Ness Labs founder Anne-Laure Le Cunff hopes so. She asked her readers for questions about her Maker Mind newsletter, which has recently grown to over 25,000 subscribers.
I find her transparency endearing and love this advice:
“I made lots of mistakes in the early days, but… The biggest mistake is to try avoiding making mistakes! I see lots of creators spending 80% of their time reading guidebooks, tutorials and case studies about growing a newsletter.”
Study These Top European Tech Newsletters
Does your newsletter stand out in your genre? If so, being included on newsletter roundup lists like this one by Amy Lewin and the team at Sifted can amplify your voice and increase sign ups.
If you’re looking for some inspiration, click your way through the list and pick up some pointers from some noteworthy newsletters.
The Psychology of Newsletter Subscriber Referral Programs
Andreea Macoveiciuc provides seven ways a newsletter creator can use psychology to prompt subscribers to share your content and increase subscriptions with referral programs.
Have you tried any of these? I’d love for you to reply to this email and share what has or hasn’t worked for your newsletter.
Via Newspackr: For Media Makers (Look out for a Screen Share Interview with founder Ryan Sager in an upcoming issue of Opt In Weekly.)
Related: Check out Getting Your Newsletter in Front of an Audience from The Newsletter Crew.
10 Ways to Improve Your Email Open Rates Today
Juris Kristobans provides some very solid tactics to improve your open rate, plus tools to help you execute them. Do you do all of these things?
Via Really Good Emails.
Should Your Newsletter Be Seasonal?
What does that even mean?
Fiction writer Robin Sloan explains how some newsletters can be effectively delivered in seasons, like televisions shows.
“The first [example] is my year-long newsletter from 2019, which was titled Year of the Meteor. It was launched with an expiration date, and I swear to you, that ticking clock was like a power source: a lump of uranium decaying, spraying off energy. I mailed an edition every Sunday, always with the week number incremented in the subject line. Everyone knew the denominator; it felt like a progress bar.”
Via Inbox Reads.
Cut Through the Noise of a Cluttered Media Market Like The NewsRun
In this article, Hanaa’ Tameez dives into the strategy behind Anam Khan’s daily newsletter The NewsRun. It summarizes and provides context for Pakistan’s major news stories in a way that helps both citizens and expats make sense of it all.
It’s a great example of a niche topic newsletter serving a simple but powerful service and resonating with a specific audience.
Khan says keeping it newsletter-first has been a priority.
“‘A lot of publications have websites or other touch points,’ she said. ‘The NewsRun’s main product is the newsletter. I specifically did it that way because I wanted to reduce touch points for people. Rather than logging onto a website or scrolling through a cluttered newsfeed, the NewsRun is a single touch point. People get it in their inbox every morning and everything they need to know is compiled onto one platform and broken down in bite-sized format so that they don’t have to scour the internet to read the news. Everything they need is already right there in front of them.”
Do not underestimate the value of making something easier to understand or building a newsletter around that goal.
How To Deliver The Most Value With A Company Newsletter: 15 Savvy Tips
This solid tips list for businesses who send newsletters is unique in that each one is from a different Forbes Coaches Council member. Take a moment to scan and see if your newsletter follows their advice.
I think my favorite that I encourage everyone to consider is number 7, from Kelly Tyler Byrnes:
Consider How You Will Sustain It
“It may seem minor, but in the excitement of planning your brilliant content and fabulous graphics, the one thing often overlooked is, how will you sustain it?”
How to Use Facebook Ads to Get More Newsletter Subscribers
The team at Paved provides instructions for setting up Facebook ads for your newsletter. You’re welcome.
Related: If you use Curated, here’s a video tutorial to help you set up conversion tracking for your Facebook ads.
In How to Write a Newsletter About the Dead, Kristen Hare shares tips about an obituary newsletter the Tampa Bay Times is launching.
Why it matters: These tips transcend to how to write about the living, too. And publishing a newsletter with this focus is inspired in its simplicity. I once wrote short obits for a college alumnae magazine. It was humbling work.
Former Chicago Tribune Newsletter Editor Charlie Meyerson Launched an Independent City Newsletter
This Q&A with Charlie Meyerson by Simon Owens digs into how Chicago Public Square came to be and what makes it work.
“I wanted to play my part, and friends made clear they were desperate for help sorting through all that was happening. One — a young mother I’d known since her high school days — wrote this: ‘Every time I looked at Facebook or Twitter today, terrible things were happening in our government. Is there any news source that is keeping track of things that are happening day by day? Just in a bullet-point form? I feel like these days might go like this and I don’t want to miss actual happenings.’
And I thought: ‘Huh. I know how to do that.’ And, over the last couple of decades, what advice have I given journalists who have a passion to communicate and time on their hands? Duh: ‘Start a blog and send it out by email.’ So I did.”
Related: Check out How to Define Loyalty, A Primer for Publishers
