Mailbox value: When it’s not about the content


We are ramping up are newsletters again at The Budget Fashionista. We will have two flavors, a person can receive a daily newsletter or a weekly newsletter. The daily newsletter are for the hardcore folks who would visit the site pretty regularly anyway, I think it will be the weekly newsletter that we are going to find the most return on investment.

Email newsletters have laughably low conversion rates as its industry standard. TBF tends to run about twice that, and the people we work with are usually delighted by the return. This could be that we keep a tight reign on our newsletter list, we double opt in and we make it painfully easy to leave. People who are on the list want to be on the list.

Thankfully we are finding less and less interest in newsletters, hopefully regulating email back to a place where it can become useful again. Email has become less of an effective tool just because of the amount of junk that most of us get everyday. “Internet Lite” stuff like pictures of kittens and sleeping babies, gets pushed through social networks. Frankly, most things sent over the internet isn’t important enough for email and if it that important there are other ways to reach the people that you are trying to reach, by say something like a telephone.

I think the main benefit for our newsletter is it’s mailbox value. I use Google reader for the blogs that I read, and even that is becoming a hassle, as I and many others are starting to rely on twitter for updates. We definitely get a bump in traffic after newsletters not because they are particularly useful, after all it’s just content from the site, but because it serves as a reminder that we still exsist, and that you should come visit. Even if they don’t read the contents of the message, the From: The Budget Fashionista is sometimes enough to get them to see us. Even if it is not right that moment, sometime soon.

I think people over estimate the this aspect of newsletter, some think its about the message, but sometime it’s about the bottle the message comes in.

Picture from Flicker


Posted on Saturday, August 08, 2009 in Business • Strategy

This is the professional website of Tobias Wright. He is a creative director, director of digital strategy and all around good guy. Here you can read some of his thoughts about business, design and strategy.

Recent Entries