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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: November 2019

Welcome to the November 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 consulting firm, 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!

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.

This month’s doc is presented by Revue, an editorial newsletter tool for writers and publishers! This month, in the Revue newsletter spotlight, I talked with the team at NOS, the biggest publisher in the Netherlands, about the remarkable success (70%+ unique open rates!) they’ve had launching a pop-up newsletter around stories from World War II. 

Also inside this edition, you’ll find learnings about welcome emails and re-engagement strategies; lessons from TechCrunch, Aftenposten, and The Colorado Sun about building subscriber-only newsletter products; a case study from Starbucks about using email to drive user habits; and more! Have something else you think should be featured in here? Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com.

-Dan

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

cartoon by Drew Panckeri

This Month in Email News

Newsletter Spotlight, presented by Revue

Here's the header from one of the NOS newsletters

I didn’t think it was possible for a newsletter — at least one with any sort of scale — to have a unique open rate above 65%. Getting 1 in 3 subscribers to open a newsletter would be an achievement for most news organizations. Getting 2 in 3 to open would be a Herculean feat. 

Then I heard about a publisher in the Netherlands that sent a newsletter that hit a 98% unique open rate. That’s not a typo: Ninety-eight percent, for an email sent to almost 10,000 subscribers!

So I had to learn a little more.

The publisher is NOS, the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation. They’re a public broadcaster with a TV, radio, and digital presence, and they’re the biggest news organization in the Netherlands. The way Lambert Teuwissen, an editor at NOS, explained it, the newsroom first launched newsletters a decade ago, but without much success.

“We started doing newsletters, and then it tapered off,” he said. “Nobody was really interested in them anymore. They were kind of formulaic. There wasn’t any soul to it.”

But things changed in recent years. NOS moved their newsletters over to Revue, and started launching products around specific issues: a weekly newsletter about the Trump administration, and then a newsletter about policy in Brussels. These were destination products built with a specific audience in mind, and NOS saw positive results right away.

“It turned out that those kinds of niche groups were really interested in newsletters,” Teuwissen said. “They had a dedicated reader base. People wanted to talk back with us, people wanted to ask us questions.”

Earlier this year, NOS started planning out an ambitious project: “75 jaar bevrijding,” or “75 years of liberation,” to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Europe during World War II. NOS decided to launch a site that would follow the liberation in real time, presenting what happened 75 years ago on a particular date as though it were happening today. 

The project would run from September 2019 through August 2020, and Teuwissen said the team knew that it needed to find a way to keep readers interested over the span of the project. “That’s where the newsletter came in,” he said.

Teuwissen’s team decided to launch a pop-up newsletter to run the length of the project — a weekly email that would include the best stories of the week and bonus content. While “75 jaar bevrijding” would focus on the “present day” news, the newsletter would give NOS the chance to share stories of what happened both during and after the war.

NOS started promoting the newsletter in their other email products and on the “75 jaar bevrijding” site. On launch day, they’d collected nearly 10,000 subscribers for the email, and that first email had a 98% unique open rate. They’d identified an incredibly loyal and engaged audience, and delivered a product just for them. The newsletter, from day 1, was a hit.

Since launch, their email list has continued to grow. Ten issues in, the newsletter now has about 25,000 subscribers, and open rates continue to stay strong: Above 70% for each send, which is still exceptionally high for a major news organization like NOS.

But the success of this newsletter goes beyond open rate. Of the seven NOS newsletters, the liberation newsletter is one of the most-clicked week after week, and subscribers are unusually engaged with the email. Early on, Teuwissen started asking subscribers questions, and those readers began emailing back with ideas for stories to cover.

“It’s wonderful,” he said. “It keeps us sharp, because each week, we get these replies, and each week, we have to go through our replies and see what we can do with these stories that readers are sending us.”

Newsletter readers have also been helpful in crowdsourcing content for the newsletter. In one edition, Teuwissen asked readers if they could help identify the location of an image taken from a December 1944 film produced by the Canadian army, in which Canadian troops liberating a Dutch town are seen riding alongside an officer dressed as Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Santa Claus.

Canadian troops, dressed as Sinterklaas. Remarkably, readers helped NOS figure out where this photo was taken

Within days, readers had identified the windmill in the background of the photo, and Teuwissen shared the news with subscribers in the very next issue.

The project has been so successful that Teuwissen is starting to think about expanding it to new audiences. NOS is considering launching another version of the newsletter, in English, to bring these stories to even more readers, including Dutch émigrés who want to share it with their families, and readers in countries that helped liberate the Netherlands. (UPDATE, Nov. 18: They’ve launched the English edition! You can sign up here.) They’re also thinking about other opportunities to crowdsource content — including from unexpected sources.

Some readers have started sending NOS the diaries kept by their parents or grandparents, with hopes that NOS will be able to tell stories that have never before been told about the war. The team is even hiring additional staff to sift through all this unpublished material.

“One might just contain one of those jewels, one of those pearls, of a story that we want to publish,” Teuwissen said.

Three Lessons from NOS’s 75 Years of Liberation Newsletter

1.) Use a pop-up product as a way to start testing — It can be intimidating to launch a daily or a weekly newsletter product. But launching a pop-up product gives you the chance to send a newsletter for a fixed period of time — a few days or a few months — around a specific event, and test out different formats or ideas. Based on what you learn, you can always launch new newsletters.

2.) Ask your readers questions — Readers can be valuable sources of insight, and sharing their stories can build a community around a newsletter. It also allows you to reply directly to readers and establish a relationship with individual subscribers. Teuwissen said that on social media, discussion can often be uncivil, but over email, he’s seen readers be far more polite and engaged. “This starts an adult conversation about the subjects that you’re writing about,” he said.

One more reason to ask readers to engage with you: Getting readers to reply to your newsletter can actually improve your inbox placement in Gmail and other email services.

3.) Don’t be afraid to take a leap — When you launch a newsletter, you might not be sure if it will actually work. Sometimes, you’re making an educated guess that a newsletter might be useful for your audience — and that’s OK! When I asked Teuwissen what his expectations were in advance of the project, he admitted, “We had no idea. It is something unique. We had never done something like this before.” But even when you try something brand new, you should still set goals in advance (list size, open rates, traffic to your site, etc.), and use those as benchmarks for success.

Here's a decorative image of three animals: An owl, a flamingo, and a seahorse

This month’s Not a Newsletter is presented by Revue, an editorial newsletter tool for writers and publishers. Revue’s used by both individual writers and news organizations, like NOS, to send newsletters. If you’d like to give Revue a try, sign up for an account here.

For Your Reading List

“More than 50,000 people now subscribe to a publication on Substack. We are processing millions of dollars a year in payments, with writers making a range of incomes from pocket money to supplementary income to ‘this is a serious business!’ levels of cash. We’re encouraged by the progress and have raised money to set Substack up for a long future, but we know this is just the beginning. There’s so much work to be done, so much more to prove, and so much more great writing yet to be produced.”

  • It’s so great to see new entrants into this space — Substack, Revue, and Buttondown, among others — pushing newsletters forward. I’m getting questions about paid newsletters and editorial products that I wasn’t getting 2-3 years ago, and that’s thanks to this new generation of ESPs!
  • Digiday’s Kayleigh Barber wrote about the referral programs used by publishers like Morning Brew, The Hustle and TheSkimm to drive email subscription growth.
  • Several publishers (and yours truly) also talked with Kayleigh about re-engagement strategies.
    • A few things I wanted to highlight here:
      • Everyone should be thinking about how to re-engage inactive subscribers (i.e. anyone who hasn’t opened a newsletter over a certain window of time).
      • Your reactivation strategy should start probably sooner than you think — as early as 14 days of inactivity, in some cases. Most companies I work with think about reactivation between day 30 and day 120.
      • If you’re trying to re-engage subscribers who haven’t opened a newsletter in years, you probably won’t have a ton of success. But if you turn on a reactivation campaign, moving forward, it can be a good way to win back readers. For instance, at The New Yorker, we won back about 12% of readers who got our reactivation emails. That’s on the high end of things — I’d set a goal of winning back 5% of inactive subs, and see how your series performs.
    • And if you want to talk reactivation, send me an email at dan@inboxcollective.com. I’m always happy to chat!
  • As a corollary to email reengagement, I also wanted to share this lesson from Eric Debrah at Newfangled about sending to cold email lists. This is something I’ve recommended to clients with poor email engagement or deliverability — emailing only the most-engaged readers, and then slowly working to reach less-engaged segments. It’s a smart strategy, and if you’re seeing truly low email rates (less than 10%), you might want to consider it!
    • And one more post on the matter: Email on Acid’s Melissa Berdine answered a bunch of email deliverability questions. From questions about domain names to the images included in an email, there’s a lot in here that you might not know!
  • Kudos to Canadian publisher The Discourse, who were unusually transparent in talking with Lenfest’s Joseph Lichterman about how they’ve refocused around driving readers to sign up for newsletters, and then converting those readers to donors.
  • Most shout-outs for transparency: Thanks to everyone who talked with Nieman Lab’s Christine Schmidt about their successes — and struggles — in launching a newsletter after leaving their jobs at local news organizations.
  • Julie Posetti, Felix Simon, and Nabeelah Shabbir have a report out through The Reuters Institute about audience development at organizations in India, the Philippines, and South Africa. Of particular interest to Not a Newsletter readers: The success that South Africa’s Daily Maverick has had building a membership strategy around their suite of newsletter products.
  • I love this report from Germany’s Krautreporter about reader engagement — in particular, through surveys. They distributed surveys through newsletters, and found that surveyed readers actually became more engaged readers. They also discussed ways to use surveys to drive email signups — a novel idea that I’m thinking about testing out myself!
  • The team at Iterable analyzed the messaging strategies from 30 publishers, and discovered that 70% of those publishers sent no welcome message after a new subscriber signed up. They also found that many publishers that did sent a welcome series focused only on selling (“12 Weeks for $.99!”) and not on building a relationship with readers.
    • Anecdotally, I’m not surprised to see these numbers — the welcome series has long been a blind spot for publishers. But it’s also one of the most valuable places to spend your time. Using the welcome series to onboard readers, build relationships with them, and ultimately drive them to some sort of action (subscribe, donate, read, share, etc.) is crucial for a successful email program.
    • I’d highly recommend that you listen to this interview that Fix My Churn’s Val Geisler did with Intercom’s podcast about how she works with SaaS companies to build a great onboarding series.
    • In related news: Intercom’s Phil Byrne broke down the four steps that their team uses to onboard readers: Convert, Activate, Retain, and Expand.
  • Lots to discuss in the subscription/paid space this month: Marc Jacob from Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative wrote about a few different email strategies — from original, destination newsletters to traffic-driving products — and how Gannett, The Chicago Tribune, and The Dallas Morning News measure success with these.
  • TechCrunch’s Danny Crichton discussed lessons from building their subscription product, Extra Crunch. There’s a lot of useful stuff in here, but newsletter folks will be especially interested to read his thoughts on launching a free newsletter tied to a paid product.
  • Madeleine Reuterdahl and Siri Holstad Johannessen of Schibsted, Norway’s biggest publisher, wrote about the success that their flagship publication, Aftenposten, has had building a premium newsletter product around wine. 
  • CJR’s Corey Hutchins wrote about The Colorado Sun, a one-year-old news organization that’s having success with a number of new products, including premium newsletters.
  • And finally: Andrew Kamphey, who writes the InfluenceWeekly newsletter, wrote about lessons learned two years in, including thoughts on revenue.
  • At Zoho Campaigns, Masooma Memon wrote about the importance of storytelling — plus a few other practical tips — for newsletters.
  • Litmus’s Whitney Rudeseal Peet shared some quick takeaways from the Litmus Live sessions in Boston.
  • For the email designers out there: Evan Diaz from Lucky Red Pixel gave a talk at Litmus Live about common mistakes that get made when adding animation to emails. (This is pretty advanced stuff, but I know there are some designers who read Not a Newsletter who’ll love this talk!)
  • Wondering how to write a great hook for some promotional copy? Very Good Copy’s Eddie Shleyner wrote about how to attract interest and turn it into action.
  • Shoutout to the Wall Street Journal’s Annemarie Dooling, who shared a bunch of evergreen links about spam, segmentation, and engagement in… a Google Doc! (There’s a ton in here that’s super useful.)
  • When you think about companies that have a really smart email strategy, you might not think about Starbucks. But I loved this story by Fortune’s Beth Kowitt about Roz Brewer, the chief operating officer of Starbucks, and how she used email to drive new loyal customers:

One of the biggest drags on the company’s store traffic was its afternoon business, and Brewer again turned to the data to understand why. Starbucks had been getting all of its sales growth from customers in its membership program, Starbucks Rewards. The 17.2 million loyalists who are now part of the program are extremely valuable to the company, accounting for more than 40% of sales but only about a quarter of the customers who come into the store every month. Occasional visitors, who frequent a store on average one to five times per month, made up a disproportionate amount of the afternoon traffic. The post-2 p.m. crowd and these occasional customers also prefer cold drinks, which now comprise about 50% of beverage sales.

The team attacked the afternoon problem at all levels: R&D lasered in on cold beverages; more experienced baristas, who normally work in the morning, were redeployed to the afternoon. And perhaps most significantly, the digital crew focused on converting midday customers into rewards members, asking Wi-Fi users for their email addresses and then targeting them with promotions to entice them to sign up for the program. Last quarter, business after 2 p.m. grew for the first time in three years, and the company reported its best sales growth over the same period. 

  • It’s a great case study for how to think about all parts of the funnel, and how email can be a key driver in moving someone from casual fan to loyal customer.
  • Journalism.co.uk’s Jacob Granger wrote about the success of Bloomberg’s newsletter Course, Work Wise. (Not mentioned in here, but worth shouting out: I think the idea of using a quiz to get people to sign up for a newsletter is fantastic.)
    • One more thing to highlight: I’ve seen some folks referring to this as a pop-up newsletter. It’s not — it’s a Course! Here’s the difference:
      • A Course is an automated series of emails that get triggered after a certain action. They’re designed to teach you a new skill, habit, or lesson. If a reader signs up today, tomorrow, or a year from now, they’ll receive the Course in full.
      • A pop-up newsletter is a newsletter that only runs for a limited-time. It’s a product designed to inform or educate around a specific event — for instance, a newsletter tied to the Olympics that only runs during the two weeks of the Olympic Games.
    • For more, I’ve added a one-sheeter from this year’s ONA conference to the Resource section at the bottom of the doc. Thanks again to the teams at Pew Research Center and The Washington Post who built those out!
  • Gwen Vargo at the American Press Institute’s Reader Revenue Toolkit shared a few lessons about engaging readers (both through newsletters and site).
  • If you’re still sending emails via a noreply@ email address, you might want to make a change. The team at Campaign Monitor explained why in a recent post.
  • Email Octopus compiled a nice roundup of email laws in various countries (like GDPR, CASL, etc.) and other terminology you should know.
  • I’ve been thinking a lot lately about messaging apps and chat, so I found this piece from Kyra Gurney of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists — “My new friend is a news bot from Chile called LaBot” — really interesting.
  • I haven’t written a ton about sweepstakes, but Second Street’s Julie Foley compiled a list of sweeps that drove both revenue and — in many cases — email growth for local sites.
  • Varun Kumar, a developer for the Indian travel site Goibibo, wrote about how his team got started with AMP for Email.
    • I’ve written about this before, but: AMP is still very much in the early days. It’s probably not a tool that most readers of this Google Doc are ready to use just yet. Things might change in a year or two, though!
  • Here’s a neat story from The Columbus Dispatch’s Danae King about Saideepika Rayala, an Ohio teenager who created a newsletter to help connect local immigrants with news happening in their community. Her newsletter, which she puts together with the help of more than a dozen volunteers, is translated into Telugu, Tamil and French. I absolutely love this — it’s such a cool project, and a wonderful example of how to build a product to serve a specific audience.
  • Speaking of unique audiences: C.J. Janovy and Briana O’Higgins of KCUR wrote about how they reorganized their arts coverage around a newsletter for “soccer dads.”
    • Something I’ve found myself saying a lot recently: A great newsletter starts with a loyal audience. Any time you’re creating a new newsletter, think first about the audience you’re building it for. The more specific, the better!
  • Sarah Schmalbach wrote about how the Lenfest Institute and The Philadelphia Inquirer are working to build hyperlocal newsletters that can scale.
  • David Maas of IJNet wrote about German publisher DuMont, and how they created a “priority visitor” metric to measure success — and then built a bunch of newsletters to help them improve on that metric. It’s a great story, and I’m hopeful that we’ll see more organizations in 2020 thinking about how to create original metrics like this!

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • Here’s an interesting tool: Inbox When Ready, a Google Chrome plugin that will lock you out of your Gmail inbox if you’re using it too often.
  • I flew Virgin Australia for the first time this month, and browsing through their in-flight magazine, I stumbled upon something pretty cool: Virgin offers a special email + SMS program for nervous fliers. Here’s how it works: When you book your flight, you can check a box telling Virgin that you get a little nervous when you fly. The week before you flight, they email you with some tips to help you prepare for your flight, and then send you SMS notifications before you get to the airport with positive affirmations and mindfulness tips. It’s a wonderful example of how to build a series to serve a specific type of customer — I’d love to see more businesses try products like this!
  • This isn’t about email, but it’s so useful that I wanted to share it anyway: The Pac-Man rule for conversations at conferences.

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 moose

There’s a special significance in this month’s animal: You may recognize the moose from the legendary cartoon, “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends,” which debuted 60 years ago this month. And with that in mind, instead of sharing a few facts about the actual moose (they’re tall, and they eat a lot), here’s a few things you should know about the show that featured Bullwinkle, the world’s most famous cartoon moose:

  • The creators of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” once attempted to create a new state, called Moosylvania. They traveled the country in a van to collect signatures for statehood — and even drove onto the White House grounds to attempt to meet with President John F. Kennedy to discuss Moosylvania. (According to the show’s creators, they arrived the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and were promptly thrown off the grounds.)
  • One of the writers for the show, Allan Burns, also created the Cap’n Crunch mascot. (Oddly, only General Mills, not Quaker Oats — the maker of Cap’n Crunch — was a sponsor of the show.)
  • According to show lore, villain Boris Badenov was a member of a union (Local 12 of the Villains, Thieves, and Scoundrels Union). Even rascals need representation, I suppose!
  • The Simpsons paid tribute to Rocky J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose by giving all the Simpsons men (Bart, Homer, and Grandpa) the middle initial of J.

Anyway, the moose! 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.