Ask HN: Why do newsletters not work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do newsletters not work?

I run a small site to teach people to code (https://enlight.ml).

It has ~600 email subscribers. I usually send an email every week or so linking the user to any new projects which have been posted. These emails are relatively short, however, they don't drive many clicks towards the site. Why is this? Over half of them open the email, but only 8% of the list actually clicks on the links.

I've tried making the subject stand out with emojis and such, but I'm not seeing much of an interest of the site through these emails. On the other hand, however, less than 15 people have unsubscribed from the list since the site launched.

What's an alternative way to spread the word to your users? How do you guys do it?

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8% isn't a bad click through rate, especially if you're sending newsletters weekly. I don't see anything about frequency next to the subscribe button on your homepage, so people may have been expecting something different, which would drive down the click through rate.

I've also seen enlight.ml posted here before, so my guess is quite a few of the subscribers came from HN or sites like it. Typically the users you get through these kinds of postings aren't all in your target audience. This might also be resulting in a lower click through rate.

The key to getting a high click through rate is delivering a lot of value. There aren't any good shortcuts.

Here are some things that may help you figure out and boost your perceived value:

* Send a survey to your users asking them what types of updates they want to get from you, and how often.

* Figure out if the same 8% engages each time, and what the patterns of click throughs are (do some people click through every single time?).

* See if anyone on your list would be willing to chat with you about the value they get from your newsletter/site.

* Do some content marketing/promotion to attract a more targeted audience.

* Make sure you're selling the benefits of doing the lesson in your emails.

* Have some clearer messaging around the signup box for the list.

I run a site to teach people data science, and I've learned a lot of marketing lessons along the way. Happy to chat further if you want -- my email is in my profile.

This is a great post^^.

I've had a similar size list as high as 55% open rate and 22% click through. The key is high quality content that tailors to the subscribers on your list, and preferably that is low on spam.

Surveying the users is a great start, I'd also check out what competitors are doing for some ideas.

Thank you! I will def take a look on implementing these things :)

Also, remove inactive users from your list periodically. (Send them a message warning them they will be unsubscribed though, with an option to stay subscribed.)

To give a few numbers out of nearly 12000 subscribers with one newsletter a month we used to do between 2,5% and 4.2% of people actually clicking a link.

I have no idea about the average but if you get those numbers weekly its actually better than what we do (and the person who is creating the content for the newsletter is a pure marketing person).

> I've tried making the subject stand out with emojis and such

The only emails I've ever received with emojis in the subject field have been spam. But, maybe I'm not your target audience. You could try split testing this.

This! So much this! If you want to test how effective things are, always make A/B tests. And as stated before 8% click rate is pretty impressive.

Good point - will test out on the next email

> I usually send an email every week or so linking the user to any new projects which have been posted. These emails are relatively short, however, they don't drive many clicks towards the site. Why is this? Over half of them open the email, but only 8% of the list actually clicks on the links.

Doesn't that just tell you that only 8% of the list were actually interested in viewing the new project? My guess is that if you made projects that interested more people then more people would click?

Your title suggests that due to your own experience that _all_ email newsletters do not work. I believe that might be a bit of a narrow view. In fact, I'm sure there are expert marketers which would strongly disagree with this.

Perhaps a better way to phrase things would be "how to make my newsletters more engaging?". Have you tried researching the topic? There are lots of resources online about "growth hacking" and email marketing.

Perhaps I'm a bit cynical but this seems like a clickbaity contrived effort to promote your site.

Sorry you thought this way. Will try and better rephrase next time.

Not sure what is happening, but the low unsubscribe rate may be because in gmail it's much easier to mark a message as spam than unsuscribing.

Assuming there's a List-Unsubscribe header present, Gmail will also (offer to) unsubscribe the recipient from the list when marking an e-mail as spam.

>Over half of them open the email, but only 8% of the list actually clicks on the links.

Maybe only 8% of them or so really care, and it's not about the medium used to reach them?

People are busy. When checking their email, they probably are doing something else and not looking for educational code projects at that that moment.

Have you verified that 8% is actually a low conversion rate?

Yeah, this. 8% is actually a very, very high conversion rate for what amounts to an email ad (granted one that was asked for, so it's not spam).

Ah, I am using mailchimp but I wasn't aware that this number was pretty impressive compared to others...

If you're using a service like MailChimp, they'll actually show you industry averages for click-throughs, even on the free plans. It depends on the industry, but 8% sounds quite reasonable.

I tried that way as well, and did not yield the expected results. And some readers of my site really prefer the good old RSS.

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