
Why Email Newsletters are so Valuable, Case study on StartupDigest - jasonlbaptiste
http://thestartupdigest.com/2010/07/05/email-newsletters-valuable-case-study-startupdigest/
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silvia77
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.

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itsmicks
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!

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silvia77
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.

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utnick
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

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johnl
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.

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silvia77
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

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buro9
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.

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silvia77
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.

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MediaSquirrel
sweet!

