Welcome to the March edition of Not a Newsletter, a monthly, semi-comprehensive, Google Doc-based guide to sending better emails! I’m Dan, and I’m 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 you can 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 Not a Newsletter briefing at this link.
Now, onto this month’s edition! Inside, you’ll find a guide to six email metrics that matter, an “oops!” moment from Lyft, a newsletter strategy positioning brief to help you decide which emails to launch next, and more! Have something else you think should be featured in Not a Newsletter? Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com.
-Dan
This Month in Email News
- Morning Brew claims 1 million subscribers, $3m in revenue — and a profitable business (Digiday)
- Escaping The Spam Box: Fewer Emails Are Ending Up There, Study Shows (MediaPost)
- You can read the full spam study from Return Path here.
- Elsewhere in spam news: Spam does not bring us joy—ridding Gmail of 100 million more spam messages with TensorFlow (Google Blog)
- While Gmail is blocking millions of spam messages, there’s also this: Nearly half the calls you receive this year will be spam (CNN)
- And in another not-email-but-sounds-a-little-like-email headline: Return to sender: Supreme Court to hear undeliverable mail case (AP)
- Paid newsletterer Substack introduces a way for podcasters to earn money (Nieman Lab)
- Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes to Start New Conservative Media Company (Axios)
- Email Scams Spike In Q4 2018, Study Finds (MediaPost)
- An Email Marketing Company Left 809 Million Records Exposed Online (Wired)
- Partisan Rift Threatens Federal Data-Privacy Efforts (The Wall Street Journal)
- Microsoft Expands Animated GIF Support with Outlook 365 (Litmus)
Six Email Metrics That Matter (That Aren’t Open Rate)
Open rate matters. But it isn’t everything. And if you’re too reliant on open rate as your north star, you might have problems in the long run.
Think of your newsletters as a car. Actually, let’s be more specific: Think of it as your first car. This was mine: an Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight, handed down from my grandpa when I turned 16.
The Eighty-Eight was a great first car: Bench seating in the front and back, with room to fit six; a cloth interior you practically sunk into; and a trunk bigger than my first New York City apartment. The Eighty-Eight was nearly indestructible, which made it perfect for an idiot teenager like me.
And in a way, that car was a lot like email: a weird, unsexy, very old piece of technology that did its job surprisingly well — except when it didn’t.
Using open rate as your only metric for success would be like driving that Eighty-Eight and caring only whether or not there was gas in the tank. It’s an old car — you have to pay attention to everything! How’s the tread on the tires? Does the oil need changing? Is the engine running OK? Have you changed the spark plugs recently? You get the idea. Your newsletters work the same way. As long as you’re keeping an eye on the entire email program — content strategy, engagement, growth, deliverability, onboarding, etc. — you’re going to be able to keep things running smoothly for a long while. But if you let one thing go wrong, other problems may arise.
Way-too-long car anecdotes aside, here are six metrics you might want to monitor:
1.) Monthly list growth — Are you pitching your newsletters correctly? Do readers understand why they’d want to sign up for your newsletter? Have you created enough new ways to capture email signups? Keeping an eye on monthly list growth is an easy way to tell that your branding and your acquisition efforts are working.
2) Click-to-open rate — There are a few ways to measure engagement on a newsletter, but this is my favorite. Simply: If 100 people opened my email, how many of them clicked on at least one link? If your product is designed to drive people to your site, this will help you measure whether or not your readers are finding content that they want to engage more deeply with.
3) The percentage of readers who open 50% of newsletters per month — I’m saying 50% here, but it’s really up to you to figure out what the bar is. Maybe you’re defining your most highly-engaged fans as anyone opening half of your emails in a given month. Maybe it’s higher — 60/70/80%. Whatever it is, this metric can help you see what percentage of your readers are making a habit of opening your emails. And those habits matter, particularly if you’re working on newsletters for a news organization: One new study from Northwestern found that building habit is key to attracting and retaining subscribers.
4) Engaged minutes per newsletter — If your focus is on driving readers back to your site, and making sure that they’re actually spending time on site, you should keep tabs on engaged minutes driven per newsletter. For those working in newsrooms on tools like Chartbeat or Parse.ly, reach out to your contacts there for help setting up a dashboard. If you’re on Google Analytics, the Top-Line Newsletter Stats I discussed last month has this built in. (GA isn’t always great at calculating total read time, so I prefer to break things out by Average Session Duration.) If you have multiple newsletters, go to Dashboards —> Create and then build one out with multiple widgets, broken out by the campaign name.
5) Mobile open rates — Here’s another metric that’s already built in that top-line GA dashboard. Remember: The majority of email use takes place on a mobile device. If your audience is primarily reading on a desktop, it could be a sign that you need to redesign your newsletters for a mobile audience — or even rethink your newsletter to be more mobile friendly.
6) Clicks/1000 — This is one of my favorite metrics for predicting the future success of a newsletter. It measures the amount of traffic you’re driving per 1,000 emails sent. Here’s how to calculate it: (Total clicks / Emails delivered) x 1000. Once you have that number, you can start to see the potential impact of your newsletters as you grow. Let’s say you have a thousand subscribers, and you’re driving 100 clicks per 1,000 emails sent. At the moment, that means your newsletter’s only driving 100 clicks per send. But as you grow your list to 10,000 readers, you’d be driving 1,000 clicks at that rate. At 50k readers, you’re driving 5,000 clicks, and at 250k readers, you’re driving 25,000 clicks, and so on. If you’ve got a high clicks/1000 number, that may be a sign that you’ve got a product you should focus on really growing, since it might produce significant traffic returns in the long run.
But I don’t want to dismiss open rate entirely — it can be a useful tool for measuring the health of your email program! If you’re running A/B tests, open rate can be a valuable metric for picking out a winner. If you’re launching a new newsletter and the open rates are poor out of the gate, that might be a sign that the product isn’t actually connecting with readers. (On the other hand: If you’re rebranding a product and the open rates spike upwards, that’d be an excellent indicator that you should continue onward.) If a specific newsletter suddenly sees a huge drop in open rates, that could be a clear warning sign of upcoming trouble. And if your open rates are strong but your deliverability is poor, that’s a sign that there’s probably something wrong behind the scenes with your ESP or your list management strategy. Open rate is the “check engine” light of email metrics. It won’t tell you what’s wrong or what action to take next, but it’s a sign that you need to start digging into the data for more answers.
For Your Reading List
- This was a fantastic essay from Craig Mod about newsletters. You should read the whole thing, but take special note of this section:
Ownership is the critical point here. Ownership in email in the same way we own a paperback: We recognize that we (largely) control the email subscriber lists, they are portable, they are not governed by unknowable algorithmic timelines. And this isn’t ownership yoked to a company or piece of software operating on quarterly horizon, or even multi-year horizon, but rather to a half-century horizon. Email is a (the only?) networked publishing technology with both widespread, near universal adoption, and history. It is, as they say, proven.
- Ownership gets to the heart of why email works. There isn’t one company that oversees email. That can make it infuriating at times — Why didn’t my email get delivered? Why did an email that looked great in Gmail break apart in Outlook? Why is it so hard to get good data on my newsletters? — but it also means that email changes rarely, and slowly. You can build for email with confidence that what works today will probably work in a year, or five years, and maybe even twenty. Email has outlived every social network, every internet trend. Email works because email is ours — it belongs to all of us.
- Anyone who runs their own personal newsletter (or a newsletter tied to smaller brand) might find these useful: 16 email list management tools to make your life easier.
- Also on the Campaign Monitor blog, Ryan Gould writes about ways to use Instagram to grow your email list.
- Here’s a really deep dive, from Michal Leszczynski on the Get Response blog, on some email marketing best practices, including why you shouldn’t use a noreply@ email address, designing for accessibility, and more.
- And it must be that time of year: Campaign Monitor also rolled out their complete guide to email marketing (it’s 6,000 words long). So if you’re looking for incredibly deep introductions to email marketing, you’re in luck this month! 📬
- On the personal side of thing: I talked to fellow Mizzou grad (MIZ!) and newsletterian Delia Cai about Not a Newsletter for her excellent daily newsletter, Deez Links.
- I mentioned this link above, but I’ll reshare it here: It’s a study, from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, on ways to build habits for your readers. The most-effective tool for doing that? If you’re reading this doc, you’ve probably already guessed it!
But how do you build a core group with a daily habit when readers have so many choices?
At the December conference, Ed Malthouse, Research Director of Medill’s Spiegel Research Center, suggested that emailed newsletters offered an effective way to get more readers into a daily habit—a view that Rosenstiel endorses.
“We’ve seen data from Google that shows that email newsletters are the single most effective way to get people to decide to subscribe,” said Rosenstiel.
- So far, so good! Newsletters built habits, habits lead to subscriptions — no disagreement here! The piece continues:
Malthouse talked about “customization”—in which newsletter recipients can pick topics to follow, such as NFL football or fine dining—and “personalization”—in which stories are recommended for the reader based on past behavior.
Customization is fairly common at big news outlets, allowing readers to opt in to a variety of daily email alerts and newsletters. Personalization, on the other hand, is an idea with vast unrealized potential.
News outlets now have the opportunity to track when a subscriber has read five of the last seven stories on the City Council. When the eighth story is published, why not email the story or a link to the subscriber? The answer is that hardly any local news operations have the technological wherewithal to do this type of personalization. But this is just the kind of tactic that would serve customers most effectively.
- I’ll be honest: I don’t know about email personalization to really say if this is the right path for many news organizations. (My advice to companies just starting to invest in email has been to focus on the basics: Building out a suite of newsletter products, making it easy for your readers and fans to subscribe, and working on building relationships with them.)
- Martin Bryant wrote about funding his daily newsletter through voluntary payments, and what he’d do differently with funding if he was to start from scratch.
- Slate’s Ruth Graham wrote about the design flaws (some of them, including the use of Comic Sans, intentional) in the Trump 2020 campaign emails.
- I liked this, from Adam Grant in The New York Times: No, You Can’t Ignore Email. It’s Rude.
- And here’s the counterpoint, from Cal Newport in The Chronicle of Higher Education Review: Is Email Making Professors Stupid?
- Once you’ve read those, consider this, from Jocelyn Glei on the Zapier blog: Email Etiquette: How to Ask People for Things and Actually Get a Response
- I wrote last month about best practices for handling unsubscribes. Now, from the Daily Shouts desk of The New Yorker, comes this: Seventeen E-mails Telling You That You Have Unsubscribed from Our E-mail List.
- Here’s a useful guide to basic deliverability metrics and Return Path’s Sender Score tool, which can be an indicator of your email reputation.
- I was thrilled to see Return Path writing about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). I’ll be honest: I don’t know enough just yet about either of these regulations, but I do know that they’ve already had — and will continue to have — a significant impact on the email space. I’ll share more as I learn more about both GDPR and CCPA.
- I stumbled upon this fun piece, from June 1994, about the time New Yorker writer John Seabrook discovered that people can be unspeakably rude over email:
I got to work at nine, removed my coat, plugged in my PowerBook, and, as usual, could not resist immediately checking my E-mail. I saw I had a message from a technology writer who does a column about personal computers for a major newspaper, and whom I knew by name only. I had recently published a piece about Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, about whom this person has also written, and as I opened his E-mail to me it was with the pleasant expectation of getting feedback from a colleague. Instead, I got:
Crave THIS, asshole:
Listen, you toadying dipshit scumbag . . . remove your head from your rectum long enough to look around and notice that real reporters don’t fawn over their subjects, pretend that their subjects are making some sort of special contact with them, or, worse, curry favor by telling their subjects how great the ass-licking profile is going to turn out and then brag in print about doing it.
Forward this to Mom. Copy Tina and tell her the mag is fast turning to compost. One good worm deserves another….
Like many newcomers to the “net”—which is what people call the global web that connects more than thirty thousand on-line networks—I had assumed, without really articulating the thought, that while talking to other people through my computer I was going to be sheltered by the same customs and laws that shelter me when I’m talking on the telephone or listening to the radio or watching TV. Now, for the first time, I understood the novelty and power of the technology I was dealing with. No one had ever said something like this to me before, and no one could have said this to me before: in any other medium, these words would be, literally, unspeakable. The guy couldn’t have said this to me on the phone, because I would have hung up and not answered if the phone rang again, and he couldn’t have said it to my face, because I wouldn’t have let him finish. If this had happened to me in the street, I could have used my status as a physically large male to threaten the person, but in the on-line world my size didn’t matter. I suppose the guy could have written me a nasty letter: he probably wouldn’t have used the word “rectum,” though, and he probably wouldn’t have mailed the letter; he would have thought twice while he was addressing the envelope. But the nature of E-mail is that you don’t think twice. You write and send.
- The entire piece is great (and I say that not just because I work at The New Yorker, and not just because in the story, the email expert at The New Yorker is named… Dan).
- Lastly, I wanted to take a second to mention the passing of Carl Sednaoui, the co-founder of MailCharts, and a leader in the email space. He died last month in a plane crash while on vacation in Kenya. I never got to meet Carl, but I was touched by some of the tributes to him: one, from his co-founder, Tom, and another, from the team at Really Good Emails. They’re worth a few minutes of your time. We’ll miss you, Carl.
A Few Newsletters Worth Mentioning
- Melody Joy Kramer passes along this interesting experiment from the Pew Research Center: a course walking readers through the basics of U.S. immigration policy.
- At BuzzFeed, we saw real opportunity for courses. (We called them courses because they were designed to teach you a new habit or skill.) They were automated, so that if you signed up today, tomorrow, or a year from now, you’d always get the same email experience. And they were short-run products, so the entire course would typically run anywhere from 7-14 days. (My favorites were the 7-Day Skin Challenge and the 14-Day Butt And Core Challenge.) The open rates were consistently excellent, and they were a good way to show readers how useful our newsletters could be.
- But I haven’t seen many courses built around news topics. I’m interested to see if more news organizations will try to build courses like these in the future.
- Stumbled upon this one, thanks to the excellent Trump Inc. podcast: freelance reporter Zach Everson launched a newsletter called 1100 Pennsylvania, that covers the White House through the lens of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. I love the concept: it’s a unique way to cover this administration.
- Forbes launched a paid blockchain newsletter that’s designed to help crypto investors.
- This one costs $595 per year, which makes it one of the most expensive standalone newsletter products I’ve seen yet. The audience for this isn’t huge — but the math here is pretty straightforward. If 250 people subscribe, it’s a product that pulls in nearly $150k per year, and it’s likely profitable.
- Others have gone down this road, too, like WSJ Pro and Politico Pro. (And CQ/Roll Call have been doing this for years on Capitol Hill.) I’ll be interested to see if other brands go down the paid + hyper-topical route in 2019.
- CNN launched The Good Stuff, a newsletter for positive stories. I mention it here because I believe it’s the first newsletter to ever receive its own TV ad.
- If there’s an interesting newsletter you think Not a Newsletter readers should see in next month’s edition, send it my way, please!
This Month in, “Hey, We Proofed That Email, Right?”
The Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month
One of the funny 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 more obscure Google Doc animals in a feature I’m calling… the Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month! This month:
The Dumbo Octopus (scientific name: Grimpoteuthis) is a creature that lives at extreme depths in the ocean, often thousands of feet down. Most are fairly small — less than a foot long — and they’re nicknamed for their casual resemblance to Dumbo the elephant. (Google clearly disagrees. Their icon is quite obviously just an egg with a mustache.) National Geographic, naturally, has video of one of these things floating around in the wild. It’s tiny, and kind of cute, but then you remember that it lives two miles underwater, and everything that lives that far down is unfiltered nightmare fuel. I’m absolutely certain that this thing knows that I had calamari last month and is secretly planning its revenge.
Anyway: the Dumbo Octopus! That’s your Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month.
That’s all for this edition! Want to be notified when next month’s edition of Not a Newsletter is live? Sign up here:
