Launching Best of JavaScript Weekly

[michaelrambeau]

A few words about how we launched Best of JavaScript Weekly, the weekly newsletter from Best of JavaScript project.

The origin

Everything started with JavaScript Rising Stars, a site released in January 2018, that analyzed trends in the JavaScript world during the year 2017.

The homepage included a field to let users subscribe to the newsletter:

Get the latest JS rankings in your inbox every week

More than 2000 users subscribed.

Building the solution

In order to be able to send emails from our own domain, we moved from bestof.js.org domain to the brand new domain bestofjs.org.

We created a static website, built with react-static, to host the online version of the newsletter: https://weekly.bestofjs.org/

We had to find a solution to manage the list of email addresses and to send campaigns.

We started using Mailchimp to manage the lists of emails, but Mailchimp is free until 2000 contacts and very expensive after this limit!

I tried Mailjet too because I like their mjml project that lets developers build responsive email easily, and they are reliable.
But I couldn't find how to setup a simple "Subscription Form" to let users registers. They have "subscription widgets" that actually are <iframe> snippets. But I didn't want an <iframe>, I just wanted a simple form tag in my page.

So actually we chose ElasticEmail service, that is very affordable (it seems to be free for our volumes).

Sending the fist email

On 2018 June the 4th, at 06:15 AM Japan Time, "Best of JavaScript Weekly Rankings #1” email was sent to 2,414 contacts.

The email includes the rankings of the week and some comments about the leading project.
The button "Read on the web" leads to the page: https://weekly.bestofjs.org/issues/1

Screenshot

Email:

Online version:

[michaelrambeau]

Some numbers from ElasticEmail reports

The 3 last issues of the newsletter have been opened by more than 30% of the recipients.

About 900 contacts have never opened any email.

Issue	Sent	Delivered	Opened
2	2,380	2,177	218
3	2,373	2,264	642
4	2,384	2,310	474
5	2,360	2,264	696
6	2,366	2,341	753
7	2,367	2,356	710

[michaelrambeau]

It seems that delivery is a problem, a lot of emails end up in the "promotion" folder of Gmail or in the spam folder.

I ordered a "Private IP" on ElasticEmail to see if it can improve things.

Just for the records, I may have to set up something at the DNS level.

Your request has been processed successfully. View the current Sender Score and MX ToolBox blacklist report on your Private IP screen. Optionally create an A record in your DNS that points to 162.254.227.133. Example - mta.yourdomain.com A 162.254.227.133. Once configured and propagated please contact support so we can configure the custom rDNS in our system.

https://elasticemail.com/resources/settings/private-ip/