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.
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.)
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.
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?
* 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).
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.
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.
I get it, but I do wish sites would give it a rest with the Newsletter pop-ups.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.