Do You Send Newsletters

[Nomad]

Do you send newsletters to your registered users? What mass email service do you use for sending your newsletters? How big is your email list? Do you just send newsletters about your site or do you also promote other products and services through your newsletters? Do you get a good conversion rate? Well, I tried and I failed because my list was very small, it did not even have 1000 emails.

[John Horton]

Well, this is a hot topic for me this week. I have more questions than answers. 

Most of the time I do this for clients. I charge $500 per mail campaign. I think this is dirt cheap.

I have 8k addresses in IPS database and 6.5k in MailChimp. These are the same users but the Mailchimp data has bounces and unsubs weeded out.

I did a mail push this week straight from the default IPS bulk mail tool. The problem is I have no idea of the open rate or delivery rate of the emails.  It is a black hole. Hell, it might have been great. I did get a result for the campaign I was promoting but maybe all that traffic was organic. The report says  600 clicks. Is that opens or clicks on the link in the mail?

I tried to config SendGrid. Could not get it to work. The support guys at IPS tried to help but suspect I did something wrong when I autogenerated the DNS settings I sent in. As is my usual issue with IPS the one thing that is lacking is good documentation. 

 

[Nomad]

You seem to have a huge list. I have a few questions for you.

How did you manage to build such a huge email list? What is your average conversion rate?

I tried to build email list through email exchange with free ebooks but I was not very successful. Well people did submit their emails to get ebooks for the did not provide their best email.

 

[John Horton]

@Nomad  My list is 100% from user accounts in my forum. I have run my site since 2008 so I have been growing the list for a long time.

As my forum subject is obscure I believe my list is very high quality. In other words, someone would have to be legitimately interested in my small niche to register for my site. 

I do not sell anything to my readers so I do not have a conversion rate. My business is all ad sales.

[JoelR]

I would definitely encourage you to use a third-party solution like SendGrid if you want things like analytics.  You may also want to clean up your newsletter list to only users who have visited / joined in the last one year, so your bounce rate is not excessively high (especially if you have a very old list).  

Will be curious how you iterate on newsletters, keep us updated - newsletters and social media outreach are two areas that I'm personally weak in, and always interested to hear how others are doing.  

[John Horton]

@JoelR I really wish I could have gotten SendGrid to work. IDK what I was do doing wrong.

As far as only using current members' emails, I want to do the opposite. I am looking to bring back old members who have not visited in a long time. 

[Maria]

I have tried sending newsletters to active users and inactive users. In my experience, there is a very slim chances of bring back inactive users to your site through newsletters. These days a lot of people do not use their best email for registration on online communities, so they don't even check their emails to discover newsletters.

[Kane]

If you have loyal users on your site, sending newsletters will work as a reminder and help you bring them back to your site. If you send important announcements or information about interesting products and services to your inactive users, you might also be able to bring some visitors. The success lies on whether the subscribers are genuine or not.