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 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 a new edition goes live!
Inside this edition, you’ll find some thoughts on building a sustainable paid newsletter; an explainer on how to use your election coverage to drive subscriptions, donations, or memberships (including a copywriting template you can use!); 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
This Month in Email Headlines
- Chinese tech and business coverage surges amid Hong Kong crackdown (Axios)
- The Future of Food Media Is in Your Inbox (TASTE)
- Disinformation for profit: How a Florida ‘dealmaker’ turns conservative outrage into cash (The Washington Post)
- I’ll quote part of this, because this is a fascinating story: “The material is tailor-made to inflame right-wing passions. But its underlying purpose is to collect email addresses and other personal information from impassioned readers, whose inboxes then fill up with narrowly targeted ads. The effect is to monetize the anger stoked by misleading political content — for as much as $2,500 per list of contacts.”
- I’ll also mention that exploiting outrage via email happens on both sides of the aisle. The Post wrote about a Democratic firm that used outrage to raise money in 2019.
- I’ll quote part of this, because this is a fascinating story: “The material is tailor-made to inflame right-wing passions. But its underlying purpose is to collect email addresses and other personal information from impassioned readers, whose inboxes then fill up with narrowly targeted ads. The effect is to monetize the anger stoked by misleading political content — for as much as $2,500 per list of contacts.”
- Scammers Are Forging CoinDesk Emails – Here’s How to Protect Yourself (CoinDesk)
- The maddeningly familiar march of Google’s Gmail-Meet marriage (Computerworld)
- Gossip, jobs, freelancing tips and more. Here are some independent media newsletters to follow. (Poynter)
- eBay Uses AI To Write Emails, Increase Marketing Performance (MediaPost)
- California posts final regulations under landmark digital privacy law impacting consumers, businesses (Reuters)
- Mailchimp Allocates $1M For Developer Integration Fund (MediaPost)
- Trump Campaign’s ‘Desperate’ Email Attack On Kamala Harris Mocked On Twitter (Huffington Post)
- Marketing Firm Koypo Hit with U.K. Fine for Unsolicited Emails (Bloomberg Law)
For Your Reading List
- A few weeks ago, I told The Washington Post that building a paid newsletter typically takes two years, and it’s not worth going full-time with it until your newsletter’s generating $75k/year in business. So where’d those numbers come from?
- 1.) That data’s based on dozens of conversations I’ve had with people who’ve started paid newsletters on platforms like Substack. (Mike McPhate of the California Sun newsletter was the first I heard to mention the two-year timeline in an ONA talk, and I think he’s spot on.) Building a loyal audience takes time — and often longer than two years!
- 2.) Most creators I talk to are aiming for a number at which they can replace their salary — anywhere from $50-75k, depending on their local cost of living.
- 3.) There are a lot of ways to get paid for your newsletter that don’t involve making a paid newsletter. I’m very bullish (and also incredibly biased!) about the future of email, but I’m also worried that many creators aren’t thinking about the other monetization opportunities — selling digital/physical products, memberships, events, affiliate strategies, advertising, consulting — that are out there, too.
- 4.) I’m hopeful that we’ll see some real research in the next year or so on paid newsletters — in particular, how to price these. There’s a LOT we don’t know yet about these.
- Also worth reading on the subject: The Washington Post’s Jarrod Dicker on the rise of the renaissance creator.
- Ann Handley wrote up a list of 17 non-negotiable things for your email newsletter. If you listen to Ann and follow this list, I promise you: You’ll send better emails!
- Simon Owens wrote a great post about the history of TinyLetter. (He, correctly, notes that Substack is the logical evolution of a trend TinyLetter started a decade ago.)
- Paved’s Claire Heginbotham put together a useful guide to using Facebook ads to drive newsletter subscriptions. (FWIW: She only looks at one type of Facebook ad strategy — driving people directly to sign up — but there are lots of other ways to use paid acquisition to convert a reader.)
- Also on the note of Facebook ads: WhatSayTheExperts talked to 45 experts about mistakes that beginners often make when building an ad strategy.
- BuiltIn’s Mae Rice offered a few tips for creating useful automations to help convert readers to customers.
- Chamaileon’s Yasmine Nahdi put together a 101 guide to designing for dark mode — in particular, keep an eye on images that might be hard to read on a dark background!
- If you want to go even deeper on the topic: This dark mode guide, from Litmus’s Alice Li last November, is still incredibly useful.
- On the Really Good Emails blog, Kelly Lamano walked through 22 examples of welcome emails from brands like Slack and Marriott. (Of note: Welcoming a reader to an editorial newsletter is a little different than welcoming them to a brand. Feel free to shoot me a note at dan@inboxcollective.com if you want to talk onboarding — I’m always happy to share examples!)
- Loved this, from Marketing Examples’s Harry Dry, about making your copywriting more conversational.
- This reminds me of an idea that a friend, who was then working with a major U.S. retailer, told me about. His team had been trying to figure out how to improve their customer service emails, and tried all sorts of strategies to improve the response rate. Then they stumbled across the answer: They added contractions to their emails. Just making the emails a bit more conversational — “You’re going to get your package tomorrow,” “We’re sending you the updated tracking information momentarily” — made customers realize they were talking with real humans, and made them far more likely to reply!
- Good stuff here from Twipe’s Mary-Katharine Phillips about how push notification strategies have evolved in 2020.
- In July, members of Congress asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai why their campaign emails were going to spam. Validity’s Nicky Copland explains what’s really happening here in a post titled, accurately, “Gmail is Not Maliciously Filtering Political Email.” As Copland notes: Political campaigns usually aren’t very strategic when it comes to email — they often add people to their lists without consent, send high volumes of email to unengaged readers, and fail to build relationships with their audience. Those kinds of practices will land anyone in the spam folder.
- It’s so great to see creators put accessibility first when designing a product. Here’s a great example, from Adam Silver and Amy Hupe, about something I’d never given much thought to: How to add a link to a website to allow someone to email you directly.
- Also on the note of user experience (though it doesn’t touch on email directly): The FT’s Anna Lisinski wrote about how they made changes to their app to increase visits there by 39%.
How to Use Election Guides to Drive Revenue
- Here in the U.S., we’re a few weeks away from a historic election. Every U.S. newsroom should be focused on making sure that their readers are informed about the races, understand the issues, and know how to vote.
- So let’s talk about how to do that — and then how to use that editorial content to drive subscriptions, donations, or memberships.
- Step 1: Build out election guides — When you do this, don’t write a normal news story. Make something actionable — give a reader clear steps to take. Here’s a great example from The Devil’s Strip in Akron, Ohio, that explains who can register and how to do so. Make sure readers understand the deadlines for voting, too. The rules are different in every state, which means that offering localized advice is especially important for readers. This guide from WBUR, for instance, helps readers understand every step they need to take to vote by mail. You could also do Q&As with candidates, as Honolulu Civil Beat has done, or even build out a Citizens Agenda — Hearken’s compiled dozens of examples here — so readers can directly hear from those running for office.
- Step 2: Make sure you collect an email address — Two ways you could tackle this: 1.) Add a pop-up or an in-line sign-up box on those guides encouraging a reader to subscribe to your newsletter to follow election news, or 2.) Use your election guide as a lead magnet. Here’s what I mean by that: You could build everything a reader would need into a downloadable .pdf (or into a multi-day email Course!), and tell a reader that you’ll send them everything they need directly to their email. At the point of sign-up, you could also offer them the chance to opt in to a news or politics-related newsletter.
- Step 3: Encourage your readers to support you so you can continue to build resources like these — I’ve written up a sample one-off email for you to use (click here to make a copy of the template in Google Docs for yourself). Add your own edits and notes, and send this email to your list to encourage them to support your work. These sorts of campaigns are great for driving new paying support, but they also help establish trust with readers and explain more about how you’re covering this election — another great outcome!
➔ Make a copy of the template here if you want to use this in an upcoming campaign.
Stuff I Loved This Month
- Last fall, at the annual Online News Association conference, the teams at Pew Research Center and The Washington Post joined me to talk about Courses, those automated, evergreen series of emails that teach readers a new skill, habit, or lesson. It’s been fun in the year since to see how many newsrooms have gone out and actually launched their own Courses. Two more two add to the list: The Wall Street Journal launched a Six-Week Money Challenge, and CNN launched Sleep, But Better. (The latter does a really nice job of integrating affiliate content into the series.) Do check both out!
- In another unusual product launch: Vice is launching The Mail, a free newsletter about the U.S. Postal Service — but they’re also offering readers the chance to subscribe to a paid print version for $8/month. I’ve never seen the combination of a pop-up newsletter + print publication before — this might be a first in publishing!
- I loved this story from Sebastián Auyanet of the Membership Puzzle Project about Conexión Migrante, a newsroom focusing on the Mexican community here in the U.S., and how a focus on answering reader questions has informed the stories they choose to tell.
- The Litmus Live conference is coming up, on September 14-18 — all online, all free. Check out their lineup here — they’ve got sessions around AMP, copywriting, and even one from Boston’s WBUR about lessons in launching a COVID-19 newsletter.
- On the note of public speaking: Andy Budd wrote about how people who regularly talk at events can use their platform to promote others. I’m lucky enough to fall into this bucket of speakers, and have been trying to push conferences towards others who might bring a unique perspective to the event. I know there’s much more work to do, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to help amplify new voices (both publicly, here in the Doc, and behind the scenes).
- As someone who writes a yearly blog post called “The Things I Believe,” I’m a sucker for articles about what people are learning. This, from Codeword’s Kyle Monson, is a really nice look back at lessons for marketers.
- The team at Taxi for Email has released a nice new tool, rate my spam, to see if your email is likely to get flagged as spam.
- This is a fun guide, from Zapier’s Justin Pot: “How to build your own Slack bot.”
- For anyone who oversees content creation at their company, Alexis Grant is looking for some input into the tools you use. It’s an 8-10 minute survey, but I’ll make sure the final results get shared here in Not a Newsletter!
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:
News that one of the National Zoo’s pandas, Mei Xiang, might be pregnant has given birth to a new panda cub made me realize: Have I really never featured the panda here in the Google Doc?
That’s a massive oversight on my part. So let’s talk pandas for a moment:
- A group of pandas is called — no joke — an embarrassment of pandas.
- Pandas don’t have thumbs, but they do have an unusual wrist bone that helps them grip bamboo when they eat.
- Male pandas sometimes do handstands while they pee in an effort to mark their territory higher on a tree. The male that can mark its territory highest typically takes control of that area.
- Pandas are black and white to help themselves hide in the snow, though based on these videos, you have to wonder if the camouflage really helps when they’re rolling down hills.
- Here is a photo of a baby panda on a seesaw. 2020’s been a year — you deserve this.
Anyway, the panda! That’s your 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:
