What newsletter publishing features are you looking for?

I'm about to start building the paid version of Newsletter Glue (the free version just launched).

With the paid version of Newsletter Glue, my goal is to help make your newsletter stand out and grow with features that are usually custom coded and only exist for massive newsletters with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

To do that, I'd love to hear what sort of features you've seen on other newsletters that you'd like to add to your own newsletter to help it grow and stand out.

But before we go further, many of you might not know what the free version of Newsletter Glue does. So let me quickly explain:

Newsletter Glue is a WordPress plugin that lets you create and send a post as an email newsletter without leaving WordPress.
We currently connect to Mailchimp and MailerLite.

With the pro version of Newsletter Glue, I plan to build Gutenberg blocks specially for newsletters. Each block is a feature that you can add to your newsletter, that's similar to one you've seen on a big newsletter.

But in order to do that, I need to know...

What features do your favourite newsletters have that you wish you had?

Over time, I've built up a mental checklist of the features that make certain newsletters stand out. Features I wish my own newsletter had.

Let me share them with you here, to kickstart this discussion...

Here are some of the features I like from some big and beloved newsletters:

Dense Discovery

My all time favourite newsletter

• Archive -- I love his archive that's both easy to read and share (by the way, you can already achieve this with the free version of Newsletter Glue. When you publish blog posts as newsletters, your blog archives becomes your newsletter archives)
• Comments section -- Since it's a blog post, there's a comments section for each issue. But what's cool is that he has a button to take you to the comments section in his email newsletter. What a great and seamless way to interact with readers at scale.
  
• Sponsored ads -- DD has a great ad section. With an ad manager powered by Google sheets. The format makes it super easy to know how much it costs to sponsor a post, and which slots are available. I don't know how much else he has automated on the back end, but I imagine it'd be pretty cool if people could fill it out a form, pick a slot and have it automatically show up in his newsletter.
  
  

Next Draft

• Every article he shares comes with social sharing buttons, so you can easily share any article in his newsletter.
  

Substack

(yes, I know this is a platform, not a newsletter, but they have some innovative features tucked away!)

• Substack lets you show an author's profile as well as a heart button to like the post. Really handy for newsletters with multiple authors, or if you just want to add a by-line. Here's a screenshot of what this looks like from The Margins, which is my favourite Substack newsletter.
  
• They also have a killer footer with the row of heart, share, read in web browser icons. Followed by a big fat share button at the bottom of each issue. All of this is great for engagement!
  

The Hustle

• Emoji NPS polls -- not only do you get a better sense for what people want, click-throughs also increase engagement which tells gmail that your email shouldn't go to spam/promotions folder
  
• Referrals
  (To be upfront: I know referrals are really popular, but it's not something I intend to build in the near future. Check out SparkLoop or Firewards if you're looking for referrals)
  

Where I'm going with all this

Normally, us mere mortals wouldn't have access to these features unless we happened to also be developers with a lot of spare time on our hands.

But the cool thing about publishing newsletters in WordPress is that it's actually not too difficult to add these features inside the WordPress editor using Gutenberg blocks.

With the paid version of Newsletter Glue, my goal is to help make your newsletter stand out and grow with features that usually only exist for newsletters with 100,000 subscribers or more.

The question now is... Which feature or features do you want most?

If I were to charge you a one time fee of $29 for a bundle of these features right now, what would you put in this bundle and happily pay for?

And of course, if I've missed a feature you really want, please let me know in the comments. Or if you prefer, you can always DM me on Twitter or email me at lesley at memberhero.pro

And once I have a better idea of what to build, I'll get to work. 💪