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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: October 2019

Welcome to the October 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. 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 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 Pit Gottschalk, a German sports writer who’s building a brand through his soccer newsletter. Read on below!

Also inside this edition, you’ll find subject line testing tools, helpful guides to email deliverability, new tools for monetizing your newsletters, and more! Have something else you think should be featured in here? Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com.

-Dan

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

cartoon by Sam Marlow

This Month in Email News

Newsletter Spotlight, presented by Revue

I first met Pit Gottschalk in May, and he told me a little about his new newsletter. He had created a daily soccer email covering all things German soccer, and it was up to 2,500 subscribers — not bad for a newsletter that was less than a year old!

I saw Pit again in August and asked him how the newsletter was going. Since the last time I saw you, he told me, I’ve quadrupled my audience.

Quadrupled? In just three months? I had to know more.

Pit’s been in the news business for over 20 years. In the early 2000s, he was the editor in chief of Sport Bild, a weekly sports magazine. Later, he led teams at Axel Springer and Funke Mediengruppe, two of Germany’s biggest publishers. Print’s still doing well in Germany — so well, Pit admitted, that he wasn’t always on top of digital trends.

“The biggest challenge an editor has is that when you’re too successful on the print side,” he said, “you don’t care about the things happening in the digital age.”

At Funke, he became interested in newsletters as a way to reach an increasingly mobile audience. He saw newsletters as a digital version of the morning paper that so many Germans still read. But over the course of his last 15 months at Funke, he struggled to get buy-in for newsletters at the organization.

This is Pit! (Quite the glamour shot here, too — looking good, Pit!)

When Pit left Funke at the end of 2018, he decided to finally launch a newsletter, and to do it around the subject he knew best: German soccer. He crowdsourced ideas for a name. One friend suggested “Fever Pit’ch,” a nod to both Nick Hornby’s best-selling soccer book and Pit’s own first name. Another friend suggested that Pit look into a newsletter tool called Revue. Pit had spent 15 months trying to launch newsletters at his old job. Fever Pit’ch was ready to launch on Revue in just three days.

He announced the newsletter on his social channels — thanks to his years in journalism, he’d built up a sizable following on Twitter and Instagram — and quickly signed up a few hundred subscribers. He decided to send his first newsletter at an unusual time — 6:10 in the morning, not 6 or 6:30 — but for a smart reason: “Everyone remembers the time, because it’s not a normal time,” he said.

But to go from a few hundred subscribers to more than 10,000 readers required some real savvy. Early on, Pit identified an opportunity in the marketplace. There wasn’t a daily newsletter that aggregated German soccer news quite like Fever Pit’ch, and readers came to trust Pit’s judgment to find the most important stories of the day. As an independent voice on German soccer, Pit found a receptive audience. “Readers tell me, ‘You stand for something,’” he said.

Pit’s also unusually focused on building his brand and trying to expand it to reach readers where they are. He started licensing his content to other publishers and portals in Germany, where he can funnel traffic from his columns back to his newsletter. (The other benefit: Content syndication covers his costs, and has allowed him to make Fever Pit’ch a full time job.) He often appears on TV and podcasts to talk soccer, which gives him opportunities to promote his newsletter. He also thinks about how to serve readers who follow him on other social channels. For his most-engaged readers, he’s even given away tickets to matches, where they can sit next to Pit at a game. 

But above all else, Pit says he’s been able to grow through word of mouth. Readers love his newsletter, and he encourages them to share his newsletter with their friends. Those referrals from readers are one of the most effective drivers of new sign-ups.

This month, the 250th edition of Fever Pit’ch hit inboxes. Next month, the newsletter will celebrate its one-year anniversary. What’s next? Pit has two goals: Reaching 25,000 subscribers, and being smart about potential expansion. He has a podcast now, and is pushing into video, but he’s also mindful that the newsletter audience needs to come first. “There is a quality level I need to stick to,” he said. “If I do too many things, the quality level could be lowered, and that’s something I cannot risk.”

Pit Gottschalk’s Four Rules for Newsletter Success

1.) Write about what you know best — “For example,” he told me, “one reader asked me if I could do this newsletter, but for rugby. I said, ‘I’d love to do that, but I cannot deliver a newsletter with the depth of knowledge on rugby.’ You need to have a great knowledge of the things you write on.”

2.) Create a sustainable publishing schedule — “There are hard times, like when I go for a beer in a pub, and I have to leave in time to write my story. Everybody’s drinking, everybody’s laughing, and I have to say goodbye because I have to write my story. People are waiting for my newsletter the next morning.” But Pit also says that when he needs to take time off, readers are understanding — as long as he’s transparent with them. They do know that he can’t publish a soccer newsletter by himself all year round, and he’s learned how important it is to build a schedule that works for him.

3.) Be honest with readers — “When I make a mistake — for instance, I once chose the wrong statistics for my story — the next day, I said, ‘Yesterday, I made a mistake. I’m sorry for that.’ And readers will say, ‘Oh, that’s fine!’” Being transparent with readers breeds trust.

4.) Be personal — “I try to share my success with people. I’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m so happy because of some big news with Fever Pit’ch!’” By sharing those milestones and achievements, his audience becomes more than just readers — they’re part of a community that can celebrate in his victories.

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 big news organizations, like Fast Company, and individual writers, like Pit, to send newsletters. If you’d like to give Revue a try, sign up for an account here.

For Your Reading List

  • Many Not a Newsletter readers have been asking if I recommend a tool to test subject lines. There are a few out there that are interesting, but none that I would look to as the absolute gospel when it comes to writing subject lines. The thing about subject lines is that what works for one brand might not work for you. At BuzzFeed, we used super short subject lines and included lots of emojis and exclamation points. At The New Yorker, our subject lines were more explanatory and a bit longer. There isn’t a *right* way to do this — test out several different styles and see what works for you!
    • Just for a Not a Newsletter readers, I’ve created a subject line + preheader calculator that might be useful. (Go to “File”->“Make a copy” to use it yourself.) It won’t tell you if a subject line is great — but it will tell you if your subject line will get cut off in a certain email client.
    • If you’re looking for a free subject line testing tool, two that might be worth trying:
      • SendCheckIt
      • CoSchedule
        • And here’s what I mean when I suggest testing things out for yourself: SendCheckIt endorses using all lowercase subject lines, while CoSchedule says that subject lines like that are actually among the worst-performing subject lines! How’s that possible? Well, both teams ran tests on very different brands, and came away with very different results.
        • So here’s what I’d suggest: Pick a few types of subject line tests you want to run — short vs. long, vague vs. explanatory, emojis vs. none, sentence case vs. title case vs. lowercase — and run those tests for a month. Then look at the data and see what you learn! From the data, your audience will tell you what they prefer.
  • Also on the note of subject lines: Litmus’s Bettina Specht wrote about all sorts of incredibly misleading subject lines, and why you should never, ever send a customer an email that starts with “FWD:” or “re:”.  
    • One last thing: Hannah Rock, chief night editor at The Times of London, talked with journalism.co.uk about nine rules for writing great headlines. I think there’s a lot to learn from Hannah’s rules!
  • Harry Dry broke down the different ways he gets readers of his site, Marketing Examples, to subscribe to his email newsletter. (13% of his visitors convert to email subscribers, so there’s a lot to learn here!)
  • At The Byline, Jacque Boltik wrote about a few behind-the-scenes factors that affect email deliverability.
    • Here’s a little more, from Return Path’s Patty Atwater, about the email reputation factors that can affect deliverability.
    • One more thing on the Return Path blog: Atwater discussed the difference between deliverability and delivered rate. (There’s a difference!)
      • Something to note here: There are a lot of different email metrics out there, and every ESP has their own phrases and terms. Make sure you really understand how your ESP defines certain terms — otherwise, you might be in a situation where you’re wondering why your emails aren’t reaching the inbox even though your delivered rate is nearly 100%!
  • James Donnelly attended Litmus Live in London — FWIW, I think Litmus’s conference is one of the best there is around email — and reported back on things he learned at the conference. Here’s part I and part II of his notes.
Per this report, people are checking email less than they did in 2016, but they still spend lots of time checking email every day
  • Adobe surveyed a thousand working adults in the U.S., all in office jobs, and came away with a few fascinating takeaways. Among them:
    • Those surveyed spent up to five hours checking their email
    • A majority of millenials (54%) admitted to checking their personal email while in the bathroom. (If anyone on staff at Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader is a Not a Newsletter subscriber, reach out! I’ve got ideas for you!)
    • Respondents said only 1 out of every 3 emails they receive at their personal inbox is actually useful to them.
      • The big takeaway for me: Email — and in particular, the mobile inbox — is where your readers are. If you build great experiences for email, you have an opportunity to exceed expectations and build strong relationships with those readers. Just remember: They’re busy, and they might be doing something else while they read your email. Build email products with that in mind.
  • Digiday’s Lucinda Southern talked to the team at the U.K. tabloid The Sun, who used a newsletter to retain 68% of their fantasy soccer audience from one season to the next.
  • Julia Angwin, editor-in-chief of The Markup, wrote about why their team decided not to track any customer data — open rates, what readers click on, geolocation, etc. — in their newsletters.
  • I highly recommend this guide to writing a great welcome series, from Cory Brown on The Byline.
  • At Fix My Churn, Val Geisler dug into dozens of examples of transactional emails, and explained how each of these examples could be improved. If you’re sending any sort of transactional emails — welcome emails, purchase confirmation emails, etc. — you’ll want to make time for this.
  • A List Apart’s Travis McKnight wrote about transparency and the user journey. If you’re thinking about building an onboarding series for your readers, do read this.
    • One more thing about onboarding: On the InVisision blog, Krystal Higgins went a bit deeper into issues with (non-email) onboarding experiences.
  • If you’ve been reading Not a Newsletter, you’ve heard me say this before, but it’s worth reiterating: If you’re driving email growth through paid acquisition, you first need to have a sense of the lifetime value of a customer. Lenfest’s Matt Skibinski explained why in a post on Nieman Lab.
  • Love this, from Anne-Laure Le Cunff at MakerMag: A guide to launching a newsletter on Product Hunt (and getting 2,000 new subscribers in the process).
  • Something I’m starting to pay more attention to: The opportunity to use registration walls to drive email signups. I still want to learn more here — if you’re using one on your site, shoot me a note at dan@inboxcollective.com. I’d love to hear more about what you’ve learned!
  • The Membership Puzzle Project’s Emily Goligoski and Jay Rosen highlighted dozens of examples of what they call “memberful routines”: ways for routinely incorporating members and readers into an organization’s process. Their report dug into examples from surveys and social media to, of course, newsletters.
  • Teen Vogue’s Rainesford Stauffer profiled Olivia Seltzer, a 15-year-old in California who started an email newsletter called theCramm, which is now also being delivered via text message.
  • Digiday’s Tim Peterson wrote about how TikTok is smartly using an email newsletter to build relationships with publishers.
  • On the Email Monks blog, Kevin George offered a nice walk-through of brands that use GIFs well in email.
  • The team at Oracle put together a lookbook of some of their favorite emails of 2019. I enjoyed reading more about why their team felt each of these emails worked so well.
  • I’ve shared a fair bit about AMP for Email, the new email language that — probably in 2020 or 2021 — many Not a Newsletter readers will be using in their newsletters. Here’s one more thing to keep in mind for the not-too-distant future: BIMI, or Brand Indicators for Message Identification. Email on Acid’s Melissa Berdine explains what it is and how it’ll affect your newsletters.
  • I really do appreciate when news organizations and individuals are willing to share data about what they’re learning. Case in point: Richard MacManus, who founded ReadWriteWeb and now writes the Cybercultural newsletter, surveyed a few hundred of his readers about their newsletter habits. Here’s what he learned about how many emails they get and what they’re willing to pay for.
  • One more shoutout: Kudos to Vicki Boykis for being so transparent about how much money her Substack-run newsletter, Normcore Tech, brings in every month.
  • At them., Sandy Allen wrote about the digital difficulty that many who identify as nonbinary or trans deal with: Trying to change your email address.
    • I was lucky to work alongside Sandy at BuzzFeed, and watching Sandy’s journey these past few years has been eye opening for me. Every time I see a sign-up form on a site that requires selecting a gender, I think of the trouble and pain this causes people just like Sandy. Theirs is another case that’s worth thinking about, whether you’re running a site that requires a username, or one where readers have to select a gender as an identifying characteristic.
  • If you’re a nonprofit, you might want to give EveryAction’s Email Deliverability Benchmarks report a quick look.
  • On the Benchmark Email blog, they’ve put together a list of words that might land your email in the spam folder. (Interestingly, “We Hate Spam” and “This Isn’t Spam” both made the list of phrases that end up in spam!)https://blog.benchmarkemail.com/email-spam-trigger-words/
  • This isn’t specific to email, but I wanted to share it anyway: It’s a guide to getting buy-in at your organization, and there are a ton of good ideas in here. (My personal favorite lesson: “Don’t bring hunches to a data fight.”)

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • One of the trickiest parts of email is that there isn’t a great way to discover new products. Podcasts and apps have stores where you can download and discover them, but email’s never had anything like that. That’s why I’m so excited about two new spaces designed to help with email discovery: Letterlist and EmailLove.
    • Letterlist is a place to promote and grow your email list.
    • EmailLove highlights great newsletters, as well as newsletter templates.
    • They’re both welcome additions to the email world, and I suggest you give both a look!
  • Kudos to the Morning Brew team for finding a way to use newsletter sign-ups for a good cause!
Here's the LinkedIn post that Morning Brew ran promoting the partnership
  • I’m with Val on this: Using alt-text wisely — especially in image-heavy emails — is a really smart move.
  • Here’s something I haven’t seen before, from the Newfangled team: a sign-up box that pre-fills some information (in this case, your country of residence) based on your IP address. For readers in Europe or Canada, that might be a useful way to segment your lists without requiring readers to fill out an extra piece of information.
  • Interesting to see multiple news sources launching pop-up newsletters around impeachment. Here’s one from Dan Sinker, called impeachment.fyi, here’s one from The New York Times, and here’s a third, from CNN.

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’m calling… the Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month! This month:

the anonymous penguin

Did you know:

Anyway, the penguin! 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.