Newsletter and lifecycle email

Turn this on and Ballad writes your newsletter on a rhythm, sends it to the people who asked for it, and drafts the automatic emails a new subscriber gets in their first weeks.

The setup is a four-step walkthrough in your Inbox, Set up your newsletter, and it ends with your first issue written.

1. How issues are sent

Two ways, and you can change your mind later:

• Ballad sends it, with Resend. If your workspace already has a Resend account in Settings → Email, pick it (and optionally your own from address). Otherwise paste a Resend API key, a from name and address on a domain you've verified there, and the postal address that has to appear in the footer; the key is saved as a workspace account so teammates' voices can use it too. Ballad creates the list, sends each issue as a broadcast, and reads back opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes.
• I send it myself. For Kit, Beehiiv, Substack, Mailchimp or anything else. Ballad writes the issue and you copy it across. Nothing is sent from Ballad.

A LinkedIn newsletter is a separate lane on the same idea: Ballad drafts the issue, you publish it from LinkedIn.

2. Who it goes to

Paste a CSV or choose a file: email, and optionally name, company and the date they signed up. Give it the signup date and Ballad matches each person to the visit that brought them, so your list arrives already knowing which post earned each subscriber.

Before it imports, you tick one box: these people asked to hear from me by email. That's not decoration. Consent lives on each person, and no marketing email goes to anyone without it, whatever a rule or a list says.

From then on the list grows on its own: a sign-up form on your site adds people with consent and the post that brought them, the same way this site's changelog does.

3. How often, and the welcome

Pick a rhythm: weekly, fortnightly, monthly. Ballad drafts each issue in the voice that signs it, from what you published and what your readers are actually asking: one opinion to open with, a few useful things, one ask.

Tick also draft a welcome series and Ballad writes the lifecycle side too: a short sequence that enrols people as they qualify and sends a step at a time. A sequence is a rule plus its emails (signed up in the last 14 days, never ran a job, in an account on the trial plan), and you see how many people it selects before you switch it on. The sequence lives in Campaigns → Always on; the rule behind it lives in People → Segments, where you can build your own: what someone did and when, the account they belong to, how they first arrived, how long since they signed up.

4. Consent, and what never happens

This is the part worth reading twice, because email is where a marketing tool can do real damage on your behalf.

• Consent is mechanical. A segment can select someone; that doesn't mean they get email. Without consent they're skipped.
• Unsubscribes come back on their own. Every issue and every sequence step carries a one-click unsubscribe. Use it (or bounce, or report it as spam) and consent is withdrawn in Ballad and every sequence for that person stops.
• Service mail is kept apart. Billing, security and terms notices go to account holders one email at a time, with no unsubscribe link and no marketing in them.
• Ballad doesn't send anything you haven't approved. Issues and sequence steps come to your Inbox first. It also never emails a customer to ask for a case study on your behalf; it hands you the link and you send it.

What arrives afterwards

Once an issue has gone out, its opens and clicks come back to the issue, and any trial that started from a link in it is credited to it. Per-person opens and clicks are kept for sequence steps, so you can see which step people stop at.

Next

• Measure what your content does: grow the list from your own site.
• Content marketing: the articles issues are built from.
• Release notes and changelog: give the issue something to announce.