What the newsletter industry needs now is better newsletter reader apps

Newsletters obey a power law distribution. Just as some newsletter are sent to tens of thousands of subscribers, and tens of thousands of newsletters are sent to just a few subscribers, for each subscriber there is a similar distribution of which newsletters they read, with some newsletters read every time and other never even glanced at.

A good Newsletter Reader would does two things: help the reader reads the emails they really want to read, and improve the reading experience.

Show me the emails I most want to see

If the level of control and the reading experience are no different than reading in an email client, then why would anyone use a Newsletter Reader app rather than just having a dedicated email address for their newsletter subscriptions?

The reason for not doing this, and the problem with how email inboxes work, is that they order the emails by the time they were received. That works fine when the emails are messages because I need to read the most recent, but it doesn’t work when the emails are newsletters. With newsletters I want to see the one I most want to read. So showing me the newsletters by date would be like organising a book shelf by when the books were published.

I might be signed up to twenty newsletters but a few of those I read every time they’re sent and some I don’t even remember signing up for and never read. But if they are all treated in the same within the app then it isn’t offering me anything better than an email inbox.

The newsletters I open the most, or have open for the longest, should be pulled out from the crowd. Or I should be able to ‘favourite’ some newsletters. Or even have a limited number of ‘must reads’ so I have to make those difficult choices.

Make it easier to read the content

Part of what makes me want to read a newsletter regularly is recognition. But there’s a balance to be had there between the design and layout that the sender intended and a simple readable experience for the subscriber. I think this is why most newsletter platforms have a far simpler layout than marketing emails, but there is more scope within a Newsletter Reader to put the control of the reading experience in the hands of the reader.

Things like font size and light/dark mode which allow a reader to customise what they see when they look at an email can help with the goal of making newsletters more readable.

A good Newsletter Reader app makes it easier for me to read the newsletters I want to read. It puts me in control, not the sender. It shouldn’t become the newsletter version of a never-ending to do list.