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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: November 2020

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 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 a new edition goes live!

In this edition, you’ll find: A deep dive into onboarding newsletter subscribers the right way; updates on AMP for Email; brand-new resources to help you sell ads, grow your lists, and get organized; and an opportunity to connect with another newsroom to talk 1-on-1 about email strategy.

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 the full archive at this link.

-Dan 

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

Two people are on an online date. One says to the other, "I can't tell whether you're gazing into my eyes or checking your email."
Elisabeth McNair / The New Yorker

This Month in Email Headlines

Let’s talk about onboarding

The very first thing that I work on with any new Inbox Collective client is onboarding. It’s one of the most important things that anyone with an email list can do.

Why? A great welcome series:

  • Establishes a relationship with the reader.
  • Guides that reader through the next steps on their journey.
  • Drives engagement from Day 1.
  • Boosts your inbox placement — it actually helps you consistently get into the good parts of the inbox.
  • Converts new readers to paying supporters.

So let’s talk about what a welcome series might look like — and I’ll start by sharing what I do here with Not a Newsletter’s onboarding sequence.

Here’s how i do onboarding

For Your Reading List

  • Sunnie Huang, the outgoing Newsletters Editor at The Economist, gave a talk at the FIPP Congress about the importance of newsletters. FIPP’s Lysanne Currie summed up a few big takeaways from the talk — among them, why The Economist team tries to find a purpose for each newsletter that goes beyond driving traffic.
    • Sunnie’s also been kind enough to share her slides with Not a Newsletter readers, and I wanted to take a moment to expand on something she touches on these slides: How to set up a newsletter team.
      • Most newsrooms do one of two things: They either have a single team that’s responsible for all email strategy and work, or they have a single leader in charge of strategy, and then the work gets done by a network within the newsroom.
      • The Economist is a bit of a mix of the two, but within an interesting twist: They’ve really invested in both the product and user research side of email. They’re one of the only newsrooms I know of that has a user researcher looking into newsletter strategy and optimization opportunities, and it’s paid off as they’ve grown their list and grown their paying audience.
    • On a related note: Mex Cooper, Newsletter Editor at Nine (a group of Australian publications that includes the Sydney Morning Herald), wrote a blog post for INMA to explain how they invested in product updates that cut production time for newsletters by 60 percent. (This one requires a membership to INMA to read.)
  • Here’s a really nice dive into Morning Brew’s growth strategy, from Jenny Rothenberg, their Director of Growth. She explains where they invest their paid spend (including Facebook ads and promotions in other newsletters) and why they created a new metric (high-quality customer acquisition cost, or HQ CAC) to measure success for their paid campaigns. Lots to learn here!
  • There’s a new report out from the European Google News Initiative Subscriptions Lab about driving paid subscriptions, and it’s worth your time. In particular, it touches on the importance of email. What they found — and if you’re a regular Not a Newsletter reader, this won’t surprise you — is that email subscribers were far more likely to become paying subscribers, and that publishers who invested in strategies to grow their lists and onboard readers saw strong results.
    • I also wanted to highlight one interesting product takeaway from the report, from the team at Denník N, a publisher in Slovakia. They created a feature where subscribers could gift a friend a free article, which could be read once that friend entered their email address. 70% of their new registrations came via this feature, and 8.5% of those users decided to pay for a trial subscription.
  • AMP announced a few new updates for their email platform. (For those who don’t know: AMP is a new-ish tool that’ll allow you to build more interactivity and personalization into your emails.) You can watch the full video announcement here, but the big takeaways:
    • Salesforce Marketing Cloud is going to roll out support for AMP in early 2021.
      • But AMP’s still not supported by all ESPs. Some — like AWeber, Iterable, Klayvio, or SendGrid — do now support it, but many of the most-commonly used tools amongst Not a Newsletter readers (MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, SailThru, Revue, Substack, etc.) still don’t support it.
    • AMP’s now supporting a few new types of CSS classes, including animations, and now works in Gmail’s mobile app.
    • They’ve simplified the process for registration for AMP, too. If you want to build AMP emails, you just have to fill out this single form to register with both Gmail and Yahoo. (Those two, at the moment, are the only two inbox providers that support AMP.)
  • In other Google news, this product announcement caught my eye: Much like DMARC for the inbox, Google’s rolling out a way to verify your SMS messages.
    • And lastly in the world of Google announcements: Make sure any images you include in emails are provided via HTTPS. If they’re not set up correctly, Google might not show your images anymore in Chrome. (If you’re uploading images via your ESP, they almost certainly already do this for you.) Taxi for Email’s Paris Fisher explains more. 
  • Two new (and very different pop-up newsletters) I wanted to highlight:
    • The Washington Post launched a pop-up dedicated to the new season of “The Bachelorette.” (Sources close to the Google Doc tell me that this isn’t a particularly good season of the show, but that’s neither here nor there.) I love seeing publishers try pop-ups like these — they’re a great way to experiment with new formats and potentially bring a new audience into the funnel.
    • This one launched a few weeks ago, but I didn’t spot it until recently: The Louisville Courier-Journal launched a pop-up around the Breonna Taylor case. With such massive global interest around this story, I think this a really smart way to build relationships with new readers.
  • Some interviews and success stories to share:
  • Hunter Walk wrote about community — particularly, how Slack groups or forums can be a good way to build community around a newsletter.
  • Digiday’s Max Willens wrote about an interesting trend: Ads popping up on Substack-powered newsletters, even though the team at Substack has made it clear that they don’t want to support ads in their newsletters.
  • Also on the note of Substack: Adweek’s named the Substack team their Publishing Executives of the Year. Andrew Blustein profiled Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi for the magazine.
  • I include this only because I can’t recall ever seeing this done before: Here’s a review of a newsletter. (It’s Tim Wu reviewing Ben Thompson’s Stratechery.)
  • I really liked this, from Inbox Army and Jenna Tiffany of Let’sTalk Strategy: A look back at the three types of emails all companies seemed to send when COVID-19 first spiked worldwide. It’s a reminder that most companies tend to copy what others are doing instead of trying to figure out their own path forward.
  • The team at Crossbeam put together a detailed guide to the ESP ecosystem and how various ESPs partner with other apps. It’s something I thought about a lot as I was putting together my ESP guide: Some products are closed systems, and some integrate well with others. When you’re choosing an ESP, make sure you’re thinking about the way that particular ESP syncs with the other tools and databases you’ll need.
  • On ConvertKit’s blog, Dana Nicole talked with a few experts to recap some of 2020’s biggest email design trends, and made a few predictions for 2021. (I’m on the minimalist design bandwagon for next year, FWIW.)
  • Good stuff here from Really Good Emails and Alex Beller from Postscript, who walked through some lessons from SMS messaging in this video.

Stuff I Loved This Month

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 shrew

I grew up in D.C. and spent a lot of time at the National Zoo as a kid, so I feel like I should have known more about the shrew. But honestly, who spends time at the Small Mammal House when you can hang out with orangutans or giraffes or pandas? The shrew wasn’t really on my radar.

But then I read this sentence in Britannica…

“Shrews have high metabolic rates and may consume more than their own weight in food daily; they cannot survive for more than a few hours without eating.”

…and thought, Shrews, they’re just like us!

So a few shrew facts for you:

  • The pygmy shrew, North America’s smallest mammal, has a heart that can beat up to 1,400 times per minute. (For those wondering, “How do they even measure the heartbeat of a creature that small?”, the answer is that they stick tiny electrodes on the shrew to monitor them.)
  • The shrew is also the only mammal in North America that can inject poison into its prey. I didn’t quite believe it until I saw this National Geographic video of a shrew attacking a snake — and winning.
  • Shrews are capable of emitting an unusual number of sounds, depending on the situation. Among those sounds, per Britannica: Clicks, twitters, chirps, squeaks, churls, whistles, and even barks.
  • There’s a type of shrew — crocidura roosevelti, or Roosevelt’s Shrew — which is named for America’s 26th president. Interestingly, his shrew isn’t found in North America — you’ll have to travel to East Africa to find it.

Anyway, the Shrew! 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.