Prologue

A few weeks ago Zoom was glitchy and my all-remote team decided to meet using Slack for our video meeting.

You should have heard the groaning.

It was unbearable.

Everything was in a different place.

Like when you drive someone else’s car and you keep washing the windshield instead of using the turn signal.

We were all a little dramatic about it.

Me, especially.

I like to think I’m more funny than annoying, but I’ll leave that to my co-workers to decide.

Anyway, we pushed through the meeting, but when we next met, on Zoom, it was refreshing to have everything where it was “supposed” to be.

It’s the concept of a “lived-in digital experience.”

This is something I was introduced to by my CEO before I came on staff at Simple Focus Software.

He’d shared this video of Patrick McNeely, VP of Operations at Simple Focus—the agency is different from the software company, but we share a CEO and ideas—explaining how designers should strive to create digital experiences that mimic life experiences.

He uses a pair of well-worn jeans as an example.

You’ve lived in them.

The threads are bare in places that reflect a certain movement you’ve made in them over and over.

And it’s a great way to think about software design.

It explains my team and our Slack video meeting woes.

But it can extend to newsletters.

Are you creating a “lived-in experience” for your readers?

Does your newsletter feel familiar?

Are your sections, your voice, your tone, and your style of delivering information becoming part of their lives?

Or could they replace you with a different newsletter and not really notice?

Today’s issue is a little thought-provoking. I read some articles this week that sent my head spinning in a “what is the meaning of (newsletter) life, anyway?” sort of way.

Let me know what you think.

Screen Share

Delivering Customer Success Guides In Newsletters

Sometimes your newsletter is just for one segment of your audience, but sometimes it makes sense to provide content that multiple segments will find interesting and let them choose their own adventure as they scan for what appeals most.

This can especially be true if you send the same information to people who subscribe to your free and paid services. It’s what we do here with Opt In Weekly. While the focus is content that helps newsletter creators in general, we have categories that will be more or less interesting to different types of creators. Plus, we run a Curated News section that is for product users or our product curious readers.

Megan Bowen of Refine Labs introduced some amazing ideas during her Newsletter Fest 2021 session, Leveraging Newsletters for Customer Success, Growth, and Advocacy.

In this short excerpt from her Q&A session, she brainstormed how a recurring section of your newsletter could be used to deliver links to a customer success guide or tutorial.

The concept:

✍️🎥 Create long form help content they can use to get more out of the product

🗝️ Highlight a different key lesson in each issue as a quick tip

📚 Remind them that the tip is part of a more comprehensive guide and link to it, too

The Simple Focus Software team gave this a try today in our Pulse newsletter.

Thanks for the pointer and for the great session, Megan!

Newsletter Tips

Can We Call Email Newsletters A New Literary Genre?

Molly Fischer thinks so.

In this piece for New York Magazine’s The Cut, she explores the modern email newsletter and its merits as a genre.

It appears that in studying the form, she subscribed to a deluge of newsletters (I’ve experienced this first-hand in my own research), found great satisfaction in what they delivered, then concluded that they lost their allure and failed to provide the escape she’d hoped they might.

The piece (splendidly written), examines the nuances of what a newsletter can be:

“The newsletters of today can be professional editorial operations, like Politico’s Playbook (which casts its readers as fellow Beltway insiders) or The Skimm (which casts them as brunch-drunk sorority sisters). They can also be scrappier, more idiosyncratic missives akin to personal blogs. Newsletters can be like newspaper columns, cut loose from institutional authority. They can be like podcasts that you cannot absorb while running errands, like zines without the photocopy static, like Instagram with the lifestyle recommendations rendered as text instead of subtext. Many newsletters partake in the limitlessly available navel-gazing of online media commentary. Newsletter writers describe the process of writing a newsletter; creators who monetize their personalities through their newsletters report on the ways that other creators are monetizing theirs.”

She then proposes that, while different, what they share is “the direct personal appeal of special delivery.” In other words, they use a 1:1 approach but scale it to become 1:many.

And that at some point subscribing to a person can become tiresome if they are overly self-promotional.

“Understanding one’s self as a cause to be championed risks a certain unappetizing self-regard.”

Plus, she writes, they lack the filter of a collaborative editorial approach.

Molly’s words are poetic, and they summarize the current state of newsletters quite well.

Actually, they summarize almost any self-publishing, transactional venture: a strong relationship with readers is the crux of success. And we tend to only have a few friends we really stay in touch with as often as most newsletters hit our inboxes.

Some will become a part of our routines, others will pile up until we unsubscribe.

A Roundup of Related Articles:

• The Washington Post reported that newsletters may threaten the mainstream media, but they also build communities.
• Pajiba pondered how long the newsletter boom will last?
• Brian Morrissey’s newsletter broke down the problem with email.

Newsletter Creators Struggle With Gmail’s Promotions Tab

You are not alone.

But I bet that’s not super comforting.

Brian Contreras wrote this interesting piece about the very real struggle unpredictable email deliverability can be for Los Angeles Times.

The best quote came from an anonymous newsletter sender (anonymously because he doesn’t want sponsors to understand how little he can guarantee the newsletter lands in the primary inbox):

“Like some ancient, unknowable deity, Gmail ‘has this influence over our lives, but we don’t know ... how they’re making decisions and how it will affect us from one day to another. We just know that it’s always changing, and sometimes it’s good news and sometimes it’s bad news.’”

Click through to read about just how arbitrary the Gmail inbox placement process can be and why it keeps newsletter writers up at night.

Discovered via American Press Institute.

Psst! Curated does everything we can to keep you primary, including instructions for new subscribers to take actions to show they want you there and curating stories on deliverability to keep you up to date.

Is There An Art To Saying No To $250K?

Pulitzer prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz did.

And we’ve somehow hit a theme this issue of what I’m thinking of as “reflecting on the editorial process.”

In this article for Artnet, Sarah Cascone reports on the reasons Saltz didn’t take Substack up on their $250K contract to jump ship from New York Magazine and publish a paid subscription newsletter.

His primary reasons?

The article indicates Saltz prefers to work with an editor and doesn’t want to spend excessive energy asking readers to pay.

Check it out here for a more thorough understanding, then indulge in the Twitter debate about the state and future of media that ensued.

Marketing

How To Create Episodic Content

You’re subscribed to a newsletter about newsletters, so I don’t have to sell you on the value of creating content that creates a “to be continued” vibe. Check out this piece by Robert Katai for some pointers on executing an episodic strategy.

Discovered via Smart Brief on Social Business

Saying So Long To Attribution

In this article, Chris Toy offers up some strategic moves marketing teams can make as they prepare for a future with less attribution data.

Publishing

Coming In September: A New (Well-Funded) Media Company

Axios has reported that Laura McGann, former politics editor of Vox.com and Politico, and Mark Bauman, previously with the Smithsonian, National Geographic and ABC News, are launching a new media company (name pending).

Types of topics they’ll cover:

• Misinformation
• Climate
• Chinese geopolitics

Funding status:

They’ve raised more than $10 million in series A.

Interesting hook:

“We’ll be creating new formats that give our audience a fuller look at big news stories that can be confusing if you read them piecemeal.”

Matthew Yglesias is joining as editor at large.

Related: New newsletter Tomorrow Will Be Worse by journalist Julia Ioff triggered a strong response from Joan Walsh: Yes, Tomorrow Will Be Worse—Because of Journalism Like This.

Also Related: Tech news newsletter company The Information is partnering with outside newsletters to expand the brand’s reach and is launching its first standalone publication, The Electric. It’s going to be about batteries and vehicles.

Money Matters

Debating The Creator Economy

Spencer Bokat-Lindell’s opinion piece on the potential impact of paid newsletter subscriptions on traditional media captures the events that prompted many journalists to become independent newsletter publishers and breaks down the arguments for and against the movement’s ability to influence democracy.

My favorite line:

“But perhaps the most valuable function of the paid newsletter is to remind people that journalism costs money.”

Curated News

Apple’s upcoming changes, and this smart strategy prompted us to add an activity filter to help Curated users find, reconfirm, or unsubscribe unengaged subscribers on your lists.

Recap:

Apple Mail’s next update will default users to choose not to be tracked and inflate open rates. Why? Because almost all Apple Mail users will appear as opens unless they tell Apple they want to be tracked.

The problems this causes:

Beyond skewing open rates (big bummer!), cleaning your list (aka getting rid of the subscribers who never open it) will be harder. But doing so is still important because your sender reputation relies in part on being a sender whose emails are opened.

Our latest response:

We’ve made it possible for you to filter your subscribers beyond just Status and Source (those have been there all along) and added Activity. In this case, Activity equals how recently the subscriber has clicked a link in your newsletter.

Now you can find a cadence that fits your send schedule and choose to either send a reconfirmation message or unsubscribe people who appear to be unengaged.

I’d recommend first filtering by people who haven’t clicked a link in a year and sending reconfirmation messages to them. You can use our default message or customize it.

Then, you can decide how long not clicking on any links in your newsletter indicates the recipient is no longer interested and either send reconfirmation messages or choose to unsubscribe them.

Help content for this is coming soon, but if you navigate to Subscribers > Email Subscribers, a little clicking around should get you started.

ICYMI: You can always check our Curated Public Product Roadmap to catch up on recent releases and find out what’s up next.

Opt In Challenge

Prevent Unsubscribes

This article provides a list of reasons people may unsubscribe and suggests how to combat each.

Your Opt In Challenge this week is to use it to run an audit and determine if any of the reasons offered—from sending too frequently to failing to create a personal connection—should be on your list of ways to improve your newsletter and act on at least one of them.

Signature

Let me know. Reply, email me at Ashley[at]optinweekly.com, or find me on LinkedIn to hit me with some feedback. I’d love to know what you think.

Also, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with fellow email newsletter creators. All archived issues will be available on OptInWeekly.com, so you can send them the link to check it out.

Have a great week sending, y’all.