AI Workflow for Newsletter Automation

Difficulty: Beginner · Setup time: 25 min · Steps: 5

Curating content, writing intros, and formatting newsletters manually eats hours every week. This workflow automatically pulls your curated links from Airtable, has OpenAI write a brief intro for each item, assembles the newsletter in Beehiiv, and triggers sending — all on a schedule you define.

What to Expect

  • 2 hr/week — saved on newsletter curation and writing
  • 3× — higher open rates vs. generic promotional emails

Tools Used in This Workflow

  • Airtable — Content curation database
  • Zapier — Trigger & orchestrate
  • OpenAI — Write intros & summaries
  • Beehiiv — Assemble & send newsletter
  • Slack — Pre-send notification

How It Works — Step by Step

  1. Step 1: Curate content in Airtable

    Tool: Airtable

    Throughout the week, you (or your team) add article URLs, titles, and one-line notes to an Airtable base. When you're ready to send, you mark the newsletter record as 'Ready to Send'.

  2. Step 2: Trigger the workflow via Zapier

    Tool: Zapier

    Zapier watches the Airtable base for the status change and retrieves all curated items for that newsletter edition. The trigger can also be time-based — every Monday at 9am, for example.

  3. Step 3: Generate intros with OpenAI

    Tool: OpenAI

    For each curated article, OpenAI writes a 2–3 sentence intro in your newsletter's voice. An overall section intro is also generated based on the theme of that week's content.

  4. Step 4: Assemble and send in Beehiiv

    Tool: Beehiiv

    Zapier creates a new Beehiiv post via API, populates each section with the AI-written intros and article links, applies your newsletter template, and either sends immediately or schedules for your optimal send time.

  5. Step 5: Confirm in Slack

    Tool: Slack

    A Slack notification includes a preview link to the newsletter draft, subscriber count, and send time. Your team has 30 minutes to flag any issues before the workflow auto-confirms the send.

Pro Tips for This Workflow

  • Build an RSS aggregator feed in Make that pulls from 8–10 industry sources and scores each article by keyword relevance before sending to OpenAI — this ensures your newsletter always covers fresh, relevant content.
  • Ask OpenAI to write each newsletter section in your own first-person voice with specific phrases you like — include 5 example sentences from past newsletters in the prompt.
  • Test your Beehiiv/Mailchimp send times with a small holdout group before automating — the best send time for your audience may be different from industry averages.

What You'll Need

  • Airtable account — Content curation database
  • Zapier account — Trigger & orchestrate
  • OpenAI account — Write intros & summaries
  • Beehiiv account — Assemble & send newsletter
  • Slack account — Pre-send notification
  • Basic automation experience, or a vetted expert to build it for you

Related Video Tutorial

Automate Your Email Newsletter with AI and No-Code Tools

Frequently Asked Questions

Which newsletter platform works best with this automation?

Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, and Klaviyo all support API-based draft creation. Beehiiv is the easiest for this workflow — it has a straightforward REST API for creating posts as drafts. Mailchimp requires campaign setup via API which is slightly more complex to configure.

Can the automation personalize the newsletter for different subscriber segments?

Yes, but it requires segment-level sending logic in your email platform. Set up audience segments in your tool (e.g., 'Enterprise' vs. 'SMB'), then have OpenAI generate separate intros or featured articles per segment. Most email platforms support sending separate campaigns to segments via API.

What happens if the AI content sounds off before I send?

The workflow saves the draft in your email platform for human review before sending — it never auto-sends. You can also add a Slack approval step where an editor sees a preview and clicks 'Send' or 'Edit'. The automation handles curation and writing; a human makes the final call.

How do I prevent the same article from appearing in multiple newsletters?

Log every included article URL to an Airtable 'Used Articles' table. At the start of each newsletter generation run, Make checks this table and filters out any previously used URLs from the RSS feed — keeping your content always fresh.

Want This Workflow Built for You?

Our vetted automation engineers can set up this exact workflow in days — customized to your tools and process. Free consultation, honest quote, fast delivery.

Get matched free — no commitment

More Social Media & Content workflows | All workflow guides | Find automation experts