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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: March 2020

Welcome to the March edition of Not a Newsletter, a monthly, semi-comprehensive, Google Doc-based guide to sending better emails! I’m Dan, the founder of Inbox Collective, an email consultancy, and the former Director of Newsletters at The New Yorker and BuzzFeed. Every month, I update this doc with email news, tips, and ideas. Sign up here to be notified when a new edition goes live!

One of the advantages of a Google Doc is that it makes it easy to read and search through older editions of Not a Newsletter. You can find them all at this link.

Inside this edition, you’ll find key questions to ask before launching that coronavirus pop-up newsletter; lessons from Gannett and The Daily Beast about the importance of email in your subscription strategy; thoughts about the Gmail algorithm; and more!

Have something else you think should be featured in Not a Newsletter? Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com.

-Dan

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

Here's what it might look like if you replied an email — two years late
Randall Munroe / xkcd.com

This Month in Email News

For Your Reading List

  • I had the chance to talk at the INMA Media Subscription Summit last month in New York. Most of these stories are behind the INMA paywall (though if you work in the journalism world, do consider becoming a member — it’s a fantastic organization!), but a few things to share:
    • I talked about strategies for building effective newsletters — and discussed where I’d start if I was building out a newsletter strategy for a brand new organization. (Step 1: Launch a daily newsletter. Step 2: Launch an onboarding series. Step 3: Launch a personality-driven product.)
    • Greg Piechota (one of the smartest researchers and thinkers in this space, I believe) talked about rethinking metrics to improve subscription success. The key quote here for any subscription business: “Purchase is never the end game. A lifetime relationship is.” Preach, Greg!
      • On a related note: The Message’s Mark Tomblin wrote about creating the balance between bringing in new customers and engaging existing ones. It’s really smart, and worth considering — acquiring a new customer isn’t the end of the journey. To quote Greg one more time, because it’s THAT important: “Purchase is never the end game. A lifetime relationship is.”
      • Also, here’s a headline from StreetFight that isn’t email specific, but definitely caught my eye: “96% of Companies Say They’re Losing Subscribers for Fixable Reasons.” (Speaking of which: I’ve got some thoughts on reactivation campaigns a little later in this edition.)
    • Gannett’s Laurie Truitt talked about the importance of newsletters as a tool for converting casual readers into paying subscribers. I’ll quote directly from the piece about Laurie’s talk:  “Each newsletter sign-up costs Gannett between US$1 and US$2, but they are getting about twice the rate of conversions of other audiences. With 25 newsletters, they have captured around 400,000 new sign-ups.” Impressive!
    • Twipe’s Mary-Katharine Phillips summed up a few key learnings from the conference (this link isn’t paywalled), and I especially wanted to highlight this note about registration walls as a way to drive email sign-ups: “Lauren Bertolini, Chief Product Officer of The Daily Beast explained that they see every email address as an opportunity for brand loyalty, with an experiment showing that users who gave an email address converted to paying subscribers at a 25x higher rate than users who paid for a discounted $1 trial offer.”
  • The Markup made a big splash this month with an investigative piece from Adrianne Jeffries, Leon Yin, and Surya Mattu about how Gmail’s algorithm affects political candidates. A few big things to note here:
    • I think they’re asking the right question here: Why does Gmail get to decide which emails land in a certain part of the inbox? And why doesn’t Gmail reveal more about why an email ends up where it does? This is a huge deal for our industry, and Gmail deserves more external scrutiny.
    • It’s also important to consider these questions as we start to see the tactics that big players are using to get into Gmail’s primary inbox. An example: Validity, one of the biggest players in the email space, offers a suite of tools to help companies monitor their inbox placement, and makes recommendations on how to improve it. But for an additional yearly fee, they’ll also give companies like Gmail a whitelist of clients who they say maintain best practices, and the Gmails of the world give those clients preferred placement in the inbox. These services can run well into the five — and sometimes six — figures per year, depending on the size of the client. It’s pay-to-play space that benefits those who can afford it.
      • That being said: I’m considering becoming a Validity customer, because I do want Inbox Collective clients to have access to tools that can help them. I’ll confess that I’m torn about this: I don’t think it’s fair that these resources aren’t available to all, but I also want to give my clients every possible resource that can help them.
    • Two last thoughts: 
      • 1.) Gmail’s inbox places a priority on engagement. They want to see that readers open, click, forward, or reply to your newsletter. The more you drive that engagement, the better the chance you have at getting into the primary inbox.
      • 2.) While I thought The Markup’s questions were spot-on, the results of their Gmail test centered around a single, brand-new inbox where they didn’t open or engage with any emails — and Gmail’s algorithm is designed to measure engagement. I’d love to see someone re-run this test — but across hundreds of inboxes with active engagement.
  • Speaking of engagement and Gmail: Last month, I shared a link about how Gmail’s starting to penalize companies that send large volumes of emails to readers who haven’t opened in 6+ months. Publishing Executive’s anonymous columnist, D. Eadward Tree, expanded on that reporting and talked about why more companies should invest in a smart reactivation strategy.
    • Of note here: Reactivation strategies can work really well — as long as they’re done on a timely basis! If only you’re doing them once a year, or if you’re trying to win back readers who haven’t opened since the Obama administration, you’re probably not going to have much success. But I’ve had Inbox Collective clients set up reactivation series that have won back as many as 20% of their inactive audience. These can work!
      • To set some benchmarks for success here: Most companies I work with are able to win back anywhere from 5% to 20% of their inactive readers through automated reactivation campaigns.
  • I promise the entire Doc isn’t about Gmail, but one more thing to note: In a list of recent Gmail recommendations, they do suggest that large publishers (folks with lists well into the six or seven figures) use specific email addresses and IP addresses for certain types of email. For instance: If you’re sending a mix of editorial emails and marketing emails to a reader, use one specific email address and IP address for the editorial content, and another for marketing messages. 
  • Delia Cai of Deez Links (and BuzzFeed) put together a few slides about how she grew her audience from a few hundred readers to nearly 3,000 daily newsletter subscribers. (Congrats, Delia!)
  • Nieman Lab’s Hanaa’ Tameez wrote about some new research around building trust with readers. The big takeaway: It takes a combination of steps — sharing bios from your team, and being transparent with readers about the work you do and why you do it — that lead to success for media organizations.
  • Hanaa’ also wrote about all of the coronavirus pop-up products that have launched in the past few weeks. (Even more have launched since that article was published!) The big question from so many Not a Newsletter readers: Should I launch a coronavirus pop-up newsletter, too? Here’s what I think:  You might want to… if you know what the goal of the newsletter is (besides, obviously, educating your readers and keeping them informed). A pop-up newsletter could be useful for:
    • Bringing in new readers — If this is the goal, make sure you know what you’ll do after the series is done. Will you be adding them to another list (breaking news, a daily newsletter)? Will you give them a choice of how to engage more deeply with your newsroom?
    • Driving new subscriptions / donations — If this is the goal, make sure you’ve got an onboarding series in place to welcome these readers and help them take the next step. For subscription brands that have a paywall, it’s also worth thinking about how much reporting you want to include in the newsletter vs. linking out so readers hit the paywall (and hopefully subscribe).
    • Engaging existing readers — If this is the goal, this might be a subscriber/donor-only type of product, and it’s an incentive for readers to become paying supporters. With this, you’re looking carefully to see if it’s a product that might reduce churn.
      • But you don’t have to launch a secondary product. Here’s WBUR’s daily newsletter (they’re an Inbox Collective client, but they’re doing great, so I’m going to brag about them!). They initially decided to bring their best reporting into their flagship daily newsletter so that they can use that to provide important coverage for readers while also growing a newsletter that they’ll have for years to come.
        • And later on, when they saw a strong need, they decided to complement that by adding breaking news alerts just for their coronavirus coverage. If your readers are asking for this sort of product, then it’s absolutely worth investing the extra resources to serve them.
      • One more great example to share: In Philly, Billy Penn added a coronavirus section to their daily newsletter (instead of launching a secondary product). Their editor, Danya Henninger, told me that it’s led to a surge in donations — about twice as many donations this week as in a usual week.
  • The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Kassel wrote about subscription businesses like ClassPass and Rent the Runway that are making it easier for customers to cancel their subscription. Why? They’re finding that customers might be more likely to return if the cancellation process was simple the first time.
  • I’m thrilled to see my old colleagues at The New Yorker launching new products just for the inbox. If you haven’t signed up for their Climate Crisis newsletter, do check it out!
    • In other launch news: Nieman Labs’s Sarah Scire wrote about a really cool new newsletter from The Washington Post, called Drop Me The Link. It’s casual and very mobile-friendly. Love the design on this one!
  • More great reporting about other messaging tools, this time from Digiday’s Lucinda Southern about how Le Monde is using WhatsApp to reach readers in French-speaking African countries.
    • While I’m thinking about France: Visionary Marketing’s Yann Gourvennec wrote a nice guide (in French) about why to invest in email.
  • In other non-email messaging tactics: The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull wrote about Restoration Hardware’s mail-order catalog, and why they continue to invest in it. I found this quote particularly interesting:

“You can’t make me open your email, you can’t make me open your website, you can’t make me go to your retail store, but you can send a large-format mail piece I have to pick up,” says Hamilton Davison, the executive director of the American Catalog Mailers Association. “It’s invasive, but it’s welcome.” Davison has a vested interest in the future of the format, of course, but his claims are borne out by research suggesting that even though catalogs typically arrive unbidden, consumers find them less presumptuous and irritating than marketing emails.

  • Just throwing this out there: Describing your product as “invasive but welcome” is a very, very odd look. (In terms of quotes I had to read three times just to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind, it’s right up there New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently telling a reporter that he didn’t undermine a key colleague — “If anything, he was over-mined.”)
  • But it’s also a reminder that many brands don’t see great results through email because they only use email for sales and deals. Email’s all about relationships, and my bet is that if a brand like Restoration Hardware shifted to an email strategy around relationship-building, they’d see far better results.
  • On the deliverability side of things, here’s a great catch from Al Iverson’s blog, Spam Resource: DMARC adoption was up 300% last year.
    • If you’re curious about DMARC, it’s one of the five things I highlighted in my 2020 Newsletter checklist. Sign up here and I’ll send you some resources on how to get set up with DMARC (as well as SPF and DKIM).
  • Oracle’s Chad S. White took a look at some opportunities for the inbox — all of which are still unproven. Among the things that made the list: Using AMP for Email and BIMI. I’m in agreement with his list. There may be some opportunities here, but it’s a little too early to say.
  • From Digiday’s Lucinda Southern, a headline that caught my eye: “The loss of tracking cookies is fueling the importance of email newsletters.”
  • I’m not going to share the link here, because, frankly, it made me too mad, but I’ll say that a major email brand, one that helps you, uh, monitor your newsletter campaigns, sent out an email the other day informing its users that Tuesdays are the best day to send newsletters.
    • Just to put this here, once and for all: There is no “best” time or day to send a newsletter. If your emails are great, readers will find them. Period, full stop, fin.
    • If you a read a report on the web that offers some sort of weirdly-specific advice — Send your emails on Tuesdays! Use only purple buttons for your CTAs! Add the  👀 emoji to every third subject line to boost engagement! — don’t blindly accept those findings as a best practice. Test it out for yourself and see what works for you.
      • Side note: I ranted about all that, and also I answered a few questions for The Gmail Genius about how I use email.
  • Over on the Verizon Postmaster blog, Sean McWilliams announced some new engagement feeds (think: Gmail’s Postmaster Tools) to help senders better track user data. Worth checking out for those with sizable lists.
  • Mightier’s Melanie Kinney wrote about the process of transitioning to a new ESP. It’s a nice reminder of the work that goes into switching — for many established companies, switching is something that takes 6+ months to do! 
  • Styli Charalambous of The Daily Maverick shared some great lessons from launching a membership program. There’s good stuff in here, especially about how they used newsletters and surveys to acquire paying supporters and learn from their audience. (Also of note: I interviewed Styli and his team for Not a Newsletter, so expect some more learnings from them soon in this space.)
    • Longreads’s Mark Amstrong also wrote a really thoughtful piece about his struggles building a membership program. Sign up for his newsletter first (it’s good!) and he’ll send it your way.
  • Not a month goes by when I don’t get questions from readers about how to design emails that look better in Outlook. Here’s a nice guide from Mailtrap about common Outlook issues and how to fix them.

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • Email Octopus’s Hollie Youlden wrote about how much progress the email community has made to elevate female voices in our space. (Amazing groups like Women of Email deserve a huge shoutout for their role in that.) There’s still much more to do, but it’s encouraging to see the industry change for the better!
  • Robin Sloan built a messaging app just for his family, and I think it’s an absolutely delightful concept. (As an aside: BoopSnoop is also a tremendous name for an app.)
  • I absolutely loved this essay, from The Ringer’s Katie Baker, about an obscure Facebook group about the Instant Pot run by a 92-year-old that grew into a community of more than 92,000 fans. It’s a wonderful reminder about the power and possibility of building community through channels like Facebook or email (or, I suppose, a Google Doc!).
  • Glitch’s Ezra Mechaber built a really neat tool. Run your HTML through the tool, and you’ll get a live preview of what the HTML looks like in your browser. You’d still want to test out the full email through a tool like Litmus or Email on Acid, but this gives you a quick way to make sure a bit of your code looks good first. (The caveat: It will require a bit of technical know-how, and it’s designed for folks who are designing HTML templates from scratch and really want to keep their CSS/HTML separate while they code.) Give Ezra’s walk-through of the product a look here.
  • I thought this was such a cool ad campaign from The Guardian, to promote their weekly magazine in Berlin.
  • This is so fun, from Article Group: The Essential Laws of Creativity. Some of these I knew well (The Bechdel Test), and some I’d never heard of but absolutely love (“Hanlon’s Razor”).
  • I’ve shared thoughts about what makes a good newsletter (and the Newsletter Positioning Doc in the Resources section below can help), but on a related note, NPR’s Alison MacAdam wrote about what makes a really good podcast.

The Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month

One of the quirks of publishing in a Google Doc is that when readers like you visit, Google identifies you as an animal in the top right corner of the doc. So to close out this edition of Not a Newsletter, I want to spotlight one of the Google Doc animals in a feature I call… the Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month! This month:

the anonymous kiwi

I’ve been thinking about the kiwi ever since I read an obituary a few weeks ago about Frieda Rapoport Caplan. Caplan ran Frieda’s Specialty Produce, a company that imported fruits and vegetables to the U.S. Back in 1962, they tried to introduce a new fruit here in the States — the first fruit since the banana that you could buy in any store nationwide. But the name didn’t seem quite right. It had always been known as the Chinese gooseberry, and Americans weren’t sure what to make of it. So, the story goes, someone suggested an alternative name: The kiwi, since it was small, fuzzy, and round, a bit like the New Zealand bird. (Technically, like the bird, it was also flightless.)

Caplan didn’t come up with the name, but she was the first major distributor to call it the kiwi, and is widely credited with popularizing the fruit in the U.S. She died in January of this year, and in obituaries, many news outlets noted her nickname: “The Kiwi Queen.”

Anyway, the Kiwi! That’s your Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month. 

Here's a decorative image of three animals: An owl, a flamingo, and a seahorse

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By Dan Oshinsky

Dan runs Inbox Collective, a consultancy that helps news organizations, non-profits, and independent operators get the most out of email. He specializes in helping others build loyal audiences via email and then converting that audience into subscribers, members, or donors.

He previously created Not a Newsletter, a monthly briefing with news, tips, and ideas about how to send better email, and worked as the Director of Newsletters at both The New Yorker and BuzzFeed.

He’s been a featured speaker at events like Litmus Live in Boston, Email Summit DK in Odense, and the Email Marketing Summit in Brisbane. He’s also been widely quoted on email strategies, including in publications like The Washington Post, Fortune, and Digiday.