inluminent

Newsletters are the primary traffic drivers to my employer’s website. I’ve been checking our statistics every day for the past year. I’m convinced that our newsletter is the primary driver of traffic to the website… no question in my mind.

Yet, we deliver a very shitty newsletter, in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, the copy and content is excellent, but the method is horrible. It goes out on a very irregular schedule (pros and cons to this approach, I agree) and its only delivered as a HTML only option. There isn’t even a multi-part MIME text only option like “If you can’t read this, please go to our website.” message.

Even the double opt-in subscriber confirmation email is HTML only. WTF?

It’s horrible, in my opinion, that a $20 Million company can’t even focus enough to get this problem fixed. Let me give you some great stats:

Open rate: @ 32% (after one week)

Confimation rate of new subscribers: @ 49%

Unsubscribe rate: @ 20% a month

Take those numbers, and stack them against some of the findings of this latest report from the Nielsen Norman group, and I bet our actual ‘read’ rate is somewhere in the 10% range, which fits the boost in actual daily unique visitors to the website we see from the newsletter distribution.

According to a report on e-mail newsletter usability, published in September 2002, from the Nielsen Norman Group, only 23% of the e-mail newsletters studied by the group were read in their entirety, 27% were skimmed and the remainder were not even opened.

Can you imagine what even a 1% increase in all of the categories would mean to revenue? (note: the newsletter has about 750,000 subscribers. We get about 30,000 extra visitors a day when we publish it. Do the math. Pretty dismal eh?)

[report link via Netmarketing]