Why You Should Avoid Using Revue For Newsletters

As a marketing agency, we're always looking to try new marketing tech and tools that may make our lives or the lives of our clients easier. So we don't mind being the first through the door and getting a bloody nose. As social media becomes a tougher nut to crack in terms of extracting traffic with a simple post or ad, you need to start to follow the breadcrumb of incentives they provide.

This means trying out the in-build tools that they offer you; in the last two years or newsletters within social media have become rather popular or picked up steam, so to speak. The self-publishing trend started with Medium and then Substack, which combined blogging and newsletter creation into an easy-to-use tool.

Social media platforms didn't want to lose that user or rather the content creator to other platforms, which is why you see sites like LinkedIn and Twitter offering their own newsletter service. We recently tried out the service offered by Twitter known as Revue, which on the surface, is a really simple way to create newsletters. It offers easy-to-use GUI, which offers embeds from Twitter, YouTube, and RSS feeds and couldn't make compiling a newsletter any easier, but with every platform comes its downfalls.

It's all about time on site

We must remember that Revue, which was purchased by Twitter, the goal is to keep users on Twitter, and if you're creating content that sends users away from Twitter, you may see your reach limited, which is why you see those newsletters with tonnes of Twitter thread embeds do better than your hand crafted multi-source newsletter.

If your newsletters are going to be continuously Twitter-heavy, then Revue might be the better option. If not, you may want to use another service and only replicate your newsletter in Revue as an amplification tool.

Poor support

When you use big tech tools, get ready to get big tech support which is almost non-existent, you'll get an auto-response until you leave them alone and have to find solutions from others who faced the same issue online. If you are one of those who like the ability to talk to someone and get one-on-one support, it will be best to use a smaller specialised newsletter service instead.

Flagged for no reason

We recently uploaded our own list of clients that we mail via MailChimp and still mail to this day. When we uploaded the list to Revue, we found that we were hit with a suspension.

Revue account suspended

We tried to make contact with the customer support team, and after months we received a thread of generic responses. When pushed for an answer, we were flat-out denied and left high and dry. The answer is we activated some flag in their system, and because their bots are the arbiters of truth and cannot make a mistake, the support team cannot do anything about it.

How's that for customer support?

First customer service response

Second customer service response

Third customer service response

Keep control over your content

As a content creator, your words, video, soundbites, and images are your product, and having it hosted by big tech platforms might be cheaper and easier, but there are trade-offs you have to be content with and might come back to bite you. If you'd like more freedom from big tech, it might be better to use a service like Ghost or set up your own hosted site with your own email client instead.

Yes, it might cost you a few bucks a year, but knowing you and your newsletter database data are secured and controlled by you might be worth the price.

If we don't and continuously submit to big techs' whims, we give them all of the power, and with that, they'll continue to marginalise creators as they become the only game in town.

Protip!

If you're looking to build an email database organically, then I suggest checking out the following posts:

• 10 Email Opt-In Tactics To Grow Your Email Database
• 12 Tactics To Gather More Email Sign Ups

Let us help you

Should you require help setting up or improving your site's email marketing, we're happy to help; feel free to contact us. for a consultation.

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If you require a more detailed guide on how to create your profile or your listing, then we highly recommend you check out the following articles. 

• How to create a nichemarketer profile 
• How to create a nichemarket business listing 

Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts about email and CRM.

• Set Up An Abandon Basket Drip Marketing Campaign
• 5 Benefits Of Using CRM For Your Business
• 10 Emails Every eCommerce Site Should Have
• SEO Spam Emails - Can We Put A Stop To This?
• 5 Free Email Suite Options
• Email Personalization Mistakes to Avoid (And How to Fix Them)
• Email Marketing Tactics To Rejuvenate Channel Performance

Tags: Newsletters, Email Marketing