Curated newsletter
A curated newsletter is an email issue built from links its author found elsewhere, grouped under headings, each carrying a sentence or two of the author's own commentary. The value is the selection and the opinion attached to it rather than original long-form writing.
Also called a link roundup or a link digest. The format spans every subject there is: design weeklies, local listings, trade digests, charity supporter updates. What they share is a reader who trusts one person's judgement enough to outsource an hour of reading to them.
How an issue is put together
Issue
An issue is a single edition of a newsletter, sent once to the subscriber list and usually numbered in sequence. In a curated newsletter an issue is a set of named sections with links inside them.
Link library
A link library is a running store of saved links waiting to be used in a future issue. It exists because the hard part of a curated newsletter is collecting through the week rather than writing on send day.
The composer and the library
Rate card
A rate card is a published list of what each advertising placement costs. For a newsletter it usually names the slot types, their prices, the audience size and the lead time needed to book.
Publishing one saves the two emails every enquiry otherwise starts with, and it stops you pricing the same slot differently depending on how the day is going.
Double opt-in
Double opt-in is a signup process that sends a confirmation email and only adds the address to the list once the recipient clicks the link in it. It proves the person actually owns the address and actually wanted the newsletter.
It costs you some signups, mostly the mistyped and the insincere ones, and it buys a list that bounces less and complains less. On a shared sending platform it is close to mandatory.
Sender reputation
Sender reputation is the judgement that mail providers such as Gmail and Outlook form about a sending domain and IP address, based on how recipients have reacted to their mail over time. It is the main thing deciding whether an issue reaches the inbox or the spam folder.
It is built slowly and lost quickly. Consistent volume, low complaints and engaged readers build it; one mailing to a purchased list can undo months of it.
How sending works
Deliverability
Deliverability is the share of sent email that arrives in recipients' inboxes rather than being rejected outright or filed as spam. It is distinct from delivery, which only means the receiving server accepted the message.
A message can be delivered and still never be seen. That gap is why deliverability is measured by engagement rather than by the sending platform's own success counts.
Bounce
A bounce is an email the receiving server refused. A hard bounce is permanent, meaning the address does not exist, and the address should never be mailed again. A soft bounce is temporary, such as a full mailbox, and is worth retrying.
Amazon SES treats a bounce rate above 5% as grounds for review of the sending account, so hard bounces should be suppressed automatically rather than left on the list.
Complaint rate
Complaint rate is the proportion of delivered emails that recipients mark as spam. It is the single most damaging metric in email sending, because mail providers treat it as a direct signal that the sender is unwanted.
Amazon SES treats a complaint rate above 0.1% as grounds for review, which is one complaint in a thousand delivered emails. That is a much smaller number than most first-time publishers expect, and it is why making unsubscribing easy is in your own interest.
Suppression list
A suppression list is the record of addresses that must never be emailed again, typically those that hard bounced, complained or unsubscribed. It is checked before every send.
The important property is that importing a list cannot resurrect a suppressed address. If it could, one careless re-import would undo every unsubscribe you have honoured.
One-click unsubscribe
One-click unsubscribe is an unsubscribe link presented by the mail client itself, at the top of the message, which removes the recipient without them visiting a web page. It is defined by RFC 8058 and required by Gmail and Yahoo for bulk senders.
Making it easy to leave sounds like it costs you subscribers. It costs you far less than the alternative, which is that somebody who cannot find the unsubscribe link marks you as spam instead.
Open rate
Open rate is the share of delivered emails recorded as opened, measured by a tracking pixel loading. It has become an unreliable measure because Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads that pixel for many recipients whether or not anybody read the message.
Treat it as a rough trend line and nothing more. For a curated newsletter the honest signal is clicks, because a click means somebody wanted the thing you recommended.
Link tracking and reports
Click-through rate
Click-through rate is the share of recipients who clicked at least one link in an issue. For a curated newsletter it is the closest available measure of whether the selection was any good.
Worth measuring per link as well as per issue. The issue-level number tells you how you did; the per-link ranking tells you what to pick more of next week.
Archive
A newsletter archive is a public website carrying every past issue as its own page. It is what makes a newsletter findable by people who have never received one.
Email is invisible to search engines and to anybody who has not already subscribed. The archive is the part of a newsletter that keeps working months after the issue was sent.
Your public archive
Bring your own sending
Bring your own sending is an arrangement where a newsletter platform sends issues through the publisher's own email sending account, such as Amazon SES, rather than its own. The publisher then owns the sender reputation and pays for delivery at cost.
It is unusual: almost every newsletter platform sends from shared infrastructure and keeps that arrangement. The trade is a little setup in exchange for an asset that comes with you if you leave.
How sending works
