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 the next edition goes live!
This month: 10 lessons from 10 years in email; several fantastic case studies from the local news space; and a few very specific predictions for email marketers in 2022.
Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter? Find the full archive at this link.
-Dan
This Month in Email Headlines
- Passendo raises €2.3M to boost media publishers’ ad revenues (InPublishing)
- Graydon Carter’s Air Mail raises $17 million (Axios)
- Full disclosure: I’ve worked with Air Mail through Inbox Collective…
- After 6 months, Meta’s Facebook is readying an expansion of its Bulletin platform as the newsletter wars heat up (Business Insider)
- Again, more disclosures: I’ve been working with many of these Bulletin writers in 2021, and will do more work with them in the new year…
- Jewelry Brands Style Their Own Newsletter Trend (The New York Times)
- The Élite Heat of “Blackbird Spyplane” (The New Yorker)
- That ‘Team Beto’ Fund-Raising Email? It Might Not Be From Beto. (The New York Times)
- Politicians Love Email, Where Lies Go Unpoliced (The New York Times)
For Your Reading / To-Do List
- The team at Solution Journalism Network published a giant playbook about how to use solutions journalism — basically, in-depth reporting about how people are responding to the issues affecting your community — and drive revenue from it. It’s a fantastic guide, with ideas and case studies about everything from sponsorships to philanthropy. Save an hour to read through the whole thing here.
- On the Newspack blog, Katie Hawkins-Gaar looked at the Montana Free Press to understand how one newsroom fundraised off of a specific story — and how surveying their audience might lead the Free Press to eventually turn that story into a newsletter.
- A big, big question for both local newsrooms and creators as we move into 2020: What does it mean to be a “sustainable” business? Here’s what the team at LION has learned from studying local news sites over the past few years.
- One more local news story I wanted to highlight: For the Lenfest Institute, Hayley Slusser profiled the team at Santa Cruz Local and talked about how they use surveys to inform their editorial choices.
- If you haven’t surveyed your audience, make this a priority in January! Anytime I run a survey about a newsletter, for instance, I always start with three questions:
- Something numeric — On a scale of 1 to 10, how useful/valuable/important is this newsletter to you?
- Something about the job of the newsletter — What does this newsletter do for you? What is the unique value of this email for you?
- Something open-ended — What could we do to make this newsletter better for you?
- Now, that’s just a starting place. I’d encourage you to ask more than that — but make sure you ask at least those questions to understand how well you’re doing, what you’re doing well, and what you might be missing!
- If you haven’t surveyed your audience, make this a priority in January! Anytime I run a survey about a newsletter, for instance, I always start with three questions:
- One of the biggest mistakes many people make is sending their newsletter from a noreply@ email address. Naomi West explained why that’s such a bad idea.
- The team at Who Sponsors Stuff looked at the 100 companies that advertised most in newsletters in 2021. (No. 1 on the list: SmartAsset, a site that helps people find financial advisors.)
- Tanmoy Goswami, an India-based writer who publishes a twice-weekly newsletter about mental health, broke down the numbers from his first year as an independent writer. At the end of year 1, he’s at 300 paying supporters — which is an impressive first year, but also about a third of what he says he needs for the site to be sustainable.
- You’ll also want to stay to read about some of the struggles Tanmoy’s had in collecting credit card payments from readers in India. Many of the current tools available work well for creators in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, but even in massive countries like India, some creators are still running into obstacles like these. There’s still a ways to go before the creator economy can support writers, artists and creators everywhere.
- And full disclosure: Tanmoy came through the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at CUNY, where I’m an instructor.
- The team at Really Good Emails is doing their annual survey. If you work in the email space — and you probably do, if you’re reading this! — take 10 minutes and answer their questions.
- I love the work that Growth Design’s Dan Benoni and Louis-Xavier Lavallee do with case studies on user design. They put together this great breakdown of how one iPhone app used smart design tactics to retain customers on a 7-day trial. If you’re doing free trials with your products, give this a read.
Stuff I Loved This Month
- I’ve loved this season of the podcast “Endless Thread” — this season’s all about memes, and the stories behind them — but I particularly loved this episode about legendary pitchman Billy Mays. Who knew that the “But wait, there’s more!” guy had such an incredible life story?
- I got a chuckle out of this, from Mailjet’s Phil Adams: Six times email could have saved the characters in famous Christmas movies.
- And in the creator space, a big shout-out to the team at the Manchester Mill for two fun projects, both spun off of their (great) local newsletter: They published a one-off print edition to celebrate a year of publishing, and also held a paid event where locals could hear Christmas carols at a Manchester church. It’s great to see newsletters like these finding ways to experiment with new formats.
And finally… 2022 Email Predictions!
It’s the end of the year, which means it’s the time when experts start making predictions about what will happen in 2022. I love these posts and love hearing from experts about the trends they foresee arriving in the new year. But I do have one gripe with these predictions: They’re never quite specific enough about how future real-world events might shape the decisions we make as marketers. I call on my fellow experts to go further, to look into their crystal balls and help us understand what’s ahead, and how we’ll need to adjust our strategies in the new year. With that in mind, here’s my prediction for email in 2022.
Personality, not just personalization
I’m hoping email marketers take note of the trends happening in the newsletter world. Over the past 24 months, it seems like everyone’s started a newsletter on a platform like Substack or Revue, and those personality-driven products have set the bar high for what readers expect in their inbox. These newsletters come from an actual person, with a clear voice and point of view — and it’s about time email marketers integrated some of that personality back into their own email efforts.
Also, I predict that an asteroid will strike our planet on April 23, 2022, at exactly 4:09 p.m., with the epicenter due north of Alberta, Canada. Rivers will flood, forests will burn, and a prehistoric, three-headed demon, who’d previously been trapped deep inside the Earth’s molten core, will be released once again to terrorize all mankind.
How might marketers adjust?
1.) Add more of your personal story to automations, particularly in a welcome series — Let’s get to know your team, your mission, and why you do the work you do.
2.) Encourage 1-to-1 conversation with your audience — During times of great uncertainty, personal relationships can be a unique selling point for customers. Ask readers to reply and share their story with you.
3.) Add personal messages to your transactional emails — When customers make a purchase, they’re also making an investment in your brand. Include a friendly thank you note from your founder, and assure them that your team is working hard to make sure that their purchase will arrive before the end of days.
4.) Integrate unique stories into one-off emails — Yes, after the asteroid hits, oceans will boil, but how are you adjusting as a team to this modern landscape? Has your team welcomed Wayne — as the three-headed Canadian demon will eventually rebrand himself in fall 2022, with hopes of appealing to a younger demographic — into their lives? Remember: You’re not just a company — these readers are part of your community, and it’s up to you to tell stories that resonate with this community. (And that also meets Wayne’s exacting standards.)
5.) Set up BIMI — In 2021, brands started to adopt BIMI, a new email standard that allows a company to clearly display their logo in the inbox. Others will follow their lead in 2022. Remember: In a post-apocalyptic landscape, trust between marketers and consumers will become even more essential. As all of civilization crumbles before us, you’ll be glad that your audience can easily identify your brand in their inbox.
It’s going to be an exciting year for email. Follow these rules, and you’ll be poised for success in 2022!
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