150 issues?! How (and why) we run our weekly newsletter

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh (an American writer and aviator)

This week is the 150th issue of the EcoSend Weekly newsletter.

One hundred and fifty.

Unfortunately there's no letter from the king for such a milestone.

But there sure is a lot to say about it. So today, I thought it'd be good to break from our usual format.

As you might expect, we think a lot about email, and we think a lot about this newsletter.

Today, I'm going to be as open as possible with you and essentially do a little "retrospective" — the sort of thing we'd normally do in a meeting as a team, but share it with you…

I hope it's of value if you are evaluating whether to start / stop / continue an email newsletter or marketing program of your own.

As always, if you want more information or have any questions, just hit reply — one of the team will reply to you right away.

What is the EcoSend weekly newsletter?

A weekly email newsletter that delivers a source of timeless education and inspiration on email marketing best practices. Sent to marketing and communications professionals who are responsible for the email marketing of their organisation.

We are not a news organisation. In general, we do not break news.
Neither are we writing a publication about sustainability.

The EcoSend Weekly newsletter is a publication about email and marketing in a more mindful world. Sustainability is at the heart of our business but it is only occasionally the leading focus of our newsletter.

We do not chase short-term fads or hype. While we reference them and are aware of them, we rarely make them the centre of our content.

Every issue should be mindful of:

• The next week of announcements and releases we are making.
• Being regarded as trusted experts on all things email.
• The context of the wider climate and world around us.
• Our own EcoSend Brand Guidelines and styleguide.
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Why do we run the weekly newsletter?

To inspire, educate, entertain, and delight people who are at the intersection of working in the world of email marketing and care about making the world a better place.

The newsletter also exists as an example of what your emails could be like if you use EcoSend. It should showcase the best in terms of all aspects of email marketing: design, accessibility, transparency, respect, readability, and written quality.

Who is the newsletter for?

Our ideal customer is someone who is responsible for email marketing at a purpose-driven organisation.

They care about learning new skills, making an impact, being effective and efficient with their time, making their organisation more successful, and doing things the right way.

A purpose-driven organisation might be made up of one person — the founder, just starting on their journey. It might be a small team of 3 people stretched thin and trying to change the world. It might be a team of 50 at a charity with limited resources and budget.

Our reader is the hero. The one who can change the fortunes of their organisation through better marketing and communication.

Our job is to equip them.

How do we measure success?

As with everything in the business, we want to be able to say “yes this is working”, and change tactics if it’s not.

A lot can get messy and confusing in the world of email but one thing is clear and drives value: more people receiving (and hopefully reading) our work.

Every week we report on how many subscribers we have and how that has changed since last week.

For each issue we may also evaluate the following to dive deeper on specific impact. But not every issue has to deliver on all of these.

• Open Rate
• Click-Through Rate
• Number of new signups to EcoSend
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  We will have good weeks and bad. This is not always within our control. We do not need every week to be a record-breaker. What matters most is the question we can only answer when we zoom out: is this a net-positive for the business? We should always aim to answer that with a strong and confident "yes!"

What have we done well so far?

• I feel really proud of the look and feel of the newsletter today. The colour scheme, the readability, the nature-focused artwork we find through the BHL. It's truly a good showcase of EcoSend at its best.
• The newsletter speaks from the heart each week. It's honest and true to our values.
• I feel we have struck a good balance (perhaps to our own detriment?) to prioritise value and education over selling. We never want our reader to feel like they got conned into a sales pitch by signing up.
• Slowly but surely our audience has grown this year. We have a really passionate core readership who are exactly the people we want to be talking to.
• We get replies — we are writing emails that people find interesting and engaging enough to respond to. And this helps fuel ideas for future editions.
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Where can we improve?

• We could experiment more — with different formats, content types, focuses.
• We could explore adding another section each week — like a roundup of news from the world of ethical marketing.
• We could provide more resources — tools, downloads, and more in-depth guides to go deeper on topics we cover.
• We could create more artwork — especially diagrams and visuals to explain topics beyond the words we share.
• We can do a lot more to promote the newsletter — using our existing social channels, promoting the benefits of the newsletter to our own users and customers, and surfacing the content to more people in more creative ways.
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Other notes and thoughts…

• We still post our email newsletter editions to the EcoSend blog separately. This takes quite a bit of effort, and we're working on a beautiful and much-needed solution to this in EcoSend itself.
• Building trust and community and a readership takes time. We are a very patient company and team. We often sacrifice short-term wins for long-term success.
• We are very proud to avoid tactics that are the antithesis of what we stand for. You won't find countdown timers, full-screen takeovers, aggressive gating of content, etc. in our marketing.
• We love creating the newsletter each week as it's a forcing function to use our own product just like our customers.
• We have made hundreds of improvements through using EcoSend to send the EcoSend Weekly newsletter.
• We obsess over user feedback, and when we ourselves use our product on a weekly basis it means we can fix and improve many things before our customers ever need to know.
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  And last but not least: we are nothing without you, our reader. Thank you for subscribing, and thank you for reading.

My one ask

Can you think back to an issue you enjoyed of this newsletter? Do you know anyone who could benefit from reading that?

Please share this with them today.

We'd love to welcome them to this wonderful community and share more with them.

• Send them a link to the newsletter
• Send them a link to this issue
• Tell them about EcoSend

And with that…

Thank you.

Here’s to the next 150.

James

This week's illustration is "Autumnal Tints on Lake Erie" (Plate V) from Anton Kerner von Marilaun's The Natural History of Plants (London: Blackie & Son, 1894–95), via the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It just felt right for our first issue of autumn and our 150th. Now, it's time to go enjoy a pumpkin spiced latte.