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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: June 2020

Welcome to the June 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!

Inside this edition: A list of my 50 favorite newsletters, details about Facebook and Medium getting into email, thoughts on the new email service from the makers of Basecamp, 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 them all at this link.

-Dan 

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

A snail attempts to reply to an email
Jason Adam Katzenstein

This Month in Email News

For Your Reading List

  • Let’s start with a bit of interesting news: Every platform sends newsletters now.
    • Well, not every one. But it kind of feels like it these days. Facebook announced that some Pages will be able to send emails to readers. Medium announced a newsletter tool. (Medium had previously announced a newsletter tool, called Letters, back in 2015.) And other platforms, from WordPress to Ghost, are building out the tools to allow their users to send emails straight from the CMS.
    • So what does this all mean? My hope is that this leads to a bit of competition in this space. A lot of this, I think, is due to the success that new ESPs have had in building better tools for email. Now we’re seeing other players dip their toes into these waters. I’m hoping that some competition leads to a few big changes, from improved workflow for building newsletters to better data for publishers. I’ll keep watching this space — I’m very intrigued to see what happens in the coming months.
  • You might not be familiar with the M3AAWG — they’re the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group, and they’re dedicated to fighting back against bad actors in the email and messaging space. Due to the spike in spammy emails tied to Covid-19, they’re highly recommending that all companies authenticate their emails through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. There are more details on their site, including steps to actually set up authentication.
  • Jon Torrey of the Better Marketing blog wrote about how Drizly, a company that delivers beer, wine, and liquor to your door, sent out a great apology email to their audience after a pretty big email blunder. I think there’s still room for improvement here — I wish the email had been from a member of their team and actually included a photo of that human and their dog — but that’s just me picking nits. This email was on brand and very well done.
  • Up in Canada, Erin Millar and Caitlin Havlak are starting a new company to provide tech and business tools to local publishers. Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire has the full details, but click through to see how Erin and Caitlin are thinking about the role of newsletters — I think they’re spot-on with their analysis.
  • Brian Boyer released Memberkit, a series of analytics tools built initially for Billy Penn and Denverite that are designed to help you build a membership program. There are a few dashboards in here that could be useful in tracking newsletter stats — but up front, you should know that it will require a bit of developer help to set these up.
    • Want something a big more plug-and-play? Try the Audience Explorer dashboard, which was created by Ned Berke for the Center for Cooperative Media. It’s a set of 10 dashboards to measure traffic and loyalty, including from newsletters. It’s available now in English and — thanks to the team at SembraMedia — also in Spanish.
    • Also on the note of memberships: At the Membership Puzzle Project, Emma Carew Grovum walked through questions to ask when picking tools for your membership tech stack. If you’re building a site based on membership, read carefully through this one.
  • On the INMA blog (for members only), Pieter De Smet of Mediahuis in Belgium walked through why his newsroom decided to build a new newsletter program, starting by creating a brand new newsletter team.
  • Two big email reports to share this month:

Email news is no silver bullet solution. It is still a minority activity that appeals mostly to older readers and the format can be restrictive. But despite its relative unsophistication, it does remain one of the most important tools available to publishers for building habit and attracting the type of customers that can help with monetisation (subscription or advertising).

  • That’s an all-time backhanded compliment right there! There are five points mentioned that I wanted to briefly break down:
    • Email isn’t a silver bullet — This is true! For most publishers, email is a tool that needs to be used in concert with other smart strategies to build and grow an audience. It’s a big part of the puzzle, but it’s not the only piece.
    • Email is a minority activity — Compared to what, exactly? The inbox is one of the most-used tools on the web. I’m not sure what they mean here.
    • Email appeals to an older audience — I’ve been hearing this for years. It’s simply not true. Email’s widely used by people of all ages, and millennial-focused newsletters like TheSkimm, The Hustle, and Morning Brew are proof that younger readers use email, too.
    • Email isn’t sophisticated — Again, not true. Most publishers don’t get as sophisticated as they could with personalization or automation, but the tools are absolutely there.
    • Email is one of the most important tools for building habit and driving revenue — Absolutely, 100% true. No additional commentary needed.
  • Many of you have written in to ask: Is time for us to roll out AMP yet for our newsletters? Not yet, I think — most readers of this doc don’t even use an ESP that supports AMP for Email. But I did want to share this case study, written by Braze’s Madison Gardner, about how one health tech company used AMP to build an in-app quiz for users. This is really neat, and when AMP does roll out more widely, I’m excited to see more examples like this.
  • The team at SparkLoop wrote a guest post for Campaign Monitor with ideas for building out the rewards for a referral program. Take a look at some of the digital offerings in here — the rewards for a referral program can get creative.
  • David Grant of the Facebook Journalism Project is back with even more data on the importance of newsletters for retaining readers who signed up during the first wave of Covid-19. It details how The Los Angeles Times, The Arizona Republic, and The Philadelphia Inquirer are all using newsletters, and they’ve set a strong example for others to follow. (Full disclosure: I’ve been a speaker at several FJP events, and have been compensated for my work there.)
  • Switching gears for a moment: Back in 2019, the team at Traffic Magazine asked if I’d write up a list of the 50 best newsletters out in the marketplace. I happily said yes, and dug deep into my inbox to find some gems. My piece — The Newsletter Boom Is Back (Again) — is finally live.
    • I say *finally* because it’s been almost a year since Traffic first commissioned this piece. It’s been so long, at least two of the newsletters that I put on my list are no longer actively sending (Annotations and A Song A Day — do come back to us!).
    • If I was writing this today, I’d probably make a few different choices. One that comes to mind: Global Health NOW, which has done a fantastic job of covering the coronavirus pandemic, would certainly make the cut.
    • There are plenty of newsletters in here that you’ll recognize, but there are a few that might be new to you. Two of my favorites that you might not know: Thought Starter, a newsletter to inspire you to take action in your community, and DinnerIn20, a newsletter full of 20-minute dinner ideas. They’re both great examples of how powerful a newsletter can be when it’s designed to drive a specific action.
  • On Indiehackers, Josh Howarth of the Exploding Topics newsletter wrote about how they built their list from 0 to 50,000 readers in 14 months. There are a few good lessons in here, and it’s encouraging to see some ideas from the “25 Ways” doc (including cross promotion) detailed here.
    • On a related note: Lenny Rachitsky of Lenny’s Newsletter explained how notable companies like Airbnb, Etsy, and Instagram acquired their first thousand users. The biggest takeaway: Just seven strategies were responsible for most of this early growth.
  • The California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, will start being enforced on July 1. On the Golden Data blog, Zach Edwards goes deep (and I mean really deep — like an hour’s worth of reading) into some of the legal questions that still remain around the CCPA.
  • One last thing I wanted to discuss: The launch of Hey.com. For those who aren’t familiar: Hey is a new email inbox from the team that built Basecamp, and the promise with Hey is that it puts users first. That means an inbox where users get to decide what goes where, and an inbox that blocks any tracking pixels.
    • And at first glance, looking through their feature set, I had this weird realization. What Hey has built is… basically my existing inbox.
    • So this is a pretty boring discussion of my literal inbox, and you should absolutely feel free to skip ahead. I promise I’ll bring it back around to what this means for you!
    • A few years ago, three things changed the way I use my inbox: 
      • The first was SaneBox, which is a super smart filtering tool that filters certain mail into certain folders, like newsletters and receipts. I get to decide up front what goes where. One big feature of Hey: The ability to filter messages into a receipts folder or a newsletter folder, based on what you tell Hey to do.
      • The second was Boomerang, which allows a reader to remove an email from their inbox and bring it back at a certain time, or to schedule an email for later. Hey’s got those features, too.
      • The third was a new feature from Gmail allowing me to set up different views for Important and Unread emails vs. Everything else in my inbox. Again, Hey built this.
    • I love the way my inbox is set up, so to see an out-of-the-box email solution that does all of this is really intriguing. When I look in my Gmail inbox, I usually only have a handful of emails in there at one time. The rest are filtered into the right folders for me to search through later. It works really well, and if Hey does all of this without requiring a bunch of additional add-ons, that’s promising!
    • That being said: Are millions of users going to suddenly switch from Gmail or Outlook to Hey? Probably not. An email address is a little like a phone number — the one you have now is probably going to be the one you have for many years to come. The users who use Hey are going to be power users and early adopters, and that’s OK!
    • I know there are some concerns in the email world that Hey will cause trouble for us because it blocks tracking pixels, making it hard to track opens, clicks, or other data. In lieu of that data, how will email marketers track success? Here’s one idea: Success could be measured in the number of new conversations you start with a reader each month. I can absolutely envision a world in which asking readers questions, and then using email to talk 1-to-1 with them, is an indicator of success. 
      • Remember: The inbox is a reader’s space. You have to earn your place there, and you have to work hard to maintain the relationship to stay there. If Hey inspires email marketers to think more carefully about what they send, to start conversations, and to put relationships first, I’d be thrilled.
    • One other thing  I’m curious about is: Will Hey inspire Gmail, Outlook, or the other inboxes to make any changes? There’s lots of room for them to improve, and I hope this gives them the inspiration to do so.

Stuff I Loved This Month

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 iguana

So here’s a confession: I didn’t know anything about iguanas when I decided to make them the Anonymous Animal of the Month. To be honest, I thought they were all fairly tiny. (Turns out I was thinking of the GEICO gecko.) Instead, here’s what I learned: Iguanas are huge (some are more than six feet long) and weirdly fascinating:

  • The marine iguana, many of which you’ll find on the Galapagos Islands, can hold its breath underwater for up to 30 minutes. I don’t understand how a creature with fangs and claws can do that, but here’s video proof.
  • In South Florida, iguanas are the second leading cause of power outages, according to one news report.
  • National Geographic says green iguanas are difficult pets to care for, and — without any sort of follow up, which really would be useful for a claim like this — noted that “many are turned loose by their owners.” (My Google history is now 90% variations of the phrase “iguanas on the loose.”)
  • When temperatures get cold, iguanas enter into a protective state of torpor, and sometimes begin to fall from the trees. Earlier this year, the National Weather Service in Miami even issued a warning about falling iguanas. 

Anyway, the iguana! 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.