What's your favorite newsletter tool?
I run a newsletter at cassidoo.co/newsletter and have almost 14,000 subscribers, and use Buttondown (buttondown.email) to run it. I've also looked at:
- Substack
- Ghost
- Memberstack
- Tinyletter
- Mailchimp
- ConvertKit
What's your favorite tool? Is it one of these? I'm considering a switch to try and get better analytics, and maybe discoverability, too.
I tested ConvertKit, Ghost, and Substack so far. I've stuck with Ghost for the past ~6 months. A big thing for me was hosting the blog (and therefore, having some strings to pull with SEO) and having customization. For those more technically inclined, Ghost is an open source project that lets you get as involved as you want, all the way out to hosting it all yourself. They have a number of integrations, so I actually use ConvertKit for landing pages and their Zapier integration to funnel them all into Ghost.
You can also rip out most of their default functionality like email deliverability and run it through other tools like Mailchimp or Mailgun. Overall, I'm pretty happy and would probably choose them again.
FWIW, I'm only at ~500 subscribers, largely via SEO.
I'm a big fan of Ghost myself for their blogging but wasn't away they actually have a newsletter element. To be honest, I think newsletter are getting more and more played out and original blogs will come back with a vengeance, but of course my hypothesis remains to be proved true lol
As far as tools I like, I tried Revue for a bit and thought it was interesting to tie it to my profile. I didn't however see any increase from this, so I can't say it was effective.
We went with the admittedly-wonky stack of:
It's a great combo for deliverability and the control of not having Mailchimp (or whatever} branding on your email. But it has a pretty limited editor, so we usually build the HTML in beefree.io's online editor.
If I were just doing newsletters? I'd probably spin up Mautic, jack it into SES and be done with it. But occasionally we need to send out a few thousand emails that are CAN-SPAM compliant but not opt-in; I don't want my Amazon account yanked for that, hence the additional Postfix servers.
I have my newsletter at https://roberto.digital/newsletter and was using Revue, but the open rates were very bad for the last month or so. I mean bad under 20%.
I recently switched to Mailerlite and on my first newsletter with them, the open rate was over 50% 🤯
I've heard good things about EmailOctopus through the Dense Discovery newsletter: https://www.densediscovery.com/notes/behind-the-scenes/
Interesting, I'm a fan of DD. I wonder if they have Markdown support.
I like Substack for its simplicity
Do you run paid or free content on it? Would you say it's particularly geared towards the paid?
I run both free and paid content. I use it a little bit differently. I have 2 separate Substack Publications - one for free and one for paid.
Ghost. Ghost. Ghost.
Do you use it? Is it the open source part that you like the most?