Inflight Briefing: 035

3 min read

Jun 15, 2023 2:31:33 PM

Inflight Briefing-assets (3)

Delivered weekly, the Inflight Briefing is designed as a blueprint for the builder and inspiration for the curious. It's for those doing good marketing.

035: Nope, not AI – newsletters!

Nonprofits and associations are ahead on the newsletter trend, leveraging regular communications to build direct connections with key community members.

Josh Kaplan, cofounder of The Publish Press newsletter, which serves digital creators, said: “Newsletters offer 1-on-1 private communication with the creator (since you can just hit reply via email), whereas social media offers a public communication channel and is not as intimate.”

Email isn’t going anywhere, and that means newsletters aren’t either. Doing the research to know what your audience cares about and then doing the hard work of diving into that dialogue with them is going to pay off big in 2023 and beyond.

Snackable snippets

The rise and rise of the email newsletter 📖

Excuse some of the grammar mistakes in this article as they openly admit they had help from AI. But it spells out just why email newsletters are not only surviving but thriving in 2023. Newsletters uniquely cater to the interests of readers while allowing personalities to shine.

How to master email marketing 🎥

Jamal from Hubspot is likely the most effective communicator I’ve ever watched. I’m already pretty into email marketing, but he could probably make crocheting feel like the most interesting thing in the world (no offense to crocheting). There’s no way to pack everything you need to master email marketing into 8 minutes, but he gets a lot further than you’d think.

How to do market research 📖

So much of a newsletter’s value is its ability to speak into an audience’s interests. Performing effective market research will help guide you as you brainstorm how to regularly engage with your target audiences through the medium.

A case against ChatGPT 🎧

In this episode of Marketing Against the Grain, Kipp and Kieran interview Neil Patel, who has some strong feelings about ChatGPT. Tune into this podcast for an outside perspective on the most important AI platform of the moment.

In the news

Keurig has partnered with the Rolling Stones on their latest iced coffee kit, called Start Me Up. The product is being promoted on TikTok with the hashtag #CoffeeTok and a separate Spotify playlist. This is one of the best partnerships I’ve seen in recent years.

When the debt ceiling was raised on June 3, one of the bill’s provisions included expanded work requirements for people receiving food assistance. And now that pandemic-era food assistance has expired, the risk that more will face food insecurity is a real concern.

Something for your inspiration folder

Music is such a powerful force that I often fail to tap into. Everyone has different taste, so I’m not trying to sell you on this artist.

This series of shows by Cercle highlights new artists playing in some of the most beautiful places on the planet, combining the power of music with the beauty of the world we live in.

Those are two things I need to be reminded of more often.