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.
Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
61–70 of 174 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
#62I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
#64Tangent: 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 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.
Re: Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
#66They 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.
Re: Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
#67Yes, 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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
#68It'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.
Re: Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
#69I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
#70FWIW, 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 :)