Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much? • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by michalu » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

bfors wrote: post #134

michalu wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's embarrassingly primitive, we export all existing subscribers into csv from our CRM, I load it into pandas dataframe and send using simple for loop + gmail api calls. I run it with "caffeinate" terminal command and use time.sleep() to time the sending for the morning as I tend to wake up pretty late. Other times when I'm travelling I just push updated csv into google cloud vm and let it run there.

A more advanced setup would be sqlite + keeping timestamps, message and thread ids for future work e.g. analytics on responses.

You can track opens using GA tracking pixel.

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

#172

Post by michalu » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

zoltrix303 wrote: post #166

michalu wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Thank you it's something in the plans but I've been too lazy to set up the billing for subscription.

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

#173

Post by dr_kiszonka » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 11:54 AM UTC

tjansen wrote: post #48

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 applica…

Bonus comment: excellent point about web app notifications! I do use calendar notifications because they are very useful.

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

#174

Post by squeaky-clean » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 9:43 PM UTC

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…)

Saw this comment late, like tl_donson says, yes but it's fairly consistent. So if your open rate drops 20% to 10% in one month, it's probably your fault and not the mail client hiding it.

In my experience most people do not block images in emails, and that's the easiest way to tell if someone opened your mail. Even most people who use an adblocker do not block email images.