3 Newsletter Automations That Save Me 20+ Hours Every Month

Newsletter Automations to Save You Time Every Week

Today’s issue: Whether you already have a newsletter or are planning on launching one, it’s a good practice to automate as many tasks as you can to make your newsletter journey easier.

Quick Hits

• Why distribution is a moat in the AI era and how to build it.

• How AI is killing the web’s business model as we know it.

3 Automations to Help You Save Time While Operating Your Newsletter

Writing a newsletter is already hard. But keeping up with content ideas, sending the right emails to the right people, and handling all the little tasks around it? That’s what drains you.

Here are three automation setups that save me hours every month and might do the same for you:

1. Curate Content With Ease

Feedly + Make + Notion or Google Docs

This is perfect if your newsletter includes curated content or links. I’ve also seen a lot of local newsletters using similar automations.

Here's the flow:

• Feedly is a tool that lets you set up your own RSS feeds and filter information based on your selected topics. Use it to monitor your favorite sources and save articles you may use for your issues.

• Make: When you “save” an article in Feedly, Make (a widely known automation platform) grabs it and automatically sends it to a Notion database or Google Doc. You must create an automation beforehand for this to work properly, but it’s easier than it sounds.

Depending on your newsletter sending frequency, you can go to your Doc or Notion page, review your saved content, and pick your favorites for your newsletter. You can even tag the links while saving, and sort them in Notion automatically.

Before setting this up, I was literally screenshotting X posts or emailing myself articles at 1 a.m.

2. Personalizing Your Newsletter to Boost Engagement

Let’s say some of your subscribers are customers, others are just browsing, and a few are MVPs who are heavily interacting with your newsletter constantly. Should they all get the same emails?

Probably not.

If you you use Beehiiv as your Newsletter Platform, they have a native segmentation feature that lets you group subscribers based on behavior or source. You can create segments like:

• People who clicked a specific link in your last email

• Subscribers added via a specific form or referral source

• Customers who’ve purchased something

The setup is quick (shoutout to Beehiiv for this feature). The payoff is huge.

Then, you can send different versions of your newsletter to each segment or even set up automations for them.

Personalized content performs better, and you don’t need to write entirely separate emails. Just tweak intros or CTAs.

3. When Someone Buys on Gumroad, Add Them to Beehiiv

Beehiiv + Make + Gumroad

I love this automation because it shows how a newsletter should be part of a bigger ecosystem of tools that bring you traffic, leads and sales.

Let’s say you’re selling a guide or course on Gumroad. Wouldn’t it be nice to automatically:

• Add that buyer to your newsletter,

• Tag them as a customer,

• And put them into a welcome or onboarding sequence?

You can do that in 5 minutes with Make.

• The trigger is a sale on Gumroad.

• Make grabs the email and metadata.

• Then it pushes that contact to Beehiiv, tags them (via custom fields or a segment), and optionally sends them a specific campaign.

This setup feels small, but it makes your newsletter way more powerful. Buyers get a different experience than casual readers. And you don’t need to touch a thing.

P.S. Speaking of Gumroad, you can check out a pretty cool PDF I have there on how to generate more leads with your newsletters.

See you next week!

Dani