Newsletter achieves triple-five landmark
The Cooling Post Newsletter can mark its 5th anniversary this month with a remarkable triple-five celebration.
The Cooling Post Newsletter first launched as a weekly email service on July 25, 2013. This coming Monday, July 9, virtually five years later, subscribers will receive the 500th edition. To cap the July celebrations, the total number of Newsletter subscribers climbed past 5,000 for the first time this month.
The first edition of the Cooling Post Newsletter was mailed to just 75 subscribers. It was initially linked to a temporary blogging website, a forerunner to the main Cooling Post website.
“The Newsletter was always conceived as an adjunct to the planned website,” explained Cooling Post editor Neil Everitt. “From the outset we resisted the temptation to buy subscriber lists. We only wanted subscribers who were truly interested in what was going on in the air conditioning and refrigeration industry. We also ignored warnings from “internet experts” and insisted that we would only employ the highest industry standards with double opt-in registrations.”
That policy has paid dividends, with the Newsletter still achieving sector-busting average open rates of 45% and click rates of nearly 20%.
Those standards were also extended to how the Cooling Post handles its mailing list. “Spam is one of the scourges of the internet. We hate it as much as you do. So, from the outset, we also decided that we would never sell, rent or otherwise release our subscriber list to third parties,” Everitt reveals. “That policy has probably deprived us of a significant amount of revenue but we think our stance is worth every penny of what we may have lost.”
As a result, and with no big marketing push, subscriber numbers have grown gradually – mainly thanks to word-of-mouth recommendations. By the time the main Cooling Post website launched at the end of October 2013, the Newsletter circulation list had grown to just 242. At the beginning of 2014, the Newsletter went twice-weekly and reached 1,000 subscribers by October of that year.
“It may have taken a while, but the fact that the subscriber list has grown naturally, without any marketing, is astonishing. To now be mailing our 500th edition to over 5,000 subscribers in the month of our 5th anniversary is a remarkable numerical coincidence,” said Neil Everitt.
“Of course, we couldn’t have done it without you – those who have spread the word – for which we thank you”
