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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?

#71

Post by blowski »

jeromegv wrote: post #65
blowski wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#72

Post by mitchellst »

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?

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.

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

#73

Post by ivanche »

exodust wrote: post #66

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…

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

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

#74

Post by SoftTalker »

mooreds wrote: post #10

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).

> 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.

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

#75

Post by mjoneill »

> 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.

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

#76

Post by chudi »

eli wrote: post #14
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…

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

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

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

#78

Post by devd00d »

tomp wrote: post #17
mooreds wrote: post #10

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 va…

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.

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

#79

Post by davewritescode »

PaulHoule wrote: post #33
mooreds wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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

#80

Post by michalu »

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.)

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