Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 174 posts

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

#131

Post by wil421 »

lancesells wrote: post #82
michalu wrote: post #80

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…

Sounds like you should switch to sending two a month.

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

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

#132

Post by kbelder »

antisthenes wrote: post #103
mbesto wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

#133

Post by rozenmd »

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.

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

#134

Post by bfors »

michalu wrote: post #122
pdksam wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

#135

Post by squeaky-clean »

kbelder wrote: post #132
antisthenes wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 audien…

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

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

#138

Post by l72 »

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 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...

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

#139

Post by jlarocco »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #53

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 "Unsubscri…

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.

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

#140

Post by real-dino »

pdksam wrote: post #111
michalu wrote: post #80

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…

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

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.

Post reply on HN