Thanks For Subscribing News #26 - It's a Newsletter Engagement Universe (waitwhat?)

Hey you! I’m Frank and you signed up for this newsletter “on all things newsletters”. Yes, very meta much, I know! Every week I present you a few of the new titles I added to my website. I also bring you a few nuggets of news on what’s happening in this renaissance of the written word. I am glad to be in your inbox!

This week I show you some engagement stats from Revue, how to find newsletters and Substack’s Core Growth Loop.

It is also my last issue for the summer holiday. We had a roller coaster ride the last few months (who hasn’t!) and I need to take some downtime from writing a newsletter every week. I’ll be back early September. Don’t forget to keep publishing and sharing!

Thanks for being here!

Frank

PS: I might still be active on my personal (Dutch) Twitter account or the Thanks For Subscribing Twitter account. I can’t promise it will be meme-free…

Today, Revue launched the new Audience Insights for their customers. Above you see the latest engagement metrics for this newsletter. 62% of my audience (you and 39 others!) opened 6 or more of the last 10 issues. Since I am just shy of 100 subscribers, the absolute numbers are small. But this one image gives me great insight how this newsletter performs over time. It shows me my newsletter not only reaches you, but you actively open the mails, not just one but frequently. Which is exactly what publishers and newsroom editors need to know, according to Martijn de Kuijper, CEO of Revue. In his latest blogpost he takes you through some of the thinking behind these metrics.

What defines “success” for a newsletter? Open ratios and click ratios are important numbers, even more important than your number of subscribers. As Martijn says

Combine this with a (somewhat aged) metric that email is 40 times more effective than social media and it is beyond me why no more companies become even more a media company with their own newsroom.

Relatively low costs, combined with more engaged readers who gave you their mail address. What more do you want?

Revue is on a roll, I look forward to what else is coming from these Dutch newsletternerds!

🔃 Brian Balfour gives a great rundown why Substack has such a great growth loop built in. For creators and themselves. But he is also critical on the monetization model. Substack takes 10% of subscription fees. Which can be a hindrance when creators grow really fast. Can Substack counter this with better bundling and discoverability? We’ll see…

🪐 The intro I wrote? A total rip-off from the excellent tips by Craig Mod. In his essay On Being a Good Newsletterer, one of my favorite newsletter authors gives some great insights on how to be a good citizen of the newsletter universe. Yeah I didn’t know either there was a universe….I also learned the word “unsubscribability”

📮 Combine your newsletter subscriptions into a convenient digest with Subscription Zero. Pretty funny favicon and Twitter avatar by the way… 😉

✨ Brought to you by Thanks for Subscribing, to make your inbox happy again! ✨

That’s it for this week. Share, like, subscribe. Support your local newsletter-author, show them some love. Find more interesting newsletters at my website and submit yours!