I don’t need your newsletter | Hacker News Reader

I don’t need your newsletter

sarahanngilbert.com

26 pointsmooreds25 comments

Your best marketing idea is probably not an e-mail newsletter.

So this is where the logical chain leaps from "I am on a bunch of newsletters which I don't value" to "Email newsletters are ineffective." That's a category error, right? (4:30 AM, somebody find the word for me.)

A "newsletter" is probably not the best positioning you could have for a scheduled opportunity to get in touch with a customer/prospect about something of mutual interest, but be that as it may, they're big freaking business. Billions upon billions of dollars a year. Every single time folks do one of those poll-Fortune-500-CMOs-and-ask-about-channel-ROI email obliterates every advertising channel, organic search, social media, etc etc.

Additionally: there is a different-strokes-for-different-folks effect going on. You might very well find How To Make Thanksgiving Bingo Cards boring. (God only knows I do!) I forgot to press send on that in 2010 and people found me to complain about it. In this wide world there is probably somebody who gets the Hoover email and has that be a nice little mini-highlight of her morning. She might print it out and clip parts of it. Maybe even show it to her friends.

Many of you run startups / software businesses. I'm sort of talking my book here, but if you trust me on anything, trust me on this: software businesses -- including software businesses with very techy customer bases, including techy customers who profess to hate email -- routinely figure out how to send emails that people like to receive, that successfully motivate behavior, and that repeatably generate absolute truckloads of money.

The unit economics of it are almost staggering: in quantity, emails cost substantially less than a penny to send. When you get in touch with the 10,000 people who affirmatively asked to hear from you, many of them are, predictably, right around that time in their life where they are in need of your product or service. They were busy because they have friends, children, jobs, hobbies, and a million things more important than remembering every company they have ever done business with, but if you catch them at the right moment, bam, sales process begins again. Given that getting a new customer in the door routinely costs companies hundreds or thousands of dollars, it's very, very easy to justify budgeting a whole quarter a year to keep old customers in a mutually beneficial warm relationship.

If you're trying to market your product, there is nothing as powerful and successful as email. Yeah, your crappy newsletter will probably just get deleted by 95% of people who get it, but the cost/benefit is still in your favor.

If you want to be a success in business, sometimes you have to take off your "indignant customer" hat and put on your "trying to make a sale" hat. Don't be a jerk to your customers, and make it easy for them to unsubscribe, but setting up a periodic newsletter is an amazingly awesome way to get repeat business. Don't not do it just because you think your product or service isn't a perfect fit. Let your customers be the judge of that.

Subscribing a customer to an e-mail newsletter that they didn't ask for is being a jerk to your customers. You might get a few extra sales, but for every sale you get you'll also get a bunch of customers who think you're an annoying spammer and will want nothing more to do with you.

> but for every sale you get you'll also get a bunch of customers who think you're an annoying spammer and will want nothing more to do with you.

Facts not in evidence. Sleazy spam still exists, suggesting there is still profits to be made even deep in the gutter.

Not saying companies should spam, just pointing out that the above is not a true statement.

I once got into trouble with one of these unwanted newsletters. A design agency in Argentina was doing the mass mailing their work to design blog authors in an effort to spread the word about the work they had done. It was a fairly large agency with big clients, one of those clients was Unilever.

I started by requesting to be removed from the list, this went well for a couple of weeks, but then (some intern, I suppose) would pick it up again and put it in their database. I got tired of this game and marked it as spam, but somehow it was still going through my inbox. By the fourth time this happened, I grew angry, so I thought about a way to get the message through that their emailing tactics weren't welcome.

I searched through LinkedIn for the highest level of Unilever I could find, and I struck gold: I got the email of the VP of Marketing of Unilever for Argentina. I wrote him an email, with cc to the owner of the Argentinian agency. I wrote to him as if he was a friend, something along the lines of...

   Dear *****
   Your design agency in Argentina, *****, has been spamming
   me about the work that they have done for Unilever. I
   wouldn't like to have my brand associated with such seedy
   marketing tactics. If I were you, I would drop them as a 
   provider. Please take care good friend.

The owner went bonkers, I just replied that he should search through their email to see how many times I had asked to be removed from their list. I guess they finally implemented a blacklist because I didn't receive another email from them.

Here's a secret: they continue to use email marketing because it works.

By "works", I think you mean "brings in more revenue than it costs" aka is profitable.

But I think the author brings up a point that it may be hurting the brand unknowingly. just because you can put someone on an email campaign for years because it is super cheap, doesn't mean you are conveying your message well or building a loyal customer.

And don't get me started on list sharing.

> By "works", I think you mean "brings in more revenue than it costs" aka is profitable.

Yep.

I assume that a monthly or semi-annual newsletter for something that doesn't have a million professional readers is not expensive to build or distribute. If someone in advertising devotes a day or two a month to it, you basically have it covered.

I've always assumed everyone has a newsletter because, well, why not?

It's like spam. Some people can lose face by abusing e-mail, but most people know they won't. It doesn't hurt or cost them anything to stick another e-mail in your inbox, so why not try?

Even in terms of conversion rates. Talk to anyone with a good, optimized email marketing campaign. You'll hear that email out performs every other type of traffic. Yeah, maybe some of these companies aren't doing it right, but it seems like the author was just pissed she couldn't unsubscribe.

I've run (and currently publish) newsletters. They are one of the best converting tools you can use for almost any business. Seriously. If you have not reasearched it you may be throwing away thousands of dollars in sales.

You do have to be very smart about using them. Here are some pointers (note that this is being included in a Marketing Bit (check my profile):

1. Cold newsletters are not for every market. When I mean cold, I refer to those newsletters that get sent out with the permission granted by the terms of service of other services. But do realize that they do work and should be explored by some markets. If you are worried about emailing people cold, then buy your way into another newsletter and have people subscribe. This is still a cold contact, but allows for inclusion into your sales funnel.

2. Newsletters are not emails. They are more close to magazines and newspapers than email. If you publish a newsletter, don't send out a wall of text. Include other media. The amount depends on the market. Test.

3. You don't need to always talk about one general subject. My best converting newsletters have always included subjects not related to the newsletter at all. Note that this varies by market. If you publish a classifieds newsletter then dont drown people with content. Do include a little joke, word of the day, wisdom quote, or similar. Keep it tidy.

4. Design matters a lot. Hire a designer for this one, and test the results. Mail Chimp has a very handy in browser WYSIWYG that you definitely check out. It work beatifully.

5. Keep a 2:1 ratio (at least) of content/advertisements (if you run ads). Or else it will drown the content.

If you want to learn more about newsletters, I'm about to publish a news Marketing Bit about them. Check out my github (github/orangethirty) to read it.

<a href="file:///C:/Users/Sarah%20Gilbert/Desktop/mothernature.com">Mother Nature</a>

"Works for me. Ticket closed."

If I have not bought a vacuum or a vacuum accessory from you in 5 years, that doesn’t mean you should try harder! Just take me off your list.

For everyone like you who has not bought a Hoover in the last 5 years, there are 10 more who's current Hoover just broke...

The email newsletter is a medium. It's often abused, but that's not the fault of the medium. Saying all newsletters are useless is a lot like saying all books are useless. Are there terrible books? Yes. Are there terrible newsletters? Yes. But there are great ones too.

I operate a design newsletter related to my ebook. It's a great way to earn sales, but it's also a great way to facilitate discussions about design.

The newsletters I enjoy most are written for a very specific, narrow audiences. They're nothing like the massive retail email ads the author mentions.

Never give out your real email address. When you must give an email away, give out a throwaway account. I keep a Hotmail account around just to catch all of the crap that most retailers feel entitled to send.

have you tried pressing the "spam" button?

I find that most of these "newsletters" stop arriving in my inbox after I do that (with my gmail account).

If I did not explicitly subscribe to a newsletter, I will hit the SPAM button. I do not care if I completed a transaction with the sender, spam is spam. I don't bother with the unsubscribe links.

I do both. Most companies respect unsubscribe requests and those that persist get blacklisted. This seems like an an easy problem to solve; not sure that it warrants a 650 word blog post.

I'll usually try the unsubscribe button first, if I recognize the name of the sender. But if it is difficult to unsubscribe, or doesn't work effectively, then the SPAM button it is.

As others have said, sounds like newsletters by themselves aren't the problem. But those who misuse them? I'm right there with the author. Hateful.

The key with any marketing is relevance. If you're getting messaging at any time that's not relevant to you, then someone on the marketing team is doing a crappy job.

(And if there's no way to successfully opt-out...that just makes my blood boil. The brands doing that are wasting their time and, more importantly, yours. The really good marketers should occasionally send out a 'list cleaning' email to be sure that people want to receive their newsletter.)

But as for newsletters as a whole, I agree with the others. Hate the player - not the game.

When giving out your email to a website, change the email slightly using a + sign like this: "<youremail>+<website>@domain.com". The email will still get to you but when they share it with affiliates you'll at least know who shared it.

This doesn't work with all email services.

The only one I know of is Google. So gmail and private email hosted by Google Apps. Anyone know of other email services that work this way?

Pretty sure most email services support this as the syntax is part of RFC 822. The problem is when certain websites ignorant of this standard, choosing not to validate email addresses with a "+" character.

We might be talking about two different thing. OP was referring to a feature of gmail that recognizes anything before a + as your username and still delivers the email to you, regardless of what's after the +. A common use of that feature is to put a note to yourself about where you used that email, like so michaelapproved+hackernewskolya@gmail.com. So, when you see a message to that address, you'll know where the person got your email from. I don't believe all email services/servers behave this way.

What you might be referring to is the syntax of the email address. Yes, it is syntactically correct to use a + in an email and not all email services/servers and web forms properly recognize that it is correct to use the plus.

I suggest people check out http://unroll.me/ It is great for condensing all the newsletters you may or may not have subscribed to

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