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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: April 2019

Welcome to the April 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 blocking spammy sign-ups on your list, a hack for adding video to your newsletters, a few thoughts on AMP for Email, and more!

-Dan

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

cartoon by Liz Montague

This Month in Email News

Let’s Talk About AMP

  • So let’s dive into about one of the biggest announcements of 2019: AMP for Email.
    • For those who might not have been following the AMP saga closely, here’s a refresher:
      • In February 2018, Google announced AMP for Email, with those hopes of making emails more interactive. You’d be able to create emails that had web-like elements — your readers could browse through their Pinterest boards or respond to a calendar invite, all within the email! — as long as you used AMP’s special coding language, and as long as the reader was opening the email in Gmail. But AMP for Email was only available to a small group of beta testers.
      • In March of this year, Google announced an expansion of the program. Now Yahoo, Outlook.com, and mail.ru are compatible with AMP emails. And a handful of early AMP partners showcased the work they’d done with AMP.
    • So the big question: Should you dive in and try building your emails with AMP? The answer is… probably not yet!
    • At the moment, AMP has a few key limitations:
      • It’s still only available for some inboxes, which means that if you’re coding a newsletter, you’ll have to create a fallback HTML version for a big chunk of your audience.
      • It’s going to require a fair amount of dev resources to create even a single AMP email. And if you’re building your emails using the templates in an ESP like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor, you’re out of luck — they don’t support AMP just yet. (So far, Sparkbox, Amazon, and SendGrid are the biggest players to roll out AMP integrations.)
      • Data on how readers interact with an email’s AMP elements may differ depending on which ESP you use.
    • There’s a reason why the only companies working with AMP so far are big sites like Booking.com, who have the tech and marketing resources to invest in this technology. For the rest of us, here’s my suggestion: Don’t worry about AMP for Email just yet. It’s still a ways away from being something you’ll be able to integrate into your emails.
    • But if you do want to read more about AMP: I’d suggest this introductory guide from the AMP team, and their documentation pages. Also: Read this, from a member of the Doodle team who worked on AMP, about what they learned building their AMP emails.
  • One more thing: Here’s a year-old post, from Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch, titled, “AMP for email is a terrible idea.” I don’t entirely agree with the premise — I do think that in a year (or three), AMP might be a useful thing for the average brand with a newsletter — but I do fully endorse this description of email:

See, email belongs to a special class. Nobody really likes it, but it’s the way nobody really likes sidewalks, or electrical outlets, or forks. It not that there’s something wrong with them. It’s that they’re mature, useful items that do exactly what they need to do. They’ve transcended the world of likes and dislikes.

  • For those of you following along closely at home: This doc has previously declared that email is a living room, email is an old car, and now, that email is a sidewalk. (What will email be next month? Come back in May to find out!)

For Your Reading List

How to Keep Spammy Sign-Ups Off Your Email Lists

I remember the first time a spambot attacked one of the sign-up pages at BuzzFeed. At first, we didn’t realize what was happening. We were looking at our email lists, and saw that a ton of new subscribers were signing up for our newsletters that day — exciting! But then we looked a little closer. Almost all of the subscribers were from the same domain, yahoo.co.uk, which seemed odd. And then we looked even closer: The sign-ups were coming in so quickly — dozens of new yahoo.co.uk emails every minute — that there was no way they could have been from a group of actual humans.

That’s the moment when we realized that something was seriously wrong. But we didn’t realize how much trouble we were in.

We were the victims of a spambot, which had been crawling the web looking for an email subscription form like ours. It had found the main BuzzFeed subscription page. We didn’t have any sort of authentication tool on that page to confirm that the email addresses being signed up were real, and we weren’t using a double opt-in process to add an extra layer of verification. Thousands of email addresses were being added to our lists, and those spammy emails could have caused huge damage to our email program. If those emails hit a spam trap — like a mouse trap, but for spam — a few things could have happened, according to the Campaign Monitor support team:

Your sender reputation will be damaged, causing bounce rates to increase and your deliverability (the percentage of emails that make it to the inbox) to decrease.

Our IP addresses may be added to a blacklist database, which means deliverability for you as well as other customers will be affected.

If you hit a spam trap operated by one of the major ISPs, such as Yahoo or AOL, they could permanently blacklist your sending domain.

If you hit a trap operated by an anti-spam organization, for example, Spamhaus or SpamCop, delivery of your emails to all ISPs — as well as companies who consult their databases — will be affected because they use that information to filter incoming emails.

If this happens to you, I highly recommend taking two steps: One to fix the immediate problem, and one to stop the problem in the long run:

  • In the short run: We figured out the IP address where the spambot was operating from, and blocked that IP from accessing our site. Then we removed the spammy signups from our list. Spambots often sign up email addresses from the same email domain (in this case, yahoo.co.uk), so we identified the domain, and went into our ESP to create a segment of users with that domain who’d signed up since the spam attack had started. Then we deleted the email addresses from our list. (We may have lost a handful of legitimate email addresses in the process — if a real reader with a yahoo.co.uk address happened to sign up that day, they unfortunately would have been deleted from our list as well.)
  • In the long run: We decided to add a layer of authentication into our subscription process: There are a few ways to do this:
    • Using reCAPTCHA on our sign-up boxes: Google has an excellent guide to adding reCAPTCHA to your subscription forms.
    • Using a third-party verification service on those sign-up boxes: Services like Kickbox can also help verify email addresses, and even block IP addresses that attempt to sign up too many email addresses at once. (Use this link and Kickbox will give you your first 100 email verifications free.)
    • Using a honeypot on our sign-up boxes: This is an advanced option, but it can be effective. Some developers will add what’s known as a honeypot — a hidden form within your sign-up box that only a bot would see. Then you’d set up your lists so that any email addresses that have the hidden forms filled out are automatically suppressed or deleted from your list.
    • Requiring double opt-in from all new subscribers: If you’ve ever gotten one of those “click this button to confirm your email address” emails, you know what a double opt-in looks like. It’s pretty straightforward: After a subscriber opts into a newsletter on your site, then they have to confirm their subscription via email. Subscribers that don’t complete the full opt-in process won’t get added to your list. This method is very effective, but in my experience, only about half of all new subscribers actually complete the double opt-in. You may lose some real subscribers in the process, so it’s up to you to decide if you want to add this to your email program.

My recommendation: Add authentication (like reCAPTCHA) to your sign-up forms, or require double opt-in — but you probably don’t need to do both.

A Few Newsletters Worth Mentioning

  • I’m fascinated by two new media brands that are creating a network of daily newsletters for specific local communities: WhereBy.Us and 6am City. Interestingly, both were started in the southeastern United States (WhereBy.Us is based in Miami, and 6am City is based in Greenville, South Carolina), and both are utilizing the marketing playbook (focusing on a referral program + giveaways/sweeps) that a handful of national email brands have used with considerable success.
    • They’re also both implementing what I’ll call the Waffle House strategy. For readers who might not be familiar with Waffle House: They’re a chain of restaurants that started outside Atlanta in the 1950s. The menu is simple: Mostly breakfast foods (waffles, eggs, hash browns) with a handful of lunch staples (burgers, chicken, steaks, salads) thrown in. Every location — all 2,000+ of them — has the same menu. And most locations have a nearly identical layout. That’s all by design: Once Waffle House created a blueprint for a menu and restaurant layout that worked, they were able to quickly expand across the country. What works in Springfield, Missouri, also works Springfield, Tennessee. The location changes, but the blueprint remains the same.
    • And there’s a lot of that in what WhereBy.Us and 6am City are trying. They’re building a model (unique content, marketing, and product strategies) that can be replicated in multiple cities. WhereBy.Us is now in five cities: Miami, Orlando, Portland, Seattle, and, as of March, Pittsburgh. 6am City is in six: Greenville, Charleston, and Columbia, in South Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; Lakeland, Florida; and Chattanooga, Tennessee. I love what I’ve seen from both of them — I think they’re onto something really promising.

Two local newspaper projects that I really like: The Minneapolis Star-Tribune launched Puck Drop, a newsletter about all things hockey. And in hockey-crazy Minnesota — where even the state high school hockey tournament is a big deal — this feels like a really smart newsletter play. On Long Island, Newsday launched their Power on Trial newsletter, an inside look at the trial of a former county executive who was eventually convicted on corruption charges. The newsletter was a short-run project that brought additional reporting — scenes and color — from inside the courthouse. Both are really nice examples of local news organizations doubling down on the coverage that they already do uniquely well.

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 more obscure Google Doc animals in a feature I’m calling… the Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month! This month:

the anonymous cormorant

Cormorants (scientific name: Phalacrocorax) are a family of birds typically found near the ocean. In North America, there are several types of cormorants, but my favorite is Brandt’s Cormorant, a bird found up and down the Pacific coast. It’s an unusual bird. For one, it often forages in tandem with sea lions, which seems like a strong premise for a ‘90s Disney buddy cartoon. And the other thing I learned: according to the Audubon Society, the Brandt’s Cormorant has been spotted diving to depths of 150 feet below the surface of the water. How many creatures are capable of flying 150 feet in the air and swimming 150 feet down in the ocean? That’s true versatility.

Anyway, the cormorant! 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.