In this episode, Gaby Galea talks to Lesley Sim, co-founder of Newsletter Glue, a WordPress plugin that helps users send newsletters from within their WordPress dashboard. They discuss what Newsletter Glue has to offer and the business side of starting a WordPress plugin and marketing it.
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Episode Highlights and Topics
- Newsletter Glue: Started with an old membership plugin with Mailchimp add-on.
- Timeline: Newsletter Glue launched as a free plugin in August, then turned pro.
- Newsletter Glue: makes writing, designing, publishing in WordPress faster and easier.
- How Newsletter Glue works: Sends blog posts as newsletters via email service providers.
- ESPs like Mailchimp: Specialize in deliverability and make sure bulk emails get sent.
- Patterns: Use your own and/or those supplied by Newsletter Glue.
- Show/Hide Feature: Decide what goes into a blog post and what goes into a newsletter.
- Clients: Combination of bloggers and eCommerce to newsrooms and publishers.
- Membership Plugins: Paid Memberships Pro, Restrict Content Pro, Memberful, Pico.
- Community/Connections: Learn how to grow your business from other plugin owners.
- Discovery Questionnaires: Get to know clients by changing how you ask them questions.
- Email vs. HTML: Newsletter Glue is optimized for email; HTML is for web sites.
- Framework: One-to-one, one-to-some, and one-to-many to market WordPress plugin.
- Newsletter Glue Affiliate Program: What works best – live streams and demos.
About Lesley Sim
Lesley is the co-founder of Newsletter Glue, a WordPress plugin that lets people publish newsletters from their blog. In previous lifetimes, she’s run her own digital marketing agency, co-owned a craft beer brewery, taught freediving professionally, worked at an ad agency, and spent way too many years as a government employee.
Resources/Links
- Newsletter Glue: 15% off first purchase (use coupon code: WPMayor)
- Lesley Sim’s Email: hi@newsletterglue.com
- Lesley Sim on Twitter: @lesley_pizza
- NewsletterGlue on Twitter: @NewsletterGlue
- Newsletter Glue on YouTube
- Mailchimp
Transcript
Gaby:
Hi, this is Gaby Galea, and welcome to the WP Mayor Podcast. In this week’s episode, we’ll be speaking with Lesley Sim. Lesley is the co-founder of Newsletter Glue, which is a WordPress plugin that helps you send newsletters from right within your WordPress dashboard. We’ll be speaking about what NewsletterGlue has to offer. I will also be talking about the business side of things such as starting a WordPress plugin, marketing it, and much much more.
I really enjoyed this episode with Leslie. She’s a wonderful person and I can’t wait for you guys to meet her. Hi, Lesley. It’s nice to have you on the show.
Lesley:
Thanks for having me.
Gaby:
It’s been a while now. We’ve been talking on email and Twitter. It’s nice to finally sit down and have a chat with you. Lesley, you’re the co-founder of Newsletter Glue.
Lesley:
Yup, that’s right.
Gaby:
Why don’t you just give us a little bit of an introduction on who you are and how Newsletter Glue started?
Lesley:
Newsletter Glue started from the ashes of an old plugin. My co-founder, Ahmed lives in Egypt. We started out with a membership plugin. We had some trouble getting that off the ground. I think we weren’t clear enough with our product differentiation and we didn’t do enough marketing at the start. We were having trouble with it and we were thinking about shutting it down.
In the process of shutting it down, I realized there was this add-on that we had created to the membership plugin, which was a MailChimp add-on that lets you send blog posts as newsletters via MailChimp. I had been using that for my own newsletter. I wasn’t too sad to see the membership plugin close down, but I was sad to see that specific add-on close. Then I realized, if I was sad about that, maybe other people would want that as well because I didn’t know where I could find a similar feature from.
With that insight, I did some early user discovery interviews. There was quite a lot of interest at the start and so we decided to go for it. That’s how Newsletter Glue was born.
Gaby:
Nice. Is it just you and Ahmed on the team or do you have other people?
Lesley:
It’s just the two of us.
Gaby:
Right, okay. How long has it been available? Have you started working on it? How long has it been?
Lesley:
Almost exactly a year, actually. We launched the free plugin in August last year, and then we launched the pro plugin at the start of December. We launched the free plugin with the intention to see if there was any interest in it. We got some early interest and that encouraged us to build out the pro version, which is what we focus on today.
Gaby:
Let’s talk a bit about how Newsletter Glue works. You mentioned that you can send blog posts as newsletters through MailChimp as well. You need that integration for it to actually work. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
Lesley:
Yeah. When we started, it was with MailChimp only. We now connect to seven—secretly eight, which I can talk about later on—email service providers, MailChimp, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, Sendy, and Sendinblue. Then the second one is Klaviyo, which we now connect to, but we haven’t released yet. Basically, if you use any of those email service providers, you don’t have to migrate to WordPress to use our connection. You can just connect by API and start publishing all your newsletters from WordPress.
This lets you write newsletters much quicker because a lot of these email service providers, the email builders are a bit clunkier to use. Writing in WordPress is a lot faster. It’s a lot easier and we give you a bunch of blocks to make that even faster. Even designing and all of that can be done really, really quickly.
For example, our customers say they save, on average, an hour of their newsletter every time they publish, when they use us instead of their old way of working. That’s what we do. We let you publish your newsletters inside WordPress, build templates using patterns.
Gaby:
Wasting an hour or more of their time setting up newsletters is quite a lot of time. That’s a great asset to have. I’ve never actually used services like MailChimp. Why don’t you give me a bit more information on what MailChimp does, let’s say, for example, one of the eight that you mentioned?
Lesley:
I guess you could consider MailChimp, they call them that type of software email service providers or ESPs. What it really does is lets you send bulk emails and lets you create segments and lists. For example, if you have an ecommerce business. Let’s say you own a pet shop and you have cat products, dog products, and fish products. You obviously don’t want to send your 100,000 customers all the same newsletters.
You want to send your 50,000 cat lovers, 25,000 dog lovers, and 25,000 fish lovers separate newsletters. Software like MailChimp lets you do that very, very easily. In contrast, if you are trying to send all of that out from your own personal email address like Gmail or something like that, not only will it be very tedious to send 25,000 emails, but also it will likely get flagged as spam just because of the way that you are doing it. Because you are sending it in bulk away.
Email service providers like MailChimp and the rest that I mentioned specialize in deliverability. So making sure that your bulk emails all get sent out, don’t get marked as spam. They also specialize in email segmenting and automation. Automation means, for example, when you buy something, again, from this pet shop, immediately you get added to a marketing email list. Then you can get that 25% off coupon or something like that.
Gaby:
So it gives you much more flexibility than regular main service providers. We currently use MailPoet on WP Mayor. Although it works, there are some things that are lacking. We are constantly looking at different solutions. This could definitely be one of them. So you’ve got MailChimp and then you’ve installed Newsletter Glue on your WordPress website. You mentioned the Block Editor. Is it all done there?
Lesley:
Yeah. I guess because we started the company just last year, we decided to do everything as modern as possible and use all the new Gutenberg stuff. That includes the Bucket, obviously, and a lot of their core components. We’re planning to move as much of the plugin itself to use the WordPress core components, using React, and all of the modern WordPress stuff that people can sometimes—it’s been quite controversial, but that we feel is where WordPress is moving towards. It was a great opportunity for us to get started at the forefront of the future of WordPress.
Gaby:
I’ve seen a lot of companies moving on towards the Block Editor side of things, even Themes. It’s the way WordPress is moving towards. Once I started building up my newsletter in Newsletter Glue, you mentioned patterns. Can I create my own or do I have to use the patterns that you supply with Newsletter Glue?
Lesley:
You can do both. It comes pre-installed with over a dozen header and footer patterns to get you started. Then after that, you can create your own patterns just by dragging and dropping in the Block Editor, and then we can save it as a pattern. It just makes it very, very easy to create little sections. For example, if you have two newsletters a week, one is an editorial, one long-form newsletter, and one is a weekly round up newsletter, then you can create slightly different patterns and templates and then just drag and drop them into the relevant newsletter and it makes everything much faster.
Gaby:
Right. And this is something you’d have to update every week or can it be updated on its own?
Lesley:
If you are adding new content, writing, and all that, then you wouldn’t have to edit on its own.
Gaby:
All right. How would this really work? You’re writing the post. You’ve written the post, you’ve published it. The next thing you want to do is send it to your subscribers in their email inbox. Do you have to start a new newsletter or is it all within the same blog post?
Lesley:
It’s up to you. We allow for both. We have customers who do both, actually. Some customers will write their blog post and then immediately just schedule that to be sent as a newsletter without touching it at all. Then you have others who are more intense about what they want to do. They have a lot of customizations.
We have a feature that’s called show/hide, which lets you decide what goes into the blog post and what goes into the newsletter. For example, if you—in the middle of your blog post—want to have a call out talking about subscribing to the newsletter, you obviously don’t want that to be in the newsletter itself. You can hide that from the newsletter and have that show up in the blog post.
In contrast, maybe you want to give each newsletter an introduction or let’s say a coupon code. In the middle of the newsletter, it’s like a subscribers only 20% off coupon code and you want to hide that from your blog post. You can turn that on in your newsletter and hide that from your blog post. Everything is just in that same newsletter and it’s just one or two different sections, which are different. You can do that inside the blog post very easily and send it up.
Gaby:
Wow, that’s a really good feature. You can just toggle it on and off. That’s great. Then for weekly roundups, I imagine those would be automated. Do you have to go in every week and update that or is it automatic?
Lesley:
Right now it’s not automatic, but we make it very easy as well. We have this bulk post embeds block. If you’re just sharing internal links, then you just search the name of the post that you wrote, then it comes up, and it pulls the featured image, the headline, and the excerpt immediately. Let’s say you’ve written or you’ve published five blog posts this week and you want to add that in, you just search each blog post to add, and then the whole thing is right there and it’s all perfectly formatted. That takes10 seconds or something, assuming you know the […] of your blog posts.
Gaby:
All right. Then I guess for statistics and all that, you then go to MailChimp. Yeah, I think that covers mostly what Newsletter Glue does, I imagine. What sorts of clients do you normally get? Are they more blog owners or do you also get eCommerce, for example, elearning for instance?
Lesley:
We get a combination of bloggers and ecommerce. We have membership site people, but I’m not sure if we have elearning people right now. We also get a lot of publishers or newsrooms, people who might run their local news site or something like that. We have a lot of WordPress people who write about the WordPress industry. A lot of them use us as well.
People, I guess, who already have a publishing platform and are looking to either graduate from their existing workflow, or they want to start doing everything more in WordPress and hate doing the back and forth, they tend to like us a lot.
Gaby:
Yeah, because, of course, you don’t need a whole new learning curve to learn how to set up newsletters on another platform. How beneficial is it to send posts through a newsletter rather than having it just on your website?
Lesley:
I guess it’s a distribution channel question. What I mean by that is, there are only a handful of distribution channels in the world. There are blogs, which the distribution is, I guess, Google search. People have discovered the blog online or maybe through sharing. Then you also have social media. People share the link to the blog. Then you have email. At a stretch, I don’t think most people do this, but I guess you also have SMS. That’s about it when it comes to digital stuff.
It depends on the person and how much bandwidth they have, obviously. For an established blogger, you want to make use of all the channels. You don’t want to just blog and have no social media presence. Anyone will tell you that that’s a bad idea.
Likewise, if you’re blogging, you also want to have email newsletters going out. But again, everybody is restrained with time and restrained with resources. You want to optimize that as much as possible. Being able to publish your blog post and at the same time spend a couple of minutes doing the newsletter and spend a couple of minutes doing your social media posting, I think that’s the ideal flow, which is where we come in.
Gaby:
Would you suggest sending the whole post, or just parts of it and then linking back to your website to get in those people coming in and maybe going to visit other posts on your websites?
Lesley:
This is really tricky. I think it really depends on the person’s strategy. We have a lot of people who just send the whole post out because they don’t care so much about trying to bring someone back onto their blog or website to take further action. These would be typically like publishers, editorial style newsletters, similar to the type of thing you would see on Substack, for example.
For those people, they just see email newsletters as a different medium. It’s like, wherever the audience wants to read their content, that’s where they’re going to be. They don’t care so much. They just want to make sure that the content is read. That’s one way of looking at it.
The other is if you were an ecommerce shop and you want people to go back to your site to either apply a coupon, check out a sale, and all of those things. Then you might want to cut off, might restrict some of the content, and get people to go back onto your site. Then also, for example, paid newsletters. Some of our customers do paid newsletters, and so they also want to direct people back to the site to read additional members-only content. It really depends on the strategy of the publisher and what they’re trying to do.
Gaby:
You mentioned paid newsletters. I was going to ask you about private newsletters. I imagine this is super easy to do with Newsletter Glue too.
Lesley:
Yup. We work well with a bunch of popular membership plugins, Paid Memberships Pro, Restrict Content Pro, Memberful, and Pico. Our users use all of these plugins to create their membership sites. We work very happily alongside those plugins.
Gaby:
Nice. Moving on to more of the business side of things. You mentioned you’ve been around for a year now. How are you with active installs? Have you seen rapid growth? How was your journey so far?
Lesley:
It’s been a roller coaster. Anyone starting a business will tell you that there are ups and downs. Some things that have been interesting for us is at the start, we had good active installs of the free plugin. Then we shifted, stopped working on the free plugin, and reduced the number of integrations. What I mean by that is we used to allow integrations to all the ESPs, all the email service providers on the free plugin.
Then we realized that that meant that not everyone would upgrade, so we started to restrict that. Now the free plugin only has MailChimp. The active installs kind of stalled and some even went down because once we limited integrations, not everyone wanted to use us. Learning about these things as we go has been really interesting, but also really tricky.
One of the things that I’ve really benefited from was trying to make more connections in the WordPress community and learn from other plugin owners to see what they’re doing, what I can learn from them, and how their business is different from mine. That has been really, really helpful for me to learn how to grow the business.
Gaby:
In fact, I’ve been seeing Newsletter Glue and your name pop up in various locations with Twitter or Slack. What are the main ways that you felt helped grow your business or create connections with other people in the WordPress community?
Lesley:
I think you nailed it in terms of channels, so Twitter and Slack. I’m a big fan of the Post Status Slack group. Anyone listening, if you’re a WordPress business owner, you should definitely check it out, especially if you run plugins or have an agency. On Twitter as well. I try to follow as many people with WordPress in their bio. That just lets me see more WordPress stuff come up day-to-day on my Twitter feed and helps me see what people care about. Then as I respond to them, I build relationships with people on Twitter. That has worked really well, actually.
Gaby:
I’m constantly trying to force myself to get a bit more out there on Twitter, especially. I’m not that used to it. It takes a while to get used to. But apart from learning from other business owners, you also mentioned you had user discovery questionnaires. How do you get to know what your clients need?
Lesley:
The first thing was reading The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. That was a mind-blowing thing for me. Because once I read that, I realized I was doing everything wrong and how to do it differently. The main thing that I took away from the book was that you should only ask questions that people can answer based on reality. You don’t want to ask a potential user, would you use this or what do you think of this?
Because then they’ll either say, oh, yeah, it’s really nice because they don’t want to hurt your feelings or it’s going to be awkward if they say they hate it. You’ll never really get a good answer from them. Likewise, if you ask them, how much would you pay for this? They will just give you some random answer, which is not realistic at all. Instead, he suggests asking questions based on what they’ve already done.
It’s like, have you searched for solutions like this before? For example, in our case, you mentioned MailPoet. Have you heard of MailPoet before? Have you searched for alternatives to MailPoet? That gives you a concrete answer from them. It helps you see if they have even looked for solutions within your niche. Likewise, it’s like, have you paid for anything like this before?
Because if they’re saying, oh, yeah, we’re already paying MailPoet $1000 a month. It’s like, great, then you’re my perfect customer. But if they say, I only ever used the MailChimp free plan, and actually, I don’t really even log into MailChimp ever, then even though they say that they like my plugin idea, they’re probably never going to convert. That was one of the huge mind-blowing things for me. Immediately, everything about the way that I ask questions changed, and the information that I got was a lot better.
The other thing was also just trying to make friends with as many of my customers as possible and providing really personal support. For example, I follow a lot of my customers’ personal newsletters. I can see how they’re using my plugin. Sometimes I even reply to the newsletters. If I notice something that they could be doing differently or improving a design thing, I’ll just reply, hey, I noticed this, which they always appreciate. I think doing that helps customers know that I actually care and actually want to improve.
They also feel less worried about sending me random feature requests. Something interesting that I realized is people actually feel scared to approach the plugin owner to say, hey, we have this feature. Hey, there’s this bug because they’re scared that the owner would just either ignore them, tell them we’re not going to work on it, or be hostile to them, which is sad and unfortunate. I try to be the other extreme, like very, very eager to help out however I can.
If it’s an easy thing to implement, we try to implement it very, very quickly. That just helps build a good relationship. I think that’s also why people are happy to talk about us on Twitter or even mention us in their own newsletters when they don’t have to.
Gaby:
I can say, I wasn’t in the WordPress community for a long time before I was an architect. Really getting into this space has really opened my eyes to knowing that there are actually people behind these plugins. When you’re just using them, you sometimes tend to forget, which is why I guess some people don’t reach out that much to the developers.
I’ve actually been involved in Spotlight for a while, which is an Instagram feed plugin, which the company RebelCode, the company behind WP Mayor has also developed. You know Mark. He was the guy who spearheaded that venture. One of the beautiful things that happened was actually seeing our customers using it. They give you ideas and they come up with these wonderful ways of how to use the features you’ve already got in different ways that you wouldn’t have expected. Have you noticed this in your clients?
Lesley:
Yeah. Sometimes when we’re doing support tickets, we’ll log into their sites or their staging sites and see how they set things up. It’s like, oh, you know what, they’re all doing this thing. I never imagined it.
A good example was when we first started, the whole idea was just sending blog posts as newsletters. There is no additional idea beyond that. But then, when we saw customers wanting to send a newsletter that’s separate from their blog posts and they were creating their own newsletter custom post type, in hindsight, that’s so obvious. But at the time, we didn’t think about it at all.
Now we have our own newsletter custom post type with its own separate archives and a whole bunch of customizations that we can do, just because now it’s a separate custom post type. That’s only because we talk to our customers. I secretly look at their sites when they ask for our support to see how they set things up. Definitely, it’s super fun and cool to learn from customers based on what they want.
Gaby:
Actually, something came to mind now. We actually use, for example, Elementor on our website. Would it be possible to use Elementor to create the newsletters or is it just only in the Block Editor that you can edit the newsletter?
Lesley:
You asked something that comes up fairly often. It’s a very tricky thing. The thing is that most site builders are optimized for the web. In contrast, all of our emails are optimized for email. HTML is a whole different monster. For us, actually, we have to do a lot of work behind the scenes to transform web-optimized HTML into email-optimized HTML. When you add a site builder in the middle of all of that, it very quickly breaks down. The short answer is no, but that’s the reasoning behind it.
Gaby:
I see, okay. I guess you can still keep the same branding and everything within the Block Editor to some extent. That should be fine. You mentioned Ahmed earlier on. What’s his role in the company?
Lesley:
Ahmed is the developer in the company. There’s just the two of us. I do everything that’s not code-related. I can’t code at all, except for very basic HTML. He takes care of all of that.
His experience is actually in membership plugins, which I guess is why he built our first project, which was a membership plugin. Also, he was the lead developer on Ultimate Member and I think User Profiles Pro. I can’t quite remember what that one was called. But he’s basically been developing membership plugins with hundreds of hundreds of thousands of users for the past decade.
Gaby:
I see. And you’ve come into the WordPress world recently, or have you been here for quite a while?
Lesley:
I started building WordPress sites in 2016. Before this, I ran a digital marketing agency and so many other tiny agencies out there in the world. We use WordPress to build sites for clients and to do marketing for clients. That’s my background.
Gaby:
What pushed you into creating WordPress plugins? It’s quite a different world, I imagine.
Lesley:
In 2019, I was getting sick and tired of running the agency. It was doing well, but it was just kind of getting to me. I always wanted to try my hand at software. Actually, I connected with Ahmed in Indie Hackers. He had written a forum looking for a co-founder. I replied to him and we started working together since then.
Gaby:
You started Newsletter Glue you mentioned with the free plugin, right? What then pushed you to go into the premium? Obviously, you’ve got the freemium setup that you have right now.
Lesley:
We always had the intention of building our commercial plugin. We wanted to build it into a business, not just a side project. We started with a free plugin just to test the waters, see if there would be any interest, and hoping if we put our plugin on the WordPress repository, wordpress.org, then we can see what the traffic and interest were from there.
Once we saw that there was interest, we decided to build out the pro plugin. Interestingly, now we are in this existential crisis trying to decide, do we continue doing the freemium business model with the free plugin in the WordPress repo and then pushing people to upgrade to the pro insider plugin? Or should we try to move to a free trial business model? Instead of encouraging people to use a free plugin, we get people onto our main site and give them a 14-day free trial, for example, and see if they want to upgrade from there.
Gaby:
What platform do you use to sell your plugin?
Lesley:
Right now we’re using Easy Digital Downloads, EDD.
Gaby:
How have you found that?
Lesley:
Good and bad. It’s very easy to set up right out of the box. You can start accepting payments. I guess, if you don’t do anything at all, you can start accepting payments within 10 minutes, maybe. But then the bad is that anything beyond that requires quite a lot of customization.
We spent quite a lot of time customizing our checkout. One of the big projects, which I’ve been procrastinating on is customizing our accounts, our customer accounts dashboard, which we haven’t touched at all. It’s out-of-the-box EDD. It’s not that user-friendly, I would say.
Gaby:
Back to the plugin. You mentioned you have the free version and the pro version. What are the key differences apart from the integrations? Is there anything else that changes between the two?
Lesley:
Actually, the differences are quite a lot. Because we’ve been having this existential crisis, we haven’t been working that much on the free plugin and trying to get new installs there. Like I mentioned earlier, we limited the integrations and all of that. Actually, just over the past three or four months, the amount of features in the pro plugin have really, really grown and the free plugin has stagnated.
The newsletter custom post type is not available in the free plugin. If you want to send stuff separately, you have to do it in the pro. We also have, I think, now seven or eight custom newsletter blocks in the pro plugin. Again, these are all email HTML optimized blocks. Anything that you send will not break, whether you’re using Gmail, Outlook, or any other email client.
You can’t build templates or patterns in the free version either. All the main features, I guess, that we talked about earlier, aren’t really available in the free version, and obviously, the email integrations as well. If you use anything aside from MailChimp, then you have to upgrade as well.
Gaby:
You mentioned you have a background in marketing. How do you go ahead and start marketing a WordPress plugin? What are your go-to areas?
Lesley:
I have this very, very simple framework, which I call one-to-one, one-to-some, and one-to-many. At the beginning of the life of a business, you have to start one-to-one. That’s user interviews. I’m reaching out to people one-on-one doing video calls, doing emails, and just being as close to the customer as possible to learn from what they want, what they don’t want, what they care about, and what they don’t. There isn’t really a way to scale that. You have to spend the time to just do it. That’s one-to-one. Then those people will slowly become your first customers as well.
One-to-some is one degree of separation, for example. Doing a podcast like this, live streams, or getting featured in newsletters, I would say that’s a one-to-some strategy. I know you or I know another newsletter writer who wants to feature my plugin. I can leverage their audiences to promote the plugin. That’s a lot of doing manual outreach, getting to know people in the community. I’m hoping that they help me market the plugin. That’s one-to-some.
Now we are in the transition to one-to-many, which is, for example, SEO and content marketing. That’s at the stage where I don’t know who is the referrer of my next customer. They might have heard of me from five different places before, then do something else, I’ve never heard of them, and then they just download the plugin. That’s one-too-many. There’s a lot more information, tutorials, and education that you have to do to get to that stage so that they never have to hear from you personally or speak to you. They are still able to find everything they need to make a purchasing decision.
That’s the broad framework that I’ve used to approach marketing the plugin. Like I said, we’re transitioning to the one-to-many now and realizing how much information, documentation, and blog posts that I have to write now. It’s very, very painful.
Gaby:
I assume affiliate marketing would then fit into that last category. You’ve got an affiliate program on Newsletter Glue too. How did you find that? How’s it going?
Lesley:
It’s going okay. I started it out with a one-to-some mindset in the sense that it was a closed affiliate program and only people who I know. If I know somebody, I know what their audience is like, and I’ve worked with them before like yourself, then I’ll invite them to become a part of our affiliate program. Now we’re moving towards one-to-many affiliate programs. That would mean that I don’t necessarily know the person.
That also, again, makes it trickier because I need to put a lot more resources on the affiliate dashboard so that people can just help themselves, which I don’t think I’ve currently done a good job of. For example, in your case, it’s very easy for you to just reach out to me or email me and say, hey, I need this, I need that. I even looked at what you had put up and then I helped make some changes and I sent you over the image. That’s a very one-to-some. I can’t do that if I have 1000 affiliates.
With the affiliate program, the thing that I found works the best is when I do live demos. Affiliates with a weekly live stream or something like that. Then I’m able to demo how it works, show the workflow, then people really get it. I’m quite excited about being able to publish newsletters in WordPress. That’s the style of affiliates that have worked best for us so far.
Gaby:
Yeah, live demos are one thing and videos as well are something that we really need to work on even on WP Mayor itself. You’ve tried it to yourself. Do you have a YouTube channel where people can go to?
Lesley:
I have a YouTube channel, but I mainly use it for hosting all the videos that we have in our documentation and our plugins. I need to get a lot better at doing YouTube videos, but it’s just so much work.
Gaby:
All right, I think we’ve covered a lot of things. Just to conclude, can you give us a bit of an idea of the Newsletter Glue pricing? I know you’ve also got a coupon code for our listeners.
Lesley:
We’re actually in the midst of changing our pricing structure, but I’ll give you what we have right now. Right now we’re broken down into 1 site license, 5, and 25. One site license is $76 a year. That’s much less than $10. It’s like $5, $6, $7 dollars a month.
The publisher is $141 a year for five sites. That’s best for someone who has multiple blogs that they regularly publish in or even a small freelancer agency. Then we have the agency license and that’s 25 sites license. That’s someone who has quite a large network of clients that they want to implement Newsletter Glue for. That’s what we have now.
Towards the end of the year, we’re going to change to add features in the different pricing tiers as well. For example, the new tier that we’re going to add is the newsroom tier. That’s for large newsrooms. They might have authors, editors, and a bunch of other different users. For that tier, we’ll have user permissions, which all the other tiers won’t have because they don’t need them.
Then we’ll also be having larger email integrations with them. For example, Klaviyo is going to go into our newsroom tier just because a smaller writer is never going to use Klaviyo because that’s quite an enterprise-level email service provider. Likewise, HubSpot and Pardot will all go into the newsroom tier. Then we’ll have a middle tier for publishers. Things like ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor will go into that tier. Then the writer will be simpler things like MailChimp, MailerLite, basically, email service providers that single bloggers will tend to use. That’s where we are moving to.
Gaby:
You mentioned a coupon code that you’ve got for readers. We’ve got a Newsletter Glue 15% off if you use the coupon code WPMayor. I’ll show it in the show notes and also link it to our website.
Lesley, what can I say? Thank you very much for being on the show and for sharing your expertise and knowledge. I look forward to many more conversations with you.
Lesley:
Yes, and super excited to see how the WP Mayor podcast takes off. In a few years, I’m sure it’s going to be the one that everyone listens to. I’m super honored to be one of the early guests of it.
Gaby:
I hope so. Thanks, Lesley.
Lesley:
Thanks.