Guide to Automated Newsletters

Overview

Automated Newsletters constantly pull content from your Team Boards and Folders into templates that you can customize to your company’s branding. Then issues are sent from the templates on a recurring schedule that you set. Built-in analytics let you see how recipients engage with the content so you can refine and improve future issues.

This is your comprehensive guide to getting started with Automated Newsletters. In this article:

1. Get started with your first newsletter
2. Collect relevant insights with AI Feeds
3. Defining newsletter templates and issues
4. Edit your newsletter template
5. Define your recipients
6. Define your newsletter's schedule
7. Review and edit individual issues (close to send time)
8. Learn from analytics

Get started with your first newsletter

Here’s a quick overview of the steps to creating a newsletter.

1. Create a newsletter template.

2. Choose your newsletter’s name. You can always go back and edit or update later.

3. Choose where the content will come from. To start, try picking one or two Team Boards that you and your team regularly add content to.

4. Set the schedule to send your issues.

5. Add recipients. You can add individual email addresses, or add your company’s distribution list.

6. Review and test your issue before sending.

7. Learn and improve. Check the Analytics tab to see how each issue performs.

Pick a descriptive name for your newsletter

The name of your newsletter can be recipient-facing, if you choose to include it in the subject line. We recommend a descriptive name that makes it clear what kind of content people can expect to find inside.

Here are some suggestions for naming your market intelligence newsletters, based on names of real newsletters from Feedly customers:

Market landscape newsletters

• Weekly Market Intelligence Digest
• Daily News Brief
• Market Watch
• Industry News

Newsletters about trends, competitors, customers, or technologies

• [Your Company Name] Trend Watch
• Competitor Watch
• Weekly Customer News
• Emerging Technology Scanning News
• Tech Daily Newsletter

Threat intelligence newsletters

• Vulnerability Report
• Cyber Threat Intel Weekly Newsletter
• CTI Daily
• Weekly Security Brief

Collect relevant insights with AI Feeds

Articles populate your newsletter from Boards and Folders

Articles are fed into your newsletter from two places:

1. Team Folders: Collections of AI Feeds and other sources.
2. Team Boards: Shared spaces where your team can save articles.

How does Feedly choose which articles to add to your newsletter? Articles that have been added to a Team Board or Folder since the last issue was sent will be added to your newsletter.

For the first issue of your newsletter:

• For Team Boards, Feedly will add up to 15 recent articles from the last 62 days.
• For Team Folders, you can choose how many articles Feedly will add to your first issue.

When to use Team Boards and Folders to populate your newsletter

You can select a mix of Team Boards or Team Folders to populate your newsletter. As a reminder:

• Team Boards are shared spaces where your team can save articles.
• Team Folders are collections of AI Feeds and other sources.

Use Team Boards when you want to manually curate a limited amount of content. If you’re sending a weekly briefing of the top 5 articles in your industry, for example, you can use a Board to nominate candidates for the newsletter as you and your team find them in Feedly.

Use Team Folders when you want content to flow automatically into your newsletter. You can always remove articles when you review each issue.

Defining newsletter templates and issues

Automated Newsletters allow you to create a template so your newsletters stay consistent in design and branding across issues. The magic of the template is that you don’t have to tweak the design each week.

A template is the base design of the newsletter.

An issue is the individual edition of the newsletter with content from your Team Folders and Team Boards. Each issue will auto-populate with articles either collected in your Folders or saved to your Boards.

Edit your newsletter template

The template editor is a drag-and-drop system that allows you to add or remove blocks from your newsletter template. Drag and drop blocks from the design panel on the left to create the elements of your newsletter.

Customize your template design for maximum engagement

Each day your newsletter is scheduled to send, Feedly will use this template to generate your issue, pulling content from your selected Boards and Folders. To make your newsletter look and feel like your company (which makes people read and engage more), you can add branding and customization.

To customize the branding, edit the template and add a logo, a header, a footer, a subscribe button, and any other recurring content in your newsletter. Elements of the newsletter you should edit in the template editor:

• Add your logo
• Add a header image

• Greeting (you can add this as a paragraph block). Write a standard intro to give it a human touch. Here’s a template if you need inspiration:

  Hi team! This is the weekly [Your Newsletter Name] curated by the [Your Team Name]. It includes the latest critical news about competitors, strategic moves, and innovations in our sector [Describe the content of your newsletter, in general]. We want to make sure this is valuable for you, so please share with other members of the company and reply with any feedback.

• A subscribe button
• Footer content
• Section titles
• Choose the color of section labels and buttons so they match your brand

• In the Newsletter Properties panel, you can set the reply-to email address, so any replies go to the right person

In the template editor, you can also make decisions about the formatting of each newsletter. Click on the different sections of your newsletter to set the properties of that section.

In the Newsletter Properties panel on the right, update settings including:

• Toggle on or off the table of contents
• Choose image size (small or large), or turn off images
• Adjust font size and alignment

Name your notes and summaries sections

By default, each summary will be named based on the topic of the article, and any notes added by your team will be labeled “analyst note”. Here’s how to change that:

1. Open your newsletter
2. In the Newsletter Properties section on the right, scroll down to the option for “summary label” and “note label”
3. Add a label for summaries and notes, so your recipients know what they’re reading. You could just name these sections “Summary” and “Analyst note” or you could pick more descriptive names, such as “AI-generated summary” and “Analysis from the market intel team.”

Choose your subject line format

You can include the newsletter name, issue number, or a combination of all three in your subject line.

1. Open your newsletter and click “Edit Template”
2. In the Newsletter Properties panel on the right, scroll down to the option for Subject
3. Choose the format you want for your subject line

Define your recipients

Here are the different methods for adding recipients to your newsletter audience:

• Add individual email addresses
• Add one of your company’s distribution lists as a recipient (here are our specific recommendations on advantages and disadvantages of using distribution lists)
• Create a subscription form and share so your recipients can add themselves
• Add a subscribe button to the bottom of your newsletter template, so recipients can subscribe to your newsletters

Define your newsletter's schedule

Now it’s time to define your schedule.

1. Go to Send Newsletters > Schedule tab
2. Select which days of the week and what time your newsletter will automatically send
3. You can also choose to receive a notification before each issue is sent, prompting you to review your newsletter content before it is sent out.

Review and edit individual issues (close to send time)

You can edit individual issues before they are sent out. Here’s what you might want to edit in each individual issue:

• Change the order of the articles
• Remove any irrelevant articles
• Manually add any articles, if you want to share articles that aren’t in your chosen Boards or Folders
• Personalize the intro text to this week’s context
• Add additional notes or analysis to article notes

Learn from analytics

Once your newsletter is sent out each week, track its performance on the Analytics tab to better understand what content your readers want. You can use newsletter analytics to:

• Learn who is most engaged with your content (you can reach out to these “fans” to collect feedback)
• View which articles received the most engagement (so you know what types of content to prioritize)
• View which articles received the least engagement (so you understand what doesn’t resonate)

Then, adjust future newsletter issues based on your learnings.

Learn more about how to read analytics.