Creating engaging newsletters
I work for an email start-up. Like many, we send out newsletters to our community. Ours often features shoulder pads, badgers and Michael Bolton. The last one even included a picture of a man with a glorious mullet. Basically, not much to do with email. Except it’s an email.
There’s a few reasons for it.
1) Do you love newsletters? I’ll be honest. I struggle with them. We needed to write something we’d read before we could ask others to do the same.
2) We just so happen to be working on an email app. So we thought how might we stand up to the challenge and write emails people will enjoy?
3) Do you also tend to throw yourself into an idea and just run with it? Unfortunately for some, this means we often throw ourselves into our marketing efforts. (I threw myself into an old elephant costume once and ran with it.) We also genuinely like the 80s and animals. It’s fun.
4) We tried writing a serious newsletter once. It didn’t work.
5) You’re having conversations with us. Often we get replies from complete strangers we’d never met and that’s generally the happiest you can find me in the office.
Building more than ‘sign-ups’
If, like me, you’re here to build an app, you’re not just building the product. You’re also building a community of supporters, an organisation and an overall legacy of some sort.
I’d like to talk about the community. Community implies knowing each other, not as a brand and a user, but as people. Why does this matter? Well, I’ve got something to share.
I genuinely hate users and sign-ups. Not the people. The words ‘users’ and ‘sign-ups’. Behind every sign-up is a person who’s got a better story to tell than me. It’s a story that’s different from mine. That’s enriching.
With all the default no-reply sign-up emails, it’s easy to forget that behind every branded newsletter is a bunch of ferocious ferrets (not real ferrets) working away.
In the world of startups and small teams, I simply don’t understand this. We’re all people curious about something at the end of the day. So where’s curiosity gone in marketing?
Well, I think it’s good to be a bit more human, transparent and accessible. A conversation is little effort that can go a long way.
Here’s very short stories of the great people I’ve met over email in the last few weeks.
The story of Ron
In our last newsletter, we shared that we were hiring. To encourage people to share the news, we created a challenge. Post the hiring link on your social network and take a selfie of yourself and your screen showing us that you’ve done it. The first person to reply wins a bottle of champagne.
Within two minutes we got an email with the completed challenge from Ron. Luckily, Ron lived in San Francisco and we delivered the bottle in person the next morning. We had a coffee together and Ron turned out to be a wonderful human being. He shines in sales and runs a start-up Andante, which is an Airbnb for musical instruments.
The story of Nick
We once put out a challenge about the 80s memory you’d never want to get rid of. We got an astonishing number of tales varying in length and controversy. Our favourite one was from someone called Nick who shared his encounter with Debby Harry AKA Blondie. The story simply read: “Smoked with Debby Harry while she was in her bra.”
Obviously, I asked him to elaborate.
Detroit. August 1982. The opening act was Duran Duran. He had a backstage pass. He was smoking. Debbie Harry approached him and asked for a drag. While doing that, she casually took her top off. She kissed him on the cheek, said thanks and disappeared again.
I mean. Hugging my hero Glen Hansard has got nothing on that.
The story of Tikiri
Tikiri is a CTO of an awesome London-based events app Frugl. We’ve never met, but we kicked off our conversation by arguing about the offspring of Bon Jovi and Aerosmith. When you do that, you’re practically best buddies. (Apparently we got it mixed up. Oh well.)
Since then, Tikiri also got involved with my letter-writing challenge I’ve put out on twitter. Every now and then, I like to write letters to strangers. When that happens, I’ll tweet about it and the first person to reply with their address becomes my next recipient. Tikiri did that and his letter is in the post now — from San Francisco to London.
Writing a letter to a stranger is a good exercise. Try it, tweet about it and use #bringbackletters.
The story of Suruchi
We’ve been interviewing all kinds of brilliant people recently. The level of skills people have has blown us away. One of those talents is Suruchi. We’ve never seen an illustrator and 3D animator like that before. See for yourself here. The video work is practically scenes out of Pixar or DreamWorks.
We’d love to hire her, but couldn’t find the perfect fit. So we introduced her to our good friend Manny who works at DreamWorks and we sincerely hope they kick it off.
Maybe one day we’ll be watching something like How To Train Your Wagon and Suruchi’s hands will have shaped what we might see.
The story of Ray
Ray is an Android fan. He was disappointed that we’ll be launching on iPad first, so he decided to make up for it through his words. He invented what we call his own iSpeak. Every time he’d start a sentence using ‘I’ followed by a verb, he would fuse it into an ‘iLike’ type of word.
He frequently showers us with random fun facts. Did you know the Yellow Stone’s ‘Super Volcano’ is well past its eruption cycle of every 600,000 years? And that Brad Pitt once complained he’d never be as handsome as Ray? His favourite goodbye greeting is ‘Trains are cool’. Last week he sent us a picture of a waterfall.
The story of Pancake Bear
We got an email from Pancake Bear. Pancake. Bear.
The story of Mike
Mike got in touch with us after we’d emailed to say we were looking for a developer. Unfortunately, he’s based and very happy with his family in the south of France. We started a conversation nevertheless and instead of a selfie with his screen, he sent us a selfie with his two daughters during sunset. He shared his support of charity work that includes Cancer Research, Wikipedia and Positive Money and hopes to do more direct voluntary work. We also started discussing how to bring Paul McCartney to St. Anthony’s that feeds people in San Francisco. It’ll be their 64th anniversary and they’d love to hear ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ performed live.
Anybody out there. Do you know Paul McCartney and can you fly him to SF?
Stay human and respond
End of the short stories. Keep them coming. Turn to me whenever you need a listening ear. Something I can help you with? A project you’d like to share? Need perking up with a letter? Or a waterfall? You can be sure there’s a human, I mean a ferret, behind hello at paperfold dot me.
Because users might be dead, but people are very much alive.
Anyway. Trains are cool.
This post was originally published on the Paperfold blog in June 2014.