This page gives a rough idea of what our e-mail newsletter could become.
Quick access 👇
- Definition
- Context
- About the frequency of our newsletter
- From subscription to weekly delivery
- About the content of our newsletter
- About the resources supporting the newsletter
- FAQ
- Open questions
What do we mean when we talk about an “e-mail newsletter”? We mean the e-mails that our readers will receive on a regular basis (weekly basis probably) after subscribing on our homepage (see screenshot below).
More broadly, a newsletter is an e-mail which contains… news, that is interesting stuff relevant to the reader's interests. Newsletters are sent to all subscribers at the same time, on a regular basis, and delivered directly to their inbox.
A newsletter is not:
- A transactional e-mail, that is an e-mail that a given user receives after doing something (reseting a password for example). Transactional e-mails are one-shot e-mails, they don't reach a large number of users at the same time. They're triggered only when the user does a peculiar action and they're sent only to that peculiar user. They're not designed to sell or entertain, they're designed to inform. Think of them as the activity log of a given user.
- A regular e-mail campaign, that is a marketing e-mail which many subscribers receive at the same time. Regular e-mail campaigns are usually sent by the marketing team to announce the launch of a new product or service (a new type of loan for example or a new iPhone). They go out when the marketing department pushes the launch button, not when the user does a peculiar action.
- A RSS-based e-mail, that is an e-mail that goes out every time a new article is published on a given website and populates a RSS feed (a new blogpost on a blog for example). RSS-based e-mails are just notification e-mails, they don't contain original content (they just copy and paste the title and the description of the article they spread).
Social networks come and go (remember MySpace? How about Vine?) but e-mail is here to stay. In the U.S., 9 persons out of 10 use e-mails on a daily basis (92%)—every day! Some people don't have a Facebook account, others don't use Twitter that much, but the vast majority of adults that go online have an e-mail address (Gmail alone claims more that 1,5 billion users). E-mail is so ubiquitous that you need one to sign up for almost all online services.
E-mails can wait in a way tweets can't. If a tweet doesn't get traction (likes or retweets) in the first few hours following its publication, then there's very little chances that it will be seen a week or a month on. E-mail is different, because e-mail gets queued in an inbox. People can read e-mails on their own schedule without missing out on stuff they received many days ago. E-mails don't go away.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram filter what users see in their newsfeed. Just because a user follows an account doesn't mean that this user will see 100% of what that account publishes. Filtering cuts organic (unpaid) reach down to something like 15%, forcing brands to pay to reach their own followers. E-mail being a decentralized protocol, it doesn't belong to any tech giant, there's no algorithmic filtering between a brand and people's inbox. If 100 e-mails get sent, 100 e-mails get delivered to people's inbox—assuming the score of the sender domain is fine.
As a customer acquisition channel, e-mail is 40 times more effective than Facebook AND Twitter combined. For every euro we put in e-mail, we get back 40 times more what we would do on Facebook. E-mail is both cheap and efficient, two things marketers love. That's why it's worth investing in.
We might start with a weekly publishing frequency and see how it goes. Monthly seems a bit slow, daily seems too demanding, weekly sounds good. The point is: we need to chose a frequency. For our newsletter to work, we need to send it on a regular basis.
People are busy. Their time and attention are limited. For them to remember us, we need to show up at a consistent time in their inbox. Being consistent creates habits and habits compound over time. Here's what Revue (a newsletter provider) says about publishing frequency:
It’s important to choose a publishing frequency—and declare it on your subscription page—in order to set expectations for potential subscribers and make it clear this creation matters to you. (See source)
Assuming we'll send our newsletter on a weekly basis, what day of the week should we send it on? Since our readers work a lot and tend to be busy during the week, I suggest we should send our newsletter on Friday.
Why Friday? Because it allows our subscribers to focus on their work during the whole week without us popping up in their inbox when they might be expecting important work-related emails. Also, by sending our newsletter on the last day of the work week, our stuff stays fresh even if our subscribers read it on Saturday or Sunday—which wouldn't be case if we were to send our newsletter on Monday for example.
Before our subscribers start receiving our newsletter, they first need to subscribe to it. This is a three steps process:
- User subscribes to our newsletter on our website.
- User receives a subscription confirmation e-mail (right away).
- User starts receiving our newsletter (on its next instalment).
As a consequence, if a user subscribes on a Saturday, then he or she will have to wait until the following Friday to receive our newsletter—because it goes out once a week and once a week only.
This e-mail is sent to a subscriber right after subscription. Ideally, it does 4 things:
- Set expectations up by announcing publication frequency (habit).
- Restate what Memo Bank is about in one sentence (pitch).
- Offer a link to check the archives (older versions).
- Invite subscribers to reply to the newsletter (conversation).
Let's take a look at real-life examples of subscription confirmation e-mails that do a great job at setting expectations.
Why it works:
- The e-mail thanks the subscriber for signing up to the newsletter.
- Frequency expectation is stated very early (every Tuesday).
- Topic of the newsletter is announced clearly (business and policy).
Why it works:
- The e-mail thanks the subscriber for signing up to the newsletter.
- Frequency expectation is stated very early (every weekday morning).
- Topic of the newsletter is announced clearly (big news).
Why it works:
- The e-mail thanks the subscriber for signing up to the newsletter.
- Frequency expectation is stated very early (every weekday morning).
- Topic of the newsletter is announced clearly (marketing tips).
- The e-mail offers a link to the archives.
- Subscribers are welcomed to hit reply and write back to Mailchimp.
There are a few things that all great e-mail newsletters always do or contain:
- They offer an unsubscribe link (no exception).
- They offer a subscription link (for people to whom the e-mail was forwarded by a friend).
- They work on mobile (about 50% of e-mails are read on small screens).
What goes inside the newsletter? Good newsletter offer original content (creation) and they also point to interesting stuff (curation). They usually adhere to a strict hierarchy of content: most important topics first down to the more trivial stuff. They offer a finish line: there's and end to them, they're not so long that people can never get done with them, they can be read in a few minutes.
What will our newsletter be made of? It could be a mix of:
- Original content (stuff created for the newsletter).
- Links to our own content (distribution of our blogposts for example).
- Links to external content (curation of interesting links).
We'll create content for our newsletter, content that will be visible only inside the newsletter. It might take the form of a small introductory paragraph which sets the tone for the week or a note from the editorial team. The point is: the newsletter has to offer more than repackaged content (stuff published elsewhere and then crammed into an e-mail).
We'll write articles on our magazine (blog) and we could use our newsletter to share them, just like newspapers do. In that case, we would not reproduce the blogpost inside the newsletter, but merely link to it. The content would live on the magazine and the newsletter will just redirect people to the magazine.
If we come across an interesting article during the week, we might want to share it with our subscribers. We could describe the content of the article in one or two sentences and share the link of the articles in our newsletter. Same with interesting statistics, graphics or stories. The point is: we don't have to create 100% of the content that goes into our newsletter. We can also curate and comment a large part of it. Remember that our reader work during the week, they don't browse the web in search of great articles.
Newsletters are e-mails, but for our newsletter to work and be complete, we'll also need external resources, stuff that are NOT e-mails.
- A dedicated subscription page (required).
- A dedicated archive page (required).
- A dedicated unsubscribe page (required).
- A proper RSS feed (optional).
Subscription pages help people… subscribe. Some of them even go so far as to offer a link to the archives of the newsletter. I like the way Substack and Revue, two newsletter providers, handle them.
Here's an example from Substack:
And here's one from Revue:
And here's a custom-made one from Ueno:
An archive page allows our users to browse previous issues of our newsletter—something they might even want to do before subscribing. Again, Substack offers beautiful archive pages that almost feel like blogs.
Here's another example from Substack:
The New York Times also does a great job at displaying their archives online, although I suspect they publish their content twice: first over e-mail and then as an article on their website—using different URLs.
When readers unsubscribes from a given newsletter, they probably do so from the newsletter itself (the e-mail), by clicking on a link usually located at the bottom of the e-mail. The unsubscribe page is the page users lands on after they have clicked on the unsubscribe link. This page has to live on our own domain and follow our design guidelines.
I like how Postmark (an e-mail provider) does it:
RSS allows people to receive our newsletter in their RSS reader without the need to subscribe to it. Why bother? Well, to some people, e-mail is associated with work, so reading newsletter in an e-mail client (Gmail for example) feels like work. They avoid it and they certainly don't do it over the weekend. Providing our subscribers with a RSS feed offers them more flexibility in their reading setup.
What does an RSS reader look like? Here's an example:
I can read previous issues of Nicolas Colin's newsletter directly in my RSS reader (Reeder.app) without even checking my e-mails—I haven't even subscribed to it.
Probably Hubspot, because this will be our main e-mail marketing tool. Unfortunately, Hubspot doesn't offer an archive page out of the box, nor does it automatically create a RSS feed for our publications, which mean that we'll have to create a special archive page using Prismic and build a RSS feed on our own—nothing unbearable though. We could use Revue, but we would have to pay for it and we would be limited in terms of design, meaning that our newsletter will look like every other Revue newsletter—a dealbreaker in my view. Substack is lovely too, but even more limited than Revue in terms of design customisation.
We could look at the growth of our subscribers list, but this is mostly a vanity metric. What matters is engagement. Do people open our newsletter? Do they read it? Do they write back when we invite them to do so? We should aim for at least a 30% open rate among our subscribers. Also, this is a long-term project for which there's no shortcut: it's all about being consistent over time.
Most banks do not send a newsletter and the ones who do mostly use it as a sales vehicle. I suggest we should look at what others are doing in other industries (not just the banking industry) to really push us.
Here are a few inspiring newsletters that we can look up to:
Isn't e-mail a thing of the past now that we all use Slack? Well, it's true that people tend to send less professional e-mails than they used to but that doesn't mean that they don't check their e-mails anymore. Quite the contrary: again, 91% of consumers still check their e-mails every day (in the U.S).
I'd rather not to. I see e-mail as a two-way street. E-mail creates a relationship. You can hit the reply button and start a conversation, this is not a monologue. noreply@domain.com addresses might prove useful in some cases, but when it comes to newsletters they just send a terribly wrong message—“We're not interested in hearing back from you but please buy our stuff anyway”, basically… It would be great if readers could write back to us.
Would we display a splash screen inviting people to signup to our newsletter 5 seconds after they've landed on our website?
How about no? Although some newspapers manage to get away with this somehow (see what The New Yorker does), most of the time this feels like an interruption. Instead of forcing people to sign up using IN YOUR FACE techniques, let's interest them into signing up using ELEGANT techniques.
Do newsletters require subscribers to perform a double “opt-in” for their subscription to be GDPR-compliant?
Nope. A single “opt-in” (consentement) is enough, even in Europe (see the CNIL take on this topic). Checking a box or filling a subscription input field is enough to prove the subscriber's consent. That being said, we might want to use a double “opt-in” signup process (input field + click on a link delivered via e-mail) at some point, to make sure that subscribers enter valid e-mail addresses when signing up. We can do it, but we do not have to do it.
Opinions welcomed, because my mind is not yet made up on the following topics:
- Should we “brand” our newsletter? Should we give it a proper name (something more creative than La lettre hebdomadaire de Memo Bank)? Should it have a proper logo (as the NY Time does)?
- Where would we like people to be able to sign up for our newsletter, appart from the footer of our website and our dedicated signup page? Should a client be able to sign up to our newsletter from our web app (by checking a box in the settings as Trainline does)?