Email clipping. Help me reduce my newsletter size.
This year I was hoping to move to a new email software for my newsletter, because the one I currently use (EmailOctopus) is too basic and doesn’t really offer anything else that I can use to improve newsletter. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re just starting out then it’s great, but if you have over 1k subs, it’s starts to lack in functionality and features and won’t really be worth your time onwards. To name a few areas that need major improvement,
- API.
- Segmentation.
- Stats.
- Analytics.
- List cleaning.
So I was testing out a new one last night that was recommended to me by a friend (MailerLite) and it’s basically has all the bells and whistles that I need and want that will help with scaling my newsletter, but before I want pull the trigger and buy a yearly membership, I thought I’d try out the trial.
So I spent like 2 hours last night recreating one of my previous emails in the new software, and sent a test to myself and I ran into a few problems. Even though the software is amazing and I love everything thing about it, the first issue is that it’s “clipping” my emails. Usually with the previous ESP, my size was always under 75 KB and for those that that know my newsletter, The Slice, I have a lot of images and gifs that I put in it, which I want to preferably keep.
Is there anyway I might be able to reduce this “email bloat” and the clipping in MailerLite or is there a different software I can use that has the same or similar features as MailerLite that will still let me keep general look and feel of my newsletter.
Hey Nic, I've been using EmailOctopus for my newsletter for couple of months now and have been doing hacky stuff around it to get it work the way I want it to. Here are my general thoughts on your requirements:
API => Offer limited API but would definitely love API access to creating campaigns and searching contacts based on fields (or access to contact list on a segment)
Segmentation => biggest missing piece is having automated campaigns based on segments but everything else can be hacked together with custom fields.
Stats => Definitely something to be improved upon by EmailOctopus team. If we can get at least # of opens, # emails sent, and timestamp of most recent open per contact (in the API response), I can probably do all contact dump every night and do a quick Excel pivot table magic.
Analytics => I have a very rough custom analytics setup to see breakdown of subscriber source and match it with Google Analytics traffic. Most subscribers have "Referred By" (a custom field I created for tracking referrals) filled with another subscriber who referred them or referrer link (like https://www.google.com or https://www.youtube.com). I'm planning to use this tracking system when doing ads as well.
List cleaning => With a growth phase I'm in, I didn't really consider this until Newsletter Crew mentioned this in their recent podcast episode. But if we get updated API with response data mentioned in "Stats" above, we can probably automate this as well.
Also, if you are interested in implementing a referral program for your newsletter, check out my write up on Medium: https://shchoi22.medium.com/how-i-built-a-free-newsletter-referral-system-for-emailoctopus-in-an-hour-99e885219d1c
Ah, shame to see you go. While we do have a number of huge newsletter creators such as Dense Discovery, Popbitch, and Tedium using us I do appreciate we might not have the features that everyone needs. The joy of bootstrapping, ruthlessly prioritising things!
One of the things we've spent a huge amount of time in the last year is improving delivery and one of the steps there has been ensuring our HTML is written in a very ESP friendly way, so I'm glad that's made a difference and we do have some good knowledge there.
So as we're not the right fit I'd love to help make your switch easy as possible and perhaps use that knowledge. If you want to send me the MailerLite HTML I can take a look and see if there are any clear red flags which are causing the bloat. I'm on tom[at]emailoctopus.com – if you send a test there I should be able to check it.
Hey Thomas! As much as I like EO, every time I need to clean my list I have to do it manually and it's a nightmare. When are you going to implement a way to automate it (e.g. filter people who didn't open last 4 issues)?
Segmentation on last campaign opened should be available in beta within days. I'll make sure you're included.
Hey Thomas! How can apply to be included?
If you're logged into your account, there's a link at the top of this article to be included in the Beta:
https://help.emailoctopus.com/article/61-how-to-send-a-second-broadcast-to-those-who-didnt-open-your-initial-email
How quick Thomas, thank you so much.
have a great day!
Cool, thank you!
Hey Thomas!
Thanks for response. Found what the the problem was and possible a bug on MailerLites side where 50+ google fonts get loaded onto the mail automatically for some reason within the html. Not too sure why they do this.
Have queried it, but I have yet to hear a response. So still waiting.
Might be sticking around for a while, as these transitions arnt the easiest thing to do.
On a side note, I’m just curious but do you potentially have any of the above points I mentioned in the roadmap in the distant future for Emailoctopus?
Ah, that doesn't sound great but does sound like 'just' a bug more than anything too drastically wrong with their implementation.
As you're likely aware we do offer most of those things you mention (with the exception of list cleaning) so I suppose it's more a case of us bulking them out to fit your needs. We're adding some campaign report segmentation tools within the next month, and expanding our API later in the year. If you have specific use cases or things you can't do, I'd love to hear it as it will definitely shape what we're doing.