Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?

174 pointsnicbou169 comments

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.

View on HN

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.)

Sounds like you should switch to sending two a month.

This is how it starts. Before you know it, they are spamming their mailing list every day.

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 :)

I'm curious, did you try a subscription model for your customers? Maybe you could even target to ones you see ordering every once in a while and offer them a monthly bag + a small incentive for the commitment?

Thank you it's something in the plans but I've been too lazy to set up the billing for subscription.

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.

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.

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!

> 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.

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.

True. I would then test that over a 6+ month interval. Depending on the volume of subscribers the results may not be correlative.

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.

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.

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

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…)

open rates are inaccurate but still somewhat useful because they’re generally consistently inaccurate month to month unless there’s been a change that would affect a lot of subscribers (eg iOS recently).

click rates are probably a better proxy for this.

Saw this comment late, like tl_donson says, yes but it's fairly consistent. So if your open rate drops 20% to 10% in one month, it's probably your fault and not the mail client hiding it.

In my experience most people do not block images in emails, and that's the easiest way to tell if someone opened your mail. Even most people who use an adblocker do not block email images.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

This works until the people who get 3 emails a month unsubscribe. Don't break it if it works.

Fries a month seems like the sweet spot. Especially with a drink. And a burger. Where do I subscribe?!

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.

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.

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.

sounds like you want more better faster for less cheaper and quicker.

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.

Are you my VP of marketing?

If you send annoying emails to my inbox I’m ignoring them and eventually will unsubscribe or mark them as spam.

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.

You are management material

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.

There is a fantasy themed candle company that emails me daily. My god it annoys me, but I also I buy so many candles.

At my day job, we did a test around sending more emails and longer emails. Initially the more we sent, the more our core metrics and NPS went up. Then as we sent even more, our NPS starting dropping but our core metrics kept going up. It was rather interesting. There is definitely a balance to be had but my takeaway is that annoying your users a bit might be ok for business.

What service do you use for templatizing amd sending the emails? Are they personalized?

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.

I'd be very interested to hear more details about your jupyter notebook setup for sending emails

It's embarrassingly primitive, we export all existing subscribers into csv from our CRM, I load it into pandas dataframe and send using simple for loop + gmail api calls. I run it with "caffeinate" terminal command and use time.sleep() to time the sending for the morning as I tend to wake up pretty late. Other times when I'm travelling I just push updated csv into google cloud vm and let it run there.

A more advanced setup would be sqlite + keeping timestamps, message and thread ids for future work e.g. analytics on responses.

You can track opens using GA tracking pixel.

What's wrong with MailChimp?

You might also spread your campaign across several days. That how we do for our customers sending over 10,000 with Gmail.

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.

> 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.

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.

Your example click rate is about an order of magnitude higher than the average.

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.

Selecting an email to delete it in the Apple mail.app also opens it. Doesn't mean I'm actually reading it.

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

> 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%

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.

I wonder if that's (algorithmic) selection bias? IE you only see dumb memes or clever ways to be funny because they are the only thing that garner enough likes to break through the newsfeed noise?

Or if companies just found out that their interesting-but-not-high-valence posts end up not going anywhere... so they create dumb memes or clever ways to be funny.

Either way though we're caught in a death spiral of algorithmic selection and self-selection leaving us with drivel - making us less likely to follow companies and companies increasingly less willing to invest in quality content or content creators. Then round and round it goes.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

> 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.

>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%.

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?

I have never allowed any notifications.

Me neither. IHMO the best option is to check "Block new requests asking to allow notifications" in Firefox (Settings -> Privacy -> Notifications -> Settings).

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.

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.

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.

My grandmother thought her computer had a bunch of viruses because of how Windows 10 showed them.

Bonus comment: excellent point about web app notifications! I do use calendar notifications because they are very useful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

Then you just move to another ESP / newsletter service with your mailing list? Or even run it yourself with something like listmonk.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

You should start unsubscribing and setting some filters, for your own good.

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.

I have the opposite approach. My inbox is 95% signal. I run my business through email so that's important.

I have the same approach as you.

Newsletter that I didn't subscribe to? One strike, you're out (unsubscribe and occasionally report as spam).

Updates from sites I care about (e.g. bank, HOA, etc) that come more than once a year? Create an email filter (gmail -> filter messages like this), skip inbox, never mark as important, apply label XYZ.

These simple hygiene measures don't take more than a few minutes each week and save tons of time and focus.

Yep. At this point I get maybe 5 emails a day, and most of them were hand-written. The Gmail red badge rarely stares at me. I can work in peace.

"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-...

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.

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.

> Channel Hedging

Love that concept. Really sums up the value in newsletters as an alternative means of capturing attention.

> 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.

least annoying (in regards of the dependencies) for the publisher

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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??

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.

Fun fact, Apple Mail "opens" the email asynchronously, for privacy reasons.

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

We push newsletters because nobody uses bookmarks or RSS anymore. You have to send users a reminder that there's new content on your website they should check out. But even then, you're competing against the pull of bottomless social media feeds, or mobile apps that ping you with notifications several times a day, like news apps.

In practice, bad newsletters read like auto-generated blog feeds: summary of content, click link to see whole article. Good newsletters put the bulk of the content right there in the email, but their business model is less about getting you to go the website, and more about shoving "sponsored content" into the body of the email itself.

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.

I would be seriously tempted to call them and then saying "Howdy, I want to talk about kickstarting my inspiration."

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.

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.

I'd be interested to know which news sites and government agencies send you this by email.

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.

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 naïve 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.

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.

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.

If I didn’t ask for it, it’s spam. On the first instance.

And I’m not even very concerned with personally unsubscribing. Foremost I want to close the feedback loop to disempower a bad actor.

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.

Years ago, before email as we understand it today existed, I roasted and sold coffee and the newsletter drove close to 80% of the sales.

Years ago I built a small "adult entertainment" business that was driven by a newsletter. High open rate, high engagement, strong sales accounting for a significant percentage of sales through the month.

Years ago I built a piece of software that made stock buy/sell recommendations. It was driven purely by a newsletter. The daily recommendations email went out once per day, very early in the AM. Once a week was an email with a link both at the top and bottom of the newsletter that you had to click to stay subscribed, and that newsletter had a little lengthier content in it. The newsletter was by invite only. It had good engagement. I got tired of running the business (wasn't very interesting) and I sold it off, and the new owner drove it into the ground within six months due to greed, making the newsletter less exclusive, and changing how engagement works and trying to use it as a vehicle to push advertising and other bad practices.

Years ago I built a piece of software that analyzed horse racing, and again, it was all driven by newsletter, and that accounted for all the engagement, most of the sales, upsell/cross-sell and subscription renewals. I sold the business after a couple of years, and watched the new owner drive it into the ground due to greed and not understanding what the newsletter was for.

I've also built a few other small side-businesses over the years, using long form content, long form sales pages and newsletters as the primary sales channels. They work wonderfully. But what you absolutely have to do is realize the value is in the mailing list, and it must be respected, and you cannot AB test it or exploit it to extract maximum value.

I still use newsletters, of a sort, for a few side-projects, and again, they work really well. Very high engagement. Especially on LinkedIn.

Of all the newsletters I've had over the years for various endeavours I've had a very high open rate, a very high engagement rate, and an incredibly low unsubscribe rate. But you have to treat the person receiving your newsletter with the same respect you would treat a well regarded acquaintance standing right in front of you. And the moment you stop doing that, your numbers will plummet.

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.

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

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).

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

It's also a way to get an email address that you can retarget ads to.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

They work if they provide value. Creating a good newsletter takes time. Especially if you have a regular schedule. If you send it on first Monday every month than it should be so. You need to prepare text, graphics, craft out subject line that will make recipient click on it, etc.

> What is the rationale behind it?

Grab an audience that does not know about RSS/Atom news aggregators?

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.

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.

Same question? Anybody know advertising RPM that newsletters could generate?

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 ).

Thanks. Are there good equivalent ad networks like AdSense for newsletters (so you don't have to establish a sales department?)

> 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.

>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

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.

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.

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around how someone can’t be bothered to expose an inert web feed but then will take on the project of actively broadcasting updates and managing all the extra moving parts that entails in perpetuity.

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

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.

At first glance, it seems to be some kind of outdated practice. But, as noted above, there are often discounts or other useful stuff.

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.

Newsletters are getting a revival because people don't have a news reader and sites stopped pushing RSS.

Basically the only unintermediated contact.

Even if you use it to let people know about new articles. I don't see why it wouldn't be a win.

Email is a high converter and email addresses are practically a type of currency.

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?

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com