How do I create and schedule a newsletter?

Creating and scheduling a newsletter happens in two stages on the Emails page: build the edition in the composer, then preview and schedule it. For everything else you can do on this page, see Working in Emails.

Step 1 — Create

1. Open Emails and build from a template, or choose Start from scratch.
2. In the composer, drag blocks from the panel into your layout, then click any block to edit its settings.
3. When your content is ready, click Preview and schedule.

While you’re composing, the composer auto-saves your work. Auto-save applies during composing only, not on the preview-and-schedule step — there, use Continue editing to return to the composer with your changes kept.

To fine-tune how your edition looks on phones, open the Styles tab in the composer and adjust the Mobile Width. Multi-column blocks and layouts (RSS, Curation, URL, and Layout blocks) also have a setting controlling how columns behave on small screens — for example, whether an image-left/text-right row stacks vertically on mobile with the image on top.

Step 2 — Preview and schedule

You’ll see a live preview of your newsletter in desktop and mobile formats, and you can use Send test to send a test version to yourself or anyone else before scheduling.

The View in browser link inside a test email opens that same unpublished edition on the web, so you can check exactly how it reads in a browser before it goes out. The page shows a banner with the send time you’ve set and a link back to the composer to keep editing.

The right panel shows the send details:

• Smart Subjects — an AI feature that drafts compelling subject lines and preview text for you. See Smart Subjects.
• Email Subject — each edition starts with a default subject you can update.
• Preview text — required; the snippet email clients show next to your subject line.
• Audience — your entire subscribed audience or a specific segment. If a scheduled newsletter’s segment is deleted before send time, Letterhead safely stops the send, moves the newsletter back to draft so you can pick a new audience, and emails your admins to explain.
• Date and Time — Letterhead shows the current local time in your channel’s sending timezone right in the scheduler, so you can pick a send time that matches your audience’s clock without a timezone converter.
• Social Card — the image, title, and preview text shown when your edition is shared on social media. Upload an image from local files or use a direct link.

The panel also carries a Content Check on the edition itself — readability, time to read, word count, and Email Weight — plus a Bounce Risk reading that flags content mailbox providers refuse for policy reasons. See What is Bounce Risk, and how do I lower it?

Let Letterhead suggest a send time

When your audience is a single segment, a Recommended chip can appear beneath the date field — for example, Recommended: Tuesday 8:00 AM. That’s the day of the week and time of day this audience has actually opened your recent sends, so instead of typing the same guess every edition, you can schedule for when your readers really show up. Select the chip and the date and time fill in with the next upcoming occurrence of that slot; both stay freely editable afterward — the chip is a suggestion, not a setting.

The suggestion is trained on that audience’s own history, up to its last ten sends, and it holds itself to a minimum: it only appears once the audience has at least three past sends with open data and fifty opens between them. Hover the chip to see exactly what the suggestion rests on. Change the audience and the suggestion recalculates for the new segment — and if that segment’s history is too thin to trust, the chip simply doesn’t appear rather than offering a shaky number.

The chip appears on channels Letterhead delivers itself. If your channel sends through a connected provider such as Iterable or Mailchimp, the open times the suggestion is built from stay with that provider, so no chip appears there and you’ll pick the date and time yourself as usual.

To see the open-time rhythm behind the suggestion for any published edition, check the Opens by hour card on its report — see Newsletter Delivery and Engagement Metrics Report.

When everything is set, click Schedule. A confirmation appears with your chosen date and time, and the newsletter’s status changes — see What Do Letterhead Statuses Mean?

Send now, for breaking news

When a story can’t wait for your next scheduled slot, choose Send Now instead of picking a date and time, and your newsletter goes out right away — usually within a minute or two. It still carries the day’s promotions even though you never set a send date.

After you press Send Now, you stay right where you are: the screen shows a simple Sending state instead of a clock time, and Pause and edit stays one click away for the brief window while the send can still be pulled back. Once it’s too late to stop, the button disappears on its own and the screen moves to the newsletter’s report by itself — no reload needed.

A few things to know:

• Send Now only appears when the edition is ready to go — if the email is still finishing building, it stays unavailable until it’s done.
• A/B test newsletters keep their own separate send flow and aren’t sent this way.

Prefer to have it done for you? The Letterhead assistant (early access — rolling out to select accounts) can draft an edition or revise its subject and preview text for you in conversation — see how the assistant works.