What are the global trends surrounding email that are occurring before the 2020s?
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 6:58 am
Hello. This is the WiLL Cloud Management Office. The first "WiLL Cloud Marketing Blog" of the 2020s is a summary of the trends surrounding email services and email marketing in the United States in 2019. The most talked-about email services on the West Coast and the successive investments made in them by major venture capital firms. The relative value of social media and email, the email marketing methods of unicorn companies, etc. We hope you will read this as a different kind of macro email marketing trend.
[Table of Contents] [ Hide ]
1 Startup email service receives funding from top US investor
1.1 Paid newsletter distribution platform: Substack
1.2 Luxury paid email client: Superhuman
1.3 Venture Capital: About Andreessen Horowitz (A16z)
2Changes in the relative value of email: from social to closed and slow
2.1 The new value of email as a slow medium
2.2 Vox Media: A media company that shifted to email distribution and performed well
3Maintaining the Absolute Value of Email: Email Marketing Strategies of Unicorn Companies
4. Summary
Emerging email service attracts funding from top US investor
In 2019, Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm formed by two of petroleum manufacturers email lists the most influential investors in the United States, made headlines when it invested in the following two email-related startups in succession.
Paid newsletter distribution platform: Substack
Luxury Premium Email Client: Superhuman
We will explain what each service provides.
Paid newsletter distribution platform: Substack
Source: https://substack.com/
Substack is a service based in San Francisco that makes it easy to create paid email newsletters. It also offers a web page dedicated to paid subscriptions, a newsletter publishing tool via email, and an all-in-one solution that helps you pay for writing.
Newsletter publishers can choose to pay or not, and Substack takes 10% of the revenue from paid newsletters. The charges vary depending on the publication, with "Sinocism," which provides information about China, costing $15 per month, and "PETTION," which covers restructuring and bankruptcy, costing $29 per month.
Since launching in 2017, it has continued to grow and now has 50,000 paid subscribers, and in February 2019, it also launched a paid podcast service.
The reason behind Substack's continued growth is its services and business model that focuses on the convenience and benefits of writers. Substack has completely eliminated the advertising revenue model and is pursuing a platform structure and revenue model that benefits "writers who want to build good relationships with their readers."
Luxury Premium Email Client: Superhuman
Source: https://superhuman.com/
The service that captured San Francisco early adopters' hearts in 2019 with virality on a par with that of Dropbox and Slack was the monthly subscription email client Superhuman.
Superhuman is an invitation-only app, and despite costing $30 per month, there are 180,000 people waiting to use it as of 2019. Its popularity increased dramatically when Andreessen, like Substack, invested in it. Andreessen said, "Once you start using Superhuman, you won't be able to use any other app."
The target audience of "Superhuman" is people who use email a lot in their daily work. Specifically, people who use email, especially those who send it, for more than three hours a day. It seems that they offer the following specifications to them:
AI-based email screening
Retry sending email
Gaining insights from social media
Follow-up Reminders
Schedule email sending
Read/unread status management
Incredibly fast email processing speed
Even if they do manage to become users, the sign-up process is lengthy: users must first fill out a lengthy survey about their daily email habits and workflows, and then, if granted access, must go through a mandatory video tutorial from a representative.
[Table of Contents] [ Hide ]
1 Startup email service receives funding from top US investor
1.1 Paid newsletter distribution platform: Substack
1.2 Luxury paid email client: Superhuman
1.3 Venture Capital: About Andreessen Horowitz (A16z)
2Changes in the relative value of email: from social to closed and slow
2.1 The new value of email as a slow medium
2.2 Vox Media: A media company that shifted to email distribution and performed well
3Maintaining the Absolute Value of Email: Email Marketing Strategies of Unicorn Companies
4. Summary
Emerging email service attracts funding from top US investor
In 2019, Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm formed by two of petroleum manufacturers email lists the most influential investors in the United States, made headlines when it invested in the following two email-related startups in succession.
Paid newsletter distribution platform: Substack
Luxury Premium Email Client: Superhuman
We will explain what each service provides.
Paid newsletter distribution platform: Substack
Source: https://substack.com/
Substack is a service based in San Francisco that makes it easy to create paid email newsletters. It also offers a web page dedicated to paid subscriptions, a newsletter publishing tool via email, and an all-in-one solution that helps you pay for writing.
Newsletter publishers can choose to pay or not, and Substack takes 10% of the revenue from paid newsletters. The charges vary depending on the publication, with "Sinocism," which provides information about China, costing $15 per month, and "PETTION," which covers restructuring and bankruptcy, costing $29 per month.
Since launching in 2017, it has continued to grow and now has 50,000 paid subscribers, and in February 2019, it also launched a paid podcast service.
The reason behind Substack's continued growth is its services and business model that focuses on the convenience and benefits of writers. Substack has completely eliminated the advertising revenue model and is pursuing a platform structure and revenue model that benefits "writers who want to build good relationships with their readers."
Luxury Premium Email Client: Superhuman
Source: https://superhuman.com/
The service that captured San Francisco early adopters' hearts in 2019 with virality on a par with that of Dropbox and Slack was the monthly subscription email client Superhuman.
Superhuman is an invitation-only app, and despite costing $30 per month, there are 180,000 people waiting to use it as of 2019. Its popularity increased dramatically when Andreessen, like Substack, invested in it. Andreessen said, "Once you start using Superhuman, you won't be able to use any other app."
The target audience of "Superhuman" is people who use email a lot in their daily work. Specifically, people who use email, especially those who send it, for more than three hours a day. It seems that they offer the following specifications to them:
AI-based email screening
Retry sending email
Gaining insights from social media
Follow-up Reminders
Schedule email sending
Read/unread status management
Incredibly fast email processing speed
Even if they do manage to become users, the sign-up process is lengthy: users must first fill out a lengthy survey about their daily email habits and workflows, and then, if granted access, must go through a mandatory video tutorial from a representative.