I’ve sent a newsletter every single week for 4 years. Here are 7 things I’ve learned.

I can’t tell you the last time I did anything consistently for 200 iterations. In fact, I don’t think I’ve actually done anything consistently 200 times. At least not consciously.

Except, of course, for one thing.

For the last 208 weeks (or 4 years), I’ve curated and published 208 editions of Karbon’s Practice Excellence Weekly (PEW) newsletter. 4 straight years of weekly newsletters.

That’s around 52,000 words and over 1,600 pieces of content shared to an audience of about 60,000 accounting professionals from across the globe.

Over the last 4 years, I’ve learned a lot about what works, what doesn’t, and what truly matters when it comes to an email newsletter program. It would be remiss of me not to share every learning with you, the audience I write the newsletter for in the first place.

So, here’s what I’ve learned so far. (I’ve included a useful action item after each tip, as well as a section that details how you can use Karbon to plan and schedule your own newsletter.)

1. Know exactly what you’re creating and why you’re doing it

No matter what you do in this world, knowing why you’re doing it, at the very least, gives you some direction.

If PEW didn’t have a mission, then I would have had no idea how to structure it (more on that soon), what to call it, or what content to include in it—anything about it at all, really.

So, before doing anything, I came up with PEW’s ‘why’: to provide genuinely useful content for accounting professionals around the world in a weekly newsletter that cuts through the noise.

It’s pretty simple, but extremely powerful when it comes to providing direction. And it actually helped us come up with the type of newsletter PEW is.

While we do create excellent content here at Karbon Magazine, it’s not the only content out there that fulfills PEW’s mission. So, we chose to produce a curated newsletter.

That means we share content from anywhere and everywhere, not just Karbon content. As long as it’s relevant, high quality, and genuinely useful for our audience, then it’s a candidate for PEW.

There are so many possibilities when it comes to designing a newsletter, but because we understood PEW’s ‘why,’ we didn’t need to agonize over the details.

Being clear about PEW’s mission at the beginning made everything much easier from that moment onward.

✅ Action item for your newsletter

Know exactly why you’re creating a newsletter
Is it to provide your audience with thought leadership and educational content? Or is it to convert prospects into clients? 

These two reasons for your newsletter are very different and will need different approaches. And no, your newsletter can’t do both. Well, technically it can but it’ll make your job very difficult.

Decide on your newsletter’s ‘why’ before doing anything else.

2. Pick a sending cadence and be consistent

When I pitched PEW to Lachlan Macindoe, Karbon’s VP of Marketing, back in 2021, he didn’t mind what cadence it was. Weekly. Monthly. Didn’t matter. What mattered was that we picked something and stuck to it.

We settled on weekly because there’s so much content out there, that if we were to round up the best content on a monthly basis, the newsletter would be way too long.

Once we settled on weekly, that was it. I had locked into a weekly commitment to our audience. No turning back. We even baked it into the name! It’s called Practice Excellence WEEKLY because that’s what it is. It’s a weekly newsletter. Not a biweekly, not a sometimes, not a ‘when I have time.’

At the end of the day, it’s about being reliable and fostering the trust you’re building with your audience.

✅ Action item for your newsletter

Pick a cadence and stick to it

Make sure it’s realistic. If you can’t confidently say you’ll be able to send a newsletter every week, then don’t go down that route. Pick something you’ll be comfortable with. If that’s monthly, great. If that’s every second month, then so be it.

3. Steal stuff you like

Be inspired by the world around you, and if you like what you see, take it and make it better. That’s what I did with PEW’s structure. 

PEW has three sections: 

1. Quick Hits

2. Essential Reads

3. Listen, Watch & Attend

Each of these sections includes three pieces of content. 

‘Quick Hits’ includes a stat, a quote, and a LinkedIn post. That’s the part I stole from an awesome Australian newsletter called The Daily Aus.

Back when ‘The Post’ was ‘The Tweet’, before Twitter became X

It wasn’t total theft though.

The Daily Aus includes a stat, quote, and a random fact or other tidbit at the top of their newsletter. I love that it starts with small, digestible content. So I used this as inspiration for ‘Quick Hits’ and made some tweaks to suit PEW’s audience.

✅ Action item for your newsletter

Go on a newsletter ‘shopping spree’

Subscribe to as many newsletters as your inbox (and sanity) can handle. Don’t limit yourself to accounting or business newsletters. Take note of what you like, what you don’t like, what’s useful, and what isn’t. And then take the good stuff, and make it your own.

4. Listen to your audience

Both when they’re happy and when they’re mad.

Typically, you know when they’re happy because they’re quiet. But when they’re mad, they will let you know about it. That’s their prerogative, and your newsletter’s greatest gift.

Sometimes they’ll disagree with a piece you’ve included. And that’s fine. We’re all entitled to an opinion.

But sometimes they’ll suggest genuine improvements. For example, we recently had a subscriber reach out quite passionately about us not making it clear enough when a link was going to take them to a YouTube video.

This matters because YouTube videos auto-play, and this subscriber was mortified every time he clicked on a link and a Jason Staats video played, sending Jason’s voice echoing throughout the office.

So, we made a simple change to make sure people knew what they were getting into when they clicked.

It can be easy to forget who you’re building a newsletter for, so when subscribers do reach out to you, treat that experience like gold.

✅ Action item for your newsletter

Send your email from a real email address and a monitored inbox

When people reply to your newsletter, you want to make sure you capture their feedback. Whether it’s good or bad. Actually, especially if it’s bad. For example, if you reply to PEW, you’re replying directly to me.

5. Benchmark the first few months and track everything

When we started PEW, it was really important to understand what success meant. Was it open rates? Was it click rates? Both? And what was a good open rate anyway?

There are global benchmarks out there. But PEW was unique, so we set our own.

We did that for three months and it set the tone for us.

I can’t stress enough how valuable this is. This, and tracking every single click.

For us, not only does it ensure PEW continues to deliver the content our audience are interested in, but it helps inform our wider content strategy at Karbon.

✅ Action item for your newsletter

Before you send your first newsletter, create a spreadsheet to track your data

If you leave this too late, it can easily become one of those things you can’t find time for. 

Once you set it up, all you need to do is input your data from the software you use to send your newsletter. Even better if your software has flexible reporting options, but not all of them do. I find the flexibility and control of a spreadsheet works well.

Here’s what I recommend tracking:

• Open rate

• Click to open rate (CTO)

• Click through rate (CTR)

• Unsubscribe rate

• Mailing list size

6. Crowdsource your content

The internet is so, so huge. There is so, so much content out there. And it can be so, so overwhelming.

So from very early on, I created a Slack channel called #newsletter-suggestions (before PEW was even named!). In there, Karbonites paste links to content that they think would be suitable for PEW.

The very beginning of our #newsletter-suggestions channel

I’m constantly crawling through LinkedIn, other newsletters, Google Alerts, etc. to find the best content for PEW, but a lot of the time, the best stuff comes from that channel. 

Our team is full of people passionate about improving the lives of accountants. They live and breathe our customers and the industry, so when they think something is PEW-worthy, they’re usually spot on.

✅ Action item for your newsletter

Create a place for colleagues to share useful content

It might also be a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel. 

Or even a Karbon work item called ‘Newsletter Suggestions.’ You could encourage your colleagues to assign newsletters and emails as inspiration to that work item, or they can post links to great content as a note on the work timeline or in the comments of a dedicated task.

7. Get someone else to read each edition before you schedule it

Each PEW is reviewed by a Karbonite. I have an incredible team of talented writers and intelligent individuals, and I absolutely lean on them to review each edition.

Their role as a reviewer is more than checking for typos though.

It’s a gut check.

Does the content fulfill PEW’s mission?

No? Toss it. Not sure? Toss it.

The value these reviewers (and their big brains) bring is invaluable.

✅ Action item for your newsletter

Select your reviewers and give them plenty of time

It might be one person on your team who reviews each edition or maybe a rotating roster. Whatever you choose, make sure you give them enough time to do the actual reviewing. Setting up your process to include buffer time is key. And that brings me to my final tip.

Bonus: How to use Karbon to plan your newsletter

Let’s get into the nitty gritty. Here’s how we use Karbon to plan each edition of PEW. It’s not perfect, but it’s powerful.

Repeat settings, key dates, and other logistics

Each PEW edition is its own recurring work item with the following repeat settings:

Because PEW is weekly, each work item is due seven days after it starts:

A clear and useful naming convention is crucial to ensure we know which edition is being sent. Every few months, we go to all the future work that’s been created based on the repeat settings and replace ‘#1’ in the work item names with the actual edition number. This exercise literally takes no more than five minutes.

I am a big fan of planning ahead, so I like to get our PEW work items automatically generating nice and early, and then automatically appearing in the correct week in My Week:

Roles

Assigning roles is so important in ensuring the production flow keeps moving nicely week-to-week. There have been many iterations of role assignments over the last four years as our team has changed. Here’s what it looks like today:

The work item’s structure

The PEW work items follow the same structure as PEW itself. This means there’s a section for Quick Hits, which houses three tasks, a section for Essential Reads, which houses three tasks, and a section for Listen, Watch & Attend, which, you guessed it, houses three tasks.

Here’s what Quick Hits looks like:

We use the comments in each of these tasks to draft the actual content related to each item.

Above these three sections, we have a section that kicks the whole edition off:

And after the three sections, we have four very important logistical sections that handle the edition’s review, final edits, scheduling, and reporting:

Automators

Like any powerful workflow, automation plays a key role. Some of the key automators for PEW include the following.

When the newsletter has been prepared and planned, the work item is automatically assigned to the reviewer, and in this case, that’s Charlie Bosler.

When the newsletter has been scheduled, the work is automatically assigned back to me and the due date is changed to a week later, which is when I collect that edition’s data:

And when I’ve collected the data, the work is marked ‘Complete’ thanks to this simple automator:

The possibilities are endless when it comes to using Karbon for a repeatable process like PEW. Hopefully this glimpse into how PEW is planned each week motivates you to think about how you could be leveraging Karbon beyond accounting-specific tasks.

In the end, what’s the point of it all?

No matter what PEW is called, how often it’s sent, or what systems we use to send it, there’s one thing that always sticks in my mind front and center: we’re writing it for humans.

Our audience are humans first, accounting professionals second. As long as that remains the North Star, then everything else falls into place.

Happy 4th birthday, PEW! Here’s to many more 🎉