I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
#2An interesting experiment, had to look in the comments to see how the group was distributed, and looks sufficiently random for a simple test
Re: I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
#3This is a very strange comment from the article:
>37% of openers clicked a link (I think this is because Mailchimp’s links are black rather than blue and it’s easy to miss them)
IMO, if they aren't doing anything to customize the appearance of their emails then this experiment isn't worth much. It also makes it sound like the emails weren't completely identical, which makes click rate comparisons invalid.
Some of the bullets are helpful, but I wouldn't take this as any kind of gospel.
Re: I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
#4I would be suspicious about how the services report clicks and (especially) open rates. They are notoriously inaccurate.
Buttondown just may just be more generous (less rigorous) in detecting false positives.
Deliverability is also partially on you (versus the provider) and is not necessarily easy to get right (nor is it necessarily consistent between email blasts).
Re: I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
#5I don't know. If the experiments were perfectly random, the Buttondown-Substack difference is a 3-sigma effect, so the difference is unlikely to be random chance. But why? What's so special about one vs the other?
Re: I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
#6I don't know. If the experiments were perfectly random, the Buttondown-Substack difference is a 3-sigma effect, so the difference is unlikely to be random chance. But why? What's so special about one vs the other?
Buttondown is less known, so it's trackers are less likely to be blocked
Re: I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
#7I’ve never thought of using substack as a way to manage my startup’s email list, but seeing this comparison made me consider it. I don’t like mailchimp and find the pricing to be atrocious for my purposes (emailing 5k people once or twice a year). How odd would it be to get an update from a company via a substack email? Does anyone else do this?
Re: I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
#8Why not use Klaviyo?
Re: I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
#9I don't know. If the experiments were perfectly random, the Buttondown-Substack difference is a 3-sigma effect, so the difference is unlikely to be random chance. But why? What's so special about one vs the other?
so my instinct for a while has been that Substack have been damaging their sender reputation by offering unlimited free sending to unlimited recipients, with the upshot that they attract a lot of people sending low-open-rate, marked-as-spam or marked-as-promotional emails. (They also, to my knowledge, won't let senders use their own email addresses, all emails are sent from Substack).
I realise it's much more complicated than this, that within a given ESP there are multiple bundles of senders and that better customers get moved to a better bundle etc, but my guess is that for any given level within Substack you're being bundled with an unusually-bad group of peers and therefore getting lower open rates -- I would love to know if this is an accurate understanding, or if there's any accurate way to test this from outside Substack.
Re: I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
#10I’ve never thought of using substack as a way to manage my startup’s email list, but seeing this comparison made me consider it. I don’t like mailchimp and find the pricing to be atrocious for my purposes (emailing 5k people once or twice a year). How odd would it be to get an update from a company via a substack email? Does anyone else do this?
> I don’t like mailchimp and find the pricing to be atrocious for my purposes (emailing 5k people once or twice a year).
Have you looked at MailerLite[1]?