My inbox spent the last week of May confessing. Dozens of companies I do not remember meeting wrote to say they had updated their privacy policy, valued my trust, and hoped I would stay. GDPR did that. A regulation drafted in Brussels made every brand with a list look hard at the list and admit how much of it was strangers.
I read four of them. I unsubscribed from about sixty.
What survived the purge is the interesting part. A writer in Seattle who sends eight hundred words a week about restaurant economics. Stumptown, which is mostly coffee and occasionally weather. Two former colleagues who left agencies and now write under their own names. None of this looks like marketing to a brand team. All of it gets opened.
For a decade the industry treated email as the channel you tolerated on the way to somewhere better. Social was where the growth was. Email was the retirement home for tactics.
Then this year happened.
Email is the only audience a brand genuinely owns, and 2018 is the year that stopped being a technicality and became a strategy.
Facebook changed the News Feed in January to favor friends over publishers, and organic reach for brand pages went from thin to theoretical. Cambridge Analytica broke in March. Instagram is beautiful and rented. Every brand I have worked with is building an audience on land it does not own, on terms it cannot read, that can be revised on a Tuesday by a company in Menlo Park with no obligation to warn anyone.
An email list cannot be deprecated. That is the whole argument.
The brands doing this well are not doing it with better templates. The Skimm built a media company out of a daily digest written like a smart friend. Girls' Night In sells nothing most weeks and has sponsors waiting. Patagonia's emails read like they were written by someone who has actually stood in a river. What these have in common is a person behind them, a point of view worth the interruption, and a rhythm you can set a week by.
Most brand newsletters have none of those. They have a promo grid, a subject line built by committee, and a send cadence set by whoever asked loudest. That is not a newsletter. That is a coupon in an envelope.
That is not a newsletter. That is a coupon in an envelope.
I bought a paper planner at Powell's last week, which I mention only because the woman at the register asked if I wanted to join their list and I said yes without hesitating. Then I stood on Burnside trying to remember the last time I said yes to anyone else. Ask what your list would say. Then go earn the yes.