Writer's Grove

Delay for tech

Today I was supposed to send out my first newsletter, called Oberon’s Shenanigans. It’s all ready to go with Oberon’s first “Meat of the Month” column. And a big honkin’ bunch of you signed up for it, for which I am very grateful! But I’m going to wait two months to send it out for two very good reasons (one of which has a lot of smaller reasons nested inside).

1. Tech! There’s a lot to it, apparently, and I learned some kinda neato stuff so I’m going to share.  First is a term I’d never heard before: List health.
   • My publisher told me about list health and convinced me to wait a couple months for its sake. The list in question is the subscriber list, and one measures its health in both its size and its open rate. The open rate is the percentage of subscribers who actually open your newsletter when it gets to their inbox. And there are limiting tech factors that can depress your open rate from day one, and then your list health will get progressively worse each month.
   • Primarily there is the tendency of some email clients—gmail, yahoo, hotmail, whatever—to automatically shove your newsletter into the spam or junk folder without it ever appearing in the inbox. People who never see your newsletter won’t be opening it. And this happens despite the fact that in order for me to send it to peeps, they have to sign up by volunteering their email address and then confirm that signup by replying to a confirmation email.
   • There’s some coding going on behind the scenes in your emails. The email clients look at that as well as content to determine whether your email is spam. We’re trying to improve the coding to make sure we get through the spam filters and into the inboxes of people who requested the newsletter, and that’s going to take the most time.
   • Replying to a confirmation email helps a lot, but it doesn’t guarantee you’ll see the newsletter. What helps even more and practically guarantees you’ll see it is adding the origin sender to your contacts. In this case, it would be me—kevin (at thingie) kevinhearne dot com. If you’ve subscribed, please add me?
   • List health deteriorates each succeeding month regardless, but it will deteriorate at a much slower rate if you take care to do as much as you can before sending out the first one. Once you’re labeled as spam by email clients it’s tough to overcome, so I’m going to do what I can to make sure you actually see what you signed up to see. I can give you some numbers from the Holy Taco Church newsletter as an example. The first issue of the Holy Taco Church newsletter had a 76% open rate. On the one hand—fantastic! But on the other—why did 24% of the people who signed up never even click on the newsletter? Most likely they never saw it. And then after that first month we never hit the 70s again. Months in the 60s, and now, about 18 months in, we’re in the 50s. Industry-wise, that’s still really good. We’re producing good content and people are enjoying it. But a large percentage of our subscribers never even see what they subscribed to. So it’s worth it to take some extra time before sending out that first newsletter.
2. Holiday stuff. Right now inboxes (and spam filters) are getting a workout as retailers try to shout for dollars. I’d rather not get lost in all of that. So the first newsletter will go out in mid-January. In the meantime, if you’d like to sign up, here’s the link for it, and please remember to add me to your contacts!

Many thanks. Peace, tacos, & beer—
Kevin