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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: December 2020

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!

In this edition, you’ll find: An update on BIMI for 2021, thoughts on why no one knows anything (yet) about pricing paid newsletters, and lessons on growing your list via pop-ups, Instagram, and great landing pages. (Plus, this is the first-ever Doc that includes email marketing tips from both Costco and a magazine about psychedelic mushrooms. 2020’s been weird like that.)

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 

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

Pandora looks at her very complicated inbox
Maddie Dai / The New Yorker

A Brief Word of Thanks

I wanted to take a moment to say: Thank you.

Not a Newsletter’s continued to grow this year — over 5,000 of you are on the email list to be updated whenever I publish a new edition. (If you’re curious, these are the top five countries for Not a Newsletter readers: The U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, and Italy. Although Denmark’s making a strong push for that #5 spot!)

I’m so lucky to have the opportunity to do this work, and so grateful that you come here when you’re looking for email advice and inspiration. I’m excited to do even more in 2021 to help you figure out how to continue to grow your email program. (There are a few projects in the works that I’m really excited about. More to come about those in the new year!)

This year wasn’t at all what I thought it would be — but when I look back on 2020, I found more than a handful of silver linings:

  • I had hundreds of 1-on-1 calls with Not a Newsletter readers, from big newsrooms to individuals launching their first newsletter.
  • I held webinars and events on every continent (except Antarctica) — more than two dozen events in all.
  • Inbox Collective continued to grow this year. I’ve loved working with so many clients and helping people get the most from their email strategy. (And I hope all of this is proof that you, too, can build a business if you first build an audience!)

So to all of you, I wanted to say: Thanks for reading, for listening, for asking questions, for every kind email and note. Thanks for supporting this work, and telling your friends and colleagues about the Google Doc. Year Two has been an unexpected journey, and I look forward to the opportunity to keep growing this thing in the year ahead.

Be safe, happy holidays, and happy new year. May it be a good year for all of us.

—Dan

This Month in Email Headlines

For Your Reading / To-Do List

  • Let’s start with an update about BIMI, which stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification. (As for how to pronounce it, it’s a bit of a GIF vs. JIF situation. I’ve been calling it “bim-EE,” FWIW.). But the important part: BIMI’s going to allow any brand to put their logo next to their name in the inbox.
    • A few quick reminders about BIMI: To set this up, you’ll first need to set up basic email authentication: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Instructions and links are in the Resources sections below in the Google Doc.
      • Here’s the other key thing: At the moment, it looks like BIMI is only going to be available to brands. (I’ll explain why in a second.) So if you’re an individual and you want to get your logo next to your name, there isn’t a single tool that’ll do that for all inboxes. But you can try the ol’ Google workaround — creating a Brand Account (instructions here) and setting up a logo for that account. That’ll get your logo next to your name in Gmail.
    • But if you are a big brand that’s interested in BIMI, I’d get moving on this now. First up, you’re going to want to get an SVG of your logo. The team at Digicert has a step-by-step walk-through explaining how to do that.
    • Then you’re going to want to generate a BIMI record. You can do that through this tool from Agari.
    • But to use BIMI, you’re going to first have to get a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC), and these aren’t available for purchase just yet. (Digicert, which will be one of the places you can buy a VMC, describes them as the equivalent of the blue checkmark on Twitter.) They’ve yet to release any sort of pricing for the VMCs, but my expectation is that this is something that might cost up to a few thousand dollars per year — just one of the reasons why BIMI is only going to be for larger brands.
    • The other reason? Your brand will have to have a trademarked logo to get a VMC. Digicert published a guide to the basics of trademarking, too.
    • So to recap:
      • BIMI’s coming soon — in early 2021, based on the conversations I’m having. You’re going to want to use it if you can, because the tests run with BIMI show that brands that use it see higher open rates. For now, set up your logo as an SVG and generate that BIMI record. When BIMI rolls out the general public, I’ll make sure you know the next steps so you can take advantage of this tool.
  • I really enjoyed this piece from Kerry Flynn of CNN Business about publishers investing in service journalism. (The way I define this category: These are stories or products that help you do more of the stuff you want to do in life — like learning new skills, building new habits, or discovering new things. For instance, at The New Yorker, we launched a newsletter called The New Yorker Recommends to help people find the best movies to watch, books to read, and podcasts to listen to.) There are a few nice examples in the CNN piece from Bloomberg and Morning Brew.
  • The Verge’s Nilay Patel did an in-depth interview with Substack CEO Chris Best that’s worth your time. In particular, I’d take note of his comments about the Substack Defender program, which offers legal defense to certain writers on their platform. 
  • Hunter Walk, a partner at the firm Homebrew VC, wrote about the idea of the multi-SKU creator. (An SKU is a code that a company uses to track specific types of products.) His point: Even the most successful paid newsletter creators aren’t going to make all their money from subscriptions. Diversifying your revenue streams — through paid products, speaking fees, consulting, etc. — is a safer bet in the long run.
  • Speaking of which: Michael Rothman, CEO of Fatherly, put together a really good list of ways to make money that don’t involve selling ads.
  • Here’s a fantastic Twitter thread about pricing from Thomas Baekdal, a Danish consultant and writer who runs the subscription site Baekdal Plus. Give yourself some time to think about his core argument: You’re probably pricing your product incorrectly.
    • I’ve had this conversation a lot recently with Not a Newsletter readers who are launching paid products. They’re trying to come up with a price point, and (I think) are typically undervaluing their own work.
    • For instance: Most people launching paid newsletters seem to have settled on one of two prices: $5/month, or $10/month. Why? Because when they look at other established products that are having success, the products are typically priced at either $5 or $10/mo.
    • The internet is, at its worst, a league of copycats. If you’ve been around a while on the internet, you probably remember the story of the Obama campaign’s “hey” emails that raised millions of dollars — and that led to thousands of email senders (not just political campaigns) making casual subject lines their default tactic. A few years ago, I remember reading a big case study that analyzed different button colors to see which were most likely to lead to a sale. After that case study declared a winning color, I don’t think I saw anything but that button color for months.
    • Point is: Don’t assume that what works for someone else is what you should do, too. Test these ideas out for yourself. See what actually works best for you!
    • And don’t assume that these other newsletters — or even the platforms they work with — have done research to identify the ideal price point.
      • If you’re reading this and thinking, “Hey, we’re a platform/publisher/research group that could do just this sort of research to help a whole bunch of people figure out how to price a newsletter subscription!”, you should shoot me an email at dan@inboxcollective.com. Let’s talk!
    • Lastly: If you’re reading this hoping I’ll tell you what the ideal price point is for your product, well: There is no universal recommendation I can make at the moment. (Sorry!) But I’m going to do my best to get you better answers in 2021.
  • Something I’m keeping an eye on: Tanya Plaza of Dotdigital wrote about bot clicks on your newsletter — mostly from security tools designed to protect users from clicking on malicious links. The reason this is worth thinking through: These bots can accidentally inflate your ESP’s open/click rate data. I’d recommend using a secondary source to track your statistics, like Google Analytics, so you can get the truest picture of what your users are actually doing.
  • For anyone working on abandoned cart emails, check out these tips from Iterable. I love their recommendation to try to start a conversation with these abandoned cart emails.
  • This was an eye-opening read from Patrice Peck, the journalist behind the newsletter Coronavirus News for Black Folks: “What Writing a Pandemic Newsletter Showed Me About America.” Make some time for this one this month.
  • From the Dept. of Self-Promotion: I did a few small interviews recently that I wanted to mention:
  • If you’ve got an hour, this is great: Harry Dry of Marketing Examples shared the story of how he grew his newsletter from 0 to 38,000 subscribers in about 18 months. (tl;dr — He did a lot of stuff that didn’t scale before he tackled the things that could scale.)
  • The team at Litmus saw their open and click rates drop earlier this year. Litmus’s Jaina Mistry wrote about how they got their numbers back up by following two key tips from Ann Handley to make their newsletter more personable and more scrollable.
  • I’ve gotten a lot of questions about converting Instagram followers to newsletter subscribers, and I’d recommend taking a look at these lessons from Diana Riojas of the 100 Days in Appalachia project. She talked through a few strategies that have been effective for her team. (I love the countdown clock idea!)
  • A great newsroom success story here from Wendy Greenlaw and Kevin Lipe of The Daily Memphian: They’ve focused on growing their newsletter audience — now up to 40,000 readers — and are seeing that those loyal readers are now becoming paying subscribers. (Also, and this makes me so happy: They’re seeing great results from their onboarding series.)
  • Hanaa’ Tameez of Nieman Lab interviewed Anam Khan, creator of the daily Pakistani news briefing NewsRun, about the workflow and inspiration behind that newsletter.
  • File this link away if you’re someone who sends a lot of emails (in the millions per month) and might have to send emails with a lot of legalese (like a notice about a security breach or a privacy policy update): the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (or M3AAWG, for short) released a guide to steps you’ll want to take if you have to send out these sorts of emails.
    • Sending out one giant blast with a legal notice is a really, really good way to make sure your emails end up in the spam folder forever. So the big things you’ll want to do first:
      • Make sure you’ve set up authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
      • Segment your list (start by sending to batches of engaged or affected users — don’t just send a million emails all at once!).
      • Send these emails from a different email address than usual (if you usually send from hello@yoursite.com, maybe send these from legal@yoursite.com.
    • The full list of recommendations from the M3AAWG are worth hanging on to — and again, this really only matters if you’re a huge site that might have to send a legal notice out to a ton of people.
  • Validity’s Guy Hanson talked about a few ways to keep Gmail happy. If you’re a big sender (100k+ subscribers, sending daily or multiple times per week), you should absolutely be paying attention to the advice here.
    • Remember: There’s a difference between deliverability (whether you land in spam or the inbox) and inbox placement (where you land in in the inbox). But as Kickbox’s Lauren Meyer pointed out recently, you shouldn’t worry too much about inbox placement. According to some research, more than half of all emails are read in an inbox that doesn’t offer tabs, and only 1 in 5 Gmail users even has tabs turned on.
    • While you’re thinking about all of this: Oracle’s Daniel Deneweth wrote about why it’s so crucial that you monitor your inactive readers. Working to win back — or eventually remove — those inactives is crucial to keeping your emails out of the spam folder and in the inbox.
  • I enjoyed this, from Ilma Nausedaite, the COO of MailerLite, about building out a strong Christmas marketing strategy. (It’s actually a little late in the game to start on this sort of thing, but the strategies here apply to most holidays!)
  • Mike Nelson of Really Good Emails wrote about a tough decision RGE had to make: Were the pop-ups on their site annoying for readers? And what should they do about them? It’s worth reading through how they decided to better deploy pop-ups on site.
    • And if you’re thinking through questions to ask before running a pop-up, I’ve got a list here. The more sophisticated you can get with your targeting, the  more effective — and less annoying — those pop-ups are likely to be.
  • Here’s an interesting interview from Mark Stenberg’s Medialyte newsletter with Shelby Hartman, the co-founder of a magazine about psychedelics called Double Blind. I particularly appreciated their discussion of analytics, and how Double Blind uses data even with seemingly small things, like writing great copy to convert readers to newsletter subscribers.
  • I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write this sentence: Costco’s official magazine, Costco Connection, wrote a surprisingly good guide to the basics of email marketing. (My absolute favorite part of this article is that they call Paul Jarvis — noted writer and creator of Fathom Analytics — a “Consultant, author and Costco member.” Let it be known: No matter what you do in life, in the eyes of Costco, your career and your ability to get a great deal on a 64-pack of toilet paper should be given equal weight.)

Stuff I Loved This Month

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 badger
  • Badgers look cute, but they’re quite tough. Some badgers have even been seen hunting alongside coyotes.
  • Badgers won’t use the bathroom in their own homes. They actually go outside, to a communal area, when nature calls.
  • They live on four continents, with the largest badgers living in Europe, and the smallest ones in Asia.
  • A group of badgers has a one-of-a-kind name: They’re called a cete. You’ll typically find badgers living in a series of tunnels known as a sett (which means, yes, you’d find a cete in a sett), some of these setts can stretch up to 100 yards long, and include multiple rooms for multiple badgers to live in. Of course, this only applies to badgers that are part of the Mustelidae family, and not to the group of University of Wisconsin alums also known as Badgers. To find them, I’d recommend the Kollege Klub on North Lake Street in Madison — they’ll be the ones with a Leinenkugel in each hand.

Anyway, the badger! 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.