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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: September 2023

Welcome to the September — and final — edition of Not a Newsletter, a semi-comprehensive, Google Doc-based guide to sending better emails! I’m Dan, the founder of Inbox Collective.

Two henchmen tell a business: "We're here to deliver Jessica's out-of-office message. You leave her alone."
Brendan Loper  / The New Yorker

Thank you to this month’s sponsors: PostApex, a solution to help you secure premium advertisers for your email newsletter; Sponsy, a tool that might be able to cut your ad operations time by up to 40+ hours a week; and Newsletter Headquarters, a new, private Slack community for top newsletter operators.

Do support these sponsors — they make sure that resources like Not a Newsletter remain free for all!

This month in Not a Newsletter…

  • Why I’m shutting down the Google Doc — and what’s coming next.
  • The six types of welcome emails every newsletter should set up.
  • Why QA testing can help you stay out of the spam folder.
  • How one French newsletter about finance built their business model — and launched a crowd equity round to support their growth.

…plus, a lot more!

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

—Dan (say hi via email or LinkedIn)

This Month in Email Headlines

Stories labeled with a 🔑 may require a subscription to read.

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To be as transparent as possible: This is a sponsored link presented by one of my partners. Interested in partnering with me? Here are the ad opportunities available with Inbox Collective moving forward.

Why I’m Shutting Down Not a Newsletter

Yes, it’s true: After five years of publishing every month in this Google Doc, this will be the very last edition of Not a Newsletter.

But while the Google Doc is going away, I am absolutely not.

Starting next Wednesday, September 20, I’ll be sending out a new weekly email featuring original stories, tutorials, and guides you’ll only find on Inbox Collective. What can you expect in the new weekly newsletter?

Every week, we’ll have brand-new guides, resources, and reporting to help you build a better newsletter.

Sign up here for the new weekly email — I promise, I’m going to try to build a resource that delivers amazing content every week that you can *actually* use!

(If you’re already on the Not a Newsletter list, you don’t need to do anything. I’ll send you the new weekly email starting next week.)

But some of you might be wondering: Why shut down Not a Newsletter now? I dove into my decision here — why I launched the Google Doc in the first place, why I thought it was time to make a change, and more about what’s coming next.

New on Inbox Collective

📬 The Six Types of Welcome Emails

A welcome series is one of those email best practices that everyone — every publisher, every indie newsletter operator, every non-profit, and every business — should set up. When I begin working with a new client, it’s almost always the very first thing we start with.

A welcome series can do so much for your newsletter. It’s one of the best ways to introduce yourself to new readers and start building a relationship with them. It’s a great way to get them to take the next step: To read something, to share something, or to do something. And if you’re selling something, like a subscription or a product, it’s an effective way to drive sales.

Plus, welcome series are crucial when it comes to keeping your newsletters out of the spam folder.

Everyone should have a welcome series. So let’s talk through the basics of a welcome series, discuss six different types of emails you can send, and figure out what you should include in yours.

*SPONSORED* 📬 How Two Successful Brands Use Litmus to QA, Test, and Stay in the Inbox

Email deliverability is about making sure that your emails land in the inbox instead of the spam or junk folder. You can put time, effort, and money into your email program, but if your emails don’t land in the inbox, all that hard work will be for naught.

And let’s be honest: Deliverability can often be confusing. There are technical steps to implement, and engagement best practices to build into your strategy.

But there’s one more crucial thing that can help you stay out of the spam folder: Testing.

Best-in-class organizations make sure to put their emails through a QA, or quality assurance, phase. Before they send an email — whether it’s going out to 100 readers or 100,000 — they run their emails through a series of tests.

These organizations understand that even if they’ve taken care of the technical steps, and even if their segmentation and engagement is right, a mailbox like Gmail might still mark their email as spam. 

Why? Maybe there’s a broken link in the email. Maybe a bit of code breaks and triggers a spam issue. Maybe the size of the email is too large, so readers click the “Report Spam” button instead of unsubscribing. Maybe the audience doesn’t recognize the sent-from name, resulting in unusually low engagement.

That’s where a tool like Litmus comes in. Their email testing tool allows you to QA every email before it goes live.

In this case study, let’s look at how two brands, Peapod Digital Labs and BoyleSports, use Litmus’s QA tool to make sure their emails are error-free, every time — and that they always stay in the inbox. Dive into the case study here.

📬 How Plan Cash Turned a Newsletter Into a Platform For Financial Literacy

In 2021, Léa Lejeune co-founded Plan Cash, a French-language newsletter to help women invest better. Today, they’ve grown to more than 20,000 subscribers, built out a lineup of paid training courses, and offer 1-to-1 financial consulting.

And this summer, they took an even bigger leap: Taking on investments for Plan Cash itself. (So far, they’ve raised more than €263,000 from readers — the equivalent of about $283,00o U.S.)

So how’d they do it? And what’s next? Lejeune spoke with Marine Slavitch, a journalist at French publisher Médianes, and they graciously allowed us to republish the conversation in English.

🇫🇷 Vous souhaitez lire cet article en Français ? Cliquez-ici.

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What Else I’m Reading

Stories labeled with a 🔑 may require a subscription to read.

Best Practices

  • How can you segment your audience to target the right people with the right content or offer? Automation Ninja’s Lucy Barfoot detailed six strategies that might work for your newsletter.
  • Success with email starts by treating email as a product — and putting a team behind it. I loved this, from Ted Fickes and Future Community, about steps any org can take to invest more in (and get more out of) their email strategy.
  • Alt text matters for accessibility. This guide, from a11y, is a good primer to writing alt text, including specific examples from a few newsletters.
  • If you missed Kickbox’s webinar about deliverability for small publishers, they’ve made the video — as well as a few other tips — available for all.

Tests, Experiments, or Learnings

  • Let’s talk about links for a moment — specifically, how to link within a newsletter. The Verge rolled out a new newsletter, Installer, a few weeks ago. And as Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton noted, they tested out an old-school link format. Instead of hyperlinking the text (like I do here in the Google Doc), they added a little thing at the end of a sentence, like this: (link). As David Pierce, the writer behind the newsletter, told Benton:

“Link designs get screwed up all the time, so it felt useful to have a way to tell people ‘tap or click on this, no matter what it looks like or how it renders, and something good will hopefully happen.’ ”

  • But by the second issue of the newsletter, based on feedback from readers, they’d scrapped that for a new format, involving bolded links, for accessibility reasons.
  • And maybe you’re thinking: Does the link format actually matter for accessibility? The answer, as Allen Pike wrote in this short-but-useful guide to link-related accessibility, is a most definite “yes.”
  • I thought this was really interesting, from Ariyh’s Thomas McKinlay: Research shows that recommendations in the present tense outform those in past tense. If you’ve got testimonials or reviews on your website, you might want to revisit them and see what tense they’re in.
  • I love reading about how people build their newsletters. Kai Brach, who writes the lovely Dense Discovery newsletter, has an unusually DIY process, and wrote a post all about how he codes his newsletter, sells ads, and handles memberships.

Monetization

  • The M+R Benchmarks report for 2023 is out, and it goes into amazing detail about what worked and what didn’t in the non-profit world. One fascinating nugget from their report: December 31st is usually one of the biggest fundraising days of the year. (Lots of people give at the very last minute.) But last year, revenue from the 31st was way down. Was it the result of a change in donor behavior? Or just due to the 31st coming on a Saturday? They’re not sure.
  • Emma Gannon, who writes the newsletter The Hyphen, talked with Charlotte Tobitt of PressGazette about why she stopped writing free editions of her newsletter anymore — her work exists almost entirely behind a paywall.
    • But this isn’t a strategy I’d recommend for everyone! We’ve got two different pieces coming this fall to Inbox Collective about independent writers figuring out what to put behind a paywall and when. One’s an interview with Virginia Sole-Smith, who writes the excellent newsletter Burnt Toast. I’ll share a sneak peak quote here from her, because it sums up my feelings so well:

“The paywall is such a useful tool, but I do see people paywalling too much too soon before they’ve built a community and a list. Then, if everything’s behind the paywall, you have no ability to build the community on the list because people can’t share it.”

  • I love a good birthday or anniversary email — especially if it’s tied to some sort of sale, deal, or fundraising campaign. 99 Newsletter Project’s Cory Brown rounded a few great examples from various newsrooms and non-profits.

Growth

  • Growth in Reverse’s Chenell Basilio took a closer look at Trends.vc, Dru Riley’s newsletter, which has grown to about 58,000 readers and $500,000 in annual revenue. Something that Chenell goes into detail on and is worth learning from: Trends.vc doesn’t monetize in just one way. They offer ads, they offer one-off bundles of trend reports for a low price ($30), and they offer an annual membership ($299/year). All of that allows Riley to maximize the revenue from his newsletter.
  • I’ve been getting lots of questions from readers — and at Dine & Deliver dinners, too — about LinkedIn newsletters. So it’s quite timely that LinkedIn’s Keren Baruch announced a few new LinkedIn newsletter features, including the ability to host multiple newsletters under a single author or brand.
    • Should you build a newsletter on LinkedIn? My general advice: For anyone with a sizable audience (tens of thousands of followers on LinkedIn or more), it might be worth experimenting with the platform. There are still limitations on LinkedIn — you can’t import or export an email list, and there aren’t monetization features yet — but it does offer larger brands or writers the ability to quickly scale a newsletter product to a wide audience.

Content Strategy

  • It’s wonderful to see people experimenting with mobile-friendly formats that get content to readers without an algorithm getting in the way. Email is certainly one of those formats, but for many teams that I talk to outside the U.S., WhatsApp (and other messaging apps) represent a huge opportunity. With that in mind, check out this interview that The Audiencers’ Madeleine White did with Juan Andrés Muñoz, creator of Pamplonews. They’ve grown their presence to 3,000 readers on WhatsApp and are starting to monetize.
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Stuff I Loved This Month

  • Inbox Collective is working on a piece exploring the challenges facing — and tools available to — newsletter editors who have disabilities. If you are a person with a disability who runs a newsletter and have experiences, references, or tools you think could be helpful to others, we may want to talk with you! We especially welcome sources who are blind and/or have international publishing experiences. Please drop Dan a line by Sept. 20 if you are available to talk — dan@inboxcollective.com is the way to get in touch.
  • Heads up: Google News Initiative is accepting applicants for their Pre-Launch Lab, a program supporting early stage entrepreneurs in journalism. It’s completely free — and participants get access to 1-to-1 coaching and lots of other resources. Applications are due Sept. 22, so get those applications in soon! 
  • This post from Jay Clouse really hit home: “How To Keep Going.” Jay’s absolutely right when he says that the most important skill a creator on the internet can have is persistence. The longer you stick around and keep making stuff, the better the chance of a breakthrough.
  • I was delighted that Matt Locke of Formats Unpacked devoted an entire edition to why Not a Newsletter works. Matt pinpointed one reason I love writing in the Google Doc: There’s a social element. As Matt wrote:

“Best of all, Google Docs have that little feature at the top where you can see how many people are viewing at the same time as you. Even though you can’t tell who they are, there is a feeling of being part of a live audience, especially if you click soon after the newsletter is sent out.”

  • That’s spot on. When I first launched the Google Doc, there were often hundreds of people reading it at one time — and because you could see all of the other readers inside the Doc, it offered social proof that what you were reading was valuable. It’s one of the features I’ll miss most in switching away from the Google Doc and over to inboxcollective.com.

Find Your Next Email Job

If you’ve ever emailed me or DMed me to ask, “Can you recommend a great person for this newsletter role?”, I’ve got good news: I absolutely can!

📬 If you’re an employer looking to hire someone for an email role, join the collective.  When you join, you’ll immediately get access to a pool of 70+ curated candidates looking for new jobs in the email space! (I keep adding more folks every month!)

📬 If you’re actively searching for or are open to a conversation about a new job, you can submit your application to the collective here! Once you join the collective, companies can message you directly about openings on their team.

This is a matchmaking service for email roles — and it’s free for everyone. Join today, and let’s get a few of you into amazing new roles in 2023!

Resources for Newsletters

The (Not a) 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 corner of the doc. For years, I closed every edition of Not a Newsletter by highlighting one of these animals. But then I had an idea: What if I commissioned an artist to design new animals just for Not a Newsletter?

So to close out this final edition of Not a Newsletter, I want to spotlight one of these animals in a feature I call… the (Not a) Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month!

Thanks to Anna Kosak for designing this month’s animal: the Corgi!

The Corgi
  • A group of corgis is known as a “wiggle.”
  • Corgi is a combination of two Celtic words, “cor” and “gi,” which together mean “dwarf dog.”
  • Corgis were originally bred as herding dogs — with their short stature, they could easily run under cows in the field.
  • Perhaps the most famous corgi owner was Queen Elizabeth II, who received a corgi named Sue for her 18th birthday. The Queen would go on to own more than 30 corgis in her lifetime. (The corgis even had their own personal chef.)
  • In my corgi research, I learned that Amazon celebrates a Welsh corgi named Rufus, who they consider their first dog employee. His paw clicked the mouse on the launch of several Amazon sites (yes, there’s photo proof), and a building on the Amazon campus now bears his name.
  • It pains me that this 46-second-long YouTube video from The Dodo, titled, “Corgi Butts Compilation Will Brighten Your Day,” has only 469,000 views. That feels too low for such a wonderfully-titled video, right? Together, I believe we can get it to 470,000!

Anyway, the Corgi! That’s your (Not a) Google Docs Anonymous Animal of the Month. 

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That’s all for Not a Newsletter! But don’t miss the new Inbox Collective weekly newsletter, highlighting tips and resources to help you build your best newsletter strategy. Sign up for it here.

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.