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”.
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.
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.
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).
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(!)
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.
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).
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.
