We’re excited to announce Hosted Newsletter, a new feature available to all Threadloom Newsletter customers beginning today. Hosted Newsletter enables forum admins to automatically publish Newsletter issues to their forum and create an archive of their forum’s best content.
Since 2016, Threadloom Newsletter has delivered over 500 million email newsletters on behalf of our forum customers. Each issue provides subscribers with a concise summary of your forum’s best content, and encourages readers to visit your forum. As a result, Threadloom Newsletter has an industry-leading unique open rate of 28% and unique click rate of 8%.
With Hosted Newsletter, we are excited to be able to offer admins a way to automatically save this content directly on their forum and make it accessible to visitors who don’t regularly receive Threadloom Newsletter.
How does Hosted Newsletter work?
Hosted Newsletter consists of three components:
- an RSS feed;
- BBcode; and
- your forum’s RSS importer.
Together, these components automatically publish “Highlighted Posts” from your Threadloom Newsletter to your forum without any manual work.
First, Threadloom Newsletter generates an RSS feed for your forum. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML feed that allows applications to access content updates – in this case, your latest Threadloom Newsletter issue – in a standardized way. Threadloom Newsletter hosts the RSS feed for you and updates it every time you send a new issue.
Second, in order to optimize the layout for your forum, we generate a BBCode version of your Newsletter issue and store it in the RSS feed using plain text.
Finally, using the built-in RSS importer in vBulletin and XenForo, you can automatically fetch updates from your Threadloom RSS feed and publish new issues to a node or sub-forum of your choice.
Once you’ve set up the RSS importer, you’re all set. It will automatically import your new Newsletter issues to your forum without any additional work from you. Each issue also contains a link to a browser-friendly version (which is now also available in the email version).*
The entire setup process takes about 10 minutes. We’ve created a step-by-step guide here.
How does Hosted Newsletter help?
Hosted Newsletter helps your visitors easily find your forum’s best content and catch up on posts they might have otherwise missed. While many of your registered members may subscribe to your Threadloom Newsletter, and some of your drive-by visitors may sign up using List Builder, Hosted Newsletter provides everyone with a fast and easy way to access this content on demand.
In our early tests, we’ve seen Hosted Newsletter result in longer sessions, more pages per session, and lower bounce rates. In the figure below, the top row is from general forum sessions, and the bottom row is from sessions where a visitor engaged with Hosted Newsletter.
Fig. 1: Google Analytics data from early tests

How do I get started with Hosted Newsletter?
If you are already a Threadloom Newsletter customer, starting today, the address for your Hosted Newsletter RSS feed is in your Threadloom Portal Newsletter settings page. You can find the rest of the steps in this Help Center article. If you have any questions along the way, drop us a line and we’d be happy to help.
If you aren’t yet a Threadloom Newsletter customer, it’s easy to get started. You get 25,000 emails per month for free, and you don’t even need to provide a credit card. You can learn more about Threadloom Newsletter here, or drop us a line.
* Note: Your RSS feed and browser-friendly version of your Newsletter are hosted on primary.org. For the past five years, you may have known us as only Threadloom. If you’ve been following our blog, you know that we’ve been working with partner forums on new ways of distributing content to consumers. We’ve been doing this using Primary, our consumer-facing brand, and have had some exciting results. Don’t worry – nothing is changing for Threadloom customers. Threadloom continues to be our brand for admins. But if you’d like to learn more about Primary, or are simply curious, check out this blog post or drop us a line.