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I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
- roneoo 5y agoI 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-netlify/ https://roneo.org/en/a-newsletter-with-hugo-buttondown-and-n...
- ldoughty 5y agoAn interesting experiment, had to look in the comments to see how the group was distributed, and looks sufficiently random for a simple test
- sosborn 5y agoThis 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.
- kixiQu 5y agoIt'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.
- sosborn 5y agoI 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.
- kixiQu 5y agoAgreed, that'd make it much more useful for the folks who are willing to customize.
- fideloper 5y agoI 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).
- civilized 5y agoI 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?
- smthngwitty 5y agoButtondown is less known, so it's trackers are less likely to be blocked
- ubac 5y agoso 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.
- civilized 5y agoGood theory. Even my Substack subscriptions land in Promotions on GMail.
- bmarquez 5y ago> 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.
- gnicholas 5y agoI’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?
- krn 5y ago> 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/ https://www.mailerlite.com/
- depereo 5y agoThis looks like it's slightly cheaper than MailChimp for transactional emails, at least for the 'starter' level subscription.
- ubac 5y agoEmail 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 https://emailoctopus.com
- gnicholas 5y agoThanks 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.
- jamesknelson 5y agoI’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.
- tremdog 5y agoWhy not use Klaviyo?
- jordansmith 5y agoThis was my thought too. Mail chimp is probably the worst ESP so all options are going to beat it
- hamiltonians 5y agosubstack sends too many emails. i had to unsub from a blog for that reason.
- leros 5y agoOpen rate should really only be affected by the content, though it's possible the platforms have different deliverability/spam rates.
- medion 5y agoI 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!
- funerr 5y agoYou didn't move to substack you mean? And how do you know if it was regretful?
- fragmede 5y agoI think they moved to substack but did not receive the promised growth/discoverability, thus they regret the move.
- medion 5y agoSorry, 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…
- ncmncm 5y agoMail 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.
- DonHopkins 5y agoIt figures. The Surprising Science of Alpha Male Chimps, TED Talk by Frans de Waal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPsSKKL8N0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPsSKKL8N0s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal
- kingcharles 5y agoThey might not be good at email, but they make great tea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZbDnuKjco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZbDnuKjco
- DonHopkins 5y agoAnd they tell great penguin jokes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ETlTZoF1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ETlTZoF1E
- kingcharles 5y agoLOL. Took me about 10 seconds to get it!
- thih9 5y ago> 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.
- exolymph 5y agoVery 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.
- sleazebreeze 5y agoIs 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/ https://guzey.com/statistics/dont-believe-self-reported-data...
- zackkatz 5y agoThis 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 https://twitter.com/lesley_pizza/status/1477841280990257152
- dSebastien 5y agoI'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.