Last week I sent our monthly e-newsletter to a little over 44,000 people. The date was February 2, and in the e-newsletter I noted that we would make a charitable donation for each person who signed up by January 14 for a launch notification for the Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest preorder.
You’re reading that correctly. I wrote January 14, not February 14.
Subscribers started pointing out the error to me, and some of them reasonably assumed they had simply missed the date. So I gritted my teeth, fixed the date in the e-newsletter, and sent it again with a note about the mistake.
And then someone told me the Facebook group link for Libertalia also didn’t work.
At this point I was incredibly embarrassed about the errors, but I really needed that link to function properly, as Facebook groups are the central communities for each of our games. So I fixed the link, highlighted it, and resent the e-newsletter again.
That’s right. In the span of 1 hour, I sent our monthly e-newsletter 3 times to 44,000 people.
Unsurprisingly, people unsubscribed. 200+ people decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. I get it, and I totally understand.
The oddest thing is that it isn’t as if we don’t proofread the monthly newsletter. It has multiple eyes on it each month. We just missed the incorrect date. I have no idea what happened with the Facebook link–I simply copied and pasted it from Facebook–but the important thing is that I didn’t click on the link to double-check it before sending the e-newsletter. Always click the links before sending.
In a cruel twist of fate, just a few weeks ago we were discussing internally how to boost our e-newsletter subscriber list. The conversation actually started off bigger: How can we reach and engage people who haven’t already heard of Stonemaier Games (or who haven’t already chosen to engage with us)?
One of the biggest measurable ways of seeing how many people actively follow our content is indeed the e-newsletter. We have a 60% open rate, which is a key indicator that we’re providing the content subscribers were hoping to get when they subscribed.
While we gain subscribers all the time, we also lose them. So today I thought I’d summarize a few of the ways we lose subscribers as well as a few ways we gain them.
How to Lose E-Newsletter Subscribers
- Send too many messages: My February 2 mistakes and revisions are one example of this, but much more commonly I see companies sending out e-newsletter messages every few days. Even for companies I’m genuinely interested in, that’s just way too many. We send one per month, and we have some smaller, more focused e-newsletters we also send once a month to applicable subscribers (like Champions and ambassadors).
- Send irrelevant content: If your subscribers sign up because they want news, previews, and deals for your products, and instead you end up talking about something unrelated, they’ll leave.
- Leading with deals: Have you ever gone to a webstore and seen a pop-up box advertising a discount on your first order if you subscribe to their e-newsletter? It’s an enticing proposal…but I think it’s also the fastest way to gain a temporary subscriber–someone who subscribes and immediately unsubscribes. I also don’t think it’s considerate of those who already subscribed without getting a special discount.
- Subscribe someone without their permission: Never, ever do this. Not only is it illegal it most countries, but it’s also inconsiderate and unethical. This is also a reason to add double opt-in confirmations so a bad actor can’t subscribe someone else to your e-newsletter without their permission.
How to Gain E-Newsletter Subscribers
- Make it easy to subscribe: On our website, I have a “News” link at the top of the page and a one-click e-newsletter subscription box in the footer of every page.
- Encourage sharing: This is new for us, and I’m not sure if it’ll work, but I want to try it. In our most recent e-newsletter, I wrote, “You can forward this newsletter to a friend who loves Libertalia!”
- Webstore checkout checkbox: We recently synced our Shopify webstores with Mailchimp so customers see an option at checkout that says, “Send me (or continue to send me) the monthly Stonemaier Games e-newsletter.” It’s an unchecked checkbox so customers can opt into it, and it seems to be working well so far.
What’s the last e-newsletter you subscribed to and why/how? Or can you think of a reason you recently unsubscribed to an e-newsletter? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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34 Comments on “How We Lose (and Gain) E-Newsletter Subscribers”
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With that number of subscribers, it must be quite expensive to maintain subscribers and send emails. I was wondering if you had considered https://sendy.co (which we found much cheaper and with better delivery rate.) We use Sendy with Amazon’s Lightsail web hosting and it’s working really well. Of course, I would be more than happy to share what I know. Thank you again for all your insightful advice, for me and for the community :)
We’re so entrenched in Mailchimp at this point that I think we’ll stick with it, but I’m glad to know that Sendy is a viable alternative!
Maybe you should have just sent a very short message with a different title the second (and third) times, something like “Libertalia contest extended to February 14th!” rather than re-sending the whole newsletter. Then in the short one or two paragraph body you admit the previous error, list the correct date & link, and give the elevator pitch for the game.
Don’t let it bother you. You provide so much good content. The numbers don’t tell the whole story. I have sold 3 copies of rolling realms to people who will never subscribe to your newsletter but will listen when I tell them to buy Wingspan or anything else. You’re my Jamie and I’m their Jamie and they’re someone else’s Jamie. Haha. Can’t be tracked by mail chimp! You are the best. Keep it up.
Thank you, JQ! I appreciate you sharing our games with others. :)
Wow, 60% open rate is fantastic. I maintain a mailing list for an Australian fan convention (which unfortunately has had to be postponed and then cancelled due to the pandemic, the next one won’t be for at least 2 years and we’ve not announced it yet) – we would send out an update maybe once a month on average, to 1300 subscribers, and our open rate is only 30%. I just suspect that mostly the newsletters are ending up in Spam or alternate folders, and there’s nothing we can do about that.
What would it take for you to write about our game in your newsletter? Check out The Flood on instagram @bedouingames Thank you so much. Feel free to reach out via social media.
There’s literally a bullet point in the above post about why we don’t do that.
“Send irrelevant content: If your subscribers sign up because they want news, previews, and deals for your products, and instead you end up talking about something unrelated, they’ll leave.”
All of the images in the newsletter are served by Mailchimp, and probably individual for each user, which will allow them to track whether it was opened, what email client or web browser was used, the approximate geo-location, and plenty of other info. Sharing the newsletter with your friend would pop up as a second opening using different clients, but they wouldn’t be able to tell if it was you opening it a second time from another computer, or a share.
The most recent reason I left a newsletter was because the very first contact after signing up was for the company’s newest product but advertised in US$. I had no idea if the product was available in my country and what it would cost and although I could have tried to find out I decided that if the company couldn’t work out this basic level of tailoring then I didn’t want any further newsletters. But more commonly I leave because I get newsletters too frequently.
Thanks Gary! I’d like to better understand this, as it kind of applies to Stonemaier. We have 4 different webstores (US, Canada, Australia, and UK/EU), but listing every price and inventory level in the e-newsletter is pretty cumbersome. Instead, if a customer in, say, the UK just goes to our UK webstore, they’ll see the price and see if the product is available.
I did a quick Google and found this https://apps.shopify.com/location-redirect which redirects traffic to the right Shopify store according to the location the user is coming from. If you could embed the product in the MailChimp email it might pull pricing and availability accordingly. Or they might be interested in extending the plug-in to do that.
Ian: I’m not sure if that’s the app we use, but our webstore is set up to do that.
Gary: Thanks for your input!
I don’t recall you ever doing direct selling through your newsletter (such as ‘This Game now $20!’). I think announcing a promotion or new product and providing a link to the correct web store would work fine for me. In the example I gave (which was a tech company) I’d have to remember the name of the product and then use a search to find it in my country – and I often find with tech a product isn’t available in my country or not available yet. Your policy of only selling products you have already got into your hubs prevents this happening. For that reason I don’t see this problem in your newsletters.
For what it’s worth, I saw all three of your emails in my inbox. I deleted the first two without opening them, and read the last one you sent, and didn’t give it another thought. I would think many people that don’t constantly monitor their email box did the same thing.
Thanks Karen!
If you send multiple emails you might be tagged as spam so even if people don’t unsubscribe they won’t get the newsletter. I honestly didn’t even notice there were multiple emails. The 200 who unsubscribed probably weren’t that interested anyway and it was just an inflated number which I guess still keeps SM in “sight” or at the forefront of their subconscious.
Maybe next time wait a day if the error is not super important or always have a link in the email to the website where you can edit things easily and anyone who is really interested has an easy way of navigating to the information they are interested in.
That’s a great point, Alaena, and I agree about waiting a little later to send a revised e-newsletter (that’s definitely better than what I did!).
We’ve all done it! I didn’t even know you had a newsletter (I follow your blogs and the fb page). You have a new subscriber! 199 to go. ;)
Thank you so much! :)
I unsubscribe to anyone who sends a few consecutive emails that are not valuable to me. Whether it be repeat information, products I don’t care about, etc. I always open SM emails because it’s never just pointless info, there is always a reason for them. I keep subscribed to a few other game related newsletters because they offer discounts, sales, etc. To push me to unsubscribe it’s more about consistency than frequency. If I get 3 or so emails in a row with nothing new or valuable then I usually unsubscribe. I think monthly is a good frequency.
Are you using a tracking pixel or similar tech to see who opens the newsletter in their mail client? Most people still don’t block those so they give a pretty good count of engagement.
I don’t think we are–we just use Mailchimp’s data.
Hi Dan:
Thanks, Dan, that’s interesting. Can an individual find out if their email opening is being tracked? Or just attachments like newsletters? Or do they just do overall preventative blocks?
Dorothy
MailChimp tracks “opens” by seeing who downloads the images contained in the email. So if you delete the email without looking at it, for most email clients the images were never downloaded and so MailChimp never records it as “opened.” Or if the email goes to your spam folder the images are blocked from downloading. If you’d like to prevent all such tracking, you could tell your email client to never download images without your permission. But if it’s a legitimate email from a company you want to hear from, registering the opening of an email is helpful information.
Anyone who unsubscribes because one time you sent multiple copies with corrections was a “low quality” subscriber anyway, so not too much of a loss probably.
I subscribed to one newsletter for a local business, and they proceeded to email me every single day (sometimes twice), with all sorts of repetitive or irrelevant content. When I asked them about it, they said they had no option for a “just the highlights” or less frequency, so I ended up unsubscribing.
I just thought the re-occurring newsletter was a Groundhog Day easter egg.
Thank you, semigenius, for adding an extra smile to my day. You have now been promoted to genius❣️
I find your newsletter interesting and read it almost every time you send one. However, I read it in my email client software, not your website. I’m thinking you don’t get any “open” metric on my reads, so I think your 60% may be low if you’re referring to the newsletter. If you are counting the number of times your newsletter has brought me to your website. I think this is the second time since I’ve subscribed. I think I subscribed a couple of years ago. I’ve been to your website since other times, but not from the newsletter. Hope that helps.
Thanks Russ! That’s good to know.
As a follow up, after I wrote the comment, I wanted you to know I did surf around your site a bit. Thought that might be relevant. For classification purposes, I own 6 of your published games.
Russ, typically emails opened in email client can still be tracked, so the percentage count would be including your views too.
The email standard includes optional read receipts – which require the right email client, and for the sender to have requested them (and, depending on settings, possibly for the recipient to manually approve sending the receipt).
The more generally used approach is to include at least one image in an email – what actually gets sent is not the actual image data, but a link to the image on a server somewhere – so when someone opens the email, they download the image from the server – which the server can track (there are more details, but the key point is that opening an email with any images in it means reaching out to a server elsewhere, which tells that server you’ve opened something with that image).