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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: September 2019

Welcome to the September 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 every previous briefing from 2019 at this link.

Now, onto this month’s edition! Inside, you’ll find lessons on building email courses from Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, tips for growing your lists via paid acquisition, a guide from Camiah to building relationships through newsletters, and more! Have something else you think should be featured in Not a Newsletter? Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com.

-Dan

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

cartoon by Harry Bliss

This Month in Email News

How to Launch a Great Email Course

In 2015, my team at BuzzFeed launched our first course. We’d never launched a newsletter quite like it before. It was set up as an automated email series — more commonly known in the email world as a “drip” campaign — but we put a little spin on it and called it a “course,” because we intended to teach readers a new skill, habit, or lesson. It wasn’t a regular newsletter — it was an evergreen series, set up in advance. If you signed up on launch day, or the next week, or even five years later, you’d still get that same series of emails.

Our first launch was the 7-Day Better Skin Challenge. In the first 72 hours, more than 30,000 readers signed up — without spending a single dollar to acquire an email subscriber! We’d never had a launch quite like it before.

And then we saw the numbers: Open rates north of 50% for every email in the series! We’d never seen anything like it.

So we launched more of these courses. We launched the 10-Day Spring Cleaning Challenge, a Couch to 5k program, and a guide to having the best semester ever. We translated them into other languages, too, and they worked incredibly well.

And now, a few other news organizations have started to invest in courses, too, and have seen equally great results.

Down in New Orleans at the Online News Association conference this month, I sat down on a panel with Ariana Rodriguez-Gitler and Andrea Caumont of Pew Research Center, and Tanya Sichynsky of The Washington Post, and we talked about what we’ve learned about courses. Ariana, Andrea, and Tanya shared a ton — examples, best practices, and stats. I’ve been on a lot of panels over the years, but I’ve rarely been on one where the panelists were so open in sharing what they’ve learned.

Here’s the good news: Even if you weren’t at ONA, you can still learn from Ariana, Andrea, and Tanya!

  • Video from our panel is available here.
  • Slides from the panel — including examples from Pew, The Post, BuzzFeed, and The New Yorker — are available here.
  • But that’s not all! Ariana, Andrea, and Tanya also put together a one-sheet guide to best practices and tips when building an email course.
  • And here’s a positioning doc to help think through your first course.

I’ll also point you to some of the courses they’ve launched — if you’re thinking about making one of your own, first check out what they’ve done!

And just for Not a Newsletter: I wanted to know what course these panelists would like to see next! Here’s what they said:

Andrea Caumont:

“I’d love to see a course that breaks down a long-term and still evolving local issue to help readers understand what’s happened so far, who the players are, what the stakes are and how they can follow along going forward. Following local news myself, I’ve often felt there was a lot more to the story I didn’t know about. Beat reporters are uniquely positioned to help readers understand the long-term context of these stories, having followed them for years.”

“The other one I’d like to see if an onboarding guide for your new city — not just where to eat, drink, play — but also local history, how to be involved and introductions to the important players and issues.”

Ariana Rodriguez-Gitler:

“I think the course I’d like to see are ‘welcome to the local area/city courses,’ but from a political/social viewpoint. What are the issues in the community? What’s their history and where are they going? What do you need to know to be engaged?”

And two final things! 1) If you’ve launched a course, or if you go out and launch one in the next few months, please send it my way! I’d love to see what you make, and feature it here in Not a Newsletter! 2) Thanks to all of you who came out to the first-ever Not a Happy Hour in New Orleans! It was so wonderful meeting so many of you and hearing how you’re using email. Keep an eye out for another Not a Happy Hour in 2020! 👍🍺

For Your Reading List

  • The Membership Puzzle Project’s Phillip Smith put together a remarkably deep dive into how to use paid acquisition to drive email growth.
    • Of note: There’s an excellent breakdown in there of how to calculate your cost per lead. This is something you should be thinking about before you spend a dollar on paid acquisition — and something you’re going to want to calculate and recalculate as you start spending money to acquire email subscribers.
    • The past few months, I’ve talked to so many Not a Newsletter readers who’ve started spending money to acquire email subscribers, but who didn’t yet know the lifetime value of a subscriber, and who weren’t sure what it would cost to acquire a single lead. Here’s what I can tell you: Channels like Facebook and Google make it very, very easy to spend your money, and if you’re not careful, it’s easy to waste your money on those channels. Make sure you’re approaching paid acquisition carefully — know your numbers and think about what the return on your investment will be before you start to spend!
  • GetResponse just published their Email Marketing Benchmarks report, and it’s full of interesting data. Among the things that caught my eye:
    • Emails with preheaders opened at much higher rates than those without (27.82% vs. 21.46%).
    • Welcome emails continue to be incredibly important. On average, welcome emails were opened at a 82.21% rate — which means they’re one of the best opportunities to reach your readers.
    • But I’ll also note: This is just one set of benchmarking data — what they’re seeing from 10,000 feet may not be what you see at ground level. Test, try, and see what works for you!
  • Acoustic — the company formerly known as IBM’s Watson Marketing — also released their 2019 Marketing Benchmark Report, and there are a few nuggets in here, too, that I found interesting:
    • Since Canada’s tough anti-spam law (it’s called  CASL, or the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation), open rates are way up, from an average of 19.8% before the law was introduced to 37.2% this year. That’s because Canadian companies are focusing more on cleaning their lists and making it easier for readers to adjust their preferences — which sometimes leads to smaller but far more active lists.
    • Mobile open rates have actually dropped across the board — something I wouldn’t have expected — but media companies still saw open rates on mobile north of 50%. I’ll say it again: Make sure you’re optimizing your emails for mobile, because that’s where (at least half) of your readers are!
  • Morning Brew’s Tyler Denk wrote about how their team drove hundreds of thousands of subscriptions via a custom-built referral tool.
    • Something I really like about the Brew’s referral program: The initial reward that readers get for referring friends is access to the Brew’s special weekend newsletter. So many referral programs promise physical gifts — tote bags, coffee mugs, stickers — but there’s a time and a cost to sending those. If you’re going to start with a referral program, start small: Access to a newsletter, exclusive events, discount codes, etc.
  • *Self-promotion alert:* I hopped on Litmus’ Delivering podcast to talk all things email with Jason Rodriguez. We talked about a few lessons from my time at BuzzFeed and The New Yorker, things people in the email world should start doing, and more.
    • In other podcast news: The folks at Postmark launched a new email podcast, Talking Email. (Do check out their interview with Anna Ward about email deliverability — it’s quite good.)
  • Digiday’s Lucinda Southern wrote about how The Financial Times added polls to its daily newsletter to increase engagement.
  • Buried in this Axios report from Sara Fischer is an interesting nugget about The Washington Post: “The Post will debut new personalized newsletters targeted to subscribers this September. The first products will have personalized recommendations and a reading list of stories subscribers have saved for later. It will later test different delivery frequencies to home in on the most convenient times to read.”
    • This comes on the heels of a new report from Twipe and The Times, who tested out personalization on an audience of 100,000 readers, and found that personalized emails led to a significant decline in churn.
      • The good news: This type of advanced personalization is showing some promising results.
      • The bad news: For most readers of this doc, it’s still not easy to deploy this type of personalization in email. For the moment, I’d focus on the things you can control — sending great newsletters and building great products. Easy-to-deploy personalization tools may still be a bit down the road for most of us!
  • On Better News, Danny Sway, digital fundraising manager for KPCC and LAist, explained how their team tried to adapt the public media “pledge drive” model for a digital audience — and even broke down the 10 different types of emails their team sent to readers.
  • At the Email on Acid blog, Melissa Berdine shared some recent favorite subject lines from the marketing world.
  • Axios’s Kendall Baker talked with The Big Lead about how they grew their daily sports email to 100,000 readers.
  • The Houston Chronicle’s hiring a Managing Editor for their newsroom, which I typically wouldn’t mention here in this section. But I was reading the description for the job, and this section stood out:

He/she must have a grasp of the operations of all newsroom departments, leading the decision-making of what stories can resound digitally, working with the Managing Editor/Content to set a new publishing rhythm focused on our newsletter schedule, not print deadlines. 

  • This is the first time I’ve ever seen a newsroom say that they’re reorganizing their publishing schedule around newsletters. I’ll certainly be keeping a close eye on what’s happening at the Chronicle.
  • There are several third-party tools that you can use to validate email addresses, but Twilio SendGrid is the first ESP I’ve seen that built an email validation API for their customers. It’s something their customers can implement into their sign-up forms to prevent bad email addresses from getting through — and even inform readers on site when they might have made a typo. (I can’t tell you how many times damn@inboxcollective.com has accidentally signed up for newsletters!) This is a great step, and I hope other ESPs will follow their lead.
  • You probably haven’t spent a ton of time on time thinking about Yahoo Mail, but this profile from Ian Bogost at The Atlantic offers a promising look at how Yahoo is trying to catch up to Gmail. It talks about some interesting efforts to make the inbox more usable — including some features reminiscent of Google’s Inbox.
    • I also loved these two paragraphs, which so nicely sum up why the inbox is such a powerful space:

Chris Royer, a designer on the Yahoo Mail team, has adopted an almost spiritual summary of this ethos. “Email is the business of your life,” he says. People cannot escape email; they still need it to use a bank account online, to sign up for Instagram, to check out from Amazon. But also, they don’t particularly want to give it up. They want to get bank statements and shipping notifications and all the rest. And email lets them do it all in one place.

That’s because email is the last gasp of information technology not under a single corporation’s close control. Ian McCarthy, whose team runs Yahoo’s email grocery feature, sees email as the ultimate open marketplace, where people connect with organizations because they choose to do so. On email, people have greater control over their identities and relationships than they do on social media or messaging apps. Maybe more than anywhere else online.

  • Not specific to newsletters, but something that’s absolutely worth reading more about: Axios’s Sara Fischer wrote a piece about the internet’s accessibility reckoning. Everything centers around a legal fight between Domino’s Pizza and a customer who says their website needs to be accessible to customers with disabilities. The case could end up before the Supreme Court, and as Fischer points out, “Should the case go that far, its outcome could forever change the way the internet is regulated — and determine how accessible the internet will be in the future for the roughly 20% of Americans with a disability.” 
    • This is something that — no matter what happens with a case like this — should matter to anyone reading this doc. I’ll admit that making newsletters accessible to all wasn’t something that was on my radar when I first started in email. It is now, and it should be part of your conversations, too.
    • A few guides worth reading for more on the topic: Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, and Email on Acid all have in-depth guides to email accessibility. At the OptInMonster blog, Sharon Hurley Hall discussed why ignoring email accessibility can hurt your business. And in the Resources section of the doc, I’ve linked to accessible-email.org, which can analyze your emails and suggest potential changes to make them more accessible to readers.
  • I loved this, from Kirsten Queen at Email on Acid, about empathy, authenticity, and email.
  • It was only a matter of time before this happened: A presidential campaign has started a newsletter on Substack. (It’s from Bernie Sanders.)
    • And in other Presidential news: A study from eDataSource says that Kamala Harris has the biggest email list of any of the 2020 Presidential candidates — but Pete Buttigieg’s emails are the most read.
  • At The New Yorker, Cal Newport wrote an excellent piece about email called, “Was E-mail a Mistake?” It’s about the future of email at work — not newsletters — but it’s a really smart look at how asynchronous messaging (basically, what happens when two people aren’t talking to each other in real time) can negatively affect a workplace. As Newport explains:

The dream of replacing the quick phone call with an even quicker e-mail message didn’t come to fruition; instead, what once could have been resolved in a few minutes on the phone now takes a dozen back-and-forth messages to sort out. With larger groups of people, this increased complexity becomes even more notable. Is an unresponsive colleague just delayed, or is she completely checked out? When has consensus been reached in a group e-mail exchange? Are you, the e-mail recipient, required to respond, or can you stay silent without holding up the decision-making process? Was your point properly understood, or do you now need to clarify with a follow-up message? Office workers pondering these puzzles—the real-life analogues of the theory of distributed systems—now dedicate an increasing amount of time to managing a growing number of never-ending interactions.

  • My feeling on email at work: Keep it short, and keep it actionable. Email’s a lousy way to build consensus or to have a discussion, but a good way to coordinate next steps (“let’s all hop on a call,” “let’s meet on Tuesday,” “will you make a few edits and send this back my way?”). The workplaces that tend to do email well are the ones that use email for action.
  • Anne McCarthy of BBC Future wrote about the potential long-term effects of autocomplete features like Gmail’s Smart Compose.
  • This is more about messaging than email, but I’m guessing many readers will enjoy this as much as I did: InVision’s Dale Berning Sawa put together an oral history of the AIM away message.

How to Build Relationships via Email

I’d like to better use this doc to spotlight the awesome people in the newsletter community. So this month, I reached out to Cam Palu and Miah Roberts, who run Camiah, and design email for places like Really Good Emails and The Discoverer. (They once made an upside-down email that blew my mind.) I love the way they approach email, so I asked them if they’d write up some of their thoughts for the doc. They went a little above and beyond and even made an original GIF to explain their approach. Cam and Miah, take it away! —Dan

A successful relationship is one built on a foundation of healthy communication. When Email is that form of communication, it is important to remember Email is a one-to-one direct line to a person. Inundating a person with too much information, providing a person with something they don’t want, or using the person’s time in a way that does not suit them, can cause the relationship to become strained. If a strain happens, it is time for awareness, acceptance, and time to put effort into adjusting communication methods to build a healthier relationship.

WHAT TO DOHOW TO RESPONDWHAT TO ASK
– Be friendly.
– Be helpful.
– Be respectful.
– Ask questions.		– Listen.
– Be yourself.
– Share something
  authentic about yourself.		– What is the relationship?
– What is your approach?
– What are you providing?
– Are you listening?
a few rules from Cam and Miah: Be friendly, be yourself, and make sure you listen

If you’re curious about their work, you can learn more at http://camiah.com.

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

the anonymous duck

I realized the other day that I didn’t know what a group of ducks was called. Naturally, I Googled it — and discovered that the answer is unexpectedly complicated!

  • A group of baby ducks is called a “brood.” That part isn’t all that contentious. But when adult ducks get together, that’s where things start to vary. In flight, you might call a group of adult ducks a “flock.” But on the water, it’s a very different story: those ducks might constitute a raft, team or paddling, according to reference.com.
  • But wait! PennLive.com reports: “As with all birds, a group of ducks is known as a flock. However, a group of duck also is referred to as a badling, flush, plump, sord or twack; a bunch, paddling or raft, when on the water; a skein, string or team, when in flight; or a dopping, when they are diving.”
  • And then there’s this:  The now-defunct blog, Duck a Day, claims that a group of ducks would be called a “brace.”
  • So what is it? A plump of ducks? A skein of ducks? A twack of ducks? Naturally, I turned to the true experts on the matter at Collective Nouns List, a website that literally just compiles trivia about collective nouns. They say a group of ducks is… a “paddling”!

Anyway, the duck! 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.