sure you avoid spam traps, fraudulent signups,
| purchased lists, spammy campaigns and all that are most
| of the work. Even if your customers are internal only,
| what happens when one of your salespeople uploads a
| sketchy email list they got from who knows where.
|
| I've worked at an ESP before and you'd be very surprised
| how many smart people are just working on the spam
| detection.
| whakim wrote:
| I don't think SES is particularly hard to use. That being
| said, there are a huge number of caveats:
|
| * Email HTML is gnarly. Hope you like tables. The vast
| majority of web developers aren't equipped to write email
| HTML for something as simple as a button and have it
| render correctly in all email clients.
|
| * Things get much more complicated when you need to email
| a large number of people (say 10s of thousands - very
| real for a lot of newsletters) and want to both
| personalize your content (e.g. add unsubscribe links) and
| not take 30 minutes to email all your subscribers.
|
| * The metrics you get with SES are extremely barebones.
| Makes Sendgrid look incredible, and that's saying
| something. Deliverability and inboxing will be even more
| of a black box than usual.
| mooreds wrote:
| That's great first hand experience, thanks for sharing.
| Personally I'd probably look at an open source package,
| but my biggest worries about building my own emailer
| would be:
|
| * making sure I followed the best practices (DMARC, DKIM,
| etc).
|
| * building IP reputation. Not sure how SES does with
| deliverability, but I know that can be an issue.
|
| * email clients rendering of my newsletter. This could by
| using text only, I suppose. That might work depending on
| your audience.
|
| Again, though, at least you have the option of building
| your own solution when you have a newsletter.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's not a technical problem.
|
| The difference between you and Amazon is that Amazon can
| deal with Gmail by picking up the phone. You aren't even
| going to get as far as 'talk to the hand'.
|
| You can do all the things like DKIM right and still go
| straight to spam. If you're a real DIY fanatic you'll run
| your mail server at home or some other IP address which
| is doomed from the viewpoint of deliverability and be too
| stubborn to change it.
|
| The SES/Dynamo/Lambda system is perfectly balanced for
| email lists that generate a huge amount of traffic for
| short bursts but still need to handles bounces and
| subscribe/unsubscribe requests whenever they come in,
| even if you don't feel like getting around to rebooting
| the server stuffed under your bed. If you try to do it on
| a conventional server you need to pay for a lot more
| server if you don't want it to get overloaded at peak
| load.
| devd00d wrote:
| I don't use Mailchimp and never will. I use sendy.co with
| amazon and on another system I built my own mailer using
| Mailgun. The main thing is to ensure you have an opted-in
| mailing list. If you spam randoms, all of these platforms
| will ban you.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > everyone checks their email
|
| Citation needed. Absolutely not the case in my experience. And
| while I check my email, I delete 80% of it unread, based on the
| subject line/sender only.
| mooreds wrote:
| "In 2020, the number of global e-mail users amounted to four
| billion and is set to grow to 4.6 billion users in 2025."
|
| You got me! :) I guess just 1 out of every 2 human beings
| checks email. The denominator includes folks without
| computers or phones too.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/255080/number-of-e-
| mail-...
| geocrasher wrote:
| Having an inbox does not mean using it or checking it
| regularly. Think of all the old people with tablets who
| don't even _know_ what their email address is. Or folks
| like me who have several. What I 'm saying is that "an
| email address exists, somebody must be checking it" is a
| flawed argument.
|
| In fact, this article: https://phrasee.co/blog/a-brief-
| history-of-email/
|
| says the following: With over 2.6 billion
| active users and over 4.6 billion email accounts in
| operation, email is the most important and widely used
| communications medium on the internet.
|
| Still, 2.6B is _a lot_. So there 's that.
| nicbou wrote:
| You should start unsubscribing and setting some filters, for
| your own good.
| corrral wrote:
| I gave up on this years ago when I realized the only
| _valuable_ things coming to my email were transactional
| emails, anyway. The rest is... newsletters and shit.
|
| If you're only checking your email to use the "search"
| function for something very specific, or to find an
| expected transactional email sent within the last minute,
| there's not much reason to bother setting up filters.
|
| Text is probably the best way for non-friends to get
| through to me, because I mostly ignore email and calls
| since they're overrun with crap, though the current
| campaign season is really trying to make text useless, too.
| So many damn fundraising texts, usually from candidates in
| other states entirely.
| nicbou wrote:
| I have the opposite approach. My inbox is 95% signal. I
| run my business through email so that's important.
| zevulous wrote:
| I run a newsletter (https://thisiscool.beehiiv.com/) about cool
| longform articles I find online, and it genuinely is nice to have
| a direct line to many of the people that follow and like my
| content (@zevulous on tiktok), especially if social media sites
| go down or delete my account for some reason.
| shortformblog wrote:
| Newsletter author here. I run two actually--Tedium
| (https://tedium.co/) and MidRange (https://midrange.tedium.co).
|
| Yes, they work. Beyond the ROI benefits already mentioned by
| other folks, it's seen as an "owned" platform, something that you
| control, versus social media, where the platform is operated by
| someone else. You can make changes and adapt more efficiently to
| subscriber needs than somewhere like social media, where
| platforms are reshaping things that can affect your ROI without
| your input.
|
| For that reason alone, I can understand why newsletters matter to
| a lot of media outlets and e-commerce folks alike.
| mouzogu wrote:
| I think it's a way to negotiate with potential
| advertisers/sponsors.
|
| Look at my audience of 1000+ people/emails that are potentially
| interested in your product, which i can shill or plainly
| advertise on my newsletter for a fee.
| kosik wrote:
| on this note, what is the best tool I can use to start building
| my own subscribers database and sending email campaings? I've
| heard many opinions suggesting mailerlite, any thoughts?
| mitchellst wrote:
| Reading down the answers, lots of people are confusing two
| things: marketing emails (mostly from e-commerce sites) versus
| content-driven newsletters.
|
| Open rate and CTR on marketing emails is very low and their
| production quality (cost) needs to be high to make a dent.
|
| Newsletters are a different beast. If you have some product-
| market fit for the content, your open rate and CTR can be very
| high. Scaling them can be tricky, because if your content is
| niche you hit a ceiling, and if it's not you hit the general
| problem of acquiring customers lots of other people are after.
|
| ...but, after you solve that, you have a scaled up newsletter
| that you can both sell ads against and use to activate your own
| monetization flows. Does it work? Yeah, it does. Very, very well,
| in my experience.
| jannw wrote:
| My PhD was on crowdfunding in the Creative Industry - One of my
| published papers was on the effectiveness of online marketing
| channels (email newsletter v. facebook v twitter) ... Quick
| answer is that, for "fans", email newsletters are a far stronger
| marketing channel than facebook or twitter. You can read the
| paper here:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756322...
| scottydelta wrote:
| I am sure they work because Substack's whole business model
| relies on it. More importantly, a lot of bloggers/writers have
| been moving to substack because of this very reason.
|
| Substack lets your readers easily subscribe to your paid/free
| newsletter and deliver new publications to their email which is
| expensive to run/maintain on your own(think of wordpress blog +
| mailchimp costs).
| alex_duf wrote:
| >I am sure they work because Substack's whole business model
| relies on it.
|
| Is Substack profitable? Because it's easy to meddle
| hype/popularity with having a business model that makes sense.
| So I'm questioning how sure one can be about it just yet.
| scottydelta wrote:
| Here is a recent Techcrunch article that shows the current
| state of things: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/26/report-
| substack-the-highly...
|
| Here is an excerpt from the article:
|
| _> Substack told Axios late last year that the top 10
| writers on the platform collectively generate $20 million in
| annual revenue. According to the Times, Substack separately
| told investors that it saw revenue of just $9 million last
| year. (It told the Times directly in a story last month that
| it has hundreds of thousands of paid newsletters now on the
| platform.)
|
| That's not a lot of revenue for a company boasting a $650
| million valuation. _
|
| It seems the newsletters seems to be working for the content
| creators, same cannot be said about Substack itself.
| haolez wrote:
| I've learned to love newsletters after becoming a hey.com
| customer. Highly recommend the service. The newsletters become a
| sort of feed that's actually quite interesting to read.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Email is a high converter and email addresses are practically a
| type of currency.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| God. I know newsletters work and I've been told to start one a
| dozen times for a personal project but i just HATE getting them.
| Not all newsletters but the ones that are clearly just another
| push notification market channel that dont add any additional
| value. Those seem to be the bulk of newsletters.
|
| The ones that are actually interesting take a lot more time and
| effort to make.
| vax425 wrote:
| They don't have to take any effort. I have a soon-to-launch
| side project that automatically turns Facebook business page
| posts into monthly newsletters.
|
| I could use a few beta testers. DM @WhidbeyHacker and I'll add
| you to the list.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| Same question? Anybody know advertising RPM that newsletters
| could generate?
| mooreds wrote:
| Depends on the audience size and makeup.
|
| I've seen tweets like this:
| https://twitter.com/petecodes/status/1548983470805876737 which
| talk about $400/month for a newsletter ad.
|
| Cooperpress has a lot of dev subscribers and I believe charges
| thousands of dollars for an add:
| https://cooperpress.com/advertise/ (run by
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=petercooper ).
| meetingthrower wrote:
| Thanks. Are there good equivalent ad networks like AdSense
| for newsletters (so you don't have to establish a sales
| department?)
| mooreds wrote:
| > Are there good equivalent ad networks like AdSense for
| newsletters
|
| My experience has been "no".
|
| I don't know of any networks that do newsletter ad
| placements; our placements have all been direct with the
| publisher. Some publishers have more than one newsletter so
| you can get some scale with them, but it's still direct
| discussion with the publisher.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I like newsletters for rarely updated blogs. I prefer RSS/Atom
| (most blogs still have it actually) but sometimes a newsletter is
| the only thing that's available.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Well, I have 7 subscribers of my newsletter. I don't really push
| it I just have a signup form at the bottom of posts and
| occasionally in the middle of longer/popular posts.
|
| I don't really know if newsletters work.
| timothycosta wrote:
| I enjoy getting certain news letters. The key is to provide
| uncommon, valuable, well written information.
|
| Take julian dot com for instance. I like his work so much so,
| that I am using it as an example here.
| alexanderson wrote:
| The proof is in the pudding. https://bytes.dev has almost 100,000
| subscribers, a 48% open rate, and can pull $6,000 per weekly
| issue in sponsorship revenue. Why? Because 50,000 eyeballs is
| worth that much.
|
| Source: https://bytes.dev/advertise
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| FWIW, as a consumer:
|
| 98% of "newsletters" are awful spam and make me think more
| negatively about company.
|
| 2% of newsletters are ephemeral gold, and they come from various
| categories - I have great newsletters both from companies wanting
| to sell me stuff, as well as interesting bloggers & writers.
|
| So if nothing else, there's definitely opportunity for
| differentiation. You can be better than the competition :). As a
| consumer, I'd say format (web page or app or newsletter) is less
| relevant - it's all about content and relevance, as well as
| timing and approach.
|
| My 100 Croatian Lipa :)
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| I've never signed up for a newsletter and never will. It's not so
| much the newsletter awareness push that irks me but the incessant
| pop-ups and pop-overs that must be dismissed each and every time
| I visit a site. It's almost paywall-level intrusive. I really
| miss the RSS days - if you wanted to receive regular updates, it
| was opt-in and didn't feel like being accosted by a panhandler.
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(page generated 2022-08-01 23:02 UTC)