Welcome to the February 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 some detailed notes about how to approach paid acquisition; a few learnings from the Trump campaign’s strategy for growing their email list; a Course success story from The Wirecutter; and more! Have something else you think should be featured in Not a Newsletter? Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com.
-Dan
This Month in Email News
- How Morning Brew grew to $13m in revenue with 33 employees (Digiday)
- ActiveCampaign, Customer Experience Automation Firm, Raises $100 Million In Funding (MediaPost)
- Phishing scammers use Trump’s name more than all other candidates combined in phony emails (Fox Business)
- Signal Is Finally Bringing Its Secure Messaging to the Masses (WIRED)
- This isn’t about email specifically, but I’m fascinated by the growth and potential of these messaging apps.
- Publishers’ CCPA compliance varies with ambiguous definition of ‘sale’ (Digiday)
For Your Reading List
- Phillip Smith’s back with a second look at paid acquisition strategies for publishers. I’ve gotten so many questions about paid acquisition recently — How does it work? Is it worth it? — so I wanted to go deeper on the subject:
- The publishers who are having success with paid acquisition are typically thinking about two steps: 1) Spending money on a channel like Facebook or Google to get a reader to sign up for a newsletter, and then, 2) Converting that reader to a paying customer/subscriber/donor.
- As part of this sort of campaign, you’re going to want to make sure that you’ve got a great onboarding series to welcome readers and convert them. If you’re doing this at scale, it’s worth building out a custom onboarding process just for these readers — they’re probably not as loyal as your typical readers, and you really need to focus on establishing a relationship with them in the 2-4 weeks after they join your newsletter.
- You should also think about creating a custom reactivation series for these subscribers. Be willing to let them churn — perhaps even after just 30 days — so they don’t affect your open rates and inbox placement.
- When it comes to paid acquisition, there are a few metrics I tend to pay attention to most:
- Cost per lead (CPL) — The cost to get one reader to sign up for your newsletter.
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) — The cost to acquire one new paying customer (a subscriber, a member, a donor, etc.).
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) — The total revenue generated by that paying customer over the lifetime of the relationship with your business.
- A simple rule of thumb here: If you’re acquiring new paying subscribers, take the value of a single year of a subscription and double it to get your CLV.
- So here’s how this might work in a hypothetical paid acquisition campaign for a news organization with a subscription business:
- Your organization goes out and spends $5,000 on ads to drive new newsletter subscribers. Your advertising works pretty well: Your cost per lead is $1, so you’re able to turn $5,000 into 5,000 new email subscribers.
- Over the course of the first month after they join your newsletter, thanks to the custom onboarding series you built (and your newsletter, of course), 5 percent of those readers become paying subscribers. You’ve got 250 new customers, and the cost per acquisition of those customers was $20.
- An annual subscription to your publication costs $100, and you’re assuming that the lifetime of a subscription lasts two years — so your customer lifetime value’s $200. For those 250 new subscribers, you’ve just generated $50,000 in CLV.
- Congrats! You just spent $5,000 to acquire 250 new customers, but turned that into $50,000 in revenue. (You’re also probably getting a raise, and a bigger budget for paid acquisition.)
- Now, is it really that easy? No, of course not. The companies that do this well go through months and months of testing to figure out how to acquire customers and convert them. (And then you’ve got to retain those customers for the long haul! Of course, building great newsletters can be a key part of that puzzle.)
- And that’s just how it works when you’re building around a subscription business. If you’re an ad-based business, not a subscription business, you’ll need to have a really clear sense of the impact that each individual subscriber has on your ad business. How much more revenue will you make in advertising for every 1,000 new engaged subscribers to your list? Be able to answer that before you spend a dollar.
- Now, is it really that easy? No, of course not. The companies that do this well go through months and months of testing to figure out how to acquire customers and convert them. (And then you’ve got to retain those customers for the long haul! Of course, building great newsletters can be a key part of that puzzle.)
- Anyway, give Phillip’s story a read — it’s a smart look at what a handful of publishers are doing already!
- The publishers who are having success with paid acquisition are typically thinking about two steps: 1) Spending money on a channel like Facebook or Google to get a reader to sign up for a newsletter, and then, 2) Converting that reader to a paying customer/subscriber/donor.
- One more thing on the subject: So much has been made of the way Barack Obama’s campaign used email (with notoriously short subject lines like “hey” to drive engagement), but there hasn’t been nearly enough discussion of the way Donald Trump’s used paid acquisition (mostly through Facebook ads) to grow his email lists. His campaign focuses on driving his audience to surveys and contests, which in turn drive email sign-ups. (You can’t submit/enter without handing over your email.) Give this article about Trump’s paid acquisition strategy by The Guardian’s Julia Carrie Wong a read — it’s really well reported.
- And in non-political examples: RightMessage’s Brennan Dunn wrote about using surveys as a smart way to grow your email list.
- I linked at the top of the Doc to that story about Morning Brew’s massive growth, and also wanted to share this: Dan Benoni and Louis-Xavier Lavallee of Growth·Design put together a great case study of why the Morning Brew newsletter is so effective.
- The team at Basecamp is moving into the ISP space with hey.com. They haven’t released many details, but based on this post from Basecamp’s David Heinemeier Hansson, it seems pretty clear that they’re building a competitor to Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook that puts the privacy of readers first. I’ll be following this launch closely over the next few months — it’s going to get some mainstream attention.
- The team at WhereBy.Us is making a pretty big pivot in 2020. For the past five years, they’ve operated their own local news sites in markets like Miami and Seattle. Now they’re pushing into a new space: They’re going to be releasing a suite of publishing tools, from a newsletter builder to ad-serving tools. They’re currently raising a new round of funding to support their new business, which should start ramping up over the next few months. I had a great conversation with their team recently — just as Substack has opened doors for subscription newsletters, I think the team at WhereBy.Us is onto something that’s going to have a major impact on the local news + newsletter space.
- This headline from Bloomberg’s Emily Chasan certainly caught my attention: “Cut Back on Email If You Want to Fight Global Warming.”
- Google Venture’s M.G. Siegler wrote about his newsletter consumption habits.
- M.G. mentions having a newsletter-specific folder to make it easy to browse through everything. That’s the exact strategy I’ve used for years now. I use an app called SaneBox (here’s a link to a free trial, if you’d like to give it a try!) to filter everything to the right folder, and it’s saved me countless hours over the years. (As of this writing, I have over 3,500 unread newsletters in my newsletter folder, but only 5 unread emails in my primary inbox. I have no idea what I’d do if SaneBox wasn’t around to sort out everything for me.)
- Joshua Brockman of The New York Times wrote about investors who rely on newsletters for financial advice. These are mostly print newsletters — monthly mailings with advice, tips, and research — but I found it interesting that many of these also have an email newsletter component (email alerts around certain stocks, or weekly updates on the markets). They’re a nice example of how email can work alongside a printed product.
- From a Patrice Peck profile in The New York Times called, “How to Build a Media Company,” about the celebrity site The Jasmine Brand, here’s a paragraph that won’t surprise any of you: “The website’s traffic eclipses the newsletter’s, yet the emails, which simply list the day’s top 25 stories, have proven to be a ‘game changer,’ Ms. Brand said. She said that these emails ‘land’ in the inboxes of high-profile celebrities, agents, editors and other industry powerhouses and foster valuable brand recognition.”
- I’m always looking for examples of organizations that are creating newsletter-like experiences on other messaging platforms. The Telegraph’s a leader in this space, specifically on WhatsApp, and they’ve just launched a daily audio briefing distributed via a WhatsApp group. It’s really intriguing, and I’m curious to see if others will follow their lead.
- On a related note: Twipe released a deep dive on habits that includes an interview about The Telegraph’s strategy, as well as ideas from other news organizations about email onboarding. I’d recommend that you give it a close read.
- Ann Handley, who writes the excellent Total Annarchy newsletter, did a great podcast interview about newsletters with the team at Podia.
- Gmail released a few steps to making sure that your emails don’t go to spam. It’s fairly technical, but if you’re having trouble with emails landing in spam, start with this resource.
- Oracle’s Chad S. White wrote about how to adapt to dark mode for email.
- Twipe’s Mary-Katharine Phillips wrote about registration walls, and ways news organizations are using them to collect email addresses. (One interesting example in here: France’s Le Monde has a newsletter that’s only for registered users. You don’t have to pay for it, but you do have to hand over your email address to read it.) Done well, these registration walls can be good ways to collect an email address and then start building a relationship with the reader — ultimately leading to that reader deciding to pay to support that organization.
- Ghost’s Kym Ellis shared lots of examples of premium newsletters, and also dove into how Ghost can be used to build out such a product.
- A few related stories: Craig Mod shared lessons from a year of running a membership program.
- On the Splice Media blog, Ariel Zirulnick of the Membership Puzzle Project detailed 11 questions to ask before launching any sort of membership program.
- And on the a16z blog, Li Jin wrote about how in 2020, the “1,000 true fans” concept might actually work with just 100 fans.
- Len Shneyder shared a few lessons from the 4.2 billion emails sent by SendGrid during the 2019 holidays. One fascinating takeaway: Emails without the word “discount” in the subject line had a higher rate of engagement than those that mentioned it.
- Litmus’s Steph Knapp shared a bunch of examples of great order confirmation emails. It’s a great reminder: Even transactional emails deserve a little bit of personality.
- And just to reinforce the importance of these emails, here’s a recent headline from Marketing Land: “Brands are neglecting transactional emails, leading to deliverability issues and lost customers.”
- Jeanne Jennings took a closer look at two very different strategies for reactivation emails: One from SmartBrief, and one from Thrillist.
- The 2020 Iditarod’s coming up in a few weeks, and I’m excited to see what the Anchorage Daily News has in store for it this year. Last year, they ran a pop-up newsletter around the event and had a ton of success. Over on the Second Street blog, Vicky Ho shared a few lessons from last year’s newsletter.
Stuff I Loved This Month
- Back in the fall, the team at the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post joined me on stage at the Online News Association conference to discuss Courses. It’s been a few months since, and I’m starting to hear from folks who actually launched a Course after learning of them either through that ONA talk or the Doc!
- The team at The Wirecutter, led by newsletter strategist Alejandra Matos, launched their first Course — the Five-Day Credit Card Checkup — a few weeks ago, and they were kind enough to share some data with Not a Newsletter:
- In the first few weeks, more than 8,000 readers have signed up for the Course.
- The average open rate for the Course is 69%.
- 40% of readers who start the Course are still engaged with it by the final email (a metric I refer to as “completion rate”).
- Kudos to The Wirecutter for giving a Course a try. If you’d like to sign up for their Credit Card Checkup, you can do so here.
- The team at Pew also launched their second Course! It’s a five-day Course about the 2020 U.S. Census, and the impact it’ll have on lives in America. Sign up for it here.
- And if you were inspired by that ONA panel and launched a Course, I’d love to hear about it! Shoot me an email at dan@inboxcollective.com with details.
- The team at The Wirecutter, led by newsletter strategist Alejandra Matos, launched their first Course — the Five-Day Credit Card Checkup — a few weeks ago, and they were kind enough to share some data with Not a Newsletter:
- I loved Everyday Arcade’s new interactive game, Privacy Chicken. It’s brilliantly done, and shows just how invasive some websites can be. But it’s also a great reminder of why it’s so important to do the right thing for your readers. They don’t get to be in the room when decisions are made around their data — someone needs to be there to stand up for them. Maybe that person’s you?
- I stumbled upon SpeedCurve’s Page Speed Benchmarks tool recently. What we know is that faster websites typically lead to more readers and more paying customers or subscribers. Their tool really makes clear how much work many news sites still have to do when it comes to speed.
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 Wolverine’s a funny creature: They look kind of like tiny bears, but technically, they’re weasels. (If you really want to get technical: They’re polyamorous weasels that can weigh up to 40 pounds — but still, they’re weasels.) But that’s not why they’re this month’s Anonymous Animal.
If you’re a college sports fan, you know that the University of Michigan’s mascot is the Wolverine. But those Michigan Wolverines are also responsible for one of the feel-good stories of the year so far. Take three minutes and watch this story, from CBS Sunday Morning’s Steve Hartman, about a nine-year-old boy’s love for the University of Michigan marching band. I promise, it’ll put a smile on your face.
Anyway, the wolverine! That’s your 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:
