Stop Wasting Time With Newsletters
How my life became better without newsletters eating into precious reading and writing time
Attend a random meeting, hand out your cards, and by the time you reach home, you would have been subscribed to five newsletters. Seems everyone has a newsletter these days.
Explainers, compilers, and recommendations, everything you need curated into a beautiful list into your inbox. You don’t need to do any work but click on links, forward it to others, so that they too are lured into Hotel California.
Lovely concept, only it sucks. Maybe not for the creators, but certainly for the consumers. I used to love reading content and still do. My Twitter profile is jammed with essays from Aeon, academic content, podcasts, and my own dog photos. Of these, I love the dog photos most.
Newsletters used to be good once upon a time. When there were only a few. Gone are those old days where we used to get one newsletter in a month, with the entire story outlined and I didn’t have to visit any other website or sift through reams of advertisements.
In a way, these newsletters cram in so much content with eye-catching hooks that you end up only glancing over the lead article. And then in a mad rush to make the lead article cut, we now have the added pleasure of seeing the most outrageous, visually assaulting imagery and wordings.
A big mistake a lot of them make is to make newsletters as the primary marketing engine. Where you end up seeing every product update, every new launch, and every gaudy imagery the company would have secured from events where they had no presence but had to solicit a blurry photo from someone else.
My biggest gripe with newsletters is that it reduces any hope, scope, and enthusiasm for any meaningful interaction. I always prefer writing blogs since they have better longevity, more freedom, and the ability to consciously interact with the readers. In the age of social media, maintaining a one-way conversation with your prospective reader or customer seems like a terrible idea.
I recently authored at 13,000-word monograph on Transhumanism. A lot of people told me to start a newsletter by collating a list of articles, important readings, and announcements in the field so that I could grow a user base, an audience, a steady stream of people who might swallow whatever I fed them without question.
I did ponder creating a newsletter a while ago. I almost went through creating a MailChimp account and started adding a few of the people I know into the list. I even collected a laundry list of articles and technologies that I would primarily cover. With a battle plan, I was almost set on creating my very own newsletter.
I started collecting articles, reading across the internet for what was “hot.” My days used to be filled with reading interesting stuff. I had a one-line mission statement about my own monograph. With my idea safely tucked away in my mental backpocket, I had lots of material to work with. And as an editor, I enjoy piecing together reams of content and giving it a coherent structure.
But in the end, I decided against newsletter. All bits of the newsletter were just me reading, trying to summarise them, trying hard to keep an eye out for word limits, finding imagery to communicate someone else’s idea. My own idea started gathering rust. It hit me that I still had miles to go before I could even start speaking credibly on my subject. A few days that I pondered with this idea left me with only mental pain, anxiety, and ennui. I realised I had lost my way.
And so I spent the next eight months negating against the idea of a personal newsletter. A lot of my own personal blogs changed to a philosophical outlook, mainly because I myself was struggling to come to terms with what had taken up so much of my mindspace. I realised that my communication, my outreach could not be this one-way street where I hammered people with information. I needed to communicate. I needed to hear. I needed to listen. I wanted to talk.
So I started researching, reading, talking to people physically, on phone, on email, on Twitter, on Facebook, everywhere. I realised that a lot of people have lots of interesting information and are happy to share provided they get an opportunity to converse. And this is where I realised that my decision to focus on what was important to me was the best decision I ever made.
In the end, everything devolves to email.
There are tons of marketing tools, productivity tools, and optimisation methods. There are tools which combine ten of these other tools and provide them in the same interface. It’s like a self-sustaining machine for a short amount of time. There are so many tools that we’ve created a new one to deal with so many tools. In case you have any queries, please reach us through email. Because in the end, it’s all email.
To date, personalised email remains the best communication method with a higher conversion rate when done properly. Automating it via a newsletter is a good idea if it is infrequent. But communicating with your customers using bots is a surefire way to put them off unless you’re feeding them their own content. A lay reader will have little to no value reading random summaries and article descriptions.
Focus on nailing your craft, on creating the best possible product, and treat your customers like human beings. Get off the one-way street of newsletters and start producing some real content. Keep your eyes and ears open. Reach out, communicate, talk to people. Social media has made it easier for you to communicate with people from across the world. Make the most of it. Don’t add names to a newsletter. Add meaningful conversations to your business, to your work.
Keep a bare minimum engagement on one-way streets. No one looks at hoardings anymore because the biggest hoardings lie in tiny little smartphones in their hands. And in this world, people can respond, people can communicate, and talk to you. Listen to them and listen to them well. You’ll be the better for it.
