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 the next edition goes live!
Inside this issue: Why your open rates from Gmail might be (slightly) inflated; newsletter benchmarks and accessibility best practices for 2022; and more!
Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter? Find the full archive at this link.
-Dan
This Month in Email Headlines
- Movable Ink Announces Intent to Acquire Coherent Path (Movable Ink blog)
- Dyspatch wants to bring AMP-powered interactive email production to all marketers (Venture Beat)
- Adobe Seeks To Drive Mobile Personalization With New Capabilities (MediaPost)
- LMA, Newspack investment in BlueLena furthers mission to reinvent business models for news (LMA blog)
- Crain Buys 20% Stake in Newsletter Publisher Front Office Sports (Bloomberg)
- Former Capital Gazette editor on joining Meta’s Bulletin (Poynter)
- Full disclosure: I work with the FOS team and several Bulletin writers through Inbox Collective.
- Why are so many liberals mad at David Leonhardt? (New York)
- Substack Bug Inflated Page Views By 100% (Gawker)
- Michigan woman uncovers lottery win in her spam folder (NPR)
- How a Ukrainian Duo Became Billionaires Correcting Work-From-Home Emails (Bloomberg)
- How The Daily Beast is making money from potential subscribers before conversion (Digiday)
- In a bid for new reader revenue, Quartz launches a membership for Africa (Nieman Lab)
For Your Reading / To-Do List
- Let’s dive into the big topic of the moment: Apple’s iOS15, and the impact that it’s had on open rates. (For those just catching up: Last fall, Apple rolled out a new operating system, and with it, a feature called Mail Privacy Protection. The big thing to know: Apple is prefetching emails on behalf of users, an action that’s designed to hide some of the user’s data from marketers. But as a result of this tactic, most senders have seen a significant lift in open rates — an increase of 10-20%, or even more.) Here’s what I can share with you this month about it:
- Since the fall, I’ve been telling you that your ESP has a bit more data about these Apple-inflated opens than what they’ve been sharing with you in their dashboards and reporting. I’ve also said that based on my conversations with ESPs, I’d expect most ESPs to roll out updates to make it easier to identify who’s really opening your emails and who isn’t. Here’s one of the first of those updates, from the team at Klaviyo, an ESP that primarily serves eCommerce companies. They’ve rolled out several updates to allow their customers to identify those Apple-inflated opens, and then create segments based on that data.
- This is a really exciting update from Klaviyo, and I expect to see more others follow their lead in 2022.
- The data issues aren’t limited to Apple. Sparkpost reported that Gmail is also prefetching some emails, leading to more of these false opens. But here’s the good news: Gmail isn’t doing this at nearly the same scale as Apple. Sparkpost reported that your open rate among Gmail users might be inflated by up to two percentage points.
- One last thing: Al Iverson of Spam Resource pointed out that while all of this may be skewing your open rate data, it didn’t break one key part of your email strategy: Your ability to identify many inactive users.
- Since the fall, I’ve been telling you that your ESP has a bit more data about these Apple-inflated opens than what they’ve been sharing with you in their dashboards and reporting. I’ve also said that based on my conversations with ESPs, I’d expect most ESPs to roll out updates to make it easier to identify who’s really opening your emails and who isn’t. Here’s one of the first of those updates, from the team at Klaviyo, an ESP that primarily serves eCommerce companies. They’ve rolled out several updates to allow their customers to identify those Apple-inflated opens, and then create segments based on that data.
- Good stuff here from the team at Sparkloop, who put together a list of a few dozen trends and ideas for newsletters in 2022. (Of note: Sparkloop’s an affiliate partner of mine, and I also made a small investment in their business in 2021.)
- The Data & Marketing Association’s Email Council is out with their Email Accessibility Guide. It’s an excellent resource with lots of practical tips for making your newsletter accessible. Do spend a few minutes with this!
- Campaign Monitor published their 2022 email marketing benchmarks. If you’re curious how your newsletter stacks up against others in your industry, these numbers might help you get a sense of where you stand.
- Kickbox’s Jennifer Nespola Lantz put together an excellent series about warming up a new IP address. If you’re a big organization that sends a lot of email (100k+ emails sent per day), you might want to read through these tips.
- Check out this interview that Digiday’s Kayleigh Barber did with Daniella Pierson, founder of The Newslette, a newsletter-first company that brought in $40 million in revenue in 2021. One quote from Pierson that I wanted to make sure I highlighted:
“We’ve been really focused on having the best 500,000 people on our list. Then we’re able to show clients, ‘Look how many people are looking at your content. Look at how many people are clicking.’ Maybe other email newsletters are just trying to grow the top number, and not really purging so that their top-line number can be big. But then when people see results, it’s a little disappointing.”
- List size isn’t the most important factor when it comes to driving revenue — list engagement is more important. Don’t be afraid to remove your unengaged subscribers. I’d rather you have a smaller list of engaged, active subscribers than a bigger list with lots of readers who never actually open.
- Another podcast to share: For The Rebooting, Brian Morrissey interviewed Jake Sherman, a co-founder of The Punchbowl, which is built around newsletters. They made $10 million in year one, and shared a few learnings from their first year. (Like The Newslette, advertising has been crucial to their growth.)
- Two local newsletter stories to share:
- Jim Iovino of the NewStart Alliance wrote about Sioux Falls Simplified, a weekly newsletter that serves Sioux Falls, South Dakota. As Sioux Falls Simplified enters year two, their founder, Megan Raposa, talked about how she plans to grow, and how she’s diversifying revenue streams to try to build a better business.
- Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire wrote about Boulder Reporting Lab, a new newsroom in Colorado that used coverage of a major news event to quickly grow their newsletter audience.
- I also wanted to spotlight the email BRL sent to readers a few weeks ago. They launched with plans to send a morning newsletter three days a week, but after a major fire in town, they scaled up to five days a week. That wasn’t sustainable for their team, so they eventually transitioned back to the three-day-a-week plan. Their email to readers explaining the change is a fantastic example of how to communicate with your audience.
- (I am pretty biased about their email strategy, though — I’m working with the BRL team on their email strategy through Inbox Collective.)
- One of the most common questions I get: How do I get to my first 1,000 subscribers? Ellen Donnelly, who writes The Ask, shared her story.
- Here’s a great example of a subject line A/B test that made a big difference, from Jeanne Jennings. It’s also a reminder that even a small test can lead to significant results!
Stuff I Loved This Month
- Two email events I wanted to make sure I mentioned: Really Good Emails’s UNSPAM conference has three events, in Chicago, London, and Boston, coming up; and ConvertKit’s Craft + Commerce conference returns to Boise, Idaho, this summer.
- Speaking of ConvertKit: They’re during a survey about the state of the creator economy. If you’re in this space, do take their survey — it takes about 10-15 minutes, and they’ve promised to share their learnings in a few weeks once the survey closes.
- WAN-IFRA’s European Digital Media Awards 2022 are coming up, and for the first time, they’ve got a Best Newsletter category. They’re now accepting submissions if you’re a European publisher with a newsletter you want to enter. (I’ll be one of the judges for this category — I’m excited to see your entries!)
- A neat email effort to spotlight: The Email Expiration Date initiative. The idea here: Many of us have hundreds of thousands of old marketing emails sitting in our inboxes, and storing all those old emails uses up a lot of energy. As a way to save energy and reduce email’s carbon footprint, there’s a push to automatically delete old marketing messages that are sitting in our inboxes. (They’re not saying that everything should be deleted — just that promotional email from United Airlines in 2012, or the one-weekend-only sale from Patagonia that they sent you five years ago.) You can read more about the initiative here.
- Yahoo’s email team has built a great new portal with all sorts of useful ideas about deliverability, AMP, BIMI, and more. If you’ve got a lot of users on your list who have Yahoo or AOL email addresses, check out the portal here.
- And I want to end this section on a more somber note. Back in 2019, I met Marc Lourdes. I was leaving The New Yorker to launch Inbox Collective, and Marc had just launched Between the Lines, a daily newsletter based in Malaysia. I was thrilled to meet Marc — three years ago, there weren’t quite as many people trying to produce paid newsletter products like this, and even fewer trying to do so outside of North America. The heartbreaking news: A few weeks ago, Marc died in a motorcycle accident. He was 39 years old. His team at BTL remembered him in a newsletter, and his former colleague, Alan Soon, now of Splice, wrote a lovely tribute to him. Marc, you’ll be missed.
This Month in Mel Brooks Quotes That Are Also Good Rules to Follow for Email Marketing
Mel Brooks is a comic genius, and also a surprisingly good source of inspiration for those of us in the email space. So in 2022, I’m closing the Google Doc with a brand new feature: Mel Brooks Quotes That Are Also Good Rules to Follow for Email Marketing! This month, let’s turn to the wisdom of “Blazing Saddles”:
Hedley Lamarr: My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention.
Taggart: Ditto.
Hedley Lamarr: “Ditto”? “Ditto,” you provincial putz?
When I started working in the email space, I noticed other newsletters that tried interesting or unusual tactics. Often, I’d reach out to them to learn a little more. Why’d they try that? Did it work? And every once in a while, someone would write back to me and confess: Oh, that? That didn’t work at all.
It’s great to learn from others, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to use examples you see elsewhere for inspiration. That’s often how you learn: First, by mimicking the style of others, and then by turning it into something that’s uniquely yours.
But don’t be so quick to assume that whatever your competition is doing must be a best practice. Don’t copy and paste. Whatever you see someone else trying, assume there’s a better-than-average chance that it won’t work for you. Feel free to learn from the tactic and try your own version — but before you put it into practice, test it out. If you simply say “ditto” and move on, you’re missing a chance to figure out what really works for you.
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