Launching a paid email newsletter is easier than ever before!

In this article, we'll cover the entire process of setting up and sending a paid newsletter using ConvertKit Commerce. (These steps apply to other types of subscription-based products, as well.)

Paid newsletter products are differentiated from other products by two key settings.

First, when you're creating a new product, select Subscription as your product's product type under the Product Details settings:

This enables recurring billing for your newsletter. Click Next to move to Product Price settings and set up your newsletter's:

The billing intervals we support are:

If you want to offer multiple billing intervals (e.g., a monthly subscription and an annual subscription), click Add another pricing plan to set up additional prices and frequencies.

Second, in the Fulfillment section, select A Newsletter:

This simply indicates you'll be delivering this product by sending your paid newsletter to your subscribers.

These two settings are the only requirements that differentiate a paid newsletter product!

From here, you're free to customize the remainder of the product's settings to your liking. For guidance on configuring products in general, refer to this tutorial.

Paid newsletters are sent as Broadcasts, filtered to send to only those who are subscribed to your newsletter product. Follow the steps below to set up this filter!

After writing your Broadcast, select the Send email option on your Broadcast's Publish page.

Scroll to the "Who would you like to send this to?" section of the send settings and click the X that appears when you hover your cursor over the "All Subscribers" recipients filter.

Click Add Filter, followed by select Subscribed to > products.

Select your paid newsletter product from the last dropdown menu, and then click Add Filter.

The next step is to add the Broadcast as a paid post to your public newsletter feed.

This gives visitors to your feed a sneak peek of your paid newsletter—so they can subscribe if they want to!

Set this up by enabling the Publish to web option below the send settings and toggling the Only display for paying subscribers setting.

(Learn more about paid posts here.)

Finally, send (or schedule) your Broadcast following the rest of the normal process.

The product filter will ensure your Broadcast goes out to only those actively paying for your newsletter at the time of sending.

That means if a customer cancels their subscription, they'll automatically be excluded from receiving your newsletter—no action is needed on your part. 🙌

With recurring billing comes recurring invoices! Here's how to view and resend receipts if needed, as well as review your subscribers' billing history.

First, click the profile of the subscriber whose billing history you want to review. Any invoice emails that have been sent to them will be listed as "Subscription invoice" under the "Email type" column:

To view this subscriber's detailed billing history, click the Purchases tab. It'll look something like this for an active subscriber to one of your recurring products:

Click the down arrow (⌄) on the right to reveal additional details.

From there, you have the options to cancel the subscriber's subscription as well as view, resend, or refund any specific receipts as needed (denoted by arrows below):

You can accomplish this by creating a Segment and using the same criteria as denoted in the "Sending your paid newsletter" section above.

Here's an example of how that might look:

The Segment will keep itself updated based on whose subscriptions are still active!

Duplicate the Broadcast and resend it to just that new customer.

We have a tutorial on how to filter Broadcasts so they go out to only a single subscriber (or a handful of them) here.

Definitely!

Your subscribers are all on your main list, and then further segmented from there. Naturally, you'll want to send your paid content to only those paying for it! But those paying folks can certainly get your free emails as well (so long as they've consented to this).

Just keep an eye on your sending frequency and volume so you don't inadvertently overload anyone's inbox.

Yes! For recurring products, you can set your discount's duration and it'll be applied to any payments made for the product during that period.

For more details, please check out our dedicated guide on ConvertKit Commerce product discounts here.

If you want to preview the checkout experience as a customer, you have two options:

ConvertKit Commerce: Creating a Product