7 ways to automate common email newsletter tasks

Everyone seems to have an email newsletter these days, highlighting sales, promoting products, or providing useful content related to their service. Newsletters are an effective marketing tool, but there’s a maintenance cost in doing them well. 

If you don’t have the time or resources to maintain your subscriber lists, track newsletter performance, or try segmentation experiments, it doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the email newsletter renaissance. Zapier can help you automate the important, but tedious tasks associated with email marketing so you can use your time for things like writing the great content you’ll send to your list.

Here are a few Zaps—what we call the automatic workflows you create with Zapier—to help you manage your newsletter subscribers, keep track of email activity, and more. 

Add subscribers to your newsletters

While putting your newsletter sign-up form in a prominent place on your website is a good first step, there’s more than one way to grow your subscriber base. 

For example, you can offer a checkbox in a form where you collect leads allowing people to opt in to your newsletter. Here’s where the sneaky maintenance cost comes in: You often need to manually download a CSV file, filter for the people who opted in, and upload their email addresses to your email newsletter software. 

Instead, use a Zap to automatically add subscribers to your newsletters from other apps you use to collect contacts. Keep in mind that you can’t automatically subscribe people to your newsletter without permission. 

You can also add a filter, available on our paid plans, to only filter for people who want to subscribe to your newsletter. 

Automatically segment your subscribers

Segmenting your subscribers into different categories allows you to tailor and test messages based on their interests. For example, you might send a newsletter promoting upcoming webinars to subscribers who’ve previously attended an event you hosted. Or, you could send segmented follow-up resources based on people’s answers to a quiz, like Marquiste Boyce of Side Hustle Mentor.

Instead of manually tagging subscribers or adding them to lists, you can try a Zap to automatically get the segmentation party started.  

Update CRM information

If you launched a newsletter as part of a wider marketing strategy for your business, you’ll want to track information about your subscribers in your CRM (customer relationship management) system. People subscribe to newsletters for a variety of reasons. One person might be interested in learning more about your product, while another might be an existing customer to whom you can market a new service, product, or feature. 

Keeping this information in one place can help you make more strategic decisions in the future. These Zaps can help you keep your contacts updated.

Track email activity in one place

While the smorgasbord of newsletter metrics are helpful for honing your marketing strategy, you don’t want that information to live in a silo. Tracking activity in your CRM is important, but you should also take into account other tools you use to make decisions. 

For example, if you use Google Analytics for your website, tracking how much traffic comes from your newsletter can help you determine what’s working and where you can make improvements. 

Whether you’re tracking offline conversions or website behavior, try any of the Zaps below to account for newsletter activity.

Keep subscriber lists tidy

Another hidden maintenance cost? Keeping your subscription lists clean. Just like a shrub, you have to prune your subscriber lists regularly. A glut of bounced emails and unengaged subscribers can tank your metrics and give an inaccurate picture of performance. (Unless the percentage of unengaged subscribers point to a trend, then perhaps you want to re-evaluate your content!)

You can use a Zap to track email bounces, get alerts, or even automatically unsubscribe bounced emails.  

If you prefer tracking or getting alerts for bounced emails, you can use a digest—available on our paid plans—to collect bounced emails and alert you at specified intervals. 

Repurpose campaigns into new content 

Repurposing content is a marketing trick that works. It can give new life to the email campaigns you’ve worked hard to create. For example, maybe you launched a drip campaign a year ago to help your customers get more out of a specific product feature. There are no rules against repromoting that campaign on social media or in a blog post.

These Zaps will automatically create new posts on social media or your website without the added burden. Of course, some content needs to be email-exclusive to give would-be subscribers an incentive, so you can limit cross-posting to the start of an email campaign if you’d like. 

Backup your email lists 

You worked hard to build your email lists, so it’s smart to back up everything in case some horrible meltdown occurs. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say most people aren’t opposed to backing up information. It’s just difficult to remember to do it until it’s too late. 

If you want to back up your email lists automatically, you can use one of the Zaps below to back up your contacts to your favorite spreadsheet app. 

Automate newsletter maintenance tasks

Don’t let maintenance and upkeep tasks prevent you from going all in on an email marketing strategy. Automation can be an extra assistant when you’re limited on time and resources.