Ask IH: How to make a newsletter
Can anyone recommend a great book, ebook, or online post that has helped you to make a successful online newsletter?
Can anyone recommend a great book, ebook, or online post that has helped you to make a successful online newsletter?
For what it's worth, I didn't read anything before starting the Indie Hackers newsletter, and it's worked out great. I figured that people liked IH for the radically transparent startup stories, so I made sure to keep delivering more of the same in the newsletter. And that's it.
One thing that's worth mentioning is consistency is key. Try to send at least once a week, on a predictable schedule, and never miss an issue. People come to rely on that consistency, and they reward it more than you might predict.
Thanks Courtland, I have heard consistency is an important factor.
I've got to write a longer post about this someday, but I run sideprojectchecklist.com. Since launching, I've had an email subscribe form, so I've had thousands of people join the list in the past 6 months. My strategy for growing it has been:
It only takes me about 15 minutes of work per week to actually compose the email now, so I can spend more time promoting the site and writing original content 😀
While I don't know any resources, I'm happy to answer any specific questions you have about running/growing newsletters. I run a weekly newsletter that has 17,000+ subs and would be happy to help where I can.
Ramy, how did you get your first subscribers?
Very first subscribers were from
I wouldn’t just share the signup page though, I’d share each edition of the newsletter and links from it so people see what they’re getting if they sign up.
I got real traction once the site did well on ProductHunt. Most of the subs didn’t come from there though, they came from communities that reshared it after discovering it on PH.
Designer News, Reddit, and many design blogs.
My takeaway since was that a product/service specifically for an audience with a strong online presence is more likely to spread. The many design blogs were hungry for content so were happy to share a new newsletter with their audiences.
I hope that helps!
Newsletter can mean a bunch of different things to different businesses. If you are in publishing then newsletter typically contains content updates and can be as frequent as weekly. If you are in software the newsletter is typically for announcing new features along with customer success stories or usage tips and can be monthly or quarterly.
Check out this list of different types of emails and when to send them: https://sumo.com/stories/email-types?ref=sumome-email-story-email-types
Success (measured by engagement) would be determined by the value of your newsletter content to your users, but also factors like deliverability.
If your ESP doesn't offer the template design you like, check out free templates from Litmus https://litmus.com/resources/free-responsive-email-templates
Thanks, the templates will be very useful. I was trying to think what type of design would work best. What ESP do you use?
I and my clients use BigMailer.io that requires you to hook into your Amazon SES account. It offers generous free tier, and priced competitively above free tier, but if you don't already use AWS you would need to create an account to use SES. Disclaimer: I am the founder of BigMailer.io
Although it does not address your overall question, once you get to the point of putting the newsletter together you may want to look into Revue (https://www.getrevue.co/) - especially if you do curated content.
I use them for my own newsletter called ASP.NET Weekly (https://www.getrevue.co/profile/aspnetweekly) and they make the process much smoother with their integration with products like Pocket.
Previously I used Mailchimp and would spend hours on things like design. In the end it was a lot of time wasted on something meaningless. For a newsletter like mine, the content is the most important. As long as the newsletter looks fairly decent, the readers do not mind.
What things do you value most about Revue?
Simplicity. For example, it integrates with Pocket which I use to collect the blog posts during the week. Then when it comes to put the newsletter together it is a case of simple drag-and-drop.
It you need custom layouts and HTML in your newsletter, then you'd better stick to products like Mailchimp. But if you want something simple, then Revue is a great choice.
At the end of the day the readers really only care about the content, so as long as you can give them great content, the design does not really matter. Well, that is my experience...
It is based entirely on content. If you are looking for a platform there is a cool one I found that is a blogging platform that allows you to create an e-commerce store and has the ability to create newsletters. It has a free version if you want to play around with it.
www.mavio.co is the site. I think its pretty cool. Look around and see what styles you like and copy them. Use own colors and stuff. I find newsletters are best if the content is hybrid between curated and created content with more on the curated side. I use Evernote to save articles and sites to save the links. Just a general description and then a link to get more details.