My newsletter, ORBITAL OPERATIONS, which can be subscribed to at http://orbitaloperations.com , goes out to 10, 425 people at the moment. Depending on what I’m doing in it, it will undergo between five and twenty unsubscriptions per week (it goes out on a Sunday evening). It grows at a small, steady rate of around a hundred people a week.

Around 70% of subscribers open the email, according to the system dashboard.

Ask an email marketer about an open rate of 70%. Most of them will tell you that 30% is amazing.

ORBITAL OPERATIONS rarely has images in it, and the email subject line is just [ORBITAL OPERATIONS] plus a datestamp.

On a slow week, where the newsletter contains only one link - in a recent case, a link to the River4 newsriver system — between 700 and 1000 people will click. More often, I’m generating between 1500-2000 unique clicks. Not world-changing, but that’s a significant chunk of 7000 people.

It is completely unsponsored. I run it on a rather slow and basic system called Sendy, through an Amazon service, and it costs me about $5 a month. I write and handcode each newsletter as basic HTML in Notepad.

I do it all wrong. I will never be a study case for marketing blogs or growth hacking sites. 10,000 people is a drop in the online ocean anyway. But I get to speak directly to at least 70% of those people, every week, about whatever the hell is in my head that weekend, just by doing it all wrong.

 

Reading: LANDMARKS, Robert Macfarlane: (UK) (US)