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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: October 2021

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 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: News about Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection rollout; ideas for setting up a great post-purchase automation; tips for embedding video in your emails; and a few email conferences to put on your radar.

Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter? Find the full archive at this link.

-Dan 

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

A man is kidnapped on a pier, and says to the two mobster, "I feel like this could have been a threatening email."
Jason Adam Katzenstein / The New Yorker

This Month in Email Headlines

For Your Reading / To-Do List

  • For those curious about the impact of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection on email, make time for this data dive from Aweber founder Tom Kulzer. One fascinating thing the Aweber team is seeing so far: Apple seems to be “opening” these emails for readers not at the moment the email is delivered, but when the phone is plugged in and charging — which is leading to a spike in overnight opens.
    • Overall, the impact of MPP has been relatively small so far. Validity’s Guy Hanson says about 20% of users have downloaded the update, and on a Litmus webinar earlier this month, April Mullen of Sparkpost shared that they’re seeing about 97% of iOS 15 users turn on MPP. Expect the percentage of users downloading iOS 15 to grow over the next few months, and you should see a gradual lift in open rates as MPP rolls out. 
    • But the important thing: This isn’t something to panic over. Keep thinking about other ways to measure success for your email program — including metrics around engagement, growth, or revenue — and you’ll be fine. And expect that over time, most ESPs will adjust their metrics to help you identify who’s truly engaging with your emails.
    • We’re already starting to see some of these changes from ESPs. Sendinblue, for instance, has announced that they’ll be providing users with an estimated open rate, designed to exclude “opens” solely due to MPP.
  • Speaking of measuring success: Make time for this Digiday piece, from Sara Guaglione, about the creative metrics that The Telegraph is using to measure the success of their newsletter program.
  • And two data stories to read back-to-back:
  • On the INMA blog, Dan Petty of MediaNews Group wrote about a clever workflow their teams are using to produce traffic-driving newsletters that are a bit more curated than the typical RSS-to-newsletter feed.
  • Good stuff here from Aisha Majid of Press Gazette, who looked at how several major newsrooms, from The New York Times to Reach (one of the U.K.’s largest publishers) use newsletters for very different purposes.
  • News from the Creator space:
  • When most people start thinking about the funnel, they think about a welcome series or emails designed to convert readers to paying supporters/customers. But many forget to set up automations or messages targeted to those who’ve already made a purchase. Here are a few ideas to try for those post-purchase flows, from the team at Sendinblue.
  • Hubspot’s Lestraundra Alfred wrote about something that hardly ever gets much thought: The power of a clear unsubscribe link in your newsletter. 
    • If you send multiple newsletters, make sure you offer readers the chance to either change their preferences or unsubscribe. You’d be shocked at how often a great preferences center not only saves readers from unsubscribing, but also leads to readers signing up for new newsletters that they may not have been aware of before!
    • And don’t hide the unsubscribe link! Earlier this month, after making a purchase from a major U.S.-based brand, I got bombarded with a half-dozen emails in 72 hours. When I went to unsubscribe, it took me a few minutes to find the link. Their designers had underlined every link in the email, except the one for the unsubscribe page, and they’d hidden the unsubscribe link in between a few paragraphs of legalese. That sort of practice seems clever until you look at the spam complaints from readers who got frustrated trying to unsubscribe — and decided to mark you as spam instead.
  • Moving on: As long as I’ve been in the email space, I’ve gotten questions about how to embed video in email. The truth is, as this post from Email on Acid explains, it’s really quite hard to do, and only works in certain clients. (My recommendation: Use a GIF with a play button on top, and then have that click out to the video.)
  • Good stuff here from Chad S. White, for MarketingProfs, about why B2B senders often face deliverability issues.
  • This was nicely done, from Monica Lent for ilo.so: A guide to using Twitter to drive traffic.
  • For OnlyInfluencers, Matthew Dunn wrote about AMP for Email, and why it isn’t more widely used. I still believe in AMP, and think it has huge potential — but until more ESPs support the technology, it’s going to be something that’s exclusively used by big companies with the resources to develop AMP emails.
  • Thinking about building a newsletter tied to a podcast? Check out these examples from Chamaileon’s Yasmine Nahdi.
  • As more businesses — from newsrooms to creators — think about building a reader revenue strategy, metrics like customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost are increasingly important. If you’re in this space, you might want to take a look at this deep dive from Napkin Math’s Evan Armstrong into LTV and CAC.
  • I’ve written before about pop-up newsletters, an email product that exists for just a few weeks (and then disappears). Here’s an interesting experiment, from The New York Times: Tom Morello, from Rage Against the Machine, will be writing a pop-up newsletter, just for paying subscribers of the Times, for the next 12 weeks. 
    • I’m especially curious to see what kind of paid acquisition the Times might be running for this sort of pop-up. I’d be trying to retarget readers on Facebook who’ve recently read a Times article, follow Rage Against the Machine, but don’t yet subscribe to the Times, and would want to see if I could convert some of them through a short-term offer.

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • In-person email conferences are coming back! On December 7, in Odense, Denmark, I’ll be giving a keynote and leading an email workshop at Email Summit, Denmark’s leading email conference. And don’t worry: Seven of this year’s talks are in English, so even if you don’t speak Danish, there’s going to be lots for you to learn! A few tickets are still available for both the conference and the workshops — you can buy your tickets here.
  • And the team at ReallyGoodEmails announced that in 2022, they’ll be hosting their UNSPAM conference in four cities: Greenville, S.C., Chicago, London, and Boston. (No official dates have been announced yet.)
  • Love this, from The Tampa Bay Times: They ran a campaign where readers could donate in support of a specific reporter or staffer. Especially as we come to the end of the year, and newsrooms are focused on driving support to hit their 2021 revenue targets, think about how you can put your staff front and center in a campaign.
  • Such a cool story, from Hanaa’ Tameez at Nieman Lab, about how South African-based publication The Continent used reader feedback in a novel way: To ask readers if they felt comfortable allowing the publication to accept advertising. (Readers, overwhelmingly, said yes.)
  • Aftenposten, the paper of record for Norway, is introducing audio versions of all of their stories. You’ve probably seen other sites try something similar, but I’m guessing you haven’t seen this: They’re using AI to do it, and are basing it off the voice of their main podcast host, so readers can hear the news presented by a voice they’re already comfortable with.
  • Kudos to the teams at the Google News Initiative and the News Revenue Hub, who just released the News Revenue Engine, a product to help newsrooms improve their payment processes. (This is the kind of thing that might not seem like a big deal, but I’ve seen firsthand how small improvements to a checkout flow lead to significantly more revenue.)
  • This is pretty wild: In 2020, the team at Spamhaus (one of the leading tech companies in the email space when it comes to phishing, malware and spam) noticed some small IP addresses that were sending a remarkable amount of spam. The unexpected culprit: An Android-powered doorbell that was easy for spammers to abuse.
  • Everyone’s worked with someone who sends work emails at non-work hours. The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns wrote about it, and suggested a few tactics for dealing with these types of emails. (One tactic I personally love: Gmail’s scheduling feature. If I’m emailing a client, say, in Europe, I’ll pre-schedule the email so it goes out first thing their time, instead of emailing them off hours. Highly recommend it!)
  • Kara Cutruzzula of Brass Ring Daily put together a list of 35 lessons for her 35th birthday, and I really loved her list. (Especially: “Listen to people older than you. Watch people younger than you. They know things you do not.”)

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 Ibex
  • The ibex is a species of wild goat, most famously found in the Alps, though you might also find them in other parts of the world, including Ethiopia.
  • A group of ibex, much like a group of goats, is known as a herd. And interestingly, if you do spot two or more ibex out in the wild, you could refer to them either as ibexes or ibex. (It’s an odd case where the singular and plural version of the word can be exactly the same.)
  • But the real reason I’m fascinated by the ibex is because the YouTube videos about them are incredible. Go watch this BBC video of an ibex climbing hundreds of feet up a dam — for the sole purpose of licking on some calcium deposits on the walls of the dam! — and try not to gasp.
  • And if an ibex defying gravity to climb up a dam isn’t good enough for you, watch this video of baby ibex sprinting down a mountain to escape a fox. I have no idea how a creature could be this sure-footed while on mountainous terrain, but the ibex is a truly impressive climber.

Anyway, the ibex! 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.