Welcome to our monthly newsletter, where we publish product updates and our favourite newsletter tips. Enjoy!
The next big feature we’re working on…
This past couple of months have seen us neck deep on incremental improvements to Newsletter Glue. And while it’s been really rewarding to make the product increasingly robust, Ahmed and I have been eager to start working on the major new features we’ve planned for this year.
The first big thing we’re working on this year is making our newsletter editor more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).
What’s the problem?
Currently, our newsletter editor is home to core blocks, Newsletter Glue blocks, external 3rd party blocks, site theme styling, and more.
We also encounter cases where a user has added 3rd party blocks into their newsletter which unsurprisingly break in email because we have no control over 3rd party blocks and hence can’t optimise them for email.
As a result, the style you see in the editor isn’t always what you get in the actual email version.
Our plans to fix this
After playing around with potential solutions, we eventually settled on building out all of our own custom blocks and filtering out 100% of external blocks, plugins and themes.
This means that, in the future, instead of using the core headings, text, image block, you’ll be using ours.
This will give us way more control and allow us to standardise designs significantly more.
What can you expect in the next few weeks/months?
We’ll be adding our new blocks into the newsletter editor a couple at a time. They’ll be given a beta label. It’ll be great if you can play around with them and let us know what you think.
Once all our blocks are ready, we’ll be turning off core blocks in our newsletter and template editors. We’ll ensure backward compatibility so that any existing core blocks will still work (even if you can’t add new core blocks going forward).
We’ll also have office hours to walk people through the changes and how they can swap out existing blocks with our new ones.
The future of Newsletter Glue
The future version of our newsletter editor will be more WYSIWYG – That is, what you see in the editor is what you’ll get in your inbox.
We’ll be adding more controls to each block to make them more powerful and give you more options without having to resort to custom code.
We’ll be refactoring the code on all our existing blocks to make them perform even better.
We’ll be updating the styling to make it look more clean and modern.
I hope you’re as excited about this as we are.
Product updates 🧰
📋 Check our changelog for a comprehensive look at everything we’ve shipped this month
Upcoming partner webinar 🔥
BuddyBoss is hosting a special webinar just for Newsletter Glue subscribers about creating a mobile app for your publication.
In this 40 minute presentation you’ll learn:
- How big publishers like New York Times get their readers to consume 10x as many articles on average and how you can too
- How niche publishers like Barron’s Investing Insights has added $200 a month in reliable recurring revenue
- How local publishers like Gujarati News in India and Hespress in Morocco have acquired 10-15 million users
- And how you can do the same with their new mobile app features.
This will be a live presentation taking place on Thursday 76th @ 6pm PT | 8pm ET.
I know I don’t usually promote other products, but I thought this was pretty cool as it’s specific to publishers (aka you). I’m interested in doing more partnerships like these in the future, specifically around cross-sharing tips and advice on growing publishing revenues.
Let me know if you find this beneficial!
That’s it for this product update. Thanks for reading.
Best,
Lesley
Built with Newsletter Glue.