Not a Newsletter: June 2022

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 the next edition goes live!

This month, Apple announces support for BIMI; new data about newsletter strategy from the Reuters Institute, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal; lessons about using audience research to launch new products; and more!

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

-Dan 

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

This Month in Email Headlines

• Inside Twitter, Shuffled Jobs and Elon Musk Tweets Dampen Morale (Bloomberg)
• “There Has To Be A Line”: Substack’s Founders Dive Headfirst Into The Culture Wars (Vanity Fair)
• Media Briefing: How newsletters publishers are dealing with a destabilized ad landscape (Digiday)
• The Ankler raises $1.5M seed at $20M valuation (Axios)
• A Q&A with Vox Media’s Camilla Cho on the publisher’s commerce newsletter expansion (Digiday)
• The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class (The New Yorker)
• Google adds Gmail alt-text support (9to5 Google)
• Superhuman has laid off 22% of its staff a month after launching on Microsoft Outlook (Insider)

For Your Reading / To-Do List

• BIMI — the global standard that allows any brand to put their logo next to their name in the inbox — is getting a significant new partner. Last year, Gmail joined Yahoo and AOL, among several international ESPs, in supporting BIMI. And this month, Apple quietly announced they will be supporting BIMI with both MacOS and iOS16, which are expected to be released this fall. 
  • This is a big deal: Per a May report from Litmus, nearly 58% of all emails are opened on an Apple device. 
  • After seeing the news, I reached out to Matthew Vernhout, vice president of deliverability, North America, at Netcore Cloud, who’s also a member of ​​the AuthIndicators Working Group, which has been building out the BIMI standard. He’s a busy guy — he took a few minutes away from attending an email conference to confirm key details for Not a Newsletter.
  • If you’ve already set up BIMI, he confirmed to me, your logos will automatically start appearing in Apple’s mail clients this fall. As Matthew noted during our interview, Apple hasn’t previously shown brand images in the inbox before, so this is a notable step for them.
  • “From Australia, Japan, through Europe into North America, we’re now seeing adoption” of the BIMI standard by various mailbox providers, Matthew told me. “And hopefully, [this move from Apple] continues to drive adoption.” Apple isn’t the only new brand adding BIMI soon: France’s La Poste is also going to begin rolling out BIMI for users.
  • Is setting up BIMI worth it? Matthew cited some internal reporting from Netcore Cloud showing that the brands that have turned on BIMI have seen a notable lift in clicks from their newsletters. “​​We’ve seen significant improvement in behavior,” he told me. 
  • One final thing: Some brands have told me that they haven’t turned on BIMI due to the cost of applying for a Verified Mark Certificate, or VMC, which is the final step in the BIMI process. (A VMC costs about a thousand dollars per year.) Matthew told me that they’re hoping to bring on several new partners to sell VMCs, which might bring that cost down.
• There were a few big reports from the news world that caught my eye. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is out with their 2022 Digital Report, which includes a ton of data on newsletters. Their Nic Newman has a full story exclusively about the email findings from the report — make time for that.
• The New York Times also made a big presentation this month to investors. It’s a long deck, but I wanted to highlight two interesting notes:
  • 1.) Readers who subscribed to a subscriber-only newsletter were 20% less likely to churn.
  • 2.) Among the list of activities that were better for retention, the Times highlighted two newsletters:

• Really enjoyed this story, on Better News, about how the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reaching Black audiences through a new newsletter. I particularly enjoyed reading about one collaboration that the AJC did with a local influencer to help grow their list.
• Love seeing stories like this, from Shay Totten for Metrics for News, about how the Arizona Daily Star used surveys to better understand which types of new products, like newsletters or SMS channels, they should launch for readers.
• Mary-Katharine Phillips and Sasha Tanghe wrote a post for INMA about tweaks the Wall Street Journal made to on-site promotions to drive deeper engagement for newsletters, podcasts, and other products. Interestingly, the WSJ found that newsletter promotions with two CTAs (one for a single newsletter, one back to their main newsletter sign-up page) got 70% more clicks than units with just one CTA. This message from them is absolutely worth remembering:

“Based on our learnings, we recommend continued testing to understand the best way to leverage on-site placements. Do not become complacent. There will always be elements that can be further optimised, whether it’s a design change or simply adding another CTA.”

• On the Local Media Association site, Emilie Lutostanski wrote about how Word in Black took a test-and-learn approach to using Facebook ads to grow their newsletter audience.  
• Tara Lajumoke, managing director of FT Strategies, gave a keynote about best-in-class strategies for subscription businesses. Her full talk is available here.
• The team at Industry Slice, which publishes B2B newsletters in the U.K., walked through their strategy for selling ads to B2B audiences.
• Let’s shift over to the Creator space for a second:
  • Fun story here from Austin Rief of Morning Brew about how they made $40,000 selling… mousepads.
  • If you’re interested in learning more about selling newsletter ads, you might want to make time for this podcast between Katy Huff, co-founder of MadRev, and SparkLoop’s Louis Nicholls.
  • Loved this, from Ann Handley, about what makes this single sentence in the Morning Brew newsletter so good.
  • Dylan Redekop of Growth Currency wrote about the importance of setting long-term goals and being resilient when building a new newsletter.
• The footer of your newsletter probably hasn’t gotten a lot of attention lately, but you might want to give that part of your email some more thought. Campaign Monitor shared a few ideas on their blog for ways to refresh that footer.
• Lead magnets can be a fantastic way, particularly for niche and B2B publishers, to grow an email list. Ahref’s Mateusz Makosiewicz shared a bunch of lead magnet examples you can learn from.
• I don’t often share my podcast appearances, but I’m making an exception this one time. Mackenzie Kruvant — a friend, former BuzzFeed colleague, and brilliant copywriter who’s worked with brands like Casper and Heyday — joined me on the Naughty by Nurture podcast to talk all about copywriting for email. (Mackenzie brought all the useful tactics; I mostly supplied the dad jokes.)
• On the note of paid acquisition, I liked this post from Parsa Saljoughian, a VP over at WHOOP, about two metrics to monitor — LTV/CAC and CAC payback — when building a direct-to-consumer business.
• I’ve gotten a few more questions recently about internal comms emails, so I wanted to share this post, from Jordie van Rijn, which walked through several good examples for those types of newsletters.
• A few years ago, Gmail rolled out a feature, Annotations, to help promotional emails stand out more in the inbox. But the feature never quite caught on. On the SendView blog, Gregg Blanchard dove into the data, which suggests that Annotations are going extinct, and quickly.

Stuff I Loved This Month

• Here’s another exciting new org popping up in the email world: The Email Markup Consortium, a new group dedicated to improving email experience for all users. You can learn a little more about the EMC here.
• If you use the Gmail Android app, here are a few hidden features you might want to know about.
• Going to be out of office soon? A horse in Iceland can write your OOO message for you.
• If you’re looking for a new email signature, this list of templates from Zapier could help. (And make sure you add a link to your newsletter sign-up form — it’s a good space to drive sign ups!)

This Month in… Mel Brooks Quotes That Are Also Good Rules to Follow for Email Marketing

Mel Brooks is a comic genius, and also a surprisingly good source of inspiration for those of us in the email space. So in 2022,  I’m closing the Google Doc with a brand new feature: Mel Brooks Quotes That Are Also Good Rules to Follow for Email Marketing! This month, let’s turn to the wisdom of “History of the World, Part I.”

There’s a classic scene where a group of Romans, one of whom is played by Brooks, are trying to escape town when they reach the banks of a river. “What we going to do? We’re trapped!” they yell. Just then, they spot a man near the water, dressed like Moses, who raises his arms. The waters part, and the Romans pass through. It looks like a miracle, until the camera changes angles, and you realize that the man at the river’s edge wasn’t parting the waters — he was being robbed.

The thing about email is that you can’t always see what’s happening behind the scenes. Sometimes, you’ll run into some email trouble — say, your emails are going to spam — and there’s an obvious explanation. But oftentimes, there isn’t, and in the absence of data, it’s easy to start inventing stories to explain what’s happening.

Try to resist that temptation. Instead, keep asking questions, and keep looking for a different angle. You never know when a single question or a different perspective might show you what’s really happening.

That’s all for this edition! Want to be notified when next month’s edition of Not a Newsletter is live? Sign up here: