Welcome to the May 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 Litmus, this quarter’s presenting sponsor of Not a Newsletter and Inbox Collective! They’re an all-in-one marketing platform that empowers you to build, test, review, and analyze emails so you can get the most out of every email you send. Learn why 700,000+ professionals trust Litmus to make every send count.
And a thank you to this month’s returning sponsors: InboxArmy, a full-service email marketing agency that can help you build out your email strategy; and Sponsy, a suite of digital tools to make managing newsletter sponsorships easy.
This month in Not a Newsletter, you’ll learn about:
- 52 ways to grow your email list.
- How Tinder might make you a better copywriter.
- Why every big brand should consider setting up BIMI (so you can add your logo and a verified checkmark in every email you send).
- Tips for driving donations from email, including best practices from ProPublica.
- Why chickens have a lot more in common with humans than you’d expect.
…and more!
Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter? Find the full archive at this link. And if you want to skip ahead to a specific section of the Google Doc, click here:
—Dan (say hi via email or LinkedIn)
This Month in Email Headlines
Stories labeled with a 🔑 may require a subscription to read.
- Sendinblue Rebrands as Brevo, Reflecting Expanded CRM Offering (MediaPost)
- Google Launches Blue Checkmarks for Verified Brands in Gmail (Social Media Today)
- See our guide to BIMI, linked below, to learn how to become BIMI-certified and get that blue checkmark.
- 🔑 TheSkimm Layoffs Cut 22 People, Including Top Sales Execs (Insider)
- 🔑 Workers Now Spend Two Full Days a Week on Email and in Meetings (The Wall Street Journal)
- Could email newsletters keep local journalism alive? (Prospect)
New on Inbox Collective
📬 52 Ways to Grow Your Email List
I’ve put everything I know about growth into a single mega-guide: 52 Ways to Grow Your Email List. Inside, you’ll find:
- 46 organic tactics to try, like sign-up pages, pop-up boxes, cross-promotion, and earned media.
- 6 paid tactics, including best practices for spending money on social media.
- Dozens of examples of these growth tactics in action.
- Recommended tools to use for each of these tactics.
Like I said: It’s truly everything I’ve learned about email growth. And I’ve made specific recommendations for next steps based on the type of newsletter you run.
Dive into all the tips and recommendations here.
🇫🇷 Vous souhaitez lire cet article en Français ? Cliquez-ici. (Thanks to the team at Médianes for translating this one!)
📬 How Tinder Made Me a Better Copywriter
Earlier this year, my friend Simon Linde reached out to me with a controversial opinion. The best place to practice your copywriting skills isn’t in newsletters or on social media channels like LinkedIn, he told me.
It’s on Tinder.
Simon’s a Copenhagen-based copywriter who’s worked with some of the largest brands in Europe, but he told me stakes at work never felt as high as when he wrote his Tinder bio.
I asked him to prove it. And he’s delivered with this new story, walking through seven copywriting secrets he learned on Tinder that will turn your copy game up a notch.
Give his story a read. I think Simon’s right — there’s a lot we can all learn from writing for Tinder.
📬 What Is BIMI, and Should I Set It Up for My Brand? Here’s What You Need to Know
If you’re a large brand or newsletter that sends a lot of email — tens or hundreds of thousands of emails per day — it might be time to add something to your to-do list: Setting up BIMI.
BIMI, or Brand Indicators for Message Identification, is a tool that allows any brand to put its logo next to its name in the inbox. When a reader looks through their inbox, that logo might be the difference between your email getting opened or ignored.
But turning on BIMI isn’t as simple as flipping a switch in your email service provider. It requires a real investment of time to set up, and there’s a financial cost to purchase the certificate needed to turn on BIMI.
So should you go through the work to set up BIMI? Let’s talk through a few questions and see if it makes sense for you.
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Sponsored: Tools + Resources I Recommend
Have you built out your personalization strategy?
- Nearly everyone I talk to in the email space has a shared mission: To better connect with their audience. Personalization’s one way I see smart organizations driving strong engagement. Some of the best email marketers are doing great things with personalization — not just adding in a reader’s first name or a bit of targeting, but really being intentional with their strategy. Consumers expect brands to cater to their online preferences and appeal to them as unique individuals. They expect their emails to be relevant to them, and it’s up to you to deliver that experience for them.
- Personalization gives marketers the opportunity to differentiate their brand from their competitors. Done correctly, personalized marketing becomes a value-add that makes it easy for consumers to find exactly what they want. Personalization is here to stay, so it’s up to marketers to understand what’s possible and how to do it right.
- The team at Litmus knows that email personalization results in both higher engagement in the inbox and happier customers. In this free resource, Five Lessons In Personalization: Planning a Strategy Across Platforms, they’ll walk you through each lesson — understanding data, data hygiene, email personalization, customer-centric loyalty, and website personalization — to help you understand how to provide the complete personalization package for your audience.
Hire InboxArmy to help you build your best email marketing program
- If you’re reading this, you probably already know that I consult with a number of news organizations and non-profits through Inbox Collective. But often, I’ll get emails from companies — particularly startups, SMBs, or ecommerce brands — who need a lot of help building out or executing on their email strategy. Maybe they need someone to set up automations, like a welcome flow or an abandoned cart series. Maybe they need help with deliverability. Maybe they need email templates designed, or someone to handle the week-to-week sending of marketing campaigns. Maybe they need an expert to help them evaluate different ESPs or migrate to a new platform.
- When they ask, I often send them over to my friends at InboxArmy, a full-service email marketing agency that works with big brands to help build, optimize, and grow an email strategy. But they don’t just do strategy — one of their biggest strengths is that they have the team to help big organizations execute on that strategy. (Inbox Collective’s a one-person operation, but InboxArmy’s a team of 120+, so they’re a much better fit for a lot of big companies!) To set up time with InboxArmy to learn how they can help you improve your email strategy, shoot Saumil Shah an email at saumil@inboxarmy.com, and let him know that I sent you! They’ll set up time and talk you through the next steps.
Sponsy makes managing newsletter sponsorships easy
- When you first start selling sponsorships for your newsletter, managing things is pretty easy — it’s something you can do in a spreadsheet. But as you start selling more ads in more newsletters while expanding your team, things get complicated quickly. Instead of spending time focused on the important stuff — writing great newsletters, growing your audience, or selling more ads — you’re spending hours per month digging through spreadsheets or CRM tools trying to find the right ad for tomorrow’s newsletter (and remembering if the advertiser has signed off on the copy yet!).
- There’s a better way forward: Sponsy. It’s like a superpowered version of Airtable — but built specifically for managing your ad inventory with your team. It comes with a powerful automation tool to help streamline your ad workflow. Their customer portal makes it easy to get the assets you need from an advertiser, approve those assets, and manage your entire upcoming ad calendar. (Plus, it’s not just for newsletters — it’ll work great if you’ve got a podcast, YouTube channel, or other platforms where you’re selling ads.) Successful media companies like TLDR, Overstory Media Group, and Payload are already using Sponsy to improve their ad workflow
- Want to see Sponsy in action? Book a demo call with them today to see how Sponsy can help you take your newsletter ad strategy to the next level.
- Still in the early stages of growing your sponsorship revenue? You can apply here for their Launchpad Package to get access to Sponsy’s tools, for six months, for free.
To be as transparent as possible: These are all sponsored links presented by my partners. Interested in partnering with me? Here are the ad opportunities available with Not a Newsletter + Inbox Collective, and here’s what’s available to book right now.
What Else I’m Reading
Stories labeled with a 🔑 may require a subscription to read.
Growth
- For large newsrooms or publishers, one of the best ways to retain paying subscribers — and grow your email list — is by setting up an onboarding flow that’s triggered when someone buys a subscription or membership. This flow should talk new paying supporters through next steps, like signing up for a newsletter. Madeleine White of The Audiencers shared good examples of post-purchase flows from The Economist, The Telegraph, and The Times.
- If you use double opt-in with your newsletter, take a look through this guide to sniper links, from Dan Benoni on Indie Hackers. It’s a great way to make sure more readers follow through and finish the opt-in process.
Content Strategy
- If you’ve seen me give a live talk, or if you’ve worked through this Newsletter Strategy Positioning Brief, you’ve heard me talk about the idea that every section of your newsletter should have a specific job or purpose. So I loved this story, from PressGazette’s Bron Maher, about the UK-based newsletter The Know, which has grown to 50,000 readers. I love the way The Know’s Lynn Anderson Clark talked about finding ways to highlight news stories without overwhelming readers, and using their staff to recommend new products to try. It’s a great example of the Jobs to be Done concept in action.
- There’s a lot I love in this interview that Newsletter Circle’s Ciler Demiralp did with Katie Hawkins-Gaar, who runs the newsletter My Sweet Dumb Brain. But this quote from Katie really stood out to me:
“I do my best to forget the size of my audience whenever I write. I usually try to write solely for myself—to put words to the things I’m wrestling with. If I do think about my readership, I usually pick one person I’d like to reach. It might be a particular friend I’m thinking of, or a random reader who might be going through an especially hard time. By keeping my target audience small while writing, I’m able to write much more personally and vulnerably.”
- I’ve tried a similar tactic over the years. When I first got to BuzzFeed and was writing our daily newsletter, the idea of writing for a massive audience made me a little nervous. So I always had one or two people in mind — people who I knew actually read the newsletter — when I was writing each edition. That helped me decide which stories might be worth including, and what the right tone of the email should be. (It helped that these people were actual readers who often wrote back to tell me when I’d done a good job or missed the mark!)
Monetization
- 99 Newsletter Project’s Cory Brown did a lovely interview with Jill Shepherd, who runs online fundraising for ProPublica. I’d highlight a favorite part, but I had about 12 favorite parts. You should really read the whole thing.
- Once you’re done with that, this list of fundraising mistakes that non-profits make, by John Walsh on Double’s blog, will give you a few ideas for your next fundraising campaign.
- And here’s one more big fundraising mistake that non-profits make: Sending to every single contact in their database, regardless of their level of engagement. For 1832 Communications, Ephraim Gopin shared the story of a non-profit that sent a fundraising letter to a home. The only issue: The people they were mailing died — 15 years ago. It’s a reminder to regularly clean your data to make sure you’re only talking to active, engaged (and, yes, living) potential donors.
- Any business that’s selling a product should think about the abandoned cart emails strategy. Ashton Oldham of Automation Ninjas put together this useful guide to building out a great abandoned cart email — including some subject lines that would work well for emails like these.
Best Practices
- This guide to copywriting best practices, from Kim Krause Schwalm and VeryGoodCopy’s Eddie Shleyner had some great ideas about creating a great ad campaign. But what stuck out to me: They said 40% of success is about identifying the right segment of readers to target. It’s a nice reminder: The message matters, but it also matters who you say it to.
- Joy Mayer dug into this report, from the Reuters Institute, about trust in news. Her entire piece is worth reading, but one big takeaway for me is that newsrooms (and other orgs, too) could do a far better job of being upfront with their audience and answering key questions that readers may have.
- This is where a welcome series, aimed at new newsletter subscribers, might help. If readers don’t understand who’s reporting the news, introduce some of your staff in a welcome email. If readers have questions about how you do reporting, answer those questions in a note from an editor. When you’re at the start of the relationship — and signing up for a newsletter qualifies as that — use every tool you can to build trust with that reader.
- What should you do about email addresses that bounce? Kickbox’s Jennifer Nespola Lantz, along with a few other deliverability experts, recommended a few next steps.
Tests, Experiments, or Learnings
- If you’re writing a sales-y email and need a little inspiration for a new call to action, this guide from Jeremy Moser for Benchmark Email might be useful.
- For Growth Croissant, Reid DeRamus wrote about what he learned at Hulu about using onboarding to reduce churn.
- Drew Price of Scaling CRM discussed ways Square might be able to improve their transactional emails. This story reminded me: Even on straightforward emails like these, there are still opportunities to test and optimize.
Stuff I Loved This Month
- Something I always tell college students: It’s never been easier to launch your own thing. Don’t wait for someone else to give you that next opportunity — go out and build something yourself. So I loved reading this, from Nieman Lab, about how students at the Harvard Crimson launched a newsletter to cover their local community of Cambridge.
- I love when people find creative ways to present content within the inbox. Here’s a great example: ActionRocker’s Jay Oram built a version of Wordle that you can play inside your inbox. He did an interview with Email on Acid’s Megan Boshuyzen to explain how he did it.
- Here’s a wild newsroom registration story: Blick, a Swiss news site, saw 25,000 readers register after scanning a QR code. The catch: Those readers had to first hike to the top of one of 26 peaks in Switzerland — the QR code was only available for scan at the end of the hike.
- A few shoutouts: Thanks to everyone at the News Product Alliance Summit who shared Not a Newsletter + Inbox Collective links; to Really Good Emails for sharing a few stories with their readers; and to Jessica L. Williams for sharing my growth list.
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. For years, I closed every edition of Not a Newsletter by highlighting one of these animals. But in 2021, I ran out of Google Doc animals to feature. Then I had an idea: What if I commissioned an artist to design new animals for Not a Newsletter?
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!
Thanks to Anna Kosak for designing this month’s animal: the Chicken!
- A group of chickens is called a “flock.”
- Chickens understand the concept of object permanence, and they can recognize the faces of both humans and fellow fowl. And just to take it a step further: In a 2002 study, researchers discovered that chickens tend to prefer humans with attractive faces. (If you’re curious, like I was, how they determined this, here’s a National Geographic story that goes deeper on such an important bit of research.)
- Like dogs, chickens cool themselves by panting.
- Hens, or female chickens, employ an unusual method of birth control. If they’re unsatisfied with the quality of the mate, they can eject sperm from their bodies.
- There are a lot of chickens on Earth — 33 billion, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Of them, 9 billion live in the United States. For the sake of comparison: There are only 370 million cattle, turkeys, sheep, lambs, and hogs in the U.S. — combined. All credit for this data goes to the North American Meat Institute, which is a real trade association and not something I just made up.
- And for you, dear reader, I went deep down the rabbit hole with the Meat Institute, discovering that it also includes spin-off groups, including the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, which, in 2015, officially announced that a hot dog is not a sandwich. (Finally, an answer!) In that announcement, they described the hot dog as “an exclamation of joy” (I’m skeptical) and “ a food” (OK, sure). None of this has anything to do with chickens — I just thought you should know.
Anyway, the Chicken! That’s your (Not a) Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month.
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