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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: July 2021

Welcome to the July 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 month: BIMI is here, and it’s a big deal for big brands! I’ll explain who it’s for and what it means for your email strategy. Also inside: Yanna-Torry Aspraki is back with another edition of Ask a Deliverability Expert, answering the big question: What habits should you maintain to stay in the inbox? Plus: I’ve got a few new email jobs, links to read about Apple’s upcoming privacy update, and more!

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 the full archive at this link.

-Dan 

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

A man prays in confessional: "Forgive me, Father. There are family emails from February I still haven't replied to."
Hartley Lin / The New Yorker

This Month in Email Headlines

BIMI is here! Here’s what it means for you.

For the past year, I’ve been mentioning — here in Not a Newsletter, and on calls with clients — that this thing called BIMI, or Brand Indicators for Message Identification, was coming soon.

Maybe that specific email acronym isn’t ringing a bell, so let’s try this: BIMI’s the thing that lets you display your logo in the inbox!

After a year-long pilot program, this month, Gmail announced that they’re officially rolling out BIMI to all users. Verizon Media research showed that brands that used BIMI saw up to a 10% lift in engagement — so this is something that big brands are going to want to implement.

I know you’ve got some questions, so before you go and apply for a certificate, here’s what you need to know.

What will BIMI work with?

BIMI will work with Gmail and Verizon Media-powered email addresses. Among Verizon’s email properties: AOL and Yahoo Mail. So it’s a big, big chunk of the inboxes out there.

Is my newsletter a candidate for BIMI?

Here’s the easy question to determine this: Do you have a logo, and is that logo trademarked?

If yes, congrats! You’re probably a decent candidate for BIMI.

Right now, in order to use BIMI, you’ve got to have a trademarked logo, and — to make things a little more complicated — it has to be approved by one of these trademark offices:

  • United States Patent and Trademark Office
  • Canadian Intellectual Property Office
  • European Union Intellectual Property Office
  • UK Intellectual Property Office
  • Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt
  • Japan Trademark Office
  • Spanish Patent and Trademark Office O.A.
  • IP Australia

If you’ve got an approved trademark that’s not from one of these offices, at the moment, you can’t yet implement BIMI.

(And if you’re too small for BIMI but still want your logo to display next to your name in Gmail, I’d recommend using this trick — or creating a YouTube account with the email address you send from, and adding a logo there. Either route should work.)

What do I need to do to use BIMI?

You’re going to have to jump through a few hoops first, but I think it’s worth it.

1.) Set up SPF (Sender Policy Framework) for your domain, and then set up DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) — These are both steps you should take anyway to authenticate your domain and prove that your emails are actually coming from you! Every ESP has different guidelines for setting up SPF + DKIM. Here are the instructions if you’re on MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, ConvertKit, or Salesforce, or ask your ESP for their tutorial.

2.) Set up DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) — DMARC was first created nearly a decade ago as part of a partnership between the inboxes and PayPal. DMARC’s designed so that if someone attempts to spoof your email address, an inbox like Gmail will recognize that the sender is illegitimate, and will block that email from ever landing in a subscriber’s inbox.

There are three different levels of enforcement for DMARC: None, quarantine, or reject. What I recommend to any brand that hasn’t turned on DMARC is to do the following:

  • Generate your DMARC record using this tool, and set the enforcement level to “none.”
  • Use this tutorial to add that DMARC record to your DNS.
  • Then set up a tool like DMARC Monitor, and keep tabs on your DMARC status for a week or two. Right away, you’ll see if things are passing through (a good sign!) or if things are getting blocked (not good!). You may discover, as many big organizations do, that you send email from a lot of different places, like your company’s HR software or Shopify, and you may need to go through the SPF/DKIM process for those senders before you change DMARC enforcement.
  • Do not — and I’m going to say the word “do not” again, because it’s that important! — change the enforcement level before you’ve authenticated all the legitimate senders of email. If you don’t authenticate those, the inboxes will block them, and those emails from HR or your Shopify store won’t reach the right people.
  • Once you’ve authenticated everything, go back to this tool, update the enforcement level to “quarantine,” and update your DNS with the new record.

Of note: BIMI will only work if your enforcement level is at “quarantine” or “reject.” (Quarantine means spammy emails will end up in the spam folder; reject means they’ll be blocked from reaching the inbox at all.)

3.) Generate a BIMI record — You can use this tool to generate the record. You’re going to need to convert your logo into an .SVG, and this guide can help you with that step.

4.) Apply for a trademark — Here’s a useful guide to walk you through the trademark process. If you’ve already trademarked your logo, make sure you have all the paperwork to prove it.

5.) Apply for a VMC (Verified Mark Certificate) — This is the very last step in the process. When Verizon Media first rolled out BIMI, this wasn’t a necessary step, but Google’s since made it part of the process. Digicert is among the companies selling these certificates — right now, they cost $899 US per year, though the full price will eventually be $1,499 US. Also of note: 

  • If you have multiple logos that you want to display next to specific emails, yes, you’ll need to apply for multiple VMCs.
  • And you’ll need to renew your VMC every year.

You can apply for a VMC through Digicert here. (Note: This isn’t an affiliate link. I’ve just found Digicert’s resources super helpful throughout this process, so I’m linking to them here!)

One more thing I wanted you to know: Digicert will go through and verify all of your information — SPF/DKIM, proof of DMARC enforcement, your BIMI record, and proof of trademark — as part of the process. But to make sure that you’re a legitimate sender and not a spammer, they’ll also take two additional steps: A video chat, with you, to prove that you’re a human; and require that you get paperwork notarized in person, by a notary that they choose. (These were requests from Google.)

So, to recap: BIMI’s here! If you’re a big brand, you should absolutely consider going through this process. It should lead to an uptick in reader engagement, and will also help you authenticate your domain and block spammers in the process. A win-win!

If you want to go deeper down the BIMI rabbit hole, check out the official BIMI site here, or these blog posts from Digicert.

For Your Reading / To-Do List

  • I wrote a ton last month about Apple’s privacy changes, but wanted to share a few more pieces on the subject: 
    • Melissa Sargeant, CMO of Litmus, looked back at lessons from the Blackberry vs. iPhone wars of the mid-2000s and pulled out a few lessons for today’s email community.
    • I talked a little about progressive profiling last month — the practice of slowly gathering information about a reader through small asks at sign-up, in a welcome series, and through newsletters. It’s something I think everyone in the email community should be strategizing around. So I absolutely loved this post, from Makerpad’s Claire Emerson, about how to use a Course to progressively profile your subscribers (while still delivering value for them!).
    • On the Litmus blog, Oracle’s Chad S. White wrote about creating Apple Mail and non-Apple Mail audiences, and how that should be useful moving forward when it comes to A/B testing and measuring the success of in-newsletter ads.
    • I also recently took part in a panel, alongside Sarah Ebner, head of newsletters at Financial Times, and Nadine Lange, Funke Media Group’s product manager of newsletters, to talk about newsletter strategy and what Apple’s updates mean for newsrooms. If you’re an INMA member, you can read about our conversation here. 
  • I’ve gotten a recurring question lately from readers: My opens have stayed constant, but the click rates seem to vary wildly from issue to issue. Any idea what’s happening? The issue, often, is something known as server-clicks — basically, when a bot pre-clicks links for a reader, hoping to catch spammy links before they get to the user. (This is particularly prevalent with large institutions, like universities, where they’re hoping to keep malicious actors off of their networks.) Travis Hazelwood of Campaign Monitor wrote about server-clicks and what they mean for your email stats.
  • Loved this, from Emily Roseman on INN, about how Block Club Chicago built a referral program for advertisers to help bring in additional revenue from their newsletter program.
  • Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire wrote about The Globe and Mail’s custom-built paywall tool, Sophi. There’s a lot to be optimistic about based on the numbers shared here, but one thing I also loved: Seeing how a paywall tool could have an impact on email growth.
  • I’ll say it for the thousandth time: Don’t worry too much about the tabbed inbox. Send good emails, encourage people to engage and reply, and you’ll do just fine. (But if you’re still skeptical, here’s what a few email experts think, too.)
  • A few creator success stories:
    • The Charlotte Ledger shared some stats with Axios Charlotte about their growth. They’re a newsletter-first local publisher on pace to bring in $175,000 in revenue this year.
    • Irene Caselli, who’s been building an audience for her newsletter, The First 1000 Days, talked with Steady about how she’s built her membership strategy. She’s hoping to hit 300 members by year’s end — which would allow her to break even with the newsletter.
      • Full transparency: I’ve been working with the Ledger team through Inbox Collective, and I’m a speaker at City University of New York’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program, which Irene was a part of earlier this year. 
    • Kaleigh Moore of ConvertKit interviewed creators about how they’ve monetized their product. Note the section about identifying value for readers — it’s well worth some thought!
    • And John Gannon from GoingVC shared a few lessons with Superorganizers about how to go pro as a creator. (“Go pro as soon as possible” really resonated with me — when I left my last job to start Inbox Collective, it felt like I was taking the leap before I was ready, but it ended up being exactly the right time to make the move!)
  • This was really neat, from Hugo Amsellem of Arm the Creators: Nine different strategies for funding a creator-driven project. (Note: This is focused on creators who are looking to raise significant funds for their work.)
  • Craig Mod wrote about pop-up newsletters for writers, and why building a product that’s only designed to live for a short window of time can be freeing for a writer.
  • If you’re a big organization thinking about migrating to a new email platform in 2021, make time for this piece by Chris Marriott, who runs a business helping companies select an ESP. He talks through what to look for during the process — and how to get a better deal.
  • List growth can come from unexpected sources. Case in point: This story from Erika Wheless of Digiday about how Snipes, a shoe store, started encouraging customers to get a receipt via email, which led to significant growth in their overall email list.
  • Good stuff here from Uplers: A huge guide to different types of drip emails, like a welcome series.

Ask a Deliverability Expert

I get a lot of questions about deliverability, and I don’t always have the right answers. But I know someone who does: Yanna-Torry Aspraki, a true deliverability expert. She’s been working in the email space since 2014 in all sorts of roles — at ESPs, with brands, and as a consultant. She really knows her stuff!

So let’s get to this month’s question:

We are in the midst of an ongoing deliverability discussion at my organization. One camp says we’re not experiencing deliverability issues as the bounce rates are low (between 1-2%). The other camp insists that bounces are only one stat to monitor, and that sending to large groups of unengaged audiences will hurt your reputation and could land our emails in the spam folder instead of the inbox. Who’s right? 

💌  💌  💌

Deliverability is complex but still remains a straightforward concept. Deliverability isn’t an exact science and many details are unknown, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have control. If you send valuable content at the right time to subscribers who expect and want to receive your emails, your deliverability will be fine. Just like when it comes to credit scores and maintaining good credit, you know exactly what type of email marketing habits you need to maintain in order to get into the inbox.

Let’s bounce right in

High open and click rates don’t equate to good sales, just like low bounce rates don’t mean your deliverability is doing great. These statistics only give you a general idea of how your email program is doing. The devil is in the details. Dig deeper and you might be surprised! 

You might get a soft bounce letting you know that your subscribers’ mailbox is full. Not the end of the world, right? Some let you know that an email address isn’t valid. But if you realize a provider like Microsoft or Yahoo is bouncing all your emails or you get the following bounce, it might be time to start investigating further and implementing some changes before mitigating the situation!

550 5.7.1 Rejected. This message has been marked as spam. 

Spammy Spamerson

Spam complaints are the worst. It doesn’t matter if it is only one person who complains. It shows the inbox providers that your email is not wanted or, at the very least, that there is something you need to change. If you haven’t heard it from the #emailGeeks before, let me be the first one to tell you: I’d much rather a reader unsubscribe than mark my email as spam. Spam complaints take only one click, so make sure you also offer a one-click unsubscribe option.

Unsubscribes are a sign that there might be an issue with your email strategy, but it does so without alerting the mailbox providers that your communications are undesirable. If your audience members are consistently telling you that there is an issue, even if it feels like it’s from a tiny amount of people, take it seriously. If you can see your spam complaints, so do the inbox providers, and they will penalize you one day. Better safe than sorry. 

Try to use segments to target specific readers with specific offers, and avoid blasting out emails to your entire database — especially during big events like Black Friday. Those mass emails will result in high spam complaints. Which will result in issues. And the four weeks until Christmas will not be enough to salvage your reputation. Send to people who expect your email. Always. In a non-annoying way.

No one is safe. Especially if you don’t authenticate your domain.

Authenticating your sender domain helps keep your brand and audience safer. First set up SPF and DKIM for every tool you send emails from, and then set up DMARC. With DMARC — which stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance — you can monitor what’s happening inside or outside of your infrastructure. DMARC is an email authentication, policy, and, most importantly, a reporting protocol. 

Many businesses believe they are too small to have their domains spoofed or used for phishing. Beware. The smaller the business, the lower the chance that it even uses authentication, let alone DMARC. Matthew Vernhout recently shared a great example of a spoofed domain — they saw 2,600 emails reported as failed or rejected in the span of two weeks! 

The actions others perform using your domain affect your deliverability, the same way your credit score would be affected if someone stole your credit card information and went on a shopping spree. DMARC gives you an insight into what is happening and helps protect your reputation by remaining proactive. There are many tools out there that can help you monitor your DMARC reports, such as Valimail or RedSift. You can also receive your DMARC reports right into your inbox — just make sure you read the XML files you’re getting. (Quick tip: Upload them here to read and understand them more easily.)

If you don’t have the technical knowledge to authenticate your domain on your own, feel free to sign up with Let’s Authenticate the World. It’s a free service I created to help all businesses send emails safely. There is no solicitation or selling. We authenticate your domain — and you get the chance to have an email geek talk your ear off about newsletters while they help you!

Your list might need a detox or, at the very least, a bit of fasting

If your list has grown a ton, you don’t have reCAPTCHA set up, or haven’t cleaned your list in a while, there’s a good chance that you’re going to see an impact on deliverability. Who you send to says a lot about you. The inboxes know which of their customers you are sending your emails to. They also know who actually opened them and exactly what they did with it. 

There are two main categories of list cleaning. You can pass your whole list into a tool such as UseBouncer or FreshAddress, which can let you know which contacts are valid email addresses and which are not. These tools can help you get rid of audience members who might be affecting your reputation, but it can never help you as much as the second type of list cleaning, which is my personal favorite: Cleaning your list by using engagement metrics.

Let me be clear: List cleaning with engagement doesn’t mean you have to remove records and never email them again. Sure, if someone’s been receiving your emails every day for the last decade and never engages with your brand, yes, they should probably be removed. But in most cases, your subscribers just need to receive only certain emails from you. You can always benefit from preference centers or subscriber lifecycles in order to automate this process.

Sending to old lists or to unengaged subscribers easily shows the inboxes that you don’t care about your audience. Whatever it is you are trying to make your subscribers do, it will always work better if you focus on your engaged subscribers. Consistently uploading old lists or buying lists (don’t do this!) might make you money for a while, but it will ruin your reputation in the long run. Fixing deliverability can take time — just like it takes time to fix your credit score after not paying your bills for months on end.

Magical insight and numbers

A great way to see how your deliverability is doing is by simply monitoring it with various deliverability tools that already exist in the market. I remember the first time I got to play with 250ok at Cakemail. For an email geek like me, it felt a little like magic!

The amount of data deliverability tools can provide allows you to remain proactive in reducing deliverability issues and helps you investigate when they do happen. From EmailConsul to Validity, there are many tools out there that will help you monitor your deliverability and the overall health of the email world you have control over. 

Have you ever done a seed test before? 

They are a great way to see how you are currently inboxing and with which providers you have issues that you might need to resolve. One I personally recommend is EmailConsul, which offers a variety of reliable tools to monitor your deliverability at prices most small businesses can afford! (Note from Dan: This isn’t an affiliate link — Yanna-Torry’s just a fan of their tools!)

Do you check daily if your domain is on any blocklist?

Sometimes, your domain gets listed on a blocklist, and inboxes will let you know with a bounce, or will make an email land in spam. Different blocklists penalize you for different reasons. Read up on the most common to ensure you don’t end up one of them and know exactly what to do when you do.

What about looking into your Google Postmaster and SNDS account?

Google Postmaster and SNDS are free to use. You do need to be sending enough volume for them to let you know how they see you and your sending habits. In most cases, subscribers on your list comprise of Gmail/G Suite and Microsoft/O365 inboxes. 

If you find the data hard to work with or don’t know how to transform the data into actionable tasks because the information is scattered or not easily understandable, you can always use monitoring tools like Validity and EmailConsul to help you aggregate the data easily in one place!

All these are great ways to monitor your overall reputation!

So… now what? 

To answer the original question: Deliverability is based on a mix of hundreds of factors, and fixing one issue is just not enough. There’s a lot to monitor, and all best practices need to be implemented correctly in order to have a good domain reputation and deliverability. It’s just like how maintaining good credit means you have to pay all your bills, not just a couple of them. 

Bounces are only one part of monitoring your deliverability. Data is power. So make sure you get as much as you can before you miss out on valuable information that can help you stay proactive in the email world.

—Yanna-Torry

💌  💌  💌

Yanna-Torry is a Canadian-born, Netherlands-based email and deliverability specialist. In 2020, Litmus gave her their first-ever Coach Award for her work serving the email community. Visit email.ventures and join her cause to make email knowledge more accessible, and follow her on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Have a question for Yanna-Torry? Submit it here, and she might answer your question in an upcoming edition of Not a Newsletter!

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • If you’re promoting your newsletter on another platform — like asking another newsletter to promote your emails, or including a call-to-action to subscribe in a guest blog post — check out this new tool, Magic, from Sparkloop. It allows you to create a one-click sign-up link for your newsletter — and the less friction in the sign-up process, the likelier that reader is to ultimately subscribe to your newsletter! It works with many common ESPs (but not Substack and Revue at the moment).
    • Full disclosure: Sparkloop’s been an affiliate partner of mine for a while, and in June, I made a small investment in their business.
  • Two big guides that should help with your strategy: MediaDev put together a massive Fundraising Guide for newsrooms and non-profits, and Membership Puzzle Project’s translated their excellent Membership Guide into Portguese.
  • Something I’ve been telling a lot of soon-to-be journalism grads: The next job you get might be one you create yourself. These examples of student-led newsrooms are a wonderful model for students to learn from (and, of course, I’ll note that you don’t even need a full website to get started — a landing page and a newsletter is enough for launch!).
  • For folks in working in product roles at newsrooms: The News Product Alliance’s Slack channel is now open to all. (It’s free to join, but you have to fill out a brief application first.) Apply to join here.
  • Really enjoyed this piece from my old boss, Ben Smith, about good signs for the news industry. Particularly noteworthy in here: The section on Outlier Media in Detroit, which has seen impressive results through texting.
  • I’ll close here on a more somber note and take a moment to remember Siyabonga Africa, a Johannesburg-based media strategist. One of the best parts of my role is the opportunity to get outside my American media bubble and meet people who are doing incredible work in other parts of the world. Siya stands out as one of those people. He was bright, ambitious, and someone who used his time to help newsrooms and NGOs push forward with their digital strategy. He co-founded the Johannesburg chapter of Hacks/Hackers, worked with dozens of newsrooms through the South Africa Media Innovation Program (which is where I first met him), and started a new role with Code for Africa in 2021. He died this month, at the age of 35. Siya, thanks for all the hard work you put in. We’ll miss you.

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 Crow

Anyway, the Crow! 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.