Sending email campaigns

Send blast campaigns to your mailing lists immediately, or schedule them to send at a future time.

After you've created your draft, it's time to send your email campaign to your subscribers. This guide has tips to help set you up for success.

This guide focuses on "blast" emails, which are individual campaigns that you send to mailing lists. To send triggered emails when someone signs up for your list or purchases a product, visit Sending automated campaigns.

The number of blast campaigns you can send per month depends on your Email Campaigns plan.

Tip: Register for our Engage Your Audience with Email Campaigns webinar where we’ll walk you through how to use Email Campaigns, Squarespace’s built-in email marketing tool, to grow and engage your audience. You’ll learn how to build mailing lists, create and send campaigns, and measure campaign performance with our analytics tools. 

Before you begin

To send a campaign, ensure you've created the following:

• At least one mailing list
• Sender details
• An email draft

We also recommend the following:

• Verify your email.
• If you're using a custom email (recommended), verify its domain.
• Review our best practices and tips for avoiding spam filters.
• Add a physical address to your website.

Keep in mind:

• Campaigns won't send if you're over your monthly amount of campaigns.
• Campaigns won't send if the mailing list has more subscribers than your plan's monthly send limit.
• The device you're using sets the time zone for scheduled campaigns. For example, if your computer is set to EST, your email campaign's scheduled send date and time will also follow EST.
• Depending on where they enter their email address, new subscribers may need to confirm their mailing list subscriptions before they can receive email campaigns.
• It's not possible to resend a campaign to a specific subscriber or subscribers on the mailing list.

Step 1 - Add your email information

To add the required email information to send your campaign:

1. In the Email Campaigns dashboard, click Drafts, click your draft, click ..., then click Edit.
2. Click Email in the top-right corner.
3. Add text to the Subject and Email Preview Text fields to entice your subscribers to open your campaign. See our tips for help.
4. Click Unique Recipients to connect one or more mailing lists to send to, or send to all your subscribers. If one email address is on multiple mailing lists you send to, they'll only receive one email. You can also select from customers, donors, members of your member areas, and segments or tags from your Profiles panel as recipients. After selecting recipients, click Back.
5. Click Sender Details to connect a set of sender details, which sets the email and name that display in the From: area of your campaign. Subscribers won't see the other recipients on the mailing list.
6. Click Legal Address to add a valid physical postal address to the footer. If this is your first campaign, the address from your site's Business Information settings displays by default, or you can add an address manually. If you aren't sure which address to use, visit our tips.

Here's how some of that information might display in the email campaign your subscribers receive:

Step 2 - Send a test email

This step is optional, but we recommend it. To send a test of your campaign to your personal email address, click Send Test at the bottom of the editor. To send it to more than one person, separate email addresses with commas. Keep in mind, test emails won't send on trial sites.

Review the test version in your Inbox. If you don't see it, check your spam folder.

Here are some things to check each time:

• Click all the links, including buttons, to ensure they open correctly. Keep in mind, links in test emails expire after 24 hours.
• Review all the text for typos and phrasing.
• Ensure the images look good. Keep in mind that some older email clients may display or align images differently. If you see this happen, but the images look correct in Email Campaigns, try viewing the test email on a different email client.
• Ensure the Unsubscribe link is visible.
• Open your campaign on a computer and a smartphone to see how it looks on different devices.

If you find anything you want to change, update the draft.

Tip: We deactivate Unsubscribe links in test emails so they don't affect your unsubscribe analytics. To see what happens when subscribers unsubscribe, visit Email campaign unsubscribes.

Step 3 - Send or schedule your campaign

Send your campaign immediately

To send your blast campaign immediately:

1. In the side panel, click Schedule.
2. Ensure the Send Immediately toggle is switched on.
3. Click Back, then scroll down and click Send to Recipients.
4. You'll see a notification that your campaign is being sent.

Schedule your campaign to send later

To schedule your blast campaign to send at a later time:

1. In the side panel, click Schedule.
2. Switch the Send Immediately toggle off.
3. Choose a date and time.
4. Click Back, then scroll down and click Schedule Campaign, then click Schedule to confirm. If you don't click this, the campaign will remain a draft even if you chose a date and time for it to send.
5. You'll see a notification confirming when your campaign will be sent.

Keep in mind:

• Scheduled campaigns appear in the Scheduled section of your Email Campaigns dashboard. If your campaign doesn't appear there, ensure you click Schedule Campaign after choosing a date and time.
• To change the scheduled time before it sends, edit the campaign and click Schedule in the Email tab.
• To unschedule a campaign, switch the Send Immediately toggle on. The campaign saves as a draft until you send or reschedule it.

Campaign "In Review" notification

If you see an In Review notification when you send your campaign, we're reviewing your campaign as a standard safety check.

To keep all our users safe, we periodically review campaigns to ensure they aren't being used to send malicious content. This is an automatically triggered step, and it doesn't mean you've done anything wrong.

Usually, the review process takes a few minutes. Occasionally, it can take a few hours.
During the review, the email appears in your Sent folder with a Pending Review flag. After we approve your email, it will automatically send to your list, and the Pending Review flag will disappear.

Campaigns say they're sent "via squarespace-mail.com"

This happens with free emails (like Gmail or Outlook) or unverified custom emails. To remove this, use a custom email and verify its domain. For detailed steps, visit Avoiding spam filters.

Campaigns delivered to the "promotions" tab

Some email clients send marketing emails to a separate folder for promotions. If customers want your email campaigns to arrive in their primary inbox, they should add your sender details email address to their contacts.

If you have an online store and you use a different email address for your store's From email address, your customers should add that email address to their contacts too.

Track your progress

Now that your campaign is officially out in the world, go to your Email Campaigns dashboard to see an overview of how many subscribers have received, opened, and clicked a link within it. You can also click Sent to see more details and compare its success to past campaigns.

To learn more, visit Tracking email campaign analytics.

Tip: Create more exclusive content for your subscribers by creating gated content with Member Areas.

Can I undo or recall a sent campaign?

No. It's not possible to undo or recall a campaign after it's sent. We recommend sending test emails to yourself to ensure your campaigns look and function the way you want.

My campaign didn't send

If your campaign didn't send, or if there's a delay in sending, contact us. We don't recommend attempting to re-send the campaign, as this can result in a duplicate.