The new multiple newsletters functionality is great, particularly for creators who want to add a personal touch to one or more newsletters for their readership. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the spectrum might be completely automated newsletters, newsletters which aren’t personalised by the creator with included messages but are instead personalised by the site’s readers themselves.
Let’s say you’ve got a fairly large publication that churns out a fair amount of content each week, split up between various tags as well as between various authors. In turn, you want readers to be able to receive a weekly newsletter with a listing of all the previous week’s posts (each post possibly displayed as a bookmark card). This automated weekly newsletter could be sent out on an all-posts basis, a tag by tag basis, or a selection of tags basis (using tags as the example rather than authors).
If the recap newsletter were sent out on an all-posts basis it would be “easy” enough to manage manually – just a big dump of all the latest. Similar if it was done on a tag by tag basis – a smaller dump, in this case of posts from particular tags. Both of these could feasibly be managed manually, although it could definitely become cumbersome if there was an inordinate amount of posts or if there was a ridiculous amount of tags of which each required their own newsletter.
Where it would get completely unworkable manually is if you wanted to give readers the ability to customise a personal newsletter by allowing them to choose which tags they wanted to be included in their personalised weekly newsletter. Say, a listing of posts from Tag A, Tag D, Tag F, and Tag J. In effect, the more tags there are the more permutations there would be, implying that there’s no way that a person could manually put together a newsletter for each particular grouping of tags that various readers were interested in (never mind when said readers wanted to update their personalised selection of sought after tags). Hence the need to automate the process.
Were that done, a custom weekly recap newsletter could look something like this:
Hey there {name}, here’s your weekly {site name} newsletter, comprised of {tags} posts.
Tag A
Bookmark cards
Tag D
Bookmark cards
Tag F
Bookmark cards
Tag J
Bookmark cards
Have a great weekend!
– The {site name} team
