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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: April 2022

Welcome to the April 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!

Inside this issue: A big announcement (I’m heading back to Denmark in the fall and would love you to join me for a workshop all about email!), plus suggestions on which data to measure with email, stories about newsrooms using SMS in creative ways, tons of links from the Creator space, amazing advice from Mel Brooks, and more!

Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter? Find the full archive at this link.

-Dan 

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

Tom Toro / The New Yorker

This Month in Email Headlines

For Your Reading / To-Do List

  • There’s some great stuff in this story from Greg Piechota, researcher-in-residence at INMA, about managing a portfolio of newsletters. But I especially wanted to share one fascinating insight from Greg:
    • Typically, when I work with a publisher, I try to break down newsletter data — everything from open rates to revenue metrics — into one of four key categories:
      • Growth
      • Engagement
      • Conversion
      • Retention
    • But Greg’s taken all these metrics and identified three categories: Popularity, activity, and loyalty. (I know, four to three doesn’t seem like a big deal — but I love how he’s done it!) Here’s how Greg explained it:

Popularity metrics include: the list size, list’s growth rate, opt-ins, deliveries, leads for new email subscribers, and cost per lead.

Activity metrics are: opens and open rate, click and click-through rate, opens and clicks per opt-in, clicks to opens, replies and reply rate, sessions, time and pageviews referred by emails, conversions to subscribers and conversion rate, cost per subscriber acquisition.

Loyalty metrics may be: number of different emails per user, proportion of subscribers signed up to any or selected emails, proportion of subscribers who opened or clicked any or selected emails, customer lifetime value of newsletter subscribers, satisfaction and advocacy scores, such as NPS.

  • Anyway, read Greg’s full story here. (Note: This is paywalled and just for INMA members. If you’re not an INMA member, you should consider joining — they do great work!).
  • I loved this story, from Cristina Kadar of the Swiss newsroom NZZ, about how they pulled together lots of data sources into new dashboards — and even created new metrics — to help their team better understand and act on data.
  • This was a great behind-the-scenes story from Documented’s Fisayo Okare about rebuilding their newsletter using reader surveys and interviews. Kudos to their team for spending so much time with readers to understand their needs — and then translating that feedback into a lovely new newsletter.
  • A few stories from the news + newsletter space:
    • You might not know that Nathan Barry, who created ConvertKit, also runs a local newsletter in his hometown of Boise, Idaho. He documented how they’ve grown the team and built a brand for the From Boise newsletter.
    • Interesting stuff from The Ken, a business news site that covers India and Southeast Asia. They already have a paid subscription offering, but now they’re building a bundle just for their premium newsletters. Their Praveen Krishnan explained why in this post.
    • Ken Doctor, who launched the Lookout Local newsroom in Santa Cruz, California, walked through lessons from their first 18 months, including some great insights into the monetization side of the business.
      • Full disclosure: I’ve done some work with Ken and his team through Inbox Collective.
    • Le Monde launched a new English language site, plus a flagship newsletter to go with it. Also of interest: They’re one of the first legacy newsrooms I’ve seen that’s using Stripe (which handles payments for many indie newsletters, like those hosted on Substack) to allow them to expand payments to new markets.
    • If you’re a Digiday member, you might want to make time for this guide to newsletter best practices for publishers, written by Sara Guaglione.
    • And for InPublishing, Sarah Ebner, the head of newsletters for the Financial Times, looked at a few newsletter trends for 2022, including subscriber-only products.
  • Kaleigh Moore broke down some data from Klaviyo around best practices for subject lines. There are a lot of great insights in here — for instance, shorter subject lines outperformed longer ones — but here’s your evergreen reminder: Don’t assume that the stuff that works for other newsletters will work for you! Use these sorts of insights as a starting point, but then test things out to see what your readers will respond to.
  • This was so great, from Ann Handley, and so timely during our current moment: “6 Strategies for Writing About the Hard Stuff.”
  • I got a few good ideas from this post from Aweber’s Sean Tinney about best practices for calls to actions. (The idea to A/B test first-person vs. second-person CTAs is one I’ll absolutely be trying soon.)
  • This was fascinating, from Connie Chan on Andreessen Horowitz’s Future site: Why China’s Version of Email Marketing Is So Effective.
    • I’ll say this again here: Email and messaging tools, like the ones Connie highlights in here, are complementary tools. You don’t have to choose whether you’re Team Email or Team SMS — think about how you can use both to drive the engagement you seek.
  • Speaking of SMS, a few other stories I wanted to make sure to highlight:
  • Should you launch a newsletter on LinkedIn? This guide from Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stelzner walked through the basics of the platform.
  • Thanks to eagle-eyed reader Molly Guthrey, who spotted this nugget: Jennifer Lopez announced her engagement to Ben Affleck in, of course, her newsletter. (The subject line: “On The JLo – Exciting News!”)
  • There’s lots of good stuff happening in the Creator space. A few stories to share: 

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • Hannah Wise has been putting together a toolkit to help newsrooms better serve the disability community. It’s all in a Google Doc — and she’s accepting suggestions, comments, and ideas to improve it. Check out her work here.
  • The amazing team at the News Product Alliance is rolling out Product Kit, a series of tutorials and guides to help you better understand product strategy, product research, and product development in news organizations. There’s a ton to learn from them already — and lots more to come!
  • Katie Hawkins-Gaar, who writes the excellent newsletter My Sweet Dumb Brain, asked the question: What does success look like? I loved her answer.
  • This was fun, from Deanna deBara on the Zapier blog: “How bad idea brainstorms have helped me get braver—and better—at work.”
  • A shout-out to Jason Rodriguez, who created this excellent Email Marketing Glossary to help explain a lot of the common acronyms and email phrases you might have heard (but also might have been too afraid to ask about!).
  • And I’ll present this, without comment, from The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts column: This Family Group Text Is Now a Subscription Service.

This Month in… Mel Brooks Quotes That Are Also Good Rules to Follow for Email Marketing

Mel Brooks is a comic genius, and also a surprisingly good source of inspiration for those of us in the email space. So in 2022,  I’m closing the Google Doc with a brand new feature: Mel Brooks Quotes That Are Also Good Rules to Follow for Email Marketing! This month, let’s turn to the wisdom of “The Twelve Chairs”: 

Mel Brooks, singing the song to the "12 Chairs"
Brooksfilms

“The Twelve Chairs” opens with a song, written by Brooks, that goes:

Hope for the best, expect the worst

The world’s a stage, we’re unrehearsed

Some reach the top, friends, while others drop, friends

Hope for the best, expect the worst

I think about those words every time I launch a new newsletter. I always start with high expectations — this is going to be great! People are going to love it! But the truth is, most of the stuff I’ve launched doesn’t work, or takes a few iterations until we land on a format that works. You never really know what’s going to happen until you put something out into the world and let your audience react.

So launch, listen, and go from there. And hope for the best.

That’s all for this edition! Want to be notified when next month’s edition of Not a Newsletter is live? Sign up here:

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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.