I’m sure this is something you’ve personally experienced: Unless you’re an inbox zero guru, 80% of the emails cluttering up your inbox will be promotional emails from companies or personalities, demanding that you buy their product/course/service or how your life will be better if you bought their product/course/service. 

Perhaps 15% of your inbox will be things you have to read. Heart-stopping notices from the tax department or warnings and statements from banks, salary slips or bill notifications. 

Personally, only 5% of the emails that land in my inbox are ones that I genuinely look forward to reading.

These are almost, always personal newsletters.

Personal newsletters are different from the email newsletters that you usually get from brands or organisations. That’s because personal newsletters, the good ones that is, are usually not asking you to buy something. Instead, they offer you a delightful glimpse into the world beyond your own. The content can be a list of articles that the author likes or an essay, usually in warm and personal tones, about an issue that is weighing heavily on his/her heart.

In a world where content is SEO-optimised and people write to please algorithms, it’s refreshing to read personal letters from a stranger who writes from the heart.

Email gets a personal touch

In the last few years, email newsletters of the personal kind have been enjoying a resurgence. This is mostly due to the emergence of tools such as Tinyletter, Substack, and more recently Twitter-acquired Revue.

Once upon a time (like four years ago), if you want to start an email newsletter, you have to sign up for email marketing tools such as Mailchimp, Mailerlite and Convertkit.This has several problems:

• It gets expensive. The more followers you have, the more you need to pay the service. 
• The tools are usually geared towards businesses. Meaning, it has bells and whistles such as audience segmentation, automation and A/B testing which are usually something individuals don’t need unless they’re running businesses.
• It’s not easy to set up. With complicated anti-spam laws like GDPR to contend with, you have to do a number of technical things such as verifying your domain to ensure that you’re not a spammer.

As a result, if you’re a blogger, writer or author, it just wasn’t cost-effective or convenient to start an email newsletter. 

Although I created an RSS-to-email newsletter for readers , I hesitated to create a personal newsletter because of these reasons. The idea of having to spend hundreds of ringgit yearly in the future to send out a free newsletter was making my head spin.

Until I found Substack.

I may be late to the party, but I started devouring Substack newsletters, got inspired, and moved from Mailerlite to Substack and started my newsletter, Commonplace Book. Substack had an easy-to-use interface and was a simple, stripped down email marketing platform that I could use without tearing my hair out.

It doesn’t have many of the bells or whistles of platforms like Mailerlite or Mailchimp, such as automation and audience segmentation, but if all you want to do is send out email newsletters to your audience, it’s a good solution. Not to mention, free! (Unless you decide to monetise it, then they take a 10% cut.

And as a person who strives to simplify every aspect of her life, Including marketing activities, Substack really makes email marketing easy and simple.

What platforms like Substack means for writers 

It enables them to set up a publishing platform easily: I still get queries about how to set up a website every day and which platform to use. Although I believe in the power of owning your webspace, setting up a website can be a complicated and expensive affair, especially if you use WordPress. So, not all writers are up to the task or want to invest the time or effort to learn how to do it. Substack and Revue gets you publishing in minutes.

It frees them creatively: I am so tired of writing for algorithms. I’ve always felt shackled by the rules of writing for the Internet. As a writer you want to be read, but to get organic traffic (ie readers), you need to write your blog posts in such a way that it can be seen on Google. However, when you do that it often strips away your creativity. A lot of times, your posts become cardboard listicles you’ve seen a thousand times before. But with a personal email newsletter, I can write as creatively as I want, SEO be damned. 

It enables them to reach readers directly: Substack enables me to reach my readers directly by emailing my content to their inboxes, I don’t have to pretzel my content into a Google-approved shape.

It gives them an income stream: Substack and Revue enables writers to earn money from their content through subscriptions. Some Substack writers are said to earn six figures a year! 

It is cost-effective: Not every writer has the ability, some may not even want to take on the costs to set up a website and mailing list to get their message out there. A domain name, hosting, email marketing software … all these add up, and it can cost you up to RM500 to 1000 a year. For some, this is too much expense for a hobby.

What it means for readers

There is no doubt that Google has changed the way we consume content. Once upon a time, I had to go to the library to find out more about a topic. I still remember the days where I had to go through stacks of magazines and old newspapers to get facts for an article I was writing for the newspaper. Now, if I needed more information, I just had to type a question into Google and a seconds or two later, have access to the world’s knowledge.

It has been revolutionary for the human race, but it has downsides too. Too much information, for one, is bad for you.

But on a literary level we have lost something too. Google gives preference to blog posts or content that are “helpful”. They are often the most searched queries, like ” How can I get rich?” or ” What can I do to pay down my student loan debt?”

These are important. However, what about the common stories of people? The kind of content that may not solve a problem directly but will give insights or different perspectives? Expose crimes? Alas, those seem not as highly valued by the algorithms.

For example, I thought the search term “covid-19 diaries” would be fairly popular since thousands of people are recording their experiences with one of the biggest pandemics In the world … but to my surprise, 0 in the world are searching for the term.

I can imagine the writer going, “Let’s not waste time writing about this – no one is searching for this content – It is not going to drive much traffic to my website.”

But a record of experiences about the pandemic is worth writing and reading about, even if it has zero traffic possibilities.

As areader I find that it is getting difficult to find content that is out of Google’s “this is valuable and useful content” criteria as they are more often than naught buried deep in the searches. Substack newsletters, or even personal newsletters served up by email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp, allows me to find and enjoy more experimental content. Okay, sure, Substack doesn’t make it easy to find newsletters to read, but it is getting better.

Newsletters also provides an avenue for important journalism to happen. It is sad that editorial work that exposes corruption and systematic dysfunction are often deprioritised by media outlets because they are not as popular or searched about.

Newsletters may be the way out.