Tips that helped us consistently achieve over 30% open rates for our newsletter
circuit.oooI cannot fathom why people sign up for this kind of spam-direct-to-your-inbox. The article openly discusses the ways in which they manipulate their audience, and admits the “newsletter” is a marketing initiative.
Nothing has me reaching for the back button faster than a popup asking me to subscribe to a newsletter.
Nothing will turn me off from your product faster than manipulative dark patterns.
The fact that they even manage their “open rate” as a metric implies a level of tracking that screams “my audience is my prey”.
What about Tip 8. "Provide consistently interesting newsletter content that provides value to readers and keeps them engaged and more likely to open your next newsletter based on the content they have previously enjoyed."?
Or combine tips 3 and 4 and keep it at 7!
Yes, that would be a fair addition.
How come you don't just dump this junk into spam? It's clearly meant to get your dollars so the content is intended to manipulate you.
Why are newsletters a thing anyway? When I see "sign-up for newsletter" anywhere in the text I'm reading it immediately signals that it's low quality content. Probably best to close the tab and continue on Wikipedia.
LOL OK
> Cheat codes for your company
Yep, that matched my expectations more than I expected.
Another tip: don't trick people into signing up, and don't require them to sign up to your newsletter to access your site content. Most of those people won't open your emails, some might report as spam if they don't remember signing up, and your open rates will plummet.
The emails have to contain content that people actually want, sent to people who actually want to see it. The numbers of people who want to see your shit are dramatically lower than the numbers of people on your mailing lists, so make sure you're regularly purging.
I have an email list that delivers updates and summaries of things that have occurred online (forums, but other related sources)... and experiences an open rate that Sendgrid reports as being above 100% (people open it more than once?! probably).
The way I do this:
1. Enthusiastic opt-in... it's not even advertised (only 65K members), and you get it on via receiving more transactional updates from a few forum and a footer link gives you the option to receive a broader summary too. It's very strongly interest aligned, and by the time someone discovers this it's niche and highly relevant.
2. Least tracking possible + simplest HTML possible (easy to read, accessible, easy to open links even if you aggressively adblock / trackblock).
3. Trivial opt-out as I don't want to send to anyone not interested in it (it costs me money to send).
4. Time. Building an audience like this just takes a long long time (12 years now).
and experiences an open rate that Sendgrid reports as being above 100% (people open it more than once?! probably).
I'm surprised they report it that way. When open rates are quoted online, it's more typical that they're based on unique opens to circulation. For example, if you have a list of 100,000 people and 50,000 open the email, that's a 50% open rate, even if they all open the email 10x (because 500% open rate makes no real sense).
Trivial opt-out as I don't want to send to anyone not interested in it
This is always a good idea. Some people who want to build a list balk at it, but would somehow prefer people who don't want their email to get "stuck" on their list(!)
Curious, have you tried doing a annual opt-in?
Ask because if you’re really not making money on it, likely good idea and my guess is if you have been running it 12 years, you’ll get a significant percentage of emails that do not opt-in.
You do not even have to be aggressive about it. Just mention it 3x in your regular newsletter with a clear deadline and communicate it’s an annual opt-in. If after the 3rd inline notice, send a 4th and final email explicitly stating to get more emails they need to re-optin.
> Curious, have you tried doing a annual opt-in?
Haven't done that.
I've simply tried to make unsubcribing be easier than hitting the spam button.
Front and centre, top of the email, single click, untracked (so will 100% work no matter how aggressive your Pi-Hole config).
Why would he wanna do that?
Simple answer is to save money, reduce spam reports, get better signal-to-noise ratios in analytics, etc — basically all the same reasons you should be doing opt-in in the first place.
Like all topics, there’s a lot to learn about it, differing opinions, etc — for example, some might say not to send an re-opt-in email to an email that’s recently opened an email, others might say that the open was just automatically triggered.
To learn more, Google to start with might be “re-opt-in campaign”:
My only advice would be create good content and make it consistent.
Each of my issue title is: “WR: Issue #X” and consistently I get an open rate of around 45% consistently, because I hope people find my work useful.
I also make the newsletter available on the web and provide an RSS feed to make it as easy as possible to get latest issues.
Also, if you use Mailchimp (and I imagine similar) the open rate is not counted if someone doesn't open your tracking pixel. They would only get counted if they click on a link.
The header "You have won first prize in a beauty contest" works pretty well for me. That and only sending the email to my wife.