Hey everyone,
I stumbled across a Twitter profile the other day that had an integrated newsletter sign up option embedded in their profile. Immediately I researched and found Revue and Twitter newsletters.
I spend about 1hr setting up Revue and building a replica of my latest newsletter, soooo much easier to use than MailChimp, at first I added in my Forem RSS feeds to pull in the content but then discovered it was much easier to use the Revue chrome extension to grab all the content I needed then I just dragged it into the newsletter editor.
It's cool, free and allows for custom domains and imports from MailChimp
Check this out:
Top comments (17)
Looks real nice on your Twitter profile!
I used to run a Revue newsletter before Twitter acquired them + added the integration directly inside Twitter profiles.
Does this mean you have officially moved MMA Life newsletter over to Revue from Mailchimp? Im asking this because I was thinking of using Revue to collect subscribers from Twitter but then use Zapier to move those emails to Substack or Mailchimp but I noticed that subscribers are sent a Revue confirmation email when they subscribe so I decided against this because I didn’t want to confuse people.
Confirmed that confirmation email comes from tmmal address and branding, works really well. Maybe to gain more traction specifically from Twitter audience and merge with sign ups from Forem on boarding, nice combination.
This is more clear to me now. I guess you'll be taking the Forem onboarding emails and adding them to your Revue newsletter, so subscribers will only be recieving your Revue newsletter.
I had it all mixed up because I thought Forem newsletter feature was automated and done through Mailchimp but if im understanding you correctly, the "periodic email digests" via Forem are not available to us yet? It's a bit confusing because the info regarding email digests inside the Forem docs does not reflect this.
Yeah I think that’s what I will be doing. I have requested to bump daily digest emails up the queue with the core team as I see it as been a core element of interaction. At the moment it’s configured per tag with a high rate of posted needed to trigger. What we need is a base level for new communities that sends out an automated daily digest of posts from the whole community.
Really looking forward to that one coming in
I agree that all Forem communities can benefit from email digests, despite the size of the community. Seems useful for retaining users/reminding them to come back to the site.
I would like to understand what the current paramaters are that must be met in order to trigger email digests. I did notice that you opened a github issue about this in the past. It looks like there's a score system + user experience level at play based on this code which was linked in the Forem docs.
This is also mentioned:
On second thought, automatic emails for smaller communities might be tricky if not enough content is being created. It makes sense that until a community hits a certain size, the admin should manually compose emails and hand-pick the content that she/he thinks the community will want to know about. A weekly digest might work better for smaller Forem communities instead of daily.
Im not sure who is working on newsletter/email functionality but maybe @ellativity and @michaeltharrington can help to clarify some of this stuff. Im also curious if there are any updates coming that relate to what we've been discussing here.
Yeah agree with that although I have been cautious about flooding members with a daily mailchimp email with a unsubscribe button (i think the daily digest directs you to unsubscribe from with your forem profile settings rather than mailchimp).
I think it comes down to good moderation initially, if your forem is small then it’s much easier to moderate the content which in turn will allow for a higher value daily digest.
Agree on the frequency, would be great if that was customisable, maybe ever 3 days to fill in the newsletter gap or whatever you choose.
This is an area that I have a lot of feelings about! I really hope we get to it soon, because I believe it has the potential to impact a lot of communities' growth.
The digest are available to all Forems which meet the minimum posting rate to trigger them. Right now that's fixed to 3 posts per day, possibly because fewer posts result in less varied content for the digest (I'm merely guessing it's to avoid repetition, so maybe @ben can better explain the reason for that number).
There are a lot of feature requests and issues in the repo for more Admin UI control over automated emails, digests, etc. We're really hoping @jennieocken and @amyatforem green light an overhaul soon, with the generalization of the newsletter API as part of that project, because in all honesty it still feels like legacy architecture from DEV.
@lee's feature requests in GitHub Discussions are helping move things in the right direction, along with requests from @noeltime and yours truly, so I encourage anyone who wants to join the conversation to weigh into these!
Perfect, really looking forward to whats coming here, these are great innovative Forem features that I personally really like. In terms of the 3 posts per day, is that triggered per tag or will it fire at just 3 posts regardless?
Yes, these are technically available, but fairly tightly configured to DEV's values. I think these would have to be adjustable for the automatic digests to go out similarly to DEV.
am not 100% sure yet, just testing the workflow, ill check the verification process again see what’s changed if i am using a custom domain
Oooo this looks real nice!
Please do follow up and let us know if you decide to go with this over MailChimp.
Would be nice if Revue was supported by Forem for the newsletter feature. Although I do wonder how effective the Twitter Revue integration is.
I have not configured the newsletter feature for my Forem community yet so im not familiar with how everything works. I was just reading the Mailchimp configuration section of the Forem docs and I just want to make sure I understand this correctly. The admin is only connecting Mailchimp within Forem, but once that's done the newsletter still has to be composed and sent out via Mailchimp? So there's no automation involved, the admin puts together the newsletter and decides exactly what content will be sent out in each individual issue?
correct, forem adds happy subscribers to the audience ID using an api key, then you create and send the content.
what’s automated is the daily digest, i haven’t got that working yet tho
I totally did not realize that within Forem email digests are separate and distinct from email newsletters.
I guess to learn more about all of this stuff I would need to start by configuring SMTP settings. Hope I don't break anything cuz the warning at the top of that docs page is a bit intimidating.
that’s pretty easy to do, then invites go out and email confirmations etc but daily digests are configured at a certain rate, I don’t think that’s fully configurable yet.
I received some of these from @lee's Forems today, and they look good! I tested out the Unsubscribe and New Subscriber links, and both work a charm.
After unsubscribing, when I tried to sign up with the new subscriber link, Revue reminded me that I had previously been subscribed and prompted me to confirm that I'd like to resubscribe. I had to double-opt-in for the resub via email.
Niiiiice! Yeah I think i’ll be sending from revue from now on 😎