The team at WordPress wrote a post about a WordPress newsletter under the title Write And Publish Your Newsletter On WordPress.Com – and there were a lot of comments.
Here’s one from Allan
Hmm. This announcement is not what it seemed to promise to me. I was thinking that this WordPress.com Newsletter was a new product. I got excited: could I, at last, ditch MailChimp to compose separate newsletters? Would this be more integrated than the excellent MailPoet plugin?
No. It’s just an alternative landing page for a WordPress.com website. The “newsletter” is just an easier way to auto-send individual posts to a list of subscribers. (Except that you can make your “post” look like a “newsletter” if you wish.)
I then re-read the announcement, and true enough, the facts are all there. But it’s not what I had hoped for. And now I have to delete an additional WordPress.com account that I inadvertently (inevitably) created in trying out this re-presented product.
Mary asked these two questions:
1) If we set up a newsletter, are the newsletter subscribers different from our regular blog followers/email subscribers unless they sign up for the newsletter too? It sounds like it’s all separate which is a choice I’d like.
2)If we import our subscribers from another newsletter platform, who then, does subscriber information belong to, and what becomes of our Newsletter subscribers if we stop using the WordPress Newsletter?
And these were the replies
1) Newsletter and blog subscribers are one in the same, functionally, though they’re separated in the back end (https://wordpress.com/people/team) by “Followers” (who have a WordPress.com account) and “Email Subscribers” (who do not have a WordPress.com account).
2) The subscriber information always belongs to you! If you decide to stop using WordPress.com, you can always export your subscriber list.
Can you make head or tail of this? I can’t.
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