What have we found to expand your email knowledge today?

Here are a few of our favourite links from across the email and business world, carefully curated just for you:

Find of the week ⭐

Our friend and podcast expert, Arielle Nissenblatt, and Well It Depends Labs, have put together a (free) month-long, action-oriented experience designed to help podcast hosts improve their shows by completing one small, practical task each day.

Starting July 1st, this challenge will cover everything from craft and audience growth to monetisation and long-term momentum with a daily prompt that takes just a few minutes to complete.

And what better way to grow your environment than by growing your podcast (one small improvement at a time?

Join the 30-Day Podcast Challenge here.

We’re also constantly on the lookout for new resources, news, tools and links, so hit us up if you’ve got something valuable to feature!

We all know about lead magnets, don’t we?

You’ve got one, your friends in email do (heck, if your gran ran an email list, she’d know lead magnets are a solid incentive to attract new subscribers).

In reality, though, most lead magnets we’re using are all pretty transactional. Those eBooks, and checklists, and templates, and freebies and all that jazz purely exist to do one thing: convert a visitor into a subscriber.

And look, that works. It's gotten plenty of people plenty of email addresses.

But think about it this way: Once that transaction is done, what do you actually know about that person?

You've got an email address, maybe a name and the source they signed up from, if you're tracking UTMs like a good email nerd. Cool story, but that's it.

And then what?

You know, we drop them into a welcome sequence that asks them to tell you more about themselves or fill in a form or survey after they click to join. You know the drill.

Sure, if you get the right info at the right time, you can customise that ever-important welcome journey, or ask for more during the sign-up process, but that means friction.

And friction, well…that drops subscription rates.

We think your lead magnets can (and should) do more.

The obvious solution here is a survey.

"Hey, welcome to the community! Quick favour: fill in this form so we can send you stuff you'll actually care about."

Surveys have their place (we're not knocking them). But let's be real about the energy of that interaction: you're asking your audience to do you a favour. They just arrived, and the first thing you're doing is handing them a clipboard…

The value exchange is lopsided. You get data. They get, well, the promise that you'll use it well. Eventually? Maybe?

There’s a way to flip that (and we’re testing this).

Instead of asking people to fill in something for our benefit, we wanted to build something that was genuinely useful to them (and happened to give us what we needed as a byproduct).

If you caught last week's send, you've already seen this in action.

We built an Email Sender Archetype Quiz (and yes, we openly riffed on the Myers-Briggs energy of it all, because who doesn't want to know what type of sender they are?).

In under two minutes, you get your archetype, your strengths and blind spots, a curated reading list matched to your style, newsletter recs, and specific next steps based on where you're at.

That's the reader-facing value. That's what they walk away with.

But here's what's happening on our side of the glass.

Every person who takes that quiz tells us (through their answers, not through a boring form) what kind of email sender they are. Their priorities, their stage, their approach, and some helpful stuff too.

And that data flows straight into how we segment and serve this community.

It’s the same tool with two jobs, so neither side feels shortchanged.

Here's where this gets interesting for your own email sending.

For new people who've never heard of us, the quiz works as a lead magnet. They discover their archetype, they get genuine value, and they join the community already tagged by sender type.

We send a welcome geared toward their archetype, but there’s no welcome survey needed. We know where they are in their email journey and what they care about.

For our existing audience (that's you, by the way 👋), it's an enrichment tool. You've been reading these volumes (maybe since the single digits), and we've been talking to you the same way we talk to everyone. That's not good enough anymore.

We want to know if you're a strategist who wants deep dives, an operator who wants tactical playbooks, or a creative who wants inspiration. Because those are different emails, with different recommendations. and, overall, different value.

And the beautiful part? You want to take the quiz. It's not a chore. It's not "help us help you" disguised as a favour. Seriously, who doesn’t want to find out something cool about themselves that also happens to let us tailor what we send you?

That's the shift, ain’t it? From capturing an audience to understanding one.

We're not going to prescribe a framework (you know us better than that by now).

But if you're building a lead magnet (or rethinking the one you've got ), sit with this to get the cogs turning:

What could you build that's genuinely useful to your reader AND tells you something meaningful about who they are?

A quiz. A calculator. A self-assessment. A recommendation engine. A diagnostic tool. Anything where the output is valuable to the reader, and the input is valuable to you.

The trick is designing it so the data capture isn't the point. It’s gotta be the side effect. Your reader should walk away feeling like they got something (not like they just filled in a form with extra steps; that’s the tricky bit in your planning).

Lead magnets that only capture give you a list, but those lead magnets that also enrich? They give you an audience you can actually serve.

And if you're in the business of sending emails people want to read (which, if you're here, we're assuming you are), knowing who's on the other end of that send button changes pretty much every damn thing.

If you haven't taken the quiz yet, now's a good time. 😉

Under 2 minutes. You get your email sender archetype, a curated reading list, newsletter recommendations, and specific next steps. And yes, it helps us make this newsletter better for you specifically.

Take the quiz here →

(And if you've already taken it, thank you. Seriously. That data is already shaping what comes next around here.)

For all those “optimise absolutely everything” gurus…👀

Yep, sometimes it just ain’t worth it. (Thanks to Thomas Frank for this gem).

What’s the secret to staying ahead of the curve in the world of AI? Information. 

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