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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: January 2020

Welcome to the January 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.

This month’s doc is presented by Revue, an editorial newsletter tool for writers and publishers! Revue’s building an email platform specifically for editorial teams. This month, in the Revue newsletter spotlight, I talked with The Verge’s Casey Newton about lessons from two years of building a must-read newsletter around tech and democracy.

Also inside this edition, you’ll find an interview with a man who’s been writing a newsletter for more than 25 years, guides to getting smarter about segmentation, advice for creating great landing pages, and more! Have something else you think should be featured in Not a Newsletter? Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com.

-Dan

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

Joe Dator / The New Yorker 

This Month in Email News

Newsletter Spotlight, presented by Revue

Casey Newton’s newsletter was born from a simple question: Was there a better way to report on the impact of social networks on modern life?

Newton, The Verge’s Silicon Valley editor, had been reporting for the site since 2013, covering platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But after the 2016 election, he started to rethink his beat. 

“I felt like I had clearly been missing a big part of the story, maybe even most of the story, which was that the social networks have these huge unintended consequences,” he told me. 

So Newton spent a few months trying to figure out how to approach his beat in the post-election era. How could a reporter best cover the intersection between social networks and democracy? Where could a reporter like him carve out space to report and discuss the issues on his mind? And that’s when he realized: There might be an opportunity for a newsletter.

“I’m spending two or three hours a day reading anyway,” he said. “What if I just sent out a list of links to people who also follow this space, maybe adding a little bit of my own commentary? Maybe that would be a useful thing.”

He pitched it to his bosses, and they gave him the green light. In October 2017, The Interface was born, and quickly found an audience. Every day, Newton writes a short column about the news — but more specifically, about the space where social networks and democracy meet — and then shares a roundup of a dozen or so links. The Interface isn’t just a briefing, though. It’s a destination product that delivers original reporting on the tech industry. If you care about the role that Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey have on our society, it’s a daily must-read. 

But here’s the crucial thing: Newton produces this as a newsletter, not a daily column. It’s email that makes it such a powerful way to deliver this work to his readers.

“I think one reason why newsletters are having a resurgence is because people are tired of endless feeds,” Newton said. “There’s something really calming and comforting about a media product that has a finite ending. If you can find someone you trust to say, ‘These are the only things that matter today,’ that has a lot of utility. And I think utility tends to be undervalued in the media, generally. We want to make products that have big impact, but we don’t always think about making things that are just useful, and I think a good newsletter is really useful.”

Revue’s been a part of the The Interface from day one. Newton needed a product that made it easy for him to save tons of links, and then add those stories to his newsletter. “Once you’re ready to build your newsletter, you can just drag and drop them into place,” he said. “And there was something about that workflow that just felt so fast to me.” To Newton, Revue was clearly built for editors like him, not marketers, which made it the best choice for his ESP. “Half of the newsletter is just figuring out what to put in it,” he said, “and nothing else has made it as easy as Revue.”

Even with Revue helping streamline the process, The Interface still takes most of the day to produce. Luckily, Newton’s got help from Zoe Schiffer, another reporter at The Verge. (Schiffer’s an excellent reporter, too. She broke the big story on the workplace culture at Away in December.) Newton and Schiffer tackle the links section together, most of which are links to other websites, and then Newton works on the column portion of the newsletter. They send it every day at 5 p.m. Pacific time — timed so it’s the last thing San Francisco-based tech employees see before they head home for the day. That timing also helps build habit — readers know when to look for it each evening. (One of Newton’s sources confessed that at their tech company, the first person to get the newsletter will shout out across the row of desks, “It’s out!” to announce when The Interface is in their inboxes.)

The newsletter doesn’t have nearly the audience that his online columns do, and it doesn’t always drive significant traffic back to The Verge, but Newton doesn’t mind. For him, the thinking is clear: If he builds a loyal audience for his newsletter, he can create a business around it.

“My hope is that if we circle back in five years, The Interface will have a thriving events business around it. It might have a podcast around it. Who knows, maybe there will be a paid subscription version of it,” he said. “And that can help a media company grow and find new and sustainable sources of revenue. To me, that’s just so much more interesting than, ‘Let’s build the biggest list we can and use it to drive a set of clicks to a website.’”

Casey Newton’s Four Rules for Building a Great Newsletter

1.) Find an undercovered niche — Here’s Newton’s recommendation: Find a subject, and then add a twist to it. “Autonomous cars is probably not niche-y enough to do a newsletter around,” he said, “but autonomous vehicles in Arizona would be a killer newsletter, because that’s where all the autonomous vehicles are testing.” With that focus, you can build a loyal following, and then grow from there.

2.) Focus on cadence + framing — “It turns out that almost everyone wants to do the same newsletter, which is, ‘Here’s five fun links I saw this week.’ And it’s just not useful, right? None of us are hard up for links. We all have enough links.” So find that unique frame — your subject plus the twist — and then decide how frequently to send the newsletter. Newton’s advice: You probably won’t want to send a newsletter more than once a week, but you should definitely send it at least once a week.

3.) Build a platform to help you build sources — Some of Newton’s biggest stories, like his piece on the secret lives of Facebook moderators, have come via tips from readers of The Interface. Newton said that the newsletter gives him a way for sources from networks like Instagram and YouTube to discover him, get to know him, and eventually establish the relationships needed to feed him scoops and story ideas. But something Newton’s learned: He doesn’t typically ask new sources for tips upfront. “If you want to develop relationships, it’s typically more useful to ask them about something really innocuous just so you start to develop a relationship and build some trust with people,” he said.

4.) Reply to every reader — “I really do feel like I’m making a thing just for the people who subscribe,” Newton said. And part of that means that when readers write back to him, he needs to continue the conversation. He gets 15 or 20 emails a day, he said, and he replies to just about every one. He encourages others to lean into that conversation — especially since it’s often a discussion that doesn’t happen elsewhere on the web. “The most common kind of comment that I get is people will say, ‘Thank you. This was a great newsletter,’” he said. It’s the kind of feedback Newton never sees in the comments section on The Verge, or elsewhere on social media, and when readers say thanks, he always takes the time to write back.

Here's a decorative image of three animals: An owl, a flamingo, and a seahorse

This month’s Not a Newsletter is presented by Revue, an editorial newsletter tool for writers and publishers. They’ve also launched a fantastic new tool: discover.getrevue.co, a site to help people discover new newsletters. It’s excellent, and worth browsing through for email inspiration! If you’d like to give Revue a try, sign up for an account here.

For Your Reading List

  • Pretty big news if you’re just starting an email newsletter: ConvertKit announced that they’re launching a freemium product to allow anyone to start a newsletter for free, much like MailChimp does. (Or to put it another way: ConvertKit’s coming after a piece of MailChimp’s customer base.) If you’re thinking of launching a newsletter — particularly one that might use automation — you might want to give them a look! (I’ll mention that Revue, who kindly sponsors this Google Doc, is also an excellent ESP option. 😄)
  • Meanwhile, the team at Substack announced that they’re launching publishing tools for teams. (Or, to put it another way: They’re coming after a piece of WordPress’s or Ghost’s customer base.) Their bet is that companies thinking about building out a website will use Substack as their publishing platform, and then will build in newsletters and a membership plan from there.  
  • Campaign Monitor released their 2019 annual report, and so did MailChimp. Campaign Monitor also released some data pulled from the 30 billion emails they sent in 2019. One key takeaway I want to highlight: They found that there is no “best” day to send your emails.
    • I’ll second this thought from their team: “This means that marketers can stop chasing an elusive ‘best day’ and instead focus on the real answer to seeing better metrics: following email marketing best practices and A/B testing to discover the day your audience is most engaged.”
  • The New Consumer’s Dan Frommer wrote about what he learned from the first year of running a subscription business. (So far, it’s mostly good things!)
  • Revue asked a bunch of smart newsletter folks for their predictions for email in 2020. My personal prediction: This is the year more of us really invest in onboarding. It’s something I’m working on with nearly every client I have through Inbox Collective, and I’m so hopeful that if you’re reading this doc, you’re thinking about how to best onboard your readers, too. (And if you just read that sentence and have no idea where to start, I want to hear from you! dan@inboxcollective.com is the email address — shoot me a note, OK?)
  • Here’s a great 2020 recap from Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga of UX Collective on the state of UX in 2020. There’s quite a bit in here about the design of news sites and design systems. Plus, Axios’s newsletters get a shout-out!
  • Back in 1994, Randy Cassingham launched the newsletter, This is True, and it’s still running today. Tedium’s Ernie Smith interviewed Cassingham about lessons from 25+ years in the newsletter business. If you read only one more thing in this month’s Doc, make it this — it’s outstanding.
  • Oracle’s Chad S. White wrote about some small changes that Gmail’s made to their spam filter. Of note: This fall, Gmail started penalizing those that send to readers who’ve shown no activity for 6+ months.
    • If you’re not running any sort of reactivation campaigns — or at least suppressing those inactive readers — do shoot me a note at dan@inboxcollective.com. I’m happy to chat about strategies for keeping your readers (and Gmail) happy.
  • RightMessage’s Brennan Dunn wrote a super-detailed two-part series about segmentation. Here’s the first part, which covers basic segmentation rules, and the second, which dives into using tags vs. custom fields. If you’re using tags or just getting started with segments, give them both a read.
  • I thought this article from Editor & Publisher’s Evelyn Mateos about marketing strategies for news organizations (i.e. The New York Times with “Truth Is Local,” the Dallas Morning News with “What Matters”) was great, but I’m curious to see how many of these news organizations will take the next step and incorporate these campaigns into their email strategy. Encouraging readers to subscribe to support local news is so important — but I’d love to see organizations doing so also build that messaging into their onboarding series and day-to-day newsletters. Go beyond marketing — really show your readers the impact you have on a daily basis. 
  • If you’re looking for conferences to attend in 2020: Invision has a great list of design conferences, and Lenfest compiled a list of journalism conferences.
  • Stack Overflow’s Ted Goas (who I’ve highlighted in Not a Newsletter before) wrote about his experience coding an interactive email. Of note: This is the sort of thing that’s possible right now, without requiring AMP or any sort of fancy third-party tools!
    • That being said: AWeber’s Jill Fanslau wrote about a few ways their team is using AMP in emails, from collecting feedback inside a newsletter to running quizzes within an email. There’s a lot here to get excited about, and I think in the next year or so, as AMP continues to roll out, it’s something that readers of this doc might start to use as part of their newsletter strategy!
  • I’m really interested to see which publishers try new ways to reach readers in 2020. Lots of non-U.S. publishers were testing interesting things with WhatsApp until that app banned newsletter-style publishing. But here’s something from Digiday’s Deanna Ting about how Bloomberg is using Telegram to send messages a bit longer than a push, but far shorter than your typical newsletter.
    • Speaking of which: Sharon Moshavi of the International Center for Journalists wrote about the need to shine a light into the dark spaces of chat apps. She makes the case for why journalists should be pushing hard to be in spaces like these.
      • Full disclosure: ICFJ’s a partner in the Facebook Journalism Accelerator, through which I regularly give talks about the power of email. (The ICFJ team is also a pleasure to work with. I didn’t really need to disclose that, but I mention it here because it’s true!)
  • Really enjoyed this piece by Unbounce’s Kaleigh Moore about matching the right landing page offer with the right email. If you’re selling anything — a product, a subscription, a membership, etc. — there are some best practices to learn from here.
  • This isn’t email specific, but if you’re designing emails in 2020, you should be thinking about iOS’s Dark Mode. Presh Onyee put together a great resource called DarkModeDesign with lots of resources to help you think through Dark Mode.
  • If you’re just starting to think about the importance of long-term customer loyalty, do give this piece in Harvard Business Review a read. In it, Rob Markey makes the case for why businesses should be putting customer loyalty first.
    • You’ll hear me say this many, many more times this year: Getting a reader or a fan is hard. Turning that reader into a customer/subscriber/member/donor is really hard. But keeping them loyal for the long-haul is the ultimate goal.
    • And if you’re trying to figure out what metrics to aim for in the new year, you may want to give The North Star Playbook, from Amplitude’s John Cutler and Jason Scherschligt, a read. It’s super long (it’s literally a book), but there’s a lot of great guidance in here about identifying metrics that matter for your business.
  • Anne Tomlin of Email Y’all did a nice interview with the Zoho Campaigns Expert Diaries podcast about designing for email and the need to test your emails with a tool like Litmus or Email on Acid. Give it a listen here.
  • Tanmoy Goswami of The Correspondent wrote about an angry email they received on their first day of work, and how they’d respond now if they had the chance.
    • When I was at The New Yorker, the very first thing I did every day was open up the inbox of reader emails and reply to as many as I could. (It was rare to not reply to a reader — I can only recall a handful that were truly nasty. Pretty much everyone else got an email back.) Some days, the inbox took five minutes to go through, and some days, it took 45, but I always went through it. If a reader had a question, a comment, or a concern, the thought was: These are our readers and our subscribers. We should always be talking with them and listening to them.
    • So here’s my challenge to you in the new year: If you’re not replying to reader/customer emails, make it a part of your routine in 2020. Better still: Get a handful of coworkers involved. This isn’t something that should be left to a customer service team. You’ll learn a lot about what your readers think, what they need, and how you can best serve them.

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • If you’ve been a follower of the Doc for a while, or if you’ve heard me speak, you’ve heard my theory that the inbox is a living room. It’s a theory that was inspired by seeing great TV anchors build a relationship with their readers through their broadcasts. One of the best to ever do that — to somehow turn a broadcast into a conversation with their audience — was ESPN’s Stuart Scott, which is why I absolutely loved this oral history of his life and career.
  • Stumbled upon this thanks to the team at Dense Discovery: A book looking at life in Germany through the lens of private citizens’ WiFi account names. I read about this and found myself saying, for the first (and maybe only time): Man, I really wish I could speak German.
  • Kudos to Article Group’s Joe Lazar and Andrew Kessler for writing a year-in-review you won’t see anywhere else: 23 Mistakes This Creative Marketing Agency Made This Year. (There are a ton of great points in here, but this line really stuck with me about their team’s process for making tough decisions: “We could disagree and commit, but wouldn’t revisit.”)
    • I’ll also shout-out Article Group for their dedication to publishing guides via Google Slides. (Which, as you could guess, is 100% up my alley.) Here’s their guide to collaboration — it’s really, really useful.
  • One more story about learning from failure: Study Hall’s Spenser Mestel wrote about what went wrong at The New York Times en Español, and how despite some major wins (including growing their daily newsletter audience to 300,000 subscribers), the Times decided to shut down that department.
  • I’ll say it again: Don’t assume that what works for one company will work for you. Test the ideas yourself, and see what works best for you. But then again: According to Connor Wood, a researcher at Boston University, you might not be able to help it. Being a copycat is just part of being human.

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 anonymous kangaroo

A few months ago, I was lucky enough to travel to Australia to talk with news organizations there about email. While I was there, I took a behind-the-scenes tour of Sydney’s Taronga Zoo and learned more about the incredible work their team does to care for Australian wildlife. Just a side note: If you’re ever in Sydney, spend the money on the VIP tour at Taronga. My day there might have been the most fun I had in 2019. Here’s me, 15 seconds after I met a kangaroo, and I was so giddy that I briefly forgot what I was supposed to do with my arms:

that's me with a kangaroo

Taronga’s also one of the amazing places in Australia that’s working to rescue and protect wildlife from the fires that have swept through their country this summer. They’re doing work to help koalas that were in the path of the fire, providing habitats for platypus, and caring for wallabies. I’m heartbroken thinking about all the people and creatures affected by these fires, but it’s encouraging to know that organizations like Taronga are there to help. If you’re so able, you can donate here to help Taronga continue to do such important work in Australia.

Anyway, the kangaroo! That’s your Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month. 

Here's a decorative image of three animals: An owl, a flamingo, and a seahorse

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By Dan Oshinsky

Dan runs Inbox Collective, a consultancy that helps news organizations, non-profits, and independent operators get the most out of email. He specializes in helping others build loyal audiences via email and then converting that audience into subscribers, members, or donors.

He previously created Not a Newsletter, a monthly briefing with news, tips, and ideas about how to send better email, and worked as the Director of Newsletters at both The New Yorker and BuzzFeed.

He’s been a featured speaker at events like Litmus Live in Boston, Email Summit DK in Odense, and the Email Marketing Summit in Brisbane. He’s also been widely quoted on email strategies, including in publications like The Washington Post, Fortune, and Digiday.