A version of this story appeared in Total Annarchy, my fortnightly newsletter that helps you be a better writer, storyteller, marketer. Get it in your inbox; you’ll love it.
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Markus writes:
Greetings from Germany. I subscribed to learn more about how to write an engaging and personal newsletter. I loved the tone in your book Everybody Writes and want to learn how to find and add my own voice to everything I write (newsletters, blog articles, YouTube scripts).
I want to make Posteingänge sexy again. (Posteingang is German for inbox.)
I admit I chose to answer Markus’s question mostly because I want to use “posteingänge” in the subject line.
Can you blame me though?
WHAT.
A.
WORD.
Before now my favorite German word had been staubsauger. It hot-glues two words together: staub (dust) and sauger (sucker) and translates, literally, as “dust sucker” or (you’re gonna love this)… vacuum cleaner.
It’s unexpected poetry. It’s GLORIOUS.
It turns out posteingang (singular) and posteingänge (plural) are similarly compounded. Some crafting German plugged in their glue-gun and fused post (mail) with eingang (entrance or way in). So a German inbox is essentially “the place where the mail enters.”
That’s why it feels so much more lyrical than the English word inbox. An inbox is purely a container: a box where stuff accumulates. It probably comes from those drab boxes for inter-office memos you see next to the cigarette ashtrays on TV’s Mad Men.
Posteingang, on the other hand, does not just sit on your laptop’s desktop like a drab box. It implies movement. Something is arriving. Something crosses a threshold. Something enters your world.
Your reader opens the door: HELLO, says your email: I AM HERE IN YOUR POSTEINGANG. I HAVE ARRIVED!
See why I love it? See how I’m slightly annoyed now that English settled for inbox? I’d like to talk to whoever is responsible for that one. It was probably Microsoft, wasn’t it.
I’m going on about this because the word itself tells us how to make posteingang sexy again: Make it feel less like content—and more like correspondence. Make it make an entrance: HELLO I AM HERE IN YOUR WORLD.
“Welcome!” your reader says. “Willkommen!”
A personal newsletter is welcomed when you:
>>> Drop your reader into a moment, not a topic. Start with something you noticed, experienced, overheard, were delighted by, got wrong.
More: How to set a scene with a cold open.
>>> Are conspiratorial. You invite someone into your world. Make them feel like you’re sharing confidences—not “engaging an audience.”
>>> Give readers your interpretation. Information is ridiculously abundant. Your judgment, taste, and perspective are literally all you have to work with now. Use them!
>>> Include specific, slightly odd details that stick in people’s brains. If you are a longtime reader of this newsletter, you’ve read about that horrific fish skinning memory, the eye twitch, the Bulgarian split squats, and now dust-sucking German words.
These experiences are details that make a writer come to life. They make you memorable because… well, someone can’t forget them.
>>> Create movement. Your story should reveal a tension or question that leads to an insight and useful takeaway. The formula:
story → tension/question → insight → useful takeaway
>>> Invite a real response. Especially at the first touch. This is my biggest gripe with modern content: Despite literal years of evidence that people value true connection, most of us rarely respond back. It’s the dead-simplest way to “engage” your “audience,” yet most of us ignore the opportunity entirely.
Some data: Welcome emails are among the most-engaged-with emails you’ll ever send: 2026 benchmarks put the average click rate for welcome emails at nearly 4X the rate of regular email campaigns (Klaviyo). You can practically hear how the slap of a high-five when your email arrives in a posteingang of a new reader.
Keep it simple. Hi. Nice to meet you. How can I help?
And then when they respond, the truly radical part: write them back.
I track my OWBR (Open to Write Back Rate) obsessively because OWBR is, astoundingly, my entire newsletter growth strategy. Here’s details on that.
>>> Develop recurring bits. Anticipated sections and callbacks make the newsletter feel like a world readers belong to.
My recurring bit Department of Shenanigans is usually the most-clicked link in any newsletter. The next most-clicked is generally to my Buy My Books or Hire Me to Speak pages. Every. Single. Fortnight.
Make of that what you will.
>>> Cut anything that sounds like it could have come from any old posteinganger. (I know that phrase translates to “inboxer” and doesn’t quite work there, but it still somehow fits. I’m using it.)
>>> Use an em dash. Just kidding. But really. Use one.
The simplest test to make posteingänge everywhere sexy again:
Does this email deliver information into a container—or does it usher in a small experience?
* * *
Back to Markus, and the second part of his question about voice.
Those bullet points might read like a tactics list for email. But they’re actually (this is the secret-truth part) how you “find” your voice.
You don’t manufacture a voice. You create the conditions for your actual mind and personality to show up. You create the conditions for it to flow out of your hands and out through your fingers through letters that appear on the page.
Your voice is carried in the odd detail you choose to include. The connection only you would make. The aside. The opinion. The uncertainty you might share. The recurring joke. The phrase that makes you laugh and that a more pro-fesh-unal version of you might delete.
Voice isn’t something you add to the writing.
It’s what’s left when you stop editing yourself out of it.