Plugin of the Month: Newsletter Glue- Publish Newsletters the Way You Publish Posts

This time, we are introducing a plugin, Newsletter Glue as our wp-content.co Plugin of the month.

 Newsletter Glue is a freemium WordPress plugin that connects to MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, MailerLite, and Sendinblue and Sendy; and lets you send posts to subscribers inside the WordPress editor. It focuses on this one feature and tries to make it as smooth as possible.

Why do you need Newsletter Glue?

The core WordPress software does a lot of things well, but sending newsletters and emails isn’t one of them. If you want to grow an email list, send newsletters to your subscribers, you will need the help of a plugin. That’s where Newsletter Glue comes into the picture. This plugin option is focused on helping bloggers and writers publish simple newsletters. It lets you design your newsletters using the native WordPress block editor and then send them out to subscribers.

One of the distinct features of Newsletter Glue is that it allows you to publish an entire blog post directly to your newsletter, which helps you create your own sort of Substack system where you can cross-publish content to both your blog and newsletter. 

Newsletter Glue connects via API to an email provider. This gives you the best of both worlds – Advanced segmentation, automation, analytics and more via your favourite email service provider and a modern editing experience inside WordPress with an SEO-friendly newsletter archive that is on-brand with the rest of your blog.  

A Glance at Newsletter Glue’s Key Features

• Newsletter editor: Custom newsletter editor (using the Gutenberg block editor) that is optimised for newsletters and displays your newsletter theme.
• Pattern Editor: Easily create pattern templates for your newsletter. It’s as simple as writing the newsletter itself.
• Newsletter theme designer: Select colours, sizes and styles for your newsletter theme. Make it look exactly the way you want.
• Custom newsletter blocks: They’ve got author bylines, containers, metadata, subscriber forms and more to allow you to create a professional-looking newsletter without coding.
• Hide content from blog/newsletter: You can easily hide content from your blog or newsletter by putting it into one of your container blocks. This lets you hide subscriber-only promotions from your public newsletter post.

Rather than sending all the subscribers the same newsletter, you can also customize the introductions based on where they subscribed. For example, participants of a 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, you can simply edit the intro, select a different segment, and send it again.

The Working

You can purchase the plugin on the Newsletter Glue site starting at $149. Once you’ve activated the plugin, you’ll be taken through an onboarding sequence where you’ll connect to your email service provider and learn how to use Newsletter Glue. You can also download the free version of Newsletter Glue from the WordPress Repository and then install and activate it. Currently, the free version only integrates with Mailchimp and doesn’t include the newsletter and pattern editors. 

Once you have written your first newsletter, scroll down to Send as newsletter and toggle it on. This expands the feature to reveal additional settings. These will be filled by default during the onboarding wizard and you can also change them in the Newsletter Glue settings. All you need to look for is the green Your email is ready to publish notification. If you see it, you can simply publish your post, which will cause your newsletter to be sent! And that’s it! Once you publish your post, your newsletter will be sent!

To consider the full cost of this plugin, you’ll also need to take into consideration the price of your email service, which you need to manage subscribers and send emails. This will depend on the service that you’re using, the size of your list, and/or the number of emails you send.