How to Automate Your Newsletter with Broadcast

Consistency is the single biggest factor in newsletter success. Readers who know when to expect your email are more likely to open it, read it, and stay subscribed. The problem is that consistency is hard to maintain manually. Life gets busy, deadlines slip, and suddenly you have not sent a newsletter in three weeks.

Broadcast gives you three ways to automate your newsletter workflow, from simple scheduling to fully AI-generated content. Pick the approach that fits your workflow, or combine them for maximum efficiency.

Why Automate Your Newsletter

  • Consistency – Your readers expect a regular cadence. Automation ensures you deliver on that promise even when you are traveling, sick, or swamped with other work.
  • Save time – Automating the send process (and optionally the content creation) frees you to focus on strategy and audience growth instead of logistics.
  • Never miss a send – A scheduled broadcast goes out whether you remember or not. An API-driven workflow sends the moment your content is ready. Autopilot handles the entire pipeline.

Three Approaches to Newsletter Automation

Approach 1: Scheduled Broadcasts

This is the simplest path. You write the content yourself, then tell Broadcast exactly when to send it.

How it works:

  1. Navigate to Broadcasts and click New Broadcast
  2. Write your newsletter content in the editor – rich text, HTML, or start from a template
  3. Configure your audience on the Audience tab (all subscribers, a specific segment, or tagged subscribers)
  4. Go to the Settings tab
  5. Click Schedule and pick your date, time, and timezone
  6. Save. Broadcast will send your newsletter at the scheduled time automatically.

You can schedule broadcasts days or weeks in advance. This is perfect for batching your newsletter work – write four newsletters on the first Monday of the month and schedule them for each upcoming week.

Ideal for: Weekly or biweekly curated newsletters where you write the content yourself and want to control exactly when it goes out.

Approach 2: API-Driven Broadcasts

If your newsletter content comes from a CMS, blog, or application, you can automate the entire workflow with the Broadcast API. When new content is published, your system creates a broadcast and sends it – no manual steps required.

How it works:

First, create the broadcast with your content:

curl -X POST https://app.sendbroadcast.com/api/v1/broadcasts \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "broadcast": {
      "name": "Weekly Digest - March 18",
      "subject": "This Week: 3 New Articles You Should Read",
      "content_html": "<h1>Weekly Digest</h1><p>Here are this week'\''s top articles...</p>",
      "broadcast_channel_id": "your-channel-id"
    }
  }'

The response includes the broadcast ID. Then send it:

curl -X POST https://app.sendbroadcast.com/api/v1/broadcasts/:broadcast_id/send_broadcast \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json"

You can build this into your publishing workflow. When a WordPress post goes live, when a Ghost webhook fires, or when your custom CMS marks an article as published – trigger these two API calls and your newsletter goes out automatically.

Ideal for: Content-driven businesses with a CMS or blog that want to send a newsletter every time new content is published. Also works well for developer teams who prefer code-driven workflows.

Approach 3: Autopilot AI

Autopilot is Broadcast’s AI-powered newsletter generator. You configure your content sources, set a schedule, and Autopilot handles the rest – fetching content, generating a draft, and preparing it for review.

How it works:

  1. Navigate to Sequences and create a new sequence
  2. Enable Autopilot in the sequence settings
  3. Configure your content sources:
    • RSS feeds – Blog feeds, news sites, industry publications
    • GitHub repositories – Changelogs, release notes, commit activity
    • Web pages – Product pages, documentation updates, competitor blogs
  4. Set your schedule (e.g., every Monday at 9:00 AM)
  5. Autopilot fetches content from your sources, generates a newsletter draft using AI, and queues it for your review
  6. Review the draft, make any edits, and approve the send

You stay in control – Autopilot generates the draft, but you approve the final version before it reaches your subscribers.

Ideal for: Developer and tech newsletters, community digests, curated content roundups, and anyone who wants AI to handle the heavy lifting of content assembly.

Combining Approaches

These three approaches are not mutually exclusive. A powerful workflow combines them:

  1. Autopilot generates a draft from your RSS feeds and content sources on Friday
  2. You review and edit the draft over the weekend, adding your personal commentary and insights
  3. You schedule the broadcast for Monday morning at 9:00 AM

This gives you the efficiency of AI-generated content with the quality of human editing and the reliability of scheduled delivery.

Another combination: use the API to create a broadcast from your CMS content, but instead of sending immediately, leave it in draft status. Then review it manually and schedule it for your preferred send time.

Growing Your Subscriber List

A newsletter is only as good as its audience. Broadcast gives you several ways to grow your list:

  • Opt-in forms – Create embeddable subscription forms and place them on your website, blog, or landing pages. Navigate to Opt-in Forms to design and generate embed codes.
  • API integration – Add subscribers programmatically when users sign up for your product, register for an event, or complete a purchase. Use POST /api/v1/subscribers to create subscribers with tags and custom data.
  • CSV import – Upload an existing list via Subscribers > Import. Tag imported subscribers so you can identify their source later.

Tag new subscribers based on how they joined (e.g., source:blog, source:homepage, source:product) so you can analyze which channels drive the most engaged readers.

Segmenting Your Newsletter Audience

Not every subscriber wants the same content. Broadcast’s segmentation lets you send different newsletters to different groups:

  • By interest – If you cover multiple topics, let subscribers choose what they want to receive. Use tags like interest:engineering, interest:design, or interest:business and send topic-specific editions to matching segments.
  • By engagement – Create a segment for subscribers who opened at least one email in the last 30 days. Send your best content to engaged readers and a re-engagement campaign to those who have gone quiet.
  • By attribute – Use custom data fields to segment by company size, role, location, or any other attribute you collect.

You can set your broadcast audience to a specific segment on the Audience tab when creating a broadcast, or use segment-based entry triggers for sequence-based newsletters.

Tracking Newsletter Performance

After each send, Broadcast tracks key metrics automatically:

  • Open rate – What percentage of recipients opened the email. Compare across issues to see which topics and subject lines resonate.
  • Click rate – What percentage clicked a link. This tells you what content drives action.
  • Link analytics – See which specific links were clicked and how many times. This reveals exactly which stories, articles, or CTAs your audience cares about most.
  • Unsubscribe rate – Monitor this per-issue. A spike after a particular newsletter tells you something about the content missed the mark.
  • Bounce rate – Track hard and soft bounces to keep your list healthy.

Review these metrics after every send. Over time, patterns emerge – you will learn which subject line styles get opens, which content types get clicks, and which send times perform best for your audience.

Best Practices

  • Pick a cadence and stick to it. Weekly is the most common for newsletters. Biweekly works if you need more time to curate quality content. Daily is aggressive – only do it if your audience expects it.
  • Send at a consistent time. Tuesday and Thursday mornings tend to perform well, but test what works for your audience. Consistency matters more than finding the “perfect” time.
  • Write subject lines that earn the open. Be specific about what is inside. “Issue #47” tells the reader nothing. “3 tools that cut our deploy time in half” tells them exactly what they will get.
  • Keep a content backlog. Maintain a running list of newsletter topics and links so you are never starting from zero when it is time to write.
  • Prune your list regularly. Remove subscribers who have not opened an email in 90 days (after sending a re-engagement campaign first). A smaller, engaged list outperforms a large, disengaged one.
  • Test before sending. Always send a test email to yourself. Check formatting, links, and how it renders on mobile.