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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: June 2021

Welcome to the June 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 the next edition goes live!

This month: What the Apple privacy update means for your newsletter and your ability to measure the success of your email strategy (tl;dr: It’s going to be OK!), and what your ESP thinks about these changes. Plus: Live email events are back (see you at Litmus Live in September?), a few email-focused podcasts to check out, and more!

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 the full archive at this link.

-Dan 

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

A Pharaoh shows his board a chart. It is, of course, shaped like a pyramid.
Charlie Hankin / The New Yorker

This Month in Email Headlines

Here’s what Apple’s privacy changes mean for your email strategy

On June 7, at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, they announced a major change to the way email works. Based on my recent conversations with readers and clients, I imagine you’ve had one of two reactions to the news:

  1. I’m freaked out by the Apple announcement. Did Apple just make email newsletters irrelevant?
  2. Sorry, did you say Apple announced something important?

So let’s catch everyone up — and then let’s get to who it might hurt, and who it might help. (Yes, it’ll actually help many of you! But more on that in a few minutes.)

Apple announced that in new versions of iOS and macOS, any user checking email on the native Mail app will be given the choice to block an email’s tracking pixel — that little 1×1 image in an email that your email service provider uses to tell you whether an email was opened or not. (It can also be used to provide additional data about a user, like their location or device, though changes in the past decade made by Gmail and others have made much of that data much less accurate.) Says Apple:

“In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”

This is one of several privacy-focused changes Apple’s making, and from a user’s perspective, it seems like a no-brainer: My iPhone’s going to make it harder for marketers to track me around the web? Sign me up!

But for the email world, there are real implications. These past few days, I’ve seen a lot of very heated discussion about the value of open rate, so let’s put this to rest here: Open rate shouldn’t be anyone’s north star metric, but yes, it’s absolutely valuable. In 2019, in a piece on Revue’s blog arguing for newsrooms to look beyond open rate, I wrote:

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.

Open rate isn’t going away entirely as a metric, but it’ll be changing in a big way. These updates from Apple are going to require those in the email space to make some shifts when it comes to measuring success and testing. I’ve spent the past few days reading and listening to others in the email industry to figure out what all of this means for you. Here’s what I can tell you:

• This announcement took everyone in the email world, including ESPs, by surprise — I reached out to ten major ESPs for comment. (A handful were kind enough to offer their thoughts just for Not a Newsletter readers. You can read their answers below.) None told me that they’d spoken to Apple before this announcement, and all are still figuring out exactly what these changes mean. If you’re wondering why your ESP hasn’t sent a major update yet explaining how they’re handling this news from Apple, it’s because they’re still figuring things out for themselves.

• Your open rate is likely about to change, but not in the way you might expect — I’ve seen some stories suggest that your open rate might suddenly drop when these updates roll out. Based on the conversations I’ve had, I’d expect exactly the opposite to happen. Apple will likely be screening emails on behalf of readers, which might make it look — at least to that tracking pixel — like your email had been opened, even if it hadn’t. There’s going to be a moment when you look at your open rate one day and think that you’ve suddenly written the best subject line of all time. I’m here to break it to you: Many of these opens will not be coming from a real person. (Sorry.)

• The more data-savvy your organization is, the more this will require a shift in the way you measure success: There are lots of different Not a Newsletter readers: Those who work for newsrooms, for non-profits, for businesses/in the eCommerce space, and those who have personal newsletters. But when it comes to this Apple update, I’m thinking of you all in three buckets:

  • Extremely data-savvy organizations — These are typically large newsrooms or eCommerce sites that are tracking data from multiple sources, including an ESP.
  • Somewhat data-savvy organizations — These are usually smaller newsrooms, non-profits, small businesses, or more established creators, who do a lot with data, but get most of it from their ESP.
  • Organizations that use data in a limited way — These are usually creators who are relying on just a handful of metrics, almost exclusively from their ESP. (So you know: I fall into this bucket with Not a Newsletter!)

If you’re in the first bucket, you’re going to be just fine — you’re already looking closely at a wide variety of metrics, from habit to conversion, and connecting the dots between a user’s email behavior and on-site behavior. You may need to make changes to certain triggered emails or habit-based metrics, but you’re the kind of organization that has the technical and data chops to handle an update like this.

If you’re in the third bucket, you’re also probably going to be alright. You’re the kind of email user who relies heavily on 1-to-1 conversations with readers, or who cares most about list growth or the percentage of readers converting from a free subscription to a paid subscription. Those metrics won’t be affected by this change.

What I worry most about are users in that second bucket. You’re the kind of organization that often builds destination newsletters — emails where the reading experience takes place inside the inbox, and that doesn’t require a click. For organizations like yours, tracking reader habit — how frequently a reader reads your newsletter — is a crucial indicator of success, and much of that metric is dictated by open rate. You might also be driving significant revenue from advertising, and those sponsorships are typically sold based on how many readers open your newsletter. Without reliable open rate data, selling newsletter ads gets a little more complicated. (I’ll talk in a moment about how I think this might work going forward.) 

And one more thing: This second bucket includes organizations that often scale their newsletter via paid acquisition strategies, like promoting a newsletter on Facebook or Twitter. Part of that strategy involves carefully monitoring the engagement of those new subscribers to see if they’re opening emails or not — if not, those readers are usually removed quickly from the list to prevent deliverability issues. For small teams trying to maintain a healthy list, things are about to get much more complicated.

• So what does this actually mean for deliverability? — At this point, I’ve still got more questions than answers. I highly recommend reading this piece, from ConvertKit’s Alyssa Dulin and Nathan Barry, about the impact on deliverability. As Alyssa and Nathan explain, there’s a catch-22 at play here:

  • Inboxes, including those run by Apple, don’t want you to send emails to unengaged readers.
  • Most ESPs look at two key metrics — open rate and click rate — to determine whether or not a reader is engaged.
  • If Apple’s telling your ESP that readers are opening emails even when they’re not, you might accidentally send emails to readers who no longer want them.
  • Apple, among other inboxes, may then punish you for not removing these unengaged readers — who, again, appear to be engaging! — by sending your newsletter to the spam folder.

And to make things more complicated: The larger your list is, the more you’ll end up paying your ESP to send emails.

So yeah, there’s all of that.

Now, I expect a few things to change. One is that many of these engagement metrics may start to lean more heavily on click data to decide if a reader is engaged, or may use other predictive signals to identify who’s actually reading. Another is that organizations may start sending more of those double opt-in types of emails — but instead of sending them at the start of the relationship with a reader, they’ll send them after a reader’s been subscribed for a while. (I remember seeing musician Scott Miller perform live, and every few songs, he’d look out at the crowd and ask, “Y’all still with me?” This’ll be the email equivalent of that.)

Here's an email we went at BuzzFeed to win readers back. It offered readers the chance to opt back in to newsletters — otherwise, with no action, they'd be removed from the list.

The ESPs have a lot invested in this, too, since many of you send via their shared IPs. (If you’re not sure if you send via a shared IP, it probably means you send via a shared IP.) If their IP addresses see a dip in reputation, it could cause major problems for their customers. Many ESPs told me that they’re already working on new deliverability solutions.

And I’d expect that going forward, especially for small newsrooms or creators, one of the key questions you’ll be asking before migrating to a new ESP is: How does your ESP handle email deliverability? That’s a good thing — it means ESPs will need to put more resources into making sure your emails consistently land in the inbox.

• I’m monitoring other potentially big changes, too — I’m curious about:

  • What happens to the email ad industry? — As I wrote about last month, many newsletters price their offerings based on how engaged their list is. For every thousand readers who open, they’ll charge an advertiser a certain rate. But if open rates are less accurate, I’d expect to see many newsletters to shift to a flat-rate fee, or a performance model, where advertisers pay based on the number of clicks on their link. Audience surveys and research will become more important when setting rates.
  • What happens to paid acquisition strategies? — Growing your list via paid channels or contests will be more risky. I’d expect, at least in the short term, that many companies will start to use double opt-in strategies in tandem with paid acquisition to weed out less engaged users, and they’ll look more closely at click rates to determine early engagement. Tools like Anyword’s (formerly Keywee) loyalty score might also become more valuable as part of a paid acquisition strategy.
  • How will this affect A/B testing?— In most ESPs, you can select which metric to track when testing: Opens or clicks. I’d expect to see a heavy shift towards clicks as part of any testing strategy. And while open rates might be less accurate, I think they’re still going to be somewhat useful as part of a testing strategy. If I’m testing, for instance, to see which performs better — “Dan Oshinsky, Not a Newsletter” or “Not a Newsletter” — I’ll still be able to see which is the winner. Yes, the open rates may be a bit higher than usual, but with a big enough sample size, both the A and B samples should be equally inflated, and the data should point you in the direction of the winner. I wouldn’t encourage you to A/B test around open rates too often, but it might be useful for limited cases like this.
  • What happens to send-time optimization? — To me, this feels like one of the real losers of this change. If you can’t rely on open rate data, then it’s going to be tough to trust metrics that predict when a user might be most likely to open an email. (That being said: Newsletters that focus on building habit by sending at a consistent time should be just fine.)

• What metrics can I track now? — Here’s where we get to the good news, and I think there’s a lot of good news to report! When I think about measuring success for newsletters, I usually start with four buckets: Engagement, habit, growth, and monetization.

There are still going to be opportunities to measure success in each of these buckets, no matter what it is you do with your newsletter:

  • Engagement — Some statistics, like open rate or click-to-open rate (the number of emails clicked divided by emails opened), are likely going to be too unreliable to measure. But click tracking should be unaffected by this change, which means that click rate (emails clicked / emails sent) will still work, as will metrics like clicks / 1000 (total clicks per thousand emails sent) or clicks per subscriber (how many links did the average user click on in a single email). A tool like Google Analytics will still be useful for measuring how much traffic (total clicks) your newsletter drives to your site, and how long a reader spends (engaged minutes) once they’re there. And let’s not forget about one of email’s true strengths: The ability to reply directly to readers right from the inbox! I would expect that more of you will start measuring direct, 1-to-1 engagement — conversations started, customers served, questions answered, etc. — in some way going forward.
  • Habit — Many ESPs automatically track a subscriber’s level of engagement, using some sort of tiered system (engaged —> active —> passive —> disengaged) or star rating (1 to 5 stars). Many of these factor in open rate, though I expect to see the ESPs start to weigh clicks more heavily. But I believe in the long run, these metrics will still be very useful — and perhaps one of the north star metrics for small publishers or creators. For years, my first question to many newsrooms has been, “What’s your open rate?” Going forward, I’d expect it to be, “What percentage of your audience is highly engaged?”
  • Growth — This will be most unaffected by this update. Monthly list growth will be a key indicator, as will the conversion rate on landing pages or growth modules, like a pop-up. For paid acquisition, cost per lead (the cost of getting one new email address) and cost per acquisition (the cost to turn that user into a customer) still matters. Some will create custom metrics, like Morning Brew’s HQ CAC, to track paid acquisition efforts. Larger organizations will also want to keep an eye on unsubscribe rate, or create new metrics, like risk, to monitor reader dissatisfaction.
  • Monetization — For many of you, metrics around monetization will become even more important. For newsrooms or non-profits with a reader revenue strategy (a subscription, membership, or donation), or businesses selling a product or services, you’re going to be asking all sorts of questions: Which emails lead to a purchase? What’s the average revenue per user or lifetime value of an email subscriber? What’s the conversion rate among newsletter subscribers? And publishers will look especially carefully at email’s impact on churn, keeping tabs on the percentage of paying supporters who are also email subscribers. (The higher the number, the likelier they’re reading your work regularly, and the likelier they are to continue to support your work in the future.) For some newsrooms, tracking other metrics — ad revenue or affiliate revenue — might also be in the mix.

• Can the email world keep moving forward without open rates? — Building a successful newsletter without email tracking data can absolutely be done. One of my Inbox Collective clients is The Markup, a privacy-focused newsroom that announced, from Day 1, that they wouldn’t track any email data — opens, clicks, device used, or location — for their users. (The team at Revue custom-built this for them.) Their email strategy relies on many of the metrics I’ve mentioned above. But they’ve also been smart about using one tried-and-true strategy to learn more about their audience:

Asking them.

Through reader surveys, you can learn a lot about your audience: What types of content they like or dislike; what value they get from your newsletter; where they live or what type of work they do; and so on. For many of you, sending an annual reader survey will be hugely helpful in understanding your audience — and for ad-driven businesses, that data will be a big part of your pitch to advertisers.

Small-to-mid-sized organizations are also going to need to get more familiar with progressive profiling — the process of slowly gathering data by asking your readers small questions over time. eCommerce sites have smartly done this for years (if you’ve bought any customized product online, you’ve probably taken a survey like this at some point), and I’m starting to see large publishers, like The Washington Post, move into progressive profiling, too.

The Washington Post asks readers what they're interested in, then recommends content to them.

For small publishers, start by making a change to your landing page, like this example from The Gist, where they ask readers one question after they enter their email address — Do you live in one of these countries/cities? — and then use that data to personalize the stories in a reader’s newsletter.

The Gist asks readers what city they live in, then personalizes newsletters based on location.

Or it might mean asking readers a few questions within a welcome email or regular newsletter to see what types of content you’re interested in, tagging readers based on that data, and then using that to personalize the CTA to become a subscriber, member, donor, or customer. (Brennan Dunn of Right Message shared a few suggestions for testing out progressive profiling and data tracking, if you want to go deeper on the subject.)

You’ll still be able to get data from your readers, but it’ll be information they voluntarily choose to give you. That represents a big step forward for both senders and subscribers.

• Any last thoughts before we hear from the ESPs themselves? — Going forward, you might need to need to think both like an eCommerce player, using progressive profiling and collecting data in multiple places (your ESP, CRM, Google Analytics, etc.), while also thinking like a nimble newsletter creator, leaning into 1-to-1 conversations to better understand your audience. Keep an eye out for updates from your ESP as they adjust their metrics to better suit this new email landscape. Larger organizations are also going to want to think about expanding into other channels that can complement email, like SMS, podcasts, or print/digital editions — any channel where you also have control over the relationship with your audience, and can monitor success.

Most of all: Don’t panic. This is a shift, but I think it’s a welcome one. As an industry, we’ll start asking more questions of our audience and thinking about new ways to measure success. In the end, if you’re sending great email, and working every day to serve your audience as best you can, you’re going to be fine.

• What do the ESPs think about all of this? — I reached out to ten ESPs for comment, and several kindly shared their thoughts with Not a Newsletter. (Others told me, understandably, that they were still trying to figure out what these changes might mean for their customers, and declined to comment.) I asked each two key questions: 

  1. What impact will this have on your users?
  2. For customers who might be worried about the impact of these changes on their email data, what would you like to tell them?

I’ve republished their answers in full below, so you can hear directly from them.

Aweber

Tom Kulzer, founder and CEO of Aweber, wrote a fascinating blog post about the privacy implications of the change, arguing, “On the surface, the privacy angle looks great to most people. However, this move further erodes privacy on the web and puts your data squarely in the hands of a very small number of large companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook.” I’d recommend reading the entire post — Aweber not only predates Gmail, but they’ve actually been around longer than Google itself (!). Tom’s seen all sorts of changes in the email space over the previous two decades, so his perspective is particularly worth noting.

He also shared a few additional answers just with Not a Newsletter:

“As the post mentions, I think this change will require users to re-benchmark what they consider good vs. bad open rates, but I don’t foresee the doom and gloom that many other places have been writing about. 

“I would redirect ‘worry’ about email data to more important things like providing valuable email content to their subscribers that solves their problems and enhances their lives. There will always be sources of data to make decisions from, but those sources will continue to evolve just as they have for the past 20+ years that email marketing has existed.”

ConvertKit

Alyssa Dulin, ConvertKit’s deliverability and compliance manager, said:

“The biggest impact Apple’s announcement will have on our users is that open data will become even less reliable, making it tough to maintain a healthy list. Since Apple’s change will automatically open emails for subscribers regardless of their actual activity, users will need to rely on more data points in order to determine which subscribers should be removed from their list to maintain healthy deliverability.

“For customers who are concerned about the impact these changes will have on them I would say: although this change might seem scary, I think it presents an opportunity for senders to start focusing on metrics that are better indicators of engagement. This also presents a great opportunity for senders to become more strategic and creative with their calls to action in order to influence more clicks. List cleaning will become more difficult, but senders can lean on sending regular opt-in confirmation emails to maintain a healthy reputation.”

CM Group

CM Group, which includes Campaign Monitor, Emma, and SailThru, published this note to customers:

“There are still aspects of this change that are not yet fully understood (i.e. how Apple will determine what a tracking pixel is versus any other image used in an email, and how this will affect desktop users, to name a few) as the beta version of the Apple update does not yet have these features enabled. Once Apple makes this available we will be testing across our products and will provide further updates.

“We are confident that there is ample time for these changes to be understood and for email marketers, CRM professionals, and organizational leaders focused on owned experiences and first-party data to respond effectively.”

Customer.io

Mike Auldredge, deliverability services manager at Customer.io, said:

“An important deliverability best practice for senders is Engagement Filtering. That’s when you send your emails to people who consistently engage with your emails or product while removing people who haven’t. Open rates have been a poor proxy for engagement for a while now. Some email clients automatically download images (including the pixels used for open tracking), some automatically block them — either way, open rates don’t mean what you think you mean. At Customer.io, We recommend Engagement Filtering on link clicks in email, or, even better, people’s actual engagement with your product.

“Metrics specific to your company are always a better bet than open rates for tracking engagement. For example, targeting your marketing emails to people who recently logged in to your platform or used your services will produce better results. Your inbox placement will be better, and you’ll see better business results as well.

“While Apple will no longer allow open tracking, the following tips are infinitely more valuable when you’re identifying engaged people who want to receive email from your brand:

• Set clear messaging expectations upfront. It can be as simple as a few sentences on your signup form or letting customers pick which emails to receive. Never assume that someone signing up for your service also wants to receive general marketing emails.

• Work with your marketing team to ensure that all your emails are relevant to a person’s relationship with your brand.

• Permanently remove recipients from your email lists that don’t actively utilize your application or service.

“Your business-specific data is always the most valuable resource for identifying your most active recipients. You’re already collecting it — now put it to some good use!”

Klaviyo

Kady Srinivasan, senior vice president and global head of marketing for Klaviyo, said:

“First and foremost, there’s still a lot to learn. Apple is just now releasing the beta version of this update, but we don’t know everything yet. That being said, from what we know, there will definitely be some real implications, but I don’t see it as a reason to panic. As marketers we’ve dealt with changes like this in the past, when things like CCPA and GDPR were introduced — and we all figured out how to adjust and adapt in a way that actually made the experience better for customers. 

“As our CEO and co-founder said on LinkedIn last week, Apple’s moves will benefit consumers who choose to opt in to sharing their data with the companies and service providers they truly trust, and that’s great news for the online businesses that are conscientious about how they build and nurture owned relationships.

“Rahm Emanuel famously said ‘a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste.’ I look at this new change as a great opportunity, actually! In my 20+ years of experience as an ecommerce merchant and marketer, I have seen that the brands that truly go on to become businesses are those that share three characteristics: 1.) They have a great product that customers love; 2.) They build great experiences for their customers; and 3.) They have a strong values-led brand. If you are working on building these fundamentals, you won’t be as buffeted by changes. If you are relying on email to drive eyeballs or other vanity metrics, it will be a long road ahead. In fact I predict that the competitive field will get winnowed down by getting rid of sub-par product based companies.

“Of course we will continue to monitor the situation as well as continue to educate our customers on best practices, through blog posts like our Customer Evangelist, Val Geisler, did last week, webinars like the one we’re participating in with Nosto and Common Thread Collective on June 16th, and more. We’ll all get through this together!”  

Mailchimp

Joe Uhl, chief architect and vice president of engineering at Mailchimp, said:

“We’re aware of Apple’s recent announcement about its new Mail Privacy Protection feature, which will likely affect how marketing platforms report email opens. While we expect these changes won’t be available to most Apple Mail users for some time, we’re actively testing their latest beta and assessing what changes might need to be made in our product so that our users can continue to have the best delivery, best content, and most engagement with their Mailchimp marketing efforts. We’ll keep our users updated as we learn more and develop our plan.”

Revue

Revue discussed these changes in a recent newsletter, explaining: 

“This change will force us to think about how to mitigate the loss, to provide more tools to increase and measure meaningful engagement. The fact that there’s now a blind spot in the funnel towards these deeper metrics is unfortunate, but it’s also motivation for us to keep building tools to support our creators in their newsletter journey. 

“We’re still in the process of working out exactly how this change will work, and what we can do to help our creators — but rest assured we’re working on it, and will keep a close eye on any developments.”

Substack

Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack, said:

“We’re not hugely concerned about this for Substack. I think this could be a bigger issue for email marketers, since the open rate means so much in that context. For Substack, the biggest possible disruption is that open tracking could be affected for anyone using Apple Mail, which might be a slight bummer for publishers who are focused on open rates. But when it comes to a paid-subscription model, the open rates don’t matter as much as total views of a story, mailing list growth, and especially revenue growth. In a way, this helps put writers on better rails when it comes to thinking about the right metrics to pay attention to. To a large extent, open rates measure the loyalty of people on your mailing list and the ‘clickability’ of your subject lines, but they don’t give much of an indication about the quality of your reporting or writing.

“Plus, we’re not in the data-gathering game – we’re in the subscription-revenue-maximization game.”

A few final resources: For newsrooms, non-profits, or creators trying to track data in new places, I’ve got a few more resources for you:

And if you want to read more on this topic, a few more additional links I’d recommend:

For Your Reading / To-Do List

  • This is very neat: Ben Thompson, whose Stratechery newsletter was one of the first big subscription newsletter products, announced that he built his own tech stack for newsletters, podcasts, and SMS. (This includes that OAuth tie-in with Spotify that I wrote about last month.) He detailed his strategy here.
  • On the Klaviyo blog, Justine Jenkins talked about post-purchase emails that really engage readers. Take a close look at the order confirmation emails in here — those emails often open at incredibly high rates, so don’t be afraid to inject voice and personality into those messages!
  • I do love learning from others who use email in a business I don’t understand well. Point in case: This guide from Tom Brown of Mews about ways that hotels can get guests ready for their visit (and upsell them in the process).
  • If you’re looking for more metrics to track when it comes to conversion, this post from Webbula’s Tejas Pitkar might be useful.
  • I wrote a little last month about the work that one newspaper group in Southern California did to build a Course around gardening. Poynter’s Kristen Hare talked to the team about what they’ve learned from the project.
  • Adweek’s Mark Stenberg had an interesting piece about Axios Local. They’ve got some impressive numbers here: They’re at 350,000 subscribers after four months, its emails average a 35% open rate, and they’re on track to do more than $4 million in advertising. (Half of that is from the Charlotte newsletter, which was formerly known as the Charlotte Agenda, and which was doing an impressive job with monetization already.) They’re also expanding into eight new cities. I’m quoted in the piece, but frankly, I did a lousy job of explaining why I think the Axios Local model has real potential. So let me try again here — by starting with the story of how we screwed up our ad strategy when I was at BuzzFeed.
    • During my time at BuzzFeed (2012-2017), we didn’t do much to monetize our newsletters. We had more than two million email addresses on our list, but we kept telling ourselves that our list simply wasn’t big enough.
    • Here’s the thing: Our sales folks were focused on big deals of $100,000 or more. Newsletter advertising, by comparison, was small potatoes. Take our biggest lifestyle newsletter when I was there: Our DIY newsletter. It went out three times per week, and at its peak, got about 100,000 unique opens per send. Based on today’s CPMs for similar products ($20-40 per thousand opens), I would’ve expected advertisers to pay anywhere from $2,000-$4,000 per send to advertise in our DIY newsletter. At those rates (and with three DIY newsletters a week), this was a product potentially worth $300,000+ per year to BuzzFeed.
    • But here was the catch: Instead of chasing several big advertisers (who’d happily pay well into the six or seven figures to advertise on our website or social platforms), we’d need to fill our newsletter slots with dozens of smaller advertisers, many of whom might be paying BuzzFeed as little as $5-10k per year to advertise with us. And our sales team wasn’t built to chase little fish — they wanted to reel in the big guys.
    • This, in a way, is what Axios Local is up against from a monetization standpoint. The Charlotte Agenda, which is the prototype for these Axios sites, was unusually good at monetizing their newsletter. They had several ad packages, from three-month-long campaigns costing $25k to small classified-like sections within the newsletter, which cost $250-300 per listing. Building that mix of ad offerings — and being willing to bring on an advertiser even if they didn’t have a huge budget — was one of the smartest things the Agenda did. (And something that other local newsrooms and newsletters should absolutely look to mimic!)
    • Now, look at Axios’s national publications for a moment. Their ad sales strategy is equally impressive. They bring in advertisers that are happy to pay five figures — per week! — to advertise in their newsletters. Some of these advertisers will gladly pay to reach new local audiences on top of the national ones. But local advertisers have different (read: much smaller) budgets, and Axios has planted their flag in cities where there may be limited advertising overlap. If Axios had launched exclusively in one geographic region, where the same grocery stores and banks were in many of their publication areas, they could go to that supermarket chain or bank and say: Hey, why don’t you advertise in all of our markets at once? You can reach your customers in all of them. That’s harder to do when you’ve got newsletters in Des Moines and Tampa — the businesses that operate in those cities are quite different.
    • Now, Axios Local does have two advantages here, and I’d expect them to capitalize on both. The Agenda had their own self-serve ad tool for classified-like ads, and they quickly transitioned that over to the new Axios site. (You can buy an event here or a job listing here. Both include a placement in a newsletter.) Buying a classified ad like this doesn’t necessarily require a sales person’s help — all they need is a form to collect the ad copy, and a tool to process the payment. (For another good example of this at the local level, check out the WhereByUs-built Letterhead product.) And now that they’ve built that self-serve tool, they can scale it to dozens of sites.
      • And for those who think the classified model doesn’t work here, consider this: As of this writing, Axios Charlotte has 267 classified ads live on their site, and 30 event listings. They charge $250 per job listing, and $300 per event. And that doesn’t include the upcharge options: $100 for a featured listing (with more visible promotion on site) or $200 to get your event into one extra day of the newsletter. Right now, the ads appearing on Axios Charlotte are worth more than $77,000, and that’s just a snapshot of what’s on their site at this moment. And remember: This is a revenue stream that requires no sales team — just a form to collect payment and copy.
    • Axios’s other advantage: They can test different ad products in different markets, and then bring the most successful ones to the rest of their properties. Des Moines can test out performance-based ads, while Minneapolis can try sponsor-driven events, and they can see what works, without the pressure that most local sites face to bring in immediate revenue. When one type of ad partnership works, they can build a playbook that they bring to the rest of their cities.
    • So it’s a fascinating opportunity! For this to work, Axios Local has to simultaneously think much smaller (in terms of the size of their deals) and much larger (in terms of the opportunity to test and scale). If they do both, they’ll be a real player in many of these local spaces.
  • Good stuff here from Eddie Shleyner of Very Good Copy, who shared some copywriting maxims — and their implications for those working in email. (Take a close look at #7 — it’s a great format to use for any emails designed to convert readers to paying customers/subscribers/donors/members.)
  • Paulius Petkevičius, who manages SEO for MailerLite, wrote a super-detailed piece on improving your SEO strategy for landing pages — including, yes, your newsletter sign-up page.
  • I liked this, from David Ramos of Ghost, about putting together a pre- and post-send checklist for every newsletter.
  • From the world of independent local news: Luke Baumgarten of RANGE, a local news newsletter covering Spokane, Washington, shared a few lessons with LION about getting his first 1,000 readers and first 100 paying supporters. 
  • Really interesting stuff: Molly Winik of SimilarWeb broke down which messaging app is most popular in 94 different countries. (No. 1 on the list in 58 countries: WhatsApp.)
  • I’m so thrilled at how many podcasts — good ones, too! — now exist about the email space. If you’re looking for some interesting conversations about email, may I recommend a few to add to your list?

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • Live email events are back! I just bought my ticket to Litmus Live in Boston this September. If you’re going to be there, too, shoot me a note at dan@inboxcollective.com — I might have to organize another Not a Happy Hour event for readers!
  • A huge congrats to the Women of Email team, which just celebrated their fifth birthday. It’s orgs like these that are making the email world — and in particular, email conferences — a much better, more welcoming space.
    • And if you’re not yet a member of Women of Email, what are you waiting for? It’s free, and you can join them here.
  • For the American Press Institute, Anita Li put together a huge report on how customer service can drive engagement and revenue for newsrooms. Make time for this one — this is something that’s absolutely crucial for the news space in the next 3-5 years.
  • News that you’ll be interested in if you spend as much time in Google Docs as I do: Google’s launched a new workflow automation tool called Google Tables. Ben Collins, the Google Sheets guru, explained what it is and how to use it.
  • From Alec Saelens of the Solutions Journalism Network: If media organizations produce solutions journalism, will they generate more revenue? (The good news: Yes, yes they will.)
  • More of this, please: The Seattle Times talked about how they focused on subscriber retention, not just conversion. (Remember: That first payment is the start of the journey, not the end!)
  • A Course launch to watch: The Wall Street Journal’s Five-Week Investing Challenge (which nicely dovetails with their stock-picking contest later this summer). The Journal team’s been doing great work lately with Courses — looking forward to seeing what they launch next!
  • Until I listened to this episode of NPR’s “Planet Money,” I had no idea that the recommendation engines that exist on basically every platform, from Amazon to Netflix, all started with one guy named Doug and a dream to build a better inbox.
  • Congrats to the team at BuzzFeed News for winning their first Pulitzer Prize. In less than a decade, BuzzFeed went from “that site you read while you’re bored at work” to “Pulitzer winner.” It’s a truly remarkable achievement — congrats to all at BuzzFeed!
  • And to my talented former colleagues at The New Yorker who fought hard for higher wages and better benefits: Congratulations! I’m thrilled that the team at Conde Nast recognizes your talent and will compensate you for the outstanding work you do.

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 Raccoon
  • A group of raccoons have a one-of-a-kind name: A gaze of raccoons.
  • Raccoons have longer hind legs than front legs, which makes them appear to be hunched over at all times. They’re also famous for their dexterity — they’re capable of scaling walls or breaking open locks.
  • If you thought, like me, that Pawnee, Indiana, was the raccoon capital of the world, you’d be mistaken. It’s Toronto, Canada, that claims the crown. Toronto’s home to a donut-stealing raccoon (“Toronto’s response to Pizza Rat,” declared the CBC), and its city government once spent $31 million Canadian (more than $25 million US) to deploy anti-raccoon trash cans. The city’s mayor, John Tory, told reporters — though I’m pretty sure this also might have been a quote from Leslie Knope: “I think the people are with us on this one, wanting to make sure we can do a better job of not only taking away their organic waste, but also making sure that we defeat the forces of the raccoon nation.” (Canadian sources close to the Google Doc say the cans are actually pretty effective. I was unable to get comment from the raccoon community.)
  • I’ve got to include one more bullet here about Toronto and raccoons, because the relationship between that city and these animals really is something. If you go on Etsy and search for “Toronto raccoon,” you’ll find dozens of delightfully twee items, from a raccoon-in-a-garbage-can mug ($20) to hand-drawn raccoon greeting cards ($4-7) to plush raccoon pillows ($36, and the seller notes that this would be a perfect item for a child’s room) to hats where the Toronto Blue Jays mascot has been replaced with a raccoon ($30).
  • But let’s not pretend like Canada’s the only country with strange raccoon ties. As proof: In 1926, before the annual Thanksgiving dinner, United States president Calvin Coolidge pardoned a raccoon, who he decided to keep as a pet. The raccoon, later named Rebecca, was taken for walks, on a leash, on the White House lawn. 

Anyway, the Raccoon! 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.