Prologue
Have you ever been to Mississippi? It’s where I grew up. Everyone there has a story collection of stories.
We’re addicted to entertaining you with words. We love that transfixed look on your face when we talk. You’re probably just trying to figure out what we’re saying. It’s just a drawl, y’all.
How you say what you say can deter, bore, or mesmerize. It goes the same with writing. I’ve spent my career as a storyteller, putting words to page as a journalist, copywriter, and marketer.
With this newsletter, my goal is to help you earn and keep your reader’s attention.
Opt In will be a carefully curated collection of ideas, each chosen to inspire and fuel your content ambitions, from writing, to curating, and publishing.
So how can we get people to read our emails?
Dennis Shiao recently pointed out that some of us have forgotten to be relational in our email content. To foster deeper relationships, we have to be willing to be human. To me, that means real, transparent, and sometimes flawed.
I’m pretty practiced at being flawed. But those are stories for future issues…
Let’s dive in.
Ashley Guttuso
Screen Share
“The way we curate content allows us to not be robotic about what we’re sending.”
Building a newsletter with a team is easier than going it alone. I interviewed Scott Rogerson of UpContent about how he rallies his team around choosing a mix of curated and original content for their weekly newsletter.
We also discussed the results he’s seen from testing newsletter tactics both at UpContent and as head of an agency. This is the first webisode (yeah, I wrote it) of our new Screen Share video series that lets you see what’s happening behind the screens of expert newsletter creators.
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Newsletter Tips
Meet Margo Aaron, Your New Addiction
If you’re sending newsletters (or even just emails) and you don’t know about Margo Aaron, you might want to cancel next week’s Zoom meetings and go binge her content instead. I’m not saying that’s what I did. But if I did, here’s what I’d recommend...
Start with this webinar, which includes some major insights on why you should be thinking really hard about how your emails should be about your readers, not yourself, and how to do that in a genuine way.
Listen to her talk about why your email needs a solid reason to be sent in this episode of Josh Fiegenbaum’s Beer2Beer Marketing Podcast.
Subscribe to Margo’s newsletter, and get a weekly dose of how she masters the art of long-form storytelling that proves that length doesn’t matter if the content is truly engaging. I read an entire 1,279-word email she sent and wasn’t bored once.
The Morning Brew Growth Strategy Recap
Achieving one million opens doesn’t happen overnight. Here’s Austin Reif’s recount of what led to Morning Brew’s success.
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Marketing
The Email Newsletter is 2020’s MVP Format
How many times have you heard “Email marketing is dead,” lately? It’s nice to have Peter Pachal unpack exactly why that sentiment is completely untrue. The bottom line: Strategic marketers can figure out how to be successful on any channel, and email can be huge in 2020 for those who know how to do it well.
rjionline.org“The value of such a loyal audience is obvious, and the relative ease of creating a newsletter product has made it attainable by both publications and individuals alike (as long as they can serve up good content, that is). It’s not a new observation that receiving newsletters has become the equivalent of the print newspaper landing on the front porch, but what’s often lost in that description is what it means for the relationship between publisher and reader: trust.”
Content Marketers Agree: Email Engagement is Important
According to the 2020 Annual Benchmark Report by the Content Marketing Institute, 90% of content marketers say email engagement is the top metric they track to measure content performance.
It makes sense. If your emails aren’t getting opened and read, the people on your list aren’t loving your brand.
contentmarketinginstitute.com
Curation
Why Human Content Curation Still Beats AI
Good news. Jason McBride says that we probably don’t need to worry about AI taking over the entire job of content curation. Instead, he suggests it will assist as a first layer of discovery.
“The reality is that humans are much better tastemakers than robots. AI cannot compete with the emotional ability of humans to curate content.”
I’m thinking of asking an AI to evaluate this and respond.
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Publishing
From Cape Cod with Love: The Local Newspaper’s Slow & Painful Transition from Print to Digital
If you start intentionally reading articles about the fall of the local newspaper, things start looking a little bleak. Maybe it rattles me more as a J-school grad, but local journalism needs a comeback, and part of that starts with reclaiming profits that should support quality news.
This in-depth essay shares the story of Cape Cod’s local newspaper crisis, which mirrors the struggle many publishers face today: finding a business model that works with both print and digital.
Read the whole thing if you have time, and try not to cringe when you think about this: The magazine that published this article made it free to read, because
capecodwave.com“This story is free because it is important and we want you to read it, especially if you think your news should be free.”
Opt In Challenge
Take Time to Strategize (Copy this Brief)
Dan Oshinsky, former Director of Newsletters at BuzzFeed, currently runs Inbox Collective. He sends out a monthly link to a Google Doc called Not a Newsletter. It’s loaded with newsletter news, resources, and advice.
Check out Dan’s Newsletter Strategy Positioning Brief (make a copy for yourself) and make sure you set goals, track key metrics, and define your primary audience. It’s a great planning doc you should revisit regularly.
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