Strategy vs. Tactics in the Land of Newsletters

While the traditional side of the publishing industry is bracing itself for disruptions in the supply chain, the conversation over on the indie publishing side is all about how to prepare for the coming email marketing apocalypse.

For those who don’t pay attention to such things, the low-down goes something like this: Apple has been doubling down on email privacy with updates for a while now, and their most recent update to iO15 adds a feature dubbed “Mail Privacy Protection.” Once activated, this feature disrupts a bunch of tools that email marketing relies on: the ability to track open rates; details about what country the reader is in; triggers that would send you a follow-up email if you showed an interest in a particular thing.

There’s a pretty good round-up over here if you want to get into the technical stuff, but all you really need to know is this: a foundational marketing tool for many indie publishers is about to change in a big way, and a bunch of common tactics are going to get trickier to implement.

The email marketing industry has also encouraged to focus on different metrics of success from this point, because open rates are going to mean nothing. There’s lots of “focus on ‘read more’ links instead of including all your content in the email” type discussions, which means I’m dreading what the next few months of newsletters could end up becoming.

Some people are going to do that well, but I suspect lots of writers (who frequently pick up tactics and apply them divorced from context) are going to make some horrible newsletters as a result. 

A brief lesson from the days of RSS and blogging: Setting your feed to show a quick blurb and Read More can be the kiss of death, because your readers have already decided where they’d like to engage with you and communicated that preference. If I put your blog on my RSS reader, it’s because I want it to appear there when I review the new posts. If I sign up for your newsletter, I want the convenience of your content showing up in my inbox, where I can easily archive it (if useful) or discard it (if not).

Read more works best as a signpost for bonus information, not the core content, and I’ve unfollowed countless writers whose blogs were set-up with an eye towards getting readers onto their sites to boost site metrics instead of getting people to read their work.  

Getting people to read your stuff is always the core strategy for content marketing, and disrupting that strategic goal simply so you can cleave to a familiar tactic is very much a case of missing the forest for the trees.