I run four weekly e-mail newsletters dedicated to programmers (in the JS, Ruby, HTML5, and 'general' spaces) with a total circulation of around 80,000 and Launchbit occasionally sells ads for me (though I'm doing more direct now, it seems).
My long term average open rates are 50.6%, 54.2%, 52.5% and 58.1% respectively - that's for weekly, curated news. They certainly drop a little over time and I've discovered two of the key reasons so far: people skipping some weeks due to e-mail overload and increasingly strict spam filtering.
What's a little annoying about this at first is that e-mail advertising is typically sold by CPM. So let's say I have 20k subscribers on a list and I can sell for $20 CPM (not unrealistic at all in e-mail).. that's $400. But that's $400 whether my open rate is 20% or 60%.
The most eagle eyed advertisers will ask for historical click rates and open rates but you'd be surprised how many don't. So in a way I'd rather charge per click but this doesn't seem to be accepted practice in e-mail right now.
Last, I've not found the word "free" to be too much of a problem. It's pretty common in mails and doesn't appear to be much of a trigger unless you all-caps it or add exclamation marks (e.g. FREE!!)
What absolutely massacred one issue of a newsletter, though, was the "Do You Really Want to Be Making This Much Money When You're 50?" post that did the rounds on HN recently. I included it and that issue's open rate fell by over half! Why? It's about as spammy a title as you could get and set off a ton of bells. So now I do even more spam analysis with each issue I send ;-)
BTW, I'm always happy to answer questions about the e-mail newsletter game, so feel free. I could probably ramble here all day about it. It's fun!
I've been subscribed to your HTML 5 and JS newsletters for a couple months now. The content has been great overall. Enough so that I'm asking you where I can signup for the other two newsletters. :)
Great! :) http://rubyweekly.com/ is the Ruby one and http://statuscode.org/ is the one for programmers generally (covers algorithms, general advances in the field, generic tools, language agnostic articles, etc.)
Signed up! I don't use Ruby much, but I'm curious to see what I can steal from Ruby back to Perl. :)
BTW, you should include links to the other 3 lists on all the websites. I see that statuscode.org and rubyweekly.com have it now, but when I checked the JS site earlier I couldn't find a link.
Technically they're at https://cooperpress.com/ but the whole idea of them collecting together as related newsletters hasn't quite gelled yet. It will take a little bit of work to do it right.
BTW, there's a Perl Weekly as well which was inspired by the Ruby one. I don't run it but it's at http://perlweekly.com/ and follows a similar formula to mine.
This is a massively late reply, but I've been signed up for the perl weekly newsletter from its inception. Thank you for mentioning it though! I'm sure Gabor is grateful for the link. :)
I've found the same thing about the word "free" and exclamation marks. Gmail especially seems to be tightening down in the last month or two - I've avoided the spam folder with Hacker Newsletter for the most part, but I'm seeing more and more valid newsletters ending up there lately.
MailChimp has two methods. They have something called Inbox Inspector (powered by Litmus) that can both show you visuals of your e-mail in various clients but also has about 10 different spam filters to test against. They also have something called "Delivery Doctor" which does a quicker check but is more a safety valve than anything super useful.
More generally, http://emailsuccess.com/ is a new service that you can send your e-mail to and it'll produce a report on all the problems, both technical and content-wise. I only just tried it for the first time and it gave a great report.
There's also http://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/ which is a JSON-accessible API to which you can send a mail and it'll run checks. Alternatively, you can just paste your message into the page.
My long term average open rates are 50.6%, 54.2%, 52.5% and 58.1% respectively - that's for weekly, curated news. They certainly drop a little over time and I've discovered two of the key reasons so far: people skipping some weeks due to e-mail overload and increasingly strict spam filtering.
What's a little annoying about this at first is that e-mail advertising is typically sold by CPM. So let's say I have 20k subscribers on a list and I can sell for $20 CPM (not unrealistic at all in e-mail).. that's $400. But that's $400 whether my open rate is 20% or 60%.
The most eagle eyed advertisers will ask for historical click rates and open rates but you'd be surprised how many don't. So in a way I'd rather charge per click but this doesn't seem to be accepted practice in e-mail right now.
Last, I've not found the word "free" to be too much of a problem. It's pretty common in mails and doesn't appear to be much of a trigger unless you all-caps it or add exclamation marks (e.g. FREE!!)
What absolutely massacred one issue of a newsletter, though, was the "Do You Really Want to Be Making This Much Money When You're 50?" post that did the rounds on HN recently. I included it and that issue's open rate fell by over half! Why? It's about as spammy a title as you could get and set off a ton of bells. So now I do even more spam analysis with each issue I send ;-)
BTW, I'm always happy to answer questions about the e-mail newsletter game, so feel free. I could probably ramble here all day about it. It's fun!