How to tailor your newsletter to fit your Slack
By: Steven Hylands
Tags: Email, Slack, Email Productivity, Newsletter, Email Marketing

Thanks for checking out Lowdown — the easiest way to create a weekly newsletter from your Slack content. Regardless of if you use Slack for a community or workplace communication for your product team or agency. It’s easy to make Lowdown work for you.

In this guide, we’ll highlight what you can to make the most of Lowdown, and tailor your newsletter to your needs.

How Lowdown works

Lowdown sends your members an autogenerated newsletter every week. When you first signup, it will analyse all of your public channels and add the most popular posts since the beginning of the week to your newsletter. These are picked based on the number of emoji reactions and replies.

The longer the week goes on, the better your newsletter will get as more posts are shared, and your members interact with them.

If you’re happy with this, it’s time to add subscribers to your newsletter. Once you have, it will be sent automatically every single Monday at 7:00 am with zero effort required! Amazing huh?

But to make the most of Lowdown here’s what else you can do, so it is perfectly suited to your Slack:

1. Select channels and number of posts to share

Sometimes all the GIFs and Memes shared in #random aren’t what you want to share with your audience. The good news is you have complete control over which channels Lowdown autogenerates content from.

When you are logged in and reviewing your newsletter, press ‘Settings’. From here, you can untick any channels that you don’t want to be included in your newsletter. From the same menu, you can also add in any private channels if desired.

Finally, from this Settings page, you can also choose if you’d like to share 1, 3, 5 or 10 posts each week.

Something to try: Send a focused newsletter of just one important channel like #announcements.

2. Customise your email subject line and title

On your newsletter screen, you’ll see an** ‘edit button’** beside both the subject line and title. Simply press this, change the text and save to confirm changes.

Your new text will be permanent and used for every future newsletter until it’s changed again.

Something to try: Change your subject and title to match your channels or what you’re trying to achieve with your newsletter eg: Product Updates or Reading List.

3. Handpick specific posts to appear in your newsletter

Go to Slack and find a post you’d like to highlight. Hover or select it, then press the ‘… icon’ to the right and you should see an option to ‘Add to newsletter’. If you have other Slack apps installed, this may be within the ‘More message actions’ menu accessed from the bottom of the list.

Any post you add will take priority and be automatically included at the top of your newsletter. The remaining slots will be filled by the most popular posts in your Slack. Your newsletter is always limited to 1, 3, 5 or 10 posts, so if you handpick more than this, not all of them will appear in your newsletter.

4. Remove the posts you don’t like

Is there a post in your newsletter you’d rather not share? No problem! In Lowdown press the ‘red X icon’ to the right of each post and it won’t be included.

5. Add your subscribers and share!

By now you should have a newsletter well-tailored to your needs. The last thing you need to do is add subscribers so your lovely new newsletter will land in some inboxes. Learn how:

Auto-subscribe your members in one-click

The easiest option is to subscribe all your Slack members automatically from the Add Subscribers page. Your members will receive no notification that they have been subscribed. We recommend collecting permission from your members before subscribing them.

Ask members to opt-in with our Slackbot

If you’d prefer to collect permission to receive your newsletter upfront Lowdown makes that easy too with our handy Slackbot. Here’s how:

**In a direct message: **Send a DM to all unsubscribed members with a button to opt-in. If you wish this can also be sent to every new member when they join. In any channel: Share a post in any channel of your choice with a button to opt-in. This is the most passive method, there is no notification to members. It appears just like any other post.

If you want to send one of our Slackbot messages visit the Add Subscribers page.

Protip: You can customise Slackbot messages to say anything you like. Try making your message relevant to the channel or content shared previously for best results.

That’s it!

Your newsletter is set up, and you now have a great way to keep your members up to date with what matters most to you — automatically!

Help us improve Lowdown

If you haven’t already, please reach out and give us feedback on your experience with Lowdown — both positive and negative your input helps us improve.

It’s still early days for Lowdown but we have big plans. To check out what’s coming next visit our public roadmap.