235 - Use Newsletter Glue to create great emails... with Blocks!

Interview with Nathan Wrigley and Lesley Sim

DEAL ALERT – 15% off Newsletter Glue! Click here and use the code – WPBUILDS15.

This is a really great blocks product that I’m sure many of you are going to love. TL;DR you can create all your blog posts and emails at-the-same-time in the WordPress Block Editor.

So if you send out emails, via a service like Mailchimp, Active Campaign, Mailer Lite etc., then you know that it can be a pain to write content in a blog post and then copy portions of that over to that SaaS service. It’s a waste of your time.

What if it were possible to use the WordPress Block Editor to create your newsletters at the exact same time as you’re writing your blog posts? That would be nice, right? Well now you can with the Newsletter Glue plugin.

It feels to me like this plugin is really pushing the boundaries of what the Block Editor can do and opening our eyes to the fact that blocks are not just about laying out post and pages, they can also be used as containers of data which can be used in other ways.

So how does it work? You drag in blocks in your posts and decide if you want them to appear:

• in the newsletter and the post
• in the post only
• in the newsletter only

Think about that for a moment. No, really. Stop right now and think about it. It’s a really powerful thing. It means that you can create posts and newsletters that are broadly the same or wildly different.

Take the WP Builds newsletter (you have signed up for that right?). There would be no point in having the podcast player in a newsletter, it would literally do nothing, so I make that available only in the post that you’re reading now. In fact the text that you’re reading now does not even make it into the newsletter, it would be far too long! So I have a block with the podcast player in for the post, and show the main content there too, but only show the excerpt of the post in the newsletter.

It’s like the promise of Gutenberg is all wrapped up in this one, elegant little plugin.

So you build up your newsletters with these little blocks that come with the plugin (there’s a Pro version, which is what I’m using). The blocks are:

• Author byline
• Callout card
• Meta data
• Subscriber form
• Social embeds
• Post embeds
• Table (coming soon)

Each of these adds in some unique layout which you’d typically want to put in your newsletter. So you build them up and then what, you hit publish right…?

Wait a moment. There’s some settings that you’ll need to configure first.

You need to hook up your email service of choice. It’s the usual suspects, Mailchimp, MailerLite, Sendinblue, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Sendy or Campaign Monitor. I hope that’s got your covered.

Then you need to go into the settings and apply the styling that you want your Newsletter to have. It’s a WYSIWYG set of simple options and if your heart desires ultimate control, you can always add your own CSS to refine things to be ‘just so’.

Like I say, I’m really sold on this plugin and think that, if you give it a try, you will be too.

I would also like to add that Lesley has been incredibly helpful on the support side of things. Each and every time that I’ve run into an issue, she’s been there to get me sorted, and that’s great.

Mentioned in this podcast:

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