Daily reports for the information-obsessed

<img src="/next-assets/img/daily-reports.png" alt="">
When we launched <a href="/changelog/2024-03-06">Analytics 3.0 last week</a>, people were particularly excited about
the monthly reports. However, we also got a lot of feedback from people who wanted to see their data every day.
This, frankly, is a bit of a sicko move if you ask me. But, we aim to please, so we&#39;ve added a new &quot;Daily&quot; option to the
list of potential report frequencies. Now, you can get a fresh report every day with all your favorite analytics.

For years, Buttondown&#39;s approach to replies has been minimalistic: you send an email,
we send it to your subscribers, that email is sent from an email address that you own, maybe
it has a <code>reply-to</code> address that you own too, and that&#39;s it. If people want to reply, they
can reply to that email address, and you&#39;ll get it in your inbox. That&#39;s how email works!
This is a great system, and for many people, it&#39;s all they need. But it means there&#39;s a lot of stuff
Buttondown can&#39;t do, because replies don&#39;t go through our system:
<ul>
<li>We can&#39;t trigger automations based on replies</li>
<li>We can&#39;t allow programmatic access to replies via the API</li>
<li>We can&#39;t provide analytics around replies</li>
<li>We can&#39;t provide a unified inbox for replies</li>
<li>We can&#39;t surface those replies on the web</li>
</ul>
So, today, we&#39;re introducing a new feature: reply tracking. Just like open and click tracking,
this is opt-in — Buttondown will never track replies unless you explicitly ask us to.
To enable reply tracking, head to your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings">account settings</a> and
head over to the &quot;tracking&quot; section. If you enable reply tracking, you&#39;ll be able to see replies
to your emails in the analytics dashboard for your emails, as well as set up webhooks and/or automations
to trigger based on replies.
(We haven&#39;t quite shipped the unified inbox or surfacing replies on the web archive yet, but it&#39;s coming soon!)

Opt-in reply tracking

You can now add automatic alt text to your images

<img src="/next-assets/img/ai-alt.gif" alt="">
Buttondown will never use your content or newsletter to power AI or LLMs without your express permission (as our
lengthy and detailed <a href="https://buttondown.email/blog/generative-ai">blog post on the subject</a> explains), but we do
want to make it easier for you to improve your newsletter and make it more accessible.
In my experience, the best features are the ones that &quot;just work&quot; without you having to press a button that says &quot;AI&quot; or has the dreaded magic-wand emoji. Here&#39;s a simple example:
you can now use a small little computer vision model to generate alt text for your images.

<img src="/next-assets/img/social.png" alt="">
In addition to the old guard of social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), you can now set up auto-posting and share your personal handle
for Reddit, Hacker News, Bluesky, and even Threads!
Head on over to the <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings/design">settings page</a> to set &#39;em up.

More social network integrations

<img src="/next-assets/img/auto-anal.png" alt="">
We&#39;ve supercharged the analytics for <a href="/features/automation">automations</a>. Now, just like for the emails you send, you can
drill into exactly who opened what, which links were clicked, and more.

Automation analytics is way better

You can now sort your subscribers by metadata

<img src="/next-assets/img/metadata-sorting.png" alt="">
If you use metadata to store additional information about your subscribers, you can now sort your subscribers by that metadata. This is useful if you want to find all subscribers who have a certain value for a metadata field
or identify particular subscribers!

Buttondown now checks for overlarge images before sending

<img src="/next-assets/img/preflight.png" alt="">
Huge images are no fun: they take forever to load, they&#39;re hard to read, and some email providers
will even block them outright. Buttondown now checks for images that are too large before sending
them, and will warn you if you&#39;re about to send a huge image.

We&#39;ve added the ability to add captions to your images! This is a great way to add context to your images and make your posts more accessible.
Check out a little example video below:
<video src="/next-assets/img/caption.mp4" autoPlay controls></video>

Add captions to your images!

Learn which emails are driving the most subscribers (and payments!)

<img src="/next-assets/img/subcounts.png" alt="New columns">
We continue to add more and more columns to the email list view that, in the fullness of time, mean
that you&#39;ll never have to leave the list view to get the information you need. (I am kidding, but only slightly.)
Here&#39;s the TL;DR — you can now see how many subscribers (and paying subscribers) each email has driven, and sort
by those columns, so as to see which emails are driving the most subscribers (and payments). This of course only works
if you have online archives enabled, since we&#39;re not using cookies or invasive ad-tech to determine this.
Combined with the existing columns, it should be easier than ever to understand which emails are pulling in traffic and conversions! (Next up; adding conversion data, too.)

You can now programmatically register webhooks with the API!

We&#39;ve added a new endpoint to the API that allows you to register webhooks (or list them, or update them, or delete them.) You can check it out
over in the <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/api-reference/webhooks">API documentation</a>.
While I imagine programmatic webhooks are overkill to many people, there are many use cases this enables for platforms managing multiple newsletters
on top of Buttondown:
<ul>
<li>If you&#39;re running a suite of ten newsletters, each with different primary authors, you can dynamically register webhooks to notify those authors
when a new subscriber signs up.</li>
<li>If you&#39;re programmatically registering newsletters and syncing them with your own data store over time, you can further automate this process by
registering webhooks alongside newly created newsletters instead of having to manually register them.</li>
</ul>
Here&#39;s an example invocation, just for fun:
<pre><code>requests.post(&quot;https://buttondown.email/v1/webhooks&quot;, {
 &quot;url&quot;: &quot;https://example.com/webhook&quot;,
 &quot;event_type&quot;: &quot;subscriber.created&quot;
})
</code></pre>
That&#39;s all! Happy programming!

Get a weekly report on your incoming subscribers!

<img src="/next-assets/img/weekly-report.png" alt="I promise &#39;GPT Digest Daily&#39; was a test newsletter.">
While we&#39;re very proud of the <a href="/features/analytics">work to level up the analytics pages</a> in the last few months, we know that not everyone has the time to check in on their analytics every day. So we&#39;ve added a new feature to help you stay on top of your newsletter&#39;s growth: a weekly report!
This is... exactly what it sounds like. Every Sunday, Buttondown will send you an email with a summary of your newsletter&#39;s growth over the last week. It&#39;ll include:
<ul>
<li>The number of new subscribers you&#39;ve gained</li>
<li>The number of paid subscribers you&#39;ve gained (if you have a paid newsletter)</li>
<li>The number of pageviews your newsletter has received (if you have a public archive)</li>
</ul>
I am loathe to add new emails to Buttondown&#39;s repertoire, so this is opt-in for now. You can enable it by going to your <a href="/settings/notifications">account settings</a> and choosing the &quot;Weekly reports&quot; option:
<img src="/next-assets/img/weekly-report-notification.png" alt="Like so!">
And you can expect even more additions to the weekly report in the future, like easy breakouts of active UTM sources and details about emails you&#39;ve sent in the past week!

More columns for subscriber and email views!

<video src="/next-assets/img/columns.mp4" controls></video>
Hot off the heels of last week&#39;s rearchitecture of the subscriber and email views, we&#39;ve added more columns to the subscriber and email views:
<ul>
<li>Modification date (for emails)</li>
<li>All the UTM and referral parameters you could ever want (for subscribers)</li>
<li>Churn date (for subscribers)</li>
</ul>
Even more coming soon, so you can always have the most important information at your fingertips.

Customize your subscriber and email list views!

<video src="/next-assets/img/columns.mp4" controls></video>
Surface only the information that you care about by clicking the little &quot;plus&quot; button in the top right corner of your subscriber and email list views. You can add and remove columns to your heart&#39;s content.
Your trenchant response to this news might be &quot;well, Justin, I care about information that you don&#39;t even have columns for, like subscriber quality or email click rate.&quot; To which I say, &quot;yes, of course, but first you build the new architecture and then you add all the fancy new columns to it.&quot;
(Which is to say: <a href="https://github.com/buttondown-email/roadmap/issues/340">it&#39;s coming soon</a>! If you have other ideas for columns you&#39;d like to see, please add them to the roadmap.)

You can now filter your subscribers by date!

<img src="/next-assets/img/sub-date.png" alt="A screenshot showing the new date filter in the subscriber list interface">
Listen, ships can&#39;t all be huge, monolithic, game-changing features. Sometimes, they&#39;re just small, incremental improvements that make your life a little easier. This is one of those ships.
I am excited about this step-change function for two reasons:
<ol>
<li>It makes it much easier to do ad-hoc emails for specific cohorts of subscribers. For example, if you want to send a special email to everyone who subscribed in the last week, you can now do that in a few clicks.</li>
<li>It&#39;s a stepping stone to shifting some of the logic and visualization in the Analytics page into the subscriber &amp; email pages, respectively. (Not committing to anything yet, but I think combining the &#39;list&#39; and &#39;aggregate&#39; functionalities
into a single page will make exploration and insights a little more ergonomic.)</li>
</ol>
(P.S. — this functionality is of course also live in the <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/api-reference/subscribers">API</a>. Just call <code>/v1/subscribers?date[]=2023-05-01&amp;date[]=2023-05-08</code> to get all subscribers who subscribed within that range.)

Do you know of <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/api-reference/events-and-webhooks">webhooks</a>?
They are terrific: a way to extend and supercharge your newsletter, even if you&#39;re not a programmer. You can pipe them up to various
endpoints in tools like Zapier or IFTTT to do things like:
<ul>
<li>Send a tweet when you publish a new issue</li>
<li>Send a Slack message when someone subscribes</li>
<li>Send a text message when someone subscribes as a paid user</li>
</ul>
Today, I&#39;m excited to announce a bit of house cleaning in the world of webhooks.
Gone are some deprecated webhooks:
<ul>
<li><code>draft.created</code> (replaced by <code>email.created</code>)</li>
<li><code>scheduled_email.created</code> (replaced by <code>email.created</code>)</li>
<li><code>scheduled_email.deleted</code> (replaced by <code>email.deleted</code>)</li>
</ul>
And in are two new ones:
<ul>
<li><code>email.status.changed</code>, which fires whenever the &#39;status&#39; (draft, scheduled, sent) of an email changes</li>
<li><code>subscriber.clicked</code>, which fires whenever a subscriber clicks a link in an email</li>
</ul>
You might be able to read between the lines on that last one a little bit. Coming soon in the land of <a href="/changelog/2023-05-16">automations</a>: a way to, say, set tags or metadata
onto your subscribers who click on certain links.

New webhooks

(NERD ALERT: If you don&#39;t use the API, this post is not for you.)
If you do use the API, you might have run into a small frustration which is this:
You&#39;re trying to sync some existing corpus of subscribers (say, your userbase) with Buttondown&#39;s list. So every time someone registers an account, they become a Buttondown susbcriber.
This is easy: you just make a <code>POST</code> request to <code>/v1/subscribers</code> with their email address and you&#39;re done.
But what if you want to then change something about them? Let&#39;s say you want to add a tag to them (to reflect the fact that they&#39;re a churn risk) or you want to delete them (because they&#39;ve deleted their account.)
You can&#39;t do that, because you don&#39;t know their subscriber ID. You&#39;d have to either store that subscriber ID in your database (not the end of the world, but kind of annoying) or search for them with <code>/v1/subscribers?email=foo@bar.com</code> and then grab their ID (again, not the end of the world, but kind of annoying.)
Now there is a better way!
Just use their email address as a PK. You can call, e.g. <code>DELETE /v1/subscribers/justin@buttondown.email</code> and it will Just Work.
This doesn&#39;t let you do anything you couldn&#39;t already do, but it should make integration, like, 10% easier. And that adds up.

Use subscriber emails as a PK!

<img src="/next-assets/img/metadata-sub.png" alt="A preview of metadata in the subscriber list view">
Do you know about metadata?
Metadata is powerful. <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/advanced-features/metadata">Metadata lets you store details like name, pronouns, or country</a> on each subscriber.
Metadata is also a little cumbersome to work with, I know. You have to dive into each subscriber&#39;s details to see it, and you can&#39;t edit it in bulk.
In time, we want to make the email and subscriber list pages truly customizable, so you can choose exactly what details (say, open rate, or total spend, or whatever) are most important to you.
But in the meantime, one quick step in the right direction — if you are collecting metadata via your subscribe form, you now can automatically see it in your Subscribers page. A victory for fewer clicks!
(BTW: did you even know you could automatically collect metadata using your subscribe form? Check out the <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/getting-started/building-your-subscriber-base#adding-metadata-to-your-subscribers">docs on adding metadata to your subscribers</a>!)

Metadata in your subscriber lists!

My copywriter (okay, we don&#39;t have a copywriter — I&#39;m talking about my fiancé) hates it
that I&#39;m titling this &quot;less terrible search results page&quot; instead of, like &quot;better search results
page&quot; or &quot;new search results page&quot; or &quot;search results page 2.0&quot; or something. But I refuse to
not speak my truth — the old page was terrible, and this one is less so:
<img src="/next-assets/img/search-results.png" alt="Search results page">
When you search for an item, they&#39;re now more logically and cohesively grouped — items returned
can be acted upon in bulk without having to go item-by-item.
More changes to search coming soon:
<ul>
<li>Performance. It&#39;s too slow!</li>
<li>More results. Surveys! Events! Other things I&#39;m forgetting right now!</li>
<li>Less janky modal!</li>
</ul>

Less terrible search results page

<img src="/next-assets/img/share-image.png" alt="A quick peek at the new share image input">
You&#39;ve been able to set an icon for your subscribe page which works as both favicon,
brand identifier, and OG image, but — that&#39;s a lot of hats to wear. Especially when
you consider that icons tend to be, well, square and share images are rectangular.
So we&#39;ve added a new input for setting a share image. This image will be used as the
OG image for your subscribe page, archive pages, and any other pages associated with your newsletter.
It will also be used as a fallback for any emails that don&#39;t have custom share images set.
I&#39;m working on automatically generated ones for you to use, but that&#39;s a little ways off. <a href="https://github.com/buttondown-email/discussions/discussions/4">Check out the GitHub issue</a>
for more deets there!

Set an OG image for your subscribe page!

<img src="/next-assets/img/analytics-2.0.png" alt="New and improved analytics page">
The analytics page used to be bad. Not gonna beat around the bush here.
It was slow, visually cumbersome, and unorganized. Most importantly, it did not answer meaningful questions about your newsletter.
In March, I sat down with a specific goal: to make the analytics page actually useful. I defined &quot;actually useful&quot; as &quot;able to answer a short but thorough list of questions&quot;:
<ol>
<li>How many subscribers did I receive over a certain timeframe, and where did they come from?</li>
<li>Which specific emails are causing subscribers to unsubscribe, subscribe, or upgrade?</li>
<li>How is my open rate and click rate trending over time?</li>
<li>How are people reading my emails: in what context, on what device, and in what languages?</li>
</ol>
I&#39;m happy to say that we&#39;ve made a lot of progress on this front. The new analytics page is fast, ergonomic, and answers the questions above.
There are, in fact, even more changes coming to the analytics page. In particular:
<ul>
<li>Adding conversion rates for the subscription funnel (% of subscribers who confirm their subscription, % of subscribers who convert to paying)</li>
<li>The ability to filter not just on date but on arbitrary subscriber characteristics such as tags or metadata</li>
<li>Even more metrics, so you can slice and dice subscribers by additional fields such as tag or payment plan</li>
</ul>
But the work in March represents a big step forward and a new foundation for future improvements. I hope you like it: <a href="mailto:support@buttondown.email">please let us know</a> what feedback you may have!
P.S.: we&#39;ve slightly (just slightly!) tweaked the logic behind the analytics paywall.
Instead of being completely hidden for free users, free users can now view their analytics for
their current month and must upgrade to view analytics for other timeframes.

New and improved analytics page!

It is springtime, which means it is time for pricing changes.
(They&#39;re quite minor this time.)
Here are the changes, in entirety:
<ol>
<li>A <a href="https://buttondown.email/pricing">prettier pricing page</a>. I suspect that you, dear reader, are not
jazzed by the intricacies of a pricing page, but I am!</li>
<li>A new plan entitled &quot;Advanced&quot; (it is hard to think of fancy words that imply &quot;better than &#39;professional&#39;&quot; yet &quot;worse than &#39;enterprise&#39;&quot;,
so &#39;advanced&#39; it is). It is $139/month and offers the exact same functionality as the Professional plan, except with a 20,000 subscriber limit.</li>
<li>More granular pricing for enterprise customers.</li>
<li>I have — breaking changes alert! — moved the &quot;whitelabeling&quot; and &quot;teams&quot; features from the Standard plan to the Professional plan for all new
customers. If you were a Standard plan customer using either of these features, you&#39;ll still have access to them at no additional cost.</li>
</ol>
There are no changes to the free, Basic, or Standard plans.
Hope all of that makes sense! If you have any questions, <a href="mailto:support@buttondown.email">we&#39;re all ears</a>.

New advanced plans + enterprise pricing!

Debug API requests in the new dedicated requests page

<img src="/next-assets/img/changelog.png" alt="">
Stop me if you&#39;ve heard this one: you&#39;re trying to debug an integration
gone awry and you&#39;re not quite sure what&#39;s going wrong. You see something with a 4XX
error in your logs, but you can&#39;t reproduce the edge case and are worried that it was
something more than a flash in the pan.
Buttondown&#39;s had a little requests table squirreled away in the settings page for a while,
but it had some limitations: it only showed the last 100 requests, and it didn&#39;t let you
filter by endpoint or method. (It was also, frankly, ugly.)
So we&#39;ve moved it to its own page! It has filtering, and pagination, and more room to breathe.
You may never need to use this page — I pray that all your integrations are perfect from the
first commit — but if you do, it&#39;s there for you.
Check it on out over at <a href="https://buttondown.email/requests">/requests</a>.

Gang, I know — the settings page can be rough at times. There is a lot of knobs and whistles
and it is somehow both overwhelming and confusing, a little like getting lost in a jungle of poorly-styled
text boxes. We&#39;re working on it, slowly and steadily!
Some of these changes are big ones — like adding the minimap to the right of the page. Some of them are small,
like this: we&#39;ve added a bona fide CSS input widget to the settings page. Gone are the days of having to
futz around with an unstyled <code>textarea</code> component: you now get syntax checking, undo/redo support, autocomplete,
and more.
There&#39;s more to come, I promise — but these tiny little improvements add up.
 
<video src="/next-assets/img/css.mp4" controls></video>

Better CSS inputs in the settings page.

A few improvements to Buttondown&#39;s WYSIWYG editor:
<ul>
<li>The toolbar now stays at the top when you scroll, so you can always see it when editing.</li>
<li>The link editor replaces the toolbar, so it doesn&#39;t displace your writing when it appears.</li>
<li>You can now insert variables as links (like {{subscribe_url}})! Previously, this was only possible in the markdown editor.</li>
</ul>
 
<video src="/next-assets/img/sticky-toolbar.mp4" controls></video>

A more ergonomic editor toolbar

Sift through the noise quickly with smart filters

When we launched the fancy new filtering mechanism in November,
there were two big pieces of feedback:
<ol>
<li>&quot;This is cool, but how do I just see the total number of subscribers I have?&quot;</li>
<li>&quot;This is cool, but do I really have to futz with all these filters just to see what drafts I have?&quot;</li>
</ol>
There&#39;s always a balance between smart, opinionated defaults and total freedom; the previous
iteration of the filtering mechanism was too much on the freedom side. Every page on which
you can filter now has a few smart defaults that you can use to quickly get to the information
you want. For example, on the &quot;Subscribers&quot; page, you can now see the total number of subscribers
you have; on the &quot;Emails&quot; page, you can quickly filter to just your sent emails or your drafts.
I wanted to get this iteration out there because it&#39;s a strict improvement over the previous
one, but there&#39;s more to come.

The emails page loads three times as fast!

The emails page is now faster. This is because — nerd alert! —
it&#39;s now running on the same code that powers Buttondown&#39;s external-facing
APIs.
The page isn&#39;t fast enough. Buttondown should feel as fast as a native app,
and it&#39;s not there yet. Getting there requires a number of investments:
<ol>
<li>Smarter handling of local-first data</li>
<li>Better caching</li>
<li>Front-end optimizations</li>
</ol>
But one big first step was just speeding up the backend of the page: the
part where Buttondown asks a database for all of your emails and then sends
them to your browser. And that&#39;s now done!

Email analytics were slow for those of you on the larger
side of the subscriber count spectrum. I have written a lot of code
(and also deleted a lot of code) to make that situation better:
it should take now on the order of seconds to pull in tens of thousands
of events, rather than tens of seconds.
There&#39;s a lot in store for analytics this year: I&#39;m excited to start pulling
in and surfacing web analytics, subscription funnel data, conversion rates, and
more. But first, the existing stuff needed to be faster — and now it is.

Email analytics are much faster!

Buttondown makes sure your images are accessible and SEO-friendly

<img src="/next-assets/img/changelog/alt-text.png" alt="A screenshot of the modal that informs you to add ALT text">
Buttondown now has a friendly reminder to add alt text to your images before sending your email.
Adding alt text (alternative text) to your images is a great way to make sure your emails are accessible to everyone, including people who use screen readers. It&#39;s also a great way to make sure your emails are SEO-friendly!

It's now easier to choose the share image (or 'OG image') for an email!

<img src="/next-assets/img/changelog/image-picking.png" alt="">
By default, Buttondown grabs the first image you add to your email as the &#39;share image&#39;
that shows up on Twitter and Facebook. You&#39;ve been able to optionally add a custom image
in the &quot;fiddly bits&quot; modal for a while now, but now you can also choose between all other images
in your email without having to upload it a second time.

If you&#39;re using Buttondown&#39;s writing interface in WYSIWYG mode, you can now
add custom HTML classes and ALT text to your images without having to drop down to HTML.
Click on the image once you&#39;ve uploaded it and a little &quot;edit&quot; button should appear in the
bottom-left corner!
(Over time, this will also allow you to thumbnail the image, add alignments and captions, and more. But, you know, baby steps.)

Improvements to the image editor

Buttondown warns you when you&#39;re about to manually add a subscriber that already exists; additionally, when
manually adding a subscriber you can now optionally activate them automatically instead of asking them to
confirm their address.

Better subscriber validation

<ul>
<li>Added hotkey support for bulk actions like &#39;deleting emails&#39; or &#39;reminding subscribers&#39;.</li>
<li>Authors can now opt out from receiving notifications for new premium subscribers (or unsubscribers). They can be taxing!</li>
</ul>

Hotkey support!

You can now select all items that match a given filter for a bulk action (such as deleting subscribers), even if there are so many items that they don&#39;t fit on a single page.

Stronger bulk actions

<ul>
<li>Archive list pages should now load around twice as fast.</li>
<li>The &quot;address&quot; field has been removed for now. No more random locations at the end of your emails!</li>
</ul>

Faster archive page

You can now modify the slug and metadata of emails

<img src="/next-assets/img/2022-10-28.png" alt="">
You can now modify the slug and metadata of emails before sending them.

<img src="/next-assets/img/2022-10-27.jpeg" alt="">
Launched a brand-new writing interface.

Improved writing interface

<img src="/next-assets/img/2022-10-17.png" alt="">
Before filtering data on a list page, Buttondown gives you a preview of how many
objects fall under that filter. This is combinatorial, so you can see how many
subscribers with the <code>premium</code> tag came from a given UTM source and so on!

Better list view filtering

Rebuilt the settings interface into a unified page to make things more navigable and accessible.

Prettier settings page

Paid subscribers whose most recent payment is past due (i.e. they have not paid for the current month) will be marked in the Subscribers page.

Marking past due subscribers

Exports have more descriptive filenames.

More descriptive filenames for exports

&quot;Page not found&quot; pages on the hosted archives now include a CTA for visitors to subscribe.

More useful 404 pages

You can view all &#39;events&#39; associated with your newsletter in a dedicated view. Read more about it <a href="https://blog.buttondown.email/2022/07/14/events-view">here</a>!

Changelog

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

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Best practices, news, and more. Every month.

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