Choosing an automation

When you open Campaigns → Automations in your channel’s sidebar, you choose what kind of automation to create. The question that decides it: are you sending one newsletter to a group on a schedule, or reacting to what each subscriber does?

Recurring email: one newsletter, on a schedule

A Recurring Email builds and sends a newsletter on a fixed rhythm — daily, weekly, every 2 weeks or every 3 weeks — to your whole audience or a segment. Everyone in that audience gets the same edition at the same time.

Example: a weekly curations roundup. Build a template with a Curations block set to a rolling window wide enough to cover a week, rather than exact dates. Set the Recurring Email to send every Friday morning. Each week Letterhead fills the block with the stories you added to your library in that window, and the roundup goes out on its own. Turn on a dynamic subject and each edition’s subject follows its lead story.

Choose a recurring email when the content changes but the audience and the timing don’t.

Workflow Automation: a journey for each subscriber

A Workflow Automation starts for each subscriber when something happens to them — they subscribe, get tagged, change status, open or click, or go quiet — and walks them through steps you lay out on a canvas: emails, waits, tags, and branches that send different people down different paths. Two people who subscribe a day apart are each at their own point in the journey.

Example: a welcome series. Start the workflow when someone subscribes, send a welcome email straight away, wait three days, send your best stories, then branch: readers who opened get an invitation to your paid tier, readers who didn’t get a gentler nudge.

Choose a workflow when timing should follow each person, or when you want steps that depend on what a reader did.

Welcome new subscribers with a workflow

The older Welcome Email automation sends a single email when someone confirms their subscription. It’s being retired: build any new welcome as a Workflow Automation, which can do the same single email and grow into a series later. Welcome Email automations you already have keep sending. See Setting up a welcome letter or recurring email.

Before you start

• Both kinds send from a template, so have one ready.
• Workflows run on channels that send through Letterhead, on plans that include them. If the Workflow Automation card shows a plan badge, clicking it explains how to upgrade.
• Both can send you a test first — see Send a test before you turn it on.

Next steps

• Setting up a welcome letter or recurring email
• Choosing what starts an automation
• Branching and splitting a journey
• Finding your way around Automations

If an automation sends something you didn’t set up, or doesn’t send when it should, contact support — that’s ours to fix.