newsletter stats
12%
subs
17%
open rate
62%
click rate
SUMMARY
Birgit Pauli-Haack, founder of Gutenberg Times, shares how Newsletter Glue halves her publishing time and improves open rates, click rates and site traffic. Her favourite features includes subscriber-only content and segmented publishing.
The problem: Publishing took us hours
Writing once in WordPress then again in Mailchimp took up a lot of time and energy.
I used to blog in WordPress and send emails in Mailchimp.
Having to do twice the work on two separate interfaces came at considerable mental and time cost.
As our readership increased, we outgrew this process, and I started looking for a more efficient way of working.
“With Newsletter Glue, I can combine two content types (blog and newsletter). This allowed me to go from three tools to one – a major productivity improvement. It reduces cognitive load and frees me up to focus on producing quality content.“
The solution: Use Newsletter glue to optimise workflow
We combined 3 tools into 1 and saved hours weekly.
We’ve kept our Mailchimp account. But instead of working inside the platform, we connect Mailchimp to WordPress with Newsletter Glue. Now, we write both blog and newsletter inside WordPress.
This way, we're able to process more information and curate links throughout the week. Our new workflow is much more integrated into our daily work.
“Now that our weekly newsletter is also published as a blog post, traffic has increased, and our content is no longer hidden in people’s inboxes, but freely available and searchable on the internet.“
Feature spotlight: Our favourite features
Here are the features we use weekly and love
Want these features for your own newsletter?
Want these features for your own newsletter?
I love using the pro blocks combined with the show/hide content feature.
I use these to give subscribers bonus newsletter-only content for the privilege to be in their inbox every Saturday.
Newsletter Metadata block
I use the Newsletter metadata block to add author info, issue number, reading time and a read online link to the top of each newsletter.
This takes seconds as all the information is auto-generated.
In particular, I like that I can direct my readers to an online version of the newsletter that lives directly on my site. This looks much more professional than redirecting to a Mailchimp archive.
I prefer to hide this block from the blog as there is already metadata generated by my blog theme. To do this, I simply toggled off Show in blog post, but keep it on in Show in email newsletter.
Callout cards
To do this, I use the Callout card block. This lets me create formatted cards in my newsletter quickly. In the example above, I've added a background colour and border radius to the callout card using the settings on the right hand panel.
As mentioned earlier, I only want this card in the newsletter, so I've hidden it from the blog post.
Subscriber forms
Newsletter Glue also has subscriber forms. I add these directly into the blog post, which only takes seconds.
The forms are automatically integrated with my email service. I can even add subscribers to a specific audience from a dropdown.
I prefer to hide the forms from the newsletter as people reading the newsletter are already subscribers.
Another powerful feature about the forms is that every aspect of it is editable inside the block editor. This makes editing the forms extremely intuitive and fast.
Send settings: Sending the same newsletter a second time to a different segment.
Rather than send all my subscribers the same newsletter, I like to customize the introductions based on where they subscribed.
For example, participants of our live Q&A who become newsletter subscribers receive an intro at the top of the newsletter that’s personalized for them.
Thankfully, this is easily done with Newsletter Glue. After publishing the first newsletter, I simply edit the intro, select a different segment, and send again.
This was even more useful on another project, where I had to send out content via two different Mailchimp accounts.
What would otherwise have been a major effort to copy and paste content from one account to another ended up taking a couple of minutes. With Newsletter Glue, I only had to change the API Key on the Settings page and everything was ready to go a second time.
The results: Hours saved, engagement and site traffic increased.
We save time, use fewer tools and get better results.
The two birds with one stone approach that Newsletter Glue enables works well for me. I reduced the number of tools I use from three to one and that’s a big win.
It all hinges on the behind-the-scenes transformation of WordPress blocks to Mailchimp email. That’s the real power of Newsletter Glue.
HTML in email is a big pain point for any email client (like Gmail) as well as for email providers (like Mailchimp), add to that mobile optimization, and I understand why email providers have to be so restrictive in their content creation tools.
"It’s a big task to abstract all the work that goes into making HTML work in emails. Newsletter Glue takes care of all of that for me, so that I can simply write my newsletter like I would a blog post."
Opens and click rates have increased. And we even get more readers on the site.
Now that the weekly round-up newsletter is also published on the Gutenberg Times as a blog post, traffic to the site has increased.
Better yet, all the information is no longer hidden in people’s inboxes, but freely available and searchable on the internet.
Open and click rates have also gone up. I also noticed that subscribers open the email multiple times over the week, returning to read the suggested links. Last week’s issue shattered the previous open-rate record with 63%.
I attribute a large part of this to the improvement in format and quality made possible by Newsletter Glue.