Forget cheese. 🧑‍🎄Move your elf!

Prologue

Zelda Love Sweets has been a seasonal visitor in our home for six years.

Our Elf on the Shelf, named by my daughters when they were two and four, is not overly creative.

She was a gift from a grandmother.

Another todo to add to our parenting list and bring some extra anxiety to our lives between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

She does not take marshmallow bubble baths or TP the playroom.

That stuff takes effort.

We don’t want her feeling stressed to perform.

It’s enough for her to find a new place to perch every night after making her trip to the North Pole and back.

If you’ve never woken up and realized that poor Zelda did not move an inch, you don’t really know what failure feels like.

The pressure to delight children day after day is pretty intense, but their joy is worth it.

We assume our eldest has the whole thing figured out, but she pretends she does not.

This is the same child who took it upon herself to move an elf around for her third grade classroom.

It was a knock-off elf someone had given our family and did not possess the magic powers Zelda does.

Her teacher had said they didn’t have a class elf, but one appeared and moved during recess each day.

Even the teacher had no clue our daughter was doing this until that last, chaotic week before holiday break, when I found out and made her confess.

Does this rambling have anything to do with your newsletter, you’re wondering?

Of course.

It’s a nod to the power of consistent delight.

I’m not saying you have to set up the equivalent of an elf-sized snow angel imprint in flour for your audience with every send, but you’d better MOVE YOUR ELF.

Make discovering her next move exciting enough to open, read, and look forward to what’s coming next.

Your readers’ joy is your primary goal.

Note: This is my last issue of 2020. Opt In Weekly will be back Thursday, January 7. I’m switching to Thursdays to better balance my work week, and possibly yours. Please let me know if you’re enjoying this newsletter, and, if you feel like giving me a gift this season, share it with someone you think will like it, too.

Wishing you a heaping spoonful of elf magic this holiday season,

Screen Share

Use Your Newsletter to Learn What Your Audience Wants

Nicholas Scalice understands the value of testing. His agency Earnworthy helps clients build and test landing pages for optimal performance. It’s only fitting, then, that he’s continually testing his own newsletter sign up page.

In fact, he believes that launching a newsletter that serves a niche audience is a wonderful way to find out what they really want.

“If you build that audience right, and you build the rapport with that audience, the opportunities to monetize are going to reveal themselves,” he says.

This is why he encourages creators to launch without selling anything at first so they can test and see what’s going to work.

In GrowthMarketer, Nicholas provides marketers insights, including news, tool tips, and the occasional link to his marketing podcasts (Growth Marketing Toolbox and Learn Growth Marketing).

During this interview, he walks us through the decisions he’s made as he created the newsletter. We discuss why combining a curated newsletter pairs well with his podcasts to serve an audience hungry for growth marketing tactics. He also shares how his referral program works and why your welcome email should ask a question. Does yours?

Newsletter Tips

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.

Are You Consistently Curious?

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.

Marketing

B2B Email Marketing Advice From... LinkedIn

Joe Sullivan nailed it with this LinkedIn post that explains why your B2B email newsletter might be missing the mark, and what you should do about it.

“So how about reinventing your company ‘newsletter’ as a digital delivery vehicle for targeted insights and resources that will help THEM, not serve YOU?

Think of yourself as a niche media source or publication for your specific audience. And be a resource.

That’s how you earn (and keep) the attention of the right people.”

Publishing

Predictions for Journalism 2021

2020 has proven that hindsight is, well, 2020.

So, of course, Nieman Journalism Lab has gathered 2021 journalism predictions. Newsletter publishers will find some of them worth considering, including these:

“Successful independent journalists will realize how difficult it can be to strike the right balance between cultivating enough of an audience to effectively monetize and becoming beholden to their whims.” —Taylor Lorenz

“Gird for too few renewals or continuing support—not just because so many Americans are in financial distress, but because as people step farther from their keyboards as the pandemic ebbs, many will tire of reading about political, biological and financial chaos. They’ll start deleting newsletters unread as fast as spam, until they are moved to cancel. Then they’ll return to relying on the convenient social pipelines filled with fluff and fakery, namely Facebook, Instagram, and Google.”— Jody Brannon

Read through for more takes on what may come to be.

Money Matters

How Wired Leveraged Cyber Week Readers to Increase Subscription Revenue

In this article, Kayleigh Barber unpacks how Wired used cyber week coverage and affiliate content to boost subscriptions.

“Traffic to Wired.com increased by more than 180% during Black Friday and Cyber Monday versus the same days last year and the most popular article visited was its Absolute Best Deals post, which accounted for 1.8 million clicks, according to Rosenfield.”

“You simply send a mail to your engaged list to do one or all of the following:

1. Save your ID as a contact

2. Mark your mail as important

3. Drag your mail from Promotions to Primary tab”

Have you done this with Opt In Weekly? If not, now would be a great time.

Happy holidays!