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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: July 2019

Welcome to the July 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 consulting firm, and — for a few more weeks, at least — the Director of Newsletters at The New Yorker. Every month, I update this doc with email news, tips, and ideas. You can sign up here to be notified when a new edition is live — or bookmark notanewsletter.com for later!

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 every previous briefing at this link.

Now, onto this month’s edition! Inside, you’ll find news about Inbox Collective, my new email consultancy, and how you can work with me on your email strategy; lessons learned from the emails of 2020 Presidential candidates; a bunch of new email jobs, including one at The New Yorker; and more! Have something else you think should be featured in Not a Newsletter? Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com.

-Dan

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

The deceased sets up an out-of-office reply
cartoon by Tom Toro 

Let’s start with the news…

In a few weeks, I’m leaving my job as the Director of Newsletters at The New Yorker. 

Why would I leave a dream job, you might be wondering?

Well, I’m opening up a consultancy to help people like you with email.

Ever since I started this Google Doc, I’ve been getting notes from readers, telling me about your email goals and aspirations. So many of you have told me that you need help with all parts of your email program — from content strategy to growth, from monetization to deliverability.

And at some point, I realized: The work I’m doing with Not a Newsletter isn’t enough. I can do even more to help this community.

So I’m starting up a consultancy. It’s called Inbox Collective, and it’s here to help people like you — and brands like yours — grow audiences, build relationships, and get results via email. I’ll be working with clients in ways both small (coaching, holding email workshops for brands) and big (teardowns of email programs, working with teams to build an email strategy from the ground up). 

The goal here is to help you get the most out of email — and that all starts with a conversation. Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com. Let’s talk about how I might be able to partner with you, work with you, and help you.

The other big news: The New Yorker is looking for a new Director of Newsletters!

All of this means that The New Yorker is looking for someone to take the reins of our newsletter program. We’re hiring a new Director of Newsletters to lead The New Yorker’s editorial newsletter strategy, and help build the long-term vision for one of our most important distribution channels.

Email is one of the largest sources of traffic to newyorker.com, one of the most important channels for driving new subscription revenue, and a huge source of ad revenue. In short: The person who takes this role is going to have a pretty big say in the future of The New Yorker. You’ll be working not just with our editors and writers, but also teams across Condé Nast (audience development, data, product, design, consumer marketing, and sales). You’ll need to be well-versed in email strategy, ready to launch new products and test existing ones, and willing to go above and beyond to communicate with stakeholders across the org.

I’ll say this: The New Yorker is an incredible place to work. Some of the most talented people in journalism work in this newsroom, and you’ll have the opportunity to work alongside them.

You can apply to the job here — and when you do, please email me at my work address (daniel_oshinsky@newyorker.com) to let me know! I’ll make sure to tell our team to keep a special eye out for loyal Not a Newsletter readers 🙂

… and with that, it’s onto your regularly scheduled Not a Newsletter!

This Month in Email News

For Your Reading List

Axios is successful because it’s able to see the obvious in something so obvious it goes over most media company’s heads: You don’t treat your engaged users and unengaged users the same. Once you’ve internalized this, you can start thinking about your email list in new ways. Rather than just checking a box for hitting a campaign-level open rate, you can start thinking about how to build deeper relationships with your engaged users. 

  • That quote above makes a lot of sense! But I also want to caution you: What Axios is doing is fairly advanced, particularly for media companies.
  • Axios sends their newsletters via SailThru — so do many Not a Newsletter readers — but this isn’t the type of segmentation that can be done with that ESP’s current toolset. What Axios is actually doing is taking their user and campaign-level data, sending it to one of their analytics tools using SailThru’s API, slicing and dicing it, and then routing it back to SailThru, where they can segment based on the data. It’s the kind of process that requires a savvy data team and a sophisticated understanding of their audience. 
  • What I’m saying is: If your bosses show you this article and ask why you’re not doing this sort of segmentation yet, you may need to have a deeper conversation with them about your company’s data capabilities. Axios isn’t using some out-of-the-box data solution to do this — they’ve invested a ton in finding ways to get access to the data they want.
  • Iterable’s Jen Capstraw wrote about the three reasons why you should constantly trim your email lists.
  • The Evergrey’s Anika Anand talked about how her team decided which sign-up methods were driving growth for their newsletter.
    • A few growth ideas mentioned here — partnerships on a local partner’s WiFi page, sign-ups through a table at a local event, even Photo Booths — might be worth considering!
  • I’m absolutely fascinated by the saga of Superhuman, a personal email client that suddenly became the center of a major conversation around privacy when Mike Davidson, a VP at InVision, wrote about how the app secretly tracks data. (The CEO of Superhuman later responded on Medium.) Read both perspectives, and give them some thought. This won’t be the last time we have a discussion about email and privacy.
  • Jerry Vermanen, who sends the wonderfully-titled Dutch newsletter “Klikdinges” (in English, “Clickything”), wrote a post for Revue about why he decided to start his newsletter.
  • Minerva Media Co.’s Sarah Day Owen discussed a few things she’s tried to build engagement with her Raleigh, N.C.-centric newsletter.
  • Cory Brown of Impact TK took a deep dive into newsletters that offer a subscription to readers — and found that many in the news industry are burying their best offers. He offered a few suggestions on how to better position those offers to readers.
  • At The New York Times, John Hermann wrote about the Slack IPO, and what it means for the future of email. As John notes:

This multi-front attack on email is just beginning, but a wartime narrative already dominates: The universally despised office culture of replies and forwards and mass CCs and “looping in” and “circling back” is on its way out, and it’s going to be replaced by chat apps. So what happens if they actually win?

  • The whole piece is worth reading, but I’ll sum up John’s main takeaway: The problem isn’t email — it’s how email is being used, and where users draw the line when it comes to sending and replying to email. (I personally swear by the 7-to-7 rule — my inbox is open for emails and replies from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Anything earlier or later, and I’ll be using Gmail’s schedule send tool to send my email at a better time.)
  • Anyway: All of this comes back to a bigger question: What is email actually for? And are you using it in a way — both in your personal correspondence, and for your professional emails/newsletters — that makes sense for your audience? It’s certainly worth thinking about further before the next time you hit send.
  • I was in Berlin in May, talking with a group of news organizations about email, and one question kept coming up: How should we be using WhatsApp to send newsletters? I hadn’t previously considered WhatsApp as a distribution channel, but promised to look into it further…
    • …until, just a few weeks later, WhatsApp announced that they would ban newsletters from their platform.
    • I will mention here, though: While Mary Meeker’s 2019 internet trends report doesn’t go into detail about email, there is one slide worth noting about the rise of messaging apps worldwide.
  • And one more note from Germany: Three publishers talked about some recent changes they’ve made to their newsletter programs to try to drive their paid subscription efforts.
  • Here’s an interesting piece from Anne Powell, John Wiley, and Peter Gray of the Wall Street Journal about the paper’s attempts — both through email, and on their site — to build habits for readers.
  • On the SparkPost blog, Jeff Goldstein wrote about a really interesting potential use case for AMP: Sending personal data via email.
  • OneZero, the new Medium tech blog, dove into Gmail’s new autocomplete feature, and argues that it’s sucking the life out of communication.
    • Personally, I disagree on this one — I happen to love autocomplete. I used to overthink a lot of my email replies, when a simple, “OK, sounds good!” would suffice. Some emails still require a longer, more personal reply — or even a conversation IRL or over the phone — but autocomplete has really helped me get through my inbox a bit faster every day.
  • This month in cringeworthy marketing messages: Here’s one shameful email blast from a gym in the U.K. And here’s a pretty bad typo from a PR firm about Jerry Lewis (who died in 2017) appearing on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
  • A random-but-wild story: Every year, The Masters holds an online lottery to sell off tickets to their tournament. And one family went to extremes to try to win (and then have the right to resell) those tickets — a scheme that involved the creation of four million email addresses!
  • Here’s a topic that’s come up a few times in recent weeks: Advertising on Reddit. Kaya Ismail of CMS Wire wrote about how others are using the platform.
  • On the SendGrid blog, Jillian Wohlfarth broke down 11 examples of effective welcome emails.
  • ReturnPath’s Emőke Magyari and Chloe Leaker discussed the importance of getting readers to reply to your emails.
  • One company I’m keeping my eye on: Pico, one of the many new tools designed to help news organizations with their subscription offers — which, naturally, will involve getting readers to sign up for newsletters.
  • I loved this, from Ozy’s Nick Fouriezos: a closer look at why Democrats running for President are using such long subject lines in their emails.
    • The longest one, from Bernie Sanders, was 46 words (!!!) long. Here it is, in full: “My request is to please use the link in this email to make a contribution before the end of month fundraising deadline we’ve set for ourselves. Please help us raise the funds we need to win. That’s it. That’s our fundraiser. Pretty simple. Can you help?”
    • Maggie Astor of the New York Times also analyzed some Presidential email trends over the course of a six-week period, and came away with a few interesting findings. Among top-tier candidates, Joe Biden sent the most emails (83), while Pete Buttigieg sent the fewest (only 14). And when it came to content, nearly all the contenders resorted to some truly unfortunate hyperbole. (“I’m so stunned, I can barely type this email.” “Shocking update: (please read!!)” “No one — NO ONE — saw this coming.”)
    • And one more Presidential email exploration: VICE News’s Evan McMorris-Santoro donated a small amount to every candidate, and then waited to see what emails he’d get. (tl;dr — He got a ton of emails.)

What are you working on? I’d love to hear more about it!

There are now more than 2,000 readers (!!!) subscribed to Not a Newsletter — and the more of you I meet, the more amazed I am by the work being done in this community. So I’m going to steal a line from a friend and ask: What’s something you’re working on this month that you’re proud of? Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com and tell me about it — and I encourage you to brag! 😉

Here’s what some of your fellow Not a Newsletterians wanted to brag about last month!

Angela He, in Washington, D.C., says:

“I recently redesigned The Atlantic’s newsletters, and I co-wrote a design/front-end resource about modular design and typography enhancement that I think might be helpful for readers”

Jay Clouse, in Columbus, Ohio, says:

“We released the second issue of our written, digital publication called the update, and one of our pieces went to #1 on Hacker News.”

Wesley Verhoeve, in Brooklyn, NY, says:

“Almost a year ago, Paul Jun and I launched The Observers, where we share photo book recommendations by visionary photographers. So far, we’ve published two seasons worth of interviews and book recommendations including ones with greats like Elliott Erwitt, Kathy Ryan, Mark Seliger, Joel Meyerowitz and about 50 others.”

Jay Owens, in London, says:

“Inspired by your GDoc non-newsletter, I put article links in a public GDoc, To Read Later. The twist is, I haven’t ready any of them — I use this doc as a means of closing tabs (but hanging on to) articles I plan to read later, but haven’t got round to yet. I fail to read most of them at all. However, the calibre of stuff curated here is far higher than I actually manage to tweet out. So it feels like a kind of inverse ‘links roundup’ newsletter.”

And I’d love to hear from even more of you! Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com, and your brag might end up in next month’s Not a Newsletter!

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’m calling… the Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month! This month:

the anonymous camel

Camels are odd creatures. I rode one a decade ago in the desert, and I can tell you this: Riding a camel is a little like riding a mechanical bull in slow motion. They sway, they jerk from side to side, and you generally feel like you’re going to be thrown from them at all times. (If you ever ride one, just make sure to hang on when they stand up. It’s an experience.)

But did you know?

  • Contrary to popular belief, a camel’s hump is filled with fat — not water — which can then be broken down into water and energy. 
  • Camels have udders, and they produce a vitamin rich milk. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that camel milk — camel milk! — could one day become a $10 billion industry.
  • Camels are actually born humpless. The humps don’t grow until they start eating solid food.
  • And despite often living in incredibly hot regions of the world, camels rarely sweat.

Anyway, the camel! 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.