🫂 Audience Insights - MM#633
Find out some more about yourself in the last ‘newsletter’ of the year
Good day my good friend.
This is it. The last ‘proper’ newsletter of the year. Next week, I will be running the now-traditional Christmas Quiz, with questions on Monday, a picture round on Wednesday, and the answers on Friday. Its all just for fun, I must say. Save your competitive streak for crushing your family at Monopoly on Christmas Day.
I say its a proper newsletter, but its actually all about you, good reader. For those of you part of the mini-bump in subscribers this week, back issues of the newsletter can be read through by just going to the Mobility Matters Substack page. Enjoy!
If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else who you think will love it. The main way my audience grows is through your recommendations. I will love you forever if you do. ☺️
James
🫵 Its all about you
No, i’m not going to start singing McFly. But I thought it would be interesting for you not to find out about my views on the transport world (you know them by now, most of you). But I thought I would share a little bit about you, so you get to know about the others who read, and maybe enjoy, this newsletter as much as you do.
Firstly, how many of you are there? Well, nearly 200 more than last year - 764 at the time of writing this newsletter in fact.
This next dataset always amazes me. Most of you are from the UK, but its closer than you may think (58% of subscribers). Other popular nations in the world include the United States (8% - with California and Oregon being particular hotbeds), New Zealand (6%), Australia (4%), and Spain (2%). A special mention goes to the solitary subscribers in the following countries: Belarus, Columbia, Czechia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Hungary, Iran, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Turkey, Uganda, and Uruguay.
All well and good, but newsletters are judged on the number of eyeballs that read them. Here I need to get a bit more ‘listy’ as Substack doesn’t allow you to export the data very easily. So, what does this data say?
Mobility Matters newsletters were read 120,000 times over the course of the year, of which 114,000 times were through you reading emails
The average email open rate (i.e. the percentage of you who actually opened each one) was 32%
95% of emails hit your inboxes (take that Spam filters)
90 of you have shared the newsletter at least once in the last year
Finally, I started asking for your feedback on the calls to actions when I launched them earlier in the year. Asking you a simple question: do you find them useful? Over the year, 37 of you have responded, and your response was pretty clear.
82.2% of you find them useful or very useful. Aww. you guys. 😊
Many of you left comments. Common themes were that the stories were very UK-centric, that they often contained practical actions that you found useful, and a lack of items on accessibility more generally. Plenty for me to action in the New Year.
❤️ Which newsletters did you love?
It wouldn’t be an end-of-year newsletter without a look back at the newsletters you all seem to love the most, would it? This is based on the number of views that each story got, and from that here are your top five, in the customary reverse order:
Starting off was my take-down of the UK’s Plan for Drivers. I have to say writing that particular newsletter was very therapeutic to do. Maybe you all felt the same? Or perhaps you just wanted to do some rage-clicking?
You lot like me complaining, don’t you? As next up was my rant about Network North. I maintain that the rules that I wrote in this newsletter about what constitutes a good strategy stand up. I wrote this one on the same day that I found out my dog had cancer, so this one is tinged in sadness for me personally. But I hope you enjoyed it.
3. Change the Narrative Part 2 - MM#601
In a pre-Mobility Camp rush I made a lot of spelling, grammar, and basic presentation mistakes in this newsletter. But you lot didn’t care. You seemed to like being reminded that most people actually support us in creating a more sustainable and just world.
2. Mobility Matters Daily #467 - Buggered Buses
This one is all down to the title. I know it is. This pre-change newsletter has nothing special about it otherwise. Mind you, the bit of the newsletter on snow and our approach in the UK to its management I quite enjoyed writing.
1. Mobility Matters Daily #457 - Co-modality for Golden Oldies
It wasn’t even close. This newsletter, all the way back in January, had more reads than the rest of the top five combined. Mind you, I did slag off Jordan Peterson in the opening paragraph (I regret nothing), but there are some good other bits in there on getting old people back on buses.
🎄 And its a Merry Christmas from him
The final words of this newsletter are from me to you, to say thank you. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for emailing me when you like something in the newsletter (and also when you don’t - you are always polite about it!). Thank you for all the kind words that you have said over the course of the year, both virtually and in person when I have had the chance to meet many of you. Thank you for your recommendations and sharing the newsletter on LinkedIn.
But most of all, thank you for being awesome. Without you working hard, being good people, fighting the good fight against all of the awful stuff happening in the world, nothing changes. I write a newsletter. You do the amazing stuff. Keep doing it. Because with you, the fight for a better world is one that we will win.
This one is from me. Have a very Merry Christmas, and see you in 2024!
More interesting than I thought it'd be! Plus your analysis is good as always.
Happy Christmas!