That's a ceiling that often sits a lot lower than most of us think it does.

We're big on audience feedback in these here parts. We ask for it in literally every single volume, we read every reply, and we've changed a heap of stuff because of what we see you’re engaging with (or not).

And, heck, we're not about to talk you out of chasing it.

Buuut there's a job audience feedback can't do for you, and for us, it took someone outside our own four walls to point that out (and we left our ego at the door for that, because we know a lot, but we’ll never know everything, right?)

Think of who actually hits reply on those amazing emails you’re sending.

They're subscribed (read engaged, the two differ big time), and they often read far enough down to have an opinion worth sharing. But this means your feedback is arriving, almost entirely, from the people your current approach is already working for.

The ones it isn't working for? Well, they've already left, or they're in the percentage that didn't open or click anything. They're not necessarily filling in your reply prompt now, are they?

So the loop you're optimising around isn't one that’s neutral.

It's made of people who've already agreed with your choices, and it'll keep telling you those choices are fine (even if they aren’t, just sayin’).

That's nobody's fault, and it's certainly not a reason to stop asking. We should be asking, but we should also be careful of the echo chamber.

Feedback from inside the tent tells you how the tent is holding up, but it can't tell you the tent is pitched in the wrong jungle (yeah, we put up tents in the jungle, okay).

And it gets trickier the better you get.

The more authority you build, the fewer people volunteer to tell you you're wrong. Nobody wants to correct the person who does this for a living (we've watched ourselves do exactly this to people we admire, so we're not throwing stones here, folks). The expertise that earns you an audience is the same expertise that filters out the criticism you actually need.

Which is roughly where we found ourselves at 75 volumes.

Our friend (despite being an All Blacks rugby supporter), Juliet Lyall, a fellow B2B email expert (and she espouses this), offered to roast this newsletter. And, naturally, that was an emphatic yes, because hey, we’re eternal students, too.

And after reading a mere three issues, came back with a line we haven't been able to let go of (hence this email):

"The newsletter doesn't lack value, but it often makes the reader work too hard to get to it."

Then she named the actual mechanism, too (and this was enlightening):

"Here is the thing we think you opened for, but first, here are several other things."

And, upon some introspection, she’s spot on.

You'd have opened Volume 75 because the subject line promised you a straight answer on A/B testing, and then we walked you past six curated links and a Find of the Week before we delivered it. And yes, those are good resources, but is that what you came here expecting to find first? Our clicks say yes, but then again, this email is about advice too…

We'd built the template that way years ago because it worked, and we kept it because it kept working, and nobody ever wrote in to complain about it.

And of course they didn't. The people who found it probably aren’t reading this anymore.

So Juliet’s summary of the whole thing was that we'd written a very good editorial and buried it inside a busy newsletter template. So we've changed it, and the order you're reading right now is the change.

Oh, and none of that came from a reader survey (or likely would have).

Because "get outside perspective" on its own is fairly useless advice, and the wrong outside perspective will merely make your work worse (because everyone has advice, though, should they?)

Here are three things we'd hold to:

1. Adjacent, not alien. The person needs to understand your world well enough that their notes are signal, not noise. A general marketing consultant would've told us to add more CTAs. Juliet knew what a newsletter is for, so she went after hierarchy instead. If they have to learn your context before they can critique it, well, you'll spend the whole session teaching and none of it listening.

2. Hand over the thing you'd defend fastest. Whatever you'd instinctively explain away is the thing to put in front of them. For us it was the template, because we "knew" it worked (lol). That instinct to justify is a decent signal that you've stopped examining something (and it's usually the oldest decision in your setup - that’s the path-dependency fallacy, after all).

3. Give them explicit permission to be blunt. A soft ask gets a soft answer, and a soft answer is just your echo chamber coating a turd in glitter. We used the word "roast" on purpose. If you ask someone what they think, they'll tell you it's great, because they're being kind and you've given them nothing else to do.

What's the oldest unquestioned decision in your email setup?

Not your subject lines or your send time, because you fiddle with those constantly. The thing underneath all of that.

Your template order, your section structure, the format you locked in when you started and haven't looked at since, because it works well enough and changing it sounds like a Saturday you'd rather not spend (yeah, we get you).

Now: who in your world is qualified to tell you it's wrong, and have you ever actually asked them?

Find them and ask them not to hold back.

And, open offer, but if you'd like a set of outside eyes on yours, send it over, and we'll take a look. (And we'll be honest with you, which is the whole damn point).

Being good at this is exactly what makes you hard to correct. So, go forth friends, and get corrected (and if you’re a chiropractor, steal that line 😉).

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 ⭐

This one's for the Europe-based folks among you (and it pained us a little to write that, because we'd quite like to be on this boat ourselves - Visa issues be damned).

Our friends over at Bouncer are running the Email Cruise on Friday, 4 September. I mean, five hours down the beautiful Odra river in Wrocław. Free entry, food and drinks included, and an actual boat!

The line-up is stacked to the (email) gills, too. Kath Pay, Radek Kaczyński, Aleksandra Szulecka-Szmyt, and Andrew Bonar…all industry experts (and legends) for something free is kinda crazy.

And speaking of finding folks to critique those emails…because a boat full of email people who've never read your newsletter is precisely the sort of outside perspective we've been banging on about up there 😉

Hop aboard the Email Cruise 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!

If you work in corporate (or send emails of any kind), this should look familiar.


It’s that time of the year where we’re hitting far more of the “casual but concerning” stage at this point 🥲🥲


(Not sure who to credit for this, but it’s a gem).

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