 First I want to thank Michelle for letting me borrow her laptop. I'm from Orlando, Florida, so I'm here for like a week going between a few cities in in New York and I really appreciate being able to pack light for this trip and I knew that there would be enough nerds here with laptops that I could just borrow one to give my presentation. So thank you all for sticking to the end of WordCamp Rochester. My name is David Wolfoff. I'm going to be talking about starting your own newsletter. A little bit of background about myself. I've been involved in the WordPress community since about 2011. I've been doing professional web development for a few years longer than that. And when it comes to newsletters, I have managed newsletters for a variety of clients for several companies that sell products directly, sell services or just have the newsletter itself be the product as far as news related newsletters. And I also just enjoy doing it on my own. I used to run one specifically for technology news. Now personally the one that I have on my slide here is just a personal weekly share about myself. But it's the one I feel like promoting not for any of my client ones because you don't need to get their email, so you can get mine. And outside of that professionally I do WordPress maintenance for a living. My company FixUp Fox and I'm also here today on behalf of SiteGround, one of the sponsors who actually has their own email marketing service. So what I plan on covering over the next short presentation is, first of all, if you have not started your own newsletter, why you might want to start one, give you some ideas about what you should write about. There's a few different personae of newsletter types and newsletter writers that we'll go over. I'm going to show you a few different tools for newsletter creation. Chances are you've heard of most of these tools already, but there's a few specific to WordPress that you might not have heard of. I want to show you how to set up a WordPress-based newsletter. Now, I'm not going to give you a step-by-step tutorial because one that would just exceed the amount of time that we have for presentation here, and also pretty much every newsletter service both has its very particular setups, but also a lot of things are the same. So one, it would be repetitive, but two, it would be, you know, if you don't use that specific tool it wouldn't apply to you. We're going to talk briefly about where you'll find subscribers, when you should send your newsletters, and finally once you have all of that going, who should you talk to when you want to build that up? I was always taught when it came to writing news-related newsletters that, you know, you need to ask those five Ws and I'm going to try to answer them all here. So there are four groups that I want to talk about because these are ones that have specifically been useful for me when I've been running newsletters. Those are building out a business. They are so you can stay independent doing them for personal enrichment, what I currently do, and also for finding your community. And I'm going to have some just example screenshots of a few of them that I personally receive because I also subscribe to a ton of newsletters. It's how I consume most of my content these days. Newsletters plus RSS feeds are my form of social media. You know, I'm not going to be seeing the links that someone has on their Twitter, Facebook, but I'll be getting them right to my inbox. I'm sure you've seen all the different stats about how sticky newsletters are, how much more open rates are in click rates versus people seeing your things on social media, how it's more likely once you get people on your newsletter sign up that you are able to sell things to them. So let's assume that you've gotten to that point. What are you going to do with your newsletter? If you already have a product, for instance, I love to paint little war game minis. I think I mentioned I'm a nerd earlier. And so I've already purchased things from this company. So I get their regular newsletter and it helps them maintain a connection with me. I get to see the new products that they are doing. It shows that they value their customers. Later on in their newsletters, they also show galleries of some of the things that their customers have painted, like we can submit our own pictures to them and they show them off in their newsletter. And I unfortunately have spent more money after getting these newsletters, which for the company itself is certainly what they're going after. You know, maybe that's not the best for my wallet, but it's nice that I feel a bit more of a connection to it and that I get to learn about things that I know I'm already interested in. You know, if somebody gives you their email and signs up for your newsletter, they already have indicated some interest in what you're doing. It's a lot easier to make a sale to somebody who already has expressed, yes, I want to know what you're selling. There is a wonderful podcast series that I love called Flash Forward. That podcast actually just ended recently, but the creator of that podcast, Rose Eveleth, she writes books, she has written some TV shows, she has a lot of different projects. And the main reason that I know about any of the projects that she has is that she maintains a regular newsletter talking about the things that she's doing. So she's able to directly connect with her audience. She runs this newsletter as a paid subscription so that you can get more information about what she's doing, join in to an exclusive community where you can interact with her and share in her work and offer your own feedback on her work. And she was also able to build a personal brand with this. So if you are focused on doing something for yourself as opposed to for another company, having a newsletter is a great way for you to build up your own brand as opposed to having to build up somebody else's. I found for myself, I'm able to talk to people who know me from WordPress events, for instance. And for better or worse, I'll say reputation or name precedes me with those specific people because they already have seen me elsewhere online. What I'm currently doing myself outside of my regular work for clients is I'm doing newsletters for personal enrichment. This one here is an example of a newsletter from a WordPress developer from Canada named Aruba Med. She writes about what she's doing in WordPress development. And that's kind of what I try to do myself as well. It's a good way for me to clarify my thinking. So it's a good way for me to, you know, if you start having an idea and then you start explaining it to somebody else, sometimes you have that like that spark of, oh, I didn't even think of that until I started telling someone else. I've had that same experience writing. I also get to keep in contact with friends. I get regular responses when I write my weekly newsletters. I will shout out to somebody, Allie Nimmins, who's not here, but a lot of you might know her. She responds to my newsletters like almost every week. And it's great because, like I said, I'm not on those social media, so at least I get to keep, you know, connection with somebody. And it's a really good way for me to keep in touch, know what's going on with people in a more direct way than just, you know, kind of being that drive-by. Hopefully you see it when you're scrolling your, put your feet on whatever social media platform. I feel like you get a bit deeper connection than just, you know, hitting like on someone's post when you reply to their newsletter. Which by the way, if you're regularly reading newsletters that are from an individual, you know, that aren't just from a company, hit the reply button. I love getting their responses. I know they do as well. And it's really nice just to have a real indication. I'm reading this. I like the thing that you're doing. And the final one, the final reason to write a newsletter that I want to share is finding your community. I apologize for the weird AI-generated image that looks really creepy. That was literally this week's episode of the Garbage Day newsletter, which is one of my favorites. But also, since he's discussing internet culture in his newsletter, it's always something bizarre and weird. There are so many things that I learn about that, honestly, I wish I didn't learn about. But also, I get to have an idea of, you know, what's going on with internet culture so that whenever someone shares with me a meme or something going on, I'll at least, you know, be a little more educated about it. I also subscribe to this newsletter in part because it's a very good community that's built up. It's a lot of people who are interested in the same types of things I'm interested in. It's a lot of people who do the same type of development work. It's people who work on the internet. And so it's a really good way to meet and talk with other people. That's a separate topic entirely, but building that community around your newsletter, around the work that you're doing is a great way to find new people and kind of like work together. I've literally, in this case, I've literally gotten a paid client from his discord through this newsletter and been able to talk about some of the things that I do, you know, for a living there. So presumably you are in here because you have an idea that you want to start a newsletter and maybe you already know why you might want to start it, whether it's for your business, for yourself, for your own clients. So you're going to need to choose what you want to write about. Myself personally, I talk about what I'm doing in my life, but I also talk about my business a bit. Since mine's a more personal newsletter that I'm sending outside of my work newsletter, I don't really talk about business a ton there. But when I would send them for my business and when I send them for my clients, I try to make sure that they focus on their industry expertise, the things that the people who are subscribing to them want to hear. So, you know, if I'm talking about for myself, I will talk to my friends about, you know, painting minis and the weird things on the internet. When I'm working with my clients, we don't really send that in the newsletters because that's not what their clients are going for. You know, one of my clients right now has a newsletter that they send out, which is more for informing their customers of their new products coming out. So, I'm not going to share, you know, here's what the people are individually doing at home, but they give me ideas on what new things are coming up in their industry. They attend a lot of industry events, and I get to kind of condense that and share it out so that their customers know where they can find them, you know, when they have new things going on. Sometimes they do have discounts and promotions going on that we can share as well. Basically, it's just trying to figure out whatever it is that your audience would be most interested in. You know, again, for my personal newsletter, I don't really have anything to promote that I'm like here. Go buy this and here's a coupon, but certainly for some of my clients, that's been a good way to drive new sales. There's a lot of different tools that you can use. I have personally used most of these ones myself. I say most of because there's actually the second WordPress one is a newer one from automatic that is very useful, but I haven't personally used. I'm sure you've probably heard of tools like MailChimp and Constant Contact and Substack. Button down is one that I find is the one that fewer people have heard of because it's more developer focused. By that I mean the way that the one person who makes it sells it is more for, oh, here's an API you can use and you can also write and mark down and here's how we handle sending and things like that. So he's certainly talking to a more developer focused audience, but it's a similar tool to the others and then as far as WordPress tools go, there's quite a few different newsletter sending tools that you can find by the plug-in repository. All of the ones that I listed here have free plans and then normally you just pay for more emails that you send. Whatever tool you use, the main purpose of a newsletter tool in my mind is sending those emails not from your own domain because most hosting companies will not look too kindly if you try sending hundreds or thousands of emails from your personal account and you'll probably get flagged for spam. So for the average company for all of the non-word press tools there, those ones handle email creation and email delivery. For the word press tools they handle email creation within your word press site which is my preference and then you will use some other third-party attachment probably to one of those ones on the first list to actually send them. The tool that I personally use on my site, I did not list because they recently did a price change that has priced them out of me recommending to the average person. Not to talk negative about a company but the reason I still use them is because I'm grandfathered and I also wouldn't be able to afford their new pricing, their more enterprise pricing just to send out personal newsletters. But also it would be, I'd be remiss not to mention that the company that I'm here with SiteGround has started an email marketing platform. It came out just about two months ago. You can do it directly from your hosting account if you have SiteGround hosting and if you are interested in looking at their marketing tools you can find it at siteground.com slash wordcamp. It's very much like again like a mail shimp or a constant contact you can create right from there but the nice thing is if you already have a hosting account it's already connected right to it, works through your website. So two of the popular WordPress newsletter building tools, I put screenshots of what they look like when you're editing up here because I wanted to make note that Newspack which is actually both of these are owned by Automatic who are onto WordPress.com but Newspack is one that they built, a newer one they built like for newsrooms that you can build with the block editor and by default I just opened it up and I just said give me the default template so I could show that it used a recent picture that I had in a blog post from WordCamp US. I don't even know if you can see it from here but you're up there but it's one of the pictures I took from our colored hair picture our dyed hair picture sorry yeah that was well it's really small too there's Michelle in the middle but yeah so that one just by default pulls up some content you know if you just want to share your recent blog posts the other one mail poet has been around for quite a while and is actually part of WooCommerce now so one if you use WooCommerce to do sales there's a lot of integrations into it that can automatically send emails to people based on if they've made a purchase or not and if you have any promotions going on you can automatically have them sent to your mailing lists so if you happen to use WooCommerce already that's a great one to look into just because it already integrates very heavily the one negative that I have for mail poet is at this point having used the full site editor and the blog editor for so long it admittedly feels a bit outdated to have to like drag widgets in and use the the old editor like that it takes a lot more time for me to edit my newsletters there but they do send very well so you've decided you're going to create a newsletter you've chosen a tool that you're going to use you started setting it up where are you going to find subscribers for your newsletter for me the way that I find most subscribers for my personal newsletter was to promote on my social media page and you know basically on my social media accounts Twitter Macedon things like that and also having sign ups easy to find on your website I also just want to make sure that people know who I am by that I mean you know for my personal one I'm not going to be like oh you all have to subscribe to this but by all means if you want to please go to my website and subscribe and but I what I try to do is incentivize that people share my newsletters at the end of all my newsletters I have a message with an easy way to forward it to other people which will also include link to the sign up page I have RSS setup on mine because I know a lot of people who just want to get the content and not have to worry about it coming to their email inbox for me it doesn't really matter if it goes to the inbox RSS feed you know as long as people are reading it for my clients they have it set up where people will get have the ability to sign up for the newsletter when they sign in for forms sorry when they do contact forms on the website make sure you are doing things like double opt-in and you have people specifically opt-in to a newsletter not only is it not only is it against a lot of things like for instance GDPR to automatically opt people into a newsletter but also you're going to get a lot of people who are upset that they don't ever remember signing up for it are going to hit unsubscribe or hit spam and in the end that's going to do a lot more harm for you than if you just you know ask them in the first place I would much rather have you know 10 people who want to read what I'm sending as opposed to 100 people that don't want to and end up marking his spam oh which application I'm using I'm using a plugin called newsletter glue it's it's very similar I would compare it more to news pack than to a mail poet they work very similarly I just really I really enjoyed it I really enjoyed working with the team there but earlier this year they haven't changed their pricing model they mainly focus on enterprise clients which is not a bad thing for them but I also cannot just you know say you should all use this for a tool that I personally also is just a bit pricier than I would pay for sending personal newsletters yes these newsletter applications do have analytics that you can look at some of them have analytics built right into them some of them have analytics with whatever third-party sending application so for instance the one I use is called newsletter glue it does not actually send the newsletters it creates the newsletters I use that to create newsletters via wordpress and then I have it connected to a third-party newsletter sending service to actually send them out to people in which case whichever service you have whatever analytics that they provide I personally use a tool called sendy it is a self-hosted one that sends email by Amazon it's it's like a one-time fee that you buy it you set it up and then you pay monthly for Amazon which Amazon's email sending service is you're going to spend under a dollar for every like thousand emails you send it's it's very cheap to send it most other platforms let's say like MailChimp or something they have I believe 500 free subscribers something like that and then 2500 free newsletters or emails sent out per month and then they start pricing based on how many emails you send that's most platforms just going back real quick one like MailPoet they offer their own sending service that you can use directly there's they give you 1,000 free subscribers and I believe 10,000 emails for free per month and then you know from that again you would pay on from there but if you don't want to use their email sending service you can still connect it to a third party application and that's going to be most of the newsletter tools that you find if they're not like any of them that I listed that are WordPress tools most of them will have a MailChimp integration a constant contact a web or all of the large other companies so that one if you're already using one of those other companies you just have something to make your newsletters easier and then two you just have your own options to you know choose who you want to work with absolutely yeah so you're going to be able to get some data directly in in both news pack and MailPoet as an example here you can get some data from them directly but you're going to get much more fine-grained data from whichever sending platform you're using from them so I'll get some email I'll get some info from MailPoet if I'm using MailChimp for instance but then if I actually go to my MailChimp account that's doing the sending I'll get the much more fine-grained data so it really depends on it depends on what data you're trying to get I've been very happy with the data that I get from sendee it has a really easy to use dashboard that lets me see you know who's getting it where they're at who's opening it what are they clicking on things like that and I also like sendee in that I can easily say that I want anonymized data only because I do want to get an idea of how many people are opening it but I also don't really care about who specifically is opening it I would rather just let them have their privacy for that but yeah they want to know sorry where what's donations ah yes yes yes you would just have some sort of click tracking set up in the newsletter if you want to sorry to repeat the question for the camera being able to get analytics tracking donations for for client I would just have some sort of tracking on the specific url that they're going to most every tool here is going to automatically do it for every link that you have in your newsletter and so you just choose you know whichever link that you want to track and if you choose not to have anonymized data you can get more fine-grain data about you know who's what what other links they're clicking on when they get there where they're coming from the people who are you know opening it and clicking on it for myself I just want to see you know what percentage of people are opening it what percentage are clicking and then you know be able to see over time if that changes um you can also use that to uh I don't personally use it you know my my personal newsletter I don't do this but you can use that data to then put them into specific funnels um so all of these platforms have the ability to create a specific subscriber list um you can either integrate that with um a third party tool if you've used like uh again mailchimp constant contact any of those other big platforms you've seen that you can have you know a list of a thousand people and then you can also put them into sub lists uh you can do that with these as well and so you can say you know I only want to send this one to the specific uh cohort and I'm not really uh I briefly touched on it but uh all of the ones that I've mentioned also have automated emails that can be sent um you know again mail poets the one I focus on mainly because they have such strong integration with WooCommerce that you can send a lot of automated emails based on specific WooCommerce actions um which I know that you're asking about donations but I could say uh you know my WooCommerce site sells physical products and digital products and I want to send a different type of newsletter for the people who want who buy something physical product from A versus digital or who buy things based on this certain sale or you know whatever thing is important for us to track um so something that does not actually have a clear answer is when should you send your newsletters uh because any advice anybody gives you on when the right time to send a newsletter is is based on either a very specific uh idea that they have or a very specific newsletter or is just based on a feeling I guess I would say um so by that I mean I'm giving some ideas about when you might want to send them but none of these things are hard festivals no one has a great answer for when the right time to send is uh it really depends upon your specific uh subscriber list and it really depends on what it is that you're talking about um I mean you know I know that uh that the idea is that there's a lot of people who will just not get to all of the email that makes it to their inbox um I'm going to read every newsletter that gets or at least I'm going to open every newsletter that gets sent to me at some point or another um but you know not everybody's like that uh so again everything that I uh say here the ideas of um you know what what times you should avoid if it's something that you're sending to people who are reading it on behalf of their businesses maybe avoid the start and end of the week um if these are uh if you're sending something that's more personal and that's for people who might have busier lifestyles avoiding the weekends um again all these things are not rules they are general ideas the main reason I want to stress that is I've seen so many people say oh you have to do this you have to do that and a big problem that I've seen is all of the people who will use uh HubSpot or MailChimp or Constant Contact all of them say oh send on Tuesday or Thursday morning from 9 to 11 a.m that's the best time to get in someone's inbox but they have so many people who follow those rules they even have um if you use Mail uh MailChimp they actually have um a sending service that you can use and not just to pick on them but they have a thing that you can use that says you choose the best time for me to send this and like they randomize it a bit but that just means that they're sending a large number of emails from different companies at basically the same time um you know it's like if you if you're deciding uh when you want to drive somewhere and you know that uh during rush hour it's when everybody is either going to work or getting off of work uh and so you know everyone decided they need to be on the highway at the same time um it it would be the same way if you just listen to what these companies are saying and everyone does it then it's going to make it even worse that you're all just going to send at the same time um so what I would really suggest is ab testing uh this can be as simple as you just manually trying different times a day in different days of week um and it could be more complex you know using the analytics and using a platform that will randomize sending times to track it um also these things don't really matter until you have a larger list built up you know if you have under I would say several hundred a thousand subscribers at least if you have under that any analytics that you're going to get in terms of when the best time to send are probably not going to be causal um that's one problem I find when people are trying to do any sort of analytics work that's based on such a small sample size is that you're not going to get any very useful data um and then I also want to talk about you know who you might talk to about building up your newsletter uh so a lot of people um will think I need to find other people who are in a similar field and uh you know and share with them and you might not know where to find those people these are two services that I have used find newsletters.com and lettergrowth.com both of them you can freely access and you can also freely submit your own newsletters to um since you can freely submit your own newsletters to them it does mean that you're gonna have to take a little bit more time to manually look through them you know to find people who are actually regularly sending out quality content newsletters but anybody who puts themselves onto these platforms is also indicating that they are open to cross promotion look for somebody who has a similar mailing list size to you who is in a similar space um because it's one of those things where it's not really direct competition if I'm already interested in you know specific topic I'm probably interested in hearing about it for more than one person um so you know if I'm if I'm talking about uh one of the examples I use was internet culture I'm gonna look for other internet culture critics to talk to I'm probably not going to look for someone doing like um uh auto sales or something you know I'm not gonna look for someone who's completely different style um but again the reason I suggest these two is because both of them are free to use and free to view but that just means you need to do more due diligence on your part uh what I think is a lot better in the long term is to form one-on-one connections with other people um sometimes it's really hard to do that uh if you're doing this on behalf of a client you know I can't I'm not going to the trade shows that my clients are to make the kind of networking connections that I make here uh so I can't go up to people and say oh hey you're also in this industry um you know check out our newsletter uh but if you're writing it for yourself that's honestly what I would suggest doing I spend all my time at word camps talking to other people about what we do for work even the other people who do website maintenance like me I don't really consider competitors necessarily because you know you're going to find somebody who does something similar but there's enough work to go around um same thing same thing here uh I find that I'm not going to compete with somebody when we're talking about the same topics because it's much more likely we have audiences who want to hear from more people about the same topic and that's everything I had to cover um but I have some time for questions because uh I know you had a few and if anyone has any other questions please yeah sorry you're slow no you're slow sorry yeah no no go for it sorry you're quick yes most of the spam I get through my website is we'd like to submit a guest post to your site yes so how do I become that person without being spamming uh the question is how do you write guest posts for someone else's newsletter uh or how do you find people who will let you write guest posts without being spammy um in my case it has been uh again they're directly connecting with other people um it does take more time but if they know you as a person you're more likely to be able to do writing for them um you know I've written pieces for some wordpress newsletters for instance and it's been a lot easier for me to show that I'm a real person who knows about wordpress and has something to write about um that's where I've personally done um uh uh done for other newsletters for uh writing guest posts I haven't done any for any of my clients because again I'm not you know in their industry directly uh I definitely I I agree I wouldn't send out just a cold email to somebody if they have no idea who you are because that's the same kind of spam I mainly get on my forms too I also love the emails that I get for websites that either don't have a website or are not a normal website like um like I host a mastodon instance and I regularly get emails there that say oh I'm gonna write a guest post for your website like you know it's obviously it's spam but I'm like what are you talking about there's no posts here okay yeah just uh um repeat that uh go directly to the website of a company that you might want to guest post for and see if they already have a form available for guest posting and that's a great example I do remember seeing master wp would specifically ask people if they want a guest post uh so the question is what analytic tools would you use to work out what time to send uh your newsletter um like I said I really wanted to stress on that one that that that is something that I really feel that people place more importance on than there's benefit to as in um most companies that say this is the best time to send they're usually talking about maybe a few percentage points difference in clicking uh click through which isn't nothing but also isn't um there's no like there's no magic trick for that uh as far as analytics uh as far as analytics for that most newsletter sending platforms you can do some sort of tracking based on when you send your newsletters so by that I mean um I'm gonna use MailChimp and as as an example that I know that you can look and see your open rates based on days um I for myself I simply just do it since I'm not using a separate platform I'm using um you know my platform as analytics built in I just kind of look to make sure that there's a healthy click rate uh what I'm defining by healthy is if I'm seeing that uh the number hasn't dramatically gone down from you know some other time uh which quite honestly usually just means that something broke in the newsletter um so I guess my answer for what analytics you would use is is whatever platform um you're sending with has a good portion of them allow you to search based on not search sorry uh view based on time of day and day of week but I don't have like an exhaustive list of which ones do and don't most of them they will present that right in like their sales page yeah I have a question yes the question is will I make this presentation public the answer is it basically already is public you can go to my newsletter page to get more info I actually um I didn't have it prepared in time for this weekend but I have a a guide that's basically this info and some other info with direct links that I'm going to be making as a separate page entirely um but you can go there to get more info and I'm actually um now that the event's passed I'm going to put this up like as a specific link on that page as well um I'm hosting I host my slides directly on my own website so that you can access them you know whenever they're I'm supposed to download them and I just want to touch upon what you said about making the time to do your own newsletter it can be challenging to make the time to add anything to your business the one thing that I found most successful um and I'm talking on behalf of myself not on behalf of newsletters that I'm doing for someone paying me to do them because I think that's a good enough reason to do those ones uh but the ones where you're doing them for your own business and you wonder if you have enough time for it um I just keep a document open that every time I have an idea every time I have a link every time I have something to add I just add it there it reduces the friction of having to add it when I say I keep a document open I actually have it open in my newsletter editing uh app on my website um so I already have things getting added there so when it comes time to assemble it I've done you know half the work already because you're already thinking oh I saw this thing that I want to share or that I want to talk about just remembering to write it down it certainly is a habit you have to form um but when when you do that you know it makes it take a lot less work to actually hit send day of and sorry I had a question Tracy no change your mind opinion of rss email campaigns uh can you be more specific about so rather than going into your newsletter tool writing something specifically to be sent to your subscribers you just take your wordpress rss feed have it convert to an email sent that way you publish on wordpress it shows up on the website and then it gets emailed to uh so question is um what's my take on rss newsletter campaigns where it takes the feed from your website and sends it directly to somebody via rss um I personally don't do that myself mainly because my thought is if somebody wants to I mean I think I provide a screenshot of my own um that that green box there sorry I know it's probably a little small the green box is literally do you want to get this as rss here's the link um because for me personally you know if people want to get the info um whatever way suits them uh so I don't want to just take the things that I posted and have it automatically send to people uh that would get I I've subscribed to newsletters like that and I've unsubscribed from them because I'm like I can read your stuff elsewhere if I want to it's nice to know when someone updates but it doesn't feel personalized and for me newsletters uh I want them to feel a little bit more personal um I don't mean personalized like I'm going to write specifically to you but that I'm not just thinking oh you know I wrote a blog post and I'm going to just post links to it everywhere um so what's the difference between the blue box and the green box in this case the blue box lets you uh sign up to get it directly to your inbox the green box is a link to get it for your rss reader I realize it's not exactly the question that you asked about having the rss send them um the post specifically um same content yeah but some people want to get it to their inbox and some people just want to use an rss reader um I actually do both because my rss reader also ingest newsletters but not all them do but but uh not everybody I've found that not everybody wants to they want to have different contexts for when they're reading um so you know my my inbox should be the context should be here's where I'm doing work and uh for everybody you know not for everybody that's where they also want to do their reading um I know it's been quite a while now but however many years ago something like eight nine years ago uh Gmail introduced the different tabs uh that you know are on by default when you set up your account um and it tries to you know automatically sort them based on where it thinks that should go um that has done a lot to damage people's ability to get their newsletters uh to the right people because not everybody checks all those tabs or you might go in and uh you know again I try to go into my inbox specifically for work um and so I don't want those things crowding it up in there I actually have a separate inbox that I personally use for all the newsletters I subscribe to uh different context it's just you know I could do a whole presentation on how I manage email just because it's emails frustrating um that said I mean that's I've gotten the most value myself from every company that I follow through their newsletters as opposed to um I'm not going to see everything someone posts to social platforms none of us are you know we know how that the different uh every social media company prioritizes what they send um and what people see based on whatever their algorithm thinks and I again I would rather have a few people who subscribe to my client's newsletters directly uh than you know more people that are on their social media because you're going to get a lot more engagement that way um like when I look at my analytics for other social platforms like when you can see how your uh well when you could see how your tweets were performing uh and things like that you know you would get one percent of people see the things that you're posting and then I look at my newsletters and you know I'm getting 60 open rates um I would much rather have that I think I actually I was there I think we have time for like one more so how do I feel about uh pop-ups on the website um you know it's funny actually somebody uh was talking to me earlier today about pop-ups on the website for marketing uh which is the average person does not like them right you go to a website you find the pop-up annoying however all your analytics are going to tell you and every company's going to tell you they uh they work so much better than not having them you know they do convert so that's how I feel that that sigh is how I feel about them they can be frustrating I would make them personally not um not overbearing like I'm fine with having exit intent you know when I go that looks like I'm going to go away from page that a pop-up comes up or if I'm there on the page scroll down far enough whatever thing but I also don't personally want it like uh whether they have like the wiggle animations or anything uh that just make them more obnoxious um I'm sorry uh if your browser choice is brave uh which is a browser uh that does some ad blocking of its own among other things um I would make sure that you always have multiple ways for you to sign up for the newsletter actually that'd be my that would be my advice elsewhere have them in your posts have them you know in the footer of your site um I also have it for some of my personal sites as I have an archive I have that dedicated page that I use a screenshot there they have multiple ways for people to sign up uh not just the pop-up but yeah there's my long answer is that uh I'm personally not a huge fan but I'm also aware that they convert so much better than not having them so the the advice that I would say is at least you know use that power for good and not evil you're not going to find one on my personal site because it's a personal newsletter like I'm not you know but uh I I yeah I might use them for client sites um if you are interested in uh pop-ups for um for newsletters or for anything else on your sites uh there are some um popular tools in the WordPress space um there's a opt-in monster is uh one that has a variety of different ways that you can get started uh making pop-ups for your site again they don't have to be for newsletters they can be for other things um and then there's also a more lightweight one that you host directly on your site called pop-up builder um has a variety of extensions for it um one reason I would suggest pop-up builder for people is that uh it starts free and then moves up from there if you want to you know get other things whereas uh the other one involves um paying to use their API like a monthly subscription that's it I mean you know it's obviously worth it if it's for your business and I think that is uh yeah that's time thank you