An engaged newsletter audience is better than a big one.
(And I managed to write it without making a “size isn’t everything” joke. Apart from that one, obviously.)
@adders Interesting post, but personally, I have some problems with it. You say, 'Inactive subscribers do get unsubscribed.' So you must be using tracking pixels or similar in your emails. As a community — as a society — I feel we need to be moving away from tracking people.
As a side note to that, you also say:
… too many unopened emails can lead some spam-filtering systems to decide that your newsletter is looking, well, spammy…)
I'm wondering how that works. How can spam-filtering systems know whether an email has been opened, unless they are also hooking into the tracking pixels? Which is just creepy. Unless you mean the spam filtering in the user's email client of choice. I suppose those systems might report back to a server. Or if they're webmail, they are already on a server. Hmm.
But if a reader chooses not to open emails, well, that's their choice. (Also, in many email clients, you can read an email with marking it as 'opened,' for what that's worth — not much, if the tracking pixel still takes effect.)
I've been trying to find a newsletter service that will let people subscribe to my blog posts by email, that doesn't use tracking. It's almost impossible. Some services have the option to turn off tracking, but that ends up just being for you, the service user. The service still puts the tracking pixel into the emails. I don't like it. In the end I've rolled my own, using old-school tools: MailMan and rss2email. But not everyone has the technical knowledge to do that.
@devilgate I'm theoretically against tracking pixels, but I also want to know how many people read the newsletter. I'd like a way to only get a view count without actually "tracking" anyone.
@devilgate I agree with the just-don't-track comments. To that end, I use Buttondown for my business blog, and have all tracking turned off. For my personal blog, I use Write.as, which lets readers subscribe via email and has no tracking around it.
I haven't turned on email subscriptions for angelostavrow.blog because I often post multiple short, titleless, updates per day, and it'd be annoying for anyone to receive an email for each one. 😂
@jack do you have any thoughts on Plausible analytics offered as a plug-in for micro.blog sites in this regard?
@devilgate As one of the responses on Twitter pointed out, another reason for removing inactive subscribers is that, on many platforms, they cost you money per send. Or the total number of subscribers is a cost threshold, so for those building a business on their work, that's a factor.
Personally, I have no problem with basic tracking, like open rates. Where it crosses the "problematic" point for me is click tracking — which some services offer. And I prefer tracking that isn't feeding into bigger data sets, which is why I use Plausible for web analytics on my sites, and Ghost for emails, which doesn’t offer click tracking.
And yes, when I'm talking about spam filtering, I'm mainly talking about Gmail, which is what by far the plurality of my subscribers use.
People who use tracking-blocking email services like Hey or Proton mail don’t get unsubbed.
@mbkriegh I've been happy with Plausible. Basic stats with no tracking. I'm also currently testing a self-hosted Ackee instance. Same concept, but free and available as a Cloudron app.
@adders Good point about the cost. Also I agree there's a difference between counting opens and tracking clicks.