Welcome to the June edition of 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. Every month, I update this doc with email news, tips, and ideas. You can sign up here to be notified when a new edition is live — or bookmark notanewsletter.com for later!
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 every previous briefing at this link.
Now, onto this month’s edition! Inside, you’ll find a few thoughts about launching pop-up newsletters, the results of last month’s Not a Newsletter survey about your goals for email, and more! Have something else you think should be featured in Not a Newsletter? Email me at dan.oshinsky@gmail.com.
-Dan
This Month in Email News
- CM Group Acquires Vuture, Raises $410 Million In Funding (MediaPost)
- Mailchimp set to launch full-service marketing platform (Marketing Land)
- Substack expands its subscription platform with discussion threads (TechCrunch)
- The Hustle Launches $299-A-Year Premium Newsletter ‘Trends’ (Subscription Insider)
- Upland Software Acquires Kapost For $50 Million (MediaPost)
- Validity Closes Return Path Purchase, Gains New Investment (MediaPost)
- Acquia Buys Open Source Marketing Automation Software Firm Mautic (Xconomy)
- SugarCRM moves into marketing automation with Salesfusion acquisition (TechCrunch)
- ‘Quartz’ Sets Up Metered Paywall, Email Newsletters Still Free (MediaPost)
- In privacy/data news:
- Here’s an optimistic look at GDPR: One year in, GDPR fines haven’t hit publishers — or very many other companies, actually (Nieman Lab)
- And on the glass half-empty side of things: ‘We’ve only just started’: 1 year into GDPR, ad industry braces for more fines (Digiday)
- Behavioral Ad Targeting Not Paying Off for Publishers, Study Suggests (Wall Street Journal)
- Google Has A List Of Everything Purchased When Merchants Email You The Receipt (MediaPost)
- New York’s Privacy Bill Is Even Bolder Than California’s (Wired)
- White House rolls out “tech bias” complaint form—and it wants your email address to stay in touch (Newsweek)
A Word About Pop-Up Newsletters
Many readers, inspired by The New York Times’s pop-up newsletter around summertime in NYC, have been asking if they, too, should launch a pop-up product, which got me thinking about the very first pop-up newsletter I ever launched.
So gather round, friends — it’s story time. I’d like to take you back, way back, all the way to a more innocent time: The summer of 2013. Miley Cyrus was about to burst into the national consciousness like a wrecking ball, the world wondered if George Clooney would ever find love after breaking up with Stacy Keibler, and I was starting to believe that what we were doing at BuzzFeed was actually going to work.
Maybe I should take a few steps back and explain.
I’d gotten hired to lead the newsletter program at BuzzFeed in 2012. Over the first few months of the job, we started building the framework for our newsletter program. We created a basic template for our newsletters and started testing. We launched a daily newsletter, and a handful of emails tied to sections of the site, like animals and tech.
And then Kate Middleton and Prince William announced that they were going to have a baby.
This was the first royal baby born in the social media era — and BuzzFeed was ready for it. We had staff in the U.S. and U.K. prepared to write, pretty much daily, about the royal baby. It made sense that we should also be the ones to launch a newsletter about the royal baby.
But we’d never launched a newsletter quite like it before! Would readers respond to such a specific product? Would they sign up for a newsletter that was only intended to run for a few weeks? How would we even get readers to sign up for such a newsletter? Did we have the right tools to grow our royal baby list?
Over the next few weeks, we learned that, yes, readers would most definitely sign up for such a newsletter. We learned that these pop-up products could work well for a site like ours. And we learned so much about how to write marketing copy and how to promote a new product like this. The royal baby newsletter was where we first started learning how to use newsletters to create powerful relationships with readers around specific communities and moments — and how to build audiences from those relationships.
Much of what we went on to do — content strategy, growth, new ways of measuring success — started with that royal baby newsletter. That newsletter gave us the learnings we needed to really start to grow our newsletter program.
So should you launch a pop-up newsletter, too? The answer is simple: It depends on what you’re trying to learn! Treat these pop-up products as tiny editorial experiments. Maybe you’re trying to learn how to grow a list, or how to put paid marketing behind a project, or how to engage directly with your readers. If so, sure, launch a pop-up newsletter!
A pop-up newsletter is a great place to learn something because the stakes are low. If it works, fantastic! You learned something that you can use on a more permanent newsletter. If it doesn’t, it’s OK! The newsletter was only running for a few weeks anyway.
But remember: Launch something to learn something. Ask big questions, and then make things to help you find the answers.
For Your Reading List
- Simon Owens interviewed Robert Cottrell, whose newsletter, The Browser, has over 10,000 paying subscribers. They talked about how Robert built his audience, and why he switched his newsletter over to Substack.
- Another newsletter success story: Poynter’s Mel Grau talked with Kris Higginson of The Seattle Times about their morning newsletter briefing.
- On a related note: Kim Fox and Ross Maghielse of The Philadelphia Inquirer shared a few audience development lessons — including some tips about rethinking their newsletters — with Better News.
- WhereByUs’s Anika Anand wrote about how her team used a Jobs To Be Done framework to deliver more of what subscribers wanted from their newsletters.
- Sam Greenspan of EmailMonks also dove deep into using Jobs To Be Done.
- After three years, the founders of Clover Letter said goodbye. Here’s their final email.
- This isn’t specifically about newsletters, but it’s worth reading: Kim Bost, a designer at Dropbox, talked about ways that building a new project can go wrong. (I’ll admit that I’ve made just about every mistake on this list!)
- I’ve gotten a lot of emails from readers who write an internal, employees-only email at their company. So for all of you, here’s a treat: on the GetResponse blog, Jordie van Rijn wrote about a number of ways to create a great employee newsletter.
- GQ’s Stephanie Talmadge gave a great talk last month about leveraging emails to grow subscriptions. Her slides are available here.
- Here’s the best lede you’ll read in this month’s doc: “The sandwich was unremarkable—lukewarm and not quite melted, like a college freshman’s late-night microwave snack rather than a true grilled cheese. But I have thought about the sandwich every week since I ordered it, because the food truck that made it won’t stop emailing me.” That’s Wired’s Emily Dreyfuss, who wrote about a series of marketing emails that wouldn’t stop.
- Speaking of which: The Wall Street Journal’s Yoree Koh and Jessica Kuronen wrote about the semi-sketchy ways that tech companies get you to click, share, purchase, and subscribe to things on the internet — and how legislation may be coming to put an end to these practices.
- Phrasee’s Stu Elmes explained the difference between unique opens and total opens.
- Unbounce’s Amy Middleton Hebdon wrote about creating landing pages that convert when someone comes to your site from search.
- GDPR turned one in May. I shared a few links at the top of the doc, but one more worth reading: the Campaign Monitor blog discussed how GDPR’s changed the email marketing industry for the better.
- On the deliverability side of things: Laura Tessmer Atkins at Word to the Wise wrote about some issues she’s seeing with Gmail and inbox placement. Might be worth keeping an eye on engagement from Gmail users these next few months — ask your ESP if they can help you pull a monthly report about engagement by inbox provider (Gmail, Outlook, AOL, etc.).
- Speaking of which: At MarketingLand, Jennifer Videtta Cannon wrote about how companies need to take ownership of their email deliverability.
- I loved this Katie Notopoulos piece for BuzzFeed News about how literary Twitter is obsessed with two newsletters.
- Return Path’s Heather Steffonich wrote about how to think about benchmarking data.
- And I share that link here so I can say this: A few years ago, MailChimp published a report that said that the average open rate for those of us in media/publishing was 22%. Over the years, I’ve had so many colleagues in the industry quote that number back to me: “Well, we’re beating the industry average of 22%, so we’re pretty happy!”
- But here’s the thing: I’ve never been able to get a straight answer as to what that 22% actually measures. What types of brands were included? How many brands are being measured there? How big are the lists included in that average? How often do their emails go out? What I’m saying is: We don’t really know anything about that widely-cited industry average.
- So if the folks over at MailChimp are reading this, please do reach out! I have so many questions about your email benchmarks!
- This sounds promising: The Times (of London) has been testing personalized emails to subscribers, with impressive results.
- Here’s a deep dive, by Dr. Neil Yager and Elena Dulskyte on the Phrasee blog, about how to correctly set up a subject line test.
- Here’s some fantastic copy writing advice from Trish Hall in The New York Times, including five specific examples for personal correspondence that she says really work. Read the whole thing, but also consider this:
In the course of doing research for a book on how people actually change their minds, and what gets them to say “yes” rather than “no,” I was distressed to find that I knew much less about it than I thought I did. I figured that my nearly five years as the New York Times Op-Ed editor gave me a pretty strong vantage point on what worked and what didn’t. It did — but I didn’t always know why. What I sensed intuitively about effective writing turned out to rest on some deep psychological truths. Understanding them provides tactics that can be exploited in both personal and written interactions.
- It’s a nice reminder to continue to challenge your existing habits. No matter how much you’ve done something, you can always see it with fresh eyes.
- Tom Wozniak wrote a post for Forbes explaining simple rules for complying with CAN-SPAM.
- Also worth reading: AdAge’s Syed Balkhi discussed four reasons why emails end up in the spam folder.
- For those of you publishing on WordPress: MailPoet looked at three plugins that are effective at collecting signups for your newsletter.
- Wired’s Indu Chandrasekhar talked about how they’re using evergreen content to drive traffic — including in their newsletters:
In addition to social, the team also includes evergreen stories in their newsletters. Indu recommends testing different ways to do this. They created a dedicated “archive only” newsletter, but they also use one to two spots in daily newsletters for evergreen content. Since your most loyal readers are likely get your newsletter, they’re an audience that wants to be reminded of your great stories.
Finally, evergreen content can be a way to engage your audience in conversations. “Ask them, What are your favorite stories?” says Indu. “We sometimes ask them, ‘Did we get this prediction right or wrong?’ or ‘What’s the best thing that you’ve seen [in relation to this article]?’”
What works best in newsletters? Here’s what Not a Newsletter readers say
- Last month, I asked readers like you to take a quick survey about what you’re using newsletters for. Thanks to everyone who took the survey!
- Here’s what you said you’re using your newsletters for:
- To help readers discover more of the stories/content they’re already passionate about — 17%
- To keep readers in the know — 16%
- To make a connection — 13%
- To teach readers something new — 13%
- To establish a personality – 9%
- To make a reader’s life easier — 7%
- To start a conversation — 7%
- To provide inspirational/aspirational content — 7%
- To try to sell something — 3%
- To crowdsource ideas — 2%
- Here’s what that looks like in chart format:
- I’m not surprised to see that most of us are still using newsletters to share links/stories/content. But I’m starting to hear from more readers who are using email to make a connection with readers or start a conversation with them. That’s a promising step — and it shows a shift from email as a tool purely for pushing content to one that can be used to establish 1-to-1 relationships with our readers.
What are you working on? I’d love to hear more about it!
There are nearly 1,600 readers now subscribed to Not a Newsletter — and the more of you I meet, the more amazed I am by the work being done in this community. So I’m going to steal an old line from a friend and ask: What’s something you’re working on that you’re proud of? Or just something in your work that you’re especially excited about? Email me at dan.oshinsky@gmail.com and tell me about it — and I encourage you to brag! 😉
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’m calling… the Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month! This month:
And you’re probably thinking: The giraffe? Really? I’ve been to the zoo, Dan. I know everything there is to know about giraffes!
But did you know?:
- Giraffes and humans have the same number of vertebrae in our necks. (Giraffes: they’re just like us!)
- Despite their size, giraffes actually have relatively small hearts — but they do have unusually high blood pressure, which helps pump blood throughout their bodies.
- A group of giraffes is called… a tower of giraffes.
Anyway, the giraffe! That’s your 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:
