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

161–170 of 174 posts

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

#161

Post by tl_donson »

hedora wrote: post #148
squeaky-clean wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Isn’t open rate obfuscated / blocked by most clients now? How do you measure it? (I’ve been blocking them for 25+ years; might be out of touch…)

open rates are inaccurate but still somewhat useful because they’re generally consistently inaccurate month to month unless there’s been a change that would affect a lot of subscribers (eg iOS recently).

click rates are probably a better proxy for this.

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

#162

Post by justinlloyd »

Years ago, before email as we understand it today existed, I roasted and sold coffee and the newsletter drove close to 80% of the sales.

Years ago I built a small "adult entertainment" business that was driven by a newsletter. High open rate, high engagement, strong sales accounting for a significant percentage of sales through the month.

Years ago I built a piece of software that made stock buy/sell recommendations. It was driven purely by a newsletter. The daily recommendations email went out once per day, very early in the AM. Once a week was an email with a link both at the top and bottom of the newsletter that you had to click to stay subscribed, and that newsletter had a little lengthier content in it. The newsletter was by invite only. It had good engagement. I got tired of running the business (wasn't very interesting) and I sold it off, and the new owner drove it into the ground within six months due to greed, making the newsletter less exclusive, and changing how engagement works and trying to use it as a vehicle to push advertising and other bad practices.

Years ago I built a piece of software that analyzed horse racing, and again, it was all driven by newsletter, and that accounted for all the engagement, most of the sales, upsell/cross-sell and subscription renewals. I sold the business after a couple of years, and watched the new owner drive it into the ground due to greed and not understanding what the newsletter was for.

I've also built a few other small side-businesses over the years, using long form content, long form sales pages and newsletters as the primary sales channels. They work wonderfully. But what you absolutely have to do is realize the value is in the mailing list, and it must be respected, and you cannot AB test it or exploit it to extract maximum value.

I still use newsletters, of a sort, for a few side-projects, and again, they work really well. Very high engagement. Especially on LinkedIn.

Of all the newsletters I've had over the years for various endeavours I've had a very high open rate, a very high engagement rate, and an incredibly low unsubscribe rate. But you have to treat the person receiving your newsletter with the same respect you would treat a well regarded acquaintance standing right in front of you. And the moment you stop doing that, your numbers will plummet.

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

#163

Post by MrDunham »

bdlowery wrote: post #143
MrDunham wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People tend to not want to follow companies Also many companies got burned thinking the smorgasbord of free traffic on social platforms would never end. It turns out that when your primary business model is selling traffic (via ads), giving it away for free is antithetical to your margins. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok (sometime soon) started off giving creators (and businesses) tons of free traffic only…

Following a giant company on social media is pointless. A large majority of their posts are dumb memes, or clever ways to be funny. It’s never anything of substance.

I wonder if that's (algorithmic) selection bias? IE you only see dumb memes or clever ways to be funny because they are the only thing that garner enough likes to break through the newsfeed noise?

Or if companies just found out that their interesting-but-not-high-valence posts end up not going anywhere... so they create dumb memes or clever ways to be funny.

Either way though we're caught in a death spiral of algorithmic selection and self-selection leaving us with drivel - making us less likely to follow companies and companies increasingly less willing to invest in quality content or content creators. Then round and round it goes.

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

#164

Post by taubek »

They work if they provide value. Creating a good newsletter takes time. Especially if you have a regular schedule. If you send it on first Monday every month than it should be so. You need to prepare text, graphics, craft out subject line that will make recipient click on it, etc.

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

#165

Post by corentin88 »

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…

You might also spread your campaign across several days. That how we do for our customers sending over 10,000 with Gmail.

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

#166

Post by zoltrix303 »

michalu wrote: post #89
lancesells wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you should switch to sending two a month.

So far we found once a month to be our sweet spot. Majority of customers buy their monthly supply in one shopping session and this is a way to prompt some of them + reactivate old customers / staled customers and convert blog subscribers. I think the next step is to segment our customer/subscriber base and send at various frequency. But it's also a "side-hustle" so it takes effort :)

I'm curious, did you try a subscription model for your customers? Maybe you could even target to ones you see ordering every once in a while and offer them a monthly bag + a small incentive for the commitment?

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

#167

Post by leros »

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.

There is a fantasy themed candle company that emails me daily. My god it annoys me, but I also I buy so many candles.

At my day job, we did a test around sending more emails and longer emails. Initially the more we sent, the more our core metrics and NPS went up. Then as we sent even more, our NPS starting dropping but our core metrics kept going up. It was rather interesting. There is definitely a balance to be had but my takeaway is that annoying your users a bit might be ok for business.

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

#169

Post by soramimo »

nicbou wrote: post #146
corrral wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up on this years ago when I realized the only valuable things coming to my email were transactional emails, anyway. The rest is... newsletters and shit. If you're only checking your email to use the "search" function for something very specific, or to find an expected transactional email sent within the last minute, there's not much reason to bother setting up filters. Text is probably the best way for non-fri…

I have the opposite approach. My inbox is 95% signal. I run my business through email so that's important.

I have the same approach as you.

Newsletter that I didn't subscribe to? One strike, you're out (unsubscribe and occasionally report as spam).

Updates from sites I care about (e.g. bank, HOA, etc) that come more than once a year? Create an email filter (gmail -> filter messages like this), skip inbox, never mark as important, apply label XYZ.

These simple hygiene measures don't take more than a few minutes each week and save tons of time and focus.

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

#170

Post by nicbou »

soramimo wrote: post #169
nicbou wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite approach. My inbox is 95% signal. I run my business through email so that's important.

I have the same approach as you. Newsletter that I didn't subscribe to? One strike, you're out (unsubscribe and occasionally report as spam). Updates from sites I care about (e.g. bank, HOA, etc) that come more than once a year? Create an email filter (gmail -> filter messages like this), skip inbox, never mark as important, apply label XYZ. These simple hygiene measures don't take more than a few minutes each week a…

Yep. At this point I get maybe 5 emails a day, and most of them were hand-written. The Gmail red badge rarely stares at me. I can work in peace.
Post reply on HN