Using your archive and newsletter directory

The Archive page is a public page that shows a channel’s published newsletters. Readers can browse past editions and subscribe to future ones in one place. If Letterhead hosts your newsletters at your own dedicated address, its front page also works as a directory of everything you publish.

What readers see

• Subscribe at the top: new visitors enter their email address to subscribe to the channel’s newsletter. The subscribe box grows or shrinks with the length of your channel description.
• Past newsletters below: published editions in reverse chronological order, each with its subject line and send date.

Your archive page is turned on or off per channel, under Settings → Sending emails → Archive Visibility, with the Newsletter Visibility toggle. That section appears for channels sending through Letterhead’s own email connection. See Managing Your Channel Settings.

Customize the archive banner

Add your logo to the top of the Archive page:

1. Go to Settings → Sending emails → Archive Banner.
2. Upload your logo.

The banner has a maximum height of 160px, with the width scaling automatically; a 3:1 aspect ratio displays best. Channel settings are usually for administrators, so if you don’t see the option, ask yours.

Hide an edition from the archive

Every edition is visible in the archive by default. To keep one off it, go to Campaigns → All Campaigns and turn on that edition’s Hide from archive toggle. This works after the newsletter has been published too, in which case it disappears from the archive straight away. It’s handy when you’ve replaced a published edition with a corrected copy and want only the updated one showing.

Hidden and public editions are published and sent to your audience in exactly the same way; the only difference is whether they appear on the Archive page. In your newsletter list, hidden editions carry an icon next to the title.

Long-time Letterhead users: earlier versions of the composer labeled this Public and worked the other way round: toggling it made an edition public, and editions were private by default.

How private newsletters open in the browser

The people who received a hidden (private) newsletter can still click View in browser and read that edition on the web, just as with a public one. Opening it this way doesn’t make it public:

• It stays unlisted in your archive and out of search results.
• It opens only with that edition’s own hard-to-guess link. A guessed or numbered web address reveals nothing.

That link is the same for every recipient of the edition. It isn’t tied to one reader, so anyone who gets hold of it, through a forward or a shared link, can open the edition too. The privacy model is unlisted and unguessable: a recipient can always get back to a clean copy, and someone who was never sent it and doesn’t have the link sees nothing.

When you send yourself a test of a private newsletter, its View in browser link works the same way, with a banner that takes you back to the composer. Transactional emails and manual one-off sends don’t include browser links.

Your newsletter directory

If Letterhead hosts your newsletters at your own dedicated address, that address’s front page lists every one of your newsletters, grouped by brand. A visitor can look over what you publish and sign up for the ones they want right there, without visiting each newsletter’s Archive page first. A Read the latest link on each newsletter takes them to that newsletter’s own Archive page if they’d rather browse before subscribing.

Think of the front page as a directory of everything you publish, and each Archive page as one newsletter’s own history. Because it’s one stable address, it’s the link to share wherever you introduce people to all your newsletters: social bios, email signatures, guest posts, or podcast show notes.

Two cases don’t show the directory and send visitors on to Letterhead’s own website instead:

• Your newsletters are on a shared Letterhead address rather than your own dedicated one.
• None of your channels has its archive turned on.

Related

• Managing signup pages and subscribe forms
• Working in Campaigns