It's been a busy start to 2021 for me, and we're already into month 2. I've been working away on some work and changes in Audience. If you read my last post The journey from 0 to 100 these are the things I've been working on and moving Audience forward.

For the dirty details you can check out the makerlog profile. In this post I'll cover some of the core work I've been doing.

Newsletter

Audience should have a newsletter, lets be honest about it, an email marketing platform that doesn't have a newsletter is just weird. This is an opportunity to show off Audience and the features I'm building into it.

To do this I've rebuilt how newsletters work in Audience, you can now create a newsletter and add email's to the newsletter, schedule the email.

This allows you to create different newsletters in the same audience account. So for my own use case I want to create a free newsletter but also a premium newsletter that is only for my users (more on this later) I can now do this from the same audience account and manage it all from the same UI just filter to the newsletter I want to look at or get an overview of both.

I'm still working on pulling the newsletter screen together but just for you here is an early preview.

Preview of the new newsletter screen.

So now you can create an email on a newsletter (I've also added edition numbers but haven't made those available yet) and save it as a draft or schedule it, the email then belongs to the newsletter.

A newsletter has an audience list but keep in mind in Audience a subscriber can exist on multiple lists. So the idea is I can have someone on my newsletter and trial users list.

I can now move forward and work on the next parts that I want for a newsletter and this is where it get's really cool.

Past Emails

I want to add a "Read the last email" to the sign up form. So it's really easy for people to read it and check it out before they subscribe.

I am also thinking that when a user subscribes, the thank you page could show the list of past newsletters or maybe collections of different newsletters.

Of course all of this will be a set of features in Audience.

Signup forms

Up to now the signup forms I've been building have been for the lists. But the new signup forms will be focused on the newsletters.

  • Blog footer sign up, this is one you can stick on the bottom of the blog.
  • Popup form, this is one that can pop up on the page.

These signup forms, would be generated in Audience, I have an idea that you could customise them and make some changes but the idea is you should be able to copy and paste them.

Subscriber Referral System

I love the way the morning brew does it's referral system. It makes it so easy for your subscribers to share a great newsletter. I plan on building in a referral system into Audience.

I had looked at third parties but I think it's better to build this in natively.

Welcome Emails and Automation

When a user signs up they will get the verification email, once they have verified. Audience could send them a welcome email, but I'm also thinking it could send an email sequence.

Another idea I have is to create a course on email marketing, I've found there are alot of people who want to start a newsletter but are unsure or stop. So I was thinking to create a course, all email based of course. That would use the same automation tooling in Audience to deliver the course.

Premium Newsletters

I mentioned above I've been looking at adding premium newsletters, let you use a payment provider you want to use or not at all and just have it as a private newsletter.

The plan at the moment is to have most of the above ready and running by Q1 2021. I want to launche the audience newsletter before the end of Feburary, the other functions and features above will come online around that.

Thank you for reading and your support. It really does mean alot to me.