My blog used to be RSS only, because I thought email subscriptions were a plot of "content creators" and not something readers actually wanted... until one of my readers told me he really recommended adding email as an option. I did, and a surprising number of people subscribed since then.
back
2 comments
Yes, I have found out the hard way that an entire generation or two of internet users has lost the ability to visit a website to see what's there. They rely on having notifications or emails come in so that they can react to things rather than proactively go seek them out. I tend to eschew push the forms of communication, for the same reason my mobile isn't covered in a colorful grid of apps: I want to actively be choosing what I do rather than having a set of options put in front of me that I get to pick from.
But that's all just a rant. Your core point is completely correct. If you want readers, you have to cater to this 'push' mentality, I think.
Ok, so if you want to read https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/, which is now publishing less than once a month, you prefer to refresh the website once a week hoping there's an article to read?
That's unimaginable to me. Most of the writers I read publish infrequently. Email is great. I don't have to be on any social media. Articles come in and I can read them at my leisure.
I deployed my own RSS reader to handle sites that update infrequently. That's still ultimately a pull, I just have an agent doing the pulling, and then I visit the site for my reader.
For a decade or~so I subscribe to newsletters and had skip inbox rules that archived them in a folder about the subject. Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them. Not sure if that means it works or not.
> Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them
Most people don't read most newsletters. Some people read some.
This Saturday I sent an email. It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people. 780 people clicked on a link.
I tweeted the same email as a link and got pretty good engagement! 20 likes, 2 retweets – that's decent for me these days. It was seen 1400 times. 78 people clicked on a link.
I have roughly the same number of followers as I do email subscribers.
> It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people
Sadly, open rates are no longer a useful metric in the absolute, at all. Some email providers will block all tracking pixels (so those people look like they never open anything, unless they click the link) and others will proxy all images, so they fire all tracking pixels systematically (so these people look to you as if they open every single email).
The only use you can make of open rates today is relative: "was the open rate higher or lower this month than last month?"
But it's extremely unlikely that your actual open rate (and list of who actually opened) is anywhere close to what the stats show. The only thing that still makes sense is click rates.
Hahaha it could well be that people are merely hoarding newsletter emails. I hope readers derive _some_ value from the emails, but since I'm not doing it to drive up "engagement metrics" I don't really mind.
There was a time when google toolbar had a search gmail button. I would use it to open gmail using whatever query was inthere. It happened quite often that it found newsletters matching the query. It takes quite a bit of hoarding to accomplish.
Perhaps it is even a better solution than website that vanish eventually. I might one day make a newsletter with links like:
example.com?re=you@yourwebsite.com&article=1234