Comment by m_d

While you may never read them, a surprising number of people do. I had an internship where my primary responsibility was composing HTML emails that went out to users on a weekly basis. If I remember correctly, the majority of our users opened the emails, and roughly 5-10% clicked on a link to content on the site. I imagine these number vary quite a bit, but for a site with a paid membership we saw a lot of traffic from HTML newsletters.