The Requirement for Building a Premium Newsletter

In June, I went to Detroit to speak at an event for the Alliance of Area Business Publishers on building successful newsletters. People repeatedly talked about how much they loved the Morning Brew newsletter, often remembering when they first signed up for it years prior. And numerous attendees kept wanting to understand how they, too, could have something like it. 

I’ve distilled my thinking about newsletters down to one question: when it comes to your newsletter, what is the expected audience outcome?

The answer to this question can fundamentally decide the trajectory of your newsletter. But if you want to have a newsletter like Morning Brew’s or any of the other unbelievably great newsletters, there is only one right answer. 

Here are the two possible outcomes:

1. Drive the reader to do something outside of the inbox
2. Get the reader to open the email and stay in the inbox

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The vast majority of media companies choose first outcome. The goal of the newsletter is to drive people to do something else outside of the inbox. That might be because they need more pageviews for ad impressions or because they are driving people to become a paying subscriber, so they need people to hit the paywall.

And to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with this. Email remains the best way to send information to people and getting people to consume more content on our websites is a critical part of all of our businesses. 

But when that is your goal, you have to make sacrifices to the quality of the actual newsletter. Maybe you only put a one or two sentence description or, in some cases, just a list of links. Every time the reader clicks a link, they bounce to a different window and then have to find their way back to their inbox. 

Then think about the following newsletters:

• Politico Playbook
• Axios Media Trends
• Puck’s What I’m Hearing
• Semafor Media
• Bloomberg’s Money Stuff

None of them make a reader click at all if they don’t want to. You can open the email, read the entire thing from the comfort of your inbox, and then close it. It’s a straightforward reading experience that delivers the information you need without any action. 

Those that treat the newsletter as the actual product versus a tool to promote other content or products are likely going to have a newsletter with higher engagement. The vast majority of users have unbelievably short attention spans, so requiring them to do a lot of things to get the information is not going to be nearly as effective as if you give it to them with a single open. 

You will also generate more advertising revenue when users are not leaving the newsletter. 

Imagine a newsletter composed primarily of links that has the first ad 25% of the way down and the second ad 50% of the way down. A user receives that newsletter and starts scrolling. 15% of the way through the newsletter, they click their first link. They read whatever content that is. One of two things will happen. Either the user will go back to the newsletter and keep scrolling—which certainly happens—or the user will stop engaging with the newsletter. 

For those that stop engaging with the newsletter, they’ll never actually see the advertisements. In email, clicks are the primary metric we are held accountable for, so if people are not even seeing the ad to click, we are not going to perform as well for our advertisers. As a quick aside: we are starting to see some partners look at email as a branding tool, but those partners are few and far between. 

Compare that to a newsletter that gives you the full experience right in the inbox. The user is far more likely to see the ads because they are not being encouraged to leave the inbox. And if they are more likely to see the ad, they are more likely to click the ad. And that then means the advertiser will be willing to pay more for said advertisement. 

Now you might not care about this fact, which I don’t blame you for. You have to look at the complete audience journey to understand where you are going to make the most money. If there is more revenue to be had driving people out of the inbox, then you should do that. However, you have to then recognize that you are sacrificing newsletter revenue. 

Fortunately, there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. 

The goal is to make a product that gives the user everything they need without clicking out to ensure the ads are seen. Once the ads have been seen, you can start to get more creative with your business objectives. So, what does that look like in practice?

It might be one or two main stories that go into the newsletter, requiring zero click out. You are giving every piece of information so the user can just read and scroll. Perhaps between each of those stories is where you put the first advertisement and then another after the second story. Now you’ve reached the end point of the “important” section. 

From there, you can start to prioritize link-heavier sections. This might be an aggregation of your most important stories. Smarter newsletter operators include an aggregation of the most important stories on the internet, irrespective of who wrote it—but, again, this is about taking a user-first approach versus a short-term business-first approach. 

Thus, you are having your cake and eating it too. You are keeping the audience engaged long enough to see and potentially click the ads, but then still serving your other business objectives all at the same time. 

But this is where most operators—typically at legacy media companies—flounder. To create great content that will keep a user scrolling in a newsletter, you need to give it resources. Even in 2023, many media companies treat the newsletter as an afterthought. 

And I think that’s a mistake. Morning Brew sold for over $70 million thanks to a newsletter. Politico’s Playbook generates $400,000 per week. With the right audience and a highly engaging newsletter, there is legitimate money to be made. But you have to put the audience first and understand what is going to keep them engaged. If you’re leading with your need to drive immediate traffic, you’re not going to have a premium newsletter. 

Thanks for reading today’s AMO. If you have thoughts, hit reply or join the AMO Slack. Buy your tickets here for the AMO Summit being held on October 26th here in New York City. Have a great weekend!