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 the next edition goes live!
This month: Yanna-Torry Aspraki is back to answer the question: Can using spammy-sounding words land your emails in the spam folder? Plus: Ideas for emails to win back readers and customers, automations and drips worth setting up, and tactics to get people in your org to better use data.
Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter? Find the full archive at this link.
-Dan
This Month in Email Headlines
- Mailchimp and Shopify team up in ecommerce boost (TechRadar)
- Braze To Launch An IPO, Engagement Firm Hits $150 Million In Annual Revenue (MediaPost)
- Knak Nabs $31 Million Cad To Market Its Drag-And-Drop, No Code Platform (BetaKit)
- Litmus Announces Acquisition of Content Automation Platform Kickdynamic (Litmus)
- Journalists Venture Beyond Their Newsrooms to Try to Cash In (The Wall Street Journal)
- One million strong (Substack blog)
- Axios Local Expands to 11 New Cities (Adweek)
- New platform launches for business journalists (Axios)
- Mailchimp wants to optimize your email campaigns using AI — here’s how (The Next Web)
- Lede to Help Journalists Build Sustainable Niche and Local News Organizations That Are Indispensable to Their Communities (Alley blog)
- The CEO of ProtonMail Says Apple Cares About Profit More than Privacy (Inc.)
- The Internet’s Unkillable App (The Atlantic)
- We Haven’t Reached ‘Peak Newsletter.’ Not by a Long Shot. (Politico)
Ask a Deliverability Expert
I get a lot of questions about deliverability, and I don’t always have the right answers. But I know someone who does: Yanna-Torry Aspraki, a true deliverability expert. She’s been working in the email space since 2014 in all sorts of roles — at ESPs, with brands, and as a consultant. She really knows her stuff!
So let’s get to this month’s question:
We cover news topics that occasionally touch on adult topics. Do we need to censor any words to avoid being marked as spam?
If you Google the top ten ways to ensure you end up in the inbox, you will most likely find a couple of articles that give you lists of words not to use in your subject line or content.
Here is the first list I found (category: Manipulative words):
| Act now Action Apply now Apply online Buy Buy direct Call Call now Click here Clearance Click here Do it today Don’t delete Drastically reduced Exclusive deal Expire | Get Get it now Get started now Important information regarding Instant Limited time New customers only Now only Offer expires Once in a lifetime Order now Please read Special promotion Take action This won’t last Urgent |
If these words couldn’t be used in email, I think marketers would have lots of issues creating appealing and valuable content for their customers. Let’s start by talking through what it takes to create great content for your audience (that doesn’t land in spam).
For Your Reading / To-Do List
- Three headlines about subscriber-only newsletters that caught my eye this month:
- The Atlantic adds 9 writers to new newsletter platform
- PARQOR is Moving to The Information’s Newsletter Network
- ‘A little bit of an experiment’: New York Times Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury on why she’s tapping artists as part of a paid newsletter strategy
- Something to think about as you read these stories: These newsrooms have seen significant subscriber growth in the past 24 months. While subscriber-only newsletter pushes might lead to a small boost in new subscriptions — and in the case of The Atlantic, they’re even giving new readers of some of these paid newsletters a year-long subscription — I think the far more valuable use for these newsrooms is to deploy these newsletters to retain the subscribers who’ve joined during this period of growth.
- If you’re reading this Google Doc, you’re probably thinking about running some sort of sale/deal/offer during the holidays. Here are a few good ideas, from Chamaileon’s Yasmine Nahdi, about emails for Small Business Saturday (though most of these could be sent at any point during the holiday season).
- Winback emails are crucial for big email businesses — whether you’re using email to re-engage an inactive reader or trying to get a customer to complete a purchase. Litmus’s Steph Knapp shared a few great examples of these types of emails.
- The Associated Press shared a few stats with SailThru about how a few small changes to their email program — including an adjustment to their newsletters that focused on driving traffic instead of keeping readers in the inbox — led to major changes in reader habit.
- Two podcasts to make time for:
- Good stuff here from Margy Vary, former marketing director at The Guardian Australia, in a podcast with Hal Crawford, about how that publication built a reader revenue model, and what readers expected in exchange for their support of The Guardian.
- Darathtey Din, who writes a newsletter about news in Cambodia, talked with Splice about lessons from launching her product.
- On the Zapier blog, Sinwan Zahid of Airtable wrote about different types of drip emails, also known as an automated email series or customer journey, that can lead someone to make a purchase.
- Alan Hunter, the former head of digital for the Times of London, and one of the co-founders of the media consultancy HBM Advisory, wrote about a few tactics to get people in your org to use more data.
- From the Creator space:
- Simon Owens profiled Judd Legum, whose Popular Information newsletter now reaches more than 150,000 subscribers (including several thousand paying members).
- For The Open Notebook, María Paula Rubiano A. interviewed Emily Atkin, the reporter behind the HEATED newsletter, about her process and her mindset going into 2022. This quote, in particular, is worth shouting out:
“Whereas I used to be working to grow that [audience] all the time, right now my goal is just to maintain it. I’m happy with where it is, because I make enough money to support myself and to save, which is more than I ever really thought I could ask for in this profession. And I’m not hungry to be rich. I just want to be happy. Which I think is another climate lesson, right? Growth for the sake of growth is not sustainable.”
- Matt Brown of Extra Points, a daily college sports newsletter, broke down where his revenue numbers are after 18 months of publishing. (And shortly after publishing these numbers, he announced the sale of his newsletter to another news site that covers college athletics.)
- Cool success story on the Makerpad blog: How a tech executive crossed $1.3M in revenue with no-code businesses.
- I enjoyed this, from Nadia Eghbal: What does it actually mean to join the creator economy?
- Vanity Fair’s Delia Cai asked a big question: How does a creator shut down a newsletter they launched and built an audience around?
- I’ll share my own experience here. A decade ago, I launched my very first newsletter, called Tools for Reporters. I built an audience and loved writing it every week. And then I got a job at BuzzFeed, and suddenly, I didn’t have as much time for TFR. At first, I tried to publish less frequently, but even that was tough to maintain. When work got busy, I basically stopped sending.
- And then, in 2015, a friend of mine, Samantha Sunne, reached out about TFR. She asked if I’d be interested in letting her take over TFR, and I quickly agreed. We’d first met at the University of Missouri, and over the years, we’d often traded emails about TFR. I knew from her work that she’d be an excellent leader for TFR and had the background to connect with my audience, so I happily handed her the keys to the account.
- Six years later, it’s amazing how much TFR has grown. Samantha took this side project and turned it into a really strong newsletter. The subscriber base is six times larger than it was when she took over. There are opportunities for revenue (advertising, events, books) that are now on the table thanks to the hard work she’s put in. (Any revenue would go to her — at this point, it’s fully her newsletter, not mine.)
- So I’d say this: Maybe you’ll hit a wall with your personal newsletter one day and decide to call it quits. But maybe there’s a writer or a friend out there who might be able to take over your list and turn it into their own thing. It’s worked so well for TFR — perhaps it’d be possible for you, too.
- I know many of you have questions about email authentication tools like DMARC and BIMI. You might want to make a few minutes for this conversation, from Kickbox, about how two different brands set these tools up and what they learned from the process.
- Thanks to Sarah-Leah Thompson of Digital Ink for putting together some thoughts on how to workshop subject lines before hitting send.
- For UX Collective, Isha Beniwal wrote about designing ads and banners that don’t ruin the reading experience for users.
Stuff I Loved This Month
- I always love seeing readers take an idea from Not a Newsletter and put their own spin on it. A few weeks ago, I got an email from Carmen Vicente, of Toronto’s Bellswood Brewing, who was inspired by some of the email Courses she’d seen in this Doc and built one for her brewery. It’s all about hops. You can sign up and get the series here!
- Over the years, one of the most common questions I’ve gotten from writers is about clipping in Gmail — is there a way to tell if you’re over the 102kb limit before sending? Beehiiv — a new email platform that launched earlier this year — went and built a clipping warning right into their email builder, which is super smart. I hope more ESPs consider adding something like this into their builder, too!
- If you’re into deliverability, check out this cartoon from the team at Postmark about how emails get delivered. It’s a truly original way to learn about what happens between the moment when you hit send and the moment when emails land in the inbox.
- A shout out to my friend Tom Critchlow, who’s been working on his SEO MBA course for a while, and finally released it this month. If you’re in the SEO space and looking for help getting executives and clients to buy into an SEO strategy, Tom’s course might be for you.
- Trying to figure out if your subject line or preheader might get cut off in a specific email client? Naomi West built a Chrome extension that can help!
- Applications are open for the second round of The Tiny News Collective. If you’re interested in building a local newsroom in your community, you should think about applying. You’ll get funding to launch, as well as the tech and consulting you need to get off the ground.
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 Ifrit is one of a handful of Google Docs animals that isn’t real. There are two types of imaginary Google Docs animals: Scary, fictional beasts, like the kraken or chupacabra, and ones that are references to memes from a decade ago, like Nyan Cat. The Ifrit falls into the former category. It’s a mythical creature, originally from Islamic mythology, that’s supposed to be wicked or ruthless.
- But I don’t really want to talk about the Ifrit today. What I want to ask is: Why is the Ifrit part of the Google Docs animal canon when so many real animals aren’t represented? The sheep is represented in Google Docs, but the goat is not. Lions and tigers are, but bears are not. Barnyard creatures, like pigs and cows, are entirely unrepresented, and the same is true for many household pets, like cats or hamsters. (Dogs are allegedly part of the canon, though in nearly three years of writing this Google Doc, I’ve never seen an Anonymous Dog pop into the Doc.) The narwhal appears from time to time, but you won’t see a shark or seal appear in here. Anteaters are in, but ants are not.
- Point is, I genuinely want some answers here about the Google Docs animals. There are so many deserving creatures that should have earned their place in Docs by now. Why no love for turkeys or chickens or eagles? Why can’t I get a butterfly or a spider in here? And of all the random meme animals, why is Nyan Cat still part of the Google Docs universe?
- So if you’re reading this, and you happen to work at Google, shoot me a note. dan@inboxcollective.com is my email. Let’s talk. I think we can make a better universe of Google Doc animals.
Anyway, the Ifrit! 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:
