Why Email Newsletters are so Valuable, Case study on StartupDigest | Hacker News Reader

Why Email Newsletters are so Valuable, Case study on StartupDigest

thestartupdigest.com

This was a post we wrote up in follow up to this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488170

Gives our personal account to why email lists are so valuable and some of the metrics we collect to track this.

Good stuff! May I ask what your open-rate is? The trend I've seen at a few places I've worked at is that Facebook has become the dominant traffic driver (Twitter in 2nd) for bringing people back to the site. Lot of factors behind this (demographics, ad teams abusing email lists over the years, etc), but I'd pretty much written off email since I know so many of our addresses are people's middle school Hotmail accounts (which I'd remove, but the ad team wants to claim they're sending to X-thousand people). Glad to hear it's working for you. Subscribing now!

Open rate varies a lot city to city but we see anywhere between 20%-60% opens across all of the issues.

We still use twitter/facebook to spread our blog posts, archives, etc but email is our main channel of distribution. For us we see twitter bringing ~30% of our subscribers, facebook doesn't do so well for us.

Startup digest is smart because it just sends out lists of events. While it does take some effort to do the research to find these events, it seems like it would be easier to put together than a full fledged magazine like most of these newsletters are ( thrillist, dailycandy, etc ).

It could be expanded to other niches: wine festivals in your city, folk concerts in your city, etc

Ive been trying to brainstorm other newsletter ideas that could be built without a huge time investment every day to produce the newsletter.

Some I've thought of: - 'Techmeme' newsletter. Build a 'techmeme' for beekeepers or some other niche and send out the links to the best stories & blog posts on beekeeping in a weekly digest post.

- some deal newsletters could also be mostly automated with scraping

Email lists are undervalued. You can get some unbelievable % responses in the Retail business. I would think a startup company that you can create a web blog from an email would be the perfect candidate for this type of marketing.

explain your idea more? ie- create web blog from an email.

At least I find it impossible to find anything in my email archives. So maybe an app like a bicycle wheel, the emails come in, route to the hub, and get directed elsewhere. Digital magazines are getting pretty snazzy, but should end up on your desktop, not stuck in your email. Similar emails can get parsed,tagged and directed to personal blogs. Nice and organized like.

actually a big opportunity is to be able to take newsletter archives and turn them into blog posts. It's actually a big problem in the email world.

If you are interested in this space email me chris at thestartupdigest.com

Couldn't you just CC posterous? And for the archive, forward the mails to posterous?

I may be perhaps missing a finer point on why conversion is better.

I actually tried that (I thought it was that simple too) but the formatting came out all strange.

I sent a note to Posterous support, and they said that Posterous was not meant for email newsletter archives and I should not use it for that reason.

Weird but for some reason it doesn't quite work and they seem to not be focusing on that.

sweet!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com