Last Friday I joined 402 other folks in New York City for the first Newsletter Conference. It was a brilliantly organized event packed with experience, knowledge and space for networking.
Why go all the way to NYC to spend a day talking about newsletters? Good question.
The best newsletters capture what I call newsletter thinking.
Dan Oshinsky of Inbox Collective, and the day’s emcee, touched on newsletter thinking early on with this:
Email is an owned channel but ownership belongs to audience. The inbox belongs to the reader. We have to earn their trust every day.
Every email, article, page, form, post or advertisement we put out there is a chance to earn or lose trust. Newsletter thinking doesn’t mean forgetting about what you want or what your organization needs from the subscriber. But it does mean seeing the world through the eyes of the subscriber.
The newsletter for everyone is a newsletter for no one.
Know your audience and talk with them directly. Don’t write for everyone who might possibly in some theoretical way be interested in your topic. I know voice is hard for nonprofit organizations. But get over it. You have something important to say so say it.
People trust people. Not brands.
The “creator economy” (as overhyped as it may feel at times) is living proof of this. Stop sending faceless organizational emails. Put a name to your newsletter. Put people in your content – and let them tell a story.
View growth from the subscriber’s perspective.
People with a clear sense of what they’re subscribing to are your best prospects. Stop pre-checking subscription boxes at the bottom of unrelated forms. Stop hiding unsubscribe links. People know how emails. Trust them to subscribe when they want to subscribe.
Let people know you see them.
Ashley Hoffman (Philadelphia Inquirer) and S. Mitra Kalita (EpicenterNYC and URL Media) talked about the power of newsletters to reach audiences underserved (or completely ignored) by national media and shrinking local news coverage. A news or nonprofit organization can rapidly (and relatively inexpensively) stand up a newsletter, do audience research, market and test a product, and deliver useful content.
There’s a lesson here for local and small to mid-sized nonprofits who can reach people largely underserved by national nonprofits with boring or unrelatable content and email programs.
Co-registration is big. And maybe bad?
If you’ve ever subscribed to a newsletter (or signed a petition) and been presented with a chance to subscribe to 3-5 other newsletters or email lists – that’s co-registration. It’s a common list building tactic. And one that nonprofits have used for years (decades!).
Co-registration is common in newsletter list-building. The problem is people end up on lists they don’t know or care about.
Many newsletter operators will remove these subscribers after a few weeks if they aren’t engaging.
Nonprofits are rarely willing to cut disengaged subscribers. I suspect that variations on co-registration have played a role in building large zombie lists.
Riches in niches.
The internet is full of communities of people who care about specific topics. Look for your audience in specific subreddits, the IG audience of topical creators and influencers, YouTube channels and discords. Aine Stapleton of International Intrigue described growing their newsletter by working with meme channels on Instagram. “It’s where our audience is,” she said while pointing out that everyone in the audience spends time on IG meme channels (yes, even you in the back). People who hear about a newsletter on a meme channel will look it up and subscribe.
Reply to this email.
Ask new subscribers to reply to your welcome email. Better yet, give them a reason to reply. Ask a question. Offer something. Inbox placement and deliverability (not to mention relationship building) improves with, you know, actual engagement.
Ask questions.
You need first party data to understand your audience, why they subscribe, why the respond, why they donate, and what they need. Stop relying on 47 question annual surveys. Many (most?) newsletters are taking new subscribers to a short survey. See the examples below from Fintech is Femme and International Intrigue.
Don’t be afraid of open-ended questions. ChatGPT is great for summarizing responses.
Ask little questions in newsletters. A one-question survey – a question of the day – could become a feature, not a burden.
Blow up your metrics.
Opens and clicks aren’t telling you what you need to know. Do you want people to read your newsletter? If yes then put valuable content in the newsletter. Give it editorial meaning. And don’t measure value by clicks out. If your newsletter is just a marketing tool to transport people to a web page then don’t be surprised if people stop opening your newsletter.
Help readers be smart.
It’s easy to find breaking news. It’s hard to understand what’s actually important. People subscribe because they trust you to help them learn and be smarter. Lean into that.
Newsletter thinking means being interesting (even entertaining). It means knowing and respecting your audience. Newsletter thinking will find you testing ways to reach new audiences and dumping inactive email addresses so that you’re successfully finding new people who want to subscribe.
Newsletter thinking also means taking seriously the relationship between you, your email and the reader. That relationship has real value. The subscriber wants to root for you. Give them reasons to stick with you.