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Why Are We Sending Editorial Newsletters With Marketing Tools?
In the past few years, we’ve seen a vibrant world of email newsletters with no goal beyond telling you a great story, perhaps with some ads attached. But despite this, many email marketing tools seem focused on … well, marketing. Perhaps these big companies should create email writing tools, too.
You could hear the heartbeats of a million indie publishers pause simultaneously last week.
And for good reason: A report on Inc. revealed that MailChimp was looking to take its popular-but-small-scale email writing tool TinyLetter and push it back into the mealy gullet of the mothership. The report came out nearly a month ago, but few people caught it until last week — at which point a whole lot of amateur publishers freaked out until MailChimp CEO Ben Chestnut sent a note attempting to calm the masses.
I’m not a TinyLetter user myself, but as someone who publishes an editorial newsletter, I certainly am a part of the movement it spearheaded. Why did it freak so many people out that premature eulogies seemed to take over certain corners of the internet?
