How to Set up an Automated Weekly Email Newsletter

Newsletters are a great way to keep your audience engaged. They’re also one of the few traffic sources you can have that aren’t reliant on an outside force. With organic traffic, you have to worry about Google changing their algorithm or cutting you off for one reason or another. With paid traffic, you have to deal with ever-shifting costs, competition within keywords, and even the potential collapse of a social network. With a mailing list, your links are delivered directly to the inboxes of the people who already professed to be interested in your content, and thus will be a direct traffic source. The numbers back this up: automated emails drove 37% of all email-generated sales in 2024, despite accounting for just 2% of email volume. All you have to do is work to maintain user engagement and expand your subscriber base.

All of that is for another post, however. First, you need to set up your newsletter.

Step 1: Determine Frequency

The first thing you want to do is figure out how often you want to be sending emails to your mailing list.

You have a few options here. A lot of mailing lists these days fall into one of four categories.

• The daily digest. Companies that send out emails this frequently are generally concerned with ongoing issues from day to day. You see this a lot with political mailing lists and the lists for activists who want to keep audiences informed. It can also be a seasonal thing, with Advent Calendar deal messages falling into this category. Amazon will also often send daily emails if you’re a frequent browser of their site, including products you have recently viewed.
• The weekly roundup. This is the most typical list type for a blog, and for good reason. About 1 in 3 digital marketers send weekly emails, making it the most common cadence. It’s frequent enough that you don’t need to worry about losing readers due to how rarely they open messages. On the other hand, it’s not so frequent that you have to struggle to find content to publish. Often, it will include your blog posts for the week, maybe a special sale in your store, and some exclusive content only subscribers can see. Data consistently shows Tuesday as the strongest day to send, with open rates as high as 38.25%, and the best send times cluster around 10-11 AM UTC.
• The monthly CTA. This is a much rarer form of mailing list message, and it’s used for two reasons. Either you’ve found that your users don’t respond very well to more frequent messages, or you simply don’t have much to say. It works better on blogs that publish only a handful of posts per month. It can also be used as a supplement to a billing cycle, as a reminder that a bill is due with some added value beyond just the bill itself.
• The occasional message. This is the method many people use when they’re convinced that they don’t have enough to say to make a newsletter worth it. It’s generally used by authors, smaller personal sites, and new product notifications or developments for people who preorder something.

For the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume you’re publishing blog posts frequently enough to warrant a weekly roundup newsletter, but not so often that you can benefit from daily messages. You won’t be flooding your readers with messages they won’t open, which is good, because too many ignored messages mean your newsletters will start being marked as spam. Do make note that you can always change the frequency of your newsletter whenever you want. If you find that people respond to daily messages more than to weekly messages, by all means, upgrade.

One quick word of caution on subject lines: avoid the word “Newsletter” in your subject line. >Open rates drop by as much as 18.7% when it appears there. Lead with the value inside instead.

Step 2: Determine Content

Once you know about how often your newsletter is going to be sent out, you can start building a content template for it. A template is important because it will give you an idea of how many pieces of content and of what types those pieces should be.

For example, say you’re sending out a weekly message but you only write three blog posts per week. Do you want to share all three of them as a content digest? Or would you prefer something a little more curated, and share only one of them as your best piece of content that week?

Every newsletter should have the following elements in it, however you decide to design it.

• Links to content on your website. Think of this like the meta title and description that Google would publish, except written more robustly than Google’s limitations. You have more space and can give more of a summary of your post without being truncated.
• Links to content on other websites. If you’re doing a frequent email newsletter but you don’t have a ton of content on your own site, it can be a struggle to figure out what to post. In these cases, curating content from partners can be a great help. It also gives you a position in your newsletter you can use for promoted posts, to sell your traffic so to speak.
• Links to your social media profiles. No newsletter is complete without a way for users to engage with you beyond their inboxes. Getting them to follow you on social media with a brief CTA and the image link of the social network is highly valuable.
• Content exclusive to the mailing list for added value. This can be anything from a small tips and tricks section to links to exclusive coupons and deals, or even direct downloads for content that can’t be found elsewhere. Distributing a new ebook? Send out a link to your mailing list first.
• A dedicated call to action. This doesn’t have to be more than a single line, but it can be as much of the focus of your newsletter as you want it to be. Some newsletters will have little more than a “check out our new content” call to action, while others will be almost entirely focused on a new product launch, to the exclusion of content links or anything else.

You can skip the curated content links if you so desire. They can be good filler and a decent secondary form of monetization in some cases, but many brands don’t want to dilute their own content with links to other brands - both approaches are valid.

As for templates, your design can range from plain text with a few hyperlinks all the way up to fancy HTML designs that essentially work as a small website hosted in the email itself. Most major email platforms offer built-in drag-and-drop template editors today, so you don’t necessarily need to look externally for inspiration, though plenty of third-party template resources still exist. Customize whatever you use to fit your brand.

Once you have all of these elements in place, the actual copywriting of the newsletter itself should be easy. Include the time-sensitive information you need to include, add in your links and descriptions, add an image or two if the template has space for it, and you’re good to go.

Step 3: Set Up Automation

Next, it’s time for the actual automation part of things. For this article, we’re going to walk through your main platform options, since the landscape has changed considerably and you have more strong choices than ever.

The most widely used platform is still Mailchimp, though it’s worth knowing upfront that its pricing and free tier have shifted significantly over the years. As of 2026, the free plan is limited to 500 contacts and 1,000 emails per month - a significant reduction from its older limits. Paid plans start around $13/month for the Essentials tier. Automation workflows, including the ability to trigger recurring weekly sends, are available on paid plans.

If Mailchimp’s current pricing doesn’t appeal to you, there are several strong alternatives worth considering:

• Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) - Offers a generous free tier based on email sends (300/day) rather than contact count, with automation available even on free plans.
• Kit (formerly ConvertKit) - Popular with bloggers and creators. Free up to 10,000 subscribers with basic features, with automation on paid plans.
• Beehiiv - A newer platform that has grown rapidly and is particularly well-suited to newsletter-first publishers. Offers a free plan and has built-in monetization and growth tools.
• MailerLite - A clean, affordable option with automation on the free plan up to 1,000 subscribers.

Whichever platform you choose, the import process for an existing list is broadly similar. Export your current list from whatever software you’re using as a CSV file, then use your new platform’s import tool to map the columns (email address, first name, etc.) to the right fields. Most platforms walk you through this with a guided interface.

For automation specifically, what you’re looking for is the ability to set up a recurring campaign or a workflow that sends on a schedule - weekly, for example - to your full list or a segment of it. Most platforms also support RSS-to-email workflows, which will automatically pull in your latest blog posts and send them on whatever schedule you define. This is particularly useful if your newsletter format closely mirrors your publishing schedule. You can also learn more about automating emails to your blog subscribers to get the most out of these tools.

Marketing automation tools in general have been shown to increase sales productivity by up to 14.5%, so the time investment in setting this up correctly is well worth it. Take time to explore your chosen platform’s knowledge base, as each one has detailed documentation and often video walkthroughs for setting up automated workflows.

Step 4: Monitor and Improve

Every major email platform today gives you access to open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, and more - broken down per campaign. Triggered and automated emails consistently outperform standard broadcast emails, with average open rates of 35.6% compared to 19.7% for regular campaigns. If your automated newsletter is underperforming those benchmarks, it’s worth investigating why.

Based on these metrics, you’ll want to start running split tests (also called A/B tests). Most platforms support this natively, allowing you to run two variations of a message to different sub-groups in your mailing list. For a deeper look at how this works with landing pages, our ultimate guide to A/B testing is a good reference.

If you have 1,500 subscribers, 750 of them will see one version and 750 will see another. You can then see how various aspects of your message affect open rates and click rates.

• Does the HTML layout do better, or does plaintext?
• Do shorter messages do better, or longer messages?
• Do people prefer one explicit CTA or several smaller CTAs?
• Do people like it when you link to other sites, or just your own?
• Does changing the send day or time (e.g., Tuesday at 11 AM UTC vs. Thursday at 2 PM) meaningfully affect open rates?

The trick to successful split testing is to make sure you have roughly equal exposure to both sides of the test, and to only test one element at a time. If you change three things about your email and one side does better than the other, that’s great, but you have no idea which of the three elements drove that result. When you test one at a time, you can isolate what each change actually does and adjust your strategy accordingly.

The other thing you may want to test, which you can’t do with traditional split testing, is email frequency. We assumed once a week was a good place to start, but maybe sending whenever you publish a new post works better for your audience, in which case an RSS-to-email workflow handles this automatically. Alternatively, you could post less often - but you risk losing subscribers who like making your newsletter part of their weekly routine. If your unsubscribe rates spike after an increase in frequency, that’s a clear signal to pull back. It’s also worth reviewing the pros and cons of RSS-based email tools before committing to that approach.

Whichever platform you end up using, invest time in understanding its analytics dashboard and automation capabilities. The data is there - using it consistently is what separates newsletters that grow from newsletters that stagnate.