The M. Harris & Co. Recipe for a Newsletter that Actually Gets Opened

Newsletters are a service. Just like a teeth cleaning, car wash, or tax preparation.

Exceptional services win new customers. 

Exceptional newsletters get opened and win new subscribers.

What makes a newsletter exceptional? It’s the same thing that makes any new product or service take off:

1. The product identifies a pain point, one that is deep, existing and can be acknowledged. (This isn’t Apple. A newsletter isn’t going to solve problems people didn’t know they had with products they didn’t even realize they wanted.)
2. These sufferers are willing to subscribe — and preferably pay to subscribe — to remedy this pain point.
3. The solution is viable in large volume. (Fairly easy for a newsletter.)

Exceptional newsletters remedy one of two pain points.

1. I don’t have enough time to read all of the things I want to read about X, and X is my job, hobby, or passion, etc. In other words, this newsletter saves me time hunting down the information myself. (Stanford research backs up that time motivates purchases.)
2. I want or need to have information about X, and Y is the only place I can get it.

The best example of a time-saving newsletter is theSkimm. It focuses on a short and easy-to-read version of the news, and is written for urban women aged 22-34. It had 7 million subscribers, more than double that of the New York Times’ Morning Briefing, as of late 2018, according to New York magazine.

It makes money by selling advertising, but it also has a paid subscription service, called Skimm Ahead, for $2.99/month. 

Its tagline: We make it easier to live smarter.

A great example of a newsletter offering exclusive information is the Polsky Weekly 10, produced by the marketing team at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago. (Subscribe here.) 

I am an entrepreneur in residence at the center. I coach hundreds of startups rising through the university on marketing and communications annually. I also donate to the center, and I’m a graduate of the school and two of the center’s programs.

I don’t just want to have information about the Polsky Center. I need to have information about it. And the Weekly 10 is the only way I (and more than 25,000 other subscribers) can get it.

There’s one final ingredient that makes these newsletters wildly successful: Their voice.

Here’s how that New York article I cited above described theSkimm’s voice:

The company’s founders insist that this voice is conversational, meant to mimic that of your “smartest friend,” the one who “tells it to you like it is.” This might be true, if your smartest friend were Christiane Amanpour being interviewed by Lauren Conrad. But the tone is effective. Its writers don’t presume that readers come in with a deep knowledge of Myanmar or the Federal Reserve; patiently adding this context is a big part of what the Skimm does. And while the tone sends a signal of inconsequentiality, it also introduces actual facts about the world, many of them of the “eat your vegetables” variety.

The Weekly 10, meanwhile, often starts each item with a pun:

3 // When the juice is definitely worth the squeeze.

NVC '17 alum Chinese e-commerce startup LemonBox recently announced the close of a $2.5M pre-A funding round.

or

9 // We're mutts about this startup.

 Get ready to meet your favorite furry friend's new best friend: dog health startup Reggie.

The voice is fun and clever. 

In summary, here is the recipe for creating an exceptional newsletter:

1. Curate crisply: Save your readers’ time; and/or
2. Give them information they can’t get anywhere else.
3. No matter what: Don’t be neutral. Neutral is boring. 

Melissa Harris is the CEO of Chicago-based marketing agency M. Harris & Co. Her company’s newsletter is Get Me Rewrite. Twice a week, the team targets text that deserves to be skewered, and shows you how it should have been written. Subscribe here for $7/month.