By Pavlos Ioannou Katidis

In today’s digital landscape, efficient and secure email management is essential for businesses facing the complexities of cyber threats and regulatory compliance. Companies are seeking ways to safeguard against unauthorized access and apply audit rules, while maintaining operational efficiency. Amazon SES Mail Manager is designed to meet these challenges, offering a suite of features that enhance both inbound and outbound email flows.

Mail Manager provides key components such as traffic policies for detailed email filtering, authenticated ingress endpoints that ensure emails are received only from verified senders, and customizable rule sets that enable administrators to precisely manage email traffic. These tools aim to bolster security and streamline the email management process.

The blog explores Mail Manager’s capabilities by demonstrating how each component works and can be utilized in practical business scenarios. Some common use cases include security, where Mail Manager blocks harmful emails based on IP ranges, TLS versions, and authentication checks while leveraging third-party security add-ons. Another use case is email archiving, where you can use Mail Manager to set up multiple archives with customizable retention periods and encryption, ensuring compliance and easy searchability.

Familiarize with some of mail manager’s key components below before proceeding with the customer use cases.

Mail manager components definition:

• Ingress endpoints:
  • Open ingress endpoint: a SMTP endpoint responsible for accepting connections, and process SMTP conversation key infrastructure. It’s a key component that utilizes traffic polices and rules that you can configure to determine which emails should be allowed into your organization and which ones should be rejected.
  • Authenticated ingress endpoint: Mail sent to your domain has to come from authorized senders whom you’ve shared your SMTP credentials with, such as your on-premise email servers.
• Traffic policies: let you determine the email you want to allow or block from your ingress endpoint. A traffic policy consists of one or more policy statements where you allow or deny traffic based on a variety of protocols including recipient address, sender IP address and TLS protocol version.
• Rules sets: A Rule set is a container for an ordered set of rules you create to perform actions on your email. Each rule consists of conditions and rules.
• Email add-ons: A suite of 3rd party applications that are seamlessly integrated with Amazon SES mail manager. Some of them are Trend Micro Virus Scanning, Abusix Mail intelligence and Spamhaus Domain Block List.

For a deep dive into Mail Manager’s capabilities, ready this blog.

Customer background and use case

Nutrition.co is an online retail business with multiple departments, including marketing, tech, and sales, that send and receive emails. Nutrition.co is looking for a solution to monitor both outbound and inbound emails and apply various controls such as filtering, message processing, and archiving. Nutrition.co uses Outlook as an enterprise mailbox environment for its employees.

Use case 1: Nutrition.co to the world

This use case focuses on the outbound email flow, where Nutrition.co employees are sending emails outside of Nutrition.co. Some of the requirements include the archival of all outbound emails originated by the marketing department, blocking any tech emails exceeding 1mb and scanning the email content of emails originated by sales. These controls should be centrally managed and provide flexibility to edit/create/delete new ones.

Solution: Each department will direct its outbound emails to an authenticated ingress endpoint by configuring an Exchange transport rule. These endpoints ensure that only authorized senders with SMTP credentials can send emails. Each ingress endpoint generates an A record, which is added as an MX record to the DNS provider for each department’s subdomain. Additionally, each ingress endpoint is associated with a specific traffic policy and rule set. According to Nutrition.co’s requirements, all connections between the departments and the ingress endpoints must use TLS 1.3 or higher. Emails that comply with the traffic policies are processed through distinct rule sets. Emails from marketing that comply with DKIM and SPF are first archived and then sent to the recipient via the Send to Internet action. Tech emails have their recipient’s address rewritten to a test email address, while emails from the sales department undergo content scanning before being sent to the final recipients via the Send to Internet action.

Use case 2: World to Nutrition.co

This use case focuses on the inbound email flow, where third parties send emails to Nutrition.co. Nutrition.co requires inbound emails to pass SPF and DKIM and have TLS 1.3 or higher to be archived. Emails originating from warehouse.com, Nutrition.co’s fulfilment partner, are containing customer order updates. These emails should be processed by Nutrition.co and accordingly update the customers’ order status database. Furthermore, warehouse.com emails should originate from a certain IP range, have TLS 1.3 or higher and pass SPF and DKIM.

Solution: Nutrition.co will use an open ingress endpoint without authentication for all inbound external emails. This is achieved by adding an MX record generated by Mail Manager upon the creation of the ingress endpoint. This ingress endpoint will be associated with a traffic policy that evaluates TLS. If the inbound email conforms to the traffic policy, it will proceed through the rule set condition and actions. The rule set condition is to pass SPF and DKIM and the actions are to be archived and then sent to the final recipient (Nutrition.co employee) via SMTP Relay. Emails containing parcel delivery updates from warehouse.com will be directed to a separate Nutrition.co subdomain, which routes all inbound emails to an authenticated ingress endpoint. Emails from warehouse.com with TLS 1.3 or higher will meet the traffic policy requirements. If they are SPF and DKIM passing, they will be stored in a Nutrition.co Amazon S3 bucket as part of the rule set. Using Amazon S3 notifications, an AWS Lambda function is invoked upon receiving an email. This function processes the email payload, and performs an API call to update the Nutrition.co customers’ order status database.

Archiving inbound emails

In the following section, you will use AWS CloudShell and AWS CLI commands to create a traffic policy that rejects emails with TLS versions lower than 1.3, includes an open ingress endpoint, and establishes a ruleset that archives emails that are DKIM passing.

Prerequisites: Own a domain and have access to its DNS provider, in order to add the MX record.

Navigate to the AWS Management Console and open CloudShell, find CloudShell availability here. Follow the steps below by copying and pasting the AWS CLI commands to the CloudShell terminal. Note that creating and configuring these resources, can also be done from the AWS Console.

# 1. Creating archive

ARCHIVE=$(aws mailmanager create-archive \
  --archive-name NutritionCo \
  --retention RetentionPeriod=THREE_MONTHS \
  --region ${AWS_REGION} \
  --tags Key=Company,Value=NutritionCo | jq -r '.ArchiveId') && echo $ARCHIVE

# 2. Creating traffic policy

TRAFFIC_POLICY=$(aws mailmanager --region ${AWS_REGION} create-traffic-policy \
  --traffic-policy-name ArchiveTrafficPolicy \
  --default-action DENY \
  --policy-statements '[
    {
      "Action": "ALLOW",
      "Conditions": [
        {
          "TlsExpression": {
            "Evaluate": {
              "Attribute": "TLS_PROTOCOL"
            },
            "Operator": "MINIMUM_TLS_VERSION",
            "Value": "TLS1_3"
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  ]'| jq -r '.TrafficPolicyId') && echo $TRAFFIC_POLICY

# 3. Creating Mailmanager RuleSet for archiving

RULE_SET=$(aws mailmanager --region ${AWS_REGION} create-rule-set \
  --rule-set-name ArchiveRuleSet \
  --rules '[
    {
      "Name": "Archive",
      "Actions": [
        {
          "Archive": {
            "TargetArchive": "'"${ARCHIVE}"'"
          }
        }
      ],
      "Conditions": [
        {
          "VerdictExpression": {
            "Evaluate": {
              "Attribute": "DKIM"
            },
            "Operator": "EQUALS",
            "Values": ["PASS"]
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  ]'| jq -r '.RuleSetId') && echo $RULE_SET

# 4. Create ingress endpoint

aws mailmanager --region ${AWS_REGION} create-ingress-point \
--ingress-point-name Archiving \
--type OPEN \
--traffic-policy-id ${TRAFFIC_POLICY} \
--rule-set-id ${RULE_SET}

To view the resources created above, navigate to the Amazon SES console > Mail Manager and view Traffic policies and Rule sets. Below, you can see the rule in edit mode.

Navigate to Amazon SES > Mail Manager > Ingress endpoint, select the ingress endpoint named Archiving and copy the ARecord, which looks like this <unique-id>.fips.wmjb.mail-manager-smtp.amazonaws.com – see screenshot below. Add this value to your MX record.

To test if the MX record has been added successfully, open your local terminal and execute the command below:
nslookup -type=MX <your-domain.com>
The response should return the MX preference and mail exchanger containing the A record value.

Testing

To test if the inbound emails are archived successfully, send an email to an address within the domain for which you have added the MX record. Wait for 3-5 minutes to allow for email processing. Then, navigate to the AWS Management Console, go to Amazon SES, and select Mail Manager. Under Email Archiving, select NutritionCo under Archive and click on Search. This should return all the emails you have sent.

Conclusion & Next steps

In this blog, we delved into the essential features of Amazon SES Mail Manager and its application in managing both inbound and outbound email flows. We explored key components such as traffic policies, authenticated ingress endpoints, and customizable rule sets that enhance security and operational efficiency. Through practical use cases, this blog demonstrates how these features can be implemented to meet the specific needs of a business like Nutrition.co. By leveraging Amazon SES Mail Manager, businesses can significantly enhance their email security and management processes, safeguarding against cyber threats while ensuring compliance and efficiency.

Continue exploring Mail Manager’s features such as SMTP relays and Email add-ons.

By Pavlos Ioannou Katidis

Pavlos Ioannou Katidis is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Senior Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He enjoys diving deep into customers’ technical issues and help in designing communication solutions. In his spare time, he enjoys playing tennis, watching crime TV series, playing FPS PC games, and coding personal projects.

Alexey Kiselev

Alexey Kiselev is a Senior SDE working on Amazon Email. Alexey has played a pivotal role in shaping the design, infrastructure, and delivery of MailManager. With years of experience, deep understanding of the industry and a passion for innovation he is enthusiast and a builder with a core area of interest on scalable and cost-effective email management and email security solutions.

Sourced from AWS

By Andrew Hutchinson

While TikTok has become a key platform for entertainment, it’s also increasingly becoming a destination for discovery, with more and more people now turning to app to learn more about products, trends and more.

Which could be an important consideration for your marketing efforts. Depending on your target market, TikTok may now be a key driver of interest, and as such, your brand should have a presence within the expanding TikTok space.

Well, for now at least. TikTok may also be gone from the U.S. as of early next year, but that outcome is still yet to be determined, amid various legal challenges.

Till then, these insights from Adobe may be of interest. Adobe surveyed 808 consumers, as well as 251 business owners, to glean more insight into how TikTok is being used for product discovery.

Some potentially valuable notes.

By Andrew Hutchinson

Sourced from Social Media Today

By Linda Hwang

Why These 11 Websites Offer the Best in Class Newsletter Services

“Now people want to know how, and there are a lot of amazing social media newsletters in the space,” Jack continued.

Jack wanted to make sure his newsletter wasn’t full of fluff. His goal was to offer advice people could take action on immediately.

As a content creator or consumer, a newsletter is a great way to share new ideas, products, trending industry news, and advice to your community.

With so many websites great for hosting newsletters, knowing what’s best for you can be difficult.

It’s okay, that’s why we’re here.

We will examine eleven of the top newsletter websites, breaking down their features, what stands out, price, and ease of use.

Whether you’re a business guru, a creative soul, or someone in between, this article will light your path to newsletter nirvana.

Why Newsletters Are Essential for Business?

Research your competitors.

Chances are, they have a daily, weekly, or monthly email newsletter.

You may be wondering why they would need one.

Today, over 4.37 billion people use email. Email is becoming more dominant over time.

An email newsletter is a publication that offers regular communication to subscribers. Newsletters play a critical role in digital marketing, especially email marketing. Often, businesses use an email newsletter to share helpful information about their company or topics related to their business that solve their customers’ problems.

A consistent email newsletter helps you as a content creator or business owner because it’s a commitment to creating content regularly.

“[Whether] you have one subscriber or ten million subscribers, you are committed to it. I have to show up every Thursday with the newsletter, even though it’s not the best time for the last couple of weeks for me to do it,” explained BenGingi, a co-creator of YASSSletter, a gastronomic newsletter on beehiiv.

“People are waiting to get it every week for the recipes they will make with their family that weekend. So, we are very committed.”

11 Best Websites For Newsletter

There are so many great options for websites for newsletters; which one is the best one for you?

That’s the million-dollar question, and we got an answer for you!

Selecting the perfect newsletter platform is like choosing the right gear for a journey. You need reliability, ease of use, and features that match your mission.

Our selection criteria focused on these aspects, pricing, and unique offerings that set each platform apart.

Let’s explore!

beehiiv: Monetization, Usability, and Customization

beehiiv buzzes to the top with its sweet monetization options, intuitive design interface, and customization capabilities that let your brand personality shine.

Whether you’re a small business or content creator on a tight budget, beehiiv offers a great pricing structure unseen in the email marketing platform world—up to 2,500 contacts on their free plan, Launch.

Stand out with beehiiv’s unique features like integrated advertising tools, 3D analytics tools, and subscriber segmentation.

“I’ve tried various platforms like MailChimp and MailerLite, but they all had limited features and capabilities. beehiiv makes it seamless and marries well with blog publishing,” toots Dave Schools, founder of the Entrepreneurship Handbook newsletter.

Schools continued, “This email newsletter-sending process is like no other platform. I also looked at Substack, but beehiiv was advanced with built-in growth. beehiiv is my growth engine.”

How to Start Using beehiiv

1. Visit beehiiv’s website and click the ‘Sign Up‘ button.
2. Choose your plan based on your needs.
3. Customize your profile and set up your newsletter template.
4. Import your subscriber list or start building a new one.
5. Create and send your first newsletter!

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an artist’s palette of newsletter tools, offering vibrant features for creators and entrepreneurs.

Great for businesses looking for complex, commerce-based automation, selling digital courses or products, and deploying custom landing pages and funnels. ConvertKit offers responsive newsletter templates that are easy to customize with your font, color, and alignment of choice.

If you are a business offering products, they provide unlimited newsletter product pages that are fully personalized to match your brand. You can set up automated funnels to pitch your newsletter to your fans with audience growth and email tools.

They offer a limited free plan, but their Creator plan starts at $9/month for up to 300 subscribers and offers excellent automation features.

Some top creators and celebrities like Ali Abdaal and Mandy Moore use CovertKit.

“[ConvertKit] was better than MailChimp. But even then, it was still complicated, and I just didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know how to do any of the automation stuff,” said Dakota Robertson, Wrongs to Write newsletter creator.

“But it was just really complicated trying to figure out how to do everything,”

Mailchimp

The mighty Mailchimp is the Swiss Army knife of newsletter services.

A popular entry-level marketing automation platform known for its ease of use and affordability. It offers a range of features, such as email marketing, landing page creation, and audience segmentation.

If you’re looking for an email marketing tool for one-off email blasts or promotional or e-commerce emails, then Mailchimp is a great tool to help you with your business needs.

When it comes to pricing, Mailchimp offers a variety of plans to fit different needs and budgets.

The free plan suits users with smaller subscriber lists, while paid plans provide more advanced features and functionalities, such as advanced segmentation, retargeting ads, and A/B testing.

Substack

As one of the most prominent email service providers (ESPs), Substack is a big player in the newsletter space, with 500,000 paying subscribers and millions of readers in 2023.

If you’re looking for a great way to be part of an ecosystem for writers, a simple platform without any bells and whistles, and your content being responsive and accessible through a mobile app, then Substack is the platform for you.

Publishing is free on Substack, no matter the number of subscribers you have. Substack will have a 10%+ processing fee for each transaction if you enable a paid subscription to your publication.

“I don’t remember when I first started hearing about [beehiiv]. It started bubbling up in my Twitter feed, you know, pretty active on people starting to use it or shifting over from Substack,” relayed Jon Finkel, creator of Books & Biceps newsletter, about his move to beehiiv from Substack.

“A bunch of DMs said you should do it over here,” he concluded.

AWeber

Known for its stellar customer service and robust automation tools, AWeber helps small businesses craft effective email campaigns without needing a tech wizard on staff.

The platform is an excellent choice for those who want a full-featured email platform that’s super simple and provides additional valuable tools. Trusted by over one million customers, AWeber is loved by people for its pricing, high deliverability rates, and integration abilities.

AWeber offers a free plan for up to 500 subscribers, but it has limited features (1 email page, one landing page, and basic email support). Their next plan is the Lite plan, which is $12.50 monthly.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor’s design-forward approach brings beauty to the inbox.

If you’re looking for a platform that offers automated customer journey and life cycle emails, a way to sell digital courses and products, and non-profit and fundraising communications, Campaign Monitor is the platform for you!

They offer segmentation features, A/B testing, integrations, analytics, automation, transactional emails, and dynamic content.

Campaign Monitor offers a “free trial” but only allows users to send one email to five subscribers. The next plan is the Lite plan, which costs $11 monthly for up to 500 contacts.

Ghost

Ghost is an open-source alternative to platforms like Substack and Medium. Being “open-source” means users have complete ownership of their data and content. For those who prefer ultimate control—Ghost is the platform for you!

The platform allows creators to transform their audience into a thriving business, focusing on building a membership service for their content. So, suppose you are heavily into blogging and web-first content, custom self-hosted solutions, educational content, or sharing knowledge. In that case, Ghost can help you excel in providing content to your audience.

It offers users a variety of templates, allowing more freedom and creativity in email layouts and design.

Ghost combines a modern and highly efficient framework with a website, CMS, newsletter platform, and paid subscription launch capability.

Ghost offers a 14-day free trial, then its next plan is $9 per month for 500 members.

Why Trust Me

Linda Hwang has extensive experience in B2B marketing and previously worked at a renowned international facilities management company. She played a crucial role in creating effective content and social media marketing plans there. Now, Linda is a marketing consultant who helps small businesses create compelling brand stories.

Mailmodo

Mailmodo injects excitement into email marketing with interactive AMP emails.

Described as the “new-age” email marketing tool that helps you create and send app-like interactive emails to help you get higher conversions and return-on-investments (ROI). Say goodbye to static newsletters and hello to engaging, actionable content that boosts engagement rates and delights subscribers.

With Mailmodo, you can create stunning no-code emails, integrate with 1,000+ tools, segment your audience, trigger customer journeys and automation, improve deliverability and open rates, and so much more—sitting at 4.6 stars on Capterra with 77% of their users likely to recommend the platform.

Mailmodo offers a 21-day free trial. The next plan is Lite, which costs $39 monthly for up to 2,500 contacts.

Flodesk

Flodesk marries elegance with efficiency, offering a flat pricing model that appeals to creatives and entrepreneurs alike.

How much, you ask? $35 per month.

Whether you are a beginner or an expert, you can use Flodesk to grow your business with an intuitive email builder and create beautiful templates you can customize and share.

Flodesk features campaign analytics, scheduling, contact management, event-triggered actions, and landing pages/web forms.

GetResponse

If you’re looking for marketing automation that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, GetResponse may be a good platform.

Like its competitor, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse offers a suite of email marketing tools to deliver tailor-made offers to your contacts when they are most active.

They offer useful features such as autoresponders, unlimited landing pages, and segmentation, along with excellent spam check features to improve the chances of your emails hitting user inboxes.

They also offer good audience segmentation features, allowing you to send better-targeted emails to your subscribers.

On the popular software review site Capterra, GetResponse received 4.2 stars—68% of the users would recommend using the software.

GetResponse offers a 30-day free trial where you have access to premium features. There are some limitations with the free trial, like webinars, messages, landing pages, marketing automation, and chats.

They offer four different plans, with the most affordable starting at $15.60 monthly.

Omnisend

Specializing in e-commerce, providing omnichannel capabilities and automation workflows that turn browsers into buyers, Omnisend is an all-in-one platform making waves.

It’s the secret power for online stores aiming to supercharge their sales through targeted, personalized newsletters.

With Omnisend, you can create personalized campaigns, automate your marketing, and analyze your results to optimize your strategy. Omnisend also provides one of the best subject line testers for marketing, providing users with insights to achieve better email performance.

Omnisend offers a free plan for up to 250 contacts with limited capabilities.

The next plan is Standard, which costs $16 monthly and allows up to 500 contacts.

How to Choose the Right Website for Newsletters?

Comparing website platforms for newsletters is challenging. Each platform has strengths, features, and tools to solve specific user problems.

The best tip for choosing the right website for your newsletter is to know your business goals and strategies.

Once you have solidified those goals and strategies, you can consider how they fit with these factors: customization, monetization, user authentication, and customer domains.

Customizing your newsletter or monetizing for growth becomes easier when you have a plan. You can make tweaks to maximize effectiveness in each factor.

Customization

Your newsletter should reflect your brand’s soul.

Look for platforms that offer extensive customization options, allowing you to tailor every aspect of your newsletters to resonate with your audience.

Finkel, creator of Books & Biceps, said, “Just like authors spend significant time making sure we get the cover of our books right, newsletter creators have the same chance to make a powerful impression with their landing page and email design,” Finkel says. “The Design Lab makes that possible to do on your own, even if you’re not a great designer.”

Monetization

Different platforms offer various pathways to gold.

Whether through subscriptions, advertisements, or sponsorships, select a platform that aligns with your monetization strategy and helps you achieve your financial goals.

One of the tips creator of Future Social, Jack Appleby, provided was “Monetization: diversifying income streams.”

He shared, “Because [of my background], I am using the advertising model for sure. Since my audience are marketers looking to me to understand how to do social media or branded content, many of the partnerships I pursue are very creative branded content opportunities.”

“What really excites me are the brands I work with, where they want to do very creative executions,” he continued.

From ad placements to affiliate marketing, beehiiv provides various ways for creators to generate revenue from their content.

“We do boosts. We do word-of-mouth. We are active on social media. We are experimenting with our premium subscription, which we started in June,” offered Dave Schools, the creative mind behind Entrepreneurship Handbook.

User Authentication

From Cybersecurity Ventures, it is projected that by 2025, cybercrime will cost the world $10.5 trillion annually.

Why be part of the statistics?

For newsletter services, user authentication is crucial in safeguarding subscriber data and enhancing trust.

Imagine user authentication as the bouncer at the door of your newsletter service, ensuring that only authorized users can access sensitive information. This security measure helps prevent unauthorized access, protecting your reputation and subscribers’ privacy.

By implementing robust user authentication methods like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and robust password policies, newsletter platforms can significantly reduce the risk of data breaches, bolstering subscriber confidence in your commitment to their security.

Custom Domains

A custom domain acts like your digital signature, instantly recognizable and distinctly yours.

It reinforces brand consistency across all communications and lends an air of professionalism that free domain names simply can’t match.

Moreover, emails sent from custom domains are less likely to be flagged as spam, ensuring your carefully crafted messages reach your audience.

If you’re using beehiiv as your platform of choice, you can use your own domain name instead of the beehiiv subdomain. To connect your domain, follow these simple steps:

1. Log into your beehiiv account.
2. Go to the ‘Settings’ tab on the beehiiv dashboard.
3. Click ‘Publications.’
4. Click ‘Domain.’
5. Scroll down to ‘Verified Domains’ and ‘Add Custom Domain.’
6. Enter the domain URL and click ‘Add Domain.’

After you add the domain, you will need to configure a web domain, a redirect domain, and an email domain.

Sounds a little overwhelming?

Well, you’re in luck! beehiiv created a step-by-step video on how to do it.

Final Thoughts

These eleven platforms can help you create websites for your newsletters, making it easier than ever to find a home for your content.

It is also clear that choosing the right platform is pivotal.

Your decision should align with your specific needs, goals, and the unique voice of your brand or business.

Among the stellar platforms we’ve discussed, beehiiv emerges as a standout contender—especially noted for its monetization capabilities, user-friendly interface, and deep customization options.

“What I loved about beehiiv right away was how simple the interface was. And, I mean, the level of support is fantastic too. beehiiv does everything I need,” said Dakota Robertson, founder of Capital Creators and Wrongs to Write newsletter.

Robertson continued, “I don’t need this crazy stuff or these extra features that I just never use. beehiiv is very focused on its users and what they actually care about, and they make it so simple to use, which I love.”

As we look to the future, the landscape of newsletter publishing is ripe with possibilities.

With platforms like beehiiv, creators and businesses have the tools to craft engaging, impactful newsletters that resonate with audiences and drive meaningful engagement.

Ready to elevate your newsletter game?

Sign up for beehiiv today and unlock the full potential of your email marketing strategy.

Don’t miss out on the future of newsletter publishing—join beehiiv now and start creating newsletters that genuinely stand out.

Best Website For Newsletters: Frequently Asked Questions

What Makes a Website the Best Choice for Newsletters?

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook advertising became so solid for advertisers that people relied too heavily on it.

During the pandemic, Facebook made changes to its algorithm that put online advertisers into a frenzy of fear and panic. It became harder for advertisers to reach their audiences, it became more expensive to generate revenue, and profit margins started shrinking.

Who wasn’t phased by the Facebook algorithm changes?

Creators and businesses who diversified their marketing efforts with a newsletter.

How about in April of 2021, when Apple introduced significant changes to its privacy controls through its updates?

When the updates were released, they drastically limited digital advertisers’ tracking capabilities. To make things even more challenging for online marketers, iPhone users could now choose to opt out of data sharing.

With these changes and more changes toward privacy controls and data, marketers need a better way to reach their audiences.

That’s why you need a website for your newsletters.

The best newsletter platform balances ease of use with powerful features, offering comprehensive customization options, competitive pricing, and seamless integrations.

beehiiv exemplifies these qualities, providing a user-friendly environment that doesn’t skimp on the tools needed for audience engagement and growth.

Are There Any Free Website Options for Newsletters?

The simple answer is—yes.

There are “free” website options for newsletters.

Each of the eleven platforms we listed has free plans or trial periods.

These options often come with certain limitations but can be an excellent way for new users to get acquainted with the platform’s features.

How Easy is it to Migrate My Existing Newsletter to a New Platform?

Depending on your platform, migrating your existing newsletter could be as easy as reconfiguring URLs and importing and exporting contacts.

If you’re using beehiiv, you can import content from various other platforms. To do so, you follow these steps:

1. Log into your beehiiv account.
2. Go to ‘Settings.’
3. Click ‘Publication.’
4. Click ‘Import Content.’
5. Click ‘Get Started.’
6. Select which platforms from the list or ‘Other.’

There are a few additional steps for the various platforms, and the instructions will vary depending on your selection.

Once you have imported your newsletter content, you can access it anytime in your beehiiv account under ‘Write’ and then click ‘Post.’

What Kind of Support Can I Expect From the Best Newsletter Websites?

Top-notch newsletter services offer extensive support and resources, including 24/7 customer service, community forums, detailed FAQs, and educational materials.

beehiiv stands out for its responsive and helpful support team, which ensures users have the assistance they need to succeed.

By Linda Hwang

Sourced from beehiiv Blog

BY TOBIAS CARROLL

This is all heading to some very creepy places

There’s been a lot of conversation lately about the current state of search engines. More specifically, there’s been a lot of discourse about the frustrations numerous search engine users have had when trying to seek out basic information. It’s prompted some people to seek out alternatives to Google — or to work on building their own. The addition of AI into the mix has led to further dilemmas, including treating The Onion stories as factual rather than satirical.

But when it comes to the effects of AI-generated images on search engine results, we seem to be on the verge of something utterly terrifying. That’s not hyperbole; the headline for a recent story at 404 Media by Emanuel Maiberg declared that AI images “Have Opened a Portal to Hell” in search engines. That is, unfortunately, an eminently accurate description of the situation at hand.

As Maiberg explained, this article grew out of another investigation, this one into scams on Taylor Swift fan pages. While researching AI-generated images for that article, he discovered a number of what appeared to be AI-generated images of Swift. Maiberg then began researching the presence of AI-generated images in search results for different female celebrities wearing swimsuits. That’s when the investigation took an even bleaker turn.

Maiberg wrote that, for two of the celebrities in question, Google Image Search returned “AI-generated images of them in swimsuits, but as children, even though the search didn’t include terms related to age.” Following those links, Maiberg noted, can take users to “AI-generated non-consensual nude images and AI-generated nude images of celebrities made to look like children.”

Deepfake images have already popped up in ways that increase disinformation about ongoing conflicts around the globe. This latest permutation is unsettling for a much different reason and demonstrates how AI-generated images can both make it harder to seek out actual photographs and take users to thoroughly unsettling places, both literally and metaphorically.

There is, unfortunately, a reason why Cory Doctorow’s concept of enshittification has become ubiquitous in the last year or so. In a recent lecture, Doctorow described a process by which “the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.” And getting a bunch of dodgy AI images — and worse — when carrying out a fairly basic image search certainly sounds like it qualifies, with a side order of moral rot along the way.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

BY TOBIAS CARROLL

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been…Read More

Sourced from INSIDEHOOK

Sourced from Forbes

Feature Image Credit: Getty

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Forbes Business Council is an invitation-only, fee-based organization for successful entrepreneurs and business leaders.

By Julia Waldow

Since 2022, writer Emily Sundberg has churned out edition after edition of her popular daily Substack business newsletter “Feed Me.” Sundberg writes about products she comes across organically, and she typically hears from brands she mentions in issues. “Often, founders will email me and say, ‘A ton of people came into the store asking for this, and they mentioned ‘Feed Me,’” she told Modern Retail.

It wasn’t until March 2024, however, that Sundberg ran her first sponsored Substack post. That post was sponsored by the apparel brand Free People, which Sundberg used to work for in high school. The two collaborated on a travel newsletter. Since then, Sundberg has worked with three other brands: skincare brand Medik8, supplements brand Moon Juice and nicotine replacement brand Jones.

By Julia Waldow

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By Joe Foley

The digital agency says AI can help creatives keep up with changing expectations.

AI is transforming processes in all kinds of industries, which inevitably means we’ll see more AI in branding and brand design. However, a lot of the discussion about the possibilities still feels abstract, leaving people wondering what practical uses the technology has for designers working on campaigns.

The most most visible face of AI at the moment tends to be generative tools like chatbots and AI image generators. But the team at digital innovation agency Rehab doesn’t see these as particularly useful for brands today in their most generic forms. Where Rehab thinks AI can play a role is in ideation and audience validation at the very beginning of the creative process. I spoke to founder Tim Rodgers and Head of Strategy Callum Gill to learn more about what this really looks like.

Many creatives will be happy to hear that Tim and Callum are sceptical about the usefulness of generative AI for producing final assets. Rehab is focusing on the earlier part of the creative process: the hours of research and strategy work that go into shaping a campaign and defining what the assets should be rather than how they should be made.

They realised that if you ask ChatGPT for an idea for a creative campaign, whatever it comes up has probably been done a thousand times before, which might be reason enough to immediately rule out it out. What they’re doing is adding further training to create smaller bespoke AI models that are more relevant to a specific brand.

Tim and Callum expect the future of AI will see the generic public models get bigger, while brands use smaller private models that have been fine-tuned to generate ideas for the creative process. It’s developed its own middleware called Daisychain, which orchestrates multiple large language models.

Rehab calls its tools an “unfair advantage” because they aim to give clients access to more intelligence than what their competitors have. This could be insights into trending topics on social media or the current interests of specific audiences. Putting this in the hands of designers, means designers become researchers. They’ll be able to get quicker, more detailed insights into what an audience is doing, saying, eating and more.

“Humans are making so much data on so many different platforms that if you want to truly understand who you’re designing for it’s really difficult,” Tim says. “But that’s a super power of AI, which can dissect large data sets and help you to understand them.”

The data needed to train bespoke models varies case by case. It can include public data, for example from social media, private static data like research documents, and real-time data. User feedback on the quality of the output is used to make the system better.

“Companies are sitting on a bunch of data that they own, they’ve created or they bought, and they’re just not utilising it,” Tim notes. “We’ve seen teams spend seven figures on research documents that go unread because they’re large PDF documents and no one has the time to find the nuggets inside that research. But if we take those reports and train a model with it, you can just ask the questions.”

Tim’s keen to point out that AI alone doesn’t hold the answer, and Rehab’s models aren’t a black box that can spit out finished results. AI doesn’t have the emotional intelligence for that. Rather it’s a springboard for human designers. For example, a copywriter and art director might have a conversation with the AI to explore trends and find ideas for campaigns.

“What we do is not replacement but enhancement,” Tim insists. “It’s about creating a trained AI that works alongside your team. It’s basically trying to leverage data. If you’re designers now have more visibility into what consumers want and are needing and can do that on a real-time basis, it’s going to lift the quality of all of the work.”

Callum suggests AI can also help designers respond to changing expectations. He says the main complaint he hears from everyone from researchers to creatives is not a lack of work or an inability to do the work, but the ability to keep up with demand, Work suffers because people are having to rush, so Rehab aims to give creatives a platform that provides more time to do the work by helping designers to avoid the wait for strategy and insight to confirm ideas.

“The expectations around the volume of work delivery have changed without the expectation around resources shifting that much, he says. “Lead times are getting shorter and shorter, so if we can empower teams to shortcut this part of the process, it leaves much more time for creatives that actually do the real creatives. How that comes to life is how the colour way is chosen, how the font is brought to life, how it looks in the various environments it’s going to live in. While AI can do some of that stuff, we know it’s the best at it yet. It’s not about taking jobs, it’s about the people you’ve got being able to deliver more in the time frame.”

As for the later stages of the creative process, Tim and Callum believe using AI to generate final assets remains risky, but they don’t find this to be a particularly interesting area either. “Sure, we can put a dog on a skateboard on an infinite number of backgrounds, but who wants that?,” Callum asks. “For us, it’s more exciting to figure out what you should do rather than how you do it. Maybe it should be a hamster on the skateboard, perhaps that would resonate more with the target audience. That’s the interesting part, more than how to produce that thing for less.”

Ultimately, Rehab thinks all brands are going to be using this kind of technology to devise campaigns. “Whatever brand has this technology is going to be faster than their competitor that doesn’t have it,” Tim says. “And between these brands, you’re going to see it in the actual work.”

For more on the conversation about AI in branding, graphic design, game design and more, see our AI Week coverage.

Feature Image credit: Rehab

By Joe Foley

Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.

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BY NICK ZVIADADZE , EDITED BY CHELSEA BROWN

Discover the best SEO hacks you can use to rank fast and avoid waiting for months to see results.

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By Elizabeth Yuko

It’s time to enrol in AI summer school.

The use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace nearly doubled between September 2023 and May 2024—when 75% of knowledge workers around the world indicated that they utilized it—according to a survey of 31,000 people in 31 countries conducted by LinkedIn and Microsoft. But they’re not without their doubts: 53% of those who have integrated AI into their workday said are concerned that using it on important work tasks could make them look replaceable.

At the same time, if you’ve ever encountered Google’s AI wildly inaccurate search results, you know that while AI might be the future, but it still has a long way to go. In the meantime, you might want to take advantage of some of the available courses on the basics of AI—especially those that are free. If you’re not sure where to start, LinkedIn Learning is now offering more than 50 free AI-upskilling courses from now through July 8.

How to take free AI courses through LinkedIn Learning

The LinkedIn Learning site can be a bit overwhelming if you don’t know what, exactly, you’re looking for, and where to find it. Plus, there are plenty of AI-related courses that haven’t been unlocked and require a subscription.

Basically, from now through July 8, these five learning pathways, featuring more than 50 AI-upskilling courses, have been unlocked and are free to access.

1. Building AI Literacy

• Course: What is Generative AI?
• Course: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
• Course: Responsible AI: Principles and Practical Applications
• Course: How to Boost Your Productivity with AI Tools
• Course: Prompt Engineering: How to Talk to the AIs
• Course: Introduction to Large Language Models

2. Applying AI to Everyday Work

Courses are available in three areas:

• Applying Generative AI as a Creative Professional (5 courses)
• Applying Generative AI as a Business Professional (7 courses)
• Applying AI as a Tech Leader (10 courses)

3. Developing Your Skills with the OpenAI API

• Course: OpenAI API: Working with Files
• Course: OpenAI API: Function Calling
• Course: OpenAI API: Code Interpreter and Advanced Data Analysis
• 8 additional courses

4. Advancing Your Skills in Deep Learning and Neural Networks

• Course: Deep Learning: Getting Started
• Course: AI Workshop: Build a Neural Network with PyTorch Lightning
• 7 additional courses

5. Developing Your AI Skills as a Cybersecurity Professional 

• Course: Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity
• Course: Leveraging AI for Security Testing
• Course: Introduction to MLSecOps
• 4 additional courses

There are a total of 55 free courses—none of which require you to sign up for a free trial of the LinkedIn Learning subscription. Unless you want to subscribe, just ignore the blue box on the right side of the page that says “Start my free month,” then scroll down and click directly on the course you’d like to take. It should begin right away without you having to enrol in a trial.

Credit: LinkedIn Learning

You can learn more about these courses and other offerings in this blog post from LinkedIn Learning’s Head of Global Content Dan Brodnitz.

Feature Image Credit: LinkedIn

By Elizabeth Yuko

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By Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf  

By Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf  

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