Increased My Newsletter Open Rate by Nearly 20% With a Few Lines of Code

Hopefully the following will be of some use to the IH community.

Background

So I started a newsletter a few weeks back. The newsletter gives subscribers weekly JavaScript challenges to solve. They are fun real-world problems as oposed to standard JS interview questions.

Its going reasonably well. I managed to get over 50 subscribers in the first two weeks.

I am new to newsletters and growing a user base in general so I've been looking around for some techniques to help with growth.

The Weekly Follow Up Email

One technique that sounded interesting was the follow up email. The idea is you send a helpful and friendly email to subscribers who have not opened that weeks newsletter offering a second chance to catch this weeks content.

I use Substack currently and there is no way do this that I can see. Please shout if I am wrong .

Being a developer with not much else to do I set about creating a script to automate this.

Here's the simple code so you can run it for yourself.

How It Works

Basically the script logs you into Substack, grabs the emails of subscribers who did not open an email and fires of a configurable reminder email to all of them.

Results

Before running this script, my open rate was actually not bad. 38% of subscribers opened the newsletter.

However, with this script alone I managed to increase that to around 55%.
I am definitely going to be using the follow up email technique more in the future. Thanks to this script I now have the process automated to a large degree.

Warning

Feel free to try this out yourself. Its a very new script so I would advise using with a bit of caution. Hope this help someone else currently growing their Substack newsletter.