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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: September 2022

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 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: Alex Hazlett and I walk you through the five types of indie newsletter business models, and how you can use them to find the right monetization and growth opportunities for your newsletter. Plus: Why it’s so important to understand the lifetime value of a subscriber, tactics to help non-profits with newsletters, and more!

Also: I wanted to say one final thank you to Selzy and Who Sponsors Stuff’s Sales Pro for their support of inboxcollective.com and Not a Newsletter this summer! We’ll have new sponsors rolling out this fall — I’m thrilled about the email brands that have stepped up to support this work. (And if you’d be interested in advertising with us, drop me a note — I’m happy to share more about how you can reach this audience!)

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

-Dan
(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

A student/teacher conference. The teacher tells the student, "Your mother's emails have been out of control."
Pat Achilles / The New Yorker

This Month in Email Headlines

New on inboxcollective.com

The Five Types of Indie Newsletter Business Models

You may have read a success story or two that makes it seem like growing a newsletter and monetizing it is something that can happen quickly and easily. Neither of those things are true. But there is a path to success — starting by identifying the type of newsletter you send.

In working with and talking to the teams behind hundreds of indie newsletters, Alex Hazlett and I found that there are five big categories in the indie newsletter space, each of which corresponds with specific business models. The five are:

  • The Analyst
  • The Curator 
  • The Expert
  • The Reporter
  • The Writer

So let’s look at each of these five models: What they are, how newsletters in that category grow, and how they make money. [Read on…]

The Hopeful Rise and Tragic End of Refashionista

Over the course of a dozen years, Jillian Owens built Refashionista into a widely-read and widely-quoted blog and newsletter. But in October 2021, Owens passed away due to ovarian cancer. A year later, a loyal reader, Lindsay Redifer, remembers Owens — and the newsletter she left behind. [Read on…]

How Do I Know If My Emails Are Actually Landing in a Reader’s Inbox?

Open and click rates aren’t enough to understand whether or not your emails are being delivered to the inbox. Our deliverability expert, Yanna-Torry Aspraki, explains what else to monitor. [Read on…]

Here's a decorative image of three animals: An owl, a flamingo, and a seahorse

You can now sign up for an email alert when we publish something on a topic you care about. These emails are going to be really brief, and sent only when we publish in a topic area of your choosing. Just make sure you sign up with the same email address you already use for Not a Newsletter, and I’ll handle the rest!

[Sign up for alerts]

For Your Reading / To-Do List

  • Back in June’s Not a Newsletter, I wrote about Apple’s plan to roll out BIMI — the email feature that allows you to put your logo next to your brand’s name in all of your emails — starting this fall. Now it’s official. The BIMI Group, which works with inbox providers like Gmail on BIMI, made the announcement this month.
  • Here’s a lovely story from RJI’s Sydney Lewis about how NOLA.com grew one of their new newsletters from 0 to 3,000 readers in a few weeks. This is a wonderful example of something I often tell my clients: It’s rarely a single tactic that drives growth. Over time, if you do a lot of little things — creating good sign-up pages, making it easy for readers to share newsletters with friends, testing out both on- and off-site acquisition tactics, etc. — you’ll have a good chance to grow a big, engaged newsletter list.
  • I’m teeing up that story up first in advance of sharing this link about RocaNews, a daily newsletter that promised its Instagram audience that they’d give away a thousand dollars to strangers if they got a thousand new sign-ups. (They did, and then they did.)
    • The big lesson here: It’s possible to convert people from social media over to your newsletter, but it might require an incentive. That could involve a giveaway or contest, but it might also involve editorial content, like voting in an annual Best Of awards (as long as readers get the chance to sign up for a relevant newsletter when they vote). There are also free tactics you can try, like adding a link in your bio, or using link stickers in Instagram stories to nudge readers back to a sign-up page.
    • But you also have to be careful when you rapidly grow your email list. There are two parts to this. First: Before you start paying to acquire email addresses, you need to have a sense of the lifetime value of a subscriber — for every new subscriber you get, how much revenue will you make from them? That might include a combination of subscription revenue, ad revenue, affiliate revenue, one-time sales of products like books, etc. 
    • Sparkloop’s Louis Nicholls wrote a lovely guide to all of this, which includes a tool to help you calculate your lifetime value! But I’ll give you an oversimplified example of this: I ran the Not a Newsletter numbers through that calculator, just looking at the revenue I bring in from ads and affiliate links. Based on those numbers, the lifetime value of a Not a Newsletter subscriber is about $10. (That’s actually pretty good!) So if I was to go out and spend money to acquire email addresses — for instance, targeting potential readers on Twitter or LinkedIn — my goal would be to keep the cost per new subscriber (known as a CPL, or cost per lead) below that lifetime value. (It doesn’t make sense to spend $15 to get a new reader if the return will only be $10.) If you’re trying to scale a newsletter list via paid acquisition, understanding the lifetime value of those future subscribers is a crucial first step.
    • And there’s a second potential drawback to fast growth: As our resident deliverability expert, Yanna-Torry Aspraki, has written, if your list grows quickly, but those new readers don’t engage with the brand, then you’re likely to end up in the spam folder. Getting readers to sign up is great — getting them to sign up and engage with newsletters is the real goal.
    • Kudos, though, to the RocaNews team for trying something different here, and for using Sparkloop’s referral links so they could track the specific sign-ups that came via social. Understanding conversion rates is crucial to evaluating the success of a promotion like this.
  • One more growth story for this month: Aweber’s Sean Tinney wrote about how Emma Johnson, who writes the Wealthy Single Mommy blog, used lead magnets to convert readers from site and social to her newsletter.
  • I always appreciate when indie newsletters publish annual reports about their growth. It’s a great way to be transparent and build trust with an audience. I’ve also seen an interesting phenomenon surrounding these reports — when an individual writer or a small team shares some details about their growth, they often see a spike in new subscriptions or growth afterwards. (Social proof that your newsletter is growing and successful can be a powerful conversion tool.) Anyway, kudos to the Defector team for publishing one of these annual reports.
    • On a related note: Steven Perlberg of Insider wrote about The Information’s growth, where they’re investing to serve subscribers, and how they almost acquired a newsletter brand, The Ankler, last year.
  • So many newsletters are concerned — and rightfully so — with email clipping, which is where an email gets cut off because of the amount of code in the email. (When clipping happens, it also may affect your open rate, and will likely lead to far fewer clicks in your email, since much of the content doesn’t appear in the inbox.) But there’s another thing to think about: How long your email might take to load in the inbox. If you’re sending emails that, for instance, have GIFs that take forever to load, a reader on their phone might get impatient and move on to the next email instead of waiting for your newsletter to fully load. (Interestingly, a large GIF or image won’t cause clipping — it’ll just cause your email to load slowly.) Anyway, thanks to the team at Litmus for this lovely guide to reducing file size — it should help many in the email space build emails that load faster.
  • A few years ago, Gmail rolled out a feature called Annotations, which let marketers add a preview image to newsletters that show up in the Promotions tab. But here’s a scoop from Brian Sisolak of Peak Inbox, who reports that Gmail now appears to be automatically pulling in those Annotations preview images from newsletters. This would be an interesting step — and would have a potential impact on any newsletters (not just marketing messages from eCommerce brands) that regularly land in the Promotions tab.
  • Two texting stories I really enjoyed:
  • For Better News, Danyelle White and Eve Rickles-Young of The Salt Lake Tribune wrote about how they’ve started to use Patreon to monetize their newsletter and podcast brand, Mormon Land. This is an interesting case where the Tribune’s content is mostly geared to a local audience, but Mormon Land reaches a national (and often international) audience, so they had an opportunity to build out a different monetization strategy here. Kudos to their team for trying something new! (Full disclosure: I’ve worked with the Trib on several newsletter projects through Inbox Collective.)
  • Good stuff here from Yasmine Nahdi of Chamaileon, who wrote about all sorts of tactics, from welcome emails to event invites to donation asks, to help non-profits get more out of their email strategy.
  • Doing an audit of your email strategy? On MarTech, Ryan Phelan wrote about 10 questions to help you understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • The lovely folks at the News Product Alliance are rolling out a mentorship program, where 150 emerging leaders in the product space can get paired with amazing mentors. If you work in news and product, you should absolutely be applying to this!
  • Selzy is putting on the Email Growth Conference on October 6. It’s free, all online, and features a great lineup of speakers who’ll be talking about ways to drive more revenue from email. (Also, the day’s host will be Yanna-Torry Aspraki, who you’ve come to know as the Doc’s resident deliverability expert!) You can sign up here — again, it’s free!
  • I’ve been saying yes to more interview requests lately, but with an exception: The interviewer has to serve a non-English-speaking audience. Here’s one I did earlier this month with Valerio Bassan and Ellissi, a weekly, Italian newsletter about media, business, and digital strategy.
    • Why do these sorts of interviews? I write in English, so these interviews probably won’t lead to many new sign-ups for my newsletter, and almost certainly won’t lead to new consulting work.
    • But there’s something bigger than that here: I want to be able to share what I’ve learned with as many people as I can. My hope is that a few of these interviews reach someone I’d never otherwise be able to reach — and inspire them to do better work. If a conversation like this can have that kind of impact, I’ll be thrilled.
  • A big thank you to Ben and the team at The Code Company, who stepped in to help tweak  the Inbox Collective website with an update allowing us to publish multiple bylines on a single story. We’ve got a bunch of co-bylined pieces coming up, and interestingly, a bunch of the WordPress plugins weren’t compatible with our template. Thanks, guys, for finding a solution for us!

This Month in… Mel Brooks Quotes That Are Also Good Rules to Follow for Email Marketing

Mel Brooks is a comic genius, and also a surprisingly good source of inspiration for those of us in the email space. So in 2022,  I’m closing the Google Doc with a brand new feature: Mel Brooks Quotes That Are Also Good Rules to Follow for Email Marketing! This month, let’s turn to the wisdom of “History of the World”:

Here's Mel Brooks, as the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, doing a backflip.
Brooksfilms

I remember the first time I saw the Spanish Inquisition scene from “History of the World.” It’s one of those movie moments that’s both shocking and brilliant. Just trying to describe it sounds like a rejected Stefon riff from “Saturday Night Live.” (This scene has everything: Tap dancing friars, synchronized-swimming nuns, rhymes involving Preparation H…) Who else besides Mel Brooks could take the Spanish Inquisition and turn it into a Broadway number featuring nuns, rotating above a swimming pool, on a menorah?

The truth is: No one else could have done this. There isn’t another comic in the past 100 years that could have pulled off a scene like this.

But imagine that someone else did try to replicate a scene like this in their movie. It wouldn’t have been greeted with laughter — crowds would have cringed or booed. (And just imagine how crowds would have reacted to another comedian attempting a “Springtime for Hilter”-type of scene!) Brooks had an inimitable voice, and it would’ve been foolish to try to imitate it.

Now imagine a less extreme example. Here’s something I saw often when I worked at BuzzFeed: I’d see other orgs that had a very different audience or very different voice try to copy what we were doing, but they seemed to be copying only the most superficial things. For some reason, other brands seemed to think that the secret to viral success was throwing cat GIFs into as many posts as possible. But those sorts of GIFs weren’t on brand for their brand. Instead of entertaining their audience, they just confused them with this odd content shift.

Whether you’re Mel Brooks or BuzzFeed or, well, you, it’s crucial to understand who you are, and to make sure that your voice is reflected in the content you put out into the world. Don’t try to be anyone else but you.

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.