Setting up a welcome letter or recurring email

You’ll find both of these under Campaigns → Automations in your channel’s sidebar:

Recurring Email — a newsletter that builds and sends itself on a daily, weekly, every 2 weeks, or every 3 weeks schedule, to your whole audience or a segment.
A welcome for new subscribers — built as a Workflow Automation. The older Welcome Email automation is being retired; existing ones keep running, but new welcome series belong in a workflow.

Not sure which you need? See Choosing an automation. Both kinds of email are built on templates, so create or pick a template first. For recurring sends, use RSS or Curations blocks so each edition fills itself with fresh content.

Create a recurring email

In your channel’s sidebar, open Campaigns → Automations and choose Recurring Email.
Give the automation a title (required — subscribers never see it).
Optionally turn on Dynamic subject and Dynamic preview text so each edition’s subject updates itself. This pairs well with RSS blocks: Letterhead uses the first heading in the newsletter as the subject.
Select the Audience — your entire audience, active openers/clickers, or any saved segment.
Set the Frequency: daily, weekly, every 2 weeks, or every 3 weeks, plus the publication day(s) and time. Weekly and multi-week options let you pick several days.
Choose when to receive a test email — 15 or 30 minutes, or 1 to 23 hours before the send — and who should review it under test email recipients. A new automation starts with your channel’s default “from” address there, if your channel has one. Recipients are optional: with none, your newsletter still goes out on schedule, but nobody gets the preview, or the email Letterhead sends if an edition can’t be built.
Select your template (or create one from a blank template), then Activate, or Save and activate later.

How dynamic subjects work

Letterhead scans the newsletter for the first heading (h1–h6) and uses it as the subject; if there’s none, it uses the first title from your RSS blocks. Very long subjects are trimmed to the last complete word with an ellipsis, capped at 150 characters.

Timing matters

The test email’s send time is when the final content is locked in, even if nobody is set to receive the test. Stories published after that moment won’t appear in the send — so if freshness matters, keep the preview window short, and set the publication time at least 1–2 hours after your content is created.

Deactivating a template that’s in use

If you deactivate a template that an active automation uses, Letterhead warns you; confirming also deactivates the automation, so nothing keeps sending from an outdated template.

Welcome new subscribers with a workflow

A welcome series is now built as a workflow. On the Automations page, choose Workflow Automation: Letterhead creates a new workflow that starts when an audience member subscribes and opens it on the canvas, where you add the welcome email and any follow-ups, waits, or branches. See Choosing what starts an automation for the triggers and Branching and splitting a journey for branches.

Workflows run on channels that send through Letterhead. If the Workflow Automation card shows a plan badge, your plan doesn’t include workflows yet, and clicking it explains how to upgrade.

Tag subscribers along the way

You can add a Tag Subscriber step anywhere in a workflow, whatever trigger starts it. When a subscriber reaches the step, the tags you chose are applied to their contact record — handy for marking who finished your welcome series. Add a step, choose Tag Subscriber, pick the tags, and save. While the workflow runs, the step shows how many subscribers it has tagged.

Those tags work like any other: you can segment on them, branch on them, or use them to start another workflow.

If you still have a Welcome Email automation

Welcome Email automations you already have keep sending. On accounts that haven’t moved to workflows yet, the Welcome Email card is still offered: choose it, give it a title, pick the template, and choose Activate or Save and activate later. If you change that template later, deactivate and reactivate the automation so it picks up the new version.

Once your account welcomes new subscribers with workflows, the Welcome Email card isn’t offered and welcome automations no longer appear in the list, because sign-ups there start a workflow instead.

When a welcome letter is sent

A Welcome Email automation sends when a subscriber confirms their subscription through the opt-in email Letterhead sends them. It doesn’t send when someone is added straight into Subscribed — by hand, by CSV upload, or through Zapier — and it doesn’t send to someone who never confirms the opt-in email, since they stay Not Subscribed.

Adding someone by hand: when you set a subscriber to Subscribed on the Audience page, tick Send a welcome letter to send it right there.
Through Zapier: add the contact as Not Subscribed with Opt-In set to Yes. Letterhead sends the opt-in email, and once they confirm they move to Subscribed and get the welcome letter. See Zapier.
CSV imports have no per-row option; add the subscriber by hand to send their welcome letter.

Send a test before you turn it on

You can send a test of any automation, so you see exactly what it would look like if it sent right now — with the current items from your feed, dynamic subjects and all.

Open Campaigns → Automations and find the automation.
Use the send-a-test action on its row, or open it and choose Send a Test.
Enter up to five email addresses and click Send a Test.

Tests arrive with Automation Test in the subject. Testing one step from the workflow canvas instead? That test says Series Test. Each test has a link at the top that takes you straight to the composer to edit the template.

Good to know

Changes only affect future sends, never emails already sent or in progress.
Pausing stops sending until you resume. See Managing a running automation.
If a test or a send doesn’t look the way your template does in the composer, contact support — that’s ours to fix.

Still can’t find what you need? Contact support.