About Lesley Sim

Lesley is the founder of Newsletter Glue, a powerful WordPress plugin that makes it easy to create and send newsletters right from your website. 

If you have any questions or need help with Newsletter Glue, you can contact Lesley or the Newsletter Glue team using the following methods.

Timestamps 

00:00:00   Interview with Lesley Sim, Co-Founder of Newsletter Glue: Exploring the Benefits of Publishing Newsletters Directly from WordPress

00:02:32   “Streamlining Content Generation for Medium and Larger Publishers”

00:04:13   Conversation on Newsletter Glue: Integrating Email Services with WordPress

00:05:42   Heading: Refining Positioning to Focus on Medium to Large Publishers: A Conversation with Lesley and Stewart

00:10:26   “The Impact of Increasing Prices on Product Decisions”

00:11:57   “The Benefits of Using a WordPress Plugin for Email Newsletters”

00:13:54   “Exploring the Growing Importance of Email Newsletters”

00:15:10   “How to Create an Effective Email Newsletter for Publishing Companies”

00:19:19   “Exploring Advanced Email Strategies for Publishers”

00:22:57   Exploring the Benefits of Email-Only Strategies for Content Delivery

00:26:09   Interview with Lesley: Strategies for Archiving Newsletters on the Open Web

00:27:33   “Streamlining Newsletter Creation with Newsletter Glue”

00:29:22   Interview with Lesley Pizzo of Newsletter Glue

Highlights

So, news lyrically, is a WordPress plugin to streamline dramatically the process of creating newsletters for publishers, medium size and up smaller. Welcome to in that kind of. Generating your newsletters from blocks within the WordPress block editor.

Like we should have those on the site accessible to be archived. If nothing else other than their good search folder. So like Google has a better understanding you, you’ve got a whole loop, more internal links and things like that.

And if you’re missing out on all of the SEO and all of the, people can just link to the site and share, share the. To me that isn’t a strong reason to not do that.

People will open the specific newsletter rather than the general newsletter. If they’re looking for something to do with kids over the weekend, then they’re definitely gonna open the Weekend Kids Events newsletter, but they might not open the weekly Recap newsletter.

When you mention an RSS newsletter, that’s a newsletter generated from like an RSS feed coming out of, I have a website that you might subscribe to normally, except rather than just going to an RSS reader, it’s going into your email provider.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Stewart: hello and welcome to Scale podcast for Modern Media. I am your host, Stuart Richie. I am the Finder and the developer at Power by Coffee.

[00:00:14] Power by Coffee is a web development and software development agency focusing on open source, particularly WordPress for, publishers and anyone with lots of content that they’re trying to monetize or manage. scale is a podcast around, the media, technology’s impact on. And sometimes media’s impact on technology.

[00:00:33] Today we have Lesley Sim, the co-founder of Newsletter Glue,newsletter Glue is a really interesting WordPress plugin that helps, publishers and archist, but can work with anyone, take their content from their site, reuse it, publish newsletters. direct from their dashboard.

[00:00:50] ​

[00:00:53] Stewart: Lesley, welcome. Thanks for being with us today. that was a really quick intro, but can you tell us more about yourself, more about your own background, kind of how you got here, where you’ve come from today.

[00:01:03] Lesley: yeah, sure can. Thanks Stewart for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

[00:01:07] Stewart: I’m very happy to have you.

[00:01:08] Lesley: Quick background. I live in Singapore and as you mentioned, I run a WordPress plugin called Newsletter Glue. And, as you also mentioned, so basically we connect via API to a bunch of email service providers. all the big ones, over a dozen of them. like active campaign, campaign monitor, and then we let you write and publish your newsletters inside of WordPress with the block editor.

[00:01:34] and that kind of opens up a whole bunch of different, possibilities. so if, you’re a big publisher and you have a whole team of writers already writing dozens and dozens of articles a day or a week inside of WordPress, and they’re already very familiar with the system and you’ve got, if.

[00:01:51] Particularly if you’ve embraced, the block editor and you have a bunch of customizations already done, it then becomes very painful for those same writers to hop into MailChimp, and craft their newsletters over there. And so what we enable is kind of to have the same workflow for your newsletters that you already have for your articles.

[00:02:10] And on top of the workflows, you also have. Now able to apply all the same monetization, seo, membership advertising, strategies that you are applying to your articles, to your newsletters. And it just kind of makes the whole,all the channels a lot more, in sync. And obviously once that happens,you have both.

[00:02:32] workflow efficiencies save a lot of time, but you also have growth efficiencies as well. yeah, and so our best customers kind of really leverage both of those things and have seen, a lot of growth with their memberships, their subscriptions, and also their new centers.

[00:02:48] 

[00:02:48] Stewart: So really that kind of right once start to be able to, to publish any everywhere. And I think it’s really important to us to like layer in there that it’s, it’s the content of the newsletter, not like the management of it. So your subscriptions and user Bs and stuff still lives in your email provider, so you’re not bringing that into WordPress.

[00:03:06] That all stays where it is. It’s very much. The content generation and streamlining that and taking, I imagine sometimes hours and hours of work, away from an editor who would have something much more interesting to do. 

[00:03:19] what you said just kind of like reminded me of something that I should probably mention, which is, a large part of the reason why we just connect to the ESP rather than be the ESP itself is we work a lot with medium and larger publishers who are. Kind of, very locked into whatever, email service provider they’re using.

[00:03:38] Lesley: And, they’ve probably got a bunch of automation segments, groups, tags, all of that stuff already set up. And it, it’s probably like a month long project to extract themselves from it. and so we don’t want, you to have to do that. And instead, we just kind of, via API connect.

[00:03:54] the s p and that’s, yeah, it’s so much faster. it’s just a, API key and you’re connected and it’s done. And, you can pull up all, all of your segments and tags inside of WordPress directly and everything’s set up already immediately. so that kind of works a lot better for the kinds of customers that we have.

[00:04:13] and that way, we don’t have to deal. The deliverability problems, which are always very stressful. And instead, you can rely on the, eight figure nine figure companies who do this day in, day out and depend on them for deliverability. which broadly speaking is kind of, a better scenario and it’s kind of a solved problem when it comes to the larger esp.

[00:04:33] so it’s nice to kind of be able to rely on them.

[00:04:35] 

[00:04:36] Stewart: I think it’s absolutely the right way to go. I don’t like, I’ve very much subscribed to, like WordPress is good at some things and terrible at other things, and I think it’s a good content management system, but it’s a terrible email. Management system. So, pass that off to something that is good at that.

[00:04:52] Like email’s one of those things like it’s been around so long, everyone assumes it must be so easy. Just, just, just send an email, it’s fine. It’s like, no, it’s not that easy. It’s really not that easy, particularly if you send in any kind of scale, like more than a few. Just the bouncebacks alone can take down a server.

[00:05:09] Like I have, I have seen servers be effectively DDOSed by rejected emails that they have tried to send. so I think it’s like by far, the better, better approach, to integrate and meet those, those customers where they are.

[00:05:21] Lesley: but I mean, let’s, let’s take a step back from that. Lesley, tell us about yourself.

[00:05:25] Stewart: You know, where did the idea for Newsletter Clear come from?

[00:05:28] 

[00:05:28] Lesley: So, it was kind of a, actually started newsletter glue, started its life as a membership plugin. So my co-founder, his background is in membership plugins, and he’s kind of been building membership plugins for the past decade.

[00:05:42] Stewart: and then he went out on his own and wanted to build his own membership plugin, thinking, I’m not gonna be bogged down by all the,tech debt and path dependence and, his bad historical decisions and stuff like that. and so he went out and built his own plugin, not realizing that, as is the case with a lot of new founder.

[00:06:00] Lesley: That actually it’s the business side and the marketing side and the pricing side. That’s the real challenge. and so he, posted on the Indie Hackers forum asking for a co-founder once he, once he launched and he realized, oh, there’s all this other stuff to deal with and it’s not that easy.

[00:06:16] So he posted on the Hackers where I’m looking for like a business and marketing co-founder, and I saw that and I got in touch with him and we started working. and very quickly realized that it was very difficult to build a membership plugin and get it up and running and earning money just because that niche is very, very established with lots of great players.

[00:06:39] I think it’ll be a different, if people didn’t like the established, plugins in that niche, but I think a lot of them are very, very well. And it was really hard to break through.

[00:06:49] Stewart: and so we were kind of actually thinking about closing down after kind of trying to get it off the ground for a while.

[00:06:56] Lesley: and I wasn’t said about closing the membership plugin down at all. but along the way we built an add-on, a MailChimp add-on that, that you send newsletters, send blog posts as newsletters. And I had been using that for my own newsletter and. Kind of sad to see that go because, that I knew there wasn’t something similar out there.

[00:07:16] And then I realized, if I was sad to see it go and if there wasn’t something similar, then maybe this is something we could do. and CK was kind of growing in popularity at the time as well. and it was kind of very, very similar, functionality. It was like, CK but in WordPress. and so we decided to pivot.

[00:07:31] Do all the things that we did wrongly the first time. in terms of like, not marketing, well, not knowing, not realizing, the established niche is hard to break into. Like all those problems that we encountered for the first time. we kind of addressed them the second time around and, it went a lot better.

[00:07:48] we got a lot more, interest. I did a whole bunch of Use interviews to make sure that we were building the right thing. yeah, and it’s kind of been growing great since then. And, earlier this year, we made the decision to not, I wouldn’t say pivot, but refine our positioning, to focus more on medium to large publishers.

[00:08:08] So like, publishers, newsrooms, media companies, online magazines. and the reason for that was simply because we realized that the kind of product that we had really suited those kinds of customers. So when I said earlier about, medium to large publishers, not like being very locked into their MailChimps and active campaigns and campaign monitors.

[00:08:31] That isn’t the case for the smaller bloggers, right? They’re always looking for the cheapest thing possible or the, do it yourself version. and they were actually pushing me to a MailChimp inside of WordPress, which we didn’t really want to do at the time. And so, repositioning kind of helped us a lot and.

[00:08:52] It particularly helped us with knowing who to talk to and, figuring out like the specifics of what we wanted to build, like product decisions. and yeah, so that’s kind of where we are today.

[00:09:06] Stewart: And I think that that repositioning exercise was kind of where I had become aware of, of news lyrically. cause obviously it started to, to kind of come into the, the realm of, that we were working with, publishers and things like that. And just from keeping an eye on kind of things that might be useful in the space.

[00:09:22] But I also remember you got quite a lot of,Twitter buzz. at the time I think I saw a lot of people tweeting about it, the usual enterprise word press glide, crowded saying how great it was to see more, more products focused on, on large-scale WordPress. And, but so that, that process now of, of migrating away from kind of everyone, is that anyone that will come along and kind of take the plugin into having a really distinct.

[00:09:47] Like, this is who we work with and this is who our, we’re a good fit for and who we’re not a good fit for. How, how do you think that’s kind of impacted, impacted the business? Has it had like a big impact? Has it really helped with growth or has it just made it’s simpler to kind of make decisions for the product?

[00:10:02] Maybe all of the above.

[00:10:03] Lesley: All of the above. I would say, I think it’s still early days, so it hasn’t, the, the sales pipeline of converting. A bigger customer is quite different from converting some, someone who’s purchasing like a hundred dollars a year plugin. so we haven’t, seen like the same number of people who are purchasing it at the lower price, purchase it at a higher price.

[00:10:26] but 

[00:10:26] Stewart: need them.

[00:10:26] Lesley: yeah, so I think we are 10, 10 times, just over 10 times more expensive now. Yeah, so we went from a hundred dollars a year to a hundred dollars a month thereabouts. yeah. So yeah, we definitely need less customers now, but the nice thing is that we get much higher quality customers as well. and like you said, it’s definitely had a huge impact on product decisions.

[00:10:51] So, for example, early on we were talking to WordPress, v i p, and they wanted to bring on, a customer. Along the way, they were like, oh, you need to, make sure all your code follows the WordPress VIP standards. And, a year ago it would’ve been really difficult to make the decision to, go through like the three weeks it took us to, make sure all our code was up to scratch.

[00:11:13] But in this case it was like a no-brainer. I was like, yeah, of course we have to do that. and we could, prioritize, like drop everything else and prioritize that straight away. and, and feel good about the decision and know that we made the right decision. I think previously we were being pulled in a lot of different directions and it was hard to kind of justify a lot of decisions cuz any product decision we made had to be viable or had to be a good decision for a whole range of different types of customers.

[00:11:40] And that was really tricky. Whereas now it’s, almost. The answer is yes, we can build that super niche, filter that you want us to build, cuz of course there’s gonna be someone else who wants this like, really advanced thing that you’d never imagined was even a thing. yeah. So I think like product wise, it’s been really great.

[00:11:57] Stewart: Great. And it’s one of those things, I imagine the, the support burden. So the number of people asking questions way down cuz the people using it, that’s what they do. Like they’re the newsletter. They’re not someone who has a hundred other things they’re doing within, within the business. but yeah, it sounds amazing.

[00:12:15] Lesley: it’s also the types of questions that we get, so like, It’s really nice when we get, as you say, like a newsletter editor or like the developer in charge of the WordPress site. be like we encountered a plug it, plugging conflict or potential plugin conflict here. The things that we’ve checked here, the things that we think are an issue, here’s the, the console errors and it’s, it’s so much, it makes life for us so much easier.

[00:12:41] Stewart: Yeah, that sounds great. I’m not gonna lie. So I think like for, for most of our audience, I think they’re not necessarily gonna be developers. I think they’re really interested in like the bigger picture of, of email for publishers. And I think your plugin and newsletter in particular, like is something I really like for WordPress plugin and for companies it’s that it’s solves a problem where the client slash customer is making.

[00:13:09] So like those email newsletters that are going out,in many cases are directly attributable to revenue, whether or not that’s, part of a, part of the, like the nurturing flow for someone that is signing up and they’re trying to get them into a, a subscription service or part of the subscription benefits or, they have a broad email list and they’re injecting sponsorships and advertising.

[00:13:31] Into, the emails that are being sent. There are so many things that these, these can be done. and I just think it’s like, while we may all get hundreds of emails a day, so many of them are terrible and you really look forward to the good ones. And it looks to me like more and more publishers are like doubling down on email as they’re kind of primary place and primary way that they connect.

[00:13:54] With their audience, particularly in a world where we can no longer necessarily depend on social channels that we maybe thought were pretty, pretty solid. Have you, have you seen similar? That’s just my, my kind attack.

[00:14:06] Lesley: Yeah, I would say so. I think, it’s been kind of happening for a while. I wouldn’t say that people are doubling down, but I would say that like there’s the, the people who are already really advanced, they’ve like maintained, their advanced status and there’s always kind of, new newer publishers who. trying to grow their new set of offerings and I think, that’s just, like everybody gets there at some point and it’s just a matter of like building up the processes, the systems. yeah. So I wouldn’t say it’s, been the case where people are kind of realizing for, for the first time that newsletters are really important.

[00:14:43] but it’s just a matter of like people getting more,In terms of the strategies that they’re employing, and realizing, yeah, what they.

[00:14:50] Stewart: Yeah, I think that’s like an interesting fork then. So we’ve got these two kind of groups. folk, those who are like super events know what they’re doing and those who are just getting started. so for those publishers listening,one and two person companies probably a little too small for news lyrically, but if they grow, maybe they’ll get

[00:15:10] Lesley: We, we have, we have one or two company people, using us 

[00:15:13] Stewart: Really? 

[00:15:14] Lesley: Like even on the new

[00:15:14] Stewart: I. Oh, that’s awesome. I mean, like, if they value their time, like I think it’s a, it’s a no-brainer. in the time it can see if, even if it saves you 20, 30 minutes a week, that’s a big improvement for a, a one person business. But if someone just gets started thinking about their first newsletter for their blog slash local magazine slash NewMedia, What, what would you suggest is like a great starting point for someone getting going with email mark?

[00:15:40] Email newsletters for their publishing company.

[00:15:44] 

[00:15:44] Lesley: I think if they’re just getting started, then honestly, we, we might not be the best fit for them, but what I would suggest is that they focus purely on consistency. So like building up the processes and the habits around publishing, whether it’s once a week, which I recommend, like don’t, don’t do it once a month.

[00:16:08] So like minimum of once a week, just kind of getting the habit, getting used to it and publishing all the time. Cuz like really you can’t improve unless you’re getting the reps in to begin with. so that’s kind of what I would say. For anyone that like thinks like, oh, of course I can do that. you wouldn’t believe the number of people who kind of say, of course they can do that and then drop off, after, like 10 months in or something like that.

[00:16:31] And, myself included, so like, I used to run a newsletter, but pretty much the moment. Yeah. Yeah. The moment I started like focusing on newsletter group, it was impossible to keep up the personal new.

[00:16:44] Fair enough, and I mean, so consistently send in about once a week you recommend, but I would say any consistent schedule, yeah, once a week minimum once every two weeks if you’re really struggling and really busy. But if you have a publishing business, I think, a fortnight. Fortnight is too little.

[00:17:01] Stewart: yeah, it’s, it’s gotten a bit steel since then, so I think you’re definitely right.

[00:17:05] At least once a week. What do you. Folk getting started should be sending

[00:17:09] Lesley: okay,so the other thing I think is if they are kind of technically savvy or at least willing to tinker, then what they can do is one editorial newsletter once a week and then one RSS based newsletter once a week. And so that way they have two newsletters a week, but only one takes effort. so that’s kind of how I would recommend doing.

[00:17:32] and that also kind of incidentally answers the question of what you should send. So editorial, could just be, what, whatever the kind of main theme the, of the publication is. So whether that’s fishing or,a, a local town or whatever the thing is, just kind of what you as an editor is thinking about, that week.

[00:17:52] So that should be the editorial. And then, the. RSS newsletter should just be kind of like a, best of kind of newsletter for the week. so that, so you can do an RSS based one, or you can kind of do a hand manually curated one and obviously the two have, trade offs. So if you do an RSS one, then you don’t have control over what goes into it and you don’t have kind of, like the final.

[00:18:16] Final say, you can’t run a test email. so if there’s an article in there that you don’t like and didn’t want to send out, you don’t really have control over that. but if you are able to really fine tune the settings, then that can be really good. and then obviously if you do kind of like a hand curator one, then it takes additional time and that again runs the risk of you dropping off cuz it’s difficult.

[00:18:40] Stewart: More time, more effort, more chance to drop off. I think we just then for, for clarity, for anyone who doesn’t know, like. When you mention an RSS newsletter, that’s a newsletter generated from like an RSS feed coming out of, I have a website that you might subscribe to normally, except rather than just going to an RSS reader, it’s going into your email provider.

[00:19:01] And it’s like being processed to create like a little, like little breakdown of like, here is Article one, article two, article three. Please click through. yeah, just for anyone who didn’t, who wasn’t listening or. Who hadn’t heard the terms before, everyone’s gotta start somewhere and we have to like be inclusive.

[00:19:19] But then on the other side of this, what, is there anything you see coming for those really advanced publishers who have like a really strong, newsletter game already? maybe are sending editorial, sending, curated lists, have, columns that are from a particular author? you. All kinds of things, that users can go down, personalization and things like that.

[00:19:38] Just a few, a few kind of things we’ve seen. What, what do you see kind of coming down the pipeline,

[00:19:43] Lesley: I think just having an infinite number of newsletter offerings is what I think is the best, 

[00:19:49] Stewart: right? 

[00:19:50] Lesley: thing to do, like the most bang for your buck thing to do? I think a lot of people want to overcomplicate things. doing a lot of like really, really fine tuned personalization or having like the, the fancy, the fancy thing is like, personalized newsletters where you can kind of like pick and choose what like settings you want and then like have that be sent to you.

[00:20:11] I feel like. In most cases, that’s overkill. And you can actually get away with really simple segmentation, but just a lot of it. So, again, if you’re a local, like a city or a town newsletter, then you could,maybe you start with like restaurants and bars and then events and then.

[00:20:34] things happening in the local park and so on. but then you can also like expand all of that, right? So restaurants and bars just becomes restaurants and then you have another bars, newsletters, and then you can have like indoor events and then outdoor events and then concerts. And it’s, it’s really the same thing.

[00:20:49] Stewart: But, having it, expanded out like that really lets people choose what they want. And then on top of that, you can also have the restaurant. Thing. And then also the, all the events, newsletters. So, even though it’s all the same content, you’ve now gone from three newsletters to 10. Yep.

[00:21:05] Lesley: and just like the more newsletters you have, the more kind of, interlinked they are, the more times people hear from you.

[00:21:14] and when it’s specific, there’s more chances. People will open the specific newsletter rather than the general newsletter. cause. If they’re looking for something to do with kids over the weekend, then they’re definitely gonna open the Weekend Kids Events newsletter, but they might not open the weekly Recap newsletter.

[00:21:32] so, so yeah, doing that I think is the biggest thing that I would recommend. And then, obviously with that comes a lot of process and workflow issues and like, concerns about having to grow the newsletter team. so I think. Everything that you can do to automate, the segmentations. And, the sending I think is really important, while at the same time maintaining a certain level of personalization so it doesn’t just feel like a timeout newsletter.

[00:21:59] which, they send like lots and lots of stuff, but then it just feels kind of impersonal. so you really wanna kind of balance those two things.

[00:22:06] 

[00:22:07] Stewart: great. There’s so many, so many options for email with these cases. I know I mentioned it before. I’m really, I’m really interested in these organizations and companies are coming along their email first. so groups like, morning Brew and tldr, where, you know, they, they call you a lot of information, but the actual product is the, the newsletter that you get every day to kind of, start your day with kind of a big info dump of all the things you, you like. obviously those are kind of monetized through, like sponsorships and things like that within, within the emails. but yeah, they’re, I think they’re really interested. Do you see like a change at all in how people are gonna start using emails, and email newsletters more in that direction? Do you think we’ll get more email only, organizations, or is this just, does, does it feel like there’s space in the market for that?

[00:22:57] Is it really gonna be a few kind of big players that can get away with it?

[00:23:00] Lesley: I think it’s really hard to do email only, and I think there isn’t a strong case for doing that either.

[00:23:08] Stewart: Yeah.

[00:23:09] Lesley: and what I mean by that is I think you have to be really, really stubborn and like be willing to really grind to get those subscribers, and do a email first or email only strategy. and I mean, 90% of the time, the hardest part is the content.

[00:23:27] And so if you’ve already nailed the content, then like, why not publish it on a WordPress site? Right. so that’s one thing. Like, it’s not, it’s not that much harder to set up a WebPress site.

[00:23:39] Right. And if you’re missing out on all of the SEO and all of the, people can just link to the site and share, share the. Like what? Yeah. To me that isn’t a strong reason to not do that.

[00:23:52] Stewart: Yeah.

[00:23:53] Lesley: so you kind of have to be really stubborn if you wanna insist on doing newsletter only. Oh, I remember what I wanted to say.

[00:24:00] Sorry. it, it’s a, all, all roads lead to Rome kind of thing. Like I feel like anyone who starts out as a new setup eventually,a site in the end anyway. like Morning Brew now has a site and you, and it’s obviously they’ve like, put in a lot of effort to, drive traffic to it and get it optimized and stuff like that.

[00:24:20] So, why go through the trouble of trying to get a million subscribers first and then build a site when you know you can do it much earlier and it would probably be less stressful and easier and.

[00:24:31] Stewart: Yeah. No, I think, I think you’re right. I think I like them from a like, oh, this is a weird take perspective, but ultimately, Like they’re, you would be leaving a lot on the table. I mean if you say you’re running advertising anyway on the newsletters, which incidentally, I would love to have a talk to someone and not necessarily yourself.

[00:24:52] Cause I think this is probably fairly specialist. Like how does advertising in a newsletter, in an email work? It’s fascinating to me cuz normally I. Sorry, complete tangent aside. People want all kinds of like, tracking and like things like that for these, e adverts that they’re running on things.

[00:25:08] But that’s so very difficult within email cuz emails are like notoriously hard to even get to render correctly, nevermind have, have an advert in there with some tracking. Like it’s crazy to me. and I imagine a lot of them don’t, they’re just like images, with a, a click through link. But I’ve definitely seen some that seem more intense.

[00:25:28] that’s an aside, I would just, that’s a thing that interests me. but yeah, but I mean, like we have, we’ve also had people like now start to realize like, oh, we put all this effort into the newsletter it just goes into people’s inboxes and it disappears. Like we should have those on the site accessible to be archived. If nothing else other than their good search folder. So like Google has a better understanding you, you’ve got a whole loop, more internal links and things like that. You can get them behind a membership. If somebody wants access to the archive, it’s like a very easy extra perk for some organizations. But unfortunately, a lot of the time they’re just locked away in the email provider and can’t be reasonably accessed to, to do it.

[00:26:09] yeah, all, all roads lead back to having a. I think it’s a good take. oh, I feel like even worse, all roads lead back to WordPress in some cases. Cause I feel like we saw, CK think you mentioned a couple times, obviously a great platform, but pretty closed off. I haven’t used it to be fair, but I’ve heard some stories about like, making it very difficult to access your subscribers.

[00:26:31] data like export, I very difficult to.

[00:26:33] CK once you’re in there, it’s really locked in. so again, back to the open web and owning your data and having, having control back to WordPress, which I feel like is a really word, clerically can, slot into this and kind of help people do their own, kinda their own kind of ck if they wanted.

[00:26:52] It’s a good, it’s a good plan. I really like it. It’s such a good idea. Very jealous. Cool. Lesley, thank you so much for your time today. is there any parting thoughts that you want to leave us with? Anything, any final takeaways that you think our publishers might like to to know? We’re here.

[00:27:11] Lesley: not really. I think something that you mentioned in passing about putting. newsletters on, on your site, on, on the archive, being able to, put it behind a membership restriction. And that being an easy, no effort on your part perk that you can offer to subscribers. Like all those things are, exactly why we exist.

[00:27:33] and, a lot of publishers, they’re manually copying, pasting their newsletters over onto their WebPress site.

[00:27:39] Stewart: Yep.

[00:27:39] 

[00:27:39] Lesley: that whole two hours of your life you can get back when you use, when you use us. and yeah, like I, I guess like that stuff really excites me cuz it’s, it’s really cool, like when we hear about customers who, they’re like, oh, Thursday is our new Saturday.

[00:27:57] And, and then like we come in and, improve their processes and like set up the templates for them and it’s like, Thursday, new Saturday becomes like Thursday, one hour day of, for newsletters. And, yeah, and I, I, I guess like that’s really cool. And so if, if you have any listeners who are interested in, talking about that stuff, and it doesn’t really even have to be newsletter glue, I just like be happy to talk about newsletters.

[00:28:21] yeah. get in.

[00:28:22] Stewart: I think, it’d be great. It’d be well worth just having a quick refresher on news lyrically from an outsider’s perspective. So, news lyrically, is a WordPress plugin to streamline dramatically the process of creating newsletters for publishers, medium size and up smaller. Welcome to in that kind of.

[00:28:44] Generating your newsletters from blocks within the WordPress block editor. And those newsletters can be, and any of the standard WordPress blocks, headings, paragraphs, images, et cetera. So you can generate editorial ones that are kind of from the editor, whatever that message is. But also then there’s a whole series of other blocks for. Doing curation. So what you would’ve referred to as RSS earlier, that generates all the markup needed and sends it off to the email provider. whether that’s MailChimp, or any of the other big ones, active campaign, I’ve forgotten them all. I’ve all just left my head. but all that content exists on your site, so it can be, published anywhere you kind of want it to be as an archive.

[00:29:22] Or you even accessed over RSS in some ways. You could probably have your email newsletter be accessible over rss, if you really wanted to and you kind of knew what you were doing. which I think is great. and then because it’s on your WordPress site, you can tie it up to whatever membership solutions you’re using within your WordPress.

[00:29:40] so no lock into any of those and probably even. External tools, that we’ve, we’ve looked at for other bits and pieces, but I won’t mention right now that about right. Lesley?

[00:29:50] Lesley: Yes, that’s perfect.

[00:29:52] Stewart: Did I miss anything? Awesome. where can, where can people find out more about you and Newsletter Glue?

[00:29:59] Lesley: they can go to newsletter glue.com and find out more. there’s like a button to book a call as well. And again, like I said, even though it’s kind of a site for newsletter glue, if you want it, you just kind of. Chat about newsletters. I’m, I’d love to do that as well. That’s kind of how Stewart and I got, got to chatting and it’s, yeah, it’s fun.

[00:30:18] yeah. And then I’m also active on Twitter, at Lesley, l e s l e y underscore pizza. So if you wanted to chat with me there, that’s, that’ll be fun too.

[00:30:29] 

[00:30:29] Stewart: We’ll make sure those are all in the show notes so people can, can click through at their at their leisure. Lesley, thank you again for taking the time today. I really appreciate it. and hopefully speak to you really, really soon.

[00:30:41] Lesley: Thanks for having me on Stuart.

[00:30:43] Stewart: Good staff. Thanks. ​ 

[00:30:45] Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. Scale is available in all the usual podcast places.

[00:30:54] Even better. if you could leave us a review, that really helps us. If you’re interested in finding out more about me or Powered by coffee, you can find us on social media and again, in all the usual places, links are in the show notes. Scale is currently gonna come out every two weeks, and we will see you then.

Links

Twitter: @lesley_pizza, @newsletterglue

Website: newsletterglue.com