Moving your newsletter to Letterhead

Moving a newsletter to Letterhead comes down to five steps. You can do them yourself in a few days. If you’re moving a large program with several newsletters, read Planning a large migration as well.

Before you start

• You’re a company admin in Letterhead, and your newsletter has a channel. If you need another channel, contact support.
• You can sign in to your current platform to export your subscribers.
• You, or whoever looks after your website’s domain, can add DNS records.

Keep sending from your old platform until step 5. That way no reader misses an issue while you set up.

1. Bring your audience

Export your subscribers from your current platform as a CSV, including their subscription status and any tags. Then import the file into Letterhead. Only bring people who still want your newsletter: unsubscribed addresses stay unsubscribed, and old addresses that bounce hurt your sending reputation. See Importing your audience.

If your contacts live in a CRM or in Mailchimp, you may be able to pull them in directly. See Syncing contacts from HubSpot, Salesforce or Mailchimp.

2. Set up your sending domain

Send from a subdomain of your own domain, such as mail.yourdomain.com, and publish the records Letterhead gives you. This tells mailbox providers your newsletter really comes from you. Then add the address you’ll send from as a verified sender. See Setting up your sending domain and Managing verified senders.

3. Rebuild your template

Recreate your newsletter’s layout as a Letterhead template so every issue starts from the same design. See Creating and managing templates. You can also bring drafts in from Google Docs or Markdown; see Importing from Google Docs or Markdown.

4. Connect your stories

If your newsletter features articles from your website, add your site’s RSS feed so new stories arrive in your content library ready to drop into an issue. See Adding RSS feeds in Letterhead and Getting started with curations.

5. Send

Send yourself a test, check it in a couple of different inboxes, then schedule your first issue. See Create and schedule a newsletter.

For the first few weeks, send to your most engaged readers first and add more each time, rather than your whole list at once. A new sender that suddenly sends a lot looks suspicious to mailbox providers. See Warming up your sending reputation.

Platform guides

• Keeping your current email provider? You can build newsletters in Letterhead and keep sending through Mailchimp, Iterable, Braze and others. See Sending through Mailchimp, Iterable, Braze and other services.
• Coming from Sailthru with reporting built on its API? See Coming from Sailthru.

If your first sends bounce or land in spam despite following these steps, contact support and we’ll look into it with you.