Initial Thoughts on a Newsletter

A Confusing Interaction

Everywhere I look online, music promoters and marketing people are screaming about news letters and getting emails for email marketing stuff. Personally, I’ve always found these systems to be annoying spam generators that I always have to unsubscribe from every time I make an account. They’re often filled with useless information and ads about whatever product the company that sent them is trying to sell.

But does it have to be this way?

I was recently playing a show, and someone came up and asked me if I had a newsletter they could sign up for. They actually wanted to sign up and receive updates about my music. I was taken by surprise; newsletters have almost always been something I’ve loathed and not wanted to be signed up for. They’ve spammed my email inbox and been the source of so much of digital clutter in my life, why would someone want to sign up for that.

What Makes A Good Newsletter?

Over the past couple months I’ve been working heavily on trying to make Instagram an overall positive experience. I actually did a bigger breakdown of that process in an earlier blog post. Long story short, I found that putting in a small bit of effort and thought can make a huge difference. In my approach to tackling Instagram (and social media as a whole) I outlined major pain points I wanted to address before starting. What did a good relationship with social media look like and how could I get there?

After applying this to my situation with a newsletter, I eventually landed on the following points:

• Doesn’t Try to Sell You Something

  • I can’t be spamming people’s inboxes with “Special Offer!” and “Sale!” all the time. This leads to people seeing that newsletter as spam and not even opening it. Aside from them ignoring my letter, I’m also now contributing to the problem of added digital spam and clutter.

• Brings Value to the Reader

  • There has to be something they get out of the newsletter that is genuinely interesting and makes their life better in some way. Weather that’s a bit of entertainment, or them learning something.

• Easily Unsubscribe

  • This one is a bit obvious. They need to be able to easily unsubscribe from the newsletter if they don’t want to receive it anymore.

• Easy For Me to Implement

  • I’ve got a lot going on at any given point in time and frankly, this needs to be relatively easy to roll out. Similar to approach with social media. I can’t be playing with settings and dialing in automation campaigns. It has to be quick and easy to make, and also have an archive where people can go back and easily find information from earlier newsletter.

Initial Ideas

My gut thoughts are telling me to utilize the blog posting system on the website. As many know, I use Squarespace to host everything, and the blog section of the website has a feature that allows me to turn any blog post into an email that is sent out via my mailing list. It can be super useful when also paired with the feature that let’s you cross post new blog posts to Facebook and Twitter (really it’s just a quick message telling your followers there’s a new post up and links to your website). It would also allow me to automatically archive everything by having it nicely integrated with the blog. But I don’t know if that would make the blog posts messy and hard to search through or not.
As you can see, there’s a good bit more work I need to do before I really implement something like this. A couple months ago I would’ve been completely against the idea, but now I’m not so sure. All I know is if I can’t make it something positive then I’m not going to launch it at all.