I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown

[fideloper]

I would be suspicious about how the services report clicks and (especially) open rates. They are notoriously inaccurate.

Buttondown just may just be more generous (less rigorous) in detecting false positives.

Deliverability is also partially on you (versus the provider) and is not necessarily easy to get right (nor is it necessarily consistent between email blasts).

[sosborn]

This is a very strange comment from the article:

>37% of openers clicked a link (I think this is because Mailchimp’s links are black rather than blue and it’s easy to miss them)

IMO, if they aren't doing anything to customize the appearance of their emails then this experiment isn't worth much. It also makes it sound like the emails weren't completely identical, which makes click rate comparisons invalid.

Some of the bullets are helpful, but I wouldn't take this as any kind of gospel.

[kixiQu]

It's reasonable to go about an experiment that includes within its experimental parameters the mailers' default appearances, since part of the reason folks use these services is to have that all done up without too much manual intervention.

[sleazebreeze]

Is this the tech influencers' version of "I switched my frontend from React to Vue"?

Also, the author has even written an article titled "Don't Believe Self-Reported Data"[0]. In light of some of the other comments about the data not quite stacking up, perhaps he should take his own advice.

[0]: https://guzey.com/statistics/dont-believe-self-reported-data...

[ncmncm]

Mail from Mailchimp is typically indistinguishable from a phishing attempt.

A company so clueless about internet security as to send out in bulk what are indistinguishable from phishing attempts clearly cannot be trusted to help manage your login/signup process.

And, any company seen to trust an outsourcer as clueless as Mailchimp cannot be trusted with your personal information, never mind your banking or stock transactions.

For particular example, Carta, a stock certificate management site, uses such an e-mail outsourcer.

[kingcharles]

They might not be good at email, but they make great tea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZbDnuKjco

[DonHopkins]

It figures.

The Surprising Science of Alpha Male Chimps, TED Talk by Frans de Waal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPsSKKL8N0s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal

[gnicholas]

I’ve never thought of using substack as a way to manage my startup’s email list, but seeing this comparison made me consider it. I don’t like mailchimp and find the pricing to be atrocious for my purposes (emailing 5k people once or twice a year). How odd would it be to get an update from a company via a substack email? Does anyone else do this?

[krn]

> I don’t like mailchimp and find the pricing to be atrocious for my purposes (emailing 5k people once or twice a year).

Have you looked at MailerLite[1]?

[1] https://www.mailerlite.com/

[rumblings]

Use ListMonk. Its an open source software. Used and developed by a unicorn.

[swyx]

kind of unsolicited advice here but if you're running a mailing list for a startup you should be emailing it more than once or twice a year so that people can build a relationship with you... at least thats the traditional email marketing advice. you do you of course

[medion]

I switched the other way - Buttondown to Substack. I did this in theory for growth, because I thought Substack may provide some better discoverability.

It did not and I regret the move!

[funerr]

You didn't move to substack you mean? And how do you know if it was regretful?

[thih9]

> 37% of openers clicked a link (I think this is because Mailchimp’s links are black rather than blue and it’s easy to miss them)

I wonder if these results can be replicated. Is there a detailed description of the process? I'm now especially interested in seeing the emails that were delivered to the users.

[dSebastien]

I've recently switched from Mailchimp to Revue.

The UI of Mailchimp felt like a real catastrophe; incredibly complex and unintuitive. Worse, the text editor was a real nightmare to use and embeds were not great at all. Mailchimp basically felt like a Matryoshka doll with screens in screens in screens in screens, to an almost comical point (except it wasn't fun).

Revue is MUCH simpler, has an excellent and easy to use editor, good-looking embeds (links, tweets), also the possibility to create a paid newsletter. In addition, Revue has native integration within Twitter, which is very nice and helps with growth. Revue isn't as powerful as Mailchimp and others around analytics and other features, but I don't mind at this stage.

[leros]

Open rate should really only be affected by the content, though it's possible the platforms have different deliverability/spam rates.

[zackkatz]

This is a great thread/analysis on Twitter by a maker of Newsletter Glue. She has extensive experience with all these providers:

https://twitter.com/lesley_pizza/status/1477841280990257152

[roneoo]

I moved to Buttondown too, and implemented a newsletter *for a static site!*.

Documentation can be found here: https://roneo.org/en/a-newsletter-with-hugo-buttondown-and-n...

[civilized]

I don't know. If the experiments were perfectly random, the Buttondown-Substack difference is a 3-sigma effect, so the difference is unlikely to be random chance. But why? What's so special about one vs the other?

[ubac]

so my instinct for a while has been that Substack have been damaging their sender reputation by offering unlimited free sending to unlimited recipients, with the upshot that they attract a lot of people sending low-open-rate, marked-as-spam or marked-as-promotional emails. (They also, to my knowledge, won't let senders use their own email addresses, all emails are sent from Substack).

I realise it's much more complicated than this, that within a given ESP there are multiple bundles of senders and that better customers get moved to a better bundle etc, but my guess is that for any given level within Substack you're being bundled with an unusually-bad group of peers and therefore getting lower open rates -- I would love to know if this is an accurate understanding, or if there's any accurate way to test this from outside Substack.

[smthngwitty]

Buttondown is less known, so it's trackers are less likely to be blocked

[hamiltonians]

substack sends too many emails. i had to unsub from a blog for that reason.

[skybrian]

It does, but there are settings to turn some email notifications off (such as for comments). You can also use the RSS feed instead.

[exolymph]

Very surprised that Buttondown didn't respond to a couple of support emails. I used Buttondown for a while (now on Ghost) and always received excellent, fast support.

[ldoughty]

An interesting experiment, had to look in the comments to see how the group was distributed, and looks sufficiently random for a simple test

[tremdog]

Why not use Klaviyo?

[jordansmith]

This was my thought too. Mail chimp is probably the worst ESP so all options are going to beat it