The Ultimate Newsletter Workflow Checklist to Streamline Your Process

Any newsletter operator has felt the chaos of the hours leading up to a deadline (especially if you're running multiple newsletters). You’ve got an hour left before the send, but you’re still scrambling to find one more article to curate, or a graphic is the wrong size. 

Maybe you were so rushed that you missed a typo or included the wrong copy for one of your sponsors. These mistakes happen, especially on teams with big lists and frequent sends. Deadlines become the all-consuming focus, leading to oversights.

Yet, email newsletters are so impactful towards achieving your goals that it’s worth the effort. They create a direct line of communication with an audience that has chosen to hear from you. 

For a newsletter to thrive, you’ll need a foundation of two things: consistency and quality. Without both, readers won’t stay, and they certainly won’t click on ads, products, or other engagement opportunities.

That’s how a newsletter workflow checklist helps. It gives you a clear, repeatable process that helps reduce errors, saves time, and delivers a polished newsletter with every send. 

Why You Need a Newsletter Workflow

A structured workflow is the secret weapon of successful newsletter creators. It provides a strategic framework to optimize both your process and outcomes. The smoother the creation process, the more you can divert resources towards strategic growth activities.

Here’s what a newsletter workflow checklist can do for you.

1. Reduces Errors

A checklist ensures you don't miss any steps along the way, serving as your safety net. You’ll remember to double-check for typos, send email tests, and make sure your ads have the right creative and links. 

In other words, you can avoid embarrassing mistakes that would damage your credibility and sponsor relationships.

2. Saves Time and Mental Energy

When each step is outlined, team members aren’t left wondering what to do next. Now, that critical time leading up to a deadline can be spent on creative activities, such as adding another engagement element to the newsletter. Switching between activities is notoriously a productivity nightmare, but having a checklist to work from helps your team move swiftly through the process.

3. Ensures Consistency

Consistency is the backbone of any successful newsletter. Your subscribers will come to expect a certain cadence, such as which days of the week and what time you send. If you send an edition late or with substandard quality because you were rushed, you lose trust. 

A workflow checklist keeps everything on time and on brand.

4. Simplifies Collaboration

If you work with a team, be it freelancers, assistants, or an in-house team, clear workflows eliminate much of the wasted energy. Everyone knows their role and doesn’t need to ask what happens next. If they’re waiting on others, they can see where they are in the process. Bottlenecks are easier to identify, and projects are completed seamlessly.

Your 23-Point Newsletter Workflow Checklist

An effective newsletter checklist can be broken down into five key phases: Planning, Creation, Sponsor Integration, Pre-Send, and Post-Send.

The first three phases can be done in parallel to some extent and should be tailored to your specific newsletter.

Phase 1: Planning & Strategy

Start by laying the groundwork for every successful newsletter send.

1. Ideation

This is where you brainstorm and decide on the main topic or theme for the issue. 

Some newsletters are at the mercy of the latest news cycle, such as Marketing Brew, 1440, and many others. They’ll be more effective if they combine this first step with the next one (Content Curation).

However, many niche newsletters start with an overall theme. For example, the Growth Hacks Weekly newsletter often dissects a business’s successful strategy. Or Michael Easter’s Two Percent newsletter may focus on his favorite gear for long hikes.

2. Content Curation

Next, start gathering the necessary assets that you’ll need for the content curation in your newsletter. This could be links, quotes, images, and more.

One key to success here is to create a process to make your content curation faster. Here are a few ideas:

• Use AI to gather the top stories from the past week. Even something as simple as a ChatGPT prompt works. “Find me the top 10 news stories about [NICHE] from the past 7 days.”
• Keep a pre-vetted list of sites you curate, bookmark them, mass-open them, and browse. It’s a little more analog, but it works for some people.
• Use tools like Feedly, Quuu, and Scoop.it to auto-curate from around the web.
• Try Letterhead to pull in relevant articles and insert them into many newsletters at once.

3. Outline the Structure

Where will each piece be in the newsletter? Is there a top news story that you must cover? Do you have a list of curated content you want in bullet-point style?

Most newsletters have a pre-built structure, so now it’s time to start assembling where pieces of content will go. Or, do you need to add or delete a regular section to accommodate something different for this send?

Phase 2: Content Creation & Design

It’s time to start building!

4. First Draft

Now it’s time to put fingers on the keyboard and type out what your newsletter is going to say. This includes:

• Subject line
• Preview text
• Headlines
• Long-form content sections
• Short blurbs describing curated content
• Calls to action

5. Create Visuals

Whether you’re designing images from scratch, grabbing them from stock photo sites, or using AI-generations, it’s time to start matching up images to the content.

This step goes hand in hand with step 4. Some images can be created before or during content writing, but some may only become apparent after the initial text is written.

A good example would be a custom infographic that your team realizes would be an excellent way to portray some of the written content.

6. Build the Email

Now, it’s time to put the content and visuals altogether into your email service provider.

The best way to get this done with minimal error is to have one person put together the email. They become the expert and understand best where things go, what the email normally looks like, and even how to use the email builder.

Having many hands involved, such as content people putting their text in and designers adding their visuals, makes maintaining send-to-send visual consistency more difficult.

Phase 3: Sponsor Integration

Not every newsletter relies on sponsorships, but it’s the most common monetization strategy. If you rely on affiliate marketing, paid upgrades, or selling your own products, adjust accordingly.

7. Confirm Sponsorship Placements

Now’s the time to double-check which sponsors will be featured in your edition. Hopefully, you have someone ready to go weeks in advance so you can pair up content with their message. 

Make sure you know exactly where in the newsletter each sponsor will be placed, and what type of ad they’ve paid for. For example, a single newsletter might have a presenting sponsor, another one who gets a content block to themselves, and another who gets a quick link in a bullet point.

8. Finalize Sponsor Creative

This step is where you put together the actual ads. Depending on your process, your team might put together the ad or get the creative from the advertiser themselves.

This step, hopefully collaborative, will set the foundation for the ad’s success. It should match the tone and visual vibe of the rest of the newsletter so it feels more organic. The more the ad sticks out, the less effective it will be.

9. Sponsor Approval

If you’re the one putting together the ad creative, you’ll need to get final approval from the sponsor. Making any edits should be the #1 priority, followed by sending it back quickly for approval. 

For newsletters that can do so, this step is best done days in advance to avoid surprises or chaotic deadlines.

Daily newsletters have it much tougher, but with the right workflows in place, it can still be done in advance. Using a tool like Letterhead can help you manage and insert ads with ease.

10. Ensure Compliance

Now, let’s cross our t’s and dot our i’s by ensuring that all sponsor materials comply with legal, ethical, and platform guidelines.

Legal guidelines are fairly straightforward. Does the ad comply with all national and state regulations? Do you have the proper disclaimers? This is especially important in heavily regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, investing, and gambling.

For ethical guidelines, your brand should set standards for which types of ads you’ll allow. If your newsletter is family-friendly, an ad for an R-rated horror movie doesn’t fit. 

Within your platform, does the ad meet all the size specifications? Does it follow the correct format (e.g., headline-image-subhead-text)? 

11. Fill Unfilled Slots

It’s time to maximize revenue by leaving no ad slots vacant. There are a few strategies you can use to fill these, starting by making sure you’re prepared in advance:

• Back-up Sponsor - Is there someone that you have a good relationship with that you can offer a slot on-the-spot for half off? It’s a win-win for you and them.
• Affiliate Product - Be sure to have a few niche-relevant affiliate products that you’ve already signed up for in your back pocket.
• Ad Network - Even if you don’t plan to use an ad network regularly, it’s nice to be a part of one to fill vacancies fast.
• Sell Your Own Product - Adding an extra promotion to your own stuff can help offset some of the lost revenue from an unfilled slot.

12. Ad Placement Check

Now that everything’s approved and ready, make sure that you’ve put the ads into the actual newsletter correctly. Double-check that the sponsor is getting what they paid for, and you haven’t accidentally swapped ads within the same newsletter or from a future or past send.

13. Tracking 

Each ad should include UTM parameters so you can provide a post-send report to your sponsor. Forgetting tracking parameters could mean the end of a relationship with a potential long-term partner because they won’t know if they’re getting enough results for the cost.

14. Sponsor Documentation

This is all about presenting as useful information as possible to your sponsors. Once you’ve got all the sponsors dialed in, this documentation could be as simple as adding the following to a spreadsheet:

• What the sponsor paid
• Location in the newsletter
• Creative
• Link

This sets you up for a post-send breakdown, where you’ll fill in data like opens and clicks on their ad.

Phase 4: The Pre-Send Review

This step should be an “all hands on deck” situation, with everyone testing and double-checking, and a final decision-maker giving the thumbs up.

15. Proofread and Edit

Check for grammar, spelling, and clarity. You can run the whole thing through AI to help improve phrasing, or read it aloud to catch anything that you missed on previous run-throughs.

16. Verify All Facts and Links

Every fact needs to be re-verified, as false claims can hurt your reputation faster than almost anything. 

Also, click every link in the newsletter to ensure it matches. Check again for UTM parameters for both sponsors and your other links to ensure complete data.

17. Review on Mobile and Desktop

Before every send, always send a test email to at least one inbox—and preferably multiple inboxes with multiple providers (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail).

Check on both desktop and mobile devices (including phones and tablets). Protecting the inbox experience is paramount in keeping your brand quality high.

18. Check Personalization

Some of the most glaring mistakes happen with improper merge tags. An extra character can turn “Hello John” into “Hello *|FirstName|*.” It’s one of the quickest ways to degrade the quality of your brand because it looks amateurish.

19. Final Sign-Off

Most newsletters have (or at least should have) a decision-maker who gives the final go-ahead. If there’s typically one person who handles all the pre-send checks, ensure there’s at least one other set of eyes to review it. If you can, let everything breathe for an hour and then look at it fresh.

Phase 4: Scheduling & Post-Send Analysis

Now it’s time to send the newsletter, relax a little, and keep an eye on the data.

20. Schedule the Send

Select the right segment for your newsletter’s send, and schedule the day and time for your email. This step should be easy, as you should already have a regular segment and a specific day/time for your sends. 

It just always pays to double-check.

21. Monitor Performance

As your email goes out, keep an eye on metrics. While things like opens & clicks aren’t as important as others, they are the earliest indicators of success with a newsletter send. 

As more time passes, you’ll start to fill in the picture on unsubscribes, sponsored content performance, and overall engagement.

22. Send Report to Sponsors

Best practice is to proactively send a report to each of your sponsors about how the newsletter went. They'll want to know about clicks (at a minimum), so you might as well send the data out ASAP. The smoother you make the relationship, the more likely they are to become regular sponsors. 

23. Archive Assets

The newsletter send is done, but there’s still so much information you can glean. Keep a folder with every send, every creative, and every sponsor. The more of these you have, the more you can extract data patterns. 

For example, imagine the power of telling your sponsors exactly what type of content gets the most clicks.

Scaling Your Workflow to Multiple Newsletters

What happens to your workflow when you scale from 1 to 5 newsletters? Or 100? The answer, usually, is that it breaks. 

For example, a large media company may manage 100+ local newsletters across various US markets. Their checklist must include efficient processes, tools to do heavy lifting, and extreme organization.

Here are a few ways that your workflow changes for a large portfolio:

• Template-Driven Systems - Newsletters can’t be built from scratch. Each newsletter must be plug-and-play so the creative team only needs to fill in the blanks.
  
  
• Automated Content Curation - This can’t be done manually unless you have a massive team. Use tools to pull in location-specific content (e.g., local events, news stories, and weather).
  
  
• Centralized Brand Assets - You’ll need a system where you can store preapproved colors, logos, images, content snippets, and more. This speeds up the creative process and also keeps brand consistency across the portfolio.
  
  
• Tiered Review Process - At a large company, you’ll likely have multiple approval levels. For example, each newsletter may have a local editor, and then perhaps a manager over many newsletters, and then one central person or team that does a final QA check before all are sent. Having this process well defined makes your sends smoother.
  
  
• Batch Processing - Managing 100 different deadlines is nearly impossible, which is why it makes sense to have send days/times for various areas. For example, you could divide the country into five regions. Each weekday, ⅕ of the newsletters are sent at 4 AM.
  
  
• Cross-Market Sponsors - Managing separate sponsor relationships for every market would be nearly impossible. Your focus should be to find sponsors willing to advertise across many newsletters—if not all of them. 

The right tools make all the difference, and that’s where we come in. Letterhead is designed to allow small teams to manage—and even scale—big portfolios effortlessly. See how we can help your newsletters grow without the headaches.