Letterhead in 2025: Building for how newsletter teams actually operate

In 2025, we shipped 100+ features and product capabilities, touching every part of the newsletter workflow, from how teams build and curate content, to how they manage audiences, monetize at scale, and send reliably across their tech stacks. 

Our customers are running complex programs across multiple brands, audiences, revenue models, and ESPs. The real challenge isn’t creating a single great send. It’s operating successful newsletter programs with confidence, every day, at scale.

2025 was the year we made that easier than ever.

Making audience health a manageable system

Deliverability issues rarely show up all at once. More often, they appear gradually: engagement dips, bounce rates creep up, inbox placement becomes inconsistent. By the time the problem is obvious, the damage is already done. This year, we shifted audience management from a reactive task to a continuous system.

• Engagement-based smart segments automatically track active and inactive subscribers across 30, 60, and 90-day windows. 
• Automated list optimization and recipient validation run quietly in the background, reducing risk before a newsletter ever sends. 
• Re-engagement flows give teams a structured way to recover value from aging audiences instead of simply suppressing them.
• On the infrastructure side, strengthened email authentication with DKIM and DMARC helps teams meet evolving inbox requirements and protect sender reputation at scale.
• More control over signup forms helps protect audience quality as programs scale.

Together, these changes mean audience quality is no longer something teams think about only when something goes wrong. It’s something Letterhead actively maintains, whether newsletters are sent directly through Letterhead or delivered via an external ESP.

Visibility that matches how organizations scale

As newsletter programs expand, another pattern emerges: teams don’t lack data; they lack meaningful visibility. Channel-level metrics tell part of the story, but leaders responsible for an entire portfolio need a way to see across newsletters without exporting spreadsheets or normalizing reports by hand.

• Company-level dashboards aggregate subscribers, delivery, and engagement across an entire organization.
• Redesigned edition-level reporting makes performance easier to understand at a glance.
• Smarter A/B testing with automatic winner selection helps teams learn faster and apply those insights consistently, even as newsletter portfolios grow.
• Subscriber activity logs provide detailed open and click histories when teams need to understand engagement at the individual level.
• Built-in UTM tagging ensures links sent through newsletters are tracked consistently across campaigns and editions, without manual setup or guesswork. 
• Governance features support in-app workflows to access, export, remove, and anonymize audience member data.

The result is a meaningful change in how teams work with Letterhead. Letterhead is no longer just where newsletters are built; it’s now where teams understand how their newsletter business is actually performing, from the inbox through downstream engagement.

Scaling production without creating bottlenecks

Newsletter teams are under constant pressure to publish faster, without sacrificing quality or engagement. In 2025, we focused on making that balance achievable at scale.

• Company-level templates allow organizations to standardize layout and structure while still giving individual teams room to flex. 
• Shared curation blocks make it easier to assemble newsletters from centralized content libraries, while expanded layout options and inline tagging give teams more flexibility in how curated content is presented.
• The new WordPress plugin automatically syncs new and updated WordPress posts into your Curations Library
• Mobile previews, mobile-specific font sizing, and layout stacking controls make it easier to trust what a newsletter will look like before it reaches subscribers.

These improvements don’t just save time. They reduce dependency on a small group of expert or power users and make consistent quality achievable across large, distributed teams of all skill levels.

Turning monetization into an operational system

For many teams, monetization is the most fragile part of the workflow. Sponsorships are coordinated manually, placements are double-checked by hand, and scaling revenue often means managing complexity. In 2025, we made newsletter monetization more systematic.

• Global promotions allow teams to manage sponsorships centrally and deploy them across newsletters without manual coordination, with support for programmatic advertising through integrations like RevContent.
• Promotions reporting makes it easier to understand how campaigns perform across channels, not just within individual sends. 
• Purpose-built layouts and IAB categorization for curated content help sponsored placements stay consistent and measurable.

The effect is subtle but powerful. Monetization becomes predictable and repeatable, without forcing editorial teams to compromise how they work.

Supporting every way teams send

We continue to support how teams already send. Some use Letterhead end to end, others rely on external ESPs, and many use a combination. We invested across all of these setups.

• Features like engagement-based suppression, list optimization, recipient validation, and sending-domain controls improve reliability and performance at scale.
• Deeper interoperability ensures that audience data, performance insights, and promotion workflows remain consistent when newsletters are delivered via an external ESP.
• We expanded and deepened CRM and ESP integrations, including HubSpot and Mailchimp, to ensure consistent audience data, performance insights, and promotion workflows regardless of how newsletters are delivered.

From a team’s perspective, the experience stays unified. Newsletters are built the same way, metrics are reviewed in the same place, and decisions don’t depend on how a send is handled. That flexibility is intentional, and built to support programs as they evolve.

Reliability as a core feature

Some of the most meaningful work we shipped in 2025 wasn’t flashy, but it was deeply business-critical. Automation monitoring, invalid feed alerts, admin-level controls, and bi-directional HubSpot sync all reduce manual risk and silent failure. 

As newsletters become more central to the business, reliability matters more than ever. We invested in observability and safeguards to ensure Letterhead continues to perform predictably as programs grow.

Looking ahead

This year wasn’t about shipping more features for their own sake. It was about building the right ones: systems that hold up as newsletter programs grow more complex, more distributed, and more central to the business. The result: Letterhead has truly become the infrastructure for fast-growing newsletter operations across sending models, teams, and portfolios.

Thank you to the editors, operations, product, and revenue teams who partnered with us throughout the year. Your feedback, ideas, and use cases directly shaped what we built, and many of those investments now support entire organizations running newsletters at scale.

We’re excited to keep building alongside you in the year ahead.