Two Things To Know Before Launching Your Newsletter

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There’s a misconception that if you run a newsletter, you need to have everything figured out at the start. If you know what your business model will look like, or if you’ve got a clear growth strategy, that’s great — it’ll serve you well as you build.

But what do you actually need to know on Day 1? I’d argue that you really only need to know two things:

• Who your audience is
• What your newsletter will do to bring value to that audience

Behind every successful newsletter are clear answers to those two questions. (And behind every struggling newsletter is an operator who hasn’t figured out the answer to one — or both — of these questions.)

Everything else, from content strategy to monetization, can be figured out later. But these two questions, I’ve found, need answers right from the start.

So, let’s take a look at both topics, and then I’ll share a positioning document to help you think through these questions for your newsletter.

Understanding your audience

Here’s a question that many newsletter operators answer incorrectly: Who do you write this newsletter for?

Often, when I ask readers or clients that, they’ll respond with the optimistic answer: Everyone!

But I’ve found that the newsletter that’s written for “everyone” is usually for no one.

I’ve sent newsletters that went out to a handful of people, and I’ve sent newsletters that went to millions of readers, but the best newsletters I’ve written are the ones that feel like they’re written for a really specific person.

Or as veteran newsletter producer CJ Chilvers put it:

You are not a broadcaster. Crowds are not gathering around a single screen to read your email. 

Write to one reader.

When I first started writing newsletters, I always thought about two or three actual people who I knew read every edition. Every time I sat down to write the newsletter, I thought: Would these people like the stories I was sharing that day? Was I writing to them in the same voice I’d use if we were having an actual conversation? Did I put anything into the newsletter that might annoy them or offend them?

My mother was one of my earliest newsletter readers. I thought about her every time I sent an issue. If I missed the mark with a newsletter, I knew my mother would be on the phone to complain.

“Daniel,” she’d say, “I didn’t like what I saw in my newsletter.”

That was always the phrase: “My newsletter” — never “your newsletter,” even though I sent it and even though it had gone out to far more people than just her. Her choice of words was no accident: Readers are pretty territorial when it comes to their inboxes. After all, it’s their space. I’ve said this before: The inbox is a digital living room. Readers decide who they let in and who they kick out. So it’s up to you to earn your place in their inbox, and the best way to do that is to write something that feels like it was written just for them.

To do that, start by clearly defining your ideal reader. These questions might help you better define them:

• What do they care about? 
• Where do they live? 
• Where do they work?
• What are they motivated by?
• What are they inspired by?
• What do they like? (Besides your newsletter, of course.)

One of my favorite examples of a newsletter with a clear audience is TheSkimm. I first learned about it back in 2013 when a handful of friends in New York had recommended it to me. I found it interesting that the friends who recommended it all had a lot in common: They were always women, typically in intense jobs like (finance or medicine). They told me that they liked the voice of the newsletter — “It’s like a friend I trust” — and that it helped them stay informed even though they didn’t have a lot of time to read the news.

That wasn’t an accident. TheSkimm launched with exactly this type of reader in mind — women, often in their 20s and 30s, who had a college degree and who wanted to be informed but who didn’t always have the time to read or who were put off by the tone of major news outlets. They wanted to be in the know but wanted the news to sound a little more like the conversations from their group chat.

You could even see a bit of the ideal Skimm reader in their original logo.

Were there Skimm readers who weren’t college grads, or who didn’t live in major cities, or who were men? Absolutely. Their newsletter has grown to reach millions of readers every day — it’s expanded far past that original ideal reader. But at the start, they were hyper-focused on delivering the right product for their specific audience. Every newsletter needs that type of audience focus in the early days.

If you can identify who your readers are, then you can start to think about the next part of the process: figuring out what value you can bring to that reader every time you send a newsletter.

Identifying the value of your newsletter

Everyone who launches a newsletter fights against the same problem: Email, for as useful and powerful as it is, isn’t exactly beloved by the general public.

Most of your readers are used to getting unwanted email. If they’re going to add something new to their inbox, it better be something truly worth reading. So it’s up to you to convince them why your emails are actually worth making time for.

The best newsletter operators think about the specific value that they bring to every send. You’ll see people refer to this value in different ways. Sometimes, they call it Jobs to be Done, or audience needs, or user needs. To me, they’re all ways of talking about the same idea: How can you, as the creator behind a newsletter, make decisions based entirely on what will best serve your audience? (For simplicity’s sake, from here on out, I’m going to refer to this concept as “jobs.”)

The job is what the newsletter does for the reader. Look in your inbox, and you’ll find lots of newsletters that aren’t built around the needs of their readers — they’re built around what the sender wants to promote. When I work with news organizations, for instance, I’ll often start by looking more closely at their daily newsletter. “What does this newsletter do for the reader?” I’ll ask. Typically, the reply comes: “Oh, that’s simple — it’s a way to get readers back to our website so they hit the paywall.”

“But that’s what it does for you, the publisher,” I’ll say. “We can’t run a pop-up on your website that says, ‘Sign up for our newsletter — it’s the best way to get back to our website and get a message to subscribe!’ We’ve got to tell them why they should make time for this. Why should someone make time for this particular newsletter in their inbox?”

That’s when we typically start looking at the different jobs of newsletters.

The five categories of jobs

When I talk about newsletters, I typically address five big categories of jobs:

• Education
• Connection
• Engagement
• Action
• Entertainment

But it’s not enough to say that your newsletter seeks to educate readers and then call it a day. You’ve got to go deeper. 

To understand why, let’s take a look at how a few actual newsletters use jobs in their newsletters. Take these three daily newsletters: Axios AM, Tangle, and The Flip Side. All three talk about daily news and politics in the U.S. — but each does a very different job for the audience.

Axios AM is a newsletter built around explaining the basics to readers. Every issue covers a handful of topics, with a few notes and bullet points for each. You won’t be an expert on any one topic after reading it, but you’ll leave each issue with a high-level understanding of what’s going on in the news. Axios writes for the busy professional who wants to quickly catch up on what’s happening, and their newsletter does a good job of exactly that.

Tangle also covers the news of the day — but in a very different way. It’s written by Issac Saul, who goes in-depth on one main issue each day, taking complicated topics and synthesizing reporting and research to help you understand that big issue in great detail. If you’re looking for a newsletter that delivers all the news you need in five minutes or less, this isn’t it. This is for someone who wants to dive into a new topic every day.

Lastly, let’s look at The Flip Side. With each issue, they assume that you’ve already read a little about the big story of the day. They don’t try to tell you what’s happened. Instead, they pull perspectives from the political left and right to help you understand how people on both sides of the aisle talk about the issue. The goal is to inform, yes, but also to amplify voices you might not otherwise see on the channels (broadcast, digital, social media) you check daily.

All three seek to inform, but one explains the basics, one goes in-depth, and one amplifies voices. Each of these is a specific job.

And that matters. Imagine, for a moment, that you saw three promotions, side-by-side, for these three newsletters, but they’d gone with a surface-level description of their product: “Stay informed with our newsletter.” That’s an accurate description — all three do seek to inform — but they don’t really capture the true value of what each of them does. But by drilling down to the core job, they can better explain why you’d want to make time for their newsletter.

Plus, understanding their job helps with design. If you know what your newsletter needs to do, then you can adapt the format of your newsletter to fit that job. Axios, for instance, uses lots of bulleted items and short paragraphs to make the newsletter easy to skim. Tangle gives you an estimated read time at the start of the newsletter so you know what kind of commitment you need to make to read that day’s email. The Flip Side uses a two-column format — views from the political left on the left column and those from the right on the right — to make it easy to find the voices you might be missing.

Specific types of jobs

Axios AM, Tangle, and The Flip Side are proof that you don’t want to settle for those big umbrella categories — you need to figure out the specific jobs underneath them that your newsletter might do. Here are a few ideas for each category:

Education

• Be informed
• Be the first to know
• Get the inside scoop
• Get updates about local happenings + industries
• Be aware
• Get expert analysis
• Explain the basics
• Identify trends
• Go in-depth
• Learn something new
• Champion key issues
• Get advice or help

Connection

• Take part in your community
• Feel a sense of belonging or pride in your community
• Amplify voices
• Find something to share with your network
• Help readers feel a specific emotion
• Highlight the people or organizations making a difference in your community

Engage

• Start a debate
• Start a conversation
• Share a new perspective
• Challenge assumptions

Action

• Try something new
• Get involved in your community
• Create impact
• Find something to purchase
• Overcome an obstacle
• Save time
• Make money

Entertainment

• Get a good deal or save money
• Be a trendsetter
• Discover something you’d otherwise miss
• Help readers dive into something they’re passionate about

That’s not a comprehensive list — just a starting point for some common jobs that I see in newsletters. Often, when I workshop these with clients, we’ll come up with brand-new jobs that are completely unique to their newsletter, and that’s great! If you can identify unique ways that your newsletter provides value for readers, you’re probably building a pretty valuable product.

(And before we move on, the jobs framework I’ve provided here is far from the only one. I also love this model, published by Dmitry Shishkin and SmartOcto, which breaks things down into just four big categories — know something, do something, feel something, and understand something — with different jobs underneath them.)

Deploying these jobs within a newsletter

One interesting thing about this framework is that a newsletter can have multiple jobs, and each job might be connected to a specific section. Take the daily newsletter from WBUR in Boston. (Full transparency: They’ve been a longtime Inbox Collective client.) 

Their daily newsletter, WBUR Today, leads off with a long introduction about what’s happening locally, recapping news from a city council meeting or making sure readers know about road closures. The job: Make sure readers are aware of key local news.

Then, they highlight a handful of stories they think you’ll want to make time for. Often, these are stories you might have otherwise missed on their site. The job: Help readers discover something new.

They also boost a feel-good story from the Boston area. The job: Make sure readers feel proud of their community.

Finally, each issue closes with a link to something funny or odd that’s trending on Boston social media. The job: Entertain a reader.

The newsletter has four very different jobs, and each gets its own section.

How to know that you’ve got the right job for your newsletter

You’ve got the job (or jobs) of your newsletter clearly identified when you can explain your newsletter in a single sentence. Try it now, and fill in the blanks: “I write the _________  newsletter and it _________ for readers.”

If it takes a few sentences — or longer — to explain your newsletter, you probably haven’t figured out the core job of your newsletter just yet. But don’t panic!

Here’s something you can do to identify the right job: If you have a newsletter audience already, survey them and see what they say about your newsletter. Ask them what they value or why they make time for it — either in multiple-choice format, with several answers pre-written, or as an open-ended question. If you hear consistent feedback from readers about why they like your newsletter, that’s the job you should emphasize.

Here’s a good example of this: In 2022, Emily Goligoski, then the executive director of audience research at The Atlantic, detailed how that publication came up with what they called the five core needs of their users:

Here’s how we collected these needs: Our team at The Atlantic conducts survey and interview-based research with current, prospective, and former subscribers, as well as with people in the U.S. and in other countries who listen to Atlantic podcasts and narrated articles. Among other topics, we ask research participants what makes our coverage unique, whether that means worth sharing, paying for, or vehemently disagreeing with….

We’ve gathered five research-backed, time-proven reasons that individual readers and listeners look to our journalism:

• Give me deeper clarity & context
• Help me discover new ideas
• Challenge my assumptions
• Let me take a meaningful break
• Introduce me to writers at the top of their craft

Once they understood those five key jobs, they could identify ways to build them into their newsletters and use them to better promote their newsletters to new readers.

If you haven’t launched your newsletter yet, you probably don’t have an audience you can survey to get feedback. There’s still an option here: You can ask potential readers or friends if you can talk with them about the newsletter you plan to build. From these conversations, see if you can identify a few clear reasons why they would want to make space for the newsletter, and then test out those ideas as you launch your newsletter.

One more thing: The job of your newsletter may change over time, and that’s OK! As your newsletter grows and as the audience changes, you may find that what you need to deliver to readers in the future is different from what you need to deliver today. Smart newsletter operators regularly re-evaluate their product and make changes, and you should, too.

Working through audience and job for your newsletter

When I work with clients to figure out the audience and job for their newsletter, I like to start with this worksheet — it distills everything in this guide down to a few tasks for you to do. This was a worksheet that Bloomberg’s Megan Hess first shared with me several years ago, and I’ve adapted and added to it over the years. Use it to think through these questions and plan out the next steps for your newsletter.

I hope it helps you, too, as you figure out how to answer these big questions that shape your newsletter.

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The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are made possible thanks to the generous support of our winter sponsor, beehiiv. They’re an all-in-one newsletter suite with built-in growth tools, customizable templates, and best-in-class analytics that actually move the needle. If you want to start a newsletter or are looking to grow your existing email list, try beehiiv today.