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 ⭐

Okay, this one's a little different, because this week's find is something we're actually running.

We've teamed up with our friend Arielle Nissenblatt (podcaster, newsletter obsessive, all-round brilliant human) to host a live, hands-on session: build an actual landing page for your podcast newsletter, from scratch, in an hour.

Thursday, 27 August, 6 - 7 pm GMT+2. And this ain’t another theory-only webinar here; you'll leave with a real, working landing page ready to share with your listeners.

Early-bird spots are open now, and there aren't many, so don't sit on this one.

Grab your Launch Sprint spot 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!

Buuut everyone with a newsletter seems to think they should be.

We've written before about what's actually worth testing in a newsletter (Volume 64, if you want the full playbook). Subject line types, CTA placement, section order… because there’s a fair bit you can test.

But we skipped a step, and it's one that actually matters before you get stuck in at the email lab.

Before you test anything, you need to ask whether testing is even the right move for you, right now.

Because, unfortunately, for most newsletter senders, "we A/B test our emails" is less a strategy and more something many folks are doing because the “experts” say they should (and we don’t vibe with that).

When last did you actually run a proper test? Not one of those "changed a subject line once and felt clever about it" kinda tests. An actual test, with a hypothesis, run consistently, measured against something specific?

If you're drawing a blank, honestly, you're in good company, folks. Most newsletter "tests" we come across are one-offs: a subject line against another, on one send, decided by whichever number looked bigger that day.

The bad news is that doing that is not considered testing. And, in email guesses with extra steps (that’s what we call this), aren’t of any real value.

Not to you, as sender, and definitely not to your audience (which is where we’ll go with this, keep reading).

Yeah, we get it, in certain spaces like DTC and e-commerce, testing works because the volume's there. Daily (sometimes hourly) sends, huge lists, and enough data points that a 0.3% lift means something real.

But if you compare that to most of us sending weekly or fortnightly to a few thousand people, the maths falls pretty damn quickly. One or two sends tell you barely anything of value.

You need consistency, or volume (ideally both), before a result is a result.

The data-people tell us this all the time, but we need to ask ourselves if we’re spending our time where it actually matters.

This isn't us telling you to abandon testing altogether (we're not about to un-recommend our own advice). But, as the wise dudes at Panic! At The Disco so famously stated, it's much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poise and rationality

So, in this case, it’s knowing whether you're the sender testing is actually built for. Let’s help you with some guidance on that:

1. You're sending often enough to build a real sample. Weekly, at minimum. Fortnightly gets a tad shaky. Monthly means you'll be waiting the better part of a year to trust a result, and by then your audience, your content and probably your goals have all moved on anyway (soz).

2. You've got enough people on the other end of it. There's no magic subscriber number, true, but if a single send maxes out at a few hundred recipients, well, the gap between "real difference" and "time wasted” is pretty clear. You don’t have a substantive data set to garner real insight that means something.

3. You're chasing incremental, not foundational, gains. Testing tightens something that's already working. It won't rescue a newsletter with a wonky premise or content nobody really cares about. If that's you, testing is like bailing water from a sinking ship with a teaspoon 🙃.

Meet all three, and testing earns its place in your week. Miss one, and it's effort spent in the wrong place (and most of us are missing at least one).

An incremental lift on a subject line test you can't even trust doesn't move the needle nearly as much as the actual substance of what you're sending.

If you’ve been here a little while, you’ll know this. Chasing a 2% "win" on shaky data while the content underneath it is average is seriously just wasted effort, when the real issue is that nobody's that keen on what you’re sending in the first place.

The focus is what’s in the content you’re sending. It all starts there. If you’re not getting engagement, then the focus lies there. If people aren’t buying, same damn thing.

So, this is us saying if you’re not focusing on this stuff, test less. Start writing better, and then go back and test the stuff that's actually worth testing.

Where do you actually land on those three things we mentioned? Sending consistency, list size, and, honestly, are you optimising a good newsletter, or trying to test your way out of a mediocre one?

If the answer puts you outside all three, that's by no means failure (we’re all figuring this thing out as we go). The idea is to use that information to tell you where your effort's best spent this month (and it's probably not a spreadsheet of subject line variants).

Not every "expert" tip applies to every sender, at every stage. This one included.

Tell us where you’re at, and we'll help you figure out if testing's worth your time yet.

We feel seen 👀


That’s okay…inbox zero was never a thing anyway.


(Thanks omgsidewalks for the reality check).

Radar turns 115,000+ podcasts into searchable ad data. Pull any brand's footprint, see which shows run host-read versus pre-recorded, read the exact copy of each ad, and confirm your own reads aired. Enter a brand and see where it advertises.

Try Radar for free