I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown | Hacker News Reader

I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown

guzey.com

91 pointsluu43 comments

I would be suspicious about how the services report clicks and (especially) open rates. They are notoriously inaccurate.

Buttondown just may just be more generous (less rigorous) in detecting false positives.

Deliverability is also partially on you (versus the provider) and is not necessarily easy to get right (nor is it necessarily consistent between email blasts).

This is a very strange comment from the article:

>37% of openers clicked a link (I think this is because Mailchimp’s links are black rather than blue and it’s easy to miss them)

IMO, if they aren't doing anything to customize the appearance of their emails then this experiment isn't worth much. It also makes it sound like the emails weren't completely identical, which makes click rate comparisons invalid.

Some of the bullets are helpful, but I wouldn't take this as any kind of gospel.

It's reasonable to go about an experiment that includes within its experimental parameters the mailers' default appearances, since part of the reason folks use these services is to have that all done up without too much manual intervention.

I guess, but at least with Mailchimp, there are a large number of "default appearances," which one did they choose? I would have appreciated screenshots of each email to see what was being compared to what.

Agreed, that'd make it much more useful for the folks who are willing to customize.

Is this the tech influencers' version of "I switched my frontend from React to Vue"?

Also, the author has even written an article titled "Don't Believe Self-Reported Data"[0]. In light of some of the other comments about the data not quite stacking up, perhaps he should take his own advice.

[0]: https://guzey.com/statistics/dont-believe-self-reported-data...

Mail from Mailchimp is typically indistinguishable from a phishing attempt.

A company so clueless about internet security as to send out in bulk what are indistinguishable from phishing attempts clearly cannot be trusted to help manage your login/signup process.

And, any company seen to trust an outsourcer as clueless as Mailchimp cannot be trusted with your personal information, never mind your banking or stock transactions.

For particular example, Carta, a stock certificate management site, uses such an e-mail outsourcer.

It figures.

The Surprising Science of Alpha Male Chimps, TED Talk by Frans de Waal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPsSKKL8N0s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal

They might not be good at email, but they make great tea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZbDnuKjco

And they tell great penguin jokes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ETlTZoF1E

LOL. Took me about 10 seconds to get it!

I’ve never thought of using substack as a way to manage my startup’s email list, but seeing this comparison made me consider it. I don’t like mailchimp and find the pricing to be atrocious for my purposes (emailing 5k people once or twice a year). How odd would it be to get an update from a company via a substack email? Does anyone else do this?

> I don’t like mailchimp and find the pricing to be atrocious for my purposes (emailing 5k people once or twice a year).

Have you looked at MailerLite[1]?

[1] https://www.mailerlite.com/

This looks like it's slightly cheaper than MailChimp for transactional emails, at least for the 'starter' level subscription.

Email Octopus[1] are great, and 50% cheaper again than MailerLite

for 5k-10k people, on monthly plan:

Mailchimp: $80

MailerLite: $50

EmailOctopus: $24

[1] https://emailoctopus.com

Thanks I'll check it out! What doesn't sit well with me is that someone can send weekly emails to 2k subscribers for free, but if I want to be respectful of people and not spam them all the time, I end up paying much more to send way fewer emails.

I’m in the same boat here. I had a list of ~15,000 blog readers at some point, but gave up sending emails when most services wanted to charge me $1000~$2000/year, even when I only wanted to send 1-2 emails a year.

If there are any services that allow me to import my previous list and email them (very) occasionally for a reasonable price, I’d love to know about them.

If the source of the email signups was a blog, I feel like you can very reasonably use substack. I feel a little dicey doing so for my startup, but I may end up doing it and sending out hybrid email updates/blog posts.

kind of unsolicited advice here but if you're running a mailing list for a startup you should be emailing it more than once or twice a year so that people can build a relationship with you... at least thats the traditional email marketing advice. you do you of course

As an end user I don't want companies to email me often to establish relationship, but if I were a company I would follow your advice. What a world of suffering we live in.

I am personally allergic to spam, and I treat others as if they are the same. You're right that I should realize that the people who sign up for our email list are genuinely excited about our products and want to hear every time we win an award or launch a new partnership. I just dread seeing those unsubscribes, knowing that I've just pissed someone off...

Use ListMonk. Its an open source software. Used and developed by a unicorn.

I switched the other way - Buttondown to Substack. I did this in theory for growth, because I thought Substack may provide some better discoverability.

It did not and I regret the move!

You didn't move to substack you mean? And how do you know if it was regretful?

I think they moved to substack but did not receive the promised growth/discoverability, thus they regret the move.

Sorry, that was a bit of a word salad. I was using Buttondown and moved across to Substack, thinking it may increase list growth - but it did not make any difference.

Also, I miss the markdown editor on Buttondown…

> 37% of openers clicked a link (I think this is because Mailchimp’s links are black rather than blue and it’s easy to miss them)

I wonder if these results can be replicated. Is there a detailed description of the process? I'm now especially interested in seeing the emails that were delivered to the users.

I've recently switched from Mailchimp to Revue.

The UI of Mailchimp felt like a real catastrophe; incredibly complex and unintuitive. Worse, the text editor was a real nightmare to use and embeds were not great at all. Mailchimp basically felt like a Matryoshka doll with screens in screens in screens in screens, to an almost comical point (except it wasn't fun).

Revue is MUCH simpler, has an excellent and easy to use editor, good-looking embeds (links, tweets), also the possibility to create a paid newsletter. In addition, Revue has native integration within Twitter, which is very nice and helps with growth. Revue isn't as powerful as Mailchimp and others around analytics and other features, but I don't mind at this stage.

Open rate should really only be affected by the content, though it's possible the platforms have different deliverability/spam rates.

This is a great thread/analysis on Twitter by a maker of Newsletter Glue. She has extensive experience with all these providers:

https://twitter.com/lesley_pizza/status/1477841280990257152

I moved to Buttondown too, and implemented a newsletter *for a static site!*.

Documentation can be found here: https://roneo.org/en/a-newsletter-with-hugo-buttondown-and-n...

I don't know. If the experiments were perfectly random, the Buttondown-Substack difference is a 3-sigma effect, so the difference is unlikely to be random chance. But why? What's so special about one vs the other?

Buttondown is less known, so it's trackers are less likely to be blocked

so my instinct for a while has been that Substack have been damaging their sender reputation by offering unlimited free sending to unlimited recipients, with the upshot that they attract a lot of people sending low-open-rate, marked-as-spam or marked-as-promotional emails. (They also, to my knowledge, won't let senders use their own email addresses, all emails are sent from Substack).

I realise it's much more complicated than this, that within a given ESP there are multiple bundles of senders and that better customers get moved to a better bundle etc, but my guess is that for any given level within Substack you're being bundled with an unusually-bad group of peers and therefore getting lower open rates -- I would love to know if this is an accurate understanding, or if there's any accurate way to test this from outside Substack.

Good theory. Even my Substack subscriptions land in Promotions on GMail.

> sending low-open-rate

This is a great theory. I'm subscribed to a bunch of Substacks, and most send fewer but longer posts which I always open and read. While others treat their Substack like a Twitter feed and send out lots of short posts a day which I hardly ever open.

Alex Berenson has already sent me 3 mails today, and the day isn't over yet...but there are other lesser known people who send far more. And some of those others are crypto/forex/finance writers who by the nature of their content, spam filters may view more suspiciously.

substack sends too many emails. i had to unsub from a blog for that reason.

It does, but there are settings to turn some email notifications off (such as for comments). You can also use the RSS feed instead.

wait, is Substack sending notifications for comments by default now? That's wild....

Very surprised that Buttondown didn't respond to a couple of support emails. I used Buttondown for a while (now on Ghost) and always received excellent, fast support.

An interesting experiment, had to look in the comments to see how the group was distributed, and looks sufficiently random for a simple test

Why not use Klaviyo?

This was my thought too. Mail chimp is probably the worst ESP so all options are going to beat it

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