How to Automate Your Newsletter

Tyler, how's it going?

Hola. Hola.

All right. Hey, so let's see. Today you mentioned that you want to talk about how to automate your newsletter, right? And I thought, yeah, you know what? We should talk about that because it's a really important thing to do to keep yourself from going totally bananas.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do it.

All right, let's do it. Let's talk about it.

Welcome to the Paywall podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine magazine publishers. This episode of the Paywall podcast is brought to you by Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more@leakypaywall.com and now for today's episode.

Now, we did a case study a couple months ago. Two large news publishers, and one of the things that came out of it very, very clearly was, and we see this with other publish, is that your cadence, your newsletter cadence is part of the secret of converting paid subscribers. So what does that mean? That means that the more emails you push out there.

The newsletter goes more times per week. As an example, the more chances somebody has of clicking an article and seeing upgrade messaging on your website and seeing upgrade. If you're doing it right, you're seeing upgrade messaging in your free newsletter as well. Right. So this, you know, if you're a, if you're in the news publisher space, especially local news, you're probably publishing once per day, like, let's say Monday through Friday, maybe twice per day. If you're in the long form content space, let's say you're a magazine publisher or other long form. You're, you're, you should be publishing two to three times per week your newsletter, two to three times per week. And that seems to work pretty well. I, I, Yesterday I had a conversation with a magazine publisher. They're doing, excuse me, they're doing once per week. And now they're gonna, they're gonna move to twice per week. They're gonna look at pulling their archives into the mix and.

And bump things up. So you need to, so cadence makes a difference. And you know, if you're listening to this, you're probably thinking, oh, God, now I gotta, I gotta do more work.

And, and the answer is no, you can actually do less work and get this done.

Magically much faster and with better results. And the solution is, has been for a very long time. It still is today. You can absolutely do this with your email provider, like mailchimp or whatever is RSS feed So you can always go to, you can always set up your newsletter so that like mailchimp will scan your website, your blog, your, your newsfeed, whatever it is, pull the content and send it automatically. Now the problems with that is it doesn't look great. The styling limit, styling limitations are there. It's hard to like, you can't insert, you know, sponsors or advertisements in the middle of your content. There's just some awkwardness to it. And I think that's probably why most publishers have stayed away from it. And being a publisher, you're generally, you know, want to be careful about how you present your brand and your content. And those things are, are super duper important. So anyway, RSS is better than nothing, especially if you're in the news space. Like, if you're in the local news space, you don't need to worry so much about design. So RSS does work, but newsletters are getting better and better looking and you should still be able to automate. Okay.

So now I'm going to hand over to you, Tyler, because I know you've been in this local news space specifically for a long time with your local news publishers. I want to hear what's new with automation and can I just hand it over to you? How's that?

Yep, sounds good. So, yeah, we work with a lot of local news publishers. Oftentimes their staff is a person of one or two. Right. You're not dealing with a large team that can navigate building a newsletter every week or every day or whatever the cadence is, should be every day if you can. And so one thing that we've been doing with newsletter glue is sort of building out a more robust automation universe for the newsletter glue plugin, which allows you to build your newsletter inside of WordPress and has automations and all that thing, those things. So out of necessity, we decided to enhance the automations so that local news publishers can just publish their content and then their newsletters go out every 24 hours if new content.

Is available. Meanwhile, they get complete control over the design, the layout, the look, everything that publishers want control of that you don't get with RSS feeds through mailchimp or something else you still send with mailchimp. That's totally fine. We have publishers that use it, not a problem. But the design part is where it usually falls apart and where you end up having having issues. So why is it important to do that? So so many of our publishers, like I just mentioned, are, are small teams and they don't have time to send their newsletters and so they've got all this great content, but they're not traffic to their site through their newsletter through that free registration that we just talked about, which we talk about every, every moment of every day. It's the answer, it's the key to life right in, in the publishing universe. So.

We wanted a way for them to get that newsletter out as much as possible. And doing so requires automation. And because of that we've seen publishers in small towns like, you know, there's a trend line on this, like they turn on, turn on the automations and then they start to see not only.

More people coming to their website, but they're also seeing people pay for subscriptions because they're like, oh yeah, I forgot I signed up for that. And they're like oh yeah. Oh wow. Like the local high school's doing this and there's like the city hall is doing that and like oh my God, I had no clue. I forgot all about that. And you're pushing them back to the site, going through that funnel we talk about all the time. And they're converting to paid and the publisher is like, wow, like we can automate that and all we have to do is publish our content. Sign me up. So that's what we've been working on. And actually the.

Latest update of Newsletter Glue is actually coming out today when this podcast is recorded on November 21st.

Woo hoo. All right, awesome. Cool. One thing I will say is if you are listening to this and you're interested in this, we're happy to set up the Flow Letter system which is has Newsletter glue baked into it along with automated segmenting and automatic auto. The automatic login system.

Yeah.

So if you want to try it out, we'll set it up for free. You can monkey around with it and see if you like it.

Yeah, we've had some publishers come to us and ask about login issues. That's kind of a pain point with paywalls. And if you sign up for this kind of service like Flow Letter and you're sending your newsletters through our system, those pain points disappear. People can log in, there's no more issues. We've had customers who have corporate style customers that are on special VPN networks and like they're having issues with logins and all kinds of madness. Having Our Flow Letter FastPass Newsletter Glue universe installed on your, on your site will. We'll get rid of all that.

So.

All right, that's enough sailing.

Yeah, but no, it's a huge pain point and that's Part of the piece of automating your newsletter. And I think we may be one of the few, if not the only platform that has this feature. And it's been a game changer for our publishers. You're dealing with humans and humans, even with a perfectly operating system. When you're dealing with an email and a password, there's a, there's confusion, right. There's things that happen like, oh, I gotta log in. Well, sure, forget password. Or maybe they're trying to register instead of login. Like there's all sorts of potential confusions. But when you get a newsletter delivered to your mailbox and there's a link to an interesting article and you click that article and you're just, and you're a paid subscriber or you're a free registered reader, you're just logged in on the correct subscription level and you have access without any hassle. And that automation saves you, you the time. This is what this whole, what we're talking about here, saving you time. You don't have emails coming into your support desk. Right. Or at least you have a lot less coming into your support desk. Some publishers, you know, not dealing with a lot of that, some publishers dealing with all quite a lot of that kind of depends. But that just goes away. And we found that, that.

You know, talk about churn reduction, you know, you're taking away a pain point from your, your paid subscribers if they, you know, and, and we, we, we get this right? Like someone's having trouble logging in. Oh, they canceled their subscription. They got so frustrated. We hear this stuff like, you know, on a, on a semi regular basis. Yeah. That people get frustrated. Yeah. I'm not going to pay for something that's not, quote unquote, not working. Even though if it's working per person perfectly, they just can't log in for whatever reason. So that's part of the automation that we find is important to, you know, keeping people happy. It's a great experience. Churn reduction being the real key. And you know, the thing that you sort of talked about with newsletter glue, you know, this is a WordPress editor, right. This is a editor that you're not going to mailchimp or other email service provider and copying and pasting your content, right. You're literally in WordPress. You fire up the newsletter, you have your templates built, you have your advertising already set. Maybe, maybe you edit the editor's welcome at the top to personalize it for the next send. And if you're doing it manually, you're just Choosing the articles. So you're kind of like, even if you don't actually physically automate the newsletter, you can automate the production because you're not copying and pasting, you're literally cutting that out. What we're talking about now is full automation where you're literally just setting a schedule and it's like, hey, automate everything and send it out at 6am or whatever it is or the other thing I wanted to talk about is you don't have to automate everything. You can automate maybe just categories of content if it makes sense. So like on Mexico News Daily when I go to check out.

I get this list of regions of news that I can subscribe to in Mexico. Their newsletter, although they're using Flowletter and they're publishing in WordPress with newsletter glue and it's all working great. Their main newsletter is hand built, you know, with not having to copy and paste into mailchimp or whatever. But their category segments, their regional opt ins here are fully automated. So they kind of have a hybrid setup where the categories, these I think these are, go out once a week. And essentially what it does is it just scans the Yucatan Peninsula category of news. Okay, there's five articles for the week. Great. Friday, whatever the day is, it gets pushed out automatically. They don't have to do a thing, not even looking at it. It's just, it's just a newsletter that goes out, but it's segmented by category. So the other thing is, you know, automate your, like you can automate your segments of your content. And every publisher has, well, I shouldn't say every, but most publishers have segments of content. If it's local news, it's you know, sports and politics and you know, whatever. If it's, if you're a magazine publisher, it's generally have like buckets of content. And you think about what buckets make sense for automating. Maybe there's some publishers have like, you know, news kind of have a news feed that runs alongside sort of their main issue production or main articles. Well, maybe the newsfeed is something that really makes sense to fully automate. You know, it doesn't need a ton of styling. You can still work advertising in there and just put. But kind of relieve yourself of that mission.

So yeah, okay, yeah, and I'll just add to that. So local news publishers tend to have high open rates by default with their newsletters just because their content is already pretty niche and what they cover, this is taking it to the next level and you're creating even more targeted content based newsletters that people really want to see. So if you're looking at this on YouTube, you can see like the southwest region of Mexico, Mexico City. Like if you're interested in those regions and you select those regions, you're going to open that newsletter because it's very specific, it's something that you want to see. And then in turn, if there's an advertiser, a hotel chain or whatever in that region that wants to advertise, like okay, maybe, maybe the, the southwest and the Mexico City newsletter doesn't have as many as your, as your main newsletter, like in terms of subscribers, but the open rate might be 65%. And so like this, this is high value reader, you know, potential for placing advertising. So something to think about as you sort of segment out your newsletter into multiple categories without technically really have to really having to do any extra work to make it happen.

Yeah, opt in segments. I mean that's kind of our whole world, right? You opt into stuff. You're right. Really not really interested in, but really, really interested in. So you're opting in. You want, you want this stuff. Yep. Yeah. Segment, segment your content and automate it. That's, that's a good, that's, that's a good wise thing to do.

Sure.

Yeah.

And also getting publishers to see that you've sent the content once, that doesn't mean that everyone on your list opened the email and saw it. So it's okay to sort of recycle even stuff that's, that just happened or three or four days ago that you've already sent. It's okay to kind of recycle some of that stuff because not everyone on your list saw it. Maybe they missed their email, blah, blah, blah. A million reasons why they might not see it. So don't be afraid to recycle stuff that might seem stale to you, the publisher, but it's still very fresh to most people.

That's a hell of a pain point we should figure out how to solve because like my friend, you know, Rob at Daybreak, Daybreak News.

Right.

So he sends out a daily newsletter. It's a, so in our area it's a curated local news later called newsletter called Daybreak. And he curates like he pulls from Dartmouth, he pulls from, from the Valley, News from, from Reddit, from YouTube, from Listservs. He gets, people send him beautiful pictures. It's all sorts of random stuff that he has to curate and he puts out a really, really good curated newsletter. It's like a Super newsletter. But. And, I mean.

I support him. I love what he's doing. I'm reading maybe two a week just because the inflow to my inbox is the way it is. You know, light, you're busy, so even the stuff you want to read and you're paying for, you'll miss. Right. So how do we.

How do we solve the pain? Point of. Here's what you really need to read this week, even if you only saw one or two of our. I think that's. I think that's a really good point. Yeah.

And we have publishers that send out these, like, weekly roundups where they basically do just that. They take the last seven days of content that have already. All of it's been sent out already. But it acts as sort of like a Saturday newsletter that, oh, I can sit down and, like, catch up on all the stuff I didn't read because I was at work or I was dealing with school or whatever.

And.

And all of that's automated. Right. So.

Oh, okay. I was gonna ask you, can you automate that?

How do you do that? Yeah. And that's the way you do it. Like, I mean, if you've got content throughout the week that's going out automatically, why not just batch that stuff up and repackage it for a Saturday or a Sunday?

Are they doing it by category or tag or something like that?

The ones that are doing it are doing it with just, like, all of their content. Like the. These are local news publishers. So it's usually not like a thousand pages or anything.

But you can't have 50 articles.

No, you limit it. So, like, you know, maybe you'll allow up to three in this section, up to two in this section, up to four in this section. I see. Yeah. And so. And you can randomize it, too. So like, just to sort of add another layer of automation to it.

So, okay, I was thinking like, feature category or something like that. So, like, you would. So you'd have five. Let's say you have five newsletters, one per week and one a day. And then each newsletter, you just pick two features or something like that. And then that's just. It's just the feature category. And then at the end of the week, it's like all the feature categories for the last week go out in the weekly newsletter also makes a sense also.

Of course. Yeah. And most of the publishers do some kind of featured, like, tagging by default to be on the homepage and stuff.

So.

Yeah, why not. Why not recycle that and give you an easy low hanging fruit weekend review of all the news in the community.

Okay, I think that's the pod. If you are interested in trying out.

Newsletter Glue and flow letter, just send an email to infoakypaywall.com yes, that's a new email address.

Who's that?

And we'll just drop in. Tyler will drop in newsletter glue and you can start monkeying around with it and see if you like it.

Sounds great.

All right. Thanks Tyler. Catch you next time.

Thank you. Take care.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription strategy, go to leakypaywall. Com. See you next time.