In the past, the answer to this idea is WebSked, but that's not what the feature is requesting here.
I believe there's a big context clarification: newsletter is NOT a bunch of links with headline, links and meta description.
Newsletter is a product that help users understand and digest news with voices from newsletter writers and editors. Newsletter audience is also different from other channels' audiences. In newsletter, there are intro messages, blurbs about an article special to specific newsletter audiences, stats of the day, photo of the day, links from other publications and so many other elements.
Other CMS platforms like WordPress have plugins that allow writers and editors to compose a newsletter inside of CMS. The benefits include easily pulling article data and media assets and use customized reusable blocks just like powerups to author a newsletter without going into ESP. Once it finishes, the publisher has the option to either send the email directly from CMS or one-click export it to ESP and send the email in ESP. A WordPress plugin example: https://newsletterglue.com/
It would be awesome that an Arc client doesn't have to mirror its content into a WordPress CMS to use plugins and enjoy benefits like this.
Ruby Yuan
Thanks for sharing this context, Ruby!
I can certainly appreciate how frustrating it is to have a core workflow not represented directly in the platform or available through a plugin. We don't have any immediate plans to address newsletters directly, but let me circulate this idea and see how our general extensibility ambitions might line up with this need.
One thing I want to clarify is that by "native" solution, I meant there's not even a premium or paid plugin we can use for Arc. We would have to build everything from scratch in Arc.
Hi Ryan,
Thank you for a quick response!
Technically speaking, all these can be built by a custom power-ups. There's also a bit more about special formatting and CSS rules when it comes to email development. At the same time, also all these functionalities and workflow integrations with ESP can be built with IFX etc. Nothing is impossible. The key question in my opinion is the cost and time to your clients. How much basic features and integration Arc can provide? How much add-on customizations can be further allowed? How many engineers and product managers does Arc foresee your news media clients have?
Let me use https://newsletterglue.com/ as an example again. With no dev efforts, this plugin can integrates WordPress and our ESP. It provides lots of blocks out of boxes. We can further customize it with our own code.
I think given how much I talk about this, it's not a secret at this point that we do use this plugin. In order to do so, we basically have a WordPress account ingests our content to enjoy using this plugin. We basically decided that the cost of paying a separate WordPress account plus paying this plugin is still far lower than developing this newsletter composing feature inside of Arc, given what Arc offers OOTB.
Recently, I talked to some other publishers using other CMS... They were shocked to hear that there's no native solution from Arc about newsletter composing and authoring in Arc and clients would have to build it themselves.
So I believe the question is not about whether it's possible to do something in Arc. It's how easy to do something in Arc.
Hi Ruby --
Thanks for the suggestion. I understand that this is not an ask for a list of links email, but rather a curated, authored newsletter experience.
I'm curious what content elements within the story body are missing? Can any of those be developed as custom power-ups to meet your specific needs?
Or is this about pulling in non-content elements, such as identifying the specific newsletter email list?