Sending a newsletter
From empty template to sent mailing, plus scheduling, resending and statistics.
Before you start you need two things: a verified sender and a list of contacts.
The template first#
Under Templates you fix your house style: colours for the background, headings, text, links and buttons, the typeface and its weights, the content width, rounded corners, shadows and the thickness of dividers. You also set your logo, a header image and the footer, with your company name and address.
The footer can carry social links. Paste a link to your Instagram, Spotify or website and the icon is recognised automatically.
One template can be marked as the default. Every new newsletter then starts with that styling. Get this right once and you never have to think about it per mailing.
Building the newsletter#
A newsletter is made of sections that you stack and drag around. There are seven kinds:
| Section | What for |
|---|---|
| Text | Ordinary paragraphs with a heading |
| Text and/or image | Text with a photo beside, above or below it |
| Images | A gallery in columns, optionally all cropped to the same height, with captions |
| Button | A clear call to action with its own label and URL |
| Video | Paste a YouTube or Vimeo link; the thumbnail is fetched automatically |
| Divider / spacer | A line, or simply some air between two blocks |
| HTML | Your own HTML, for when you know exactly what you are doing. Unsafe tags are stripped |
To the left of the preview are three tabs: Content, Settings and Sending. Everything you fill in there is saved as you go, so there is no save button. The right of the tab bar says whether it is saved, and shows you while it is saving.
Content holds the sections plus two fields:
- Subject. What the recipient sees in their inbox.
- Preheader. The short preview text most mail programs show after the subject. Leave it empty and the mail client grabs your first sentence, which is rarely what you want.
Settings holds:
- Internal name. For you only, to find the newsletter again.
- Template. Which house style this newsletter uses.
- Language. Your page language by default, but you can override it per newsletter.
- Share link. See "Viewing online and sharing" below.
A preview on the right updates as you type. The two buttons above it show it at the width of a desktop screen or of a phone. Do check the phone view: that is where most people will read your newsletter.
Personalising#
In your text you can use {voornaam}, {achternaam} or {naam} for first name, last name and full name. They are filled in per recipient.
If you do not know everyone's name, use a fallback: {voornaam|reader} becomes "reader" when the first name is unknown. Without a fallback you get an ugly gap in your sentence, so always do this.
Test first#
Send a test mail to yourself. Look at it on your phone, not just your laptop; that is where it will be read. Check the subject line, the preheader, and whether your buttons are big enough to hit with a thumb.
Test mails count towards your monthly allowance.
Send settings#
The Sending tab, to the left of the preview, holds where the newsletter goes:
- List. With its subscriber count. On a repeat send the list is fixed and cannot be swapped.
- Sender. Only verified senders appear here.
- Track opens and track clicks. Switch them off and no statistics about who opened or clicked are collected.
- Tag links for analytics, with the campaign name beside it.
The tags are meant for your own analytics tool, on your website for instance. Every link in the mail gets utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign added, so visits from your newsletter show up there as such instead of as "direct". The unsubscribe link, the "view online" link, mail and phone links and links to a spot inside the mail itself are left alone, and a link you already tagged yourself keeps your value.
The campaign name is the name of your newsletter by default. You can override it here, for instance to see several mailings under one heading. Once you send, the name is fixed: rename the newsletter later and the links in the mail that went out stay the same, so your numbers keep adding up. For different defaults across every newsletter on this page, set them under Campaign tagging on the newsletter overview.
Sending#
Press Send and you first get a summary: which list it goes to, how many subscribers that is, which sender it comes from and how many emails you have left this month. If your allowance is too low, the app says so up front, with the number of recipients.
If the list or the sender is not set yet, the screen says which of the two, and you can only send once you fill it in under Sending.
After sending, the newsletter is locked. To send an amended version, duplicate it; you get a new draft with the same content.
New addresses go out in waves#
For some addresses we know that mail arrives: a newsletter of yours was delivered there in the past year, or the person signed up themselves and clicked the confirmation link. For other addresses we do not know, for example when you just imported an old list. Such a list often holds addresses that no longer exist, and too much mail coming back hurts the delivery of all your mail.
If your send has at least 100 of those addresses, the newsletter goes out in waves. You see this beforehand in the summary.
- The newsletter goes straight to every address we know to work, plus a small, random group of the new addresses.
- After a few minutes we check how many of those came back or were reported as spam.
- If that goes well, a group twice as large follows, and so on until everybody has it. This is usually done within the hour.
The waves only go to whoever was on the list when you sent. If someone signs up while they run, you send it to them yourself afterwards with To the remaining contacts, as after any other send.
If 5 percent or more of the waves comes back because the address does not exist, or 1 percent or more reports the mail as spam, the send stops. You get a mail about it and see a notice with the newsletter. We look into it and let you know whether the rest still goes out. You cannot send the rest yourself at that point.
Addresses that did not exist leave your list by themselves. Your next newsletter starts with a small wave again, so a bad list gets cleaner step by step.
Scheduling#
Switch on Send later and pick a moment. That moment is in your own timezone, shown under the field; see Account and signing in. The newsletter gets the Scheduled status and cannot be edited until then. To change something anyway, cancel the schedule; the newsletter returns to draft and is not sent.
Resending#
A sent newsletter has two extra options. Both reach only the group in question, so nobody gets it twice:
- To people who did not open it. Often worth trying a second subject line a week later. This makes a copy you edit first, with the number of people shown beforehand.
- To the remaining contacts. For people who signed up after the send. This makes no copy: the same newsletter goes out once more, only to them. So you keep one newsletter, with one set of statistics. Before you confirm you see who they are. If more people sign up later, the button comes back. While the newsletter goes out in waves, or when that send was stopped, this button is not there.
Viewing online and sharing#
Every newsletter carries a "view online" link, which works per recipient and keeps the unsubscribe link.
To share your newsletter on social media, create a share link. That is a public URL without an unsubscribe link and without a recipient. Newsletters without a share link cannot be reached that way at all, so sharing stays a deliberate choice. You can always revoke the link.
Statistics#
After sending you see, per newsletter: recipients, sent, delivered, bounces, complaints, pending, opened and clicked. "Pending" is mail the receiving server has not said anything about yet. After a temporary refusal delivery is retried for up to a day, after which it lands under delivered or bounces after all. Below that are the most-clicked links, shown without the campaign tags so you can see at a glance which page each one is. A click on the unsubscribe link does not count as a click. The "view online" link works per recipient, but appears in that list as a single line, "View online", with all its clicks added together. Older newsletters may still show an "Unsubscribe link" line.
Click one of those numbers and you see who is behind it: the addresses that bounced, the complaints, the mail that arrived, and with tracking switched on also who opened or clicked. Useful when you want to know which addresses to clean up. Click a column heading to sort on that column, click again to reverse the order. Empty cells, such as people who have not opened yet, always stay at the bottom.
The per-recipient data is kept for 180 days. After that only the totals per newsletter remain and the list of addresses is empty. That is deliberate: we do not keep it longer than needed.
The dashboard shows your average open and click rate across all your sends.
A few things to keep in mind:
- Open rates are an indication, not an exact measurement. Many mail programs preload images or block them entirely. Gmail and Apple Mail often fetch the images as soon as the mail arrives, so opens in the first seconds after sending say little about who actually read it.
- Clicks are more reliable than opens. Look at those if you want to know whether something worked. Security software at the recipient, such as Microsoft Defender, opens every link in a mail within seconds of arrival. Such a scanner loads the images as well, which opens the mail. BandPage recognises those scans and counts them neither as a click nor as an open. Such a scanner often comes back a few more times, so clicks in the five minutes after a scan do not count either. The recipient list then shows "Security scan" instead of a time.
- Bounces and complaints matter more than either. If they climb, your sender reputation suffers and your next mailing arrives less well.
Delete a sent newsletter and its statistics go with it. Those cannot be recovered.
Updated on 29 October 2026