How to return from a newsletter hiatus in style

The second remake of Ben Hur was number one at the box office for six whole months. It is still tied with Titanic and Lord of the Rings for the most Oscars won by a single movie. Meanwhile, the fourth remake of Ben Hur couldn’t make back its budget and has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 25%. Reboots and revivals are fickle beasts!

On the face of it, emailing a newsletter list that’s been collecting dust may not seem intimidating. Your subscribers have a track record of proven interest, and you’ve delivered on your promises before. All that’s left is to jump back in, right? Except, your audience’s interests may have evolved or moved on, like gamers’ near-universal disappointment with the crude and outdated Duke Nukem sequel that arrived 10+ years late. Or, conversely, your own tastes may have changed while your audience hoped for more of the same (I’m looking at you, CGI Yoda). 

If you want to revive a newsletter list that you haven’t emailed in a long time, and you want it to be well-received, the tone and technical details have to be just right. You have to keep Indiana Jones out of the refrigerator, as it were.

Locution and style when hitting the reset button

Alan O'Rourke started Beautiful Email Newsletters in 2008, sending his list the best email designs he could find, five days a week. Before long, the list was 6,000 subscribers strong. Then, Alan got a new job, “I simply had no time and brain space to keep BEN updated. BEN lay idle for about a year and a half. Something I felt very guilty about.” Yet the readers kept discovering his past emails and subscribing, giving him a growing-yet-idle list.

The prospect of reviving the list was daunting. There were “14,682 subscribers, the majority of whom have never actually received an email from me…if I simply restarted the weekly email and sent it on Friday I will get a shit ton of people marking it as spam, simply because they will not remember subscribing.” That right there, subscribers forgetting they ever signed up, is the thing you need to address above all else, literally.

Kathryn Fox understood the assignment, sending her first The Crime Lady newsletter in nearly a year with the subject line: The Crime Lady: Reboot, Redux. And, if that wasn’t clear enough, the first line read “Well, it’s been quite a while. And a lot has happened since I last sent an email in…checks notes…December 2023.” In less than 30 words, Kathryn acknowledged the hiatus and teased an exciting return.

Even if your newsletter didn’t previously include personal updates, a reboot email requires something different. People want to know what you’ve been up to and why you took a break. For Kathryn it was that “I didn’t want to stay on Substack, but I couldn’t figure out where to move, and it was easier not to post, and I had a book to finish, and then suddenly, nearly a year has passed.” Those are relatable problems!  

Unfortunately, things can never go back to exactly the way they were before. Every revival is going to look different than the original. Arrested Development from network TV never could have remained unchanged when it moved to streaming. But fans can be forgiving when they are forewarned. If the new version of your newsletter will be measurably different than it was before, explain why after acknowledging the hiatus. Set expectations for the new schedule, tone, or format early on in your first email back.

Inevitably, some people will still want out. And it’s far better for them to unsubscribe versus marking your newsletter as spam. A reboot is one of the exceedingly rare instances when you should include an unsubscribe link near the top of the email. 

Alan of Beautiful Email Newsletters recalls that for his reboot “I told them why I was emailing them, reminded them how they signed up but more importantly, I gave them as many ways as possible to unsubscribe. Also, and I feel this is important, I told them my story. I made the email as personal, and personable as possible.” Honesty worked: Five people out of more than 14,000 marked that newsletter as spam, and less than 1% unsubscribed.

Settings and list management for reviving a newsletter

Start by cleaning up your list. That means removing any bounced emails or subscribers who didn’t open a newsletter in the months before you stopped sending it. And, since you’ll hopefully enjoy a wave of signups after ending the hiatus, enable features that handle cleanup for you automatically. In Buttondown, for example, there is Subscriber cleanup on the Subscribing ****page and a configurable firewall on the Settings page for spammy signups to boost your open rates and lower the chances of your emails getting marked as spam.

Taking segmentation a step further, you could divide your list in two, with one half for subscribers who previously opened every email and the other half for those who were less active. It might even make sense to send your I’m Back email to only your most loyal subscribers, gathering their feedback in a sort of beta readers list before re-engaging less active readers.

If you’re sending your newsletter from a custom domain, make sure it’s still live and your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are up to date. Buttondown can usually handle this for you automatically, but it’s worth sending yourself a test email just to be certain that everything works as expected. And, when it arrives, double check that your address and copyright year are up to date, and auditing how accessible your newsletter is for those who read it with the help of assistive technology.

Finally, give your newsletter signup page a facelift (with changes like these tips on getting more subscribers from your website) and confirm that signup forms still work. 

In all likelihood, your email provider released a handful of new features while you were on break. Take a minute to revisit all your backend settings to both set up anything you didn’t have before and to reevaluate how you feel about the way you set up things before. You might want to, say, disable subscriber tracking while enabling UTM tracking and automatic cross-posting. Starting with a semi-clean slate is one of the biggest advantages of a newsletter reboot!

Marginalia and prep work for newsletter makeovers

That’s it, really. Make sure your newsletter’s backend is up to snuff with a clean list, up-to-date authentication, and working signup forms. Then, write a personal, transparent email about where you went and why you’re back. Everything else is window dressing. 

If you feel the need or motivation to go the extra mile, you might refresh your newsletter’s visual branding, introduce a new format, or survey subscribers about what they want. If you offer paid subscriptions or email courses, you might give them away for free to the people who stuck with you through the hiatus. Anything to show that you’re taking the return seriously.

Sticking the landing on that first email is vital. But it won’t amount to much if there’s nothing to back it up. Never promise to update or add to the formula if you won’t be able to stick to it. In the absence of a crunch for time, push the reboot back until you have a backlog of three to five issues ready to send. That way, you can spend more time in the reply loop, responding to your most loyal subscribers.

Your audience welcomed you into their inbox at least once before. Most of them will do so again as long as you show that you take that trust seriously. And as long as you don’t give Peter Parker Bangs and a dance number.

Header Photo by Gunnar Ridderström on Unsplash