Towards Newsletter Insights
Last week I created a post to list newsletters and the products stack used to create, run, maintain and promote them.
With the above data, I found lots of insights can be derived about newsletters that might be helpful to other Newsletters.
I think besides content, products and growth tools are also important for a Newsletter.
So I tried to extract data from the products used by all the Newsletters, such as expenditures, products and growth tools used by the top 33% of the newsletters and tried to compare the Return on investment for each one of them.
Link given at the end of this post.
It was quite fun, using data to analyse and compare the Newsletters.
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From the above data it is clear that, every newsletter has their own requirements and based on their requirements they have used different set of product stacks.
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There are awesome products that I didn't know exist, to make Newsletter creation , automation, and maintenance very smooth and easy.
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To start a newsletter, I think it is better to see all the available product & growth options in the market. So that when you scale, you do not have to switch product to cut extra expenses. And that is one of the reason why this data analysis was done.
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I think to have a clear vision in which direction the Newsletter shall grow is very important from day one. So tracking and comparing other Newsletters that falls in the same market categories are worth it. This will answer what your Newsletter lacks.
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Most of the top Newsletters are found to be using IndieHackers, LinkedIn and Facebook and SEO as growth tools. So may be you shall try these options if you are not doing it already to increase your growth, because data doesn't lie.
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I also tried to predict the least monthly expenditures for all newsletters.
I found that :-
a. Top newsletters are not only trying to have quality content, but also try to reduce the cost of maintaining it.
b. So if you are using fancy products or spending extra cost that you may not recover using your content then may be you should switch to a better alternative.
c. I do not have much experience of running Newsletters. But it seems that you can very easily create, run and maintain Newsletters at a low cost. (I haven't considered the cost of creating custom website and extra domain cost.)
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Type of Revenue model is very important parameter. I didn't include it in my first version of form data. So I couldn't compare Newsletters based on the type of revenue models.
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Side by side comparison is not so useful using less data. So I didn't make it functional.
Link of the Insights and the List of Newsletters are given below.
More data would of course help me to derive better insights. But with whatever data I could collect, I tried to show the insights behind them.
Link for the list and data is given below. See if this is interesting to you and give feedbacks.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Air-UGa9GyNAxAP4WBy1XSb-_QG7mqpqR7-LWGBj14g/edit?usp=sharing
If you interested in capturing more data for this project, please save it in the form link given below.
Thanks for the overview. It is interesting to see what other people are using too. I'll add mine via form you provided.