Welcome to the May 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 guide to writing great subject lines; rules for adding emojis to your emails; a survey for Not a Newsletter readers (like you!) about how you’re using your newsletters; more than a dozen new email job openings, including roles at The New York Times, The Intercept, The Texas Tribune, and Zapier; and more!
-Dan
This Month in Email News
- Paid Email Newsletters Are Proving Themselves As A Meaningful Revenue Generator For Writers (BuzzFeed News)
- Upland Software buys PostUp for $35 million (Austin American-Statesman)
- Validity to Acquire Return Path (BusinessWire)
- In privacy/data news…
- Think tanks funded by Silicon Valley are working on Capitol Hill to overturn California’s landmark online privacy law (The Intercept)
- For more:
- Two consumer privacy bills filed in Texas (IAPP)
- For more: Ad Industry Slams Texas Privacy Proposal (MediaPost)
- Microsoft: Hackers compromised support agent’s credentials to access customer email accounts (TechCrunch)
- Study: Only 27% Of U.S. Companies Are Compliant With GDPR (MediaPost)
- Publicis announces $4.4 billion deal to acquire data marketing company Epsilon (CNBC)
- This one’s not specifically about email, but it’s still a good read: Facebook Showed Me My Data Is Everywhere And I Have Absolutely No Control Over It (BuzzFeed News)
- Think tanks funded by Silicon Valley are working on Capitol Hill to overturn California’s landmark online privacy law (The Intercept)
- In pivoting to paid, publishers run into tech headaches (Digiday)
- And for those who miss the design of Inbox: The former lead designer of Gmail just fixed Gmail on his own (Fast Company)
How to Write a Great Subject Line
One of the most common questions from Not a Newsletter readers is, How do I write a great subject line? What should I include? So let’s take a deeper look at that this month.
A subject line is a little like a fingerprint: It should be unique to you and the emails you’re creating. There’s no right way to write one — it’s up to you to figure out what your subject line style should be! But here are a few rules for writing one:
For Your Reading List
- In March, I was down in Austin talking with a group of news organizations about email. Joseph Lichterman at the Lenfest Institute wrote up my four rules for building awesome email newsletters.
- Digiday’s Lucinda Southern wrote about how Switzerland’s NZZ is using newsletters to drive their subscription efforts.
- Also worth reading: Markus Barmettler, who heads up the NZZ data and analytics team, discussed how their team approached email personalization.
- I wrote last month about AMP for Email, and why it’s best to be patient with new features like that. I’d forgotten to mention this, though: Back in 2014, Gmail released a new feature, called “Grid View.” A year later, Google killed it off. Here’s what I wrote at the time about the need to take things slow with experimental email features.
- Also in AMP news: AMP also held a conference last month in Japan, and they included a session on AMP for Email, featuring product managers at Google and companies that are currently using AMP. You can watch the full session here.
- I wasn’t able to make it down to South Carolina for the first-ever UNSPAM Conference, but I’m thrilled that they’ve made the slides from their talks available online.
- My favorites in here: Meghan Sokolnicki’s talk on email design trends, Jorge Selva’s talk on personalization at scale, and Betsy Grondy’s talk about email automation.
- A fun little thing from SendGrid’s Julie Griffin: The History of Email Quiz. (I, for one, am glad I never had to worry about designing an email for the IBM Simon.)
- I wrote a little about Whereby.Us’s email model last month. Nieman Lab’s Christine Schmidt took a closer look at their membership program.
- Here’s a super deep dive into all things email marketing: SendGrid’s 2019 A-Z Email Marketing Guide.
- ActiveCampaign’s Lauren Minning discussed strategies for building great re-engagement emails.
- Wired editor-in-chief Nick Thompson wrote about their digital subscription plan, a year in. This won’t come as a surprise to Not a Newsletter readers: Newsletters have been a big part of their success!
They’ll particularly pay, we also learned, if you send them newsletters. The propensity to subscribe by people who enter WIRED.com on a mobile device is rather low—unless they come in via a newsletter. (To give one data point, a visitor who reaches us via search is 1/19th as likely to subscribe as one who comes in from a newsletter; a reader coming in from Facebook is 1/12th; and a reader coming in from Twitter is 1/6th.) That’s one reason why we’re launching all kinds of new newsletters, tied to specific sections of the site.
- Digiday’s Jessica Davies talked with Giovanni Buttarelli, who oversees GDPR — he’s gotten the nickname “Mr. GDPR” in the press, to give you a sense of his expertise on the matter — to discuss tech, media, and the state of GDPR.
- Also in privacy news: Return Path’s legal team dug into the legal implications of the California Consumer Privacy Act.
- I wrote last month about keeping spammy sign-ups off your list. MailPoet’s Raelene Morey went a bit deeper into one spam-protection tool: the honeypot trap.
- This was also fascinating: NPR’s “Planet Money” explored the history and future of CAPTCHA. I highly recommend taking 25 minutes for this one.
- Testing is crucial to the long-term success of any email program. On Inside Design, Kai Rikhye wrote about alternatives to A/B testing that might be worth trying.
- Litmus also has a five talks from their Litmus Live conference explaining how brands like Indeed and Square run their A/B tests.
- I’ve gotten lots of questions from readers about tools for keeping track of their content calendars, managing projects, and more. Over at the Zapier blog, Maria Myre broke down nine project management apps that might be useful for individuals or small teams.
- Phrasee’s Parry Malm wrote about how aggressive short-term selling tactics — “Get 25% Our Store This Holiday Weekend!” — can actually backfire in the long run.
- On a related note: Return Path’s Alexandra Braunstein wrote about why decreasing your email frequency might help with inbox placement and subscriber engagement.
- The Litmus team accidentally included a broken link in an email for their conference. Litmus’s Heather Moran wrote about how they corrected the error, and what others can learn from the experience.
- Quinn Ritzdorf, a Mizzou journalism student, shared a few lessons from a failed newsletter experiment at a paper in Northern Colorado.
- At Designmodo, Nataly Birch wrote about a few rules for using emojis in your emails. It’s worth reading, and I wanted to add a few thoughts to the conversation here.
- If you’re going to use emojis, make sure you ask yourself: Is this on brand for us? If your brand is ~fun~, then it’s fine to use emojis and GIFs (within reason). If not, remember: You risk the chance of looking a little out of touch.
- This isn’t about email specifically, but I still found it fascinating: At Slate, Jane C. Hu looked into the spammers infiltrating Google Calendar and Google Hangouts.
- Here’s a nice guide from Campaign Monitor to using web fonts in your newsletters.
- Every once in a while, I like to dig through old newspaper and magazine archives to see what the experts were saying a decade or two ago about email and the web. Here’s a fun read from the archives: It’s Steven Levy, in Newsweek in January 1996, writing about the three biggest players on the web. And who were those fearsome Big Three? Why, just the names you’d expect!: AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. And impressively, Levy actually predicted that they were in a bit of trouble — early gateways to the web that wouldn’t last as the internet grew:
Something has to give, and it will. Look for the onliners to get out of the direct-connection business. The three major newcomers in the field–Apple’s eWorld, five Microsoft Network and, most recently, AT&T Interchange–have already declared their intention to become giant Web sites. (A Web site is a destination in the vast, multimedia area known as the World Wide Web.) Prodigy plans to do the same by 1997. AOL and CompuServe will inevitably follow. Instead of being walled-off cities, the services will merge into the larger world of cyberspace. Of course, these companies believe that their virtual locations will be de facto gateways to the Internet, designed “to bring order to cyberspace chaos,” says Compuserve CEO Bob Massey. But once they stop locking in people via direct-dial connection, their inherent advantage in the “first stop on the Net” competition is lost….
Does this mean that the Big Three will be gone by the year 2000? Not necessarily. Recently, high-tech soothsayers have declared video rentals doomed by the advent of pay-per-view television. Hasn’t happened. Likewise, if the Internet doesn’t develop as anticipated, the dead men of the online services may keep walking for some time, especially if they are nimble enough to change direction. Still, I would hate to be the one who issued them life-insurance policies.
It’s a nice reminder that as we look forward the future, we really don’t know what happens next. You can read the entire column here.
What works best in newsletters?
- I loved this chart, from Axios, about what works best on certain social media platforms:
But I was surprised — especially from a company that’s so email-centric! — that newsletters were left out of the discussion. So let’s keep the conversation going here.
Here’s what I’m asking you: I’ve put together a two-question survey that I’d like you to fill out. Here’s what I want to know:
- What’s the purpose of your newsletters? — I’ve left a space in case you want to add your own suggestion.
- What kind of content does your audience see in your newsletters? — You can use the chart above as inspiration, or add your own ideas.
Enter your answers here in the survey, and I’ll share some learnings in next month’s Not a Newsletter!
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 more obscure Google Doc animals in a feature I’m calling… the Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month! This month:
The loris is the rare animal that’s both surprisingly cute and surprisingly deadly. Take, for instance, this video of a slow loris eating a banana. You’re probably thinking: Oh, that’s just a monkey with manga eyes! How cute! But you’d be wrong! I’ll quote the good folks at Popular Science here:
An article published in the Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases suggested slow lorises adopted serpentine markings and movements as defense mechanisms…. Slow lorises are the only known venomous primate, secreting toxins from a gland located along the crook of their inner arms.
The slow loris is a cute, furry, big-eyed primate that climbs trees… and also evolved over thousands of years to behave like a cobra. So again, this is a wonderful reminder: Nature is terrifying, and pretty much everything out there can kill you.
Anyway, the loris! 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:
