Magento newsletters templates don’t work. When you Queue the newsletter the body of the email isn’t brought through from the template. To fix this you need to copy the following your file into your local code and make a small change.

Copy…

/app/code/local/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/Newsletter/Queue/Edit

To…

/app/code/local/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/Newsletter/Queue/Edit

And then change the code that sets the value of the editor field for the newsletter message to get the template text and not the template text preprocessed.

$fieldset->addField('text','editor', array(
    'name'      => 'text',
    'label'     => Mage::helper('newsletter')->__('Message'),
    'state'     => 'html',
    'required'  => true,
    'value'     => $queue->getTemplate()->getTemplateText(),
    'style'     => 'width:98%; height: 600px;',
    'config'    => $wysiwygConfig
));