A journal on email marketing, the craft

Small decisions that decide whether an email is worth reading.

We write about the strange craft of writing to a stranger's inbox. About the medium of email itself, the writing on it, the reading of it, and the small habits that separate emails worth opening from the rest.

Something we've been reading and rewriting

Copywriting

Preview text is the second subject line you never wrote

Everyone writes subject lines. Almost nobody writes the preview text next to them. The result is that most inboxes are full of subject lines paired with a random accidental couplet — usually the words "having trouble viewing this email?"

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Other essays worth your Sunday morning

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The medium

Why the newsletter came back

In 2010, everyone knew email was dying.

Design

The email design principles that outlast every tool

Email design advice ages badly.

Industry

What Substack got right, and what it got wrong

Substack changed the shape of the newsletter economy.

Practice

The re-engagement email nobody wants to send

The email that asks a subscriber "are you still interested?" is the one every program should send and almost no program does.

Fundamentals

Marketing email versus transactional: the line that decides everything

It sounds like a technicality — one flavour of email or another.

Metrics

Reply rate is the one metric that predicts everything else

Open rates lie.

Craft

What good email footers actually do

The footer is the piece of your email that gets the least design attention and does the most quiet work.

Opinion

Automation without authenticity is just spam with better graphics

Modern email tools can automate almost everything a program does.

Perspective

Attention is the only resource that matters

Every debate about email marketing eventually collapses into a debate about attention.

“Attention is the only resource in email that behaves like a scarce commodity. Every serious decision follows from that.”

— From one of the essays

The Monday memo

One short memo. Every Monday. Read in three minutes.

A Monday note on something we've been thinking about — a small fix that moved numbers, a metric worth watching, or a reader's reply we could not stop turning over.