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15 Comments

Sent my first newsletter! 46% open rate

Yesterday I sent my first newsletter to 68 email recipients.

Here is a bunch of stats after 18 hours:

  • Open rate: 46%
  • Unsubscribed: 1

I imported almost 80% of the email list from my other Mailchimp account. If only 20% opted in for Alta Bits, I think only one unsub given the open rate is surprising, I expected at least around 5-10 people unsubscribing :)

What do you think of these stats?

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Update after 24 hours:

  • Open rate: 47%
  • Unsubscribed: 2
  • Click rate: 3%
  1. 4

    Nice open rate. The trick is to maintain it as you grow.

    What’s your plan for growing your subscriber numbers?

    1. 1

      Hi @pauldmet :) That's a great question - in fact I don't have any other strategies than sharing on social media, being active on Twitter, IH, LinkedIn, perhaps Facebook. I tried hacker news but it's quite difficult to get traction there before you get banned for sharing your content only :) Other than that, Reddit is afaik a great source for new subscribers, but you need to build your brand there first, which in my case will take lots of time (2 karma :D).

      I plan to direct more traffic from my company website to Alta Bits as well, but haven't figured out the best way yet (So far I just added a top banner that doesn't convert much)

      Any tips on growing newsletters are welcome!

      1. 1

        All of the above 😄

        Referrals could work if you can figure out some interesting swag.

        You could cross promote with other newsletters that share the same audience.

        If you’re going to monetize you could try paid traffic.

        Take a look at this as well: https://newslettercreators.com/how-to-get-more-newsletter-subscribers/

  2. 3

    Well done, the product looks great. I just subscribed myself as I found the second article very useful. I didn't realize such a small market share (0.34% for ConvertKit) could still be so profitable.

    This information is the kick I needed to keep me going with my projects as entering any field with established players always seems so daunting. These types of successes give me hope that I can still make a living with my own product as long as it is useful to some number of people and I choose my market and prices right.

    1. 1

      Thanks @VuyiswaNkosi I'm glad to have you on board! ;)
      Exactly, that message is supercharging - we tend to think of products that are absolute gamechangers and will revolutionize the industry, so when we hear that similar thing already exists, we get discouraged. It's hard to get over it, but ConvertKit example is eye-opening :)

  3. 2

    Congrats, I remember I was quite nervous pushing that "SEND" button for the first time :)

    Now regarding the open rates and click rates all really depends on your sector/audience relevancy/size. I started with 20 subscribers & friends in the crypto niche. At the time I head 90% open rates and 60% click rates. As I went to gather around 500 subscribers it all went down. Funny enough I had cases where I sent a newsletter (which was poorly mobile optimized) and got 70% open rate and 1% click. After a quick fix in Mailchimp the next one got 70%/30%.

    Anyhow my point being the more subscribers you get, the more metrics will come down. I managed to settle with around 50% open and 20% click which is still above benchmarks - all depends on the quality. I have around 20 newsletters coming into my email every week and frankly already thinking of cutting the number down to essentials to maintain sanity and information overload.

  4. 2

    That's great, keep up the good work!

  5. 2

    It’s a good start. Congrats.

    Let’s celebrate when you list grows bigger. Also consider measure other metrics apart from open, such as click, reply and referral.

    I’m currently maintaining a list of 22k subscribers for the company I work for. It takes a lot of experiment, segmentation and split test to achieve an average 37-68% open rate, 2-12% click rate.

    Also making use of all the learnings to a ~500 subscribers of my little side hustle. The key learning is welcome email and personalization. Still a lot to do.

    Happy to exchange ideas :)

    1. 1

      Hi @felix12777 ! That's correct, I'm really far from being overly excited. I was just surprised by these stats because most of the recipients received the email totally out of the blue.

      Zlides is looking great, your lead magnet has a really resonating value proposition! I just joined! :)

      1. 1

        You're welcome! Excited to hear your update in the future too. All the best. @thedc

  6. 1

    I got a list of about 500 subscribers interested in crypto that have previously bought products from me. If anyone is interested, hit me up.

  7. 1

    I have over 5k email list if anyone wants to buy high open rate percentage click too.

  8. 1

    Nice, I think that’s a solid start! Those stats are pretty on par with a react.js mailing list I run.

  9. 1

    Those are great numbers! We just started a newsletter https://topstonks.com

    To give you some numbers to compare to:

    44% open rate
    230 subs
    1-2 unsubs per email

    On my last newsletter, the content got a bit stale and I was seeing open rates of about ~20% before we shuttered it.

  10. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  11. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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