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Comment by michalu | Hacker News Reader

My company sends a newsletter once a month. We're selling roasted coffee. This single day account for 20-30% of our monthly revenue. In fact email is our single best performing channel. Hope this info helps.

EDIT: I should also add that we're combining every newsletter with some "offer" e.g. we make a new blend or roast couple of bags of some coffee we don't typically stock. We're also keeping it very personal - it's literally just a plain text email (we've got this new thing on stock, here's what we've been up to and here's some new content on blog - have a great month.)

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Sounds like you should switch to sending two a month.

This is how it starts. Before you know it, they are spamming their mailing list every day.

So far we found once a month to be our sweet spot. Majority of customers buy their monthly supply in one shopping session and this is a way to prompt some of them + reactivate old customers / staled customers and convert blog subscribers.

I think the next step is to segment our customer/subscriber base and send at various frequency. But it's also a "side-hustle" so it takes effort :)

I'm curious, did you try a subscription model for your customers? Maybe you could even target to ones you see ordering every once in a while and offer them a monthly bag + a small incentive for the commitment?

Thank you it's something in the plans but I've been too lazy to set up the billing for subscription.

I assume that returns are diminishing, and turn negative past a certain point.

If a company that I'm interested in sends me an email once per month, then I generally don't mind it. I might even appreciate it.

Send it every two weeks, and you're training me to tune out and usually click the "Delete" button without looking at the content.

Send it weekly, and you've irritated me enough to have the motivation to unsubscribe. Maybe just flag you as spam if the "Unsubscribe" link isn't immediately easy to find. Certainly tarnished my view of your brand.

I don't know where the "sweet spot" is, but monthly sounds about right.

Agreed, but depends on the content. For things like this, I'm assuming they can tell what people who do buy actually buy, and we might assume it's enough coffee for a few weeks or so.

I do get some newsletters weekly and do not mind at all, because the info is new/fresh/useful. For 'buy some stuff', unless I'm buying every week (which I don't beyond food) likely less is more.

Really, it just depends on a the value you provide in your emails. If Apple sent me 40% discount promo codes, I'd LOVE weekly emails. Ha!

> I assume that returns are diminishing, and turn negative past a certain point.

Which is why you should test it.

Jan '22 -> once a month

Feb '22 -> twice a month

Mar '22 -> thrice a month

Jan '23 -> once a month

Feb '23 -> twice a month

Mar '23 -> thrice a month

Compare and contrast for both unsubscribe rate and conversion.

Probably better to use a split test. Segment the list into two segments (via random assignment). Send one segment two emails per month, send the other one per month. Compare the segments.

True. I would then test that over a 6+ month interval. Depending on the volume of subscribers the results may not be correlative.

I work for an ecommerce company.

The unsubscribe rate doesn't really change, it's fairly constant at 0.3% of the audience every time.

There are obviously diminishing returns on the revenue with frequencies. Our business is moderately seasonal, so the numbers are not that accurate on the revenue side.

I think a majority of people don't unsubscribe; they just mark your emails as spam and ignore them. That lowers your credibility with email providers, and if that happens enough, you start seeing your emails being considered as spam and you get entirely blocked off the ISP.

Also, it may be a mistake to attribute all of your revenue from the email to email. By its nature, emails are going to the segment of your audience most interested and most likely to purchase. Only a portion of revenue from it is actually incremental; a large part probably would have ordered anyway, and the email gets credit only because they're also clicking through the email.

Of course, it depends on what offers are in the email, etc. If you want to test, the best bet is as was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, segment out a set of customers and change the frequency of emails over the long term, and track their total sales.

Yep, you need to track your open rates too. If you have a 20% open rate, run a daily spam trial, and find you had a 0.3% unsub rate but your open rate is now 10%... You actually had a 50% unsub rate, your customers just aren't letting you know they've unsubscribed

Isn’t open rate obfuscated / blocked by most clients now? How do you measure it?

(I’ve been blocking them for 25+ years; might be out of touch…)

open rates are inaccurate but still somewhat useful because they’re generally consistently inaccurate month to month unless there’s been a change that would affect a lot of subscribers (eg iOS recently).

click rates are probably a better proxy for this.

Saw this comment late, like tl_donson says, yes but it's fairly consistent. So if your open rate drops 20% to 10% in one month, it's probably your fault and not the mail client hiding it.

In my experience most people do not block images in emails, and that's the easiest way to tell if someone opened your mail. Even most people who use an adblocker do not block email images.

You're talking in general, and most of your points are correct, but they don't apply to our business fully.

For example, our newsletters are always offering a time-limited discount for the purchase. They're also not segmented out to people "most likely to purchase", because we don't have that data. It goes out to 100% of our audience every time, unless they made a very recent purchase.

If we knew who the people are that are most likely to buy, it sure as hell would make the business easier to run.

No, just no. AB testing how much you can squeeze out of the channel has a huge negative backlash. A customer driven "send these more often" or "send these less often" offer in the email will give the customer the ability to set the level of engagement that works best for them and avoid both rage quits and user hostility to being "worked."

A friend of mine was hired by Peet's to try to clean up the mess they caused by doing this to their previously loyal fan base, it has been a lot of work and expense.

> A friend of mine was hired by Peet's to try to clean up the mess they caused by doing this to their previously loyal fan base

Clean up what? You test it once and if it works, it works, if it doesn't you revert back. You're not going to get a huge backlash of brand loyalty for increasing a monthly newsletter to 2x/month. And if you get ANY backlash you simply revert back. Most people wouldn't even notice.

I think you're overthinking my recommendation.

> A customer driven "send these more often" or "send these less often" offer in the email will give the customer the ability to set the level of engagement that works best for them

You should have this option regardless of what techniques you use.

> And if you get ANY backlash you simply revert back. Most people wouldn't even notice.

The people who dropped the newsletter after it became spam definitely won't notice that you reverted back to the expected behavior.

It depends on the size of that group and their sensitivity. I’ve found that consumers generally don’t think as much about it as tech people - it’s much more random than we like to think.

If your test costs 2% of newsletter receipients who were 2 emails away from unsubscribing, it might be worth it.

As always, know your audience.

This works until the people who get 3 emails a month unsubscribe. Don't break it if it works.

Fries a month seems like the sweet spot. Especially with a drink. And a burger. Where do I subscribe?!

One thing i'd like to see is links at the top of emails asking the user if they want to change their receive frequency; I know many newsletters already have a "change how often you get these" button, however, needing to go to that page and then enter & submit a form is tiresome and tends to not be worth it when the newsletter isn't that important to you. Indicating that you can change to 'monthly' in a single click/tap is probably much better UX.

My experience is that diminishing returns happen, but the big question is when they happen. I’ve run a few medium sized email and postal campaigns, and evenly time we were shocked at the response rate by contact #10. It was always higher than we expected.

Not in the coffee business, but I doubt those who like coffee enough to receive a coffee newsletter need to purchase twice a month. It's very likely that doubling the touch points with consumers would lead to ad fatigue.

This said, it's possible that once a month isn't the right interval. 3 weeks or 5 might be better. Analysis would need to be done.

sounds like you want more better faster for less cheaper and quicker.

As a consumer, please no. Way too many places go from sending one email to once a week to suddenly every single day... and some local restaurants decided multiple per day would work.

Are you my VP of marketing?

If you send annoying emails to my inbox I’m ignoring them and eventually will unsubscribe or mark them as spam.

I know an online retailer who sends a newsletter every day, if not multiple newsletters per day. It’s insane. Apparently they have enough customers who don’t unsubscribe that it works for them.

You are management material

I have one company that I like to receive mails from and it is because I actually care about the content in their mails — it is actually interesting stuff, not marketing bs.

If they sent me an email twice a week I would unsubscribe after a month.

Every company that tries to waste my time like that looses a bit of my respect, period.

There is a fantasy themed candle company that emails me daily. My god it annoys me, but I also I buy so many candles.

At my day job, we did a test around sending more emails and longer emails. Initially the more we sent, the more our core metrics and NPS went up. Then as we sent even more, our NPS starting dropping but our core metrics kept going up. It was rather interesting. There is definitely a balance to be had but my takeaway is that annoying your users a bit might be ok for business.

What service do you use for templatizing amd sending the emails? Are they personalized?

We simply send emails using gmail API. They are personalized a bit, I run everything from jupyter notebook. Not a big fan of services like mailchimp. We keep personal approach so I prefer to land in primary inbox vs "promotions" as most customers are businesses and we've had exchanges over the email. We're just under 2k which is the daily limit for gmail, will start using SMTP with it since that gets you 10k emails a day.

I'd be very interested to hear more details about your jupyter notebook setup for sending emails

It's embarrassingly primitive, we export all existing subscribers into csv from our CRM, I load it into pandas dataframe and send using simple for loop + gmail api calls. I run it with "caffeinate" terminal command and use time.sleep() to time the sending for the morning as I tend to wake up pretty late. Other times when I'm travelling I just push updated csv into google cloud vm and let it run there.

A more advanced setup would be sqlite + keeping timestamps, message and thread ids for future work e.g. analytics on responses.

You can track opens using GA tracking pixel.

What's wrong with MailChimp?

You might also spread your campaign across several days. That how we do for our customers sending over 10,000 with Gmail.

I really like MJML. It's an abstraction layer that targets most email providers.

You still need to test with a service like Litmus, but it gets you 90% of the way there.

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