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:
A big thank you to Litmus, this quarter’s presenting sponsor of Not a Newsletter and Inbox Collective! They’re an all-in-one marketing platform that empowers you to build, test, review, and analyze emails so you can get the most out of every email you send. Learn why 700,000+ professionals trust Litmus to make every send count.
And a thank you to this month’s other sponsors: Postmark, an email platform with stellar deliverability and a focus on customer service, and Understanding Google Analytics 4, a useful new course from The Content Technologist.
This month in Not a Newsletter, you’ll learn about:
- Tactics to help you win back as many as 15% of your inactive readers.
- How to start monetizing your independent newsletter, including best practices around pitching and pricing a membership or subscription.
- Must-haves for a welcome series or a newsletter sign-up page.
- Why the state of Utah sometimes flies mountain goats around via helicopter.
…and more!
Some news from the Inbox Collective world: A big welcome to Claire Zulkey, the new managing editor of inboxcollective.com! Claire’s a fabulously talented editor (and the writer behind Evil Witches, a newsletter for mothers). I’m thrilled to have her here — she’ll be making the stories you read on our website a whole lot better.
Plus, some news about Dine & Deliver, presented by LiveIntent: We’re ready to announce the next three dates for our invite-only newsletter dinners! We’ll be in:
- Boston on May 11
- New York on June 15
- And if you’re going to the Online News Association conference, great news: We’ll be in Philadelphia on August 24
You can apply to attend any of these dinners via this link.
Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter? Find the full archive at this link.
—Dan (say hi via email or LinkedIn)
This Month in Email Headlines
Stories labeled with a 🔑 may require a subscription to read.
- 🔑 Newsletter publishers say they continue to see uptick in revenue despite advertising slowdown (Digiday)
- And in related news:
- Klaviyo conducts companywide layoffs (TechCrunch)
- Substack invites newsletter writers to invest (Axios)
- A former Protocol editor buys part of the company’s email list to launch something new (Nieman Lab)
- 🔑 Is David Sirota of the Lever a journalist or an activist? The answer is yes (Airmail)
- 🔑 The Nightmare of AI-Powered Gmail Has Arrived (NY Mag)
- The influencers getting rich by teaching you how to get rich (Vox)
New on Inbox Collective
📬 How to Set Up a Reactivation Campaign to Win Back Inactive Email Subscribers
A reactivation campaign should be a part of any good email strategy. These campaigns keep your list clean and help you stay out of the spam folder — all while converting some of your inactive readers back into active readers. A successful reactivation campaign might win back anywhere from 5-15% of your inactive list and convince them to start opening your newsletters again.
But when I talk with clients and readers about these, the feedback is usually the same: Yes, we know we *should* do these, but how do we actually run a winback campaign?
So I’ve outlined everything I know about reactivation emails in this guide: How to identify your inactive readers, what emails to send to them (and when), and how Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection affects your ability to run a successful campaign.
📬 How to Start Monetizing Your Indie Newsletter
How do you know when it’s time to start monetizing? And what are the different ways newsletters like yours monetize?
Here’s what I’ve learned about building a subscription or membership model — from pricing to building out your content strategy — plus best practices around advertising, affiliate revenue, selling products or merch, and more. Let’s walk through your options and put together a roadmap that will work for you and your newsletter.
*SPONSORED* How Three Successful Newsletters Used Beehiiv to Grow Strategically — And How You Can, Too
Best-in-class newsletters can put their acquisition sources under a microscope. They can see which channels drive both short-term growth and long-term engagement. And all of it starts by understanding what to measure and how to measure it.
By slicing and dicing the data, seeing opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and even paid conversions by source, newsletter operators can get the data they need to make the decisions that matter.
In this case study, let’s look at how three newsletter-first businesses — Lookout Media, Payload, and Fantasy Life — used Beehiiv’s advanced 3D Analytics dashboards to identify which channels to invest in to successfully grow their newsletters.
📬 How a Survey Can Improve Your Newsletter Strategy
If you don’t incorporate reader surveys and feedback into your newsletter strategy, you’re missing out on a chance to build a better newsletter.
Here’s a great example of this, from Ephraim Gopin, a fundraising and marketing expert who writes the Daily Dose of Nonprofit newsletter. At the end of 2022, he ran a big survey of his audience to collect feedback. Among his questions:
- What did they like?
- What would they be willing to pay for?
- When would they be most likely to read a newsletter?
- Did they use Dark Mode on their devices?
And based on that feedback, he made some big changes to his newsletter. In this article, he’ll walk you through what he asked, why he asked it, and how to use feedback to improve your newsletter, too.
Sign up for an email alert when we publish something on a topic you care about. We’ll only email you when we publish in a topic area of your choosing (at most, once per week).
SPONSORED: Tools + Resources I Recommend
Litmus helps you make every send count
- I’ve been a Litmus user since 2013 — it was one of the most valuable tools in my toolbox at both BuzzFeed and The New Yorker to help my team design and send emails readers loved. I learned quickly that when you’re building emails with a big team, you need a process to keep everything on track towards the moment you hit “send.” Litmus helped us figure out that perfect workflow. And over the years, I’ve recommended it to clients big and small to help them with every stage of their email workflow, from design to QA.
- While you may not have full say over the demands placed on your email marketing team, you do have a say in how your team gets things done. That’s where your email workflow comes into play. The art of a great workflow is defined less by control and more by flexibility. Instead of creating rigid rules for your team to follow, think more about creating light structure.
- The team at Litmus tapped into their expertise to give your current workflow an efficiency boost. The Ultimate Email Workflow Toolkit is the one collection of resources you need. They’ll walk you through the three phases of improving your workflow — Planning, Build & QA, and Review — with worksheets, templates, and checklists to take your email workflow to the next level.
Learn about how email works with Postmark
- Email is a lot of things, but one thing it doesn’t have to be is complicated. Postmark is an email delivery service with stellar deliverability and a focus on customer service. Part of their mission is making email easier — and even fun! — to understand for both technical and non-technical folks alike. I love that Postmark’s created a bunch of resources to help anyone learn more about how email works:
- This 3-part email authentication video series takes you through bite-sized lessons about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. If you’re expecting the same old technical walkthroughs, you’re in for a surprise: Kittens, puppies, and ducklings abound. (One viewer described it as if “David Attenborough, Sigur Rós, and the email geeks had a baby.”)
- And they’ve created several webcomics all about email. They created Journey to the Inbox, which shows exactly what happens to your emails after you hit the “send” button. They published Ruthy Redemption, about scammers, spammers, and an honest email sender who gets thrown into the email spam folder pound by mistake. And they created Dun Dun Dunning, about a super-owl who helps fix issues with churn caused by credit card payment failure.
- Oh, and Postmark doesn’t just create videos and webcomics. They also built a great platform to help you send marketing newsletters and transactional email. Use the code NOTANEWSLETTER to get 50% off your first month.
Learn how to get the most out of Google Analytics 4
- Every time I’ve logged into Google Analytics recently, I’ve seen a message reminding me that the old version of GA is being phased out in summer 2023 to Google Analytics 4, or GA4. And every time, I think the same thing: Figuring out how to use GA4 is a problem for my future self.
- Except for one thing, Future Dan: Summer 2023 is almost here.
- The team at The Content Technologist has put together a fantastic resource for anyone who, like me, needs to quickly get up to speed on GA4. Their daily email course, Understanding Google Analytics 4 will not only help you navigate the transition to the new Google Analytics — it’ll also help you understand how to get the most out of this powerful new platform. When you sign up, you’ll get daily emails and videos talking you through how to use GA4, and the series was made specifically for audience editors, publishers, content marketers, and anyone else who has only thought of themselves as a “words person.” (*raises hand*) You’ll learn how to better use digital dashboards and set up GA4 to track the metrics that matter to you.
- Understanding Google Analytics 4 costs $450 — not cheap, I know, but by the end of it, you’ll understand how to get everything a media operator needs out of GA4. Don’t wait until the last moment to learn GA4. Sign up for Understanding Google Analytics 4 and start getting more out of your analytics today.
To be as transparent as possible: These are all sponsored links presented by my partners. Interested in partnering with me? Here are the ad opportunities available with Not a Newsletter + Inbox Collective, and here’s what’s available to book right now.
What Else I’m Reading
One thing I heard in my end-of-year survey was that there are sometimes too many links in Not a Newsletter, and you wanted help finding the stuff you really want to read. So I’m going to organize these links into five categories: Stories about growth, content strategy, monetization, best practices, and tests, experiments, or learnings.
Of note: Stories labeled with a 🔑 may require a subscription to read.
Growth
- Cory Brown of 99 Newsletter Project walked through some best practices for creating a landing page to convert readers to subscribers. (The big thing here that I’ll echo: Make sure there’s only one thing you can do on the page: Sign up for the newsletter. If you give them the ability to click out to other pages, you might be adding friction to the sign-up process.)
- I’ve gotten this question a lot recently: Should I launch a newsletter on LinkedIn? If that’s something on your mind, make time for this interview that The Economist’s Aaron Coultate did with Mapping Journalism’s Francesco Zaffarano about their LinkedIn product, which now reaches 2.8 million subscribers.
- And The Economist’s isn’t even the biggest newsletter on LinkedIn, per this chart from Reletter. The biggest is Harvard Business Review’s Management Tip of the Week, which reaches 4.4 million people.
Content Strategy
- I always love a good story about a newsroom investing more in Courses, which is why I loved this piece, from Digital Content Next’s Esther Kezia Thorpe, about their new Course from the Financial Times, called MBA 101.
- And here’s one more from the world of Courses: Canada’s The Discourse grew their newsletter audience by 30% after launching two Courses.
- These are two great examples of orgs that launched a Course with a specific goal. For the FT, the goal was around converting readers into paying subscribers. For The Discourse, the goal was around bringing in a new audience. Understanding that big-picture goal is crucial to helping you build a great Course.
- Should you turn your newsletter into a podcast, too? (Or turn your podcast into a newsletter?) David Tvrdon of The Fix makes the case for it.
Monetization
- The team behind Jax Today, a daily newsletter in Florida, had fantastic success converting newsletter subscribers to donors through their end-of-year campaign — 5% of their total list donated. For Better News, they walked through some of the tactics and messages that worked for them.
- Full transparency: Jax Today’s an Inbox Collective client, and I worked with them on this EOY campaign.
- The Membership Puzzle Project — an amazing resource for anyone with a membership strategy — just published their final update. Here are three new articles from them I wanted to share with you:
- For Growth Croissant, Reid DeRamus walked through how to build models to predict the future of a subscription or membership business.
- Selling ads for your newsletter? Matt McGarry of The Newsletter Operator put together a list of media kits to emulate, as well as some tips for what to include on these pages.
- If you want to go deeper on ad strategy: Katy Huff of MadRev chatted with the Send & Grow podcast about what advertisers want to see — from copy to clicks — when they advertise in your newsletter.
- For those in the non-profit space, I loved this post, from Claire Axelrad of NonProfitPRO, about communicating your mission to potential donors. One key, as Claire wrote: “Don’t tell me you’re a hospital foundation, a comprehensive human services agency, a symphony, a food bank, an education foundation, an animal shelter or a maritime museum. That’s an empty structure, a category. Instead, tell me something specific and meaningful that calls you to this mission.”
- Here’s a fascinating tactic, from Hearst Newspapers’s Ryan Nakashima. They introduced the ability for paying subscribers to gift readers a subscription — and found that subscribers who learned about that benefit were 9% less likely to churn. But that’s not all: Readers who received those links as a gift were asked to register before reading, and 20% chose to do so, which gave Hearst thousands of new readers they could target with subscription offers.
- What’s the future of the creator landscape? Antler’s Ollie Forsyth laid out where things are now — and included a few predictions for 2023 and beyond. (I’ll second the “return of part-time creator” prediction. I’m seeing a lot of this in the email space, and I’ve got stories coming on inboxcollective.com about it.)
- Free trials can be a useful tactic to convert readers into paying subscribers or customers. Ceren Kurban of UserGuiding put together a list of emails to send to users during a free trial to get them to engage — and, ultimately, convert.
Best Practices
- What should every onboarding campaign contain? Automation Ninjas’s Lucy Barfoot walked through some best practices. (This guide was intended for someone selling a product to their audience, but the tips should apply to just about anyone.)
- For more on the topic of onboarding, check out this story from The Washington Post’s Anjali Iyer for INMA: “Personalized subscriber onboarding results in higher engagement, retention for Washington Post.”
- The teams at Litmus and AWeber just published a lovely guide about the foundations of copywriting for email. You can download it here.
- I already shared Ephraim’s great piece on surveys, but if you want to go deeper on why audience research matters, check out this interview that The Atlantic’s Gina Bulla did with Madeleine White of The Audiencers. I especially loved these two questions that Gina’s team asks before deciding if they want to do a piece of research:
- Is it actionable, or will we make a decision based on the research?
- Is it really a question that our audience can answer for us?
- Or, to put it another way: Make sure you’re asking something to learn something.
Tests, Experiments, or Learnings
- The consulting team at Oracle Marketing put together a big presentation on email trends for 2023. Two interesting things from their report: Dark mode represents a growing opportunity for newsletters, and AMP adoption has stalled — mostly due to the lack of support in Apple Mail.
- Editor & Publisher’s Rob Tornoe wrote about how three publications in Alabama — The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times, and Mobile’s Press-Register — went digital-only. But what really caught my eye was this nugget about how quickly they’re willing to pivot away from an unsuccessful newsletter:
Every newsletter they launch has a three-month period where they track what does and doesn’t work in an attempt to refine the results. If an idea just doesn’t work out, they’re not afraid to ditch it and move on to a different newsletter.
- This is something I tell clients when launching a new newsletter: Give yourself a window of time to test it out. Identify metrics — growth, engagement, monetization, or direct feedback via surveys — that you’re going to measure. And at the end of that window of time, regroup as a team and decide: Do you want to keep doing this newsletter?
- The best organizations are the ones that are willing to move onto the next idea — they don’t double down on something that isn’t working. Kudos to the Advance Alabama team for doing exactly this with their own newsletter strategy.
Stuff I Loved This Month
- The team at Mailmodo created a neat tool, Dark Mode Checker, to see how your email looks in Dark Mode before you hit send.
- Can you create an entire newsletter landing page — including the HTML for the page — using only ChatGPT? Rolf Mistelbacher did.
- This 13-word-long email from Sticker Mule is proof that sometimes, a great call to action is all you need.
- Should you set goals for your work, even if what you’re working on is a hobby? Wesley Verhoeve made a great case for why the answer should be yes.
- There was a moment in American politics when email was used to mobilize voters to take action. So how did we get to the current moment, when politicians are sending emails with subject lines like “Your flight confirmation-ZWCLXT 20NOV” to try to get people to donate? The Baffler’s Arvin Alaigh explained it all in this piece.
Find Your Next Email Job
If you’ve ever emailed me or DMed me to ask, “Can you recommend a great person for this newsletter role?”, I’ve got good news: I absolutely can — thanks to the Inbox Collective talent collective!
📬 If you’re an employer looking to hire someone for an email role, join the collective. When you join, you’ll immediately get access to a pool of 60+ curated candidates looking for new jobs in the email space! (I keep adding more folks every month!)
📬 If you’re actively searching for or are open to a conversation about a new job, you can submit your application to the collective here! Once you join the collective, companies can message you directly about openings on their team.
This is a matchmaking service for email roles — and it’s free for everyone. Join today, and let’s get a few of you into amazing new roles in 2023!
Resources for Newsletters
- Newsletter Strategy Positioning Brief — a helpful doc for anyone who might want to launch a newsletter
- This one’s a worksheet that’s been floating around the email world for a few years now. Bloomberg’s Meagan Hess first shared it with Not a Newsletter, and I’ve adapted and added to it for your use
- *EXCLUSIVE TO NOT A NEWSLETTER* Which Is The Right ESP For Your Indie Newsletter? — a deep dive into choosing among AWeber, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Ghost, Mailchimp, and Substack
- *NEW* 52 Ways to Grow Your Email List — a guide to ways you can grow your email list using both organic and paid strategies
- Email Marketing Glossary — a guide to email marketing acronyms and terms
- Email Preview — a tool for saving emails as a .pdf, .png, or .jpg
- *EXCLUSIVE* How to Write a Great Subject Line For Your Newsletter — best practices to A/B testing ideas to help you send subject lines that get opened
- *EXCLUSIVE* 30 Ideas to Improve Your Newsletter This Year — tips and ideas to take your newsletter to the next level in 2023
Shoutouts + Thank Yous
- Thanks to the team at Ghost for highlighting both my subject line story and Yanna-Torry Aspraki’s Ask a Deliverability Expert column in their newsletter.
- Thanks to David C. Baker for the shout-out to Ephraim’s great survey story.
The (Not a) 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. For years, I closed every edition of Not a Newsletter by highlighting one of these animals. But in 2021, I ran out of Google Doc animals to feature. Then I had an idea: What if I commissioned an artist to design new animals just for Not a Newsletter?
So to close out this edition of Not a Newsletter, I want to spotlight one of these animals in a feature I call… the (Not a) Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month!
Thanks to Anna Kosak for designing this month’s animal: The Goat!
- A group of goats is known as a “herd.”
- Goats, like humans, have accents.
- They also have unusual stomachs. A goat’s stomach has four compartments and works 24 hours a day to break down things in their bellies.
- Mountain goats are technically not goats. Per National Geographic, they’re officially “goat-antelopes.”
- But I mentioned mountain goats anyway because you truly have to watch this video, of mountain goats in Utah being moved via helicopter. (The state sometimes needs to replenish the population in less goat-dense areas.)
- There’s a long history of goats serving in the British armed forces, dating back to the 1700s. One notable goat who served: William Windsor I, who, unfortunately, was demoted after attempting to headbutt a military drummer. (Billy, as he was known, was reinstated to the rank of Lance Corporal in 2006, and retired from active duty in 2009.)
- In 2003, I spent a summer working as an intern at a small news outlet called States News Service. (Imagine the Associated Press, if the AP only had one office and it was in the lobby of the JW Marriott and people constantly walked in thinking it was the hotel’s business center and sat down at your desk to print out stuff.) One of my main tasks: Digging through a list of contracts handed out by the federal government every week. One week, I stumbled upon a story about a business called Goats R Us, which deployed a team of goats to handle lawn work too hilly or dangerous for humans. Naturally, I wanted to figure out who might be behind a business like Goats R Us.
- And if you’re curious: As of 2022, Goats R Us is still very much in business.
Anyway, the Goat! That’s your (Not a) 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:
