If you were an email subscriber for my publication, you may have noticed that we discontinued the newsletter. My partner on that is UpRipple and Adam is actually doing a ton of refactoring of the platform and integrating some other tools with it, including a CRM.
The beauty of my newsletter was that I didn’t actually have to build anything – the system just grabbed my latest posts, my podcast feed, and some integrated some other details into a well-designed email. I don’t have any site sponsors and I’m quite selective of the ads that I place on the site to ensure I keep my readers engaged. As a result, I don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars to deploy an email newsletter.
Jetpack Subscribe to Site
I’ve since moved my email to Jetpack. It doesn’t offer a means of uploading my old subscribers, so you’ll need to sign up again.
You may not realize it, but Jetpack (even the free version) includes email subscriptions. It’s not a well-promoted feature, though, so you’ll have to enable it.
- Sign up for Jetpack.
- Upload the Jetpack plugin to your site.
- Connect your site to your WordPress account.
- Enable Subscriptions by navigating to Jetpack → Settings → Discussion.
The service produces a beautiful, responsive email that instantly sends the post to your site’s subscribers. Here’s a view of my most recent newsletter:
It’s not a perfect system, and has some noticeable limitations:
- I’m not able to migrate any of my old subscribers because their invitation system only allows 10 email addresses at a time.
- The emails don’t include the featured image. I’ve spoken to their support team and that’s not a feature they’re likely to add (I wish they would). They only take the author, the date, the title, and the body of the article.
- The author photo is pulled from Gravatar, even if you have your own author image on the site. Since I have a lot of submissions for my authors, I typically have to manage this locally and can’t get folks to register for Gravatar.
- While a beautiful, responsive email, some of the formatting of elements is a little off, like embedded Tweets and embedded videos that don’t always show a thumbnail. It would be nice if they embedded a play button on the video stills as well.
- I’m not able to customize the reply email address. Everything comes from donotreply@wordpress.com. It would be nice if I were able to add a reply email address to these emails, even if they did come from WordPress.
- I’m surprised that the subject line doesn’t include the publication name. It’s just [New post] with the article title. I wish it were [Martech Zone] with the article title but there’s no means of customizing it. The reply name does have the site name.
That said, it’s still a great means of sending your subscribers your latest posts in a nice email.
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