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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: August 2023

A man in a shirt and tie tells a carpenter, "Oh, me? I make emails."
Tommy Siegel  / The New Yorker

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!

A man in a shirt and tie tells a carpenter, "Oh, me? I make emails."
Tommy Siegel  / The New Yorker

Thank you to this month’s sponsors: Litmus Live, one of my favorite email conferences, taking place in Boston (and online, for those who can’t attend IRL) this September; and Conversion Ads, from Refind, to help you grow your newsletter on autopilot.

Do support these sponsors — they make sure that resources like Not a Newsletter remain free for all!

This month in Not a Newsletter…

  • Claire Zulkey shared 11 lessons from five years of writing her newsletter, Evil Witches.
  • Hanna Raskin won a James Beard Award for her newsletter, The Food Section, so we talked about the award and how she’s learned to market and grow her newsletter.
  • Yanna-Torry Aspraki is back with another Ask a Deliverability Expert column, answering the question: Should I set up DMARC for my newsletter?

…plus, a lot more!

Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter?

—Dan (say hi via email or LinkedIn)

This Month in Email Headlines

Stories labeled with a 🔑 may require a subscription to read.

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*SPONSORED* Make sure you get your ticket to Litmus Live! 

Join some of the biggest names in email at Litmus Live — the premier event for email marketing professionals — this September! Network with peers, get hands-on experience at interactive workshop sessions, and hear from some of the brightest minds in the industry, all in one three-day event. The star-studded speaker lineup includes Samar Owais, Alice Li, Paul Airy, Val Geisler, Mark Robbins, and Naomi West — all folks whose work I’ve shared here in Not a Newsletter — and so many more. They’ll cover topics like eco-friendly emails, accessibility, succession planning, email footers, and all the other common headaches email marketers face daily and how to overcome them. 

Basically, if you work in email, you won’t want to miss this conference. Make sure you’re there in Boston from September 11th-13th for Litmus Live! And psst… for a limited time, book your exclusive hotel rates (discount expiring soon!)

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To be as transparent as possible: This is a sponsored link presented by one of 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.

New on Inbox Collective

📬 What I’ve Learned From Five Years of Evil Witches

Claire Zulkey launched her newsletter, Evil Witches, as an experiment to see if moms wanted to read the type of parenting writing she had been practicing online and on social media: Something that was centered around the mother — not the child — with an aversion to obligatory sap, apologies, or happy endings. 

It’s still a part-time project for her, but five years later, she’s grown her audience to over 11,000 subscribers and has so far earned over $73,000 total from Evil Witches. Things are clearly trending in the right direction.

So I asked her to share a few lessons from five years of writing a newsletter. Here’s one of my favorites from her piece: “What I’ve learned is to trust my own expertise and experience. My newsletter is emblematic of my writing career. I am not the richest, most influential, or most famous writer in the world, but I am legit, and so is my process.” (That might be the wisest thing we’ve ever published on Inbox Collective.)

Here are the rest of Claire’s 11 lessons.

📬 How Hanna Raskin Built a James Beard Award-Winning Newsletter

Two years ago, Hanna Raskin launched The Food Section, a publication that aims to bring independent and rigorous coverage of restaurants and food culture to the South.

The Food Section’s grown to 660 paying subscribers and more than $50,000 in gross annualized revenue. And this June, Raskin’s writing won a James Beard Award — the Oscars for food. (Even more impressive: The Food Section won for Dining and Travel, beating out feature stories from two old-guard magazines, Bon Appétit and Garden & Gun.)

But what’s long impressed me is how Raskin markets her paid subscription. One bold marketing tactic that caught my eye: In May 2022, she told readers that she’d randomly remove 15% of her free list, but readers who chose to pay for a subscription would “avoid the axe.” It worked — she saw an immediate bump in subscriptions, and that growth has steadily continued for over a year.

Raskin and I talked about what she’s learned as a reporter who’s learning how to market her own publication, why experimentation matters for independent newsletters, and what others — even non-foodies — can learn from her James Beard win. Dive into the Q&A here.

📬 Ask a Deliverability Expert: Should I Set Up DMARC?

DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, is a widely-adopted authentication protocol that helps prevent email spoofing and phishing attacks. With DMARC, you can tell the inboxes where you’re sending email from, and tell them what to do if they spot someone trying to spam, spoof, or phish a reader using your email address.

But many brands and newsletters still haven’t set up DMARC. Some orgs tell me it’s too confusing to set up, or too hard to monitor DMARC.

So I asked Yanna-Torry Aspraki to write about DMARC in her latest Ask a Deliverability Expert column. What is DMARC? What do you need to do before setting it up? How do you monitor everything to make sure your emails don’t land in spam? She digs into all of your questions here.

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What Else I’m Reading

Stories labeled with a 🔑 may require a subscription to read.

Best Practices

Monetization

  • What marketing messages do the best job of driving paying subscriptions? A report from researchers in London and Munich found a few combinations of messages that worked well. The team at Toolkits shared a few takeaways from the final report.
  • What’s a good free-to-paid conversion rate? For Lenny’s Newsletter, Kyle Poyar and Lenny Rachitsky put together a report based on data from 1,000 companies. Even though this data isn’t specific to newsletters or creators, I still think you’ll learn a lot from how businesses like Canva or Spotify convert users to paid.
  • Creator Science’s Jay Clouse wrote about how pricing tiers can unlock higher value (and higher customer satisfaction) from each purchase.
  • INMA’s Mark Challinor talked about how whenever he discusses ad rates with advertisers, he puts the emphasis on what he calls “meaningful engagement” — not audience size.
  • The team at Hell Gate, an independent (and newsletter-first) New York City newsroom, broke down their numbers at the end of year one. My take: For an independent outlet to go from $0 to $19,000 in monthly recurring revenue in a year is very impressive.

Growth

  • ConvertKit founder Nathan Barry wrote about different types of flywheels, and how each can help a creator continue to grow and build their product.
  • Matt McGarry wrote about how he grew his newsletter to 10k subs. Something I found interesting: Even though Matt runs a business where he helps newsletters buy ads, he found that not all ad platforms worked well for his specific newsletter. (Twitter worked, Facebook didn’t.)
  • Success stories are great, but we can learn so much from our failures, too. Here’s one great example, from Becky Pierson Davidson, about why a referral program didn’t quite work for her team at Bossbabe.

Content Strategy

Tests, Experiments, or Learnings

  • I shared the Hanna Raskin Q&A above, but I wrote a bit more on LinkedIn about the big lesson I hope you take from it: Test, don’t copy.
  • Parcel’s Naomi West ran a test over six months to see if a text-only onboarding series would outperform a series with heavily-designed emails. The results were a bit unexpected: The designed emails led to more initial clicks, but the text-based emails led to far more conversations and conversions.
    • This is also a great reminder to make sure that whenever you launch a new product, like a welcome series, you should pick metrics to measure the success of that product. I love how Parcel identified middle- and end-of-funnel goals — Did readers write back to us? Did they make a purchase? — as their primary metrics.
  • ConvertKit’s out with their 2023 State of the Creator report, based on interviews with 1,200 creators. Two fascinating takeaways for me: 1) Creators are bullish on opportunities for partnerships, and 2) Creators are a little skeptical of AI tools. (Only about 1 in 3 used AI tools in the past year.)

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • Small publishers — basically any local newsroom or indie operator — should make time for this webinar, from Kickbox’s Al Iverson and Jennifer Nespola Lantz, about deliverability best practices and how to stay out of the spam folder. It’ll happen on Aug. 23 — save your spot here.
  • I’ll be speaking at the Colorado Press Association’s annual convention, in Denver, this September. I’ll be leading two sessions: A talk aimed at non-profits all about optimizing your EOY fundraising campaigns, plus a workshop about launching new newsletter products. You can get your tickets here. 
  • A few podcast appearances to share: I went on the Local News Matters podcast to talk about local newsletter success stories, optimizing newsletters, and pricing ads for newsletters. And the Remote Work Tribe podcast included a few lessons from me as part of their 50th episode retrospective.
  • And finally: Two former BuzzFeed colleagues (Joanna Borns and Erin Chack, who also happen to be two of the funniest people on the internet) wrote this masterpiece for McSweeney’s: “Really? You’re too good for our newsletter? Wow.”

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 75+ 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

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 corner of the doc. For years, I closed every edition of Not a Newsletter by highlighting one of these animals. But 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 Great White Shark!

Great white shark
  • A group of great white sharks is called a shiver or school.
  • When a great white is born, they’re already 4 feet long. They grow, slowly, over the next two or three decades, up to their final size: About 20 feet long and 4,000 pounds.
  • Great whites can have up to 300 teeth, but interestingly, they don’t really chew their food. Instead, they use their teeth to tear into what they’re eating, and then swallow it whole
  • Great white sharks typically travel solo, which is why researchers are so interested in two great whites, named Jekyll and Simon, who appear to be traveling up the Atlantic seaboard together this year. (One theory: They may be siblings.)
  • Where I live, in New York City, there’s been a lot of talk about sharks ever since a woman was bitten by a shark at Rockaway Beach, and several more were bitten on Long Island. Why’s it happening? Scientists say that the improved water quality in the area has attracted more fish, like bluefish, which in turn have attracted sharks. To keep locals safe, New York’s rolling out a fleet of drones to try to spot sharks and help during any future search-and-rescue missions.
  • The good news: Sharks aren’t interested in eating humans. They’d rather find fish or seals to eat. As one researcher told The Washington Post: “For a great white shark, a seal is a big juicy steak with a slice of chocolate cake. A person is an old piece of celery that’s been sitting on the counter all day.”

Anyway, the Great White Shark! 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:

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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.