Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?
So many blogs promote their newsletter, often before I even start reading their article. I run a content-based website, and many of my competitors push their newsletter.
What is the rationale behind it? I don't subscribe to a single newsletter myself, so I'm a bit puzzled about the benefits of running one.
173 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadLook at my audience of 1000+ people/emails that are potentially interested in your product, which i can shill or plainly advertise on my newsletter for a fee.
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 want to follow companies on Twitter or Instagram, if they want to stay up to date, a lot of them might want news in their easily filterable inbox, in my experience.
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 to eventually suppress it to push people towards paying to reach the followers they worked so hard to get.
On the other hand, once someone has given you permission to email them then it really doesn’t matter if you do it from your own mailserver, mailchimp, or anything else… They are still expecting you to be in their inbox (hopefully delivering great value).
Source: I was reading the internal newsletter in the bathroom of a major social network's office ~6 years ago when they were announcing (in celebration) that they had suppressed organic reach to sub 5%
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.
In the beginning for instance I would get emails from Best Buy that often had good offers, but at some point it got like ArsTechnica’s dealmaster and the offers became insipid. Even if the offers were compelling I couldn’t buy something every day.
But it's also about brand recall. Having someone's email address lets you put an ad (subject line) in front of them for almost free, as often as you want, without having to go through the algorithms of the social networks.
From all traffic channels Newsletters are my most favorite ones.
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%.
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.
Yes, for similar sized brands and types of campaign. I worked for quite some time in email marketing for blue chips.
Some email campaign stats from Mailchimp (which may be self-serving but does match other numbers I've seen) ... says "open rate" is about 20% - 30% and "click-through-rate" (of a link embedded within the email) is about 2% - 5% :
https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-marketing-benchmarks/
If people are not tricked into email newsletter signups via dark patterns (e.g. a default check box on an ecommerce shopping checkout), a lot of readers do actively open and click on emails they voluntarily signed up for. In such cases, click rates will realistically be much higher than 0.1%.
I get it, but I do wish sites would give it a rest with the Newsletter pop-ups.
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.
Its the only way to actually own your audience. Rather than asking permission to access someone else's audience.
For example, I get emails from some people for the last 10 years. I would have forgotten about them many times over.
Having a Facebook page with a lot of likes use to mean you could get on their feed, now you are lucky to get any views without paying for them.
Another way is RSS feeds, but many companies seem to consider that there's not enough users for the trouble.
* 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).
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 vaccines aren’t 100% safe or 100% effective which is absolutely true but was considered fake news by mainstream propaganda a year or so ago. Besides the point but I expect I’ll get some replies so just noting preemptively.
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.
There is a clear difference between lock in to a single provider and their commercial interests and strategy and the possibility that your content might fall foul of a number of providers.
For many email is a much less risky option than alternatives. Do you have a better option?
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.
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 facebook or even a place like HN or Lobste.rs, you have exactly zero ability to export the contact info of people who knew you and want to continue to hear from you.
* making sure I followed the best practices (DMARC, DKIM, etc).
* building IP reputation. Not sure how SES does with deliverability, but I know that can be an issue.
* email clients rendering of my newsletter. This could by using text only, I suppose. That might work depending on your audience.
Again, though, at least you have the option of building your own solution when you have a newsletter.
The difference between you and Amazon is that Amazon can deal with Gmail by picking up the phone. You aren’t even going to get as far as ‘talk to the hand’.
You can do all the things like DKIM right and still go straight to spam. If you’re a real DIY fanatic you’ll run your mail server at home or some other IP address which is doomed from the viewpoint of deliverability and be too stubborn to change it.
The SES/Dynamo/Lambda system is perfectly balanced for email lists that generate a huge amount of traffic for short bursts but still need to handles bounces and subscribe/unsubscribe requests whenever they come in, even if you don’t feel like getting around to rebooting the server stuffed under your bed. If you try to do it on a conventional server you need to pay for a lot more server if you don’t want it to get overloaded at peak load.
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.
* Email HTML is gnarly. Hope you like tables. The vast majority of web developers aren't equipped to write email HTML for something as simple as a button and have it render correctly in all email clients.
* Things get much more complicated when you need to email a large number of people (say 10s of thousands - very real for a lot of newsletters) and want to both personalize your content (e.g. add unsubscribe links) and not take 30 minutes to email all your subscribers.
* The metrics you get with SES are extremely barebones. Makes Sendgrid look incredible, and that's saying something. Deliverability and inboxing will be even more of a black box than usual.
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.
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-friends to get through to me, because I mostly ignore email and calls since they're overrun with crap, though the current campaign season is really trying to make text useless, too. So many damn fundraising texts, usually from candidates in other states entirely.
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.
You got me! :) I guess just 1 out of every 2 human beings checks email. The denominator includes folks without computers or phones too.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/255080/number-of-e-mail-...
In fact, this article: https://phrasee.co/blog/a-brief-history-of-email/
says the following:
Still, 2.6B is a lot. So there's that.Substack lets your readers easily subscribe to your paid/free newsletter and deliver new publications to their email which is expensive to run/maintain on your own(think of wordpress blog + mailchimp costs).
Is Substack profitable? Because it's easy to meddle hype/popularity with having a business model that makes sense. So I'm questioning how sure one can be about it just yet.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
> Substack told Axios late last year that the top 10 writers on the platform collectively generate $20 million in annual revenue. According to the Times, Substack separately told investors that it saw revenue of just $9 million last year. (It told the Times directly in a story last month that it has hundreds of thousands of paid newsletters now on the platform.)
That’s not a lot of revenue for a company boasting a $650 million valuation.
It seems the newsletters seems to be working for the content creators, same cannot be said about Substack itself.
I've seen tweets like this: https://twitter.com/petecodes/status/1548983470805876737 which talk about $400/month for a newsletter ad.
Cooperpress has a lot of dev subscribers and I believe charges thousands of dollars for an add: https://cooperpress.com/advertise/ (run by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=petercooper ).
My experience has been "no".
I don't know of any networks that do newsletter ad placements; our placements have all been direct with the publisher. Some publishers have more than one newsletter so you can get some scale with them, but it's still direct discussion with the publisher.
I don’t really know if newsletters work.
While I appreciate using RSS to get a taste of the spectrum of current events, newsletters tend to be more curated, sometimes carrying a theme, and have the feeling of quality.
I used to flip through the weekly ads in newspapers but oh boy there was nothing quite like getting a company’s sales catalog. The feeling is similar for me.
A website (and also RSS) -- that is not hard paywalled with account login -- is a "pull" by anonymous webbrowser clients. The website's content creator doesn't have a direct relationship with readers because you'd only have web browser IP addresses or aggregate statistics with Google Analytics, etc.
In contrast, newsletters can be "push" by content creators because you have collected email addresses that want the newsletters and therefore have a more direct relationship with readers. Building the audience via email addresses is valuable because it works outside centralized platforms like Youtube, Patreon, etc.
My previous comment dissecting example of Tim Ferris website-vs-newsletter : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27716442
Based on Gumroad stats, open rates are above 40%. I send 10-15 links per week, and the total link clicks average around 150 (not sure if adblockers affect such stats). I try to optimize links to share based on interest shown in topics so far.
And as others have commented, one of the reasons to start a newsletter is to have your own platform for sharing content.
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?
Bonus answer: I think they are quite useful for web applications (mail, calendars, slack etc) and I usually prefer enabling notifications to installing a native client.
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.
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...
If you have enough people in your newsletter you can increase your traffic and keep it more consistent, more traffic is more ad revenue. You could even get your newsletter sponsored and make it a source of revenue.
I have not worked on newsletters specifically but I can attest that sending emails is generally very effective.
1. I don't want to give my email. 2. I don't want to receive spam. 3. I don't like long letters with massive amount of different news (even in single domain).
In my view newsletters/digests take more time to read and I prefer to receive small pieces of topics more often (what I'm interested in specifically, not whole the editor choice) than to recevie bunch of them on weekly basis.
Bonus points, you get independence from your email provider, so if Google or whatever decides to delete your account spuriously you don't die digitally.
If you depend on SEO, SEA, Adsense you depend on Google.
If you depend on Facebook, Insta, you depend on Meta.
If you depend on Linkedin, you depend on Linkedin.
If you depend on Newsletters, you depend on Spamfilters.
Every channel has its risk. So hedging your traffic channels is the best thing you can do. And Newsletter is the least annoying one, as Google and Facebook maximize for ad-spendings. Spamfilters don't.
Love that concept. Really sums up the value in newsletters as an alternative means of capturing attention.
That's not saying much. Those are still highly annoying, to the point where I will often permanently cancel service with companies that do it.
Don't email me ads for shit, unless I told you to do that.
Grab an audience that does not know about RSS/Atom news aggregators?
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 "Unsubscribe" link) when all they want to do is unsubscribe. You get tarred with the wrong brush. Very frustrating.
If it weren’t spam, I wouldn’t be unsubscribing.
And I’m not even very concerned with personally unsubscribing. Foremost I want to close the feedback loop to disempower a bad actor.
Basically the only unintermediated contact.