DISCLAIMER:
You can’t trust anything written here. Every single word was written by someone who makes money from creating newsletters for businesses. He should not be trusted.
Newsletters are brilliant! Much better than social media (Boo!) Here are three times newsletters KO’d social media.
1. Newsletters make you independent
Lots of online marketing happens on platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Fraudbook, Instagrim, YouTube, LinkedIn and so on. They’re fabulous. Well, some of them are. But fabulous or not, they all share something in common. They control your access to people who follow you. They hold the keys to the door. The platform decides whether or not you are allowed in. Your access can be revoked at any time, no warning or reason given.
In other words, your audience is only yours at the platform’s whim (in so far as you can own an audience—this isn’t the Middle Ages, after all), and the platform can take your audience away or restrict your access to it. One minute, they’re your friend; the next, they’ve put a dagger in your back.
Jerks.
Newsletters don’t fight against you or stab you when you’re not looking. Your email list is yours. You can store it, access it and use it to its full capacity whenever you want. The only rules you have to comply with are national or international regulations like GDPR, which are there to protect people, rather than generate money. And if you don’t like the email service you’re using, you can take your entire audience with you and go somewhere else.
2. Newsletters are a direct route to your audience
The other other thing about social media platforms is they decide who sees your posts and who doesn’t. They don’t care a fig about the fact your followers want to see your posts. Instead, they care a cartload of figs about making money.
That’s understandable. Running a platform like LinkedIn costs a lot of money, especially if it offers a free membership tier. So it’s only fair the platform earns money from you somehow, possibly by pushing advertising into your feed or by encouraging you to pay for increased visibility. (But not by hoovering up vast amounts of information about you and selling it to third parties without your knowledge, or by tracking you all over the internet to Kingdom Come. Jerks.)
The upshot is that only a fraction of your followers will actually have your post presented to them in their feed. You often have to pay to get more reach, especially if you are a business.
Newsletters have a clear advantage. You can be almost certain that everyone who subscribes to your newsletter will receive a copy in their inbox when you send it out. Your newsletter platform doesn’t withhold your email from anyone. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s in their best interests if your emails arrive safely with everyone who wants them.
3. Newsletters are nearly always seen (but not always opened)
Nearly 100% of your newsletters will be seen. Even if the subscriber doesn’t open an issue and deletes it, they will have seen the subject line in their email software. Of course, there is a chance it will languish unseen forever in a junk folder. But for a purposeful and well-crafted newsletter, it’s OK to assume subscribers will at the very least see the subject line of each issue.
Over on social media platforms, your post may not actually be seen even if the platform ‘presents’ it in someone’s feed. Some social media platforms have pretty sketchy ideas about what constitutes an appearance or view in someone’s feed—if, in fact, the feed even belongs to a real person with a heartbeat and a social security number. For example, on several platforms, if a video is only half visible (ie. only the top or bottom half appears on someone’s screen) for a couple of seconds, it gets reported as having been viewed. (When I tried something similar in school, it never worked. Teachers insisted I worked through all of the pages of a book top to bottom and from front to back for a book to be considered read.)
And one time newsletters punched weakly, but not as weakly as social media platforms
And that brings us to analytics. Short version, open rates reported by email platforms can’t be trusted. And that’s fine. Open rates are reported using tracking pixels inserted into emails. But Apple (and I believe others too) have started to crack down on these pixels, or block them by default. In addition, people are themselves switching off the option to automatically show images in emails they receive. (The pixel functions as an image. No image, no open rate tracking.) Personally, I don’t like to be tracked, so I don’t mind if the tracking pixels inserted into emails are blocked. There are other ways to gauge the success of a campaign without using spy software.
Contrast the unreliable open rate analytics of newsletters with the wealth of super-reliable, independently-audited analytics provided by social media platforms, who have never, ever been found to be a lying bunch of hypocrites hell bent on selling all the data they can harvest from you to literally anyone who will pay them, regardless of ethics, morals or legitimacy.
In case the sarcasm was too subtle: newsletter open rates are unreliable; the numbers of impressions, views, engagements, etc offered by social media platforms should, I believe, be tipped straight into a blast furnace.
But maybe you see it differently? Please tell me where I’m wrong in the comments.