This article was originally published on Not a Newsletter: A Monthly Guide to Sending Better Emails.
Email isn’t just a way to broadcast information to readers — it’s also a way to start a real conversation with your subscribers. You can ask them questions and encourage them to reply. You can showcase personalities that readers are excited to invite into their inbox. You can establish trust and use that to turn casual readers into loyal subscribers.
What would it look like for a newsroom to truly embrace the conversational side of email? For a great example, look to the Windy…
Our thinking behind the email insights that we have just launched on Revue.
Dear newsletter nerd, indulge me for a math exercise. Let’s assume there are 12,934 people on your list, and the open rate of your most recent issue was 34.5%, is that… good?
Try to do that math in your head.
Another question: The issue before that most recent one had 12.158 people on the list, the open rate was 35.8%. Was that… better?
These kinds of metrics might make sense when your emails are marketing one-offs or journeys. But if your goal is to create an engaging, habit-creating editorial email product, these are not the metrics you need. The answer…
This article was originally published on Not a Newsletter: A Monthly Guide to Sending Better Emails.
Casey Newton’s newsletter was born from a simple question: Was there a better way to report on the impact of social networks on modern life?
Newton, The Verge’s Silicon Valley editor, had been reporting for the site since 2013, covering platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But after the 2016 election, he started to rethink his beat.
“I felt like I had clearly been missing a big part of the story, maybe even most of the story, which was that the social networks have these…
The latest release of the WordPress.com plug-in Jetpack contains a new block that allows newsletter authors to easily embed a Revue subscription form in their WordPress.com sites.
The Revue profile page is a popular feature of our editorial newsletter service. Authors love how it combines a beautiful archive with an easy sign-up. It’s a perfect home for their newsletter.
While the profile page has good conversion, it still requires authors to link to it, and convince readers to click on a link and then subscribe on the profile page. …
This article was originally published on Not a Newsletter: A Monthly Guide to Sending Better Emails.
I didn’t think it was possible for a newsletter — at least one with any sort of scale — to have a unique open rate above 65%. Getting 1 in 3 subscribers to open a newsletter would be an achievement for most news organizations. Getting 2 in 3 to open would be a Herculean feat.
Then I heard about a publisher in the Netherlands that sent a newsletter that hit a 98% unique open rate. …
This article was originally published on Not a Newsletter: A Monthly Guide to Sending Better Emails.
I first met in May, and he told me a little about his new newsletter. Pit Gottschalk had created a daily soccer email covering all things German soccer, and it was up to 2,500 subscribers — not bad for a newsletter that was less than a year old!
I saw Pit again in August and asked him how the newsletter was going. Since the last time I saw you, he told me, I’ve quadrupled my audience.
Quadrupled? In just three months? …
Revue has helped many authors and publishers launch new newsletter products. But until now, we never launched our own newsletter.
It’s a little strange we never did, but we simply never got around to it. Until six weeks ago when we started “The week in newsletters”, Revue’s weekly update for newsletter editors and audience managers.
The good news is that we got to follow our own advice on how to start a newsletter and experience and share what it’s like.
Start slow, then start sharing
Many authors feel overwhelmed when starting a newsletter. They have big dreams but few practical experiences to guide them. And…
From time to time we do a little research about newsletters at Revue. This time we were interested in the composition of the teams producing newsletters for publishers. Who are the people writing and editing newsletters in newsrooms? What are their job titles and who do they report to?
Many publishers use Revue as their tool for editorial newsletters. But we wanted to get a broader perspective. To look beyond our user base, we created a brief survey asking newsletter staff about their job titles and reporting lines.
The answers were quite interesting. The majority of newsroom staff working on…
Revue’s note: This post is part of a series on secrets by newsletter experts. It was written by Arjen van der Horst. Arjen is USA correspondent for Dutch public broadcaster NOS and TV news program Nieuwsuur. For the NOS he writes the Trump Weekly newsletter.
If there was something that did NOT cross my mind on Wednesday November 9, 2016, it was starting a newsletter. It was the day after the American presidential election. I was completely exhausted covering one of the craziest elections in American history. …
Revue’s note: This post is part of a series on secrets by newsletter experts. It was written by Jerry Vermanen. Jerry is a data journalist from The Netherlands. His daily work is at Pointer, a data journalism website and tv programme by Dutch public broadcaster KRO-NCRV. He is also author of his newsletter “Klikdinges” (which translates loosely to Clickything).
Why would someone ever follow me through a newsletter? A small amount of imposter syndrome is known to everyone, I presume. It’s also the reflex I had when I was considering starting my own newsletter called Klikdinges just 2 years ago…
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