Welcome to Not a Newsletter, a monthly, semi-comprehensive, Google Doc-based guide to sending better emails! I’m Dan, and I’m the Director of Newsletters at The New Yorker. (Before that, I led the email team at BuzzFeed.) I’ve spent the past six years helping these organizations build stronger relationships with their readers, and along the way, I’ve learned a lot about how to send really great emails. I also end up reading a lot — more than a normal person should, frankly — about how others build, send, and think about email, and I wanted to find a way to share that with you.
Why do all of this in a Google Doc (instead of, uh, a newsletter)? Simple: It creates an archive that’s easy to search and share. Whether you’re reading this today (in January 2019), or in a few months, I hope you can find what you’re looking for and share it with your team.
Here’s how this will work: I’ll update this doc every month with news, tips, and ideas. You can sign up here to be notified when a new edition of Not a Newsletter is live — or you can bookmark this page for later!
And now… on to this month’s edition! Inside, you’ll find email conferences to attend in 2019, a closer look at email design systems, a warning about the ALL CAPS SUBJECT LINE, and a list of new newsletter jobs. Have something else you think should be featured in the next edition of Not a Newsletter? (Or just want to say hi?) Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com.
-Dan
This Month in Email News
- Looking to learn from email experts this year? Taxi has a list of two dozen email marketing conferences worth attending in 2019.
- A reminder for fans of Gmail’s Inbox app: That app will be shutting down in March.
- Litmus is running their annual State of Email survey through the end of January. If you’re in email marketing (and you’ve got 20 minutes to give), consider filling out their survey.
- More headlines:
- The Washington Post’s newsletter brand, 202, is outgrowing the inbox (Digiday)
- Don’t Reply to Your Emails: The Case for Inbox Infinity (The Atlantic)
- Why I Didn’t Answer Your Email (The New York Times)
- Has Washington Media Reached Peak Newsletter? (The Washingtonian)
For Your Reading List
- Ted Goas at Stack Overflow writes about how his team created a design system to completely overhaul the way they send email and communicate with customers:
When I joined the company in 2016, there wasn’t a process for email design and development. No one at the company was dedicated entirely to email. Folks would build emails the same way they built web pages. They knew mobile email is hard and nothing works in Outlook, but they weren’t familiar with the common gotchas that seasoned email designers “just know.”
This resulted in a bunch of inconsistently designed emails that fell apart in most email clients. For a company that sends four million emails a week, that’s a problem.
At best, a broken email contributes to the broken windows theory (“if this email’s broken, I wonder what else is…”) and erodes someone’s trust in us. At worst, it means someone can’t complete a task.
When we put more effort into an email project, the process was slow, designs were inconsistent, and code was hard to test. Without a design system, everything was bespoke design. Bespoke design doesn’t scale.
Our team didn’t have anyone dedicated entirely to email, so we had to find a way to allow more people to build consistently-designed, properly-rendered email. We felt the pain of not having a way for folks to build consistently designed, properly rendered email at scale and identified an email design system as a solution to our problem.
- You can look through Stack Overflow’s finished design system here. And here’s another impressive example of an email design system, from The Wall Street Journal, as explained by their Cory Etzkorn.
- Chad White of Litmus looks at 13 email trends for 2019.
- Campaign Monitor’s Ros Hodgekiss explores one of the most-asked questions in email: When’s the best time to send a newsletter? (The answer is more proof why you should be investing in creating emails that look great on mobile devices.)
- On the SendGrid blog, Len Shneyder explores data from Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This stood out to me:
During Black Friday week this year, marketers used fewer exclamation points in their email campaigns!!! Although exclamation point usage was slightly up overall in 2018 over 2017, they were used 12% less during the holidays.
As in 2017, subject lines with exclamation points saw less engagement on average. In 2018, subject lines with exclamation points saw lower engagement (20% unique open rate versus 25% without). The implication here is that we all know what time of year it is, and the visual emphasis isn’t necessarily driving greater consumer response.
- Remember: Challenge the ideas you read about in this edition of Not a Newsletter. Don’t take other people’s successes or failures at face value. Test them for yourself and see what works for you. (And if you have learnings you want to share for a future Not a Newsletter, email me at dan@inboxcollective.com — I’d love to hear what you have to say!)
- Kevin Mandeville looked at data from 11 billion emails sent in 2018 and broke it down by email client.
- Austin Whiting at SendGrid writes about perfecting your preheader text. (I’m still amazed at how many brands send emails without preheader text. The preheader is an extension of your subject line — take advantage of that space!)
- The Washington Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Anu Narayanswamy write about a political consulting firm that used an aggressive email strategy to raise millions of dollars for Democrats in the 2018 midterms:
The solicitations piled into voters’ email accounts — sometimes multiple times a day. And they carried alarming messages, often in blaring capital letters.
“We’re on the verge of BANKRUPTCY.”
“Our bank account is ALMOST EMPTY!”
“Trump is INCHES away from firing Robert Mueller.”
The catastrophic language yielded a fundraising bonanza for clients of Mothership Strategies, a little-known and relatively new digital consulting firm that raked in tens of millions of dollars from a tide of small donations that flowed to Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections….
The company’s three millennial founders are unapologetic about their tactics — so much so that one employee’s bio on the company’s website touts she has “mastered the ALL CAPS SUBJECT LINE.”
The tone of their email appeals, they said, is in keeping with the Trump era.
“This is a unique moment in American history. The urgency in our emails, the volume of our emails, reflect that,” said Jake Lipsett, 25, during an interview at the firm’s sleek offices near the District’s Columbia Heights neighborhood.
- Could a twice-a-day, THE WORLD IS ENDING! marketing campaign work as a short-term strategy? Sure, I suppose! (Technically, it already did!) But beware the company that claims to have discovered a secret breakthrough like this. Just as Facebook killed clickbait and curiosity gap headlines, and as Google killed many SEO hacks, ultimately, consumers and algorithms will wise up to this trick. (For more nuanced reading on the matter, I highly suggest this story.)
- Here’s what I know about email: It’s about building relationships. The inbox is like a living room. Your subscribers are going to let a handful of trusted sources — family, friends, and if you’re lucky, your brand — into that space. Trust is hard to win and easy to lose, and when you lose it, subscribers will hit unsubscribe. So treat your readers well, and build relationships for the long haul.
YouTube Video That Will Make You Feel Old
Remember the time that Bryant Gumbel didn’t know how to pronounce the “@” sign on the “Today” show? That video turns 25 years old this year.
- 🚨 Self-promotional siren: Over on my blog, that video inspired a post about the future of the internet, and how we really don’t know what will happen next. 🚨
That’s all for this week! Want to be notified when next month’s edition of Not a Newsletter is live? Sign up here:
