A better workflow for writing email campaigns.

I like writing emails, but I hate email editors.

They suck.

All of them. In fact the better the email platform is at managing your automated campaigns, the more they suck as a place to write.

On the other hand, WordPress is getting better at being a half-decent tool to write in. The new editor is quite a nice place to write, especially once you find the “distraction-free” mode.

 

So, I thought it might make sense to use WordPress, instead of ActiveCampaign to write my emails.

It makes sense for a few other reasons too.

  1. My emails sit on my website, picking up the odd bit of SEO traffic.
  2. My emails are all sat on a platform I own, so if I ever fall out of love with ActiveCampaign, I still have them archived here.
  3. It’s easier to share the same content elsewhere, like on Twitter. This helps out with the SEO quite a bit as well.

So. I sat down and wrote a plugin for WordPress. (With a little help from my dev team at The Conversion Co., and also swiping a useful bit of HTML from Ian Brodie.).

You might be reading this on my blog in which case you can see what it looks like as an email here.

Or, you might be reading this as an email, in which case you can see what it looks like as a blog post here.

On the email version you’ll notice the little author box, which is entirely driven by information already in my WordPress user profile. I thought this was a nice touch to bring a bit of recognition and familiarity to my writing.

If you’ve been trying to work out how to publish your emails as blog posts, you might want to think about doing it the other way around, and starting on your blog.

Either way being able to write once, publish with a few clicks to both platforms, and then be able to share on social media as well, is a huge saving in time and energy that I can now spend on writing more.

If you think you’d like to try it yourself, follow me on Twitter and drop a comment on this post. There’s some work to be done to tidy the code up for public consumption, but I’ll do it if there’s enough interest.