I had a call with a client this week about their newsletter strategy. “I feel like we don’t have a complete picture of what our audience wants,” they told me. “What are we missing?”

I’ll tell you what I told them: Building a newsletter strategy is like putting together a 10,000-piece puzzle. Every time you send an email, run a survey, or talk to readers, you collect a few more puzzle pieces. But you’ve got to be patient — it takes time to collect enough pieces so you can start to see the full picture.

Here’s hoping you discover a few key pieces of your puzzle this week.

—Dan

A few weeks ago, Claire Zulkey — who edits the stories here at Inbox Collective and makes everything you read on the site a whole lot better — came to me with an interesting interview. She’d just talked with Virginia Sole-Smith, the author behind the newsletter (and podcast) Burnt Toast, which Sole-Smith has built over the past seven years into a product that brings in six figures annually.

What I found most fascinating from their conversation was how often Sole-Smith talked about breaking newsletter rules I’d considered ironclad.

Think readers will only reply to surveys if they’re short? Sole-Smith just ran one with 50 questions (50!!) and got lots of great feedback.

Think you need lots of perks to convert readers to paying subscribers? Sole-Smith offers few, and has 3,500 paying subscribers.

Think your newsletter is the best way to promote a new book? Sole-Smith believes the reverse — a book is actually a great way to promote your newsletter — might be equally true.

We can learn a lot from people who don’t follow the rules. And it’s why I think you’ll learn a ton from this interview — it’s full of lessons for anyone who’s trying to convert readers into paying supporters.

Read the interview →

Yesterday, Google announced that starting in February 2024, they’ll be rolling out some changes to keep inboxes free of spam. The three big changes:

My take on all this: Follow the best practices that Yanna-Torry Aspraki laid out in this Ask a Deliverability Expert column, and you’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about in the long run.

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