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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: August 2019

Welcome to the August 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 consulting firm, and — through the end of the month, at least — 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 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 briefing at this link.

Now, onto this month’s edition! Inside, you’ll find a few lessons from my two years at The New Yorker, thoughts about shady subject line practices, and more! Have something else you think should be featured in Not a Newsletter? Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com.

-Dan

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

cartoon by Elisabeth McNair

This Month in Email News

I Worked for Two Years at The New Yorker. This Is What I Believe.

Every year, around Thanksgiving, I write a blog post that I call The Things I Believe. It’s an inventory of the year that was, as I look back on what I’ve learned and the person I am at that moment.

As as I approach my final day at The New Yorker — in September, I start full-time on Inbox Collective — I wanted to look back at two years in this newsroom. It’s been an incredible place to work, and I feel so lucky to have been a part of this team. So as I look back on my time at The New Yorker, this is what I believe:

Whatever it is you do, be the best at it — Whenever someone asks me how to get a job at The New Yorker, I always tell them: This is a place full of the best people in their field. I truly believe we have the best editors, writers, fact checkers, and artists anywhere. My colleagues are so unbelievably good at what they do — I continue to be amazed at how talented this team is. And if your ambition is to work at The New Yorker one day, keep working to be the best in your field. When you are, this place might be ready for you.

Give yourself time to focus — It’s not just that the people who work at The New Yorker are talented. It’s that they’re given the opportunity to focus on their work. It’s not uncommon to hear that a copy editor or a fact checker is going to be working on a particular piece for a few days — or longer — to make sure that the work is done right. Focus breeds excellence.

Make the extra phone call — Before The New Yorker, I’d never worked at an organization that had a dedicated fact-checking team. Our fact checkers check everything — and I do mean everything — that can be checked. Here’s a glimpse into the process, as explained through the experience of actor Daniel Radcliffe, who was once tasked with fact checking a review of a Mexican restaurant. Their attention to detail is remarkable.

Don’t take yourself too seriously — Here’s another secret of The New Yorker: If we just published lengthy profiles about Polish novelists or reported pieces about the future of modern dance, I’m not sure we’d get that many readers. What sets The New Yorker apart is the humor. This is a place that can be silly, goofy, and subversive, and that makes all the difference.

It’s been a joy being a part of this team. I’ll always be a reader — and a fan.

For Your Reading List

  • Google Analytics is rolling out a few changes to the way they measure traffic. Do read their blog post announcing the changes.
  • Vanity Fair’s Claire Landsbaum asks the question: Are we at peak personal newsletter? (No, not yet. Far from it, if I have to guess.)
  • Here’s a really good post from Campaign Monitor debunking several myths about email. They dive into misconceptions around list size, subject line length, and more. It’s worth your time.
  • Slate’s Aaron Mark wrote about some of the most misleading subject lines and “sent from” names that have landed in his inbox. One email was sent from “Rachel, me (2)”, making it appear as though it was an email from someone he knew and part of a larger thread of emails — a remarkably sketchy practice!
    • Alan Rosenberg, executive editor of the Providence Journal, also wrote about the sometimes shady emails that land in his inbox.
    • Here’s the thing: Trying to trick a reader into opening an email never pays off in the long run. Never. With email, if you overpromise and underdeliver, you’ll almost certainly end up with an email in the trash bin — or a with a reader clicking the “unsubscribe” or “spam” button.
  • Get Response’s Michal Leszczynski discussed 12 reasons why your email might be landing in spam.
  • Speaking of which: Matter’s Brett Hellman wrote about how his company’s emails ended up in email deliverability hell, and the steps they took to dig themselves out of it.
    • I don’t agree with all of the tips here (for instance, everyone should be including preheader text from the start, and subject line emojis are probably fine for 99% of Not a Newsletter readers), but I do like the way they tested and worked through the process!
  • The Idea’s Mollie Leavitt talked with Morning Brew’s Austin Rief about their referral program and new newsletter launches. And Alex Lieberman talked with Policy Genius’s Hanna Horvath about how Morning Brew actually started out as a PDF sent around daily to family and friends.
  • 6AM City’s Mary Willson wrote about how they baked engagement into their newsletter program, and announced a new membership program they’re testing out in Greenville, SC.
  • The Globe and Mail’s Garth Thomas talked with INMA about the role that newsletters play in their newsroom, and how they’re exploring premium subscription products.
  • Slate’s Ruth Graham reviewed Graydon Carter’s new newsletter, Air Mail. 
    • For those who haven’t seen it, here’s the gist of it, per Graham: “This is not a breezy note from an erstwhile editor loosed from the constrictions of the print magazine world. It’s a fat glossy magazine folded awkwardly and crammed into your inbox. You couldn’t possibly read it in one sitting.”
    • That actually made me think of a conversation I had six years ago with the founders of TheSkimm. We were talking about how they set up the structure of their email, and I asked if they had been inspired by Politico’s Playbook newsletter. It had a lot of the same elements: News sections, some commentary, a conversational voice, and birthday wishes to readers. Playbook was one of the biggest newsletters anywhere, and I just assumed it was the blueprint they’d used for TheSkimm. But they told me something I didn’t expect: When they were building out the format for their newsletter, they actually had a very different product in mind: “The Today Show.” And if you think about “Today,” you’ll see some of the parallels: Breezy discussions of the news, quick recommendations and reviews, and even that Willard Scott-esque birthday segment. They took one format and truly made it their own.
    • Of course, the secret is that you still have to adapt something for the inbox. If you’re a longtime reader of the doc, you’ve heard my schpiel about the four building blocks of great newsletters. Start with one of those, layer on the right format, and think clearly about the audience you’re trying to serve. That’s where any discussion about a new email product should start.
  • So many of you have reached out to ask: “As I set up the email program at my company, should the email team be embedded within several teams, or should everything be centralized?” My old boss Erica Futterman explained the pros and cons of each to Nieman Reports (scroll down to topic #3).
  • Here’s a novel sign-up strategy from Bloomberg: They’re using a career quiz to drive subscriptions for their new newsletter, called Work Wise. They talked to Digiday about the project.
  • The Shorenstein Center’s Heidi Legg wrote about for-profit models for local news, including several news organizations that are relying heavily on email — or built entirely around email.
  • The Facebook Journalism Project shared lessons from one of their first accelerators, and found that among a group of U.S. newspapers, and found that on average, those publishers were able to convert 5-10% of their newsletter audience to paid subscribers.
  • It’s not about newsletters specifically, but I wanted to share these basic principles from the Financial Times’s tech team. There are a few great rules here (“1. Slow down to speed up”, “8. Treat unblocking others as your priority”) that everyone should think about at their workplaces.
  • Is it email or e-mail? Grammar expert June Casagrande says… email!
    • Of course, The New Yorker still lives by e-mail and in-box. I’ll confess: I protested those spellings early on. I tried to make the case that the hyphens looked silly. And… I lost those debates. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • Email Monks talked to 27 experts in the email world about common marketing mistakes. Lots of stuff in here to watch out for!
  • I thought this was really smart, from Dani Fankhauser on the Jilt blog: Why e-commerce brands should think about segmenting those abandoned cart emails to target different audiences.
    • The lesson for those in other spaces: There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for your readers and customers. Think about who they are, how you first got connected to them, and how you’re going to take them on a journey with you.
  • Kudos to the team at Litmus for taking some steps to push email accessibility forward. These are ideas that everyone in the email world should think about.
  • I’ve gotten lots of questions this year about HTML basics. Here’s a nice guide from Email on Acid’s Melissa Berdine to understanding the building blocks of HTML.
  • At BuzzFeed, we used to have a general rule: If you’re going to run an outrageous headline, make sure the content actually delivers on the promise of that headline. So with that in mind, here’s this: This is the most insane unsubscribe process ever imagined, and I can’t believe a company actually put customers through this.
  • Revue did some digging into newsletter job titles at news organizations. Most organizations have a “newsletter editor,” but they’re starting to see a few new titles pop up.
  • I throw my full endorsement behind all four of these tips from Fast Company’s Roi Ben-Yehuda about how to take back control of your inbox
  • Not specifically about email, but I loved the way this New York Times job listing explained some of the values that matter to them when building a new product.
  • And this is about messaging in general, but I’m keeping my eye on it: Nieman Lab talked to journalists in Ukraine who are using Telegram to distribute news.
  • Something to consider for your newsletter: Digiday’s Max Willens wrote about how some publishers are using one-question surveys to solicit reader feedback.

Stuff I Loved This Month

The team at Really Good Emails just rolled out an amazing update to their site. If you’re not familiar with RGE: It’s a site where you can see great emails built by brands you know and respect. But now on RGE, you can create accounts, build Pinterest-style collections of various emails (and then share those collections with colleagues), and view the code of a specific email. It’s super useful, and I highly recommend signing up and using RGE as a resource!

Here's a decorative image of three animals: An owl, a flamingo, and a seahorse

I’m on the record as being a bit skeptical of AMP for Email — at least for the moment, until it becomes a bit more widely supported within the industry — but I was really impressed by a recent email from Email Monks that used AMP in a live newsletter:

Here's a sign-up form within a newsletter. Love this!

For one, they managed to embed a sign-up module directly in the newsletter. I love the possibilities here: You’ve just acquired a new paying sub, and you’re trying to get them to sign up for an additional newsletter in your onboarding campaign — so you embed the form right there. Or you launch a new newsletter, and want to cross-promote the product to your core list. Or you add a sign-up form to make referring a friend to your newsletter easy!

You can provide details directly within the email — pretty neat!

And this contact form is great, too. Instead of pushing readers to an outside survey, could you use AMP to get feedback within the body of the email? Or run quizzes or games within the email using a module like this?

I still want to see more examples of AMP, but I’m certainly more intrigued after seeing this one!

Here's a decorative image of three animals: An owl, a flamingo, and a seahorse

The team at UNO, a millennial-focused news outlet in Buenos Aires, sent me the sign-up page for their newsletter, and it was too good not to share!

Here's the UNO sign-up page, featuring the Salt Bae meme

Their team tells me that credit here goes to designer, Martín Zalucki, who — I might add — has some truly unusual art on his Instagram. (If you’re not interested in seeing what Donald Trump would look like as a Pokémon, don’t click.)

Have you seen a sign-up page as good as this? Send it my way — I’d love to see it!

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’m calling… the Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month! This month:

the anonymous koala

Back in 2017, I had the privilege of going to Brisbane, Australia, to give a talk at a conference there. I was excited about traveling to Australia for the first time, very excited to be a keynote speaker (also a first for me), but above all, I was thrilled to have the chance to meet a koala. (Priorities, you know?)

Koalas are odd creatures. Did you know:

  • Koalas can sleep up to 18 hours a day, mostly because all they eat are eucalyptus leaves. If they ate anything with actual nutritious value, they might be able to stay awake for more than a few hours a day — but instead, they eat a food that makes them smell oddly like cough drops.
  • There’s a serious chlamydia problem in the koala community.
  • I’ll quote directly from a Mental Floss article: “In captivity, koalas exhibit more lesbian behavior than straight. Sexual encounters have been known to involve up to five females. They last twice as long as heterosexual encounters.” 👀
  • During mating season, male koalas make a deep grunting noise to try to scare off other males and attract females. But some koalas go extra deep with these bellows to try to sound as large as possible — I suppose the previous bullet point might have something to do that. 😬

Of course, none of what I just told you matters in the slightest, because above all else, koalas are insanely, stupidly cute. At the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary outside of Brisbane, there were koalas everywhere. I was eating lunch in the cafeteria and looked left, and there was a baby koala staring me right in the face. In the main koala area, I saw a koala cuddle train, which is exactly what you think it is. If you’re lucky, you can log on to their koala cam and catch koalas mid-nap, all hugging one another. This happened when I was on their site the other day, and I truly felt #blessed:

koala snuggles, caught on camera

I even got to meet a koala named Buckley during my trip to Brisbane, and he literally could not have been less interested in me, and I still think it might have been one of the five greatest things to ever happen in my life.

That's me, meeting Buckley the koala!

Anyway, the koala! 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

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.