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

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

#41

Post by franze »

blowski wrote: post #34
meibo wrote: post #3

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 wan…

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.

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

#42

Post by mobilene »

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.

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

#43

Post by salzig »

tiberriver256 wrote: post #38
dr_kiszonka wrote: post #24

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).

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

#44

Post by jasode »

blowski wrote: post #34
meibo wrote: post #3

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 wan…

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.

>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%.

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

#45

Post by blowski »

franze wrote: post #41
blowski wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

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

#47

Post by lock-the-spock »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #24

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 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.

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

#48

Post by tjansen »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #24

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 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.

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

#49

Post by PaulHoule »

mooreds wrote: post #36
PaulHoule wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

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.

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

#50

Post by scottydelta »

alex_duf wrote: post #15
scottydelta wrote: post #11

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.

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