Newsletters

A newsletter is a designed email: heading, text, pictures, buttons, products, two columns, social links, in your colors, with your address and an unsubscribe link in the footer. It goes out from your mailbox address, so replies land in the inbox, and each send is a broadcast with its own opens, clicks and unsubscribes.

Recommended newsletters for your business (top of Email → Newsletters, for owners and admins): the designs that fit what you have — the one written for your booking industry (a salon’s rebooking nudge, a restaurant’s menu, a studio’s class schedule, a course start, a stay offer, an event), best sellers picked per person once your store has orders, new arrivals and back in stock when products are synced, a review ask after recent visits or orders, refer a friend when you have regulars, and the monthly newsletter when none went out for a month. Each card shows the design drawn small. Use this design opens the designer from it; nothing is sent or scheduled until you do. The X hides a suggestion for you.

1. Customers → Newsletters → pick a design: a built-in one (monthly, announcement, promotion, launch, welcome) or one you saved.
2. Edit the blocks on the left; the preview in the middle is the exact email. Switch to Mobile to see it at phone width. Styles and Footer tabs set colors, font and the address.
3. Next: message — a name (yours only), the subject line, preview text and sender name, with the inbox row and the email previewed beside them. “Generate a variation to A/B test” writes subject line B from A, changing one thing (personalization, length, a question, an emoji), so the test tells you what worked; the split slider decides who gets which.
4. Next: review — the recipients (audience, count, who is left out, send spacing, skip the unengaged, topic), the message checks (subject lines, preview text, content: errors block the send, warnings only show), an optional follow-up email, and when: now, later, or each person’s best time. Send me a test from the Design step first.
5. Send. Results are under Broadcasts: per person, whether it was sent, opened, clicked or unsubscribed, and which subject won.

Text blocks take light markup: a blank line between paragraphs, **bold**, _italic_, [link text](https://…), and lines starting with “- ” make a list. {{first_name}}, {{name}} and {{brand}} are filled in per reader, in the subject too.

Subscribers are contacts who said yes to email: the sign-up form (a hosted page at /subscribe/<your key>, or a snippet for your own site, under Newsletters → Settings), the pre-chat survey, a Flow’s Subscribe step, or the consent column under Customers. With double opt-in on, a sign-up gets a confirmation email and only the click subscribes them. Every unsubscribe link sets consent back; the person is skipped from then on.

Calendar (Newsletters → Calendar): every send on the day it went or will go — newsletters, email and WhatsApp broadcasts, automations switched on — month by month in the workspace’s timezone, so the next send lands where there is room. Send spacing (Newsletters → Settings): anyone who received a marketing email from you within the last sixteen hours (or the number you set) is skipped by the next newsletter and by automation email steps, so two sends never stack up in one morning; a single send or an automation can switch it off.

Revenue: with a Shopify store connected, an order placed within five days of a click on a newsletter — or, with no click, an open — is credited to that newsletter. Each order counts once, for the last email touched. The list shows the total; Results lists the orders. It is checked every fifteen minutes; Update now on the results page asks at once.

Replies: a customer who hits Reply on a newsletter lands in Inbox → Tickets as a ticket that names the newsletter, so the team answers from the inbox rather than a mailbox nobody watches. Results counts them in the funnel (Replied) and the number opens the list; a second reply from the same person joins their ticket.

Placing things: select a block and press the + on its top or bottom edge to add a block, a section or a pre-built piece exactly there, no drag needed. Dragging still works — a block dropped on the top half of another goes above it, on the bottom half below it; the canvas scrolls when you drag near its edge. Every block has a Box (padding, background, border, corners) on the right; a section has its own text color and typed column widths. Hover an icon in the block’s toolbar to see what it does. Pictures: select one and drag the handle on its right edge to resize it; the badge shows the width and the pixels it gets in the email, and the block panel says what to upload (twice that width, so it stays sharp on phones). Crop to a shape — square 1:1, portrait 4:5, 3:2, 4:3, 16:9, banner 3:1 — opens the crop tool at that ratio with the best size for the spot; a crop smaller than that is flagged.

The palette has three tabs: Blocks (text, image, button, split columns, header bar, divider, spacer, products, coupon, table, review, video, social, HTML, cart, recommended), Pre-built (twenty-odd ready sections — headers, heroes, two-story rows, tables, coupons, reviews, video, event, footers — with search, a type filter and “includes blocks”; click to add, drag to place) and Saved (your own). Styles covers the template: page and content backgrounds, a background picture, width, corner radius, margin, padding, border; body and heading fonts, sizes, line height, letter spacing, alignment, link color, button shape; and how it reads on a phone (margin, padding, body size, heading scale). Newsletters → Settings holds the defaults every new design starts from.

Recommended products: a block that fills in per person at send time from your catalog (AI Agent → Knowledge → Products) — the store’s best sellers by the orders seen here, skipping anything that person already bought. Against the benchmark: the results page compares open, click and unsubscribe rates with the typical figures for your industry (from the 2025 Mailchimp and Klaviyo reports) once a send has twenty recipients or more.

Follow-up email: on the review step, “Resend to non-openers” sends the same email again with a fresh subject line to everyone who neither opened nor clicked, one to seven days after the first send finishes; bounces, complaints and unsubscribes are left out, and it goes only once. The results page links the two sends. Two tests at once: on the message step write subject line B (or let the AI write it), then “Also test a different design” — B starts as a copy of A and the A / B switch above the canvas edits each. The B half gets subject B and design B; the results page names the leader. Each person’s best time: the send option that spreads the newsletter over the next twenty-four hours, each copy going at the hour that reader has opened most (three opens to go on; the rest go at once).

Preferences: every newsletter’s footer links to a preference page next to Unsubscribe. There the reader picks the topics they want (the list under Newsletters → Settings; tag each newsletter with one when you send it), how often at most (every email, weekly, monthly), or a thirty-day pause. Sends respect all of it, so someone who wants less gets less instead of leaving.

Autosave: a newsletter being written is a draft, and the designer saves it a moment after every change — the design, the name, subject lines, preview text, who it goes to, and which step you are on; “Saved just now” by the step buttons says so. Close the tab, come back later, and it is under Drafts at the top of Newsletters, with Continue. Sending it removes the draft; Delete does too. Saved designs are different: a design you keep to start the next newsletter from (Save as a design to reuse, on the Design step).

Dark mode: many readers open email on a phone in dark mode, and mail apps handle it differently — Apple Mail and iOS Mail follow what the email asks, Gmail on Android may gray a white card on its own. Styles → Dark mode sets what yours asks for. “Keep my colors” (the default) tells the app to show the email exactly as designed; right for designs with dark bands, photos or brand colors that must not change. “Adapt to dark mode” gives the email a second, dark palette — page near-black, card dark gray, text light; buttons and dark bands keep their colors — for readers in dark mode; right for plain text-on-white designs. The Dark button above the email shows either as a dark-mode reader sees it, and the review step notes which you chose. Two things that break in dark mode whatever you choose: a dark logo or icon on a transparent background (put it on a white tile), and dark text drawn inside a picture.

Preview and test (the button above the email on the Design step, and on Review): the email exactly as it goes out, with its inbox line (from, subject, preview text), on a computer or a phone, in dark mode, with pictures blocked, or as the plain-text part. Preview as: search a contact and see their own copy — their name, the values from their records, and only the blocks their show-rules let them see; their details are listed underneath. Send a test to up to five addresses, filled as that contact, and tick Remember to keep the addresses on this device. Checks: the pre-send checks, pictures without alt text or not on https, personal tags that contact has no value for, the size against the point where Gmail cuts an email off (102 KB, taking the unsubscribe link with it), and every link in reading order — Check every link opens each one and says which do not. Review with AI gives a second opinion on the words; it changes nothing. Inbox views shows the simulated views side by side; they come from the email’s own code, so colours, pictures and words are exact, but real apps can differ slightly in fonts and spacing.

Export as HTML (Design step, under Send me a test): downloads the email exactly as it would be sent, as one .html file — for another email tool, a developer, or a client to sign off. Merge tags stay as {{first_name}} and the unsubscribe link as {{unsubscribe_url}}, for the tool it is pasted into to fill; tracking links are not added.