---
title: "Expanding from cross-product newsletters to a book club and site"
date: 2022-08-21
description: "Abysmal newsletter metrics Pivoting to a cross-product newsletter Experimenting with a cross-product area newsletter Not much hope for the newsletter..."
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/web-and-workplace-influence/part7-from-newsletter-to-book-club
---
# Expanding from cross-product newsletters to a book club and site
![In the corporation, lots of groups send out newsletters, which gives this format more of a standard feel. Other formats like blogs weren't so common.](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/newsletters_example1.jpg)

After some frustration over newsletter formats that stuffed all content into the email body, making link tracking impossible except for email opens, I converted our newsletter into a series of blurbs with links pointing to full articles on an internal website (not too unlike the [newsletter for my idratherbewriting.com blog](https://tinyletter.com/tomjoht/archive) I send out). This approach allowed me to meticulously track clicks on the links. When I did, I was discouraged to find that newsletter readership was abysmal — people really weren’t clicking the links. I mean, maybe 5-8 people clicked links, out of several hundred recipients. People just weren’t reading newsletter content.

![No one really read the newsletters we were sending. When I divided the content into small blurbs with "more info" links, I could more easily see that almost no one was reading any of the articles.](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/newsletters_no_one_reads1.jpg)

## Pivoting to a cross-product newsletter

I decided to pivot the newsletter approach. I felt that my audience was too small, and I needed to expand it to get a more acceptable number of clicks. I modeled my new approach after another internal newsletter that targeted every related product group in a comprehensive way (cutting across multiple groups and org lines). I figured that if I had a much larger reach, such as the same reach as my personal blog, I’d see more clicks and traction.

I was convinced that size would be the needed trigger to see more acceptable metrics. Reason being, the newsletter distribution for my personal blog includes about 6,500 people. When I send out a newsletter, even if just a few people make comments or other reactions, it seems to make the effort feel worthwhile. With my personal blog, typically about 30% open the email, and about 200-300 people click the links on average. So overall, there’s decent reach.

Here are the newsletter metrics from Tinyletter (the newsletter tool I use) for the most recent newsletter I sent for my personal blog:

![Newsletter example from my personal blog. Out of about 6,500 recipients, about one third open the email.](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/tinyletterexampletom1.png)

I use Rebrandly to track clicks on links. This is because I want to track clicks not only in the newsletter, but on Linkedin and Twitter as well:

![Click tracking results from my personal blog. The career advice post had a much higher click rate than my other posts. Usually, about 200-300 clicks is average.](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/rebrandly_link_clicks1.png)

And as much as I’d like to say I don’t care whether people read what I write, that’s not true. Few writers write without any anticipation of being read. It’s not that writing is an act of narcissism, where the writers aspires to draw attention to him or herself. Instead, I want the validation that what I’ve written is good. That what I’ve created is interesting, compelling, and means something to someone besides myself.

If no one reads my posts, it’s a good indication that what I’ve written is crap and that I should change my approach. Like a comedian, if no one laughs at your jokes [reads what you write], then maybe your jokes [articles] aren’t very good.

## Experimenting with a cross-product area newsletter

To increase my audience reach, and hopefully find the readership I sought, I partnered with two adjacent documentation groups around me and sent out a cross-product area newsletter to a significantly larger audience.

![Partnering with other doc groups seemed like a good way to expand the newsletter's scope and reach.](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/cross_product_doc_efforts1.jpg)

How much larger? It’s hard to tell. With corporate email lists, there are often groups that include other groups as subscribers, with multiple levels of group nesting. I attempted to track down exactly how many people were included in the new list but lost visibility at some levels due to access permissions. My guess, however, is that the audience included around 1,000 recipients. Probably 3x my previous audience size.

In expanding the audience, it’s worth noting another difference between internet and corporate newsletters. Within a company, you don’t need to ask permission to send people newsletters. You can just target groups with information that you think is relevant to them. It’s the expectation that people just receive newsletters from relevant groups. Consequently, though, I’m guessing many view their inbox as a source of spam.

Partnering with the other doc groups to generate the cross-product newsletter was tougher than I thought. Not all writers were on board (at first), and they wanted much more discussion about the newsletter “plan.” I didn’t have a solid plan but wanted to keep it loose and experimental. My initial idea was to adopt a systems approach and comment on larger documentation trends and patterns across the developer portal.