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 the next edition goes live!
This month, Inbox Collective turns three (!!!), so I put together a deep dive into what I’ve learned — and what you might need to know if you want to start your own indie consulting business. Plus: Why email is boring again, tips for nonprofit newsrooms, ideas for using buttons in your email strategy, new programs and grants to consider applying for, and more!
Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter? Find the full archive at this link.
-Dan
This Month in Email Headlines
- Shopify invests $100 million in email startup Klaviyo, latest in string of deals by e-commerce giant (The Globe and Mail)
- FEC says Google can let political campaigns dodge Gmail’s spam filters (Engadget)
- Axios to Sell Itself to Cox Enterprises for $525 Million (The New York Times)
- Sailthru Offers Tool For Collecting, Applying First- And Zero-Party Data (MediaPost)
- Mailchimp Resumes Crackdown on Crypto Newsletters Including Messari, Edge (Decrypt)
- Ben Chestnut Stepping Down As Mailchimp CEO (MediaPost)
- Uber receipt emails are crashing Microsoft Outlook (The Verge)
- Burger King emailed everyone a blank receipt in a whopper of a mistake (The Verge)
- Prime Time: Amazon Sent Half A Billion Emails For Its Sale Days This Year (MediaPost)
- Brands Are Investing More Social Budget On Creator Partnerships (MediaPost)
- This Guy Sued a Spam Texter and Got $1,200 (and You Can Too) (Vice)
- Parents face back-to-school jitters as they anticipate a flood of emails, texts and social-media pages to monitor (Wall Street Journal)
New on inboxcollective.com
How I Built a Consulting Business From a Google Doc and an Email List
Inbox Collective turns three this month. So for this anniversary, I put together a deep dive into how I grew my consulting business, including a breakdown of where my revenue comes from, what’s next for the business, and what you (hopefully!) can learn from all of this. [Read on…]
Claire and Erica Have a Few Things to Tell You
A decade ago, Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur started sending marketing emails for their store. Now their newsletter is the heart of a growing product-discovery business with five different revenue streams. Alex Hazlett explains what they’ve built and how they use their newsletter to drive revenue. [Read on…]
Why Mailchimp might be the right ESP for you
I’ve long been frustrated that there isn’t a good source to find reviews and recommendations of email tools. So I’m going to try to start building that out for you on Inbox Collective. We’ll be reviewing ESPs, growth tools, and more. Here’s the first of these: A review of Mailchimp, and why it might — or might not! — be a good option for your newsletter. [Read on…]
For Your Reading / To-Do List
- In February of 2021, I made a prediction for the year. I wrote:
2021 is going to be the year that email died — again.
You’re going to read a lot about the death of email this year. “Why I left Substack” posts will be the new “Why I left New York.” Some new technology will become a media darling. (The next time you’re on a family Zoom call, ask your teenage cousin to show you their phone. The hot new app of 2021 is probably on there already.) Expect Twitter threads and LinkedIn poetry about why this time, truly, it’s time to say goodbye to email.
- And much to my surprise: I was wrong! There weren’t nearly as many “Email is dead!” stories and essays as I’d expected last year. The backlash to all of the growth in the email space never really came.
- But this month, two stories popped onto my radar. The first, from Vox’s Peter Kafka, started with an ominous headline: “The newsletter boom is over. What’s next?” Finally! I thought. The hot takes about email are here! But I was pleasantly disappointed: This story had a nut graf with a reasonable thesis:
Which doesn’t mean newsletters have gone away. At all. Just some of the hype surrounding them. And in its place, there’s a more realistic attitude about the format and the business you can build around it: Newsletters, it turns out, are just like blogs and podcasts — they’re super simple for anyone to create. But turning them into something beyond a hobby — let alone turning them into a full-time job — requires talent and sustained effort.
- The other, from Insider’s Steven Perlberg, looked at how tech companies aren’t throwing money around at writers the way they might have a year or two ago. Again, despite the headline of the story, there wasn’t much in here that screamed “Email is dead!”:
After years of newsletter frenzy, there’s a sense in the media world that things are cooling, as the newsletter platforms choose to reduce the number of bets they make on new writers and instead focus on bettering the product for existing users.
- What it says to me is that, just maybe, we might not experience the “Email is dead!” phase I’d predicted. Instead, we might be entering a new phase in 2022: “Email is boring!”
- The idea of email being a channel with lots of hype always seemed at odds with what email is: Reliable, a little clunky, and rather boring. People who work in email are making long-term bets on their newsletters. There’s nothing about newsletters that moves particularly fast; email is for people who are willing to be patient in building an audience and a business.
- There’s also another question at play, one raised in Perlberg’s story: What happens to newsletters in uncertain economic times? I can’t tell you what will happen with the global economy in the next year or two, but I can say that newsletters tend to be pretty resilient. Why? The best newsletters are built on the relationship between writer and reader. The newsletters with the strongest relationships are probably going to be just fine — and keep in mind, many of these newsletters continued to grow in early 2020, even as the world went through a recession and a pandemic. No business is recession-proof, but newsletters tend to be stable in good economic times or bad.
- Anyway, I’m happy to say that email is boring again — and that’s OK by me.
- Moving on: Greater Public asked me to write a blog post with 10 tips to help public media outlets improve their email strategy. Even if you’re not a public media outlet, there are probably a few ideas in there that might help your newsroom.
- A few more practical tips: Penny Riordan of the Local Media Association wrote about five different ways that Canadian newsrooms used buttons to drive clicks, sign-ups, and donations.
- Matt Lindsay of Mather Economics wrote about the latest subscription and advertising trends for newsrooms. There are lots of useful benchmarks and numbers in this report for newsrooms —make time for this one.
- More benchmarking: INN is out with their annual “State of Nonprofit News Report”report. There’s a ton to dig into here — this part of the news space continues to grow, and INN’s findings go well beyond just newsletter and audience development data.
- A new group, the Email Markup Consortium, is out with their first-ever accessibility report. The TL;DR on this: The email space has a long, long way to go when it comes to making emails more accessible.
- And if you’re looking for a few more accessibility tips, here’s a good guide from Jason Rodriguez.
- I wear a lot of hats at Inbox Collective. One that you won’t find on my bio: I often play email matchmaker for clients. They’ll come to me asking for the right tool for a specific task, and I’ll try to find them a good match. One of these matches happened last year with WBUR in Boston, who was looking for a tool to build newsletters in WordPress and streamline their workflow. I connected them with Newsletter Glue, an excellent email builder that syncs nicely with Mailchimp, WBUR’s ESP. The result: WBUR halved the time it takes them to produce a newsletter. WBUR’s Meagan McGinnes and Ben Eagle wrote about the process.
- A few other success stories to share:
- The Los Angeles Times’s Stacy Perman wrote about two fast-growing newsletter-first businesses, Puck and Ankler, which have both raised significant funds to help accelerate their growth.
- Tangle’s Isaac Saul wrote about his newsletter’s third anniversary. Tangle’s now bringing in $30,000 per month from subscribers, and Saul wrote about where he plans to reinvest in the business going forward.
- Press Gazette’s Alexandra Turner profiled Lemon-Aid, a British newsletter that launched in March 2020 to support parents during the pandemic but that’s continued to grow.
- It’s always exciting to see new newsletter businesses popping up outside North America and Europe. I loved this interview that Splice’s Alan Soon and Rishad Patel did with Amanda Cua, the Philippines-based founder of BackScoop, a newsletter that covers tech and business in Southeast Asia.
- On the messaging front: Here’s an interesting post from Paula Felps of INMA about how HT Media, an Indian publishing house, used WhatsApp to convert readers to subscribers and to reduce churn. One quote I loved from the piece:
“We started WhatsApp as a one-way channel, but now it is two-way communication,” Inderpreet Singh, vice president and head of growth for HD Digital, said. “People can ask for content, top news, and top market-related news. Even at the category level, they can keep asking for various stuff. That has worked very well for us.”
- Cool story here from the Winnipeg Free Press’s Erin Lebar about how they’ve used surveys. They didn’t just get useful feedback — because they sent the survey to registered users and asked if they would like to sign up for a newsletter within the survey, they also got 5,000 responses and 2,400 newsletter signups from the survey.
- Every org with a subscription or membership strategy should have a dunning strategy — dunning refers to the process of trying to win back readers who may involuntarily churn due to credit card issues or other payment failures. Here’s a lovely guide from Postmark’s Fio Dossetto with examples and tips of how to set up a dunning series.
- In July, I grabbed a copy of “Converted,” a new book about using data to convert and retain readers, by Neil Hoyne, Google’s chief measurement strategist. (If you’re new to this space and want to quickly get up to speed on the tactics and metrics that marketers use, it might be a good one to add to your bookshelf. You can buy a copy here from Bookshop.) But one thing I really enjoyed from the book were a few links + tools that Hoyne included:
- Hoyne released a CLV calculator as part of the book. It’s geared towards those selling some sort of product (so it might not be a great match for a newsroom or non-profit), but it’s free and might be worth checking out.
- I also really enjoyed this story, from back in 2016, about how Google X ran experiments. One thing I found fascinating: The Google X team used to give out an award to the team member who came up with the best experiment. But interestingly, the award was given out before the experiment was run. Why? Explained Google X’s Astro Teller (emphasis mine):
“If you give out the award before you’ve run the experiment, then people start to really feel that you don’t actually care about the outcome. You care about the quality of the question. So every two weeks, we would give out an award for the best experiment.”
- Focus on asking the right question first — the answers will follow later. I love that.
Stuff I Loved This Month
- Here’s a delightful story about the importance of accessibility, from The Washington Post: “The unexpected star of NASA’s Webb images — the alt text descriptions.”
- I love seeing newsrooms investing in solutions journalism. Here’s a great case study from the Arizona Daily Star about why they invested in that beat.
- It’s always more fun for me to share success stories. But kudos to Sarah Day Owen Wiskirchen, founder of Raleigh Convergence, for sharing the story of why she shuttered her newsroom, and what others can learn from her experience.
- Cool story here from Ernie Smith on Tedium about the history of printed newsletters, which date back hundreds of years.
- There’s a lot out there that might be worth applying for at the moment. Here are a few that caught my eye:
- The Poynter Leadership Academy for Women in Media is accepting applications for 2023. They’re looking for women or nonbinary journalists who are still relatively new to leadership roles in newsrooms but who want to gain the skills to become better leaders.
- CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program is opening up to another cohort this fall. They’re looking for independent reporters or creators who are looking to build their own business.
- Listening Post Collective is rolling out a playbook for launching a civic media project. The playbook is free and available on demand, but they’re also opening up grants for people who go through the course. Those will be available through April 2023.
- If you’re interested in the data science behind a paywall, check out this blog post from The New York Times’s Rohit Supekar about how they optimize for two very different goals: Engagement with Times content, and subscriptions.
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 “Silent Movie”:
In 1976, on the heels of “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein,” Brooks was one of the biggest names in comedy. What would Brooks do for his next film?
And he responded with a choice that, for just about anyone other than Mel Brooks, would have seemed downright bizarre: He decided to make a silent movie, the first made in decades.
But here’s my favorite twist: There is a dialogue in “Silent Movie” — exactly one word is spoken aloud. And to speak it, Brooks picked Marcel Marceau, the renowned French mime, who, by the nature of his work, never spoke on screen. Naturally, a silent actor working in a silent film who happened to speak caught everyone’s attention.
I’ve been thinking a little about that moment, and what it means for our line of work. I’ve been in plenty of rooms where a team is running a test and trying to figure out what to do next. Keep running the test? Make an adjustment? Wait for additional data? It’s easy to jump ahead, to want to make a decision quickly. It’s easy to want to make a statement as soon as possible.
But it takes time to collect the right data and to spend enough time listening in order to make the right decision.
Resist the urge to say something too soon. Be quiet, be patient. And when you speak, make it count.
That’s all for this edition! Want to be notified when next month’s edition of Not a Newsletter is live? Sign up here:
