This guide explains how to control the appearance of newsletter emails sent to your WordPress.com subscribers. You’ll learn how to adjust the email content and preview your emails before they go out.
In this guide
When you publish a new post, emails are automatically sent to your subscribers. The email will include the post title, the author, and the date. You can control the following aspects of the emails’ appearance by going to Settings → Newsletter:
- Include or exclude your post’s featured image in the email sent out to your readers.
- Include either the full text of the post or just an excerpt with a link to the full version of the post (see below).
- Customize the sender’s name—by default, this will be your site title, but you can edit how it appears in emails.
If you want to preview what the email will look like to your readers before it is sent out, take the following steps:
- While writing your post, click the Newsletter icon in the upper right corner of the editor (the icon looks like a paper airplane).
- Ensure “Post & email” is selected.
- Click the “Preview email” button to view how the email will look on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
- Click the “Send test email” button to send yourself a copy of the email.
You can control how much text appears in the emails sent to subscribers. Below are different examples (email shown on the right) and the settings to choose for each one (shown in the editor on the left).
To include the full text of the post in the email, ensure that “full text” is selected under Settings → Newsletter → “Email”:
You can show just the opening text of your post in the email, followed by a link to read the full post on your website. Insert a More block to determine where the text stops, and a “continue reading” link appears:
You can write a custom piece of text to introduce the post, which does not have to be part of the post itself. Ensure “excerpt” is selected under Settings → Newsletter → “Email” and write your custom text in the excerpt setting of the post:
If you have selected “excerpt” under Settings → Newsletter → “Email” but do not write anything in the excerpt setting of the post, the opening lines of the post’s text will be used to introduce the post.
WordPress.com newsletter emails are useful for site owners who wish to have emails sent automatically. However, you may wish to have more control over the appearance and schedule of emails sent to your subscribers. In that case, you can use a third-party newsletter service to create an email list, design custom email templates without WordPress.com branding, and schedule emails.
With our plugin-enabled plans, you can design and send a custom newsletter on your schedule with the MailPoet plugin. MailPoet provides greater control over email design and delivery schedules. You can start with the MailPoet beginner’s guide.
You can also integrate other popular third-party newsletter services, such as Mailchimp, MailerLite, or any other newsletters, with plugins.
Sites without custom plugins can use the built-in Mailchimp block to encourage signups to a newsletter you manage with Mailchimp.
