About 1.5 years ago. I started a newsletter. A few weeks later, I brought on the fabulous comic artist JoAnna Wendel to help. The newsletter was supposed to be a fun way to connect with my audience, to be creative and funny.
But the newsletter didn’t work. No one ever seemed to subscribe no matter what I did. Here’s a thread about why.
After a lot of soul-searching, @JoAnnaScience and I have decided to give up our newsletter. So. No more falcons in wedding dresses. https://t.co/LjJOEyY9Mo
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
It will be sad, we both had so much fun together. @JoAnnaScience has a fabulous new job (YAY), and we are both pretty crunched for time. But the main reason? Well, I think the newsletter failed. Here is why:
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
We’ve been working together (which has been fabulous btw @JoAnnaScience is a wonderful colleague!) on this thing for about a year and a half. Weekly work, consults, edits, etc. But in the end? Only 353 people subscribed. Yup. Only 353.
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
These days, people UNsubscribe every day. The newsletter has become just another thing cluttering their inbox.
Why didn’t more people subscribe? I’d welcome thoughts or opinions from you all, but I have a few of my own:
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
1) It’s possible I got in on the tail end of the brief, glorious newsletter phase. People were really into them as a way to get away from social for a while. Then they realized they didn’t want more email.
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
2) I went to newsletter panels and talks, read newsletter tips. As recommended, we did something different (Science facts and COMICS!). I made sure the newsletter wasn’t all about me. I promoted pieces by white women and POC esp. That’s important to me.
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
3) As recommended, I reached out to big people in my area to ask them to spread the word. I think only one person did. I get it. No one likes getting bugged and we’re all really busy. I get email like mine all the time, asking for support. I ignore them too.
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
4) As recommended, I promoted it. I put it on Facebook and Twitter and my website, asking people directly to subscribe. Calls to action are good! No one subscribed. People told me they loved my newsletter…they always clicked through via Facebook.
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
5) At one point at one of the newsletter panels, I asked a panelist about it, WHY was my newsletter failing? He asked me what I was doing, he said it sounded really great. He admitted…he had no idea why it wasn’t doing better.
He did not subscribe.
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
What did I miss? I don’t know. I think organizations might have an easier time with this. They have ways to scrape email addresses, to nudge people harder and harder until they sign up. We didn’t have that.
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
And what did I learn?
1)I learned to cut my losses. 🙂
2)I learned that most followers, be they friends on Facebook, connections via email or followers on Twitter, aren’t going to take that action step for you. (I admit, I knew this already, this is just another lesson.)
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
3) I learned that to make something like this a success, you really need to have a big connection, those big people who will go out of their way to pull you up. Maybe that’s an org that will promote your thing. Maybe it’s famous people. But you have to have one of those.
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
But the BIGGEST thing I learned?
4) Collaborating on comics is AMAZING. @JoAnnaScience constantly surprised me with the hilarious, off-the-wall ideas she came up with. Most of them were things I never would have thought of myself! She’s pretty brilliant. 🙂
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
So, it’s been fun. Really fun. I loved sharing fun science facts and promoting causes and writing I cared about. I’ll just do that elsewhere now. And hopefully @JoAnnaScience and I will combine forces again in the future for more science amazingness!
— Sci Curious (@scicurious) June 8, 2018
