Buttondown has had the ability to upload a <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/advanced-features/share-images">custom share image</a> for your newsletters, if you were willing to design or find one that you wanted to use. For example:
<figure>
 <img
 src="/next-assets/img/og-image-example-fudge.jpg"
 style={{ width: 500, margin: "0 auto" }}
 alt="A Buttondown newsletter with a custom-made share image."
 />
</figure>

Today, we’re adding two templates that get automatically filled out based on your newsletter’s name and the subject of your email.
They’ll appear alongside other options for your share image, and you can use them instead of designing your own!
<figure>
 <img
 src="/next-assets/img/image-generator.png"
 style={{ width: 500, margin: "0 auto" }}
 alt="The new templated share images available in Buttondown's settings. They're prefilled with your newsletter's name and email's subject."
 />
</figure>

For more of the technical details on how we built this, head over to the <a href="/blog/image-generator">accompanying blog post</a>.

Made-for-you share images

<img src="/next-assets/img/automation.png" alt="">
I know I said this <a href="/changelog/2023-05-24">last week</a> but it bears repeating: we simply cannot stop shipping more automation functionality!
A whole bunch of new automation actions are now available, including:
<ol>
<li>Trigger automations based on new paid subscriptions, letting you automatically send a welcome email or add a tag to new paying folks.</li>
<li>Filter subscribers based on price, letting you send a special offer to folks who are just paying monthly to encourage them to upgrade to a yearly plan.</li>
<li>In addition to sending a custom email or an archived one, you can also now create automations that send the latest public email.</li>
</ol>
Wahoo! 🎉

A handful of new automation niceties!

<img src="/next-assets/img/sf2.png" alt="">
<img src="/next-assets/img/sf1.png" alt="">
Folks love <a href="/features/surveys">surveys</a>. And now you can add a survey to the end of every email you send with Buttondown.
This is perfect for evergreen questions (feedback, suggestions for future content, etc.) that you want to ask every subscriber.
(And shout out to <a href="https://twitter.com/joemasilotti">Joe</a> for suggesting this feature!)

Close out every email with a survey!

Trigger automations based on survey responses!

<img src="/next-assets/img/automation.png" alt="">
We simply cannot stop shipping more automation functionality!
You can now create automations based on survey responses from your subscribers, allowing you to do things like:
<ul>
<li>Tag folks who respond to any survey as &quot;high-engagement&quot;</li>
<li>Email folks who respond to a survey saying that they&#39;re interested in your opening consulting openings with a link to schedule some time</li>
</ul>

<img src="/next-assets/img/autotag.png" alt="Triggers and tags">
As you might have guessed from <a href="/changelog/2023-05-22">yesterday&#39;s changelog entry</a>,
adding support for click events was a mere stepping stone for more automation shenanigans.
We&#39;ve launched two new expansions to our automation functionality:
<ol>
<li>In addition to triggering automations on new subscriber confirmations, you can now also trigger automations on new clicks for subscribers.</li>
<li>In addition to merely sending emails as part of automations, you can now add or remove tags from subscribers!</li>
</ol>

More automation functionality

Supercharge your newsletter with automations!

<img src="/next-assets/img/automations.png" alt="An example automation sequence welcoming folks">
I am thrilled to announce that automations are now generally available for folks on the Standard
plan or higher. 🎉
Automations let you create sequences or one-off emails that are sent to your subscribers based on
their actions and data. For example, you can send a seven-part welcome sequence to new subscribers,
or share a special offer with folks who have been subscribed for more than a year, or share some specific
articles with folks depending on their tags or metadata.
Read more in the <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/advanced-features/automations">docs</a>, or get started
by <a href="https://buttondown.email/automations">creating an automation</a>.

Subscribers are now automatically reminded to confirm their subscription!

<img src="/next-assets/img/reminder.png" alt="An example email client sending an email to churned subscribers">
Here&#39;s a bit of inside baseball when it comes to running a service like Buttondown: there&#39;s a tricky balance
to achieve between maximizing author outcomes and respecting subscribers. On one end of the spectrum, we could be
really annoying and send a ton of emails to subscribers, but that would be bad for authors. On the other end of the
spectrum, we could be really respectful and send no emails to subscribers at all, but that would be bad for authors.
For a while, authors have been able to manually send a reminder to subscribers who haven&#39;t confirmed their
subscription. This is a great way to get a few more subscribers on board, but it&#39;s a bit of a pain to do manually.
So... we automated it. In your settings page (under &quot;Subscription flow&quot;), you can now enable automatic reminders for
subscribers who haven&#39;t confirmed their subscription. We&#39;ll send them exactly one email: roughly 24 hours after
they initially signed up (with a bit of juice to make sure it&#39;s sent at a reasonable time of day for them).
I&#39;ve enabled this for all current authors, but it&#39;s a one-click toggle to turn it off if you don&#39;t want it.

Send emails directly to churned subscribers.

<img src="/next-assets/img/send-to-churned.png" alt="An example email client sending an email to churned subscribers">
Even the best paying newsletters deal with churn. Churned subscribers are ones who have downgraded from a paid plan
to a free plan but remain subscribed to your newsletter. This may happen for a number of reasons:
<ul>
<li>Their payment method failed and they never updated it.</li>
<li>They decided your newsletter wasn&#39;t worth paying for. (How rude of them!)</li>
<li>They found your newsletter valuable, but something was keeping them from staying a paid subscriber.</li>
</ul>
Whatever the reason, you can now send emails directly to churned subscribers. This is a great way to try to win them
back or learn more about why they churned. (Maybe send them a <a href="/changelog/2023-02-28">survey</a>!)

<img src="/next-assets/img/newsletter-email.png" alt="An example email client sending an email to the new draft endpoint">
Back in the olden days of Buttondown (2018), we had a easter egg feature: if you emailed
(<a href="mailto:&#x64;&#x72;&#97;&#x66;&#x74;&#115;&#x40;&#109;&#103;&#46;&#x62;&#x75;&#116;&#x74;&#111;&#110;&#x64;&#x6f;&#x77;&#110;&#46;&#x65;&#x6d;&#97;&#x69;&#108;">&#x64;&#x72;&#97;&#x66;&#x74;&#115;&#x40;&#109;&#103;&#46;&#x62;&#x75;&#116;&#x74;&#111;&#110;&#x64;&#x6f;&#x77;&#110;&#46;&#x65;&#x6d;&#97;&#x69;&#108;</a>), we would create a draft for you. It was a fun little feature
that a couple people used and loved, but it was very hard to find — there wasn&#39;t a great
place in the interface to highlight it.
Rather than fix this problem by either removing the feature entirely or carving out a space
for it in the interface, we&#39;ve doubled down. If you send an email to <a href="mailto:&#110;&#101;&#119;&#115;&#x6c;&#x65;&#116;&#116;&#101;&#114;&#x73;&#x40;&#109;&#103;&#46;&#98;&#x75;&#116;&#x74;&#111;&#x6e;&#100;&#x6f;&#119;&#110;&#x2e;&#101;&#109;&#97;&#x69;&#x6c;">&#110;&#101;&#119;&#115;&#x6c;&#x65;&#116;&#116;&#101;&#114;&#x73;&#x40;&#109;&#103;&#46;&#98;&#x75;&#116;&#x74;&#111;&#x6e;&#100;&#x6f;&#119;&#110;&#x2e;&#101;&#109;&#97;&#x69;&#x6c;</a>,
that will create a full-on email for you. This means, if you so wish, you never have to log onto
Buttondown at all except to check your analytics once in a while!
(A good caveat here: this will only work if you have a single newsletter associated with your email address.
If you&#39;ve got multiple newsletters, try using different email addresses for each one!)

Create drafts and emails from your email

...well, its description, at least.
<img src="/next-assets/img/openai2.gif" alt="">
I, like everyone else, am having a fair bit of fun with ChatGPT these days! Right now I&#39;m of two strong convictions:
<ol>
<li>This stuff is really, really powerful.</li>
<li>The prose that it generates is... not particularly good.</li>
</ol>
One thing that ChatGPT is particularly good at is summarization of rich text. We&#39;ve quietly shipped functionality
to let it automatically generate descriptions of your emails (good for SEO and for client previewing!), which feels like
a very appropriate use case: less about generating prose and more about shaping existing prose into a more digestible form.
(If you&#39;ve got novel ideas for how LLMs might be useful for Buttondown, <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">I&#39;d love to hear them</a>. Don&#39;t expect
&quot;generate the entire email&quot; to be a feature anytime soon, though — I&#39;m not sure your subscribers would have fun with that.)

Let ChatGPT generate your newsletter...

Get paid for referring users to Buttondown

Buttondown has had a referral program (or an &quot;affiliate program&quot; if you prefer, though there&#39;s something vaguely skeevy about that parlance to me) for a while now, but it&#39;s been hidden
in the proverbial attic (by which I mean the &quot;odds and ends&quot; section of the documentation,
which is not a place that many folks visit).
The details are simple:
<ul>
<li>You get a unique referral link that you can share with folks</li>
<li>If they sign up for Buttondown using that link, you get 25% of their subscription fee forever</li>
<li>If they sign up for Buttondown using that link, they get $9 off their first month</li>
</ul>
No strings attached, no weird catches. Buttondown has grown almost entirely through word of mouth, and I&#39;m excited to double down on that.
Read more about it <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/advanced-features/affiliate-program">here</a>!

A timeline to help you better understand your subscriber's journey.

<img src="/next-assets/img/journey.png" alt="A quick peek at the new subscriber journey diagram">
It&#39;s not always obvious to see what or how a subscriber has gone through in terms
of subscription and payment history, especially when you&#39;re trying to see why they churned
or why they&#39;re not paying. We&#39;ve added a new subscriber journey diagram to help you
better understand your subscriber&#39;s journey — you can find it directly on the &quot;notes&quot; modal
in the subscriber view. (That notes modal is getting a little overgrown, we know — changes
to clean up are coming soon!)

RSS-to-email just got even more powerful.

<img src="/next-assets/img/rss-variables.png" alt="A quick peek at the new share image input">
If you&#39;re using RSS-to-email, you now have two additional variables you can use
when setting up your automation:
<ol>
<li>The author of the post (<code>{{ item.author }}</code>)</li>
<li>The date the post was published (<code>{{ item.publish_date }}</code>)</li>
</ol>
These variables are available in the subject line and the body of the email
for both digest-style and individual emails. It&#39;s easier than ever to keep your
audience informed about the latest content from your publication!

Every subscriber has a &quot;type&quot;. This is the state of the subscriber: whether they&#39;re active, whether they&#39;ve unsubscribed,
whether they&#39;re on a trial, etc. We&#39;ve added a few more types to make access and filtering easier:
<ul>
<li>&quot;churned&quot; subscribers, which represent subscribers who were once paying for a premium newsletter and no longer
are doing so. (You may want to reach out to them directly to get feedback or to offer them a discount!)</li>
<li>&quot;malformed&quot; subscribers, which represent subscribers who have an email address that is not valid. Sometimes
people mistype their email address or accidentally throw in a space or two.</li>
<li>&quot;complained&quot; subscribers, which represent subscribers who have complained about your newsletter. You may want
to reach out to them directly to apologize and ask them to give you another chance.</li>
<li>&quot;disposable&quot; subscribers, which represent subscribers who subscribed from a disposable email address. These
are often used by spammers to sign up for newsletters and then unsubscribe. (Buttondown will not send
emails to these addresses so as to preserve your deliverability.)</li>
</ul>

Even more subscriber types

<img src="/next-assets/img/teams.png" alt="">
After what has been too long of a wait, Buttondown now has support for teams!
Invite your entire team to help manage your newsletter and write together.
You can read more on the <a href="https://buttondown.email/features/teams">new feature page</a>
or <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings/users/new">invite someone</a> right now.

Collaborate with friends and colleagues!

Poll your subscribers with quick in-email surveys!

<img src="/next-assets/img/survey.png" alt="">
&quot;I want to poll my subscribers&quot; has been a long-standing request from users: to know what kind of content resonates, to get demographic information, etc.
There are a lot of &quot;big picture&quot; solutions to this problem — I recommend highly my friends at <a href="https://tally.so/?utm_source=Buttondown">Tally</a> and <a href="https://reform.app/?utm_source=Buttondown">Reform</a> — but
those are heavier solutions for when you have lots of questions and conditional logic and other bells and whistles. What if you just want simple questions in your email?
Head over to the <a href="https://buttondown.email/surveys">Surveys</a> page to get started. I bet you two dollars it takes you less than five minutes to set up a survey, and once you&#39;ve done so
you can add it to any email you want.
(If you&#39;re interested, you can read some more of the inside baseball that went into building this feature <a href="https://github.com/buttondown-email/discussions/discussions/6">here</a>!)

<img src="/next-assets/img/changelog/rss.png" alt="RSS">
You can now hook up an RSS feed to your newsletter to automate the process of adding new content to your newsletter.
This is a great way to keep your newsletter fresh and up to date, and the first of many steps forward in making Buttondown
the best way to run a newsletter alongside an existing publication. (Write once, publish everywhere!)
This was a pretty big and gnarly feature to build out, and there&#39;s more to go. But it&#39;s a good start —
a dozen newsletters have been quietly humming away using this infrastructure for the past month and I&#39;m
excited to see what people do with it now that it&#39;s open to the public.
You can start by getting <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings/automations/new">your feed hooked up</a> or,
if you&#39;d prefer, just read more about the various knobs and whistles in the <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/advanced-features/rss-automation">documentation</a>.

Automate your newsletter with RSS!

You can now change the canonical URL of your emails to an external URL (if you&#39;re, say, cross-publishing alongside an external publication or blog.)

Change the canonical URL of your emails

You can now filter your emails by their source (source meaning from the API, from an import, from the app itself, and so on.)

Filter your emails by their source

You can now filter your subscribers by UTM source:
<img src="/next-assets/img/2022-09-27.jpeg" alt="">

Filter subscribers by UTM source

You can now sort your subscribers by tag:
<img src="/next-assets/img/2022-09-14.jpeg" alt="">

Sort your subscribers by tag

<img src="/next-assets/img/2022-09-12.jpeg" alt="">
You can now resubscribe subscribers who have accidentally unsubscribed.

<img src="/next-assets/img/2022-09-08.jpeg" alt="">
You can now drill into the &#39;deliveries&#39; list on an email to see a full list of who received the email.

Better email delivery reporting

<img src="/next-assets/img/2022-08-15.png" alt="">
You can now choose specifically what collections of data you&#39;re interested in exporting from Buttondown.

Fancier exports

You can now attach arbitrary files like PDFs or documents to your emails.

Attach files like CSVs or PDFs

You can now secure your account through an MFA token.

Secure your account with MFA

You can now send previews or &#39;teasers&#39; of premium-only emails to unpaid subscribers.

Send teasers of premium emails

You can now send old emails from your archives to specific subscribers.

Changelog

Every change to Buttondown, even the small ones. (Those tend to be the important ones, after all.)

Ready for a better newsletter?