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Not a Newsletter

Not a Newsletter: September + October 2020

Welcome to the September/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 a new edition goes live!

This month’s doc is presented by Media Mobilize, an ad network that drives revenue through native ads in newsletters and podcasts. This month, in partnership with Media Mobilize, we’ve put together the first-ever Not a Newsletter Beginner’s Guide to Selling Newsletter Ads. How do you price a native ad? Which metrics matter most to advertisers? We cover all that, and more, in this guide. I hope it helps!

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 the full archive at this link.

-Dan 

(Email / Twitter / LinkedIn)

What an inbox full of political campaign emails probably looks like
Randall Munroe / xkcd.com

This Month in Email Headlines

**SPONSORED** Newsletter Spotlight, presented by Media Mobilize

At least once a week, I get this question in my inbox from a reader: “We’re thinking about selling native advertising in our newsletter. How should we price it?”

It’s a great question, and one I posed to the team at Media Mobilize. They help sell native ads in hundreds of newsletters worldwide, including leading brands like Girls’ Night In and 6AM City, so they know this space as well as anyone. They dug through their data and came back with a few recommendations — not just for CPMs, but also for getting those most out of these native placements. In partnership with Media Mobilize, we’ve put together the first-ever Not a Newsletter Beginner’s Guide to Selling Newsletter Ads.

Why native ads? Do those actually drive more revenue than programmatic ads?

Setting up programmatic ads is pretty easy — usually just a matter of plugging some code into your newsletter and turning the unit on. But if you’re running programmatic ads, you’re leaving money on the table. Media Mobilize’s research has found that you’re making about ~$0.50 CPM with programmatic units. (For those who might not know: CPM refers to the cost you’d charge an advertiser to reach a thousand readers.) But the ad networks typically decide what gets seen, not the publisher, and readers often tire of these banner ads. It’s the same stuff that they’re seeing across the web, and these ads rarely perform well.

So how much more revenue could I drive with native ads?

The short answer: A lot more.

Industry wide, Media Mobilize sees a wide range of rates — anywhere from $5 to $30 CPMs, depending on the brand, the audience you’re reaching, and the quality of the content.

Why are native spots so much more effective?

Because it feels less like an ad and more like a recommendation from a person or a brand you like. You get to control the content, the tone, and the voice. You get to integrate it into your newsletter in a way that makes the content feel useful for a reader. Done well, readers actually get value from a native ad, and discover new things they might not otherwise find. Based on dozens of conversations with brands that put native ads in their newsletters, I can tell you that the newsletters that succeed with native ads find that their readers actually like the advertising in their emails, and advertisers want to build long-term relationships with those publishers to continue to drive results for them.

What else should I keep in mind when selling native ads?

When I asked the team at Media Mobilize this, they came back with three questions of their own:

  1. How much editorial involvement is there in the ad? Let’s say you’re selling a daily newsletter, and readers have a high level of trust with the writer of that newsletter. And let’s say that writer is also the one writing the ad and recommending the product. That sort of recommendation usually leads to a high conversion rate, and might justify a higher CPM because the ad also feels like an endorsement.

To give you a real-life example: Right now, you’re reading a native ad from a person you (hopefully) trust, and the ad was produced by that person. (FWIW: This was — I wrote every word.) When that person (me) makes the recommendation — in this case, that you should set up a call with Media Mobilize to see if they can drive more revenue for you — it hopefully carries additional weight for you, the reader. (I’ll end this bit of meta commentary here, but you get the idea.)

  1. How engaged are your readers? If you see high levels of engagement — opens, clicks, replies to the newsletter, etc. — that typically leads to higher engagement with the ads, and allows you to charge higher CPMs.
  2. How frequently are you running ads in your newsletter? Cadence plays a key role here. If you’re just starting to sell a daily newsletter, you’ve got lots of ad space to fill, and might want to lower your CPMs. If you’re selling a weekly newsletter, you have limited space, and can charge higher rates. You also want to think about the quality of the advertisers you’d be including. This is something I think Media Mobilize does well with their partners. They tend to fill ad placements with reputable brands, like Warby Parker, who readers actually like to hear from. That leads to higher engagement and reduces the risk that readers might get tired of the ads they’re seeing.

How many subscribers does a newsletter need to start selling ads?

For Media Mobilize, they say that they see the best returns for their partners when they reach ~50,000 unique opens per newsletter. Notice that I mentioned opens, not subscribers — list size isn’t as important as subscriber engagement.

Their team recommends starting around $10-$15 CPMs because it’s not too high and not too low, so you de-risk having any partners be really unhappy while also capturing the upside if it does go well — those partners might quickly become repeat customers. Run some tests with a few advertisers to see how they perform, and get some feedback from the brands to see if they were satisfied with the results. Then you can adjust your pricing accordingly based on the feedback you get.

I’ll also mention here: You can start running native ads even if your newsletter hasn’t hit that 50k threshold, and even if you don’t have a dedicated sales team. I’d encourage you to reach out to Media Mobilize — they sell and place ads in newsletters like yours, and could help you drive revenue and better understand where you should be setting your rates. I’ve seen them work well as a standalone sales team, and also as a partner to fill additional native ad spots. 

What metrics matter most to advertisers?

Before you sell your advertising, make sure you have basic numbers: Open rate, click-to-open rate, list size. Bring some demographic data to the table: Is your list more male or female? How old are your readers? Where do they live? This is data you may be able to get from your ESP or via Google Analytics. (These GA dashboards can help with that.)

Then start thinking about conversions from the native ad. Most brands won’t spend just for awareness — as the Media Mobilize team reminded me, the “Mad Men” days of spending huge money just to get your name out into the world are over. Today’s advertisers like to see results, be it traffic, leads, or conversions (how many readers clicked through and converted on the offer in your newsletter?).

Remember: These brands will have their own metric in mind to measure success — clicks, or for the direct response marketers, cost per acquisition (CPA). For premium brands, they may be making hundreds of dollars off a single customer, so they’re willing to spend a good bit to acquire a new customer. Media Mobilize’s advice from working with these types of advertisers: If you see really high conversion rates on your native ads, you’ll be able to charge much higher CPMs in the long run.

Are there any other best practices I should be thinking about before I start selling native ads?

  • Your native placements really should look native. Think about how to integrate them in a way that makes them look sharp — but not too obtrusive. But disclosure is also important and legally required when there is an advertisement.
  • Don’t oversell the product. The more genuine the recommendation, the better! (In this case: I have several clients who work with Media Mobilize, and like the work they’ve done for them. It makes it pretty easy for me to recommend Media Mobilize here in the Google Doc!)
  • Make sure you’re thinking about the fit between your audience and your advertiser. As much as I’d love to be able to sell Warby Parker glasses in Not a Newsletter, I don’t think it’d be a great fit for what I do here. Be mindful of your audience, and try to introduce them to advertisers who will serve that audience well.
  • Keep your fill rate in mind. If you’ve got a daily product — or even several daily products — your readers might grow fatigued with seeing the same ads day after day. Don’t run an ad just to run it. And remember: There are lots of ways to use your newsletter to drive revenue, and you can use those native spots for other purposes, like driving a subscription or getting readers to turn out for an event.
  • Always ask for feedback from your advertiser. The more questions you ask, the more you’ll learn about what works and what your advertisers value. Be smart about your ads — you should still be testing and learning to figure out how to make your native ads even more useful for both advertisers and readers.

Lastly, try to match your audience with premium brands. I think Media Mobilize really does a great job of bringing great advertisers, like quip and Bombas, to their newsletter partners, and the quality of the advertiser typically leaders to stronger results — and increased revenue.

This month’s Not a Newsletter is presented by Media Mobilize, an ad network that drives revenue through native ads in newsletters and podcasts. Media Mobilize work with brands like Outside Magazine and The Infatuation to take the work out of selling and placing sponsored units. They also make it easy to place and track advertising, so you can focus on content and growth while letting Media Mobilize deliver results. Interested in talking with Media Mobilize about how they can help your business? Set up a call with them today.

For Your Reading List

  • This piece in WIRED UK on newsletters, by Oliver Franklin-Wallis, is one of the best I’ve seen so far on where newsletters — in particular, paid newsletters — are going. I talked with Oliver at length for the piece, but wanted to highlight a few things:
    • 2020’s the year that paid newsletters really made the leap into the mainstream, and Substack deserves the lion’s share of the credit for that. But if you pulled a list of the 10 biggest emails written by writers and creators (in terms of annual revenue), none would be on Substack.
    • That’s not to say that Substack’s failing here. (It isn’t — they’re doing phenomenally well and have been a force for good in the newsletter space!) But reporters, writers, and creators need to start thinking beyond paid newsletters.
    • Let me talk about Not a Newsletter for a moment. I have no plans to turn this Google Doc into a paid product — I don’t think it’s the right move for the work I do through Inbox Collective. (And it would affect my ability to help a broader audience of readers, like you!) So to give you a sense of where Not a Newsletter is heading:
      • Consulting is still my no. 1 driver of revenue.
      • Paid talks are no. 2.
      • Advertising in the Google Doc is no. 3.
    • But even that’s not enough, I think, to build a stable long-term business. It’s why I’m starting to explore affiliate content, and mapping out what a series of paid courses would look like for my readers. (Other things that might be on the roadmap one day: Workshops or classes, a membership program, or even new content channels.)
    • Too many times, the journalism world has made the mistake of relying on a single stream of revenue for success. We shouldn’t make that mistake again with newsletters. There is so much potential for newsletters, but all of us need to be thinking about how we can continue to diversify our revenue as we build our audiences. This won’t be easy to do — but I do think it’s something that can be done! As always, I’m optimistic about the future of email, even if I do think the backlash (“Email is dead!”, “Paid newsletters are over!”, etc.) is coming soon.
  • A few more links about creators and newsletters, before we move on:
  • The Membership Puzzle Project released this fantastic, incredibly-detailed guide to building a membership strategy. It talks through each part of the process, and includes detailed case studies. You could spend hours digging through it. (In fact, you should!) I contributed just a tiny bit to the newsletter portion of the guide, but all credit is due to the MPP team for making something that’s so wildly useful.
  • Kayleigh Barber of Digiday wrote about Courses — those automated series of newsletters designed to teach you a new skill, habit, or lesson. I’m so bullish on these — they’re something that most newsrooms should be thinking about as they grow their newsletter programs.
    • A few new Courses I wanted to make sure you saw:
      • WBUR launched their 7-Day Election Guide to help voters in Massachusetts prepare for Election Day. It’s a fabulous Course, and one that I expect many newsrooms will consider using as a template for future elections!
      • Oregon Public Broadcasting launched a Course around the fight that took place over the future of forests back in the 1990s. It’s called “Timber Wars,” and it’s tied to a podcast of the same name.
      • Clean Plates launched a 10-day Course called “Your Wellness Tune-Up.” It’s a fascinating one because it’s not just a useful series — it also serves as a lead magnet for a paid Course of theirs.
      • Here’s something that should make your ears perk up: The Open Notebook got $48,000 in grant money (!!!) to launch three Courses, all geared towards helping science journalists. Yes, these are products you might be able to get grants to launch!
      • Here’s a Course from Blogging for Devs about building an audience for your content. (And they even shared lessons learned from their launch.)
      • Another great one, from Trusting News, is a 10-day Course delivered exclusively via SMS to help newsrooms earn trust with readers. (I think this is the first I’ve seen of these that’s text-only — very cool!)
        • Full disclosure here: WBUR, Clean Plates, and The Open Notebook are all teams I work with through Inbox Collective.
      • Point is: It’s fantastic to see more newsrooms investing in these products. As always, if you have questions or want to chat about Courses, dan@inboxcollective.com is the email — I’m happy to talk!
  • Several local newsrooms, like the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis, have been quietly expanding into regional markets (in the Star-Tribune’s case, that means Duluth, MN) through newsletters in those cities. But now things are going to get really interesting, as Axios — with 1.4 million unique email subscribers, and a newsletter business that drives more than half of its revenue — has announced that it’s going to launch newsletters in local markets like Minneapolis. Safe to say that I’ll be keeping an eye on all of this as we move into 2021.
  • A few links, all related to paid acquisition, caught my eye:
    • Andrew Wilkinson, who owns several prominent digital businesses, including Dribbble, talked about launching a newsletter to cover his hometown in British Columbia, Canada. He spent about $200,000 in Facebook ads (I confirmed with Andrew that’s in Canadian dollars — that’s about $150k USD) to build an audience from nothing to about 40,000 subscribers.
    • Austin Rief, co-founder of Morning Brew, wrote about how important paid acquisition has been in getting their newsletter audience to a million daily unique opens.
    • Jacie deHoop of the (excellent) sports newsletter The Gist talked with The Knowhow’s Wing Sze Tang about their growth, which was aided by a grant that allowed them to spend $50k on Facebook ads for their newsletter.
      • So here’s the question you might be wondering: Is this much paid acquisition normal?
      • Here’s what I can tell you: Some of these numbers are eye-popping, but many leading digital publishers spend six figures per month to acquire new email subscribers. It’s not something people like to brag about — but for publishers that are growing online, it’s part of the cost of doing business.
      • Of course, it is possible to grow without paid acquisition. But having that money in the bank to grow certainly does help accelerate things. If you’re thinking about spending money to grow your lists, I’ve got a few tips in my deck of 25 growth opportunities.
        • In those slides, I talk about the importance of understanding the lifetime value (or CLV) of an email subscriber. The team at Paved built a simple calculator to help you figure out your CLV. Before you spend a dollar on paid acquisition, you should know your CLV.
      • While we’re on the topic of paid acquisition: Here are a few tips from Keywee’s Inbar Yagur about how to write copy for paid campaigns on Facebook.
      • And Andrew Hutchinson of Social Media Today shares some big news: Facebook’s removing the rules about text on images in ads. (If you’ve run Facebook ads before, you’ll be thrilled by this development. If you haven’t, you’re probably scratching your head — but I promise that it’s a pretty big deal!)
  • I’ve gotten a few questions recently about internal company emails. It’s still something I’m learning more about, but I did want to share this resource from Will Cannon of Chamaileon with tips for sending good emails to keep your colleagues informed
  • This, from Dana E. Neuts of Subscription Insider, has my attention: A paid daily briefing called the The New Paper, which is delivered daily by text message, launched earlier this year, and is up to 7,000 subscribers and $400,000 in annualized recurring revenue. For a startup not backed by a major news organization, that’s very, very impressive.
    • One more text-message success story here, from NJ.com, about how they used Subtext to quickly grow an audience interested in back-to-school news.
  • Should you prioritize HTML or plain text emails? Litmus’s Magan Le talked with email experts about the pluses and minuses of each. 
    • For my money, I think the answer is “both.” Lots of emails — onboarding emails in particular — work best when they’re as simple as possible. But when you’ve really got something big to announce, an HTML email with a great design works really nicely.
  • For folks who are thinking about moving their newsletters over to a dedicated IP, I’d suggest checking out this post from Spam Resource’s Al Iverson.
  • Some interviews worth checking out:
  • Media Voices’s Esther Kezia Thorpe shared a few lessons from starting a daily newsletter. She touches on the importance of really talking with readers, of asking questions and responding. I can’t say this enough: Email is about relationships. The more you focus on that 1-to-1 conversation, the better your email program will do in the long run.
  • Good stuff here from Simon Owens about how he saw a 30% jump in paid subscriptions to his newsletter by running an NPR-style pledge drive.
    • A few other success stories involving email that I wanted to share: Positive news from Quartz in the U.S., Spain’s El Diario, and Switzerland’s Heidi.news.
  • If you missed Litmus Live, don’t worry — the team at Taxi for Email compiled daily recaps of their learnings from the week.
  • Something I’ve seen first-hand in my time at Inbox Collective is how far ahead Scandanavian publishers are compared to newsrooms in the rest of the world. So while this story from Digiday’s Lucinda Southern isn’t about email, it’s worth a read anyway: “To grow revenue, Schibsted built its own podcast platform.” 
  • At Editor & Publisher, Matt DeRienzo talked about the importance of “known users” — basically, turning anonymous readers into readers you know a little about (you have their name, their email address, etc.). In conversations with others in the media space, “known users” is one of those metrics that’s coming up more and more, and Matt’s column has some good advice about why prioritizing those relationships is so crucial.
  • Great advice from here from Tobias van Schneider about writing good UX copy for buttons and links. The right copy could be the difference between driving a sale or a newsletter sign-up — or not.
  • Also on the note of copywriting: Check out these 10 tips from Eddie Shleyner of Very Good Copy, all inspired by ad legend David Ogilvy.
  • Two new-ish email podcasts I wanted to recommend:
    • Elliot Ross, who runs ActionRocket and Taxi for Email, launched EmailTalk, a podcast where he talks with experts about everything from email accessibility to privacy in the inbox. It’s great, and I’d recommend you add it to whatever you use to listen to podcasts.
    • And if you’re especially interested in deliverability, make sure you subscribe to Deliverability Defined, a podcast hosted by ConvertKit’s deliverability experts Alyssa Dulin and Melissa Lambert. Their recent episode about running your own deliverability audit is excellent.
  • Also on the note of deliverability: Will Boyd of SendGrid wrote about five ways to check your sender reputation. This is something I’d absolutely encourage all of you to do every few months, particularly if you’re sending emails daily.
    • And if you’re not running regular reactivation campaigns to win back your readers, you should! IMPACT’s Ramona Sukhraj details a few examples — mostly from eCommerce brands — about ways to win back those readers.
  • MailPoet’s Dianna Gunn wrote about some basic dos and don’ts when asking readers for feedback through a survey. One great piece of advice: Be direct with your calls to action. (Or to really simplify things: Make sure you’re asking something to learn something.)
  • Litmus released their Fall 2020 State of Email Report. Lots of useful stuff in here, but one thing that I wanted to highlight: 50% of marketers surveyed by Litmus say they have no plans to use interactive elements, including simple elements like GIFs, or more complicated features like AMP, any time soon in their emails.
    • I think that’s a mistake, and it’s why I wanted to share this post, from Kelly Shetron of the Email Design blog, about why GIFs can be useful in email — particularly when you’re trying to drive a reader to take a specific action.

Stuff I Loved This Month

  • Big shout-out to Vox Media, which released Brainery — a free, on-demand series of classes led by Vox staffers to teach you everything from marketing strategy to the basics of user experience. It’s a fantastic resource for individuals looking to level up their skills.
  • Google News Initiative is rolling out a new, free program to help small and mid-size publishers accelerate their growth. It’s so exciting to see programs like these becoming available to all, and I’d encourage any publisher to check out their resources.
  • And congrats to the team behind The News Product Alliance, a new community for people who work in, well, the news + product space. Becca Aaronson, formerly of Chalkbeat and The Texas Tribune, explained why she’s leaving her job to help launch this important initiative.
  • ONA 2020 is underway and available to all. There are a few sessions on newsletters, too — do check those out!
    • One of those sessions is being hosted by Jaqueline Boltik of YellowBrim and Kim Bode of the Los Angeles Times. If you have five minutes to take their survey about newsletter workflows, please do! I’ll make sure to share some results in the next Not a Newsletter.
  • On Knak, Tania Blake interviewed some amazing women in the email space. Learn from them, and do follow them on their social platforms!
  • I keep thinking back to the advice Casey Newton gave me about launching a great newsletter: Find a topic, and give it a twist. With that in mind, here’s a fantastic example from Tabatha Leggett, a former BuzzFeed colleague of mine. She decided to launch a newsletter that recommends new books to readers every week. But here’s the twist: Every week, those recommendations come from a new country. (So far, she’s covered Japan, the Netherlands, Egypt, Norway, and Argentina. Only 190 countries to go!)
  • Stephanie Griffith built a tool called Email Preview to help you save emails for later. Just upload the HTML, URL, or the EML file, and you can download them as a .jpg or .png. Simple!
  • I wanted to make sure I mentioned a Not a Newsletter reader, Terry Godier. He’s done some cool stuff in his career — working on SEO at Viacom, building out the User Insights product, launching a podcast with poker legend Annie Duke — and he’s back with a new paid product, Growth Library. If you work in the marketing space and are in charge of strategy — or just have the bandwidth to do cool things to grow your audience — you’ll want to give Growth Library Pro a look.
  • Brian Krebs wrote about an email oddity I’ve never heard of before: Random internet users accidentally using his real Gmail email address as their two-factor email address. It’s a random but wild story.
  • Paul Metcalfe put together a nice, evergreen list of email resources on a site called Letterstack. I love the way he’s laid this out, and I’ll probably try something similar for the Not a Newsletter archives (which are getting a little unwieldy, tbh) in the not-too-distant future.

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 anonymous pumpkin

I’ll never understand why Google Docs includes the pumpkin — a form of winter squash closely related to their zucchini — in its list of anonymous animals. But it does, and we’re closing in on Halloween, so if there was ever a time to mention it, it’s here and now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, with considerable regret, a few things you should know about the pumpkin:

Anyway, the Pumpkin! 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.