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Comment by stevoski | Hacker News Reader

> Email might not be the most attractive means of communication, but newsletters are direct and exclusive to customers, a good starting point. “You should have an email newsletter if you have nothing else... This is the one opportunity you have to make something just for them that no one else consumes.”

I'd love to see some broad evidence that email newsletters are effective. I've experienced no strong correlation myself between the frequency of sending newsletters and sales.

The strongest argument I've heard for email newsletters is, "it can't hurt, so you should do it just in case it helps." But that ignores opportunity cost.

Can anyone (preferably who doesn't work for a email campaign company) give any strong evidence in favour of regularly sending out email newsletters?

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You should not send anything ever if you dont have a properly engineered marketing plan and funnel in place. Why? Waste of time.

Newsletters, like all forms of media, work when the message works. Meaning that if the message is shit, then the vehicle is shit too. You have to establish a direct 1:1 communication with your target market, learn about what problems they would pay money or give attention to, and then produce quality content around them. The problem stems when people publish content for the sake of hitting the publish button. It feels like you are doing marketing well, but not really. One piece of content a year can have a bigger impact than one thousand pieces. Doesnt even need to be long form. A well crafted and curated message may take one paragraph or ten to drive a point. Maybe even a sentence.

What you should do is define your goals as to what you want to achieve. Then talk to the people in the market. Friend them on social media. Figure out what makes them tick. Finally, having learned about them and their wants, craft a message that they cant ignore. Repeat until you hate yourself and then ten years after. Will this work? I dont know if it will work for you. It has worked for me and I have made it work for others. But that doesnt guarantee it works for you because you might not be able to execute. Oh yeah, you might just suck at marketing. :)

In my experience it's the difference between "Oh a random bloke on the internet has a $product" and "Oh Swizec who's often helpful and interesting has a $product"

That's a big difference imho.

But I've noticed that somewhere between going from 1000 subscribers to 7000+ things have changed. It's time to look into segmentation and personalization properly. Especially for product launches.

Primarily, email is your channel. Not beholden to the whims of another entity like Facebook or Udacity or Google or even HN and Reddit and Youtube. Took me a long time to learn that lesson.

And yes, this is what we got because RSS got killed. Email newsletters and facebook pages.

It's most definitely true but all of those email newsletter services and "marketing gurus" never tell you the real truth.

It's not as simple as just "build a list and print money".

It's more like, provide top tier content for free for years and years while you test everything that's super specific to your content.

Then, you take what you have and transform that into an intelligent autoresponder (drip campaign) that has a purpose of having a user take action (maybe buy one of your products).

There's no shortcuts to this.

Email marketing is ridiculously cheap in terms of retention compared to most other forms of marketing. You 'own' the list, unlike with Facebook and Twitter. You can push to the list, unlike Google.

I can't talk for startups, but I have worked with very big enterprises on email marketing and all their analysis said email was the most cost-effective over the customer lifecycle.

Makes sense -- when people subscribe to your email list, they have directly indicated at least some level of interest in your product. That's more than any bio/demo based ad campaign can guarantee.

Potentially, someone might have expressed interest by following or liking you. The problem is that the only way of reaching those people is by paying Facebook. The cost increases as your list grows.

When you send an email newsletter, even if your customers don't read it or respond, you're getting your brand name and offer in front of them. The costs barely change as your list grows from 100 to 10 million. That's the real advantage of email compared to just about every other form of marketing.

Compare the costs and sales of pushing an ad to 10 million people who liked you versus 10 million people who bought from you or subscribed to your newsletter. The latter will nearly always give much better value for money.

May I ask which service you use where the cost barely grows from 100 to 10 million subscribers?

We use Mailchimp and it's definitely not the case. Might be time for a change!

Specifically, with Mailchimp, 100 subscribers would be free.

10 million would be $40,700/month.

https://mailchimp.com/pricing/high-volume/

If you're using Mailchimp to handle a list of 10 million users you're definitely doing it wrong. You need a tool that charges by number of emails sent instead of size of list.

These days I'd suggest buying an in-house email tool and use an SMTP server (SendGrid, Mandrill, SES, Mailgun). Pricing will obviously be more expensive but it increases much more slowly than with Facebook. To send 10 million emails on SendGrid would cost around $5K. Depending on the terms, that kind of budget would cover somewhere between 50 and 50000 users with Facebook or AdWords.

Ha! Yeah, well we're not quite at the 10 million mark, and not sure who would pay that amount.

We actually use Sendgrid for transactional emails and should probably revisit for marketing. They didn't have the list manangement features when last we looked and there's a little integration dev that'll need to be done, but you've prompted me to take another look at it. May be worthwhile now. Thanks.

But, even with those guys going from 100 emails to only 4 million (highest quoted on the site), the price goes up a couple of orders of magnitude from $9.95 to over $1600. That's hardly "barely growing costs" and for a bootstrapped startup, the difference may be prohibitive. Hopefully, you've got some revenue or funding by the time you hit that subscriber base. But, don't want to gloss over the fact that you will pay significantly more as your list grows substantially, even if it's less than with other channels.

OK I guess I phrased it badly. At a list size of 10 million, email will probably cost around $10K per month to service. With SEM you'll be lucky if it costs less than $250K per month.

So for every SEM placement, you can send 25 newsletters. So you need SEM to convert 25x better than email to get value from it. That might be possible, depending on the quality of your list, but my experience is that all companies eventually use email marketing because it's so much cheaper with big lists.

I would question how you even got a list size of 10 million, or what you're hoping to get from direct marketing, if $10K per month is prohibitive.

Points well-taken. Thanks for sharing.

I've been working in this industry for many years. This is very true.

> I've experienced no strong correlation myself between the frequency of sending newsletters and sales.

So, it turns out that the effectiveness of email newsletters, just like that of landing pages, is highly variable.

I would suggest doing quite a bit of A/B testing on the effect of subject lines, content, format, frequency, day-of-week, time-of-day, etc. (Not to mention the extra variables that customization and personalization[0] can throw into the mix) on email open rates and clickthroughs (as well as on the rest of your funnel) in order to get really good results.

[0] The distinction, AIUI, is that Customization would be "for monthly newsletters that go out 60-89 days after the user signs up, add this opening paragraph", whereas Personalization would be "add some recommended product links to the footer based on the individual recipient's product reviews and ratings."

Getting someone on a mailing list at least provides the benefit of requiring them to think about you more and see your name more often. I know I have personally bought things from vendors more because their newsletter (which I almost never actually read) would come and keep them in the forefront of my mind.

On a few occasions, these newsletters actually have informed me of useful discounts, sales, or new products and caused me to buy right away, but mostly they just increase brand presence/mindshare. Even though it's not directly measurable, that's not a benefit to be discarded, IMO.

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