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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: December 2019

Welcome to the December 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!

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 them all at this link.

Inside this edition, you’ll find guides to building pop-up modules that drive email sign-ups, several super-detailed reports about the state of email in 2019, a list of email conferences to attend in the new year, lessons about how to use email to drive donations, and more! Have something else you think should be featured in Not a Newsletter? Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com.

-Dan

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

Benjamin Schwartz / The New Yorker 

A Semi-Brief Word of Thanks

I think a lot about the decisions that get made over the course of a lifetime — the little choices we make that lead us to unexpected places.

Here’s one about Herman Boone. If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because you remember it from the movie “Remember the Titans.” If you don’t know that name, well: He was the football coach of one of the first integrated schools in Virginia, and in his first year as coach, his team — a team of black and white students, playing against all-white squads — won the state championship. He died this month, at the age of 84.

I met Coach Boone in 2004. He’d been speaking at an event in Washington, D.C., and afterward, I introduced myself, and asked if I could interview him for my high school newspaper. He asked what high school I attended, and then told me something incredible: In the year his team won the state title, in the season that was later immortalized in “Remember the Titans,” his very first preseason game was against my high school. It was just a scrimmage, but still: What were the odds?

I later interviewed Boone, plus a few of his players and the then-head coach of my high school, and wrote the story. It was fun to write, and a bit of reporting kismet: Who’d expect a 17-year-old to stumble upon a new footnote in sports history?

And had that been the end of the tale, it would’ve been enough! Except that later that year, I submitted that story to a national high school journalism contest — and won. The contest was hosted by The Kansas City Star, and as part of the award, they flew me out to Missouri. I’d won for sports writing, and it turned out that half of The Star’s sports department had attended the University of Missouri’s journalism school. I’d applied to Mizzou — it’s the oldest school of journalism in the world — but hadn’t given it too much consideration. But it felt like everyone I met at The Star told me: You have to look at Mizzou. 

So I did. And a few months later, I enrolled as a freshman at the University of Missouri.

I wonder, sometimes: What would’ve happened had I made another choice? What would’ve happened had The Star selected another winner, or had I not applied to that contest, or had Herman Boone not remembered some meaningless scrimmage played 34 years earlier against my high school’s football team, or had I just not gone that day to see him speak? What happens then? Who would I have become?

I don’t have the answer. I’m just grateful for the decisions that led me here.

So here’s another one of those decisions: It’s December 2018, and I have this thought: I should create a space to share what I’ve learned — and what I’m reading — about email. It shouldn’t be a website or even a newsletter. It’ll be a Google Doc, and there will be an email alert that readers can sign up for to find out when the next issue is published. My wife asks me how many people might be interested in such a thing, and I say: Maybe a few hundred? I tell her that if ten people sign up for the email alert by the end of January, I’ll keep it going.

I launch this Google Doc, which I eventually call Not a Newsletter, and 400 of you sign up in the first 72 hours. And from there, things grow.

When I launched that first issue, I never thought that there would be a day when Not a Newsletter would have 3,000 email subscribers in more than 50 countries. (It now does, as of December 17th!) I never imagined that it would be the reason I’d be invited to talk about email at events in five different countries on four different continents in a single year. And I never expected that it would be a Google Doc — a Google Doc! — that would push me to leave The New Yorker and start Inbox Collective.

2019 has been unexpectedly wonderful, and it’s thanks to all of you. I’m so thankful for each and every reader of this doc, whether you’ve been here since issue 1, or just signed up a few days ago, and I’m so thankful for the opportunities you’ve given me by reading and supporting Not a Newsletter.

So I’ll say it again: Thanks for reading! Thanks for subscribing! Thanks for sharing this with your friends and colleagues! Thanks for investing in email!

Most of all: Thanks for making 2019 such an unbelievable year! I promise to do even more to help you in 2020. (You never know where a single decision might lead you!)

You, dear reader, are awesome. For everything: Thank you!

-Dan

This Month in Email News

For Your Reading List

  • Looking to attend an email conference in 2020? Here’s a list of events to consider, courtesy of the team at Taxi for Email. (On this list: I’m personally planning on attending UNSPAM in Greenville, S.C., in March!)
  • RightMessage’s Brennan Dunn put together a fantastic guide to creating sign-up forms that convert. There’s a lot in here — from messaging to setting up the right type of sign-up modules — that’s worth reading through. 
  • 250ok’s Anthony Chiulli took a look back at the year that was in email, from acquisitions to major product rollouts. 
    • 250ok also released their Global Deliverability Benchmark report for the year. (The short version: Gmail is even more important than before, and more emails actually reached the inbox — not spam — in 2019.)
    • Litmus released their State of the ESP report for 2019. The most-used ESP in 2019? It’s MailChimp, which was used by 23% of companies surveyed by Litmus.
    • More email stats for you: Here’s SendGrid’s 2019 Email Benchmark and Engagement Study. There’s a ton in here, from tips on personalization to research about using GIFs in email, so make some time to sort through this one!
    • SailThru’s 2019 Retail Personalization Index is out, and there’s a lot in here to dig through if you’re curious about how top brands are using email, site, and mobile to create great experiences for customers.
    • One more 2019 year-end report to share: Ericsson, the mobile telecommunications company, has a report out about the growth of mobile devices internationally. There are some fascinating numbers in here: 
      • The three biggest countries for mobile growth in Q3 2019: China (14 new million subscribers), Indonesia (9 million new subs), and the Philippines (8 million new subs).
      • Mobile data traffic grew 68 percent between Q3 2018 and Q3 2019, and is expected to grow another 27% every year through 2025.
      • There are technically more mobile subscriptions than there are humans on Earth (due to a few factors, including people owning multiple phones).
      • But the thing I found most interesting: By 2025, the overwhelming majority of mobile phone users will be on 4G or 5G technology. More users on faster data connections opens up huge possibilities for anyone trying to deliver content via mobile — including all of us using email to reach readers on the go. Mobile is already the dominant platform for email, and it’s only going to become more important in the years ahead.
By 2025, the vast majority of mobile phone users will be on 4G or 5G. So that opens up real possibilities for anyone delivering content via the internet.
  • The team at G2 analyzed thousands of emails sent by Democratic Presidential candidates this summer to see what they were sending to their audience. (TL;DR: Lots and lots of fundraising emails, plus some emails hawking merch.)
  • Here’s an interesting example of a contest that drove email acquisition: Time’s Person of the Year poll drove more than 500,000 sign-ups, according to Axios.
  • A simple rule: Be honest with your readers. So often — especially this time of year, with so many holiday-related sales happening — readers get inundated with special offers. But how good are those offers? A Sky News analysis in the UK found that only 5 percent of deals were actually the best offers from that year.
  • This is so great, from Trusting News’s Joy Mayer: It’s a detailed guide to the A/B tests that PolitiFact ran to see which donation CTAs converted best in newsletters. This is a great example of how to run an A/B test and how to measure success. (Full disclosure: PolitiFact is run by Poynter, and in 2020, Poynter will be working with Inbox Collective on email strategy.)
  • Over on the INMA blog, Newsday’s Anthony Bottan wrote about the success his team has had with pop-up and subscriber-only newsletter products.
  • Here’s a nice checklist from Bruce Lawson about common accessibility issues. (These are focused on websites, not email, but most apply to email as well!)
  • I thought this was such a smart stance, from an interview that Google’s Abigail Hart Gray did with InVision: A/B testing is amazing for making incremental changes. But revolutions don’t come out of A/B tests.
  • Kudos to the team at WhereBy.Us for making public all of their documentation around how they do research and try to better understand their readers.
  • The Boston Globe’s Matt Karolian talked with Storybench’s Carro Halpin about all the work that’s gone into producing the paper’s marijuana coverage, which now includes two newsletters (one free and weekly, one daily and for subscribers only).
  • The Salt Lake Tribune team talked with Lenfest’s Joseph Lichterman about an email campaign that helped raise more than $30,000 to fund a reporting job at the paper. (Full disclosure: The Tribune’s also an Inbox Collective client, but this campaign ran before I started working with their team.)
  • The New York Post’s Virginia Backaitis interviewed Vera Gibbons, a TV journalist who left her job to start a newsletter.
  • Jacob Donnelly’s A Media Operator newsletter wrote about why he’d start with a newsletter if he was creating a new media company.
  • If you’ve been reading this doc for a while, you know I’m fascinated by the opportunity for Courses, those automated email series that teach readers new skills, habits, or lessons. Here’s a company I didn’t expect to see launching Courses, per Publishing Executive’s Leah Wynalek: Field & Stream.
  • I’ve seen some shady email practices the last few years — but this is one of the shadiest I’ve ever seen.
    • Make this your mantra for 2020: Your subscribers are your most loyal fans. Treat them well, and be transparent with them. If you attempt to sign readers up through shady practices like the ones detailed above, don’t be surprised when you land in the spam folder — it’s where you belong when you don’t respect your readers.
  • Litmus’s Steph Knapp asked a good question: Interactive emails are a hot trend, but is anyone using them? The short answer: No, and interestingly, most aren’t even considering it!
  • Pinterest’s JonLuca DeCaro looked at email authentication — the use of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — among Fortune 500 companies. I’m as surprised as he is to find that some major companies aren’t using these tools to make sure that they continue to land in the inbox (and keep others from spoofing their email address).
    • In related news: Oracle’s Chad S. White put together a really nice explainer about email blacklists, and how to get off them. This is hopefully something most readers of the doc won’t ever have to worry about, but I’m sharing it here just in case.
    • Also: If you’ve got questions about email authentication, shoot me an email at dan@inboxcollective.com — I’m always happy to chat about it!
  • I’ve talked before about the importance of trying things for yourself. If you read about a case study in Not a Newsletter, don’t just accept it as a best practice! Try it and see if what worked for another organization will work for you. Here’s a great, non-email example of that in the real world: Instagram’s been experimenting recently with the way they show likes. So one company, HypeAuditor, looked at influencers in six different countries to see how that product change was affecting engagement. What’d they learn? Even a single test on a single platform run across a few different markets had very different results. (Brazilian influencers with 100k+ followings saw a 28% dip in likes due to the experiment, but in Japan, influencers with similar followings saw a 7% increase in likes.) Again: Test, test, test, and see what actually works for you in your market!
  • Something I’m keeping my eye on in the new year: More platforms offering the capability to send emails and convert subscribers. Ghost just rolled out a beta email product, and WordPress rolled out a recurring payments feature.
  • Chamaileon’s Roland Pokornyik wrote about cart abandonment strategies worth considering.
    • If you’re a news organization that sells subscriptions and you’re not yet using a cart abandonment series, you should consider it! There may be opportunities there to drive additional sales.
  • Robin Sloan wrote about the practice of writing newsletters in his most recent newsletter, and it’s lovely:

If the format speaks to you, I really do encourage you to start one up, maybe even weave it together with some others that already exist. Brace yourself: newsletters don’t offer the dopamine drip of Instagram and Twitter. They grow slowly. They receive zero hearts, zero stars (though they do sometimes earn a reply, which is far better). You really need to enjoy the simple act of sitting down to write one, or you might as well be doing something else.

But maybe you WILL enjoy it! I can tell you that I spring up on Sunday mornings to write this. It is nothing more and nothing less than a perfect pleasure.

Stuff I Loved This Month

Everyone I spoke with about him told a story about notes they received from one of his typewriters. Sally Field recently received a note from Hanks that conveyed how moved he was by her 2018 memoir, “In Pieces.” She was kicking herself because she has yet to convey to him how much she enjoyed his book of short stories, “Uncommon Type,” which she had read a year earlier. (She also told me about the weekly newsletter he wrote, on a laptop, on the set of “Forrest Gump,” about happenings among the cast and crew. A weekly newsletter.)

  • On a related note: I was surprised to learn that Mister Rogers was a regular user of email (according to this Tom Junod essay). Naturally, he was an AOL user — ZZZ143@aol.com, per the link above.

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:

the anonymous kraken

I don’t have a ton to say about the Kraken. Actually, that’s not quite true: I don’t have anything to say about the Kraken. It’s not real, and I don’t really understand why Google Docs includes it as an anonymous animal alongside so many other real animals — especially since Google’s weirdly lacking in so many types of sea creatures! (Fish and shellfish apparently don’t exist in the Google Doc universe.)

Which got me wondering: Why doesn’t Google sub in some new anonymous animals in 2020?

So here’s what I’ll ask, for those brave readers who’ve made it this far: Is there an animal you think deserves to be Google Doc-ified next year? Send me an email at dan@inboxcollective.com and make your case — I might even have an illustrator draw up the best ones so that we can petition Google to finally allow in all sorts of new animals. (If I have my way, the Anonymous Crab will finally get its due in 2020.)

Anyway, the Kraken! 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

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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.