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.)

If a company that I'm interested in sends me an email once per month, then I generally don't mind it. I might even appreciate it.

Send it every two weeks, and you're training me to tune out and usually click the "Delete" button without looking at the content.

Send it weekly, and you've irritated me enough to have the motivation to unsubscribe. Maybe just flag you as spam if the "Unsubscribe" link isn't immediately easy to find. Certainly tarnished my view of your brand.

I don't know where the "sweet spot" is, but monthly sounds about right.

I do get some newsletters weekly and do not mind at all, because the info is new/fresh/useful. For 'buy some stuff', unless I'm buying every week (which I don't beyond food) likely less is more.

A friend of mine was hired by Peet's to try to clean up the mess they caused by doing this to their previously loyal fan base, it has been a lot of work and expense.

Clean up what? You test it once and if it works, it works, if it doesn't you revert back. You're not going to get a huge backlash of brand loyalty for increasing a monthly newsletter to 2x/month. And if you get ANY backlash you simply revert back. Most people wouldn't even notice.

I think you're overthinking my recommendation.

> A customer driven "send these more often" or "send these less often" offer in the email will give the customer the ability to set the level of engagement that works best for them

You should have this option regardless of what techniques you use.

The people who dropped the newsletter after it became spam definitely won't notice that you reverted back to the expected behavior.

If your test costs 2% of newsletter receipients who were 2 emails away from unsubscribing, it might be worth it.

As always, know your audience.

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.

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.

For example, our newsletters are always offering a time-limited discount for the purchase. They're also not segmented out to people "most likely to purchase", because we don't have that data. It goes out to 100% of our audience every time, unless they made a very recent purchase.

If we knew who the people are that are most likely to buy, it sure as hell would make the business easier to run.

(I’ve been blocking them for 25+ years; might be out of touch…)

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.

click rates are probably a better proxy for this.

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 :)

This said, it's possible that once a month isn't the right interval. 3 weeks or 5 might be better. Analysis would need to be done.

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.

If they sent me an email twice a week I would unsubscribe after a month.

Every company that tries to waste my time like that looses a bit of my respect, period.

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.

You still need to test with a service like Litmus, but it gets you 90% of the way there.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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...

* 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).

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:

   With over 2.6 billion active users and over 4.6 billion email accounts in operation, email is the most important and widely used communications medium on the internet.

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.

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.

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?

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.

* 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.

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.

* 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.

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.

Paid - PPC and the like

Earned - Press, News Coverage, etc. Basically, causing a way to get yourself in the news cycle

Owned - Email is the best example. You, for the most part, control this and it's the easiest way to control your future. By getting newsletters people begin to know, like, and trust you and become more likely to buy.

Open rate and CTR on marketing emails is very low and their production quality (cost) needs to be high to make a dent.

Newsletters are a different beast. If you have some product-market fit for the content, your open rate and CTR can be very high. Scaling them can be tricky, because if your content is niche you hit a ceiling, and if it’s not you hit the general problem of acquiring customers lots of other people are after.

…but, after you solve that, you have a scaled up newsletter that you can both sell ads against and use to activate your own monetization flows. Does it work? Yeah, it does. Very, very well, in my experience.

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.

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.

Does that mean you should do it? That's the more interesting question. Panhandling works. Spamming works. Direct mail campaigns, sending out mass texts to lists you buy from states that sell voter records all work. Standing on the street corner asking random passersby if they want to buy drugs works.

But you're ruining a commons. Mail, SMS, and email are nearly useless communication channels now because the signal to noise ratio is so low. They're major annoyances you spend more time deleting and curating than actually getting value from as a user. It's understandable that producers don't see it that way or don't care. From their perspective, they have some unique value proposition that is just so great for their users that they need to keep them informed. The problem is there are millions of other producers who feel exactly the same way, and the net downpour is so overwhelming on the consumer side that it doesn't matter. I don't care how high value these information streams are. There is a limit to what I can consume in a day, and I would rather select and curate myself, on a pull model, and some days consume nothing at all, rather than have it all pushed at me. If you haven't heard from me in a while as a customer? Guess what? That means I'm probably happy. I bought your product, I'm using it, and I'm satisfied with it. I don't need another. When I do, I'll come back, but that might be years in the future. Deal with it. I can't buy something from every vendor I've ever done any business with every week for the rest of my life.

How does it cost nothing??

In practice, bad newsletters read like auto-generated blog feeds: summary of content, click link to see whole article. Good newsletters put the bulk of the content right there in the email, but their business model is less about getting you to go the website, and more about shoving "sponsored content" into the body of the email itself.

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 habit is the full page sign-up prompts seconds after visiting site. Like the cookie consent form pop-up wasn't enough, let's slap them again with newsletter prompt.

Look 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.

I get a few random things that just make me happy, like a daily email from a guy who travels the world and sends one photo a day - he might make his money on guidebooks or itineraries or something.

I suppose some might use Facebook or Twitter for this but I use neither.

Unfortunately it seems to me the big newspapers like NY Times are intent on sending mails with daily commentary and “analysis” rather than just high-level digests. I do get digest emails for my work - Washington legislative stuff that doesn’t get a lot of public attention - and those are much more useful than the “analysis” NY Times likes to send; I really wish they would do more of a straight daily news summary.

C-span also has a great daily email with video clips from the day - just politicians in their own words, rather than “analysis” which always just means commentary and opinion. The Economist does some commentary in its daily emails but it’s brief and has a good survey of world news and it’s always worth reading.

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.

I don’t really know if newsletters work.

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.

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.

Source: https://bytes.dev/advertise

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.

For the non-discount emails, I'll just send something about the company or the products. If I was on a morning show talking about the company, I'll send out the video. If I don't have anything else out, I just remind people of the fact that it's very hot, and we sell frozen dog treat mix.

Each email goes out to about 3500 people and generates 3-15 sales. Discount emails do better than non-discount, but some non-discount (like good press coverage) do very well. New product launches and sales for major holidays when people are looking to shop (e.g. Memorial Day, BFCM) do over 15 sales.

I've tested doing it less often, and ultimately doing one email a week barely affects unsubscribes and easily generates enough extra revenue to be worth it.

The ones that are actually interesting take a lot more time and effort to make.

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.

Yes, they work. Beyond the ROI benefits already mentioned by other folks, it’s seen as an “owned” platform, something that you control, versus social media, where the platform is operated by someone else. You can make changes and adapt more efficiently to subscriber needs than somewhere like social media, where platforms are reshaping things that can affect your ROI without your input.

For that reason alone, I can understand why newsletters matter to a lot of media outlets and e-commerce folks alike.

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.

We announce events there, so it has added value for the end user.

Main reason to do so: social media platforms (read: instagram and certainly facebook) burry your posts if you don't pay up for "promotion".

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.

Obnoxious newsletter notifications as soon as one enters a website are extremely grating though. If I care enough to want a newsletter from you, I’ll find it myself.

Another way is RSS feeds, but many companies seem to consider that there's not enough users for the trouble.

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.

98% of "newsletters" are awful spam and make me think more negatively about company.

2% of newsletters are ephemeral gold, and they come from various categories - I have great newsletters both from companies wanting to sell me stuff, as well as interesting bloggers & writers.

So if nothing else, there's definitely opportunity for differentiation. You can be better than the competition :). As a consumer, I'd say format (web page or app or newsletter) is less relevant - it's all about content and relevance, as well as timing and approach.

My 100 Croatian Lipa :)

Grab an audience that does not know about RSS/Atom news aggregators?

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.

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

Take julian dot com for instance. I like his work so much so, that I am using it as an example here.

Basically the only unintermediated contact.