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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: March 2023

Welcome to the March 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!

A big thank you to beehiiv, this quarter’s presenting sponsor of Not a Newsletter and Inbox Collective! They’re an email platform founded by ex-engineers at Morning Brew, and their tools are absolutely worth a closer look. You can check out beehiiv here.

A man stands before a support group and says, "Hi, my name is Barry, an I check my email two to three hundred times a day."

This month in Not a Newsletter, you’ll learn about:

  • 12 tactics to help you get your first 5,000 readers.
  • Why blocklists matter, and how to make sure your newsletter stays off them.
  • The four types of user needs, and how to use them to improve your newsletter.
  • What to do if it’s time to end your newsletter.

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

This Month in Email Headlines

Stories labeled with a 🔑 may require a subscription to read.

New on inboxcollective.com This Month

Every Good Newsletter Needs an Exit Plan. Here Are Four Paths to Consider.

Even if you launched a newsletter with permanent intentions, things change. Maybe you’ve grown the newsletter to the point where others are interested in buying it. Maybe you get a new job or experience a shift in circumstances (a move, a new baby, hobbies) that downgrades a newsletter on your priority list. Or maybe the newsletter has run its course and you’re no longer interested in writing it.

So Alex Hazlett took a look at four potential next steps:

  • You could sell the newsletter.
  • You could keep it going on the side, perhaps sending less frequently or with less content.
  • You could hand it over to someone else to run.
  • You could shut it down.

Which one might make sense for your newsletter? Let’s explore all four options.

How to Get Your First 5,000 Readers and Engage With Your Audience

Launching your newsletter is the easy part. Now comes the real work: Starting to build a loyal audience for your newsletter.

How do you grow your audience and get your first 5,000 readers? And how do you get more readers to engage with your content? Let’s dive into those two areas of opportunity and see if we can find a few ideas that will work for you.

Ask a Deliverability Expert: What’s a Blocklist, and Why Should I Care About Them?

A reader wrote to me recently with a question: “I’ve read stories about email blocklists, but I’m not sure what they are or who runs them. Is this something I should be worried about with my newsletter? Could they stop me from sending my newsletter to readers?”

So I turned to our resident deliverability expert, Yanna-Torry Aspraki, to get the answer. She walked through:

  • Who runs these blocklists, and how they work.
  • Why being listed on a blocklist affects your sender reputation and deliverability.
  • What best practices you should use to stay off blocklists.

Blocklists, as Yanna-Torry writes, aren’t anything to fear — but you do need to be proactive to make sure you stay in the right parts of the inbox. Here’s what you need to know.

Vous souhaitez lire cet article en Français ?

Last month, I announced that we’re partnering with Médianes, a France-based consultancy and website, to translate some of our stories. In February, we published this fun story about how a French newsletter, Bulletin, took one section of their newsletter, turned it into a book, and sold €60,000 of books to readers. This month, they’ve translated Jason Rodriguez’s wonderful guide to creating accessible emails. Lots more to come from this partnership in 2023!

Comment créer des newsletters accessibles ?

Un guide complet pour vous aider à rendre le design et le contenu de vos newsletters accessibles au plus grand nombre. Cliquez-ici.

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What Else I’m Reading

One thing I heard in my end-of-year survey was that there are sometimes too many links in Not a Newsletter, and you wanted help finding the stuff you really want to read. So I’m going to to try to organize these links into five categories:

  1. Stories about growth
  2. Stories about content strategy
  3. Stories about monetization
  4. Stories about best practices
  5. Stories about tests, experiments, or learnings

Let me know what you think! Shoot me a note at dan@inboxcollective.com — is this useful? Did it help you find something you might have otherwise missed? I’d love to hear from you.

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Note: Stories labeled with a 🔑 may require a subscription to read.

Growth

  • In my guide to getting your first 5,000 subscribers, I wrote about 12 tactics that are worth trying. One that I want to shout-out: Cross-promotion with other newsletters. If you want to go deeper on cross-promo, check out this story from Jens Lennartsson on Indie Hackers with some suggestions and best practices.
  • And here’s one more: I wrote in my story that cold outreach to friends and colleagues is often a really good way to bring in a few hundred subscribers. I mentioned one anecdote:

One indie writer told me he DMed every person he knew on LinkedIn with the same two-sentence message, asking if they’d sign up and share some feedback with him. He got several hundred sign-ups from those messages

  • So if you’re curious about what that message might look like, here are two templates from Mike Kim that are worth copying.
  • Growth is also a function of creating good content and building relationships with your audience. So often with the publishers I work with, we talk about the funnel: How do you move people on a journey from casual reader to loyal customer? I loved this, from Ghost, which talked through the four stages they see in the creator funnel: Discovery ➡️ Trust ➡️ Access ➡️ Purchase.
  • I find that when companies first invest in paid acquisition — buying ads on channels like Facebook — they often waste money on ads that don’t work. Matt McGarry of The Newsletter Operator talked about a handful of mistakes to avoid when spending money to acquire newsletter subscribers.

Content Strategy

  • 🔑 With March Madness upon us in the U.S. — for my international readers, March Madness is the annual college basketball tournament — I loved reading this story from The Athletic’s Brendan Quinn about HoopVision. It’s a subscription newsletter and a YouTube channel devoted to all things college basketball, and the story about how he’s been building it over the past decade is fascinating.
    • This is one of those stories that reminded me: Most of the success stories you hear about are actually years in the making. Building a brand, building an audience — it comes from doing great work, year after year, for years.
  • Ann Handley talked with Kevin Lynch, creative director at Oatly, about why that brand launched a newsletter called Spam and how they figured out the marketing strategy behind it.
  • Ida Jakobson of the The Mallorcan newsletter talked with Newsletter Circle’s Ciler Demiralp about a number of useful topics, including using SEO to build a newsletter audience.

Monetization

Best Practices

Tests, Experiments, or Learnings

  • If you’re a longtime reader of the Google Doc (or have seen me give a talk), you’ve heard me say this before: When you’re building a newsletter, the first two steps are figuring out who your audience is and what they need from you. I’ve sometimes referred to the latter step as “Jobs to be Done,” and sometimes referred to it as “User needs.” If you download the Newsletter Strategy Positioning Brief, you’ll see a version of this on page 2, with some suggested ways to serve readers.
    • I mention all of this as a prelude to this lovely new whitepaper on user needs from SmartOcto and Dmitry Shishkin, a former BBC staffer who developed the user needs framework. The original version of user needs highlighted six user needs:
      • Inspire me
      • Amuse me
      • Educate me
      • Give me perspective
      • Update me
      • Keep me on trend
    • The User Needs Model 2.0  simplified things down to just four core needs:
      • Know something (fact driven)
      • Do something (action driven)
      • Feel something (emotion driven)
      • Understand something (context driven)
    • And underneath those come more specific needs. So for instance, let’s say I write a daily local newsletter with three sections. The top section highlights breaking news and stories you need to know; the middle section includes a column offering analysis on a big story; and the bottom section lists events happening today in the area. I’d be filling three key needs here: I’d help readers know something, then understand something, and then do something.
      • And best yet: Once I understand those needs, I can also update my sign-up page to make sure I’m giving future readers the best possible pitch for signing up.
    • That’s the high-level version, but I’d encourage you to read the entire report here. You’re going to take a lot away from this.
  • Should you set up a suppression list for inactive or disengaged readers? Kickbox’s Jennifer Nespola Lantz, along with a few other email experts, walked through best practices for setting one of these up.

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • One more shout-out to the team at Beehiiv. They created this fantastic tool, Newsletter Navigator, which can help you calculate the lifetime value of your newsletter, estimate the value of ads in your newsletter, and figure out the cost to acquire a new subscriber (and then make your money back from them). There’s a lot here — bookmark this one.
  • Kudos to the team at the News Revenue Hub, which rolled out RevEngine, a payment system designed for newsrooms. I have several clients who’ve been using it, and if you’re a newsroom (particularly a non-profit that asks for donations), you should give this tool a look. It integrates with Stripe, and they’ve even got a free tier for newsrooms.
  • If you ever need to send a cold email to a brand to drive a sponsorship, you should make time for this story, from Passionfruit’s Jen Glantz, featuring three scripts influencers have used to sell ads.
  • What can AI tools be used for? I loved this suggestion, from fellow indie consultant Steve Bryant: It might be a way to generate a ton of bad ideas.  Maybe, from all those bad ideas, you’ll find something actually worth trying.
  • I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Twitter anymore, but I absolutely loved this post, from Link in Bio’s Rachel Karten, about how it took Amtrak three months and seven rounds of revisions to send a tweet that simply read, “trains.” (The tweet did go viral.)
  • This headline from CNET, I’ll admit, is one of the first times I read something about AI and got a little freaked out: “It’s Scary Easy to Use ChatGPT to Write Phishing Emails.”
  • If you’ve got three minutes and want a good laugh, here’s a video from former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Melissa Villaseñor about why she’s lousy at writing emails.

Shoutouts + Thank Yous

  • Thanks to Simon Harper for shouting out Not a Newsletter as one of his go-to resources. 
  • A big thank you to the team at Refind for sharing Simon Linde’s copywriting piece with their audience.

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.

So to close out this edition of Not a Newsletter, I want to spotlight one of these animals in a feature I call… the (Not a) Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month!

This month: the Marlin!

  • A group of marlins is known as a “school.”
  • If you try to picture a marlin in your head, you’re probably thinking of the blue marlin. Female blue marlins are both bigger than males and live longer. (By quite a long time, too — the average lifespan of a female marlin is 27 years, compared to 18 years for a male.)
  • But there are other, smaller types of marlins, too. Take the white marlin, for instance. While the blue marlin might weigh up to 2,000 pounds, the white marlin usually weighs less than 180 pounds.
  • Marlin, particularly the blue marlin, are often hunted for sport. Ernest Hemingway was an early big-game fisherman, once catching a 468-pound marlin off the coast of Cuba in 1933. His experience fishing for marlin allegedly inspired “The Old Man and the Sea.”
  • And with baseball season about to begin, let’s turn for a moment to the Miami Marlins. In 2012, Miami-Dade County paid $2.5 million to artist Red Grooms to design a piece of art to be installed beyond the park’s centerfield wall. Grooms designed a 73-foot-tall sculpture, called Homer, that featured flying marlins and flamingos, along with jets of water that shot in the air whenever the Marlins hit a home run. (Here it is in action.). It was, depending on your perspective, either gaudy or gorgeous — until the Marlins decided in 2018 to move it outside the stadium. Fun fact: If Grooms disavows the art — he declared publicly that it should remain inside the stadium, not outside — the Marlins owe Miami-Dade County the $2.5 million back.

Anyway, the Marlin! That’s your (Not a) Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month.

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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.