Are Email Newsletter Even Viable Anymore?
Every few years we’re told that we need to move on from using email newsletters as a part of our marketing platform. And David says that advice has always been wrong.
Links
David’s article on Punctuation.com (subscribe to his newsletter at the bottom of the page)
Transcript
Blair Enns: David, I have a question for you that I've put to many of our clients. If you had to go all in on one lead generation mechanism, you had to take all your lead gen chips and go all in on one square, what would that square be? Before you answer, obviously, the subject of this episode is, are email newsletters even viable anymore? I'm not necessarily setting you up for the email newsletter answer. I honestly don't know what your answer would be, but if you had to go all in on one and you couldn't do anything else, what would it be?
David C. Baker: I would hire one of those guys that rides around neighborhood on a bicycle for the Latter-day Saints that just sells like crazy or a used car salesman.
Blair: The guy with the spinning sign at the side of the road. [laughs]
David: That one, I like that one. Yes. Oh. I would actually say a book. If I was capable of writing a really good book, that's probably where I'd put it.
Blair: Yes, because you're so horrible at writing books, but go on.
David: [chuckles] For something that's definitely in my wheelhouse and available to people, it would be email marketing in the mix for sure. A lot of it has to do with the industry in particular, right?
Blair: Right.
David: Email marketing for a fashion firm, that'd be a little bit different, right?
Blair: Right.
David: It fits me because I come from an academic background, and it doesn't necessarily fit anybody. Actually, that's one of the important points. When you and I look across the stable of the very successful clients we've worked with individually or maybe together, there's thousands of these firms out there, and you and I know hundreds of them that have no disciplined marketing plan are very successful.
Others that are just really great at networking or they rely on referrals or they do email marketing, or they do digital SEO, SEM spin, something or other. I'm not saying that you have to do this. I'm just saying, really, let's quit saying that email is dead. Email is still just as relevant as it ever has been. There's some unique qualities about email that make it that way.
Blair: You've got a list of reasons why email leads all other marketing options. Before we get into that, let's pick apart your business a little bit more. You write an email a week and you've been doing so for-- Maybe the weekly cadence is a few years now, but beyond that, how many email newsletters, if we're using that old term, do you think you've sent in your career?
David: Oh, goodness. I have them all. I've saved them all. I hate to go read those early ones, it's pretty embarrassing. Yes, from '96 on.
Blair: Did they even have email back in '96?
David: They did, but there weren't any ESPs. I had a server rack in my home with a T1 line. We had a DNS server, a web server, and an email server. That's how it started. Then it's just migrated since then. Hey, here's a question for you while we're thinking back in time. What's the largest computer disk size you remember? You remember three-and-a-half-inch disks, right?
Blair: I remember the five and whatever floppies.
David: Five and a quarter.
Blair: Yes.
David: That was earlier. Then do what was earlier than five and a quarter inch?
Blair: The first computer I had was a TRS-80 with 4K of RAM.
David: Yes.
Blair: The disk was an external audio tape cassette drive.
David: Oh, wow. Yes. Eight inch was before the five and a quarter.
Blair: Eight-inch disks.
David: Yes. Then they went to five and a quarter, then three. Then, of course, disappeared. What's interesting to me about all of this is just thinking through all the technology that is not a part of our lives at all, but the technology where you can see a thread all the way back. Email is one. The other is discussion boards. I used to log into a discussion board, this was 35 years ago, and get updates to software. Those two things are still here. Just because something's been around for a long time does not mean that it's no longer relevant. Email is smack in that category.
Blair: Yes. Let's go back up and set some context. You say here in-- I don't know if this is a blog post that you've written already.
David: It is, yes. It's out there. Yes.
Blair: It is. You start with the goal of get famous however you can. Are you saying that's the goal of your marketing, is to get famous?
David: Yes. Get famous so the right people know about you for the right things at the right time. That's really a simplified way to think about it, and there's just lots of ways to do it. How you decide to do it has a lot to do with where you focus because people gather in different places based on your focus. Your personality as a person, that has to be factored into this. The assets that you bring to the table.
Then the other one that I've been thinking about a lot more than I used to is, do you have more time or more money at the moment? If you've got more time, then you probably ought to do this, figure it out for yourself. If you've got more money and you're really busy, then you probably ought to just job it out to somebody to do. Those are the things that you would weave into your answer about how to get famous. Whatever that answer is, it doesn't have to, but it might involve some sort of email marketing because there's some pretty unique advantages to it.
Blair: Yes. As you pointed out, if you're a marketing firm focused on fashion, probably email isn't the way to go. There might be a role for it, but probably Instagram or even TikTok, something more visual might be more appropriate for you. If you're an interior designer, you're almost certainly using Instagram. This isn't universal. You're not universally saying that everybody should see email as their primary marketing channel. Your point is that it's been here forever, but it's still one of the best channels. Of course, it depends on these variables of your personality, whether you have time or money, the nature of your focus or specialization.
David: Yes. When you look into the future at what's going to happen, what'll happen to social media if some of the laws are changed, or what'll happen if TikTok is banned? You look at all of these things and you're not really sure how to paint it, but there is no signal at all that email will not be just as relevant into the indefinite future as it is right now. I just don't think it's much of a danger to incorporate it if it happens to make sense based on all these factors that relate to you personally.
Blair: Yes, there's this line, I think you quote it, maybe it's Rand Fishkin. It's not his line, he quotes it from somebody else, the enshittification of the internet. It's not just the internet, but it's the various platforms. It's almost like it's this inevitable cycle of these new platforms come out and they're amazing, and look at the audience you can reach and look at the engagement. Then more and more it becomes harder to reach, it becomes more pay-to-play. Our friend, Philip Morgan, wrote a great post on this a couple years ago. We've cited it a couple of times. I think it's called When the King Gets Hungry. It's really about the platform owner sees everybody monetizing the platform and they start to take that money, and they start to monetize it more and more. These platforms that start out as amazing, at some point, you realize, "Oh, my audience on this platform isn't really my audience." That's not the case with email, right?
David: Right, it's not.
Blair: People have this urge, they think, "Okay, I should do some more thinking," and they decide to do some writing. They don't want to set up a blog or whatever, so they just go to Medium, which would be the logical choice, and they start writing. Then they decide to move it maybe to Substack or something and they realize, "Oh my goodness, those were not my subscribers. Those were Medium subscribers that were directed to me, but they own all the SEO juice," right? The thing about email is this is mine.
David: The other thing that we've talked about multiple times on here is Gini Dietrich's model, her PESO model, paid, earned, shared, owned. This is an owned category. That's really why it's so unique. This would be true of almost any other owned category like a podcast, for instance. There's still some aggregation and some discoverability issues, so let's say if you put your podcast on Spotify.
Blair: Yes, that's what I was thinking about. It's like podcast was basically RSS audio, and I guess technically it still is. It was this thing that you owned where you owned the platform. Now you're having this consolidation primarily on Spotify. You and I have never talked about this, but I do have this sense of losing control of the audience via podcasting. Maybe that's a topic for another day.
David: Yes, right.
Blair: Okay. Email leads all the other channels, all the other options. The first reason for it is that you own it and you can't be deplatformed. Your next point here is that there's an expected response path. What you mean by that is just hit reply?
David: Yes, exactly. You just hit reply. Now, of course, sometimes it's going to go to an unmanned address, right? Most of the time, you can just hit reply.
Blair: I get your weekly email.
David: I wish you read it. I know you get it. I wish you read it.
Blair: [laughs] If I reply to it, does that go to you?
David: It goes to me and Jonathan together, and then whoever needs to reply picks it up.
Blair: Got you.
David: When I sent this newsletter out as a weekly email, I said, "Hey, hit reply. Try me out." A lot of people did with comments or questions. That's beautiful. You're listening to a podcast and there isn't any response mechanism.
Blair: Just go ahead and hit reply, folks, and we'll get right back to you.
David: Right. Yes. I love this. If you actually want to have a conversation, a relationship with your list, this facilitates it. Very few other things do.
Blair: Yes, that's a really good point. As you're saying that, I realize there's some times where I think, "I don't want to read the replies to this." There are other times I'm really, really interested in. I should just take it all. It's part of the package. It is one of the benefits. It's like when we used to allow comments on blogs. Do you remember that?
David: Yes, I remember that, but it's a very painful memory. Let's not go down there. [chuckles]
Blair: Yes. I was actually thinking of enabling that again. I was on somebody's blog and they had comments, and I thought, "Maybe it's time to go back and revisit that idea," because of the response path idea that you talk about, the value of email here.
David: In some cases, yes. There's a lot of things I subscribe to where I'm just as interested in the conversation afterwards. I would say Freddie deBoer or Matty Yglesias, I read the comments as much as I do read the articles. What terrifies me is that I'm afraid that the comments to a blog post will not support the image I'm trying to convey. That's what scares me.
Blair: Yes, you don't want to give a platform to idiots. What else is on your list of reasons why email leads all the other options?
David: The other one is that email provides a pretty reliable feedback loop. It's not as if open rates are all that scientific, especially after the change that Apple made to their mail program, how they record, how do they classify and open. Still, it's comparative. Like on my list, I'm looking at a few things. I don't want any spam complaints ever. I want an unsubscribe rate of less than one-fourth of 1%. I want the net size to hold steady or rise, accounting for the people who unsubscribe and the new subscribers.
Whatever my open rate is or click-through rate, whatever, it may not be all that accurate, but at least it shows me a trend, and that's really good. You can do the same thing with your podcast. That's even audited, so it's just as reliable, maybe even more reliable than the email thing. How are you going to do that with the other forms of media? I just like the fact that there's a feedback loop. As you write an article on something and your stats dive, quit writing stuff like that. Write better stuff.
Blair: Yes. My stats say never put the S word in the subject line, sales.
David: My stats say never write about financial management issues, but I am determined to shovel vegetables on people's plates and not just feed them steak, so I don't really care. You're still going to get it.
Blair: Yes. That's interesting. Okay. Now, the benefit is everybody uses the medium.
David: Right, doesn't everybody have one?
Blair: Yes, and your point is there are no exceptions to this. Does anybody know anybody in business who is not on email?
David: If they are, would they ever buy from you?
Blair: Yes.
David: [chuckles] They're living somewhere in a jungle, right? They would kill you. They don't want your email. It just struck me as so odd. I wouldn't go to all this trouble for just a single unknown prospect, but I can find pretty much any adult's email anywhere. All you have to do is give me one email that they've used somewhere in their life, and I can find the rest of the emails they use.
The same is true for a phone number. Everybody has a phone number that you want to reach, but there's still something very different about calling somebody out of the blue, right? I hadn't even thought about this until I was writing this article. I was like, "Wow, every single person has an email address." Not everybody subscribes to cable TV,
Blair: Yes. I don't. Not everybody's active on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm not on Instagram. I'm not on Facebook. I just deleted Twitter/X from my phone just because I'm not using it, and I thought, "This is a bit of a dud. I might come back to it someday if it becomes useful to me again. It's not a principal thing, it's just a usage thing." When you think of this, I think in the town we live in, Colette and I are seen as, "Oh, you're the people who aren't on Facebook." I just assume nobody's on Facebook because I'm not on Facebook, but that's not true. Clearly, I think there's five billion people on Facebook, but everybody's got email.
To your point about you can get an email address, listener, if you need to find anything on the deep or the dark web, David is your man. I'm often asking him to go get information for me. I don't know how he does it or where he gets it, but he gets it, anything you want.
David: [laughs]
Blair: Background checks on your babysitter. Whatever you need, man. It's also cost-effective. Do you remember the discussions where people were talking about, maybe we'll charge a cent in email-
David: Yes.
Blair: -and that would keep spam down? It's basically free, isn't it?
David: It really is. If you're subscribing to something like MailChimp, you're going to pay more for a bigger list, but that's just so meaningless. It's basically just a trivial cost it doesn't matter, especially in the scheme of things. Oh my goodness, we just did an analysis recently and we have a return on investment in our LinkedIn advertising. For every $30 we spend, we get about $100 worth of work from it. That's good. Then you think, "Wait a second, you mean your marketing budget is 30% of your income? That's bad." If you did the same analysis around email, it would blow you away. You'd never buy another digital ad in your life. From a cost-effective standpoint, it's amazing.
Blair: Yes, we're not talking about what's in the content of that email, but we'll get there. Another point, re-engagement, right? People go quiet, just park them for a little while, and then go back to them.
David: Yes, right. Whereas let's say you say to Facebook on your Facebook feed-- I don't know if you've never seen this because you're not on Facebook, but you can say, "Hey, I don't like this ad, don't show it to me again." Then they'll say, "Hey, do you want to tell us why?" I said, "No, just quit showing it to me." It's never going to show up again, right? It's gone.
Somebody unsubscribes from my list, I still have their name. I forget what the exact details are, but I think legally, you can try to re-engage them later. Anyways, however you feel about that ethically. The fact is that you can still try to reach them. You can re-engage them. Maybe they unsubscribed for some weird reason or whatever. You can't necessarily do that. If somebody quits listening to your podcast, you don't have any way of reaching them five years later.
Blair: Yes, great point.
David: Last one is scalability. I don't know if that's the right word here, but it's something that you could write something that resonates with your audience, and it takes no more effort to send it to 10,000 people than 2,000 people. That's what I mean by scalability there. It's powerful.
Blair: Continuing with our advocacy of spamming as a marketing approach.
[laughter]
David: Yes.
Blair: These benefits, some of these are the reasons why your inbox is just filled with garbage, so what's in the email is just as important. Let's talk about that, critical components of the strategy. Walk us through the key elements of how you should think about the content and other elements of your email strategy.
David: Yes. I think I've got five points here. The first one is there should not be any news in your newsletter. It's an unfortunate term. I don't know what else to call it. When you say newsletter, everybody knows what you mean, but there shouldn't be any news in there.
Blair: Yes, news about the firm, unless maybe it's a PS. Can you put a PS in there?
David: Yes. You can even have really relevant stuff, you won an Emmy or something. Yes, obviously, you want to tell people that, but the most recent hire or the award you got for doing something for some other client, that stuff doesn't change people's world. You ought to have a segmented list like grandma and your former classmates who thought you'd never amount to anything. You send stuff to them and brag about what's happening. First thing is no news. Second is really usable insight that is going to be tied closely to your positioning/. It shouldn't be the insight that just anybody could write. It should be the insight that's tied to your positioning.
Third, and this one I get a lot of questions on. Actually, this was the one reply in various forums that I got the most of after sending this out, and that's how does it make sense to give away all your stuff? Then they don't need to hire you, right? Which is a legitimate question, but what people do in response to that is they skate across the whole top. That doesn't really help your prospects to see. Instead, just peel off one little illustration of something and go really, really deep, and they'll assume that you can go very deep on all the other issues that you haven't addressed yet. Does that make sense before I go on?
Blair: Yes. By skating across the top, you mean people tend to write about content that is too broad.
David: Right.
Blair: They're nervous about going deep because they feel like, "I'm giving away everything on this topic." I love your language around this. I've heard you advocate this for years. You go an inch wide and a mile deep in your content, so very narrow slivers. Then you can write forever because there are an infinite number of slivers. You go deep into these topics. Now, just following up on the question of when you give something away for free and when do you charge for it, and your answer, which I love and I've quoted numerous times, is the minute somebody asks you to apply that guidance to their situation, that should be a paid engagement.
David: Yes.
Blair: I'm sure you've experienced this. You write a post. It's a post that is sent via email, drops into somebody's inbox. It stirs some profound thinking on the part of the reader. The reader reaches out to you asking for advice on how to apply that guidance to their situation. That's when they're coming up to the line and possibly even asking you to step over the line where you should start charging, correct?
David: Yes, exactly right. This happened to me actually two weeks ago. A fella, his name was Charlie, lives nearby. He's probably listening to this. He said, "Hey, can I buy you coffee and pick your brain?" He happened to live nearby, so it was an obvious thing that could have happened if he knew me. [laughs]
Blair: Hey, you're getting a coffee out of it. Sounds like a great deal. [laughs]
David: That's basically what I said. I said, "This is what I do for a living."
Blair: I just had a coffee. I'm good. Thanks.
David: I said it nicely, but firmly, "I have to put these boundaries up or I just can spend all my life doing that stuff." He said, "Oh, no. Actually, I want to talk about hiring you." I apologized to him." I said, "I'm really sorry. I made an assumption that you were just wanting to pick my brain." Then he acknowledged, "I probably could have said it differently." That would have been like, "I give this advice away for a living. If you want me to apply my thinking to you, then I have to charge you, right?" That's your point.
Blair: Yes, that's where the line is. Yes.
David: Anyway. That third one was dive really deep with a sliver. The other is to have a point of view that's so thoughtful that it will create some sort of a reaction to most of the people reading it. The way I think about this for myself is, even though I'm a fairly courageous person, I am frequently nervous right before I hit send. There was something in this that made me a little bit nervous too. I think that's the way it should be.
You could be so confident in what you're doing that there's just no nervousness at all, but you should be sending something that when people receive it, they just ignore it or unsubscribe, or they just sit there and think about it a minute and maybe forward it to a friend or a colleague or a competitor or something. That's what we're looking for. I find that most of the things that I get and then quickly unsubscribe for are just ignorable, and you can't be ignorable.
Blair: Yes, that's right. I think you should have this feeling of immense pride and looking forward to the response or fear. It's one of those two things. If it's just, "Oh, okay, done, get it out," maybe that's a piece that you shouldn't be putting forward into the world. I still remember the email that I was most nervous sending. I think it was around 2008, so it's going way back. It was called 12 Proclamations for the New Year. What made me nervous about it was not so much the content, but the tone of voice. I was experimenting with the tone of voice. Then I got all kinds of positive feedback, and that post ended up getting blown up into a book, The Win Without Pitching Manifesto.
David: Oh, really? I didn't know that. What was the tone? Was it angry, confident? What was the tone?
Blair: No. It's the grandiose language of we shall,-
David: Oh.
Blair: -like writing the 10 commandments.
David: Right.
Blair: The tone really resonated, so I went with it in a book format. We're talking about the critical components of an email strategy, so I'll just recap them here. There's one more. Don't include much news in your newsletter. Do include usable insights that pay off your positioning. Cut off a sliver and dive really deep, an inch wide and a mile deep. Aim for a point of view that's thoughtful, that's so thoughtful either make someone stop and think or unsubscribe. A bit of a polarization in your point of view.
If you're putting forward regular content without a point of view, that's probably content that AI could write. That's one of the things I like about a point of view or even an ideology these days. Then the fifth one to wrap up this section, I guess I was alluding to this with the question off the top, your relationship with your readers is the first thing that you'd grab if you had to flee your burning office or a burning building, right?
David: [chuckles] Yes.
Blair: The first thing you would grab is your list. I feel that way too. I feel like you could burn my business down, take everything from me, take away this podcast, take away the books. As long as I had my list, I could rebuild fairly quickly.
David: Yes.
Blair: That's exactly the way I feel. The point is not, how do you protect your list? The point is that you should invest in your list because it is the most important thing in your business. That's the point of this to me. It's like, "Wow." Whatever the cadence is, just do it. Let's wrap up. You've got some great advice from a blog post or two of Rand Fishkins. Rand is the founder of SparkToro, and he's an SEO guy. Moz before that, that big company, right?
David: Yes, Moz. Right.
Blair: He's got an interesting stat here, and then I'll throw it back to you to just pull on whatever thread you want to pull on. According to his research, he says, "Statistically, it's better to trade 1,000 new followers on any of these platforms for a single email subscriber."
David: Yes, I read that, and I thought, "It sounds like he's exaggerating, but he comes at this stuff as a scientist. Maybe he isn't."
Blair: Yes.
David: Then he goes on to say, "Social media engagement rates have plummeted in the last 15 years. Ad engagement to Google's CTRs have fallen massively the last decade, and now there's zero-click searches." Those are the ones where you actually just get the answer right there. You don't have to click through. The visibility of TV and print are dropping, and then you talked about enshittification and so on. This was very surprising to me, not just to hear it, but to hear it from him because this is one of the biggest scientific names in the SEO world. For him to talk about the value of email was even more striking to me.
Blair: Yes. We could pick the social platforms. TikTok is still on the rise, although threatened. It's probably going to be fine, but it's still on the ascendancy. Instagram is keeping pace. The rest of them, again, this term, the enshittification, what's a YouTube subscriber worth? I don't think it's a lot. Views are worth something. What's a subscriber worth? I'm not sure. My own personal disillusionment with the few remaining social platforms I'm on, I don't know if I've talked about this on this podcast before but I've spoken about it on others, is I'm just rapidly losing interest in social media, period.
Maybe that's just an old dude who's had enough and he's decided what he likes and what he doesn't like or what works and doesn't work. I'm not going to walk away from intelligent marketing. In terms of my own interest in these things, there's something about the platforms that feel like they're just not doing it for me anymore. Maybe it's because I'm not a teenage girl, although I still do like TikTok.
David: [laughs]
Blair: I'm not on it, but it's a great way to kill 20 minutes.
David: Contrast that with LinkedIn for me. I have, I don't know, 20,000-- I don't even know, but whatever, not that many enough followers on LinkedIn, a lot of connections. I keep watching these people that have somehow mastered the engagement game. I had a couple of calls with somebody last month about, how do I get better at LinkedIn? Every time I dive more into that, I'm thinking, "Oh, man, I just feel like I'm playing the system and then they're going to change the rules on me as soon as I figure it out." That's the difference between a platform that you might participate on that you must like LinkedIn, you must, and having your own email list. It's just different.
Blair: That's an interesting point, this idea of, okay, how do I play this game now because the rules have changed? You have a conversation with somebody who's figured it out. Now I have to change how I'm using this platform. I have to show up differently. It's a formatting thing. It's a commenting thing. It's these little things designed to game the system. That's part of my fatigue with it.
I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it. It's somebody else's platform. The platform is in charge. The platform has decided we no longer value that, we now value this. They're just trying to get ahead of people who are trying to game the system, and all of us users are trying to game the system. It's a bit of a cat-and-mouse game that does get tired at some point. Whereas your point here is email is email is email. It doesn't change. You own it. You're in control. You have this freedom and it's free.
David: Yes, largely free. The big message I want to plaster across this episode is think carefully about what role email can play in your marketing strategy. It might very well should be included in some way.
Blair: Yes. That's a great way to finish. You're not saying everybody should be on email, it should be your primary channel. Think carefully about it. Maybe just underpinning that is the idea that it's been around for so long and it's seen as such an everyday use case tool that maybe there comes a point where we take for granted the marketing capability that this old friend still has.
David: Yes. The other thing we do too is that we react to the emails we get all the time and we say, "I don't want to be included in that batch." I get very few emails I really want. To me, I flip that around and say, "You know how easy it is to stand out in that crowd." Most everybody really isn't doing it very well, so it makes it easier for you if you know how to do it.
Blair: That's a great point to end on. Are Email Newsletters Even Viable Anymore? There is a blog post on punctuation.com if you want to read more about it. If you do not subscribe to David's email newsletter, it's punctuation.com or winwithoutpitching.com for mine. We both write fairly regularly, you more so than me. Thank you, David. Great episode.
David: Thank you, Blair.