Newsletters

Newsletters are the bedrock of our early customer acquisition efforts. It'll typically be the most common place we'll interact with our users in the initial weeks and months. We like it because it's free, it gives us a lot of freedom and real estate to express our message, and it's fairly instant in its response.

Newsletters work best when they are approached as friendly conversations. They royally suck when they are approached as billboard ads wrapped in email containers. The world is mostly filed with the latter, so we're going to show you how to engage and build your early audience using a friendly, personal style.

As we create our first newsletter, we're going to think about how to open up a conversation with our recipients. That means we're going to ask questions, we're going to tell stories, and we're going to offer value so that people want to have more of those conversations.

"Wait, WTF are you talking about? I thought I was going to create a newsletter to get my startup more customers, not write love letters to a bunch of strangers?!"

See? That's where people screw this up!

We’ll approach these early efforts very differently than we will later with our marketing when we have a larger audience. Right now, we want to focus on making a small group of really close knit customers feel like it's just us gals talking.

If we lead early on with "Hey I had this idea 9 minutes ago, click here to buy my stuff!" — we're going to lose customers really fast. Instead, we're going to use these newsletters to ask our tiny audience what they think about our idea. We're going to highlight the suggestions they have made in subsequent newsletters — a virtual high five, if you will. We'll ask for money later on when the product is more refined. Right now, the currency we're looking for is input from our customers, not cash.

We're going to use our newsletter to communicate to our small but growing audience on a fairly regular basis - at least once a month if not more. Each time we send our newsletter, we're not just sending an update - we're leveraging our audience to help us explore and understand another unknown area of our business model.

One send may be focused on learning what price point works best. Another may be determining which features we should build first. Yet another may simply be a way to build some heightened interest in our pending launch. We'll pick one singular goal and build a small campaign to help drive that outcome. The newsletter will be the most important brainstorming meeting we can have, because we're having it with real potential customers.

Every time we sit down to craft our next newsletter masterpiece, we're going to ask ourselves the 3 questions:

1. What do we want to achieve? We only get to pick one objective. So, what's the most important thing we can learn in this send?
2. What can we say that will delight people? We want our newsletter to be something people enjoy reading. So, what can we share with our audience that will entertain, inform, or engage them in a way that will make them excited to get our next edition?
3. What single action will we focus on? Based on our objective, what's the single "Call to Action” we want to drive them to?

We'll cover each of these questions and our best approach to answer them throughout this course.

For our purposes, we're going to suggest creating a free account with Mailchimp — though, feel free to use any other newsletter software that you'd like. One thing we don't recommend is using your default mail client and sending out a mass email. Not only does it look low rent — there isn’t an easy way to add new subscribers, purge unsubscribes or get a closer look at detailed reporting on newsletter performance.

If you want to get a feel for what you'll need to do, the good folks of Mailchimp have a very easy step-by-step tutorial as well as a video walkthrough. You can dig into that now or keep reading and come back to the setup later.

From this point on we should have a newsletter account created — we just need to figure out what to do with it.

The CTA —or "Call to Action"— is our raison d'être or "reason for being". Think of it like the giant button we want everyone to press. While the CTA will likely appear below our images and copy — before we begin drafting up the message for our newsletter, we should ask: "What action do we want this newsletter to drive?"

We only get one shot at people's attention — and rarely for more than a second. So, we should focus on driving one response. If we really want to get a second response—we’ll just save it for a future newsletter.

Some popular CTA Formulas we could use:

• Share this (item) on social media
• Click here if you'd like to learn more (drive to Website)
• Reply to this message to tell us your thoughts

There's no hard and fast rule as to which CTA to use — so long as it's fairly actionable and doesn't create a lot of overhead for the user. If it's something the user can take action on in one or two clicks, it's probably a good CTA. If it requires a bunch of work (more than 60 seconds) we're going to see a lot less action.

With our CTA in mind, it's time to craft our narrative. We’ll be doing this a lot — so, instead of discussing how to write our first narrative— let's just talk about how to approach each newsletter, since they tend to follow the same cadence.

1. Images speak louder than words
   If we can say it with an image, we should use an image. People hate to read, but they love to scan. A compelling image — whether it's a screenshot, a product photo, or a funny meme — will get far more attention than just about anything we write with text.
2. Every Word We Write Is Our Last
   Brevity is our friend in email. We win by saying more with less. Think of every additional word we write as one more step toward creating an email no one will ever read. By the way — this rule applies to literally every type of email.
3. Get To The Point
   If our reader can't understand what we’re trying to accomplish by the end of the first or second sentence — we’ve lost. This isn't the time for preamble. If our goal (CTA) is to ask for some feedback, start with that.
4. Make It Personal
   Avoid writing as if we’re creating brochure copy the same way big companies write faceless messages aimed at faceless consumers. Where possible use "I" and "We".
   (yes, that's gross).
5. Tell A Story
   Wherever possible, try to use a personal story or anecdote. Think of how people communicate on a Facebook post — it's about something personal to them.
   While this ridiculous soap example is just a horrible product idea, telling a relatable story is a great way to make people feel closer to you, which builds trust and authenticity.
6. Add the Call-to-Action (CTA)The CTA or “big giant button” is where all of this foreplay is leading. We want to make sure it’s prominent, it’s descriptive (“click here” isn’t descriptive, but “register for our beta” is), and it points directly to the landing page we want people to take action on.

If we zoom out a bit, we can take a look at what the perfect newsletter message body might look like:

• Image to start off
• Welcome line with CTA in mind
• 3-4 sentences of important copy
• 2+ paragraphs of supplemental copy (if needed)
• CTA

If we don’t always have an image or a long message to share – no biggie. These are our best practices, not the minimum requirements for sending any message.

The subject line is, in many cases, more important than the newsletter itself. This is because it's the one thing the recipient will see — regardless of whether they decide to open the email. So, our subject line has to seriously rock, every time.

It's often best to write the subject line once we’re done writing the CTA and body copy so we can take some time and be more creative about what the subject line should convey.

• Avoid Being Generic
  "Business Update" is a terrible subject line. Let’s think of our subject line like the little card on top of a gift. Make it personal and interesting and give them a reason to open the box. "We created a custom necklace for your daughter" is far more specific and it relates to the recipient’s interests, not ours.
• Keep It Short
  Most people will see the subject line on a small device like a phone, so we need to keep our subject line to as few words as possible. Five words or less is ideal.
• Offer A Reward"Free cookies for your feedback". We probably don't need to literally offer cookies (although that does sound delicious) but think of our subject line more as a "gift" than just a request. Lead with what we’ll give, follow with what we’ll get.

Before people ever open our newsletter, they are going to see who it came from. If they don't recognize the sender — or even worse, it sounds spammy — we’re toast.

We’ve got a few options here, in order of most friendly to least friendly:

• Pam Ledbutter - Your name — which presumably this small of a list should recognize. Always our best bet.
• Pam @ CompanyCo - Not a bad option if we think they may recognize the company more so than us personally. Also, we could substitute the product name if that's more familiar.
• Pam, CEO of CompanyCo - Allows us to throw a little weight around with our incredibly prestigious self-inflicted title. Most people aren't getting a lot of emails from CEOs, so every bit helps.
• Pam and Cindy - If we’re a team, we could try both names, but we run the risk of the recipient not knowing either without a company or last name.
• Team at CompanyCo - Not awesome. Feels like we’re about to get an ad of some sort and kinda reeks of being generic.
• CompanyCo - Works great when everyone knows and loves our company. Short of that, looks identical to every spam sender in the world.

Think of the combination of our subject line and our "sent from address" as an important gatekeeper to determine whether our email will ever get opened. They may seem like small things, but they make a huge difference in the efficacy of our email sends.

The default move for most startups is to load in as many emails as possible — and carpet bomb the hell of out of them! Why not? More emails = more responses = more progress right?

Well, not so much.

At the very least, we should divide our newsletters into two sends. This doesn't have to be super complicated - we can just divide the list in half if we want since these are fairly small lists we're talking about. But, the point of doing two sends is to learn from the first send and to then make adjustments to the second send.

Almost every time, we'll realize .05 seconds after we’ve smashed the "send" button, that we should have done something a lot differently! Sometimes this doesn’t become obvious until we get the initial response (or lack thereof) from our audience. We'll find typos, an image will show up as broken, or realize we’ve pointed everyone to a link that doesn't work.

It also gives us a bit of solace when we go to hit "send" that if we did screw something up, we have another shot at getting it right. Also, if we get zero response, we're obviously not going to send out the rest of those emails until we come up with some fresh ideas for how to send something different.

After we've hit the big "Send" button and begun a silent prayer to the "Gods of Deliverability" we then begin to wonder: "What should we expect from all of this?"

We're going to analyze two sets of results in each send - the hard stats (opens, clicks, etc) and the responses.

Open rates and CTRs will tend to average out to about the same rate over time, but Responses and Special Actions will vary greatly from send-to-send depending on the ask. We'll have to send 3-4 newsletters before we can really get a handle on how well they are working.

When done well, newsletters can be an incredibly effective tool to spark early conversations with our audience and give us a sense for how they feel about what we’re building or what we’re offering.

On the other hand, all too many Founders put themselves in danger of torpedoing their open rate, landing in Spam Land, or just making an overall poor first impression with their audience by falling prey to a few glaring, yet easily-avoidable mistakes.

Luckily, the next time we sit down to spin up a newsletter, we now know exactly how to avoid these pitfalls — including keeping our subject line super personal, concise, and rewards-driven (when appropriate); sending from a friendly, recognizable “from address”; and driving readers to an actionable, descriptive, and frictionless CTA.

Until this point, we’ve kept a pretty tight focus on nailing our engagement with our immediate social circle. We’re now going to start thinking even bigger by continuing conversations with our customers across the world of social media while casting an even wider net over our audience.