Bots as Newsletter Killers

A lot of techies seem to think bots will replace apps, and there is a good case to be made for that.

In the more immediate future though, one of the best uses for bots is as newsletter replacements.

As many strengths as newsletters have (see Ryan Hoover’s article on this), they also have a ton of weaknesses.

Mid-sized newsletters are expensive to operate. Morning Short, which has around 8,000 email subscribers, costs me $75 a month in just mailing expenses. This cost-of-entry makes it expensive for niche/hobby newsletters to operate. Which leads to two things:

• Great newsletters closing their doors.
• Great newsletters selling themselves (and your email address) to the devil to break even.

It’s also super-easy for a good newsletter to get lost in the inbox of even the most dedicated reader. People get a lot of emails (over 205 billion emails a day). And that’s assuming you even make it to their inbox. Ever-restrictive spam filters prevent millions of good-faith emails from reaching their intended recipient every day.

Chat bots are cheap, at least for now. The bot I’m building I expect to cost me $0 a month for the foreseable future, at almost any scale.

Chat bots are segmented into channels, so your messages don’t get lost. There’s context and order in messaging apps. No matter how many messages your reader receives a day, you’re much likely to get lost.

And, because users have to actively opt in to chat-bots (at least on Facebook messenger), there are virtually no spam filters. If you’re on the platform, and they let you into their messaging box, you’re in your reader’s messaging box, with their mom, their best friend, and their girlfriend.

Not to mention, the click-through rates are insane. One un-named colleague who runs a SMS-based newsletter reports 40% clickthrough rates. That’s not people who saw the message. That’s people who clicked a link in the message to visit a page he sent them.

That’s insane. A good email newsletter will see a 30–40% OPEN rate these days, and a 5–10% clickthrough rate.

These platforms aren’t yet saturated with spammy marketers making us hate the platform, and that’s a huge advantage for the newsletter-makers that do adopt the bot world, now.

With bots there is concern about vender-lockin, or so-called “digital-sharecropping”, where you engage a base of users, only to be locked out of the platform on which you engage them. Certainly, the fear of being shut out by Facebook scares me. The number of large, unaffiliated bot platforms makes this almost a non-concern though. Slack. Wechat. Telegram. iMessage. Plain text messages. All platforms with hundreds of millions or billions of daily active users, and the same core advantages.

So, needless to say, I’m working on making my newsletters available as bots as soon as possible.