Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.

— Dr. Seuss (American children's author and cartoonist)

Is AI terrifying or exciting? Yes.

In a week where there’s been news of AI potentially ending civilisation, I felt it’d be a good time to confront the topic head on.

In the space of just two years, the conversation around AI has moved far beyond “Have you tried ChatGPT yet?”

While a lot of AI discourse centres around big tech, there’s a lot going on in the charity and non-profit world. In fact, according to the Charity Digital Skills Report, 92% of large charities are using AI in some form.

If you’ve been following EcoSend for a while, you’ll know we have a deeply considered approach to AI. We have a categorically different mindset to the majority of the digital marketing industry in this regard.

Because while there is tremendous potential, our whole philosophy as a business is to leave the world better than we found it. So the vast array of concerns around ethics, sustainability, and our very existence as a species are worthy of at least a little consideration.

And even if we take a leap of faith and skip past the ethics, morals, sustainability, and humanity questions, there are some very practical concerns for any marketer or communications lead:

How do I get the productivity benefits of AI without everything we publish starting to sound like everyone else's AI-generated slop?

We can’t cover everything in one newsletter issue, so we’re going to focus on the practical application this week.

I’m going to assume you are already using AI in some capacity in your daily working life. If that’s not you, then feel free to skip this edition and we’ll pick back up next week.

Treat your voice as an asset

Across the sector, the same worry keeps coming up: the fear that much of marketing and digital communication is starting to sound the same. Smooth, polished, and, to be totally honest: bland. Empty, void, and emotionally flat.

"AI slop" has become shorthand for this: copy (and images and any other media) that's technically fine but emotionally totally forgettable.

I would call it: lacking soul.

Why AI slop is an issue for charity communications

For charities, AI slop matters — perhaps even more than in other industries.

You and your organisation work tirelessly to bring supporters to your cause. Your supporters are giving and donating from the kindness of their hearts. They don’t need to support you.

They give because something or someone made them feel something.

When your emails start reading like soulless slop, you risk losing the very core of what drives people to support you.

AI isn't necessarily the problem here, though. Because with the right approach, it can be used to help further your cause.

The real risk is using AI to create content without a point of view. To outsource your critical thinking and human connection.

While by no means exhaustive, here are a few ways we’re seeing experienced teams use AI to save time and produce more, while keeping their soul and applying care and craft to their work.

1. Write down what "sounding like us" means

If you work in a larger organisation, you likely have brand guidelines.

But while many focus on the logo usage and colour palette, very few have a guide to tone of voice that's actually usable.

A great task to help both your team and your AI underlings write more consistently is to pull together a one-page reference on your organisation’s tone of voice. You might want to cover:

• Five words you'd use, and five you never would.
• Three pieces of recent copy that sound exactly right.
• How you talk about the people you support (and some example of how you don’t).

This can obviously grow, but start small. It’s an internal asset that is so easy to avoid but once you have it, it can yield so many benefits. It can become a reference for every draft of every blog post, email, social media post, and web page — whether a person or a tool is writing it.

2. Use AI for scaffolding, not storytelling

There’s a common refrain I see on my journeys around the web:

AI was supposed to do the boring work so humans could do the creative work. Instead, AI is doing the creative work and humans are still doing the boring work.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Let AI do the jobs that don't need your soul. It can be a great sparring partner for ideation and creative ideas: subject line variations, restructuring a long report into a short email, generating first-pass summaries, suggesting alt text, and resizing copy across channels.

Focus your energy on the heart of the message. Make this real, make it human, be passionate. And use that as the epicentre for AI to work from — not the other way around.

So much time can be lost to the administrative aspects of digital marketing. Try to offload those parts and prioritise your energy on the really important, human aspects of the role.

3. Start from real material, not a blank slate

Generic inputs lead to generic outputs.

You likely have some extremely valuable assets and resources that are massively underused.

Create drafts based on the raw information only you have: real places, real stories, from real volunteers and staff.

Specific details that are unique to your organisation are how you escape the slop.

For example “A warm meal" is quite forgettable.

"Leah's first hot dinner in three weeks: shepherd's pie, with extra gravy" is a level of specificity and detail that AI just can’t guess or make up. And your readers know that.

4. Add a "would we say this out loud?" check

Before anything goes out, read it aloud.

That is another step… but it’s almost always worthwhile.

If it sounds like a press release, a LinkedIn post from a grifter, or a phrase you've seen on ten other charity websites, you probably want to rewrite it.

There are so many well established tells to look out for: “it’s not just X, it’s Y”, “in today's fast-paced world”, “we're thrilled to”, excessively flowery metaphors, and tidy lists of three that say… nothing.

5. Give your team permission to be imperfect

While I don’t like to admit it, some of the best-performing emails (in charities, non-profits, and for-profit businesses) are short, plain, and a little rough around the edges.

It might not always be appropriate, but in some situations, the best campaign could well be: A note from the CEO written on a train. A thank-you that sounds like it came from an actual person. A note from someone you helped relaid verbatim.

Polish isn't always the goal. Being believable and human is.

6. Measure more than open rates

If your tone of voice and digital marketing is working, you'll see it. It might not always be obvious but you will see it in places that can be hard to track: replies to emails, forwarded newsletters, and supporters quoting your words back to you.

Track those signals — perhaps just in a rough spreadsheet at first. They help to clarify whether people feel spoken to, or just spoken at.

The opportunity

As more and more organisations default to the same tools, they naturally default to the same phrasing and concepts. A distinctive, human voice is more valuable than ever.

The charities that thrive over the next few years won't be the ones who avoid AI. They'll be the ones that know exactly who they are, and don’t forget what connects them with their supporters.

Your supporters can tell the difference between soul and slop. Make sure they never have to wonder.

Until next time,

James

This week’s illustration is "Burchell's Zebras" by Louis A. Sargent, from Frank Finn's The Wild Beasts of the World (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, c.1909), via the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Look at it for a second and the three zebras run together into one striped shape, which is how the herd protects itself. Look a bit longer and every animal's pattern is its own. You could say that's what this week's issue is all about: numerous pieces of content that all fits together, and each piece still has its own stripes.

Don't be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One person gets only a week's value out of a year while another gets a full year's value out of a week.

— Charles Richards (American author and psychologist)

How many genuinely brilliant ideas do you think you need to fill your annual content calendar?

One for every week?

Because if you’re responsible for the communications of a charity, a non-profit, or any purpose-driven business, it can certainly feel that way.

Every time newsletter day rolls around I used to find myself asking:

Right. What the heck are we sending this time?

But I have good news: you don’t need 52 brand-new ideas to have an annual content calendar and an engaging email strategy.

We previously shared some ideas for writing your email newsletter faster, and today we're taking it a step further, with a simple system.

With the right structure and approach, you can build a plan around just five or six good ideas. And as you'll see, the rest will quickly fall into place.

A simple, reliable system for your newsletter ideas

If you’re like me, you might default to thinking of every email as a completely new creation.

But I’m trying to stop thinking like that.

Instead, we want to take a little time in one session to create just a handful of formats — a bank of ideas and structures — you can return to again and again.

If we’re going to get fancy, we could call it our “email newsletter idea toolkit” or something… But you can call it whatever you want.

Six formats to spark a whole year of newsletter ideas

Armed with each of these, the ideas can start pouring out — you can likely think of multiple ideas and examples in your organisation for each of these core concepts. Before you know it, you’ll have 52 issues.

1. Tell a story

Tell a story that appeals to the emotional side of your audience — it could be about a person, a moment or an experience that brings your work to life.

2. Share an insight

Tell your audience about something you’ve learned recently in your work that could be relevant to them. Give people a reason to think.

3. Show your impact

You don’t have to do this in every issue. You could dedicate entire email updates to just one number, a milestone, a result or a small win. Show people where their support is going — and go deep on it.

4. Ask for action

We’ve spoken before about the art of asking people to take action with good CTAs. You could go deep in multiple issues about why taking action can be so impactful — for you, your organisation, and for the recipient. Donate, purchase, volunteer, attend, sign up, share, reply. Give people something meaningful to do.

5. Introduce someone

People love to connect with people — not faceless entites. Spend an issue dedicated to a volunteer, a team member, a customer, a supporter, a partner or someone whose life has been touched by your work. It’s easy to underestimate the impact this can have on building lasting, trusted relationships with your audience.

6. Go behind the scenes

What are you working on? What’s changing in your organisation or your industry? What does a normal day at your organisation actually look like? Going behind the scenes can feel uncomfortable — it’s often messy and full of things we are embarassed by. But again this can build so much trust with your audience, and again remind the reader that you and your team are human. More than ever, people want to hear more about how things work on the inside — not just the flashy cover.

And that’s it — you now have six formats you can rotate throughout the year.

Of course, I don’t expect any of these to be unbelievably surprising to you. But what I encourage you to do is to step out of your comfort zone, and go a little deeper on any one of these in a future email.

Overcoming repetition

You might think that this could get repetitive over the course of a year — re-using five or six ideas.

But it doesn’t have to be — it all depends on how you “fill” each of these concepts. For example, the chances are you can think of more than just one person you could introduce to your audience — you may even be struggling to pick who right now! This idea alone could give you ten compelling emails to put together.

The benefit of repetition

It’s also worth bearing in mind the importance and benefit of repetition.

You and your team might have spent the last three weeks talking about the same campaign — in every meeting, in every internal call, and around the lunch table.

But your supporters haven’t!

You might feel like you’ve mentioned your new project a hundred times. Someone who joined your mailing list last month is hearing about it for the first time.

And something that feels completely obvious to the people inside your organisation might be exactly what your audience needs explaining.

Almost always, you’re so much closer and more aware of your content, your work, and your organisation than anyone in your audience is. So don’t be afraid to frequently go back to basics, and repeat yourself.

Ask yourself the right questions

Instead of asking yourself “What can we possibly say that we haven’t said before?”

Try asking questions like:

• What’s interesting that’s happening in our work right now?
• Is there a lens I can look through that would make a topic interesting to our audience?
• What story would I want every single one of our subscribers to know about, even if some have heard it before?

For example, if you’re working on a new project, you could tell the story of someone impacted by it.

It might be obvious, but if you’re working on a new fundraising campaign, you could dive deeper on the impact the money will have — even if that may feel a little repetitive.

If you’ve just put together a new report, don’t feel you have to share the whole thing. You could pull out one surprising insight or statistic — you could even do this on multiple occasions with different elements, to make the one report go so much further.

If you’re celebrating a big milestone, don’t be afraid to highlight it and connect it back to what matters to your audience.

If you come back to this toolkit of just six formats, I promise you will quickly find that you’re not trying to manufacture 52 pieces of content per year from thin air.

Fewer ideas, less pressure, more impact

The returns from email marketing, and specifically from newsletters, rarely come instantly. They grow gradually, and they compound over time.

That’s why we often say: the best email strategy isn’t a perfect one, it’s the one you can actually keep doing with consistency.

So, next time the blank email template stares back at you, don’t panic!

You probably don’t need another idea.

You just need another angle.

Until next time,

James

The illustration in today’s edition is of pigeons. They're the same breed, drawn five times: same beak, same absurd orange eye ring, same white head, same tilted-forward stance like they've all just been asked a difficult question. But they each have a different shield — green, buff, black, chestnut, white. If you were stretching your analogies, you could say it’s one idea of a pigeon, interpreted multiple times, much like today’s whole theme.

The artwork itself is a chromolithograph plate from The Pigeon Book by Alfred Henry Osman (London: George Newnes, 1910), digitised by Cornell University Library and made freely available by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Public domain.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

— René Descartes (French polymath)

Last week I shared my thoughts on clickbait subject lines in answer to one of the questions I was asked when running a workshop on email marketing for charities.

Following on from that, there were so many great questions that I wanted to do another one justice today — it’s all about CTAs, or calls to action.

"One CTA per email" is one of the most misunderstood “rules” in email marketing. Your monthly newsletter likely has to highlight many things, so what can you do to increase the chance of someone actually engaging with it?

Why one CTA is considered a best practice

I tend to find that when you’re about to knowingly break a rule, it tends to help when you understand the motivation behind that rule in the first place.

It’s considered best practice to put one CTA in most emails because the brutal reality is:

A reader will do at most one thing. If you don't decide which one, they'll usually choose for you. And that choice is usually nothing.

Somewhere along the lines, it’s easy to think "one CTA" means “one link”, but that’s not the case at all — plenty of excellent emails contain dozens of links.

When you present three asks (or CTAs) of equal weight, it might seem like you’ve given the reader three chances to act.

But what you’ve actually done is hand them a decision they didn't want to faff with, at 8:40am, while they’re in a queue.

And any psychologist will tell you the response to an unwanted decision is often deferral. “I’ll come back to this later”. Spoiler alert: they won't.

I was never one for maths at school, but if you enjoy that sort of thing you could think of it in terms of probability…

Three equally-weighted asks are not three chances. They're one chance, divided.

So the task for us here is not to delete two links, necessarily. We need to rank our three links in terms of importance — and then make sure the structure and layout of our email honours that ranking.

A quick way to rank links: is it an ask, a read, or a reference?

I don’t know about you, but often the monthly newsletter can be a melting pot of stuff to send out — new articles, a survey, a new offering, a mention of something that the team did, and an odd link to something that adds further context for those interested.

Many of the items in your newsletter are not the same species, even though they usually get treated identically.

One way to help prioritise your links and CTAs is sort them into different buckets or tiers. As an example, you could think of prioritising based on the following:

Tier 1: the ask

The one thing you actually want the recipient to do this month, that has a deadline or a target or a number attached.

This is what you should prioritise, perhaps with visual emphasis by using a clear and bold button.

It gets space above the fold (early in the email). It gets its own paragraph explaining why it matters and what happens when they click.

Preferably exactly one item lives here. If you have two items here, it’s worth considering if you should have two emails.

Tier 2: the read

Content you'd love people to enjoy but aren't explicitly measuring — for a charity this could be a story from a volunteer, or the photos from the summer fair. This can get a headline and visuals, but the link could be a standard text link rather than a button to keep the emphasis on tier 1.

Tier 3: the reference

You often want to link to things people should be able to find, but you don’t necessarily need them do anything or take action.

For example, you might have updated a policy, there might be a change to your contact details, and we often link back to sources for attributing artwork. Don’t shy away from these links — they are crucial for credibility. Just place them and style them so they’re relative to everything else — often towards the end of the email, and perhaps in a smaller font.

By thinking about the goals of your different links, your email can still contain everything. But it will have a structure and a priority that reduces the effort of the reader.

Design is ranking made visible

As the person creating an email, you become the person who will spend more time reading and looking at it than any recipient.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that most recipients will spend more than seconds reading your email. Most often, the recipient is not reading, they are scanning your email.

So the visual weight of each element is crucial to form an easy-to-read map they can use to navigate your content.

Once you have your hierarchy of links defined, you need to make sure your email’s design aligns with it.

For example:

• If everything's a button, nothing is tempting to click. A button is a signal that says “this is important, click me!” If you use a button for every link you lose the main benefit of using a button: that it stands out.
• Two buttons creates a choice. And we know choices get deferred. If you must show two buttons, try to make one the “primary” button and the other the “secondary” button.
• You can repeat your CTA Placing a link once in the text near the top of your email, and once as the button later on is OK. It’s still one ask, repeated. Repetition is a well-established approach for encouraging readers to take action, especially when many recipients never reach the end of the email.
• Focus on the order Whatever comes first is what most recipients will think the email is about, no matter your intentions. If the survey is the priority, the survey should not be the fifth item!

Is your current email template making this hard? If every section is identically styled with an identically styled button then it might be worth an hour of your time to make a few changes. It’s easy to fall into a trap where your template is forcing you down a path that doesn’t serve your content or your priorities.

What to do when one email isn't enough

Sometimes you've got two (or more!) priorities and one email. What do you do (aside from panic)?

A few approaches that I have tried and seen other marketers experiment with:

Give the highest priority CTA its own email

A short, single-purpose email sent three days after the newsletter could be the best option. A bonus here: because the second email is short and about one thing, it's the kind of email people that can get actioned easily, and forwarded to a colleague.

Defer one of your CTAs to the next email

Your newsletter is a series, not a one-off. So if it’s a monthly newsletter, you have twelve slots and twelve chances to lead with something. The pressure to cram everything into your September edition comes from treating each issue as your only shot, but often items can wait. Keep a running list and let items wait their turn when it makes sense.

Split your list — send each CTA to a different segment

If the survey is most appropriate for active volunteers and your story post is really aimed at engaging lapsed subscribers, you might have an opportunity for segmentation. Two shorter emails could be easier to write and more effective than one large that's trying to serve everyone.

Eliminate the CTA from your email entirely

Not everything needs to be in the newsletter. Sometimes things live on the website and get referenced elsewhere. The instinct to put every internal update in the email can turn a newsletter into an internal noticeboard that no one outside the office finds interesting!

A note on measuring your CTAs

If you want to know whether any of this is working, look at which links got the most clicks (as opposed to just the overall click-through-rate (CTR).

A newsletter with clicks spread thinly across five links looks the same on a high-level dashboard as an email where those five links all went to your most important action.

Better still, measure the ultimate success of your campaign — not just the opens and clicks. If your CTA is to a survey, measure the thing you actually wanted: survey responses, not survey clicks.

Try it on your next email campaign

Open your next newsletter draft and if you feel you have too many asks and conflicting priorities, write them out. Then try to put them in priority order.

Then ask yourself two questions:

1. Does the email's layout match that order? If your top priority ask is the third section down in the same grey box as everything else, the design likely needs a few changes.
2. If you had to delete two asks, which would you keep? Whatever you'd keep can be given the primary button. The other two don’t have to be cut, but they can be demoted.

If you genuinely can't pick, that's useful information too. It could mean this should be broken into two emails, or split to two audiences. And it’s better to figure that out before you've sent it!

Ironically for an email about CTAs I don’t have one for you this week. I just hope this has been a helpful topic for you, and if it has, please reply and let me know!

Until next time,

James

This illustration above is taken from a hand-coloured plate from the Edinburgh Journal of Natural History and of the Physical Sciences (1835–1840), via the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Public domain. Multiple cats (not CTAs), all heading somewhere different — which would you choose?

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

— Samuel Johnson (English writer and lexicographer)

This week I ran a workshop on email marketing for charities.

A big mix of people signed up — from school uniform banks, hospices, carers' centres, heritage trusts, dance companies, and an orangutan society.

I was blown away by the interest, and while I was speaking, the chat in the side-panel started to get busy with questions and ideas.

Good question!

The questions were often far sharper than the slides I was presenting… And one of the questions was a straight up disagreement with something I'd suggested. Gasp!

In a weird way, I found this all quite reassuring — you only get questions and disagreement from an audience thinking hard and listening — instead of vacantly nodding along.

The chat was so good I thought it'd make a great foundation for the next few weeks of this newsletter.

And I want to start with the disagreement, because it's the one I've thought about most since. I've had a little time to ponder, so I can hopefully answer it with a little more depth than my frantic multi-tasking on Tuesday.

If you're one of the many who joined us from that session: welcome! This is the EcoSend weekly newsletter, and (unless I mess up) it will hit your inbox every Friday.

"When is an interesting subject line just clickbait?"

I suggested a few spicy subject line ideas that I didn't really caveat enough.

A couple of the comments:

• "I'd be wary of a curious subject line in case they seem too gimmicky or like marketing."
• "That "Can we ask you something awkward?" line felt like trying to trick people into opening."
• "Mission-driven organisations should hold themselves to a higher standard even if it means our marketing might not be quite as effective as private sector counterparts."

Aim for curiosity, but only if it makes sense for your organisation

When writing subject lines I often want to spark curiosity — not clickbait. They aren't the same thing. The real test is what happens after the recipient opens the email.

Clickbait is often a trick — it creates a gap for the recipient that it doesn't close.

"You won't believe what happened next!" — this is often a promise with nothing behind it. The reader knows within seconds that they've been had! I'd argue that most readers are now so attuned to these tactics that they have the opposite effect and should be avoided at all costs.

Curiosity is different, though.

Honesty is the best policy

I gave an example of a subject line that works: "We nearly lost the barn owls". It's a specific and true subject line. And crucially the email delivered exactly the thing it dangled.

Nobody feels tricked, because nobody was.

For me, the test is: "will the recipient feel misled once they open this?" If the email content delivers on the promise of the subject line, it's just a good sentence — it's not clickbait. It just might not be for everyone.

Many people on the call suggested charities should hold a higher standard. At EcoSend we really want everyone to hold themselves to a higher standard. The big red line is honesty.

Watch your language!

Whether you think it's clickbait or curiosity, the language might not be for everyone. Some organisations will want to steer into far safer waters.

A subject line like "February Newsletter" isn't going to trick anyone. But it could miss an opportunity to encourage opens. It isn't any more ethical than "We nearly lost the barn owls". It's just less playful, and less of a tease. And those might be categorically inappropriate goals for the written communication of your organisation.

As was suggested in the chat — one idea is to use the subject line to be clear about what the email is, and use the preview text to carry the hook. Clarity and curiosity in sequence, rather than fighting in the same subject line.

Try it now

Write your next subject line and preview text. Then ask: if the recipient opens, will they feel the email kept its promise? If yes, send it. If you hesitate, you've got a problem — maybe it's the subject line or maybe it's the content. So take another look and ask again until you can confidently say yes.

Then hit reply and send it to me. I'd love to see the ones you're not sure about — the borderline cases are far more interesting than the safe ones, and I'll share the best of them in a future edition.

And if you were in the room on Tuesday: pick the one thing you wrote down and do it this week. I said I'd check in a month from now to ask how you got on, and I meant it!

There were plenty more good questions from that session — on how many calls to action a newsletter can carry, how to get clicks out of a plain email, and what to do with a mailing list you've inherited and know nothing about. I'll get to those over the coming weeks.

If you're not yet using EcoSend, you can get started completely for free, with no billing details or commitment required. Or have a play with our free email builder without signing up at all.

Until next time,

James

P.S. Huge thanks to Ross, Marie, and the team at Third Sector Lab for inviting me to run the workshop. Watch the full workshop for free if you missed it. They are doing amazing work — if you work at a charity and want to develop your digital skills, go and check them out.

The illustration at the top of this edition is titled Common Fox, painted by Wilhelm Kuhnert for The Royal Natural History, edited by Richard Lydekker (London: Frederick Warne, 1893–1896). Kuhnert had a reputation for going and looking: rather than working from skins and stuffed specimens in a studio, as many of his contemporaries did, he travelled to paint animals in the places they actually lived. Foxes are also known for being rather curious and cunning — much like our topic today. Public domain, via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (French writer, poet, and aviator)

There's a temptation, when designing an email, to think of it as a little webpage.

Add a navigation bar. A big hero. Three columns. A handful of cards. Some buttons. A footer packed with links.

And before you know it, you've built a homepage that happens to arrive in someone's inbox.

But email is a different medium — and the best email design leans into that rather than fighting it.

Your reader is probably in a hurry

When someone visits your website, there's at least some intent behind it. They chose to go there.

An email is different.

It arrives among meeting invitations, receipts, newsletters, delivery updates and thirty-seven other things demanding attention.

You're lucky if you have seconds to make someone care.

So rather than asking "how do we fit everything in?", ask:

If someone only gives us five seconds, what do we want them to take away (or do)?

That question can often lead to much better emails.

Embrace the scroll

Websites need navigation because they contain lots of information and people need to find their way around.

Emails have a wonderful advantage: they only really go in one direction. Down!

You can use that as a constraint to breed creativity: Create a clear hierarchy. Lead with the most important thing. Let one idea naturally follow another.

And, I'll let you into probably the biggest secret from my many years of pushing pixels around on screens: don't be afraid of space.

A little breathing room between sections can do more for readability than another border, box or background colour ever will.

Let images do some work

As we touched on last week, a great image can communicate something before you've written a word.

If you're announcing an exhibition, show the work. If you're promoting an event, show people enjoying it. If you're sharing your charity's impact, show the people, places or things behind the numbers.

Images shouldn't just decorate the email. They can help tell the story.

And of course, they don't need to be enormous, heavy files either. Optimising images keeps emails lighter and faster to load — which matters most for the person reading on their phone, halfway through a commute, on patchy data.

(EcoSend optimises every image automatically, by the way, so that one's taken care of.)

Give your recipients fewer choices

One of the easiest ways to improve an email is to remove something.

If you have seven buttons competing for attention, none of them feels particularly important.

Instead, decide what the email is really asking someone to do.

Read the story. Book a ticket. Donate. Register. Reply.

You can still include secondary information — but give the primary action room to breathe, and make it unambiguously the top priority.

Design for the inbox, not the browser

The best emails are not miniature websites.

They tend to be simple. Linear. Focused. And often can be more personal.

So next time you're putting an email together, resist the urge to fill all of the available space.

Try focusing on one idea, with a clear hierarchy, some great imagery, and a little more breathing room than usual.

Your website can take on the heavy lifting.

Try it now

Open your last campaign and count the number of things you're asking someone to click.

If it's more than two or three, try building the same email again with one — and see whether it reads better, not worse.

If you're not yet using EcoSend, you can get started completely for free, with no billing details or commitment required. Or have a play with our free email builder without signing up at all.

And if you do strip something back, hit reply and send me the before and after. I'd love to see what came out.

Until next time,

James

P.S. This week has been a big one at EcoSend — we shared our summer update (including a little cameo from our head of customer happiness Hugo), and our first ever Impact Report. That's a recap of our first year as a B Corp — oh how time flies!

The illustration at the top of this edition is from Lovell Reeve's Conchologia systematica, or Complete system of conchology (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1841–42). Every shell on it was built by a single animal in a single unbroken spiral, starting from that tiny point at the top and never once branching. Reeve could have filled the page many times over with these illustrations. Public domain, via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

It’s been a while since we’ve shared an overall “state of things” and we felt it was long overdue. So today I’m delighted to bring you a proper update on EcoSend as we move through the hottest, driest summer the UK has ever recorded.

This is, without exaggeration, the biggest set of improvements we’ve ever shared in one go:

A brand-new email builder, automatic image optimisation, inline image editing, and a new Review Mode that catches mistakes before they ever reach an inbox. And our first B Corp Impact Report.

Let’s take a look at what the team has been busy with.

Welcome, new customers

First, a warm welcome to some of the brilliant organisations who’ve recently chosen to adopt EcoSend as their email marketing platform: Borough Market, Shambala Festival, 30x30 UK, and Craft Scotland.

From a legendary independent festival to one of the world’s most iconic food markets, we’re genuinely honoured to help an ever growing number of purpose-led organisations reach their audiences in new, beautiful, and impactful ways.

It means the world that mission-led teams like these trust EcoSend with their email. Every campaign you send is a vote for change, helps restore nature, and tells a story to more people.

See more of our customers

The all-new email builder

We’re so excited about the new email builder.

We started from scratch to create an email builder you’ll actually enjoy using. Calmer, faster, and more powerful than anything you’ve experienced before.

In most tools, creating an email is a chore. We wanted the opposite: a calm, distraction-free canvas when you want to focus on your words, and full visual control the moment you want to design. Switch between the two in a single click. You can even paste straight from Markdown, Notion or Google Docs and go from blank page to sending in minutes.

Under the hood, it’s built on principles we care deeply about. Expert defaults — typography, spacing and colour dialled in by professional email designers — mean every send looks polished without hours of fiddling.

Accessibility is built in, not bolted on: semantic structure, sensible heading hierarchy, easy alt text editing, and high-contrast presets as standard. And everything is battle-tested across Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and Yahoo, so what you design is what your audience sees, everywhere.

When you do want to roll your sleeves up, it’s all there — columns, colours, backgrounds, sections, saved reusable blocks, fine-tuned padding, personalisation variables, effortless social links. The defaults are brilliant and the ceiling is high.

The new email builder is available for all users on all plans. But if you don’t have an account yet, you can even use the new builder for free, right now, without signing up.

Automatic image optimisation

The best-looking campaigns can so easily become the slowest to load. Product photos, speaker headshots, crowd scenes — they look fantastic, but then can hang on patchy mobile data, and use bandwidth and energy for no reason.

The usual fix is so much of a chore that most people don't do it: resize every image, pick the right format, run each one through a compression tool, and remember to do it every single time something changes. Miss one, and the whole campaign might pay for it.

So we made it automatic.

EcoSend now optimises every image in your campaign as you build it — automatically, in the background, with no loss in visual quality.

We resize each image for the space it actually fills (including retina displays), pick the best format automatically (efficient JPGs for photos, crisp PNGs for logos, and even WebP or AVIF when supported by the recipient), and compress it intelligently. We’ve seen reductions of over 86% — yes eighty six percent — in file size, with images that still look every bit as sharp.

That means faster loads, more engagement, lower energy use per send — and one less thing on your pre-send checklist. There’s nothing to switch on and nothing to configure: it’s already running on your next campaign, on every plan, at no extra charge.

Inline image editing

Cropping, rotating, or tweaking an image used to mean opening another tool, making the change, then re-uploading it and hoping it still fits. Not any more.

You can now edit images right in the email builder — crop and zoom, change the aspect ratio, rotate, flip, add a border, apply rounded corners, or replace the image entirely. All without a single trip to another app.

And once you’ve styled an image exactly how you want it, automatic image optimisation takes care of sizing, formatting, and compressing it behind the scenes — so it still loads fast and looks sharp for every recipient. Available now for all paying customers at no extra charge.

Review Mode

We’ve all done it — spotted the typo just after hitting send. Review Mode is here so that it happens before the send.

Review Mode automatically checks your whole email as you write it, and proactively suggests one-click fixes for anything it finds. It covers three core areas:

• Spelling and grammar — your entire email is checked in milliseconds, with suggestions for anything worth a second look. It all happens privately on your device — no third parties, and no AI.
• Accessibility — low colour contrast is spotted for you, and any images missing alt tags are flagged so you can set them before sending.
• Compliance and email best practices — subject line length, a working unsubscribe link, call-to-action buttons that actually link somewhere, and personalisation variables with working data and sensible fallbacks — all checked.

Hit send with total confidence. It’s included for all paying customers — with no add-on fees and no extra usage charges.

Our core values, and no AI

These product updates are hands-down the biggest we’ve ever made.

They’re all in service to you and your subscribers — ensuring you can confidently send your best work, and see the results you work so hard to strive for.

We’re incredibly proud that these updates, as with everying in EcoSend, are built in accordance with our core principles of accessibility, sustainability, security, and deliverability.

And despite being the middle of 2026, we’ve made a deliberate effort to bring you all of these features while introducing absolutely no AI into the platform. We feel these are some pretty magical updates, and we just don’t need to put AI in for the sake of it.

One year on: our B Corp Impact Report

A year on from certifying as a B Corporation, we’ve published our first B Corp Impact Report — an honest look at how we scored, what we’ve done since, and where we are going next.

We couldn't be more proud of the work that we've done in our first year as a B Corp. Here are just a few of our highlights from the last twelve months:

• More than 20,000 trees planted through our customers’ campaigns.
• Volunteering days with The Paddock, Bow Foodbank, and at the River Quaggy.
• 95% happiness score and NPS of 42 since we started measuring these late last year.
• Our new public handbook including our Ethical Policy and AI Policy.

Certification was a finish line in some respects, but also a new starting line. The full report walks through each impact area in turn, what’s gone well, and what we’re focused on next as we head into our second year as a B Corp, and toward recertification in 2028.

Check out our 2025–26 B Corp Impact Report

What’s next

This has been the busiest couple of months for the EcoSend product we’ve ever had. But we’re not stopping there. This has been just the start, and the rest of 2026 looks to be even bigger.

Roll up, roll up…

We’re excited to be developing our first native integrations — all focused around event ticketing.

If you’re an existing Ticket Tailor or Humanitix user, or you run a business that puts on events, we’d love to invite you to be part of our select group of testers as we develop these integrations. Please contact us to request early access and learn more.

Your biggest requests are in our sights

There are still a few big “how is that not there yet?” features in EcoSend that we know many of you have been asking for for a long time. We hear you. We’re determined to deliver for you and elininate any remaining frustration from workflows you’ve had to rethink since switching over.

We always pay close attention and are deeply curious about everything you ask us to add, change, and improve. So please keep the feedback coming — the chances are we’ll have something for you very soon.

Stay tuned, we can’t wait to show you what’s next.

In 2025, EcoSend — and our parent company GoSquared — became a Certified B Corporation.

For those of you new to the world of B Corp, it's a certification that independently evaluates companies as meeting high standards for social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit with purpose across workers, community, customers, and the planet. If that sounds like your cup of tea, learn more about the B Corp movement.

It's no walk in the park to certify as a B Corp. We spent over a year getting ourselves ready, followed by months of work with our assessors, customers, and the community to finally reach the finish line.

Except, certifying isn't really a finish line — it's worthy of celebration, but it's also just a new starting line.

Our first impact report

Part of certifying as a B Corp means you must share a report of your impact and progress every year.

This is our first ever impact report and we're incredibly excited to share it!

While many B Corps share a flashy PDF or slide deck, we're sharing this as a blog post, living by our dedication to digital sustainability, accessibility, and the open web. Perhaps in the future we will consider adding a PDF version, but for now — this feels right.

It's an honest account of where we scored across the five B Corp impact areas, what we're genuinely proud of, and — just as importantly — where we have the most work still to do.

A quick word on who "we" are. GoSquared has been building software since 2006. EcoSend is our email marketing platform, built for purpose-driven organisations to make email a force for good. It's beautiful to use, built to scale, and every campaign funds nature restoration.

Certification gave us a mirror. It showed us where years of trying to do the right thing had genuinely paid off — and, just as usefully, where good intentions hadn't yet become crystalised or turned into systems. This report is us holding ourselves up to that mirror, in public.

— James Gill, CEO of EcoSend

Our B Corp score

The B Corp standards are changing, and there is no longer such a focus on a numerical points-based score.

However, when we certified last year, the B Corp Impact Assessment (BIA) scored a business across five areas. The median score for an ordinary business that completed the assessment was around 50.9. The bar to certify is 80, out of a possible 200.

We reached 88.7.

There are two things that stand out to us here, from these scores:

Workers is our strongest area by some distance — a reflection of our small team and how much we genuinely care.

Customers and Environment are where we have the most headroom in the points-based system, despite us feeling strong already, and they're where we have been doing even more work in the last year.

Here's what we've been doing in each area.

Governance: Putting our ethos and values in writing

Our commitment: to operate to high social and environmental standards, and to be transparent about how we're doing — including when we fall short.

• A legal commitment — Certifying meant changing our governing documents to bake stakeholder interests — workers, community, customers, and the planet — into how decisions actually get made.
• Public accountability — Our performance is published on our public B Corp profile, and we write openly about our progress here on the blog, and in our handbook.
• We actively turn customers away — Our Ethical Policy sets out the industries we won't serve — arms, fossil fuels, gambling, tobacco, cryptocurrency, predatory lending, adult content and more — and the ones we review case by case. We turn away revenue that doesn't align with our mission.
• A considered approach to AI — Our AI Policy explains why we've deliberately resisted bolting "AI" onto everything, and commits us to never training models on your data or the content of your emails.
• Independence — EcoSend is independent and founder-led. We answer to our mission and our customers — not to external pressure for growth at any cost.

As we grow, we know there will be more to do on governance. But for now, as a small team, we feel good about where are and where we're going.

Workers: Making a great place to work

This is our strongest area, and the one we're proudest of.

From team praise on Friday afternoons, to impromptu tea breaks, to birthday celebrations, to the Christmas team day out — we're at our best when we're together.

Our commitment: to make EcoSend a place where a small team can do their best work and feel genuinely supported.

• We protect time for good. Our team volunteers on company time — not a perk bolted on at the edges, but part of how we work. Those days are some of the most valued in our calendar.
• We donate to charity through Payroll Giving. We’re delighted to have been awarded the Platinum APGO Payroll Giving Quality Mark for 2026 from Charities Trust, in recognition of our commitment to Payroll Giving.
• We're a team that looks out for one another. As we said when we certified, it "wouldn't have been possible without the incredible hard work of our team." That care for each other is the engine behind everything else in this report.
• Many of our policies are public. Our handbook is where we share how we work — openly, for the team and for anyone else to read. Why keep them all in a locked intranet page, when we can share them with the world? We want to continuously improve our handbook based on feedback, and hope it can be a source of inspiration for others.
• We question the norms of work itself. We've explored openly whether a four-day week could be part of the climate solution, the pros and cons of remote working, and even shared jobs that might appeal to those fearful of climate change — the kind of thinking we'd rather have out in the open than avoid.

Being part of our community

Our commitment: to be actively involved in our community, and to back the people and projects doing good in it.

• Support charities with email marketing — We spent hundreds of hours working with charities and non-profit organisations to help them improve their email marketing and public communication — with workshops, educational guides, and one-to-one sessions throughout the year.
• Hands-on volunteering — We took part in multiple volunteering days — rescuing young trees from weeds at The Paddock, sorting donations at Bow Foodbank, redistributing surplus food with The Felix Project, and rescuing litter from the River Quaggy.
• Trees, by the thousand — Every campaign our customers send plants trees. Through TreeApp and our partnership with Tree-Nation, we've helped plant more than 20,000 trees — you can watch the live count on our About page and learn more about how and where we plant trees.
• Lifting people, not just landscapes — Through our work with Beam, our customers' campaigns have helped raise over £1,500 to move people toward safe homes, steady jobs, and new skills.
• Growing the movement — We helped represent the SaaS for Good initiative alongside our friends at Ticket Tailor and Squared Up, encouraging more software companies and founders to use their business as a force for good.
• Championing Project Salt Run — we donated to and featured Hannah's epic journey of 100 marathons in 100 days.
• Highlighting events focused on sustainability — we rebuilt, launched, and manage the Sustainability Events Calendar with our friends at Small99 and the team behind Avery & Brown. The site provides a one-stop-shop for discovering climate sustainability focused events near you.

Delighting our customers

Our commitment: relationships built on honesty, transparency and respect — and a product that genuinely helps purpose-led organisations succeed.

• Honest by design — We believe the unsubscribe is a feature, not a failure, and we've written openly about whether ethical marketing actually works. We'd rather earn long-term trust than win short-term clicks.
• Your data stays yours — We don't sell or share your data, and we don't use your emails or campaigns to train AI models. You can read exactly how we handle this in our Privacy Policy and AI Policy.
• Transparency you can measure — Our free email carbon calculator shows the estimated footprint of a campaign, and your account shows the trees and offsetting it funds.
• Giving features away for free — Email templates (with some specifically for B Corps!), our best-in-class email builder, our CSS inliner, and our UTM campaign generator — we give them all away for free without requiring even an email address to use them.

While we scored a relatively low 4.5 here it doesn't mean we don't care about our customers. Quite the opposite! The BIA rewards formal systems for measuring and proving the impact we have for them, and we still have work to do there. What we can show today is what we've been building for our customers, and how we show up when they need us.

What we shipped for customers

Customer impact isn't only measured in support tickets. It's also whether the platform gets better at helping our customers do their work. Between June 2025 and July 2026 we shipped a lot — here are some of the highlights we're proudest of:

• The all-new email builder. The biggest product update we've ever made — a calm, focused way to craft stunning, accessible emails, built from the ground up with months of customer feedback.
• Free Email Template Gallery. Beautiful, accessible, low-carbon templates anyone can use — including ones for newsletters, events, and announcing a B Corp certification.
• Hosted Forms. Share a signup link anywhere — email signatures, social bios, QR codes — without writing a line of code. One of our most-requested features.
• Integrations that meet you where you are. Gravity Forms for WordPress, plus Zapier templates to connect EcoSend with the rest of your stack.
• The free tier. So mission-led organisations can start building their audience and sending with EcoSend without entering billing details.

Shipping features and platform updates is how we turn care for customers into something they can use every day. And our work here is never ever done.

Customer success

EcoSend is a small team. When you write in, you get a real person — not a ticket bot, not a script. Since November 2025 we've been running support through Help Scout, which has let us measure that properly — and hold ourselves to it. The figures below are all from Help Scout, covering that period.

While these numbers give a helpful overview, it's only when you speak to customers one-to-one that you understand what good service really means to people.

What sold me on joining EcoSend is the great team of people behind it and their values. I know for a fact that whenever I have an issue, I'll get support and answers in a timely manner.

— Yuval Ackerman, Ethical Emails

The EcoSend team were very helpful during our migration period, and offered a level of hands-on assistance we had never experienced with Mailchimp. It's nice to know you're dealing with a real human whenever you submit a support request!

— Carolina Miranda, Founder of Cultivating Capital

James replied within 30mins of my email. He was very helpful and personable.

— Emma Onyejekwe, Mitcham Hedgehog Project

This has (sad as that may sound) really made my day! Thank you. It's so good to finally be able to [edit contacts that had mis-spelled their email address].

— Sarah Cossom, The Orchard Project

We're proud of these numbers, but even conscious of the human emotions we can cause through our work. Measuring satisfaction and support speed is only part of formalising our impact on customers, and there's a lot more for us to start reporting on.

Environment: caring deeply about our home planet

Our commitment: to leave the planet better than we found it in everything we do.

• Lean, renewable powered infrastructure — EcoSend runs on serverless technology that draws energy only when you need it, on cloud regions powered by renewable energy.
• Positive climate impact built in — We automatically offset more than the estimated emissions of every campaign through our climate partners, including TreeApp, Tree-Nation and Play It Green.
• Commitment to digital sustainability — We help customers send leaner, cleaner campaigns — better for deliverability and for the planet alike. We also live and breathe our principles through our marketing site, with a focus on minimal energy use, low-carbon graphics, and more.
• Nature is part of our brand — In recent months we've started to make use of beautiful botanical and nature illustrations across our site and brand. These come from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and with each we use the opportunity to educate our audience and customers about nature, wildlife, and the BHL artwork itself.
• No AI features — AI is a hugely controversial topic, and we have so far taken the stance that our customers are better served without it in EcoSend. It's a choice that reflects the principles in our AI Policy.
• Time outdoors — While it might be easy to laugh off as a gimmick, nature is not indoors — it's outside. Whenever possible we work outdoors, especially for our marketing videos. You'll be hard pushed to find a video of us inside while filming a marketing video — whatever the weather.

Like Customers, Environment is an area where we know we can always go further, so we're eternally focused on what we will do next.

Looking forward

Certification showed us our strengths, and helped us to draw a map of where to improve — and Customers and Environment are top of that list.

In the year ahead, we're focused on:

• Measuring our footprint more rigorously and setting concrete carbon-reduction targets, working toward definitively carbon-negative operations.
• Going further on customer impact — building on the satisfaction and support metrics we've started tracking, and finding better ways to measure outcomes and the good our customers do through us.
• Deepening our policies. Since certifying, we've published our Ethical Policy and AI Policy; we'll keep turning good intentions into written, accountable systems, shared for everyone to see in our public handbook.
• Bringing others with us. Through SaaS for Good, our writing, our videos, our marketing, and the EcoSend platform itself, we want to help grow the number of B Corps in the world — even though there are now more than 10,000, we think this number is far too small.

B Corps recertify every three years, so we'll be reassessed in 2028 against standards that are themselves getting tougher. Our aim isn't simply to hold onto what we’re doing — it's to strive to be better on every level.

Thank you

Our mission only works because of the people behind it.

If you’re a customer — thank you. Many of you are B Corps yourselves — who challenge and inspire us in equal measure. And thank you for holding us to the standard we've set.

And thank you to the team, who care deeply about everything we do, especially our impact on our community and the planet.

We're just getting started.

The screen is the same size for every story. A shot of a teacup is the same size as an army coming over the hill. It’s all storytelling.

— Sir Christopher Nolan (British and American filmmaker)

Christopher Nolan and his team have spent hundreds of millions of dollars making sure every single frame of The Odyssey is worth looking at.

So in this week’s edition we’re going to discuss how you can raise your marketing budget to do just that.

Just kidding, of course. Most of us can only dream of having the time, money, and multidisciplinary talent that go into making a blockbuster movie.

But there’s a lot we can take from the world of movies that applies to email marketing.

Almost every email we send has a story, a viewpoint, a goal, a frame… and an image.

An image vs a thousand words

Today we’re talking about those images — they tell their own story. Whether we intend them to or not.

Images in email are rarely decided. They're usually grabbed.

The photo that was already in the folder. The stock shot that was fine from last year. The logo, because the space looked a bit empty.

The images are often hastily thrown together, while the words get multiple rounds of edits and a debate about a comma.

Filmmakers don't work that way. They obsess over what the audience sees, because they know it's doing most of the emotional work.

I think email marketers should too. But what does that look like in practice?

Here are a few thoughts on using images to take your next campaign to Troy and back.

Fill the frame

One of the reasons IMAX feels so immersive is that it fills your field of view. There's nowhere else to look.

While the screen is usually a fraction smaller, email can work the same way. Your hero image should make the reader feel like they're there — not like they're looking at a location from across the car park.

Most photos are simply taken from too wide of an angle.

For example, instead of the entire museum exterior, choose someone standing close in front of a painting.

Instead of the whole concert venue, choose a face in the crowd, mid-cheer.

Instead of a generic charity logo, choose the person your work exists to help.

Tighter framing can often lead to stronger emotion.

Wide shots explain where. Tight shots make people feel something. In a 600px-wide email being read on a phone on the bus, you almost always want the second one.

Every frame should earn its place

This is a famous filmmaking principle: every shot should exist for a reason. If it doesn't advance the story, it gets cut — however expensive it was to film.

Exactly the same applies to email.

Ask this of every image in your campaign:

• Does it create curiosity?
• Does it create emotion?
• Does it explain something that words would labour over?
• Does it persuade?

If the honest answer is no — you probably want to cut it.

Not because images are bad, but because a decorative image isn't neutral. It costs load time. It pushes your call to action further down the screen. It adds weight to every single copy you send. And it dilutes the other images that actually matter.

Three good images beat eight adequate ones, every time.

As we often say: email isn't free. And neither is a frame that isn't doing any work.

The director's cut

You rarely need (or have) a better photo. You need a better version of the photo you’ve already got.

Take one image and run it through the cut:

Crop it tighter. Get your subject filling the frame.

Straighten it. A level horizon reads as "professional" before anyone consciously knows why. A wonky one reads as "rushed" just as fast.

Nudge the brightness. Most phone photos are a touch flat straight out of the camera.

Optimise the aspect ratio. The same picture can be transformed when you adjust the frame — like making a portrait photo landscape or vice versa.

That’s four small moves that don’t require Photoshop, design requests, or waiting on anyone else's calendar.

A practical example

Let’s take a look at two versions of the same photograph.

Version A: Hugo, somewhere in a field. A small brown speck near the treeline. Lovely day. Nice field.

Version B: A tight crop. Hugo fills the frame, ears up, alert, looking towards something that has caught his attention.

It's the same (pretty average) photo. But it tells a different story.

One is a picture of a field with a dog. The other is a picture of a dog who has spotted something.

That single crop, with a little rotation, is a very basic but impactful intro to composition — and it took about ten seconds.

Whatever's going in your next campaign, see if you can discover the version of it that's Version B.

Argus’s Hugo's eye for detail

As anyone who has read or watched The Odyssey will know: dogs notice things.

The closest we have to trusty old Argus is our very own Hugo (shown above, waiting for his master to return home).

If Hugo were reviewing your next campaign, he'd probably notice:

• The horizon isn't straight.
• That image is four times bigger than it needs to be.
• The subject is tiny in the frame.
• That stock photo doesn't make me feel anything.

Good imagery is mostly about noticing the little things.

Editing images inside EcoSend

You can now perform basic edits on your images inside EcoSend, with inline image editing.

It's right in the email builder — so you can crop, straighten, flip, add borders, and replace images without ever leaving your campaign.

We hope it’s an update that will change your emails forever.

Try it now

Open your last campaign and pick one image — the hero is a good place to start.

Crop it tighter, straighten it, brighten it slightly, and see whether the whole email suddenly feels art-directed rather than assembled.

If you're not yet using EcoSend, you can get started completely for free, with no billing details or commitment required. You can also have a play with creating an entire email without signing up at all, using our free email builder.

And if you do give it a go, hit reply with a before-and-after. I'd genuinely love to see one.

So would Hugo.

Until next time,

James

The illustration at the top of this edition is Sea anemones from the Bay of Naples. Plate from Le attinie by Angelo Andres (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1884), part of Fauna und Flora des Golfes von Neapel. This was a survey of everything living off the Neapolitan coast. It's the same water Homer sent Odysseus through: Sirens on the rocks to the south, Scylla and Charybdis a little further on. Public domain, via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

At EcoSend, we've always believed that building a better business means creating a positive impact beyond the products we make — in everything that we do.

Whilst we're proud of our ever-evolving commitments to sustainability, accessibility, and to making email a force for good, we recognise there are always more opportunities for us to do good in the world.

That's why we're incredibly proud to share that EcoSend has been awarded the Platinum Payroll Giving Quality Mark by Charities Trust.

The award recognises organisations that go above and beyond in encouraging workplace giving, and reflects our commitment to making charitable giving an accessible and meaningful part of working at EcoSend.

We're honoured to receive this recognition from the Charities Trust, but what matters most to us is what it represents: creating a culture where giving back is embedded into the way every company does business.

— James Gill, CEO of EcoSend

What is the Payroll Giving Quality Mark?

The Payroll Giving Quality Mark is a government-backed accreditation, administered by Charities Trust, that recognises employers committed to supporting Payroll Giving in the workplace.

Organisations can achieve Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum or Diamond status, with each level reflecting the strength of employee participation and the organisation's commitment to promoting charitable giving.

Receiving the Platinum award places EcoSend amongst a growing community of employers helping to make charitable giving a natural part of working life.

Why Payroll Giving matters

Payroll Giving is one of the simplest and most effective ways employees can support the causes they care about.

Donations are taken directly from an employee's salary before income tax is deducted, making it a tax-efficient way to give while providing charities with reliable, predictable income they can depend upon throughout the year.

This regular support enables charities to plan ahead, invest in long-term projects, and focus more of their time and resources on delivering meaningful impact.

For us, Payroll Giving is a simple but powerful way to ensure that our success also helps support organisations creating positive change across society.

One of the top organisations EcoSend employees have chosen to donate to is the Against Malaria Foundation. The AMF is frequently cited as one of the most effective charities in the world, ranking highly in cost-effectiveness, transparency, and established track record.

Part of a bigger commitment

Receiving the Platinum Payroll Giving Quality Mark isn't something we've pursued as a standalone initiative.

It's one part of our wider commitment to building a business that creates positive environmental and social impact.

As a certified B Corp, we're continually looking for ways to ensure that our business benefits not only our customers, but also our team, our communities and the planet.

Alongside our Payroll Giving programme, we also do a whole lot more including:

• Offer discounted pricing for registered charities and community-benefit organisations.
• Care deeply about digital sustainability, with our focus on reducing the environmental impact of email marketing.
• Are committed members of the Good Business Charter, and a certified B Corp.
• We've signed up for Founder's Pledge, Business Declares, the Better Business Act, and more.
• Support global nature restoration through our tree planting and biodiversity partners.
• Share practical guidance to help organisations communicate more sustainably.
• Take part in regular volunteering days, spending time helping local community initiatives, such as conservation sites, river cleaning days, and food-bank shifts.
• Take every opportunity to bring nature into our work, like sharing beautiful illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

We know these actions won't solve the world's challenges on their own, but we believe meaningful change comes from consistently making better choices.

Thank you to our team

This recognition wouldn't be possible without our team.

By choosing to support charities through Payroll Giving, our team are helping organisations working across a wide range of causes; from environmental conservation and social justice to healthcare, education and community support.

Every contribution, no matter its size, helps create lasting positive impact, and we're incredibly grateful to everyone who has taken part.

Looking ahead

Receiving the Platinum Payroll Giving Quality Mark is something we're immensely proud of, but it's certainly not the finish line.

We'll continue looking for new ways to increase our positive impact, whether that's helping more purpose-driven organisations send more sustainable emails, supporting charities through initiatives like Payroll Giving, or finding new opportunities to give back.

A huge thank you to Charities Trust for this recognition, and to everyone on the EcoSend team for making it possible.

Together, we're proving that business can be a force for good.

Our Payroll Giving Award

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Slowing down enables you to act in a high quality way. Kind rather than curt. Polished rather than sloppy. It's hard to be thoughtful when you're in a rush.

— James Clear (American writer, author of Atomic Habits)

Every week, my mum reads over this newsletter to check for mistakes.

And almost every week she finds something that no amount of personal review, or automated checking can spot.

Now, unfortunately, my mum can’t check every email our customers send, as much as I’m sure she’d gladly offer to help.

So what do you do when you don’t have access to the best proof-reader and email checker?

The most anxious moment of the day…

The campaign is built, the copy's been through three rounds, the images are in, and your cursor is hovering over Send.

Everything looks right. Let’s go!

For many marketing people, this is the most anxiety-inducing moment in the day.

Once you send, it's gone. There's no unpublishing, no quick-fix edit, no "we'll sort it in the next version."

The email lands in tens of thousands of inboxes exactly as it left — typo, dead link, "Hi first_name" and all.

Every experienced marketer and comms lead has a scar from that moment. The apology follow-up is the most-read email most brands ever send, and nobody wants to write one!

The people who've been doing this a long time make the same mistakes as everyone else. But from many conversations with experienced marketers, I’ve found they tend to share one common approach: they’ve made it a habit to to one last deliberate check before sending (with or without an external checker like my mum). And they know exactly what to look at.

After countless conversations, and many mess-ups of my own, here’s our guide for what to check when you next come to hitting the big Send button.

Your pre-send review, in order

1. Check your links

Every single one. The hero button, the inline text links, the logo, the footer. Broken links are the most common send-day disaster and the easiest to miss, because they look completely normal until someone clicks. If there's a discount code, a UTM, or a landing page that only went live this morning — click it. Don't assume.

2. Check your merge tags (aka Variables) and personalisation

"Hi first_name" is the classic, but it's not the only one.

Fallbacks that don't fire, a contact field pulling in blank, a segment condition that's inverted. Personalisation that breaks is worse than no personalisation — it announces that a machine sent this and nobody checked.

If you're setting these up in EcoSend, our guide to Variables walks through fallbacks and how to test them.

3. Check the subject line and preview text

Send a test email, read them together, in an actual inbox, at the length they'll actually appear.

Is the important word still visible after truncation? Does the preview text repeat the subject or add to it? Is there a leftover "TEST" or a draft placeholder hiding in there?

4. Check the sender details

Is the sender name and email address the one you intended, or a system default? The sender name is just as important as (and sometimes more important than) your subject line for building trust and getting your email opened.

5. Check the images (and their alt text)

Do they all load? Are any still pointing at an old URL?

Are any of them heavier than they need to be?

And crucially: does the email still make sense with images off, which is how some subscribers may first see it? Alt text isn't just accessibility box-ticking — it's what carries your message when the pictures don't arrive (like when your recipient is on their commute on the London Underground), and part of making sure your emails are accessible to everyone on your list.

6. Check how it looks on mobile

Most of your list opens on a phone. A layout that's elegant on desktop can collapse into a single squashed column with a button that becomes broken or completely unusable. It’s especially important to check on mobile when you have a more complex layout with columns and multiple images. Look at it small before you look at it sent!

7. Check the key details (that have real consequences)

Selling something? Check the actual discount amount.

Running an event? Check the date and time of the event. The price. The venue. The deadline.

These are the errors that don't just look sloppy — they cost money, trigger refunds, and generate support tickets. Read them slowly, and out loud if you want to really check.

8. Check the unsubscribe link

Is the unsubscribe link present and working? It’s a fundamental one, it’ll lead to complaints, and if it’s not working it can risk tanking your reputation.

Keep yourself compliant and keep your emails out of spam folders.

9. Check for typos

We all have a spellcheck on our computers, but typos can creep in in the places we least expect.

Every time I write anything I’m reminded of the time my mum spotted a typo on the front page of a magazine going to print. We’re often so busy checking the details we forget to check the most prominent text — the subject line, the titles, and lines we skip because we’re so confident in them.

10. Check for grammar mistakes

Just as with typos, it’s so easy to make a simple grammar mistake when we’re writing.

We know what we want to say, and when we read it back, we skim through with the knowledge of our own intent. Nothing beats getting another team member to take a glance over the email to double-check you haven’t used a “their” instead of a “there”.

Why it’s so easy to slip up

None of this is hard, but that’s why it can sometimes feel like it can be skipped.

Pre-send checks are the definition of an invisible, repetitive task — the kind that gets squeezed when you're rushing to make a send window, or when the campaign's been signed off and everyone's waiting around for you to “just get it live”.

The checklist lives in someone's head, or in a wiki nobody opens, and under deadline pressure the head-checklist gets shorter and shorter until it's just "does it look about right? OK I’ll hit Send!”

And while a solo look at your own work is better than nothing, it’s the weakest kind of proofreading there is. You read what you meant to write, not what's on the screen. You've seen this email twenty times; your brain is very good at filling the gaps automatically.

The fix isn't to try harder. It's to make the check structural — something that happens every time, in the same place, without relying on memory or willpower.

So we have a few gifts for you

1. Your free pre-send email checklist

We put together these steps and checks in a downloadable cheat sheet. Feel free to steal this — print it, pin it, or Slack it around to your team.

Before you hit send, be sure to cast your eyes over the EcoSend pre-send email checklist:

2. Introducing Review Mode in EcoSend

What's better than a checklist? An automated check right by your side as you create your email.

This week we released Review Mode in EcoSend. We’re rather excited about it.

Before any campaign goes out, Review Mode gives you a single, calm pre-flight checklist — it’s an objective and detail-oriented review over everything that tends to go wrong, continuously updated with every change you make. And, in news that goes against the grain of 2026, it doesn't use AI.

It checks your spelling. It checks for common grammar mistakes. It catches merge tags that will fail on send and personalisation fallbacks that aren't set. It highlights potential problems with showing up in the inbox — like subject line length, preheader text, from-name issues. It surfaces images missing alt text and even flags contrast and readability issues. Plus a whole lot more. And it gives you a clear, tickable list to walk through before you commit.

Review Mode isn’t there to slow you down or nag you. It's there to be the second set of eyes you don't always have on a small team — so the deliberate last look happens every time, not just on the sends you remembered to be careful about.

The goal is simple: fewer apology emails, fewer broken discount codes, fewer "resending with the correct link" subject lines.

And a bit more calm in that last minute before you hit send — with or without a check from my mum.

Try it now

Your next campaign is a good place to try it. Build as you normally would, then — instead of heading straight for Send — open Review Mode (or the checklist above) and walk through the checks one-by-one. It takes a couple of minutes and it's the cheapest insurance for your email.

If you're not yet using EcoSend, you can get started completely for free, with no billing details or commitment required. Review Mode is available for all paid plans at no extra charge, and if you want to try Review Mode before paying, just let me know by replying to this email.

Also, if you fancy it, hit reply and tell me the worst thing you've ever accidentally sent. We collect these and will share them in a future piece. It helps to know none of us are alone in making horrendously embarrassing email mistakes.

Until next time,

James

The illustration in this post is of a Grey Heron, a bird that stands perfectly still at the water's edge before making one committed strike. "Héron cendré" by Des Murs, from Musée ornithologique illustré (Paris: J. Rothschild, 1886–1887), via Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The details are not the details. They make the design.

— Charles Eames (American industrial designer)

The best-looking email campaign you’ve sent is probably your slowest for recipients to open.

If you're sending a campaign for an event or for a product, your campaigns are likely image-heavy by nature — product photos, speaker headshots, venue shots, sponsor logos, the hero banner that took three rounds of approval. It looks fantastic in your test send. Then it goes out to 10,000 people, and the whole campaign tanks on impact.

Here's what the weight of those beautiful images might actually be costing you.

How heavy images hurt you

They load slowly on mobile

Most of your recipients open emails on a phone, often on patchy data on the way somewhere. A heavy email means images that hang, or a hero banner that's still a grey question mark by the time they've swiped away.

Gmail clips it

Go over ~102KB and Gmail hides the rest behind a "view entire message" link — burying your CTA and breaking your tracking in one move. Oversized images are one of the fastest ways to get there.

It burns energy for no reason

Every unnecessary kilobyte, multiplied across your whole list, is data transferred and stored, and energy spent to deliver a picture that could have looked identical at a fraction of the size. Email isn't free — and neither is a 4MB banner.

The usual fix is a chore

The frustrating part is that fixing it by hand is often tedious and easy to forget.

The solution is often something like this:

1. Resize every image before you upload.
2. Choose the best format for each image (photos prefer JPG, line art prefers PNG).
3. Run each image through a compression tool to then optimise the file size further.
4. Remember to do these steps every single time there’s a review or a tweak on every asset, forever.
5. Miss one, and the whole campaign pays for it.

It's exactly the kind of invisible, repetitive task that slips when you're busy — which, before a big send, is always.

So we made it automatic

EcoSend now compresses every image in your campaign as you build it — automatically, in the background, with no visible loss in quality. You upload the full-resolution images you love; we deliver a version that's a fraction of the size and looks just as sharp in the inbox of each of your recipients.

That means faster loads, less clipping, lower carbon per send — and one less thing on your pre-send checklist.

The point isn't to make your emails plain or ugly — quite the opposite! It's to strip out the weight that was never doing any work, so the images that matter arrive fast and land well. Beautiful and light were always meant to be the same thing.

Try it now

There’s nothing to switch on and nothing to configure — if you're on EcoSend, image optimisation is already running on your next campaign. Log in, build as normal, and send something that looks great and travels light.

If you’re not yet using EcoSend, you can even try it out without signing up — just use our free email builder that’s now available for everyone!

Don’t say we’re not good to you…

Also, if you want to get geeky with me, hit reply with a recent campaign and I’ll tell you how much lighter it would have gone out by using EcoSend.

Until next time,

James

The illustration in this post is Audubon's “American Beaver” (Castor Fiber Americanus) from 1845–48, plate 46 from his book The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. Image courtesy of the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

If you come together with a mission, and it's grounded with love and a sense of community, you can make the impossible possible.

― John Lewis (American civil rights leader, not the department store owner)

So, you’ve decided to run an event…

Most marketers nail the promotional blast. But they wing everything else, and then wonder why registrations stall and half their sign-ups never show.

It’s not easy getting people to show up to events, but the goal of this week’s email is to help you avoid some of the mistakes we’ve learned the hard way over the years.

The fix isn't to send more emails necessarily. It's all about sending the right emails, at the right moment, each doing one clear and focused job.

This issue is a too the point, so here's the full sequence. Steal it and let me know how you get on.

The 7 email sequence

The timings here are just suggestions — you might find that for your specific event it makes sense to stretch these out or compress them depending on many factors like the size of the event, whether’s in person or remote, and whether it’s paid or free to attend.

1. Save-the-date

Send this 4–6 weeks out from your event. Lock in the calendar spot. Keep it short: date, one-line why, and a single "Add to calendar."

2. Registration open

Send this 3–4 weeks out. The full pitch. What it is, why it matters, who it's for, one clear CTA to register.

3. Agenda / speaker reveal

Send this 2–3 weeks out. Sell the value. Real sessions, real speakers — this is what people are actually signing up for.

4. Social proof nudge

Send this 1–2 weeks out. Who's coming, a past-attendee quote, "spots filling up." Momentum for the undecided.

5. Last chance

Send this 2–3 days out. Urgency, aimed only at those who haven't registered. Short and direct.

6. Know-before-you-go

Send this the day before, or the morning of the event. Time, link, logistics, what to bring. This is your single biggest email lever against no-shows. You might also want to make it easy for recipients to tell you they can’t make it, so you get a heads up.

7. Follow-up

Send this 1–2 days after the event. Thank you, recording and resources, a feedback ask, and one soft next step.

Less but better

Don't send all seven emails to everyone.

Segment by behaviour: contacts who have already registered should skip the "register now" chain. No-shows should get a different follow-up than attendees (even if it’s just a different subject line).

For a little more work, it performs better, and every recipient gets a reason to open.

The EcoSend angle: more thoughtful, sharper, and better-targeted emails can make all the difference to your event attendance. Blasting the whole list on every step is often a really ineffective and short-term approach. Get this sequence right and you’ll have a winning playbook you can roll out confidently every time.

Until next time,

James

P.S. Are you running an event soon? We’re working on a bunch of ways to make EcoSend better for marketing events, so let us know and we’ll get you early access to what we’re building.

Making it easy (and cheap!) to reach your subscribers, TinyLetter was great for beginners who just wanted the functionality to be able to send mass email campaigns.

If you’re searching the internet trying to find the TinyLetter login, unfortunately, the newsletter platform previously found on Mailchimp’s website no longer exists.

In this post, we’ll explain what happened to TinyLetter, and show you a cool alternative that you don’t even have to leave this website to sign up for.

What Was TinyLetter, And Why Did It Shut Down?

TinyLetter was a free and simplistic newsletter tool that solely consisted of the option to add a subject line and body copy.

Adored for its ease of use, TinyLetter was particularly popular with writers, startups and entrepreneurs who wanted to share newsletter content with their subscribers.

Originally built by Philip Kaplan, TinyLetter was acquired by Mailchimp in 2011.

However, 13 years later in 2024, TinyLetter was discontinued by Mailchimp, with its last day of operation on February 29.

Mailchimp instead encouraged users to migrate to its paid platform if they wanted to continue sending newsletter campaigns as they did through TinyLetter.

Coupled with their aggressive pricing strategies, Mailchimp’s decision to remove their free newsletter in TinyLetter appears to be commercially based.

TinyLetter's axing comes off the back of Revue being shut down by X (formally Twitter) back in 2023. This has left many in search of both Revue and TinyLetter alternatives.

If we want to go the whole hog here, some users are also in search of Mailchimp alternatives!

Mailchimp Vs TinyLetter

While TinyLetter was owned by Mailchimp, many users at the time were confused by the differences between the two. After all, you could access TinyLetter through Mailchimp to send email newsletters, even though Mailchimp itself is an email platform. So what gives?

In a nutshell, TinyLetter only offered free and simplistic functionality to send a newsletter. Crucially, this meant TinyLetter users didn’t benefit from the likes of email templates, autoresponders, segmentation or analytics.

Therefore, if users wanted an email platform geared towards professional use, they inevitably had to upgrade to a paid Mailchimp plan.

TinyLetter FAQs

Still can’t wrap your head around TinyLetter or where it’s gone? Allow us to enlighten you.

If you have any questions about our newsletter or email marketing platform here at EcoSend, feel free to get in touch and we’ll be right with you!

What Is TinyLetter?

Depending on where you purchased your Scrabble board, a tiny letter may be a tile which is printed rather small. If it’s the former Mailchimp product you mean, well TinyLetter was a newsletter platform that used to exist.

While TinyLetter isn’t available anymore, newsletter platforms such as EcoSend continue to provide newsletter functionality. Overall, newsletters remain a profitable way to engage your subscribers through email.

New to sending email newsletters? We’ve even put together a guide on How To Create An Email Newsletter Using EcoSend so that you can get straight to work on creating a stunning newsletter campaign.

TinyLetter Vs Substack – What’s The Difference?

Both TinyLetter and Substack are the names of online publishing platforms where you can create newsletters to share with the world. The key difference is that TinyLetter has closed down, whereas Substack still exists.

I Used To Make Newsletters Using TinyLetter, What Other Platform Should I Use Instead?

If you enjoyed creating newsletters with TinyLetter, then you should definitely continue on a new email platform.

There are plenty of options out there, but we hope you’ll try EcoSend. We have plans to suit all budgets, and we can make your newsletter sustainable! Keep scrolling to find out more.

In Search Of TinyLetter Alternatives? Your EcoSend Plan Is Waiting!

At EcoSend, we know the value, not to mention the enjoyment that sending a newsletter out to your subscribers can bring. We even send out our own every week — the aptly named EcoSend Weekly.

If you want to continue your email newsletter, or even start one from scratch we highly recommend it.

With the average person checking their emails 15 times a day, and a typical ROI of $42 for every $1 spent, email newsletters can have endless benefits for your business.

Some of the top perks include:

• Drive traffic to your website
• Keep existing customers engaged to prevent churn
• Nurture leads to encourage conversions
• Enhance customer relationships and loyalty
• Low cost to produce
• Fully trackable campaign results

If you decide to switch to EcoSend, these perks only continue! That’s because as the world’s first sustainable email marketing platform, your newsletters will be sent through servers that are powered by renewable energy. We’ll also plant trees based on your usage!

➡️ ✉️ Click here to try out EcoSend for free!

Whether you use the EcoSend free 'Sapling' plan, or one of our paid 'Canopy' or 'Forest' plans, we're confident you'll benefit from way more features than you got with TinyLetter. That’s because we are a professional email tool geared towards helping you succeed!

We hope that helps, and that you’ll give EcoSend a try. If you need anything further from us, please get in touch.

We are all here on Earth to help others, what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.

― W. H. Auden (British-American poet)

The standard advice on lead magnets is simple: offer something free, gate it behind an email address, and watch your list grow.

This used to work. And in some industries it still does.

But the success rate is lower than ever. Answers are at the end of a chatbot. Free, ungated content is abundant.

And even for the lead magnets that bring in signups, they’re often not the ones you want. The new subscribers don't open. They don't reply. They certainly don't buy. You've grown your list and diluted it at the same time.

The problem isn't that lead magnets don't work. It's that too often they’re designed for your business, not for your customer.

And as a result, they often attract everyone, when what you actually want is to attract someone — the specific person who might one day become a customer.

Why free attracts the wrong crowd

Anything free tends to attract two very different groups: people with a genuine problem you can solve, and people who just like free things.

The second group is much larger, and a generic lead magnet is catnip to them. "10 free templates," "the ultimate mega-guide," "500 resources in one download" — these attract collectors, not buyers. They grab the file, never open your emails, and sit on your list as dead weight: dragging your open rates down, costing you money to keep, and — for a brand that believes email isn't free — burning energy on people who were never listening.

A freebie-hunter isn't a lead who hasn't converted yet. They're a lead who was never in the market at all. The goal was never to maximise signups. It was to win customers.

The test: would only your future customer want this?

Here's the single question that fixes most lead magnets. Look at what you're offering and ask: would this be valuable only to someone with the problem my product solves?

A good lead magnet isn’t useful to people outside your market, and at the same time, it’s genuinely valuable to people inside it. It's not trying to appeal to everyone — it's trying to repel the wrong people as efficiently as it attracts the right ones.

"A free guide to productivity" is for everyone, which means it's for no one. "A checklist for switching project management tools without losing data” is only interesting if you're actively thinking about switching — which happens to describe your ideal customer exactly. The narrower magnet will grow your list more slowly but grow your business far faster.

What qualifies a lead?

The best lead magnets do double duty: they deliver value and they signal intent. The act of wanting them tells you something about the person and their stage in the buying journey.

Tools that solve a specific problem

A calculator, a template, an audit, a checklist tied directly to the job your product does. Someone who wants your “digital carbon footprint calculator" is telling you they care about the exact thing you sell.

Content that requires context to want

A guide that assumes the reader already has the problem — "how to improve deliverability when you're sending to 5,000+ subscribers" — self-selects for people at the stage where you're relevant.

Things with a small amount of friction

This is counter-intuitive, but a magnet that asks for a tiny bit of effort — answering one question, picking a use case — filters out pure collectors while barely slowing down genuine prospects. Friction isn't always the enemy. Sometimes it can be a good filter.

The pattern in all three: the magnet is worth less to someone who doesn't have the problem, and precisely useful to someone who does.

Fewer, better subscribers change the maths

It feels like a downgrade to trade a big list for a small one. But as we talk about often around here, it doesn’t have to be. It all depends on your business and your goals.

A list of 500 people who each self-identified as having the exact problem you solve will out-earn a list of 5,000 collected through a generic giveaway, almost every time. They open more, because they wanted to hear from you. They convert more, because they're actually in the market. And they cost less to serve — no dead weight quietly eroding your deliverability, your send costs, and giving you false hope.

This is the same principle behind everything we bang on about: email isn't free, so who you let onto your list matters more than how many. A lead magnet is the front door. It's worth being deliberate about who you invite through it.

The one thing to avoid: over-optimising for volume

“How many people downloaded it" is the easiest metric to celebrate.

But if you focus on this too much it can be easy to slide into making poor decisions. You might start making the magnet broader, easier, and more generic — and you'll fill your list with people who'll never buy.

You want to measure the lead magnet by what happens after the download as well: do these subscribers open, click, reply, and convert at a rate you're happy with? A lead magnet that adds five real prospects a month is worth infinitely more than one that adds 300 ghosts.

Don’t give up, just ask a simple question

If your signups have slowed to a trickle of people who never engage, the fix usually isn't to do bigger giveaways. Go back to the most basic of questions:

• Who is your ideal customer?
• What are they struggling with?
• If they’re in the market, what would they be searching for right now that could really help them?

Let me know if you’re already experimenting here, I’d love to hear about it!

Until next time,

James

This week’s artwork is an illustration of Aeschynanthus speciosus (commonly referred to as the showy lipstick plant because of its bright tubular flowers), by William Jackson Hooker. Originally published in Annales de la Société royale d’agriculture et de botanique de Gand in 1847. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.

― Warren Buffet (American investor and philanthropist)

Every marketer has felt the little rush of their follower count going up. It feels good, and it looks like progress. It’s an audience being built.

But there's an uncomfortable question hiding underneath it: what if that platform changed its rules tomorrow? What if they throttle your reach, change their algorithm, or suspend your account by mistake?

How many of those people could you still reach?

For most social followings, the honest answer is: almost none. And that's the whole difference between an audience you own and one you rent.

The distinction between owned and rented audiences

Of course, you don’t really own your audience… that’s not a world anyone wants to live in.

But you can own the right to have a direct relationshup with each person in your audience.

An owned audience is one you can reach directly, on your terms, whenever you choose. An email list is the clearest example: you have their email address, you decide when to send, and no third party sits between you and the person who chose to hear from you.

A rented audience is one you can only reach with their landlord's permission. Your followers on any social platform belong, functionally, to that platform. You can post — but whether your post is seen is entirely up to an algorithm you don't control and can't appeal to…

The numbers make this stark. Organic reach on most social platforms now sits in the low single digits — a few percent of your followers might see any given post. Email open rates for an engaged list routinely run 30–50%. One of those audiences you built. The other you're merely borrowing, at a rate the lender keeps quietly raising.

Rented reach can vanish overnight

This isn't a hypothetical — every year, businesses that built their entire presence on a single platform learn the hard way what "rented" means.

An account gets suspended by an automated system with no human to appeal to. A platform changes its algorithm and a reliable stream of customers evaporates in a week. A network falls out of fashion, or gets sold, or simply decides your kind of content is no longer what it wants to show. None of these require you to do anything wrong. You're a tenant, and the terms of the lease were never yours to set.

When it happens, the followers don't come with you. You can't export them, you can't email them to say "here's where to find us now”, and the relationship you thought you'd built was always mediated by someone else. When that someone else leaves, so does the audience.

An email list is the opposite. If your provider disappoints you, you export your list and take it elsewhere. The relationship is portable because it was always yours.

Why this matters even more for small teams

It's tempting to think owning an audience is a luxury for later — that first you chase reach wherever it's cheap, and worry about ownership once you're bigger.

For a small team, especially one with a paid service offering, or a charity that relies on donations, I believe it's the reverse. When you have limited time and budget, the last thing you can afford is to pour that effort into an asset you don't keep. Every hour spent growing a following you can't contact directly is an hour rented rather than invested.

A list compounds. The subscriber you earn today is one you can reach next week, next quarter, next year — for the cost of a send. Social reach can reset to zero with every post and any algorithm change. One builds equity while the other rents it, indefinitely.

Social still matters — as a means, not an end

None of this means abandoning social. Social platforms are genuinely good at one thing owned channels can't do: reaching people who've never heard of you. That's incredibly valuable. Earlier this year we posted short-form video every day for a month — so we have the receipts to show for those efforts.

The shift is in what you're using it for. Social is the top of the funnel — the introduction. Its job is not necessarily to accumulate followers; it's to turn strangers into subscribers, moving people from rented reach onto a channel you own.

And this is not easy — almost every social network makes it hard to do this. The infestation of “Link in the comments” across the online world is an ugly result of this desire by platforms to keep you and your audience in their walled gardens.

The practical rule: treat every social platform as a way to earn an email address, not as the destination. A great post that adds 200 followers is nice. A great post that adds 40 subscribers is an asset. Point your best content at the second outcome, and social finally starts working for your business rather than for the platform's.

The one thing to avoid

Don’t build your business on borrowed ground.

Of course, I strongly encourage almost every founder, marketer, and communications person starting out to build an email list from day one.

Don’t tell yourself you'll get to it once the social following is big enough to "convert." That day rarely comes, and if the platform turns on you first, the following you were going to convert leaves with it.

Don’t wait any longer…

Start moving people to owned ground now, while it's small and easy. A list of 200 people who chose to hear from you is often worth more than 20,000 followers you can only reach if an algorithm allows it.

If you've been building an audience on rented land, the fix is simple to start: give people one clear reason to join your list, and one easy place to do it. If you're on EcoSend, we can help you set up a signup form and a welcome email that turns first-time visitors into subscribers you actually own.

Until next time,

James

The beautiful artwork in this edition of EcoSend Weekly is "Weaver Birds” — they are so named because of their elaborately-woven nests. The artwork is a chromolithograph by L. Prang & Co., from Animate Creation (New York: Selmar Hess, c.1898). Contributed by Smithsonian Institution Libraries via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

As it’s the hottest June day on record in the UK…

Don’t knock the weather. If it didn’t change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn’t start a conversation.

― Kin Hubbard (an American cartoonist)

Few things sting quite like watching someone unsubscribe from your list after you hit send.

You wrote something honest, you cared about it, and someone read the first line and reached for the bin.

It's tempting to treat that as a failure and sob for the rest of the day.

It’s tempting for some to go a step further — and bury the unsubscribe link, add a guilt-laden "are you sure?" step, or just hope nobody finds the 8pt low contrast text that is hiding your unsubscribe link.

Resist all of that. A clean, easy unsubscribe isn't a leak in your list. It's one of the healthiest things you can offer, for them and for you.

What an unsubscribe can tell you

An unsubscribe is information, and it's honest information. Which is more rare than it sounds!

Someone who leaves was never going to buy, donate, or engage. They were a number that made your list look bigger and your open rate look worse. When they go, the people who remain are, by definition, more interested in hearing from you. Your list gets smaller and more accurate at the same time.

Compare that to the alternative. A subscriber who can't easily leave doesn't become engaged — they become a problem. They stop opening. They start deleting on sight. And eventually, a meaningful share of them reach for the other button: "mark as spam." That one costs you far more than a clean exit ever could.

The deliverability case for letting people go

Ultimately, unsubscribes protect the thing your entire email programme depends on: whether you land in the inbox at all.

Mailbox providers like Gmail and Outlook monitor how people react to you. Opens, clicks, deletes, and — most damagingly — spam complaints all feed into whether your future emails are trusted.

A hard-to-find unsubscribe link doesn't keep people on your list; it converts would-be unsubscribers into spam-reporters.

A single spam complaint does more damage to your sender reputation than dozens of clean unsubscribes. Making the exit easy is, quite literally, a deliverability strategy. You're trading a vanity metric (list size) for a survival metric (inbox placement).

It's also the right thing to do — which is rather the point

For a brand built on the idea that email isn't free — that every send costs someone time, energy, and attention — making it hard to leave would be a contradiction.

Respecting attention means respecting the decision to give less of it. Someone who no longer wants your emails shouldn't have to fight to stop receiving them. Letting them go gracefully is the same value that made them trust you in the first place, applied at the least convenient moment. Your true values often only show when you have a difficult decision to make.

There's a small climate benefit too. Every address you keep emailing out of habit is energy spent reaching someone who isn't reading. A leaner, genuinely engaged list sends fewer wasted emails — better for your numbers and for being true to digital sustainability principles.

How to do unsubscribes well

Making it easy doesn't mean making it cold. A few things that help:

Put the link where people expect it

Clear, visible, in the footer, in plain language. No tiny grey 8px text the same colour as the background. If someone is looking for it, let them find it.

Offer a downgrade, not just a door

A preference centre — "fewer emails," "just the monthly roundup," "only product news" — gives people a middle option between all or nothing. Many will happily turn the dial down instead of off, if you let them.

Honour it instantly and confirm warmly

No “please allow ten days for us to process this request.” Confirm it's done, thank them genuinely, and leave the door open. "Sorry to see you go — you're always welcome back" costs nothing and is remembered.

Never make them log in or reply to leave

Friction here doesn't retain people. It just routes them to the spam button.

The one thing to avoid: guilt

The manipulative unsubscribe flow — the frowning cartoon, the "we'll miss you 😢," the pre-ticked box that keeps you subscribed unless you notice.

This is the email equivalent of a gym membership you can only cancel by phone. It might work for one interaction, but it poisons everything after it.

People remember how you treated them on the way out. Treat the exit as the last impression you'll make, because it is — and because the people seeing it include the ones who haven't decided to leave yet.

We believe in doing this right

Of course, if you're on EcoSend, your emails already include a clear one-click unsubscribe — and you can set up a preference centre to give subscribers a softer option than leaving entirely. See how to set yours up.

Or just reply and tell us your current unsubscribe rate — we're happy to tell you whether it's something to worry about (it usually isn’t!)

Thanks for reading this week. If it wasn’t for you, you are welcome to unsubscribe — I promise I won’t take it personally…

Stay hydrated,

James

This week’s beautiful artwork is "Herons" by Roland Green, featured by W. P. Pycraft in “Birds in Flight”, and published in London by Gay & Hancock in 1922. Digitised and published online by the BHL.

If you're talking to everyone, you're talking to no one.

― Howard Gossage (an American advertising executive, know as the “Socrates of San Francisco”)

Almost everything written about email segmentation assumes you have a large list, a dedicated CRM, a data analyst, and the kind of traffic that makes A/B testing meaningful.

If you're a charity, a small B2B, a growing purpose-driven brand, or really anyone with a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers — that advice was not written for you.

This week I'll attempt to write some advice that is for you.

Why segmentation matters (even at a small scale)

The argument for segmentation is simple: different people on your list have different relationships with you. Treating them identically is a missed opportunity, if not a way to mildly irritate a portion of your subscribers.

A donor who has given three times doesn't need to receive your introductory "who we are" email. A prospect who signed up last week hasn't built enough trust with you to be pitched the same way as someone who has been engaged for two years.

Small lists can actually make this easier to get right, not harder.

Chances are, you know your subscribers better. You have context and you don't need machine learning to tell you that your customers and your latest newsletter readers are different audiences.

Start with one question: why are they on your list?

Even thinking about segmentation can be a lot of work, so before you build any segment, you want to ask:

Why is this person on my list?

In practice, most small lists coalesce into two or three meaningful groups based on the answer:

Leads and prospects

People who haven't bought or donated yet but are curious or considering. They need content that builds trust, demonstrates value, and answers objections.

Customers or supporters

People who have already taken the step. They need content that deepens the relationship, surfaces new value, and recognises them as insiders rather than prospects.

Inactive subscribers

People who haven't opened or engaged in 90+ days. They need their own strategy (re-engagement, or a clean unsubscribe — more on that in a future issue).

If you only ever build these three segments, you'll be ahead of the vast majority of senders your size.

How to tag subscribers without a complex setup

Most email platforms — (including EcoSend!) — let you add custom fields (or tags) to each of your subscribers so you can label them and ultimately group them together.

You don't need a fancy integration to get started. Here are three practical ways to build your segments:

At the point of signup

Use separate signup forms for different contexts. Someone who signs up through your "get a demo" page is a lead.

Someone who signs up through your general newsletter footer might be an interested observer.

The form they came through tells you a lot — and most platforms can automatically tag based on which form was used.

Based on behaviour

Did someone click a link in an email about a specific product or cause? Tag them.

Some platforms let you set up simple automations like "if a subscriber clicks a link in our donation campaign, set the property "interested-in-donating" to true."

You don't need to do this manually, and you can get fancier with tools like Zapier to automate even more.

Based on what you already know

If you're migrating from a spreadsheet or a previous platform, you probably have data — purchase history, donation records, which event someone attended.

Import this information as properties or tags. It may seem like a faff, and can take an afternoon of focus, but it's worth every minute and pays back dividends.

What to actually send each segment

Once you have your segments, the question turns to:

What do I do with my segments now?

The answer doesn't have to be complicated.

Leads and prospects

Focus on useful, trust-building content. Case studies, practical guides (possibly like this one 😉), and answers to common questions.

Don't pitch too hard, too fast — your job here is to ensure your reader feels like they made a good decision by subscribing.

Customers and supporters

Go deeper. Perhaps you could share behind-the-scenes updates, early access, and the kind of honest content that says "you're an insider now."

Show gratitude without being cloying. Show recognition that their support matters and is doing something real.

Inactive subscribers

This is delicate, but you could send a dedicated re-engagement sequence (three emails, in an honest tone, with a very easy unsubscribe). We could cover a lot more here, but that's a whole newsletter in itself.

This is all great, but you barely have time to write one email

The key thing on this whole topic: you don't have to write entirely separate campaigns for each segment every week.

Often it could be a single change — a different opening line, a different CTA, a different subject line — that makes the same core email feel relevant to two different audiences.

One thing to avoid: over-engineering it

If it's not not doing segmentation, one of the biggest segmentation mistakes we see smaller senders making is designing a system so complex they never actually send anything and get into a complete mess.

You know what I'm talking about — eight overlapping tags, a 14-step decision tree, a segment for every possible subscriber combination.

Start with one segment (aside from your main list). Run with it for a month, and see what you learn. Then, if all goes well, look at adding more.

This takes restraint, but the best segmentation system is the one you'll actually use!

If you're on EcoSend and want to set up your first segment, just reply to this email — we're always happy to talk through what makes sense for your specific list.

Until next week!

James

P.S. Next week (week beginning Monday 22nd June 2026), here in London we have London Climate Action Week. We're going to be attending a few events, so if you're around please let me know — I'd love to say hi.

The beautiful botanical artwork in this article is from Köhler's Medicinal Plants — a famous Victorian botanical atlas published in 1883 by Fr. Eugen Köhler. Digitised and published online by the BHL.

It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.

― Warren Buffett (American investor and philanthropist)

Take a look at most "growth marketing" advice and you'll find many ideas from the same playbook.

You know the ones: countdown timers that reset the moment you refresh the page. Pop-ups that won't take no for an answer. Unsubscribe links buried in 8pt grey text. Confirm-shaming copy — "No thanks, I don't want to save money.”

They’re designed to make opting out feel like a moral failure.

These tactics exist because, in the short term, they tend to work.

Fake urgency lifts click-throughs. Confirm-shaming reduces unsubscribes. Pre-ticked boxes inflate your list.

I suspect you’re reading this, though, because you want to do better than that.

As with many solutions in marketing, in business, and in life, what works in the short-term might very well be costly in the long-term.

The real cost of dirty tactics

How bad are these approaches for you and your audience?

Let’s take a look and establish what each of these quick, dirty tactics actually costs.

Fake urgency

A countdown timer that resets every time someone revisits your site is categorically not driving urgency. It is a lie, and most people now recognise it as one.

The first time someone catches it, they don't just distrust that email or page. They distrust everything you send afterwards.

Real urgency — a genuine deadline, real limited capacity — still works.

Manufactured urgency just burns trust for a short-term bump.

Confirm-shaming

No thanks, I'd rather not protect the planet.

It might shave a point off your unsubscribe rate this week.

But the people who stay are not more engaged. In fact, it’s worse. Chances are, they just got the ick. Annoyed, icked-out subscribers don't necessarily unsubscribe, they mark you as spam.

As you know, getting marked as spam does far more damage to your sender reputation.

The honest version — "Unsubscribe" or "No thanks" — may cost you a few people you were going to lose anyway, but it keeps the relationship clean.

Pre-ticked consent boxes

Adding people to your list via a pre-ticked box at checkout inflates your numbers immediately.

But those subscribers never actively chose you. They're the least engaged people on your list, the most likely to complain, and they’re a compliance risk depending on where they're based. This is what regulations like the GDPR were brought in to eradicate.

A genuinely opted-in list of 2,000 contacts will outperform a pre-ticked list of 10,000 on every metric that matters.

Hidden unsubscribe links

Making it hard to leave doesn't stop people leaving — it just changes how.

Instead of clicking "unsubscribe," they click "spam." One spam complaint does more damage to your deliverability than a dozen clean unsubscribes.

By hiding the unsubscribe link, you’re effectively trapping the recipient. And when they want to escape, they will take the path of least resistance. Make it easy for them, don’t trap them.

What should you do instead?

The pattern across all four of these: dark patterns trade a small, visible, short-term metric — one more click, one fewer unsubscribe, one more "subscriber" — for a larger, less visible, long-term cost.

Sender reputation. Inbox placement. The trust that makes someone open your next email at all.

The alternative doesn’t have to mean passively letting go of growth.

You can still create urgency. Real urgency! But you need to make a genuine case for staying subscribed, and ask for consent clearly and confidently. You have to deliver real value, and know who you’re serving better than anyone else.

The difference is that none of it depends on the reader not noticing what you're doing.

Growth built this way is slower. It may not show up in a weekly report. But it compounds — because every subscriber on your list actually wants to be there.

And that, surely, is better for everyone.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

― Voltaire (French writer and philosopher)

Most emails arrive in an inbox with three pieces of visible information:

• The subject line.
• The sender name.
• And a short line of text after it — usually around 90 characters — that appears before anyone opens anything.

That third thing is preview text. Also called preheader text.

And in most campaigns, it's either random code-like nonsense, accidentally filled with "[View in browser]", or a pale repetition of the subject line.

Which is a huge waste. Because preview text is valuable real estate — a second chance to give someone a reason to open.

This seems small, why are we discussing it?

We spend a lot of time exploring how to craft great emails.

But last time I checked, most organisations don't have a 100% open rate. If you do, let me know — I'll temporarily remove my hat of skepticism — I'd love to hear what you're doing 😁.

So whether your open rate is 5% or 95%... chances are, many people are never seeing your actual emails.

Most, though, assuming your deliverability is good, are likely to see the three key details we mentioned at the start: the subject line, the sender, and the preview text.

How preview text works

When you send an HTML email, you can include a hidden snippet of text near the top of the email's code that email clients pull out and display in the inbox view.

If you don't set it, most email clients (Gmail, Outlook, etc) will grab the first visible text in your email instead — often something like "Having trouble viewing this email? Click here."

That's not a great first impression.

Done well, preview text does a specific job: it completes the thought the subject line started, or adds a second layer of intrigue, information, or humanity that tips a recipient from "maybe" to "yes, I'll open this".

Example

Subject line: Your best customers might not be receiving your emails Preview text: It won't show up in your reports. Your open rate might hint at it.

Those two lines work together. The subject line creates concern; the preview text deepens it. Neither would be as effective alone.

Four ideas to make your preview text work harder

Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing. In each example, the subject line is first and bold, and the preview text is the secondary line, so you can see them more like they'd appear to a recipient.

1. Finish the subject line's sentence

If your subject line is a question or an incomplete thought, preview text can land the answer — or tease it enough to earn the open.

Example

We've been thinking about sending less Turns out, it's better for everyone. Including you.

2. Add a second hook

If your subject line covers the what, preview text can cover the why — or the who, or the stakes.

Example

17 ways to grow your list ethically Most list-building advice is written for ecommerce brands flogging trainers.

3. Humanise the send

Preview text doesn't have to be a sales line. It can be a voice — warm, direct, personal. Especially for organisations where relationship is the whole point.

Example

A quick note before we go quiet for August James here. Just wanted to give you an important update before the summer break.

4. Set the right expectation

If the email is a specific type — a survey, a story, a resource — tell people. Readers who know what they're getting are more likely to open and less likely to be disappointed.

Example

We'd love your opinion on one thing Two questions. Takes about 90 seconds. Your answers actually shape what we build next.

What to avoid

👎 Repeating the subject line

You've already said that. Use the space to add something.

👎 Generic filler

"Welcome to our July newsletter" is not a reason to open.

👎 Accidentally leaving it blank

Set it intentionally. Every time.

👎 Going too long

Most email clients truncate at around 90 characters. Write short and punchy — the important bit should land in the first 60.

Preview text in a world of AI summaries

Yes we've got to cover the topic of AI briefly...

Gmail and Apple Mail are now using AI to generate short summaries of your emails — sometimes replacing or supplementing the preview text that appears in the inbox. Apple Intelligence (available on most recent Apple devices, like the iPhone 15 and newer), in particular, rewrites what subscribers see before they open based on the actual content of the email, not the preheader snippet you carefully crafted.

This is genuinely new, and it may change the calculus a little for some.

My honest take here is: preview text still matters, for several reasons:

• Most email clients — especially on Android, Outlook, and older platforms — still show your preview text directly.
• And for clients that do generate AI summaries, the summary is often built from your email's actual opening lines.

Which means the best response to AI inbox summaries is the same as the best response to good writing generally: make the first sentence of your email genuinely compelling.

The practical takeaway in an AI world

Don't write preview text as a substitute for a strong opening. Write both.

A great preheader and a strong email intro are complementary — and together, they give you the best chance of landing well whether a human or an algorithm is generating what the subscriber sees.

The inbox is getting smarter. And your copy needs to keep up.

One more thing

I wouldn't normally give such a shout out in the newsletter, but this week it feels relevant...

We've been working on a completely new EcoSend email builder, and we've been working on this exact challenge.

In most email tools, preview text is buried in settings — easy to miss, easy to forget. We've moved it front and centre in the new builder. You'll see it right alongside the subject line when you're setting up a campaign, which means it's almost impossible to skip or forget.

This is a small but mighty change. And we believe it’ll help our users send campaigns with properly considered preheader text. And ultimately get more of their emails opened — a big win!

Learn more about the new email builder

Don't build links. Build relationships.

― Rand Fishkin (CEO and co-founder of Moz)

It's easy to feel like list growth is something that just… happens slowly, to other people, with big marketing budgets.

It doesn't have to be!

Many organisations with large audiences of engaged email subscribers didn't get there through ad spend — they got there by being genuinely useful, specific, and a little creative.

Here are some ideas — some obvious, some not — to get your list growing with people who might actually care about what you have to say.

One thing to not do

Before we get into the good stuff, I wouldn’t be doing my job right if I didn’t explicitly call out this anti-tip first.

I know you know this already, but I still occasionally get asked questions like this:

What’s the best way to warm up a list I’ve just purchased?

🏃‍♀️💨

Do not buy your list. Please! Do. Not. Do. This.

What might seem like a shortcut is anything but: you will have a list of email addresses on your hands... Those (might) belong to people. And those people likely never wanted to be sold to, and never expected to be emailed by you.

You will almost certainly tank your sender reputation by emailing them, and the ethical and compliance grounds are hazy at best.

Oh, and it's often actually illegal if you're in most countries with modern data protection laws.

Just steer clear of buying lists.

OK, now, let’s get onto the real tips… the ones you’re here for!

Start with what you already have

1. Ask your existing subscribers directly. Send a short personal email to your current subscribers asking them to forward it to one person who'd find it valuable. A warm referral is worth twenty cold signups.

2. Audit your confirmation emails. Every order confirmation, donation receipt, event booking, and membership renewal you send is a missed opportunity if it doesn't include a clear, low-pressure invite to join your newsletter.

3. Add a signup CTA to your email signature. Every email you and your team send is a touchpoint. Link to your signup page with a single compelling line — "Get our weekly ideas on [topic]."

Btw 🤫 I have only just started putting a signup CTA in my signature — so far, it’s been really positive. Sending a little “👋 hi!” to anyone who has joined in the last week after seeing the newsletter link in my email signature!

Make the value obvious

4. Name your newsletter. "Sign up for our newsletter" is forgettable. "Join 3,000 people reading The Roots Report — weekly ideas for regenerative food systems" is something people want. Give it an identity.

5. Publish your archive publicly. Let prospective subscribers read your recent issues before signing up. Seeing the real thing converts far better than a generic "we promise to be useful" landing page.

6. Create a lead magnet worth having. A practical guide, a template, a checklist — something genuinely useful your audience would pay for. Give it away in exchange for an email address. The key words here are genuinely useful(!) A PDF repurposing your About page won't cut it. Don’t create a lead magnet for the wrong reasons — you’ll just waste everyone’s time.

Go where your people already are

7. Speak at events (even small ones). A 20-minute talk to 40 engaged people in your niche will often produce more quality subscribers than months of social posting. End with a clear, simple signup CTA. A good tip here is to generate a QR code for your newsletter signup page so people can quickly sign up from your slides.

8. Collaborate with adjacent newsletters. Find organisations or individuals who share your values but don't overlap directly. Offer a swap — you mention them, they mention you. One honest recommendation from a trusted voice beats an ad any day!

9. Show up in communities. Whether that's a Slack group, a Discord, a LinkedIn community, or a local WhatsApp — be a genuinely useful participant first. Add a link to your newsletter in your bio or profile. Never spam — don’t be “that guy” asking for signups before you’ve even said hi.

10. Be quotable on social. Turn your best newsletter lines into standalone posts. Not previews, not teasers — actually valuable content that stands alone. This is quite “top of funnel” but the people who engage will likely want more — and as long as you follow the other steps here, it’ll be easy for them to become a subscriber.

Lean into your mission

11. Partner with aligned brands. If you're a sustainability organisation, find a certified B Corp, an ethical retailer, or a purpose-led brand whose audience overlaps with yours. Co-create something — a guide, an event, a campaign — and both promote the signup page. As long as you are crisp and clear at the point of signup, you can both benefit from more subscribers.

12. Run a small pledge or challenge. "7 days of [thing your audience cares about]" delivered by email is a remarkably effective signup hook. It sets clear expectations, delivers real value, and creates a habit of opening your emails. It also gives an answer to the “Why now?” question for anyone on the fence about signing up.

13. Create a free tool or resource hub. A calculator, a directory, a curated link library relevant to your niche — things people bookmark and share. You could gate it lightly (name + email) or keep it free and include a newsletter CTA prominently.

The obvious stuff (that many people still skip)

Btw 🤫 One thing I always feel nervous about when writing these newsletters is reflecting on how many of my recommendations I’m not following. Why is it always so much easier to give advice to other people than to yourself?! Anyway…

14. Put your signup form everywhere. Homepage hero. Blog sidebar. Footer. Pop-up (yes, tasteful pop-up forms can work — especially exit-intent ones). After every blog post. Don't make people hunt for it, and don’t expect people to sign up the first time they see a signup form. It might be that they need to see it five times before they commit.

15. Run a giveaway or prize draw. This works especially well if the prize is mission-aligned — an experience, a product from a partner, a consultation with you. Low cost, high reach if promoted well. Again, just make sure it’s genuinely valuable, not made-up and a decoy — people see through this.

16. Use your events. In-person or online, events are list-building gold. Collect emails at registration, and follow up afterwards with an explicit invite to join your newsletter. These are people that already showed up for you, so it feels criminal to not make it easy for them to keep up to date for the future.

17. Just ask more often. Seriously — most organisations err on the side of asking far too rarely. No one wants to come across too pushy, and given you’re reading this, I suspect you’re not on that end of the scale. At the end of a blog post, at the bottom of a press release, in the bio of a guest article, in an Instagram story. You have permission to ask. Use it!

The thing that ties all of this together

Every signup method above works better when people trust you — and people trust you when your emails are consistently worth reading.

List growth and list quality are not separate problems. Fix the content and be clear on your audience, and growth follows naturally.

Unlike what many marketing “experts” may tell you, the goal isn't a big list. It's a list full of people who open your emails because they're glad they signed up.

Until next week,

James