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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

I have an email list that delivers updates and summaries of things that have occurred online (forums, but other related sources)... and experiences an open rate that Sendgrid reports as being above 100% (people open it more than once?! probably).

The way I do this:

1. Enthusiastic opt-in... it's not even advertised (only 65K members), and you get it on via receiving more transactional updates from a few forum and a footer link gives you the option to receive a broader summary too. It's very strongly interest aligned, and by the time someone discovers this it's niche and highly relevant.

2. Least tracking possible + simplest HTML possible (easy to read, accessible, easy to open links even if you aggressively adblock / trackblock).

3. Trivial opt-out as I don't want to send to anyone not interested in it (it costs me money to send).

4. Time. Building an audience like this just takes a long long time (12 years now).

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and experiences an open rate that Sendgrid reports as being above 100% (people open it more than once?! probably).

I'm surprised they report it that way. When open rates are quoted online, it's more typical that they're based on unique opens to circulation. For example, if you have a list of 100,000 people and 50,000 open the email, that's a 50% open rate, even if they all open the email 10x (because 500% open rate makes no real sense).

Trivial opt-out as I don't want to send to anyone not interested in it

This is always a good idea. Some people who want to build a list balk at it, but would somehow prefer people who don't want their email to get "stuck" on their list(!)

Curious, have you tried doing a annual opt-in?

Ask because if you’re really not making money on it, likely good idea and my guess is if you have been running it 12 years, you’ll get a significant percentage of emails that do not opt-in.

You do not even have to be aggressive about it. Just mention it 3x in your regular newsletter with a clear deadline and communicate it’s an annual opt-in. If after the 3rd inline notice, send a 4th and final email explicitly stating to get more emails they need to re-optin.

Why would he wanna do that?

Simple answer is to save money, reduce spam reports, get better signal-to-noise ratios in analytics, etc — basically all the same reasons you should be doing opt-in in the first place.

Like all topics, there’s a lot to learn about it, differing opinions, etc — for example, some might say not to send an re-opt-in email to an email that’s recently opened an email, others might say that the open was just automatically triggered.

To learn more, Google to start with might be “re-opt-in campaign”:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22re-opt-in+campaign%22

> Curious, have you tried doing a annual opt-in?

Haven't done that.

I've simply tried to make unsubcribing be easier than hitting the spam button.

Front and centre, top of the email, single click, untracked (so will 100% work no matter how aggressive your Pi-Hole config).

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