Newsletter Therapy
Helping you send emails that delight, entertain, inform and sell.
Deliverability, not to be confused with Deliverance
Hey Reader! I’m going to flip the script today. As an email marketer, you know how disheartening it is to spend a lot of time crafting an excellent message only to find that 75% of your audience hasn’t read it. (And let me just pause for a moment to say that if, in fact, your open rate isn’t what you’d like, I invite you to pick up Big Click Energy, a thorough guide to writing subject lines. You can write headlines that get your email opened! I can help. Normally $17, but because I love you...
shh! still sleeping
Hey Reader! I might in fact be a bear in winter. I certainly feel like one; grouchy and sluggish, stumbling around looking for a quick snack of raw salmon before heading back to the cave to sleeeeeeeep. Which makes writing email hella challenging. But of course I’m all about getting them out there, so here’s a quick tip: Your email can be super short. Observe: Hey! Hi! Do you need help with _______? I’ve got openings on Friday at 1:00, Monday at 11:00 and Tuesday at 3:00. Sign up here. [link]...
Getting by with a little help from my friends
Hey Reader! List-building! I'm guessing that's exactly what you want to be thinking about on the last day of the year. 😁 I keep meaning to write about building your mailing list because it’s a crucial part of publishing a successful newsletter. It’s also a challenging part of the process. There’s a whole bunch of things you can do to get people on your list, and in the next few weeks I’ll talk about a few of them. It’s one of those consistency things - you’ve just got to keep at it and it...
The opposite of procrastination
Hey Reader! It's dark. I mean, the sun is up, allegedly, but the sky is a deep dull gray and turning on every light in the house is hardly enough to engender the idea of "daytime". And yet - it is a weekday and one on which I am supposed to be getting sh*t done. 🤗 My family is off celebrating our very non-religiously-affilliated Christmas 🎄without me. At home, all alone, I had such high hopes of getting the house clean! And getting up early! And generally being super productive. While also...
you don't have to walk on water
Hey Reader! Do you ever see those posts that start: Vulnerable share… ?? Sometimes those words make me roll my eyes like I’m a thirteen year old at a family dinner, but I like that people feel free to be vulnerable in public spaces. I’m all for consensual exposure. I value privacy - and I’m open to giving it the heave-ho pretty often. Openness and authenticity are things you hear a lot about when it comes to ‘putting yourself out there’ in business. Am I pro-vulnerability? I am. Do I think...
I’m only a quitter sometimes
Hey Reader! Here's a short list of the sports I tried when I was a kid but quit after a season: Tennis, ice skating, competitive swimming, gymnastics. What can I say, I love to try new things! My mother’s constant refrain was that if I wasn’t immediately good at something I threw in the sweaty towel. She wasn’t wrong. And more practice would have made me much better at all those things. But as a probably-undiagnosed-ADHD kid I didn’t have the capacity to go deep into something that didn’t...
Be bold already!
Hey Reader! I remember Tessa writing ‘Buy Nothing Day’ on the big chalkboard calendar in the warehouse at Oregon Food Bank. I think she erased someone else's designation of the day as Black Friday, though maybe it was merely a sad blank square. Either way, she was committed to boycotting the national day of consumer delight, and so was I. That was years ago, and I still don't like Black Friday, though at this point I think it's more about the name. Doesn’t it sound like some medieval...
Now for something completely different...
Hey Reader! I’m taking a break from newsletter advice this week to get all bossy about something new. Shopping. If you know me well, you might be wondering why I’m giving advice about something I dislike so much. I’ll tell you: I spent years helping people declutter their homes and offices and calendars and lives. And the number one way to battle clutter? Avoid bringing stuff into your home to begin with. The holidays are upon us, and gift-giving is the celebratory activity we seem to be...
Coincidence? I think not.
Hey Reader! Ok, so I subscribe to a LOT of newsletters. Tips on living with ADHD (I’m not diagnosed, but suspicious). An overview of recently published novels (TBR list is longer than my commute). A link roundup from an ultramarathoner (don’t have to do it if I read about it). So, yeah, I hear from a lot of experts on the regular. Recently I realized that the newsletters I’ve stuck with over the years have this in common: they look the same every week. Not to say I don’t hear from their...
We all turn into our parents
Hey Reader! Talking about the weather is a trope, right? Like, the most boring conversation of all time? In college my friend Valerie and I used to make fun of our parents for bringing the weather into every conversation. 🙄 I mean, for real. Didn’t they have anything interesting to say? My family was stuck in gray, blustery New Hampshire while we lived and learned in gorgeously sunny Colorado. They were likely angling for a chance to remind me that their weather was pretty much always worse...
Helping you send emails that delight, entertain, inform and sell.