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?

See what’s driving your Email Weight number

Email Weight is the size of your rendered email. A heavier email is more likely to get cut short by Gmail’s “View entire message” link, which hides everything after the cut — including your unsubscribe footer.

Click the arrow next to the Email Weight number in Content Check to see what’s adding to it:

• Content — your text and the markup behind any images you include, not the images’ own file size. Writing less or including fewer images brings this down.
• Layout — the styling behind multi-column blocks, mobile spacing, and per-block padding. Simpler layouts weigh less.
• Old client support — extra markup that keeps your email looking right in Outlook and older email apps. You can turn this off per email.
• Click tracking — the size your email service provider adds when it rewrites your links to track clicks. Trimming any tracking parameters from your own links can bring this down too.

A category that isn’t adding any weight is left off the list, so you only see what’s actually driving the number — and a warning icon next to the total means your email is heavy enough that Gmail may clip it.

Every newsletter you send is also minified automatically before it goes out: styling that would otherwise repeat on every element is folded down so it ships once instead of many times over, with no visible change to how your email looks. That keeps a long edition further from the size where Gmail starts clipping it. There’s nothing to turn on and nothing to manage — it happens on every send.

See when this audience usually opens

If your audience is a single segment, a line reading Peak Opens for Segment appears beneath the date field — for example, Peak Opens for Segment: 8:00 AM. That’s the time of day this audience has actually opened your recent sends, so instead of typing the same guess every edition, you can pick a time when your readers really show up. It’s there to inform your choice and nothing more: it won’t fill in or change the date and time for you, and the picker stays yours.

The reading is drawn from 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. Hovering it shows exactly what the number rests on. Changing the audience recalculates it for the new segment — and if that segment’s history is too thin to trust, the line simply doesn’t appear rather than offering a shaky number.

It’s for channels Letterhead delivers itself. If your channel sends through a connected provider such as Iterable or Mailchimp, the open times behind it stay with that provider, so nothing appears there and you pick the date and time yourself as usual.

You can see the fuller open-time rhythm behind that number for any published edition on 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? Penpal can draft an edition or revise its subject and preview text for you in conversation — see how Penpal works.