But stay with me.
Right after I floated the idea that nobody is really reading our email newsletters on a Communicators Club Zoom call, I opened my inbox to find an email from my online pilates studio with the subject line: “respectfully, i can’t do it anymore.” The first line read: “I’m SO done with the boring emails. You know the exact ones. The generic Monday schedule that I send every week, that lands in your inbox and probably gets scrolled past before you’ve even had your coffee. I’ve been sending them for a while now.”
Most of us have been sending them for a while now.
Here’s the thing. We are living in a moment of absolutely staggering information overload. Every brand, organization, cause, and creator you’ve ever interacted with is competing for the same real estate in your brain. And at the bottom of that pile, sitting right underneath the breaking news alerts and the social media notifications and the text messages from your family group chat, is the weekly church newsletter. I’m not saying this to be harsh. I’m saying it because pretending otherwise is costing you.
The part that actually concerns me is not that people aren’t reading. It’s that the weekly newsletter is still, for the vast majority of my clients, the single biggest time investment their communications person makes every week. That is a problem. We should not be pouring our best energy into something that, if we’re being honest, is not going to attract more readers over time. It’s going to attract fewer. Email newsletters as a format are declining and no amount of better subject lines is going to reverse that trend.
Where email is headed is shorter, more personal, and more targeted. Think less roundup, more direct message. The emails that will get opened are the ones that feel like they were written for one person, not blasted to a list.
So what do we do? We pare it back. We simplify the design to the point where it takes almost no time to produce. We stop creating graphics for it because graphics add visual clutter anyway. And we invest that freed-up time into making our website the actual hub of information for our community, with our emails doing one job: pointing people there.
I’ll go one step further. I think there is a real possibility that we stop sending these emails altogether, and I don’t think that day is as far off as you might assume. The organizations and nonprofits I subscribe to stopped sending the regular roundup a long time ago. We’re just a little slow to catch on. Start getting ready now. Start training your community to look to your website for what they need. Start treating your newsletter like a signpost rather than a destination.
And whatever you do, stop spending so much time on something that most people are scrolling past before they’ve even had their coffee. My pilates instructor figured it out. You can too.
Go disrupt something,
Christen
