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!
And a big thank you to beehiiv, this quarter’s presenting sponsor of Not a Newsletter and Inbox Collective! They’re an email platform founded by ex-engineers at Morning Brew, and their tools are absolutely worth a closer look. You can check out beehiiv here.
This month, I’m sharing:
- The steps you’ll need to take to launch and start growing your own personal newsletter.
- How a French newsletter took the closing section of their newsletter, repackaged it into a book, and sold €60,000 worth of books.
- A useful guide to building a media kit to attract advertisers.
- A few great stories about using audience feedback to inform newsletter strategy.
Plus a big announcement about Dine & Deliver, the newsletter dinner series I’m co-hosting… and more!
Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter? Find the full archive at this link.
This Month in Email Headlines
- Publisher tech firm OpenWeb makes $100 million acquisition of Jeeng to help publishers better target ads and emails (Insider)
- CM Group Rebrands as Marigold (Global Newswire)
- Axios Pro generated $2 million in 2022 with more than 3K paid subscribers (Digiday)
- FEC dismisses GOP complaint over Gmail spam filter (The Washington Post)
- LinkedIn’s Newsletter Subscribers Quadrupled as Meta, Twitter Axed Products (The Information)
- Bloomberg, Axios, Politico, other business publishers rethink subscriber retention during the economic downturn (Digiday)
- Sendmarc nabs $7M to offer email protection from phishing attacks and email impersonation (TechCrunch)
- Semafor sells Verizon on sponsoring its text message interview series (Digiday)
- The boring journey of Matt Yglesias (The Washington Post)
- Biden’s HBCU office promotes Wells Fargo products in email newsletter before backtracking (Politico)
- The GOP Sent 61 Insane Emails Begging Me to Buy a $35 Membership (Mother Jones)
- Tired of after-work emails and calls? In these countries, they’re outlawed (The Washington Post)
New on inboxcollective.com This Month
How to Launch Your Indie Newsletter (Parts I and II)
Over the past few years, I’ve gotten this question over and over again from readers: If I’m launching my own newsletter for the first time, where should I start? So I’ve put together a big guide walking through the steps I take when launching a new newsletter (for myself or with a client).
Part I: How to Launch Your Indie Newsletter — In Part I, I walk through the steps you need to take before launch: How to pick a name, set goals, and identify the right formats for your newsletter.
Part II: How to Write and Promote Your First Newsletter — In Part II, I talk about the steps you’ll need to take to send your very first email, and how to start building your list.
Parts III and IV will be live in the next few weeks — I’ll talk about tactics to get your first 1,000 (and 10,000 readers), and how to monetize your newsletter.
How a French Newsletter Turned a Fun Outro into €60,000 in Book Sales
Here’s a fun story about how a dedicated relationship with readers paid off, literally, when the French newsletter Bulletin created and sold a book based on a section of their newsletter. Here’s what their team learned from the process of creating “The Dictionary of Extraordinary Words.”
A special note: This story was first published by Médianes, a France-based consultancy and website. They were kind enough to both conduct this interview and translate it into English for us. This is the first of a few stories we’ll be working on together in 2023 — we’ll be translating a few pieces of theirs into English, and they’ll be translating some Inbox Collective content into French. I’m very excited about this partnership!
Four Deliverability Tricks That Actually Work
When it comes to keeping your emails in the inbox, which tactics actually make a difference? I asked our resident deliverability expert, Yanna-Torry Aspraki, for the definitive answer. These are the four she recommends trying.
Nonrival Makes Forecasting More Fun
It’s rare when I come across a newsletter that does something I’ve never seen before. That’s why I got so excited when I found out about Nonrival, a newsletter from Walter Frick that combines automations and predictions into a novel format. Evelyn Crowley interviewed Walter about what he built and how he did it.
30 Ideas To Improve Your Newsletter This Year
Want to take your newsletter to the next level in 2023? Here’s the full list of 30 actionable tips you can try this month.
For Your Reading / To-Do List
- Non-profit newsrooms, bookmark this: Indiegraf’s Elena Coll walked through a few steps you can take to convert newsletter subscribers to paying supporters.
- Sharene Azimi of the Institute for Nonprofit News shared several great lessons from 2022’s end-of-year fundraising efforts — including a few interesting stories on how newsrooms partnered to raise money.
- And if you’ve got a fundraising campaign coming up soon, I put together some tips around building out a campaign aimed at your newsletter audience.
- I get a lot of questions from readers about how to set up a media kit to bring in advertisers for their newsletter. Really happy that I can now share this resource with them: A useful guide from the team at Passionfroot with recommendations for what to include in your media kit.
- I’ll continue to say it: Audience research — surveys, polls, 1-to-1 conversations with readers — need to be part of your newsletter strategy. So I loved this guide on The Audiencers blog, from Khalil A. Cassimally, about how The Conversation shifted to a decision-first approach to doing audience research.
- And here’s one more fantastic case study, as reported by Mollie Muchna of Trusting News: It’s about how The Arizona Daily Star used postcards to collect survey feedback from their community.
- In my guide to email platforms for indie newsletters, I wanted to make sure I walked through the questions I ask before exploring a platform. So I was thrilled to see this, from Scaling CRM’s Drew Price: A list of seven steps larger orgs or publishers should take before picking an ESP.
- I’ve really been enjoying the work that Substack’s Reid DeRamus has been doing on his newsletter, Growth Croissant. Anyone with a subscription newsletter should make time for this post about customer lifetime value and retention.
- A few indie newsletter success stories:
- Bron Maher of PressGazette talked to the team at Cheapskate, a newsletter that lists free events happening around London, about how they grew to 10,000 subscribers.
- Beehiiv’s Darwin Binesh profiled the team at International Intrigue, a global affairs newsletter that’s grown to 20,000 subscribers in just over 15 months.
- The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey talked with Steve Hayes of The Dispatch about hitting 40,000 paying subscribers, with 17% of their total email list choosing to pay. (FWIW: That’s an absurdly high conversion rate.)
- And I really enjoyed this, from the Substack blog: How to promote your book using your newsletter.
- How do you build a newsletter as a side hustle? Alan Soon and Rishad Patel talked with Zurairi A. R., the news editor at Malay Mail, about one successful newsletter launch aimed at covering Malaysia’s parliament.
- One more 2022 end-of-year recap that I wanted to share: Peter Torres Fremlin talked about how the Disability Debrief newsletter grew during their first year — and where they still need help to continue growing.
- I love seeing newsrooms try pop-up products. Here’s a fun story, from Esther Kezia Thorpe of Media Voices, about a new newsletter from The Wall Street Journal that’s only sent when big news happens. (It’s a cross between a breaking news alert and one of their signature briefings.)
- I’ve written before about AMP for Email — it’s something you can use to add interactive elements to emails. Here’s a case study that might get newsrooms excited about AMP: Mailmodo’s Vaibhav Khanna wrote about how The Indian Express used AMP to create an RSS-powered email that updates in real time.
- Unfortunately, many ESPs still don’t support AMP. Here’s which ones do.
- There are a lot of ways to screw up a good email strategy. For Only Influencers, Mark Morin walked through five tactics that could derail an email program.
- Really liked this, from Jordie van Rijn for CMSWire: “5 Ways to Make Your Marketing Emails More Personal — Without Personalization.”
- Birthday emails can be used for both conversion and retention. AWeber’s Sean Tinney walked through tips for setting a birthday email strategy.
- Birthday clubs also represent a sales opportunity. From Second Street, here are two examples — one from WGN-TV, one from The Aberdeen American News in South Dakota — that drove ad revenue for those orgs.
- Experiencing deliverability issues? Kickbox’s Jennifer Nespola Lantz put together a four-part deep dive into email headers, and how they might help you identify deliverability issues. (Up front: This one’s a fairly technical guide.)
Announcing… Dine & Deliver!
Last year, the guys at Who Sponsors Stuff and I were talking about something that frustrated us: There aren’t many events for newsletter operators. Sure, there are conferences about news or marketing that might include a panel about newsletters, but shouldn’t there be something more?
So we decided to create the event we wanted to attend.
This year, Who Sponsors Stuff and Inbox Collective will be co-hosting Dine & Deliver, presented by LiveIntent. Dine & Deliver is a series of invite-only dinners for newsletter publishers and operators.
There will be food, drinks, and the chance to swap ideas with some of the most plugged-in newsletter operators from across North America. (This isn’t just a New York City event — we’ll be bringing Dine & Deliver to cities across North America this year. We’ll be officially announcing the first few cities shortly.)
It’ll be free to attend, but space is limited! Dinners will be capped at around 20 guests per city to encourage free-flowing conversation.
Interested in attending an upcoming Dine & Deliver dinner? Submit your application to attend here.
(And thanks again to LiveIntent, the presenting sponsor of Dine & Deliver, and Kickbox and Mark It Done, for their support of these dinners. We‘re lucky to have partners who believe in this community and want to create something great to support it!)
Stuff I Loved This Month
- A big shout-out to Cory Brown, who put together a library of newsletter examples for newsrooms, from daily products to welcome emails.
- How can newsrooms track the impact of their work? Check out the Impact Tracker, from the team at Impact Architects. Rosemary D’Amour of IA explained what it is and how it works. (Oh, and it’s free!)
- Looking for a list of key dates to build a marketing calendar around in 2023? GetResponse’s Anna Kvasnevska has a month-by-month guide to all the big (and maybe not so big) holidays. (I, for one, can’t believe I already missed January 9 — National Clean Your Desk Day.)
- What name should you build your newsletter behind? Really enjoyed this, from Jay Clouse, about how he made that decision for his own brand.
- If you’re curious about how I named Inbox Collective, I told that story back in 2020. (Every day, I wake up grateful that I didn’t name this company Inboxx.com.)
- Politicians have been known for some usual subject lines. But this subject line, which landed in my inbox the other day, was truly… something.
- (I can only hope they A/B tested the number of exclamation points.)
Find Your Next Email Job
If you’ve ever emailed me or DMed me to ask, “Can you recommend a great person for this newsletter role?”, I’ve got good news: I absolutely can — thanks to the Inbox Collective talent collective!
📬 If you’re an employer looking to hire someone for an email role, join the collective. When you join, you’ll immediately get access to a pool of 40+ curated candidates looking for new jobs in the email space! (I just added more folks this month!)
📬 If you’re actively searching for or are open to a conversation about a new job, you can submit your application to the collective here! Once you join the collective, companies can message you directly about openings on their team.
This is a matchmaking service for email roles — and it’s free for everyone. Join today, and let’s get a few of you into amazing new roles in 2023!
Shoutouts + Thank Yous
- Thanks to Jessica Malnik for having me on The Remote Work Tribe podcast!
- Thanks to Jane Friedman for her kind words in her newsletter about my email platform guide!
- Thanks to the team at Splice for making sure readers took a closer look at my list of questions to ask before picking an email platform!
- Thanks to Beatriz Guarezi for featuring Simon Linde’s copywriting post in her newsletter. (What a world: A Brazil-based newsletter featuring an English language story by a Danish copywriter!)
- Thanks to Really Good Emails for sharing my 30 Ideas post (and, in general, for all the examples on their site — I don’t know how I’d put together a client presentation without them!).
- And thanks to Ann Handley for inspiring this new Shoutouts + Thank Yous section of the Google Doc! (I wrote about it in my 30 Ideas for 2023 post.)
The (Not a) 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. But a few years ago, I ran out of Google Doc animals to feature at the end of Not a Newsletter, and wasn’t sure what to do. Then I had an idea: What if I commissioned an artist to design new animals just for Not a Newsletter?
I had a few designers create sample versions of the Google Doc animals, and settled on this design, from Anna Kosak. She’s created more than two dozen new animals to add to the Not a Newsletter canon. I’ll be sharing more in the months ahead!
So to close out this edition of Not a Newsletter, I want to spotlight one of these animals in a new feature I call… the (Not a) Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month!
This month: the Flamingo!
- A group of flamingos is called a “flamboyance.” (Though a group of young flamingos form what’s known as a “crèche.”)
- At birth, a flamingo’s feathers are white and gray, and their beaks are straight. It can take a few years for their feathers to turn pink and their beaks to develop their signature curve.
- If you look at a flamingo standing up, you’ll notice a joint about halfway up their leg. That’s not the flamingo’s knee — it’s actually their ankle.
- Flamingos are usually seen standing on one leg, not two. Researchers believe that it’s actually easier for them to stand this way — they even found that a flamingo cadaver could easily stand upright on just one leg.
- When you think of flamingos, you might think of tropical locations like Florida or the Caribbean. But you could also look further east, to Africa, where flamingos have traditionally flocked to the lakes of Kenya’s Rift Valley to feed on the algae that breed there. Here’s a video from National Geographic taken over 15 years ago at Lake Bogoria — from the air, the lake is almost completely obscured due to the density of the flamingo population.
- But things are changing due to the climate. Water levels are rising in these lakes, and the algae that the flamingos feed upon cannot survive in the new conditions. In 2000, researchers estimated that 850,000 flamingos visited another Kenyan lake, Lake Nakuru. In 2021, that number had dropped to less than 12,000.
- The flamingo is the national bird of the Bahamas. But the plastic lawn flamingo is the official bird of Madison, Wisconsin, thanks to a prank that University of Wisconsin students first pulled in 1979.
Anyway, the Flamingo! That’s your (Not a) 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:
