Last update on Thursday, 6th of February 2025.
Newsletter Generator is a web application that allows you to automate repetitive tasks, when preparing a typical newsletter campaign. It can also be used in more advanced scenarios, and fit into larger newsletter delivery pipeline.
Typically it replaces the need to manually download and resize product images, or copy and paste product names, descriptions, and pricing information, from the online ecommerce store into the newsletter template. All this work is automated by Newsletter Generator, and this substantialy reduces the time needed to prepare a newsletter.
Note, that Newsletter Generator does not require any special access to backend APIs, custom integrations nor special connections to target website. All data fetching is done using web standards such as HTTP and HTML. This means it's more cost efficient to integrate Newsletter Generator into your workflow.
Newsletter Generator is a tool for email marketing professionals and agencies, who design and send a lot of marketing campaigns for their clients. You may have a few people each having different skills or duties, or you may be one-man army creating campaigns end to end. Either way, you already have designed and coded email templates, and now you seek to optimize and automate work on next campaigns, using these templates.
Usually this is solved by writing in-house scripts in various programming languages, or building specialized editors for building newsletters quicker. I've written and maintained various scripts and editors, back when I worked in an email marketing agency. Also, I've seen it being done in other agencies. Newsletter Generator is an attempt to solve this problem in more robust way, and provide this tool to a wider audience.
The prime objective of Newsletter Generator is to reduce manual work needed for repetitive tasks related to creating a full HTML newsletter for the same client.
Both registration and login use the same form, located here.
Note: If you don't have an account yet, it will be created for you automatically, when you first login.
Just enter email address you wish to use, and the "magic" link will be sent to this email address. You need to have access to the inbox of this email address to be able to use Newsletter Generator.
Application will send a login "magic" link to the provided email address. Of course there is nothing magical about this link. It contains an authorization code, which is used to verify the correctness of the login process. This link expires after 15 minutes, and is one-time use only. If the link expired, just request a new one, sending the form again. You may need to wait a few minutes between attempts. This is a measure to prevent abuse.
When you click the link, you will be logged into the application.
While anonymous or temporary email inboxes such as mail.tm or Guerilla Mail are not blocked, it will be more useful for you to be able to send emails from the email address you provide during sign up.
When requesting help with the account, you will need to use the same email address you used when registering.
User accounts in Newsletter Generator are called workspaces, however that name does not appear in the application itself. Workspace is where all the work happens, after logging into the application.
A new workspace will be created automatically, when you use an email which was not used before in Newsletter Generator.
Workspace is divided in a few sections, which allow to group and work on main concepts:
Note: If you want to test Newsletter Generator without investing a lot of time upfront, you can postpone importing your templates, and can use built-in demo template right after signing up. You can select it on brief editing screen.
To leverage Newsletter Generator's capabilities, you need to tell it where it can find your templates. Newsletter Generator is compatible with git version control system, and can download (clone) files from any private or public repository.
If you want to know how to import templates, skip to the next section; or read on to see how to prepare a template before it can be imported.
Before template can be used by Newsletter Generator, it's structure needs to follow a few rules. These rules were designed to make it as easy as possible to turn an existing newsletter into a compatible template.
Name your template's directory, so that it can be easily recognized among different templates. Next, commit the template into target repository and push it to your git hosting provider. After importing to Generator, your template will be listed with the name of the directory.
Importing happens by cloning a repository with templates into the Generator. Newsletter Generator works with any remote repository hosting service, which uses git protocol and is accessible from the Internet. You can use popular git hosting services, such as Bitbucket or GitHub, or host repository yourself.
Technical detail: repository is copied with a depth set to 1, and only latest commit on main (master) branch is being used. Please take this into consideration when working with repositories.
To use a public repository containing templates, use a git URL, and paste it into repository fetching form on Template page. Send the form, and the files will be copied from remote to the workspace.
To use a private repository, first add an SSH access key to it, so that Newsletter Generator can connect. Different service providers may call those keys a little bit different, but usually they're called "read-only keys" or "deploy keys". Search for such an option in your repository settings, and add there the SSH public key provided by Newsletter Generator for your workspace.
When repository is cloned, Newsletter Generator will scan the files, and try to find all first-level directories having an index.html file in it. All matching directories will be considered a template. Directory names will be presented as template names within Newsletter Generator user interface.
Newsletter Generator main feature is ability to download data from remote websites and use it inside newsletters. This is accomplished by using basic web scraping techniques: issuing GET requests to remote websites, downloading HTML, and parsing it. Afterwards, content can be put in desired places of a template.
But before content can be used, Generator needs to know what part of a website is interesting to you: what content it should hold on to. Creating a selectors file will help with that, and will allow to match a remote website's data with your future brief's content, making it easy to merge all data together and output a full newsletter preview.
What's more, selectors file is usually something you create one-time, and it rarely changes. Adjustments may need to be made, when a particular website's frontend implementation changes, which is not happening often.
You can go to Selectors view to create selector files.
Selectors are just text. In the selector files you can put links to remote websites and selectors themselves.
Consider this file:
https://example.com @title h1 @description p
Above selector file, will result in following data to be shown in preview pane:
| From | https://example.com |
| title | Example Domain |
| description | This domain is for use in illustrative examples in documents. You may use this domain in literature without prior coordination or asking for permission.More information... |
What Newsletter Generator did is, it had downloaded the page sitting at https://example.com URL, then parsed the HTML, and extracted the data using CSS selectors from the selectors file. Then this data will be available at handles "title" and "description", and whenever those names are used inside the template file, Generator will switch the variable names with the data downloaded.
Selector file can contain any text, but only the lines detected as compatible will be used by Generator.
Each line can be:
You can define multiple URLs, and all the selectors will be matched against all pages.
In agencies, majority of the work happens around briefs. Project manager is in contact with the client and they work out the brief for the next campaign. These briefs are saved in various tools, like trello, and the communication happens over email.
Newsletter Generator fits this workflow by providing a single text area, where you can write or paste in your brief. Then, newsletter will be generated based on the content of the brief. So, briefs are kind of a "blueprint" for a newsletter.
Writing a brief for a specific brand requires preparing and uploading base HTML into Newsletter Generator. Please read the authoring templates section to know more how this works.
If you want to test out writing briefs without uploading your own custom email templates yet, you can use the built-in demo template. Select it on the brief editing screen. You can inspect the source code for this template on github to see where keywords for tables and variables are placed.
Below you can see the brief for INTERSPORT brand.
@preheader Final Sale do -50%
@banner https://www.intersport.pl/media/homepage_media/image/FINAL_SALE_SG_2_1.jpg
@url https://www.intersport.pl/sporty/wyprzedaz/
@cta Click here!
#products
https://www.intersport.pl/koszulka-damska-view-on-the-sea-roxy-erjzt05689.html#cid=18&tid=1
https://www.intersport.pl/bluza-treningowa-damska-2xu-french-terry-crew-wr7076a.html#cid=18&tid=1
https://www.intersport.pl/koszulka-damska-adidas-future-icons-3-stripes-iv5267.html#cid=18&tid=1
#products
https://www.intersport.pl/koszulka-nike-fv8382-943274.html#cid=18&tid=1
https://www.intersport.pl/kurtka-mck-nn-sary-iii-ss-24-s-m-427082-913459.html#cid=18&tid=1
https://www.intersport.pl/kurtka-mck-hoda-ii-24-s-m-427072.html#cid=18&tid=1
#footer
Brief can contain any text content. Parts not recognized by Newsletter Generator will be ignored, so it is easy to mix in some general comments regarding the campaign being sent.
Briefs are scanned line by line and word by word.
There are many email marketing service providers, that allow uploading a zipfile with your custom newsletter template. In fact, this is a very popular feature, because ESPs want to have as many customers as possible, so they don't want to limit your options of getting your newsletter into their platform. Even if your email service provider is not on this list, there's high chance that newsletters downloaded from Newsletter Generator will work just fine.
Where zipfile upload is unavailable, there's usually an option to paste in HTML directly. If that's the case, when generating a newsletter, choose to host images on newsletter generator infrastructure. That way you will be able to just copy HTML from Newsletter Generator and paste it into your ESP's HTML editor.
| Provider / documentation | Import method | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upload zipfile | Paste HTML | ||
| AWeber | No | Yes | – |
| ActiveCampaign | No | Yes | – |
| Campaign Monitor | Yes | Yes | – |
| Brevo | No | Yes | – |
| Ecomail (in Polish) | Yes | Yes | – |
| Freshmail (in Polish) | Yes | Yes | Freshmail was bought by MailerLite. |
| GetResponse | Yes | Yes | Max file size is 10 MB. |
| Kit / ConvertKit | No | Yes | – |
| Klaviyo | Yes | Yes | – |
| Mailchimp | Yes | Yes | Requires "Standard" plan or higher. Images must be placed in the zipfile's root directory, and max file size is 1 MB. When generating a newsletter, make sure to select the option which places images alongside index.html file. |
| MailerLite | Yes | Yes | After creating a new campaign, select custom HTML editor, then by selecting the "Import HTML" button, select "Import code from file". |
| Sendy | No | Yes | This is a self-hosted software solution, where you need to connect to AWS SES, or other infrastructure to send your emails. |