The Sample publisher report

A few days ago I added a Revue integration to the publisher console (look in the “Subscribers” tab). If you use Revue, I highly recommend that you enable it. That will allow me to import 1-click subscribers directly to your list automatically instead of manually pasting them into your signup form. Also, this way they won’t need to click on a confirmation link, so you won’t need to import the subscribers CSV to catch people who neglect to click the link.

Caveat: Revue is continuing to demonstrate how janky they are. I have included instructions in the publisher console for connecting The Sample to your Revue account, however, there’s a good chance the integration won’t work at first. It turns out (and there is no mention of this in their public documentation) that 3rd party integrations won’t work until your account is verified (i.e. looked over by a human). If your account is not yet verified, the publisher console will show you a little error message with some help documentation for how to get verified.

To save you a link click, the way to get verified is you have to import a CSV of subscribers, which will trigger the review process. For the next several days, you’ll be unable to send any emails from your account, but eventually someone will presumably look at your account and then say “yep they don’t look like a spammer,” after which you can go back to The Sample’s publisher console, add your Revue API key again, and then hopefully not get an error message.

I say “hopefully” because my own test Revue account already went through this process earlier this month, but it still didn’t work. A support person told me to import a CSV again, which I did, which triggered the review process again, for which I am still waiting to finish... again. And I guess maybe the stars will be aligned this time and my account will actually get verified and the Revue integration I wrote will actually work with it.

It is also extremely hilarious that the whole reason I wrote a Revue integration first was to make sure you wouldn’t have to go through the CSV import process and get your account temporarily frozen. I guess that’s unavoidable. Just be sure to import a CSV after you send out one of your regular issues and not right before.

Final note: since I haven’t actually been able to use the !@#$ing Revue API, I haven’t written the code to import subscribers to your list yet. I’ve just written the bit to connect to your account in the first place. After some people with verified accounts have enabled the integration, I’ll wait for them to get some one-click subscribers, and then I’ll manually use the API to import the subscribers, after which I’ll make it automatic so there’s no delay between “person clicks subscribe-in-1-click” and “that person is on your list.”

(Did I mention Beehiiv is a great Revue alternative? I had a short chat with the founder last week, he’s a nice guy!)

Anyway. Starting tomorrow I am going to add integrations for Ghost, Mailchimp, and ConvertKit (in that order). Those platforms (along with Revue and, of course, Substack) are the most commonly used by all of you. For other platforms, I’ll wait until people request integrations. No point making an integration if no one’s going to use it yet. (If you’d like to enable automatic 1-click-subscriber import and you don’t use one of those platforms, let me know!)

Besides that, I have a list of other publisher console improvements to make, but I’m going to put them off for a bit while I do some things to hopefully improve subscriber retention. After all, the most valuable thing we can do for publishers anyway is to increase the number of 1-click subscribes coming in. Currently my ideas for improvements include:

1. A “view previous issues” button for the emails, for when people are on the edge about subscribing. Over the months I’ve had several people mention that they run into that problem a decent amount. My original planned solution (which I’ve discussed in previous publisher reports a few times) was to add a “demo” button which would cause the next few issues to get forwarded to you, each including a subscribe-in-1-click button like usual. If you don’t hit it after a few issues, you don’t get any more issues. However my cofounder suggested the “view previous issues” thing, and that would be much faster to implement. So we’ll start with that and see if it solves the problem.
2. Add a web interface for reading issues we’ve forwarded to you. Then when someone hits one of the rating buttons or the 1-click-sub button, instead of just saying “thanks for your input lol,” we can say “thanks for your input lol, and by the way since you’re evidently in reading mode right now, here’s another issue we forwarded you before that you didn’t open.”
3. With the web interface in place, we can then try batching the emails, e.g. by default send people two emails a week with 5 links to newsletters each, where each link goes to the web interface. Then we’ll see if that improves engagement over the default of getting 1 newsletter per day with the entire body included in the email.
4. Then we can revisit #1, and if the “view previous issues” thing doesn’t do it, we can do the demo button.

Once all that’s done, I’ll get back to publisher console improvements, and then we’ll see how things are doing and decide where to go from there.