Joyful Docs

Newsletters

Write once, send to thousands.

Creating a newsletter

From your publication page, click New Newsletter. Give it a title—this becomes the email subject line. Newsletters auto-save as drafts until you send them.

The editor

Everything is a block: paragraphs, headings, images, quotes. Type / on an empty line to see the slash menu:

H1 Heading 1
H2 Heading 2
Bullet List
" Quote
Image
Divider

Hover over any block to drag it around or access the menu for duplicating and deleting.

For text formatting, select some text and a toolbar appears. Or use keyboard shortcuts: Cmd+B for bold, Cmd+I for italic, Cmd+K to add a link.

Personalization

Make your emails more personal with placeholders that auto-fill with subscriber data:

  • {{first_name}} — subscriber's first name
  • {{last_name}} — subscriber's last name
  • {{email}} — subscriber's email address

Just type the placeholder directly in your content. When you send, each subscriber sees their own info. If a subscriber doesn't have a name on file, the placeholder is replaced with an empty string.

Web-only & email-only content

Sometimes you want different content for email subscribers vs. web readers. Click the grip handle on any block and choose:

  • Web only — appears on your public page but not in emails
  • Email only — appears in emails but not on your public page
  • Show everywhere — default, appears in both

Blocks with visibility set show a colored bar on the left edge: blue for web-only, amber for email-only.

Use this for things like "Subscribe to get more content like this" CTAs (web only) or exclusive subscriber notes (email only).

Templates

If you've set up a template, select it from the dropdown in the editor. Your content gets wrapped in the template's header and footer when you preview or send.

Sending

Go to the Send tab. Your newsletter will be sent to all active subscribers of your publication. You can filter by tags if you want to target a subset.

Set your from name and email (if you have a custom domain, you can send from that). Then either send immediately or schedule for later.

Always send a test email to yourself first.

Send without publishing

When sending, you can choose between Publish article (appears on your public site) or Send only (email-only, not visible on your site). Use "Send only" for subscriber-exclusive content or announcements you don't want publicly visible.

Scheduling

Instead of sending immediately, pick a date and time. Scheduled newsletters show a small clock icon next to their title—hover over it to see when it's set to send.

To unschedule a newsletter, open it and go to the Send tab. You'll see a banner like this:

Currently Scheduled

This newsletter is scheduled to send on 12/5/2024 at 3:00 PM

Click Unschedule to return the newsletter to draft status so you can edit or reschedule it.

Version history

The editor auto-saves as you write. Click the History icon in the toolbar to see previous versions and restore one if needed.

Publishing to the web

Sent newsletters are automatically published to your public homepage where anyone can read them. If you want to hide a newsletter from your public page, click Unpublish in the newsletter settings.

You can also edit and republish a sent newsletter. This updates the web version only—the emails already in people's inboxes stay as they were. Useful for fixing typos or updating links after sending.