Newsletter Plugin and Wordpress: Wysija's Blog

Introducing Packzip, Your New WordPress Plugin Packager

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Marco in Development

At Wysija we hate losing time on tedious mechanical processes. And launching a WordPress plugin unfortunately involves many of them.

We host our plugin on GitHub, and develop beta features on a dev branch and hot fixes on a master branch.

On launch day, we have to complete some steps to be sure that the final version will work fine. We start by cloning the master branch in a new folder and compressing CSS files. Then we minify JS files to improve performance.

At this point, we have to pull all the latest .po files from Transifex (the localization platform) and convert them to .mo files.

Read our post on translations and Transifex.

After zipping the plugin, we distribute it to our beta team, to enter the last testing phase. That’s the .zip that everyone will download publicly from the WordPress plugins repository after we upload it through SVN.

During the last months, we automated all these little steps, and ultimately packed everything in a self-hosted app that you can run on your server: enter Packzip! Read More…

4 Comments

Baking Success with BuddyPress, and Newsletters

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Kim in Case study

Lynn Hill, founder of Clandestine Cake Club For our latest case study, I decided to reach out to one of our first ever users, Lynn Hill. Her newsletter needs, her site’s success, and her personal profile make her a good example for our readers.

When Lynn set out to start a local cake club, little did she know her initiative would end up as a social network, spawning the globe two years later.

“I have to pinch myself on what I’ve created“, she tells me over the phone.

Her project starts in Leeds, UK, where a group of strangers met to share each others home baked cakes in late 2010.

The meetup’s concept is straight forward. No cupcakes, brownies or cookies allowed. You only talk cake. You don’t judge each others cakes. The venue is kept secret until the day of the event. Oh, and you eat a lot of cake.

“I created a website to invite strangers, purely to make it known with the help of social media, mostly Twitter”, says the 62 year old retiree. From the start, her goal was to gather everybody on a single platform.

The Clandestine Cake Club was thus born. The club’s expansion resembles expanding dough with an excess of yeast:

over 9000 members
which are in 185 local cake clubs
in 15 nations, as distant as the Bahamas
and a cookbook with rave reviews

Making Translation a Priority

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Kim in Development

Our newsletter plugin is fully translated in nearly 20 languages thanks to the collaboration of over 50 volunteer translators.

Below is a piechart of our users’ language distribution: wysija-language-distribution

The French tendency is due to our roots. Showing up at WordPress events in France has popularized us in the country.

Our sales’ pie chart per country shows a more internationalized picture:

wysija sales per country

This is quite a different picture of the distribution of the nearly 30 million WordPress websites (excludes wordpress.com) :

Pie chart of languages of all WordPress websites

Free Autoresponder in WordPress? Video, Please!

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Kim in Tips & Help

Our plugin offers a simple and free autoresponder for WordPress. Here’s a quick video of how it works:

I set out to write a full comparison of autoresponder plugins. I searched, I tried, and I got discouraged.

Instead, this post will cover our own solution with splashy video. No more, no less. If you have less than 2000 subscribers, it won’t cost you a dime to set up. Ready? Read More…

3 Comments

One Step Back, Three Forward

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Kim in In house stuff

Things have been going quite well for us. We’re feeling the thrill of our plugin taking off after more than a year of total dedication.

How do we assess that we’re doing so well? We’re in the top 30 highest rated and most popular plugins on the wordpress.org repository.

Every day there are over 1000 downloads of Wysija. More and more people are recommending us to their friends and colleagues.

3 items we’re working on, which are not features

New Year, New Themes

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Kim in Development

Some new themes! We’re rolling out 10 new themes for our Premiums users. They come from Studio Corpus, a small design agency in France, where I live. All of them come with their original Photoshop files for you designers.

You can view all of them at the top of our themes’ page and in your plugin.

Moreover, 10 current Premium themes become free. That’s over 30 free email templates. I nod for that. Read More…

1 Comment

Mistakes We Spot in Your Newsletters

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Kim in Tips & Help

Ready to start 2013 with a few newsletter writing tips? I’ve subscribed to over 200 newsletters made with Wysija in over a year. This allows me to assess how good or bad some campaigns are. Let’s jump straight to my recommendations.

I read text, not images

It all begins with the subject. What will make me click on your email in my inbox full of unreads? Sender and subject, that’s it. Keep your subjects short, precise, relevant to your geography, event, etc. Remy of emailblog.eu has his own top 10 subjects for 2012.

Second, I see a lot of long, long emails. Gmail has even begun to chop off the bottom of emails with too much content. Inboxes are now more than ever on mobile phones. So how long is long? That depends on how often you send and what type of content or site you have.

See example of a French editor that’s beautifully to the point.

Generally, if you think your length is good, that means you can bring out the ax and scream: “Here’s Johnny!” Read More…

6 Comments

What We’ve Learned in One Year

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Kim in In house stuff

Our plugin celebrates its first anniversary this month. What experience can we share with you?

Quite a few things, all shaped by 30 releases, 25 000 active users (guesstimate), 200 000 downloads and plenty of visits to WordCamps.

At the end of this post, I’ll also cover what to expect in the next 12 months.

Two different user expectations

Free and paying users have been waiting for a quality plugin for newsletters for a while. Both have different expectations.

WordPress users have come to expect lower quality from free plugins: complex user interfaces, little or no support, or relinquished code. It’s not a criticism. It’s rather the nature of a directory of free software, without understating the recent explosion of the Premium.

At the other end of the spectrum, are the customers of online email marketing services. Read More…

43 Comments

The First 5 Minutes of a New User (Video)

Posted on November 22, 2012 by Kim in Feedback, In house stuff

Ever wondered what someone thinks of your plugin the first time they try it? The four of us at Wysija sure do.

Our users give us positive feedback on how “easy it is“. The adoption rate of our plugin tells a similar tale.

Over half of Wysija’s 175 000 downloads use the latest versions. This is the story told in this piechart on our page on the WordPress plugins’ repository:

But what about the unhappy people who dropped Wysija after 5 minutes? Read More…

14 Comments

Designing our Upcoming Form Editor

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Kim in Development

The are 2 features our users ask us every week:

Additional fields in their forms for phone numbers, gender, country, city, birthday, etc.
A way to design their subscription forms easily without code

We’re going to address both with a single new form designer. You’ll be able to drag and drop your fields into your form, but also add styling, in one interface.

Think of our beloved visual editor for your newsletter. But this time for forms.

We’re not sending Curiosity to Mars, but still, such a feature does require time and thought by the team here (essentially Ben, the WordPress master coder, who points me in the right direction).

Our first step is to move the form’s options away from the widget and put them in our plugin’s settings page. This is what it looks like, in our wireframes at least: