Email Newsletters Are Still A Serious Business | Hacker News Reader

Email Newsletters Are Still A Serious Business

jasonlbaptiste.com

Email is huge for B2B. Executives -- especially those in non-technical fields -- generally couldn't care less about RSS or Twitter. But they spend half of their day in Outlook or (god forbid) Lotus Notes.

Do you think that makes them more likely to read content coming into their inbox? ie- they use email way more for work type stuff, but they're indifferent when it comes to consuming content.

Yes, I think they're probably more likely to open email than the average user. But my point was really that if you've got something that executives want to read, then email is most likely the format they want to read it in.

And depending on the specifics, I'm not sure there is a difference between "content" and "work stuff" for B2B

I've always thought that RSS would have had wider understanding and use if Outlook could discover, consume, and display RSS feeds -- formatted as email messages so as not to confuse the user of Outlook too much.

That's exactly what Outlook does.

Yet nobody uses it.

True, I haven't actually used Outlook in years, last time I did I know the version I used didn't do this. RSS has existed in some form since 1999. Outlook seems to have just achieved the ability to consume the format with Office 2007 [1] [2]. And it's buried in the account settings [3]. Which I guess makes sense, but it really should be accessible from the folder pane/list.

[1] http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/introduction-...

[2] http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/view-rss-and-...

[3] http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/add-an-rss-fe...

I wonder if, for certain types of worker, e-mail is stickier or more attractive because "doing e-mail" looks like work, whereas "browsing the Web" could be frowned upon by a passing higher-up?

I don’t think things are going to stop here by any means. Content is a huge business and customer acquisition can be done fairly easily if you’re sticking to a specific niche.

This is interesting to me because my family's business, Seliger + Associates Grant Writing (http://blog.seliger.com), runs an e-mail grant newsletter that's been far more useful to us than anything else we've done in terms of advertising and in terms of getting people's attention. In addition, we regularly look for e-mail newsletter where we can advertise but have trouble finding them—a lot of people want to sell us banner ads on their websites, which have proven useless, but relatively few have newsletters.

I'm not sure why this is; I would guess part of it is because people have to actively sign up for a newsletter, rather than merely finding the website through Google or whatever. Maybe the ads are better integrated.

A number of pay per click affiliates found that by including an opt-in to a list during the sales process they were able to make sales again and again and again. Shifting from short term to long term profitability. Why make one sale to a client when you could make several?

Repeat sales to existing customers are the backbone of the economy, this should not be a surprise to anyone.

I agree, sadly not enough people pay attention to this. Jacques, I wish you'd write a lot more. You have a ton to teach/smart things to say.

I wish the article offered more insight into how these newsletters are worth so much?

Hey, this is a followup to a post that explains that well towards the end: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/commentary/email-newsletters-busin... hth.

This is great. Also, for a more general overview of the theory check out the book Permission Marketing. It's largely about what gives large email lists their value, how to grow that value, etc.

My understanding is that sites like DailyCandy, etc. do well by having very good open/CTRs for their emails and known/attractive demographics, and can therefore charge quite a bit to place ads. (They don't list ad unit prices, but some more info: http://www.dailycandy.com/mediakit/)

Utility based content is also a big one. They send content that is useful/provides new insight.

Wow, the sale price for DailyCandy is an eye-opener (125 million)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DailyCandy

Edit: already stated in Jason's original post:

http://jasonlbaptiste.com/commentary/email-newsletters-busin...

If you've got the right kind of people reading your list, you can charge MUCH higher rates for ads than you could ever get away with on the web.

just wrote a follow up piece on HN about our personal story on why email newsletters are worth so much: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489352

You mentioned a list of potential verticals. Care to name a few?

Sure. It's funny. I almost ended up doing something in this space (mix of content and monetization). If it weren't for Andres pushing me + attending startupweekend, i'd be doing something here instead of Cloudomatic. Some verticals I identified:

- Casual geeks. People who want to know what we know, but just don't have the time + know geeky tricks.

- Urban demographic. It's valuable and something overlooked in the tech space. Why do you think all of those things trend on twitter with weird hashtags? It's because of the urban demographic.

- Family living. People want tips for better family living. It's also a valuable demographic.

- College focused. Do .edu email addresses only and segment by city. This is how facebook got started and college humor spread. It's highly viral and highly valuable. Think financial companies paying for a dedicated email to 100k college kids with good editorial content.

- Male fitness. Sort of mens health meets GQ. Fashion, sex, fitness,money,etc. Women often get all the love here when it comes to content online, but this is a gaping hole. If you've ever picked up a fitness magazine, you would know advertisers spend a ton here.

I think there's more. I'd start with either the first one or last one. If you end up doing one of those, I'd love to help in some way possible.

Jason - Thanks for your thoughts on newsletters.

Do you think there is room for something targeting the entrepreneurial demographic? (if there is such a thing) I'm not talking just startups but small biz types of which there are many. The problem is that the group is heterogeneous but would seem to be valuable to advertisers if there was content the group valued.

On another note, I've heard newsletters by some big established media outlets, Forbes, Fast Company, etc charge $250 per thousand subscribers. Seems absurd but what we were quoted once for an ad placement in of their newsletters.

Small-medium sized business owners are worth a lot of money. I think there's a ton of room there. I've thought about that demo as well. You'd really have to keep it tight.

Yes - keeping it tight given the diversity of that audience will be key.

In your experience, is there a # of subscribers at which newsletters become interesting to advertisers? e.g., min of 10k subscribers, 20k, etc?

In our experience, once you hit above 50k subscribers it starts to get the attention of advertisers. Also important is how long you have been doing it for, it takes time to build up trust.

Great post with some really great points in the comments as well. There are a TON of upstarts in this space and some already target the areas you've mentioned. Of particular note is Startup Digest (www.thestartupdigest.com), which already has thousands of subscribers and an established presence in tons of cities. At the moment, they send out a weekly newsletter with startup events in each city. Definitely worth subscribing to if you're an entrepreneur.

here is the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489352

I'm not surprised HARO was successful. It's an incredibly useful service.

Agreed. It was well run too. I'm actually very curious, what else would do well with something very HARO like - ie- 1-3 emails a day connecting people together.

That's truly the essence of HARO: making connections between people. Especially where one of the people is in need of something. The other part of HARO is that the reporters' needs would often be difficult to fulfill otherwise (e.g. I'm looking for people who've had a bad reaction to Viagra in the Boston area, etc.).

I bet there are other ideas like this out there.

Is there something that would be useful to the HN crowd?

My guess is that you'd want to exclude the HN crowd and look for somewhere that's not exploited. We're all pretty good at navel gazing here and might well have thought of it.

I've always thought, for example, that secretaries/PAs are an underserviced market. They have jobs that involve a lot of moving parts (managing people's email, time, travel, special events, ...). I bet there's a start-up in there making them a service that they need.

There are people doing this already, one example:

http://hellomonday.nl/

Television/film casting is like that. Being from Los Angeles I had dabbled in "extra" work a bit (still have my expired SAG card! :) Casting agents always need certain looks or skills, e.g. someone tall with red hair that can horseback ride, or has a running car older than 1970. Stuff like that goes out in casting calls, and the best they can do is ask people to work their social network in the traditional way, i.e. family or friends they might know etc. Come to think of it Hollywood in general is pretty low tech...

Great insight. Sounds like HAPO (help a producer out) might work. Clearly not just LA because there's also NYC.

This is a really good idea. There's a service that does this I heard about on mixergy, but not email/haro like.

So, shall we build it? I've got next weekend free. Just need someone who can market it to producers.

Unfortunately, marketing is my weakest suit. I'm more of a developer role.

Edit: As a matter of fact this all reminds me of a project I started with an aspiring director, which I still think is a good idea. He approached me with the idea to connect script writers with studios. He had some web design skills and supposed connections. I was to build the backend of the site. I was enthusiastic about that project and even started the coding, but he never delivered on the marketing. He lost his motivation after a competitor site upgraded and corrected many of its flaws (inktip.com).

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