Re:Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so...
by mitchellst on Monday August 01, 2022 @12:37PM
(#32308646)
Reading down the answers, lots of people are confusing two things: marketing emails (mostly from e-commerce sites) versus content-driven newsletters.
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.
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.