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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: January 2023

A child tells their mother: "If you want to know how school was, subscribe to my newsletter."
Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski / The New Yorker

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 the next edition goes live!

This is the start of year five of writing this Google Doc — if you’ve been with me since the beginning, or if you’re new around here, thank you for reading!

And a big thank you to beehiiv, this quarter’s presenting sponsor of Not a Newsletter and Inbox Collective! They’re an all-in-one newsletter suite founded by ex-engineers at Morning Brew, and their tools are absolutely worth a closer look. Beehiiv comes with built-in growth tools, customizable templates, and best-in-class analytics that actually move the needle — all in an easy-to-use interface. Check out beehiiv here.

This month, I’m sharing:

  • Ten lessons from ten years in email.
  • Copywriting tips to help you sound more human (and less like an AI bot).
  • Resources around calculating customer lifetime value that anyone with an indie newsletter should check out.
  • Dozens of ideas to help you improve your newsletter this year. 

Plus: The Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month is back! (With a slight twist — read on and I’ll explain more!)

Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter? Find the full archive at this link.

—Dan (say hi via email or LinkedIn)

A child tells their mother: "If you want to know how school was, subscribe to my newsletter."
Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski / The New Yorker

This Month in Email Headlines

What’s the right ESP for your indie newsletter?

At the end of 2022, several prominent email platforms shut down, and dozens of independent writers popped into my inbox to ask the same question: Which email platform should I move to?

I’ve gotten this question a lot over the years. So I put together a guide — first to share with all those writers looking for a new email platform, and now to share with you.

In this guide, I’ve narrowed the list down to six email platforms I think indie newsletter writers should take a closer look at, and why:

  • AWeber is perfect for someone who needs an email tool that has lots of bells and whistles, but at a reasonable price point.
  • Beehiiv is perfect for someone trying to blend a subscription or membership model with advertising.
  • ConvertKit is perfect for someone trying to blend subscriptions, ads, and advanced automation tools, all within one newsletter.
  • Ghost is perfect for someone who’s trying to build out a publication — not just a newsletter.
  • Mailchimp is perfect for someone looking for a marketing solution with lots of integrations.
  • Substack is perfect for someone who’s focused on building a paid subscription or membership.

I’ll warn you in advance: If you’re looking for a quick and breezy read, this might not be for you! This guide checks in at about 12,000 words — it’s based on my work with indie newsletters over the past three years, testing on all six platforms, as well as hundreds of conversations with indie newsletter operators. My hope is that it’ll become a go-to resource any writer will turn to before launching a newsletter.

In this guide, I dove into what makes each of these platforms so useful, what they cost, and why they might be right for you. I also walked through seven questions you should be asking up front to help you pick the right option.

I’m hoping it helps a lot of people (hopefully you, too!) find the right platform to build a great newsletter.

Dive into the guide here

I’ll also note: Yes, Beehiiv’s the sponsor of Not a Newsletter this quarter — but their team isn’t sponsoring this guide, and wasn’t involved in the production of this guide. (They did answer a few questions for me while I was putting it together.)

Also on inboxcollective.com

10 Lessons From 10 Years in Email

I officially started working in the email space in December 2012, and I’ve learned a lot from a decade of building email teams, running tests, and sending thousands of newsletters. Here are ten lessons that stand out.

5 Tips To Write More Like A Human (And Less Like An AI Bot)

As AI gains traction, writing emails with a human touch is more important than ever. Denmark-based copywriting expert Simon Linde walked through a few tips to help you find your voice in 2023.

30 Ideas To Improve Your Newsletter This Year

Want to take your newsletter to the next level in 2023? Every day this month on LinkedIn, I’ve been publishing a quick, actionable tip you can try. Make sure you follow me on LinkedIn for the next tip.

Want to catch up on the series? Here are all the tips I’ve published so far.

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

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For Your Reading / To-Do List

  • I’ve seen a lot of newsrooms create interesting dashboards to track newsletter success, but I haven’t seen anyone try something quite like what Nine — the Australian publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald, among other titles — is doing. Several members of their team detailed how they used both dashboards and data visualizations to help their newsrooms understand newsletter trends.
  • Mailmodo put together a State of Email 2023 report, including email myths, tips, and quotes from experts. (I’m among those quoted in here.) Lots in here that you’ll want to dig through! 
  • Reid DeRamus, who works as a product manager on the growth team at Substack, put together a great guide to understanding customer lifetime value for newsletters, and what factors a newsletter should consider to improve CLV.
    • He also built this Google Sheet to help you calculate and visualize CLV. If you’re an indie newsletter with a subscription business, copy this spreadsheet and use it to run your own numbers.
  • Adweek’s Mark Stenberg talked with the New York Times about how they used their 7-Day Happiness Challenge to drive more than 110,000 sign-ups for their Wellness newsletter — all in a week.
    • As someone who’s been cheerleading for Courses for a few years — readers love learning new things, and will sign up in droves for useful content like this — I’m thrilled to see this success story. Here’s to hoping even more will launch Courses in the year ahead!
  • December brought a number of end-of-year reports from indie newsletters. A few I really liked:
    • Tanmoy Goswami wrote about lessons from year two of his newsletter. One takeaway that I nodded my head along to: When you’re going solo, you’re always learning new things. As he put it: “Learning is a fulltime job.”
    • The Arizona Agenda’s Rachel Leingang and Hank Stephenson talked about getting to $120,000 in annual revenue — and why, reluctantly, they’re adding a paywall to certain stories.
    • Tangle’s Isaac Saul talked about hitting big milestones ($450,000 in annual subscription revenue) and how he hopes to expand his team in the year ahead.
    • Ryan Sneddon, who writes a daily newsletter for Annapolis, Maryland, called Naptown Scoop, put together an impact report, detailing the work he and his readers did to support local causes. With direct donations, fundraisers, and donated advertising, Naptown Scoop gave more than $41,000 back to their community in 2022.
  • In my email platform guide, I wrote about how ConvertKit founder Nathan Barry was inspired to start that platform after successfully using his email list to sell a digital course. So it makes sense that ConvertKit also published this, by Dana Nicole: A list of 50 online courses any creator can build and sell.
  • So many teams think a preference center is the place where readers go to unsubscribe from newsletters. But that’s not always the case. As Drew Price of Scaling CRM wrote, a really good preference center could actually help you grow your newsletters.
  • Here’s a question I’ve often gotten from non-profit clients: When someone donates to our org, should we automatically add them to our email list? On the Foundant blog, Ephraim Gopin walked through both sides of the argument — and then explained why he prefers allowing readers to opt in instead of opt out.
  • I’m keeping an eye on newsletters being acquired by other newsletters (or larger businesses). Here’s one recent example: Milk Road, a crypto newsletter that sold less than a year after launch. Lisa Rowan of They Got Acquired dug into that sale.
  • In other messaging trends:
  • How can teams better utilize data in 2023? FT Strategies’s Sarah Dear talked through three foundational steps every org should try.

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • Katelyn Bourgoin, who writes the Why We Buy newsletter⁠, put together a series of Coda templates that she uses for brainstorming, monitoring sponsorships, and running growth campaigns. It’s all free — you can check out her Newsletter OS templates here.
  • Is there a company out there that doesn’t offer an email client — but could? Oracle’s Chad S. White made the case for why Amazon should create an email client to compete with Gmail.
  • Loved this video, from YouTuber Ali Abdaal, about the 12 different revenue streams that make up his business. Two things I really loved:
    • He started his weekly newsletter in 2018, but didn’t start directly monetizing it until 2022. But as his audience grew to about 200,000 readers, he realized the opportunity with his newsletter and opened it up to sponsors. (That revenue stream made $97,000 in 2022.)
    • I love how many small revenue streams Abdaal has. The big revenue streams (he has a few that make more than $1 million per year) are more exciting, but it’s fantastic to see a creator like this try out lots of different opportunities — even if some only make a few thousand dollars per year. As he invests more in each of these, he’ll have opportunities to grow small revenue streams into bigger ones (or stop working on ones that aren’t growing).
      • To bring it back to the email world: I wrote about the Inbox Collective business over the summer, and looking back at it, I identified nine distinct revenue streams for my business. Five are tied directly to the consulting I do with Inbox Collective (retainer work, coaching, project work, audits, workshops). The others: Paid talks, affiliate deals, advertising, and teaching.
      • This year, I’ll add a tenth (IRL events — more to come on that soon!), and really invest more in affiliate and advertising. Those account for less than 10 percent of my total revenue to date, but I think they’re both places with room to grow. (Speaking of which: Here are the ad opportunities available with Not a Newsletter + Inbox Collective! Ad slots are sold out for February, but I do have a few still available for March onward.)
  • I loved this, from Zilahy Máté for Get Response, about the weirdest spam emails from 2022. (I have no idea how the Baby Grand Piano scheme was supposed to work.)

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 owl!

Here's the Anonymous Owl
Illustration by Anna Kosak
  • A group of owls is called a “parliament.”
  • Owls are famous for their night vision, but they don’t have eyeballs — at least not like humans do. They have rod-shaped eyes, which are better for handling low-light situations, and then spin their heads or bodies to look around.
  • Owls make virtually no sound when they fly. Here’s a video of an experiment that the BBC’s “Natural World” did with several types of birds flying over super-sensitive microphones. Other birds made plenty of noise, but the owl barely registered a sound, even as it flew mere inches over the microphones.
  • Owls also have a remarkable ability to swivel their heads at rapid speeds. That’s partly because of the sockets that connect their heads to their bodies, and partly because owls have backup arteries, which supply blood when other blood vessels close off as their heads turn.
  • Scientists announced the discovery of a new species of owl just three months ago. It’s known as the Principe Scops-Owl, and lives on Príncipe Island in the Gulf of Guinea. (The island is one of two that makes up the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, which is about 500 miles south of Lagos, Nigeria.) Rumors about the existence of the Principe Scops-Owl dated back to 1928, thanks to the “tuu” call it makes when night falls, but it took nearly a century for researchers to officially discover it.
  • In other scientific discoveries: In 2020, scientists discovered owl fossils, in northern parts of Wyoming, that they believe are 55 million years old. One distinctive characteristic of this owl: It had what researchers called “murder feet,” thanks to the sharp toes that could be used to capture and kill prey.

Anyway, the Owl! That’s your (Not a) 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.