Helpful recommendations for building an audience and sending successful campaigns.

Squarespace Email Campaigns is designed to work with all different features on your website to keep your audience engaged. As you're preparing to send your first campaign, go through the list below to ensure you've set up everything to help your campaigns succeed.

For more in-depth explanations, click any of the linked guides in the checklist. If you want hands-on help, you can hire a vetted Squarespace Expert.

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 sending campaigns

To prepare for sending campaigns, set up the following requirements in your Email Campaigns dashboard:

• Create sender details - Your sender details are the name and email address that display in the "From:" line of campaigns. It's not possible to send a campaign without sender details.
• Build a mailing list - Create a mailing list, then add subscribers manually, collect email addresses with a newsletter block, or if you already have a mailing list, import contacts with a .csv file. Remember never to use email addresses without permission of the recipients.
• Add a legal name and address - All campaigns need to include a legal address in the footer where you can receive physical mail. If you don't want to share your home address, we recommend setting up a PO box.

Avoid spam filters

Take these steps before sending a campaign to help ensure your campaigns aren't marked as spam:

• Use a custom email address - Email providers are more likely to filter your campaign as spam if sent from a free service like Gmail or Yahoo. Use a custom email address and recommend your recipients add it to their contacts.
• Verify your third-party domain - If your custom email address uses a Squarespace domain connected to your site, the domain is automatically verified. If your custom email uses a domain registered with a third-party, like GoDaddy or Hover, ensure you verify it. Verifying your domain helps ensure your campaigns don't get marked as spam.

Build and send your first campaign

Create your draft, add your content, and prepare to send your first blast campaign. Follow our recommendations below to learn the basics of creating campaigns:

• Create your draft - In the Email Campaigns dashboard, click Create, then click Blast and select a template. Blast campaigns are sent to specific mailing lists, either immediately or at a scheduled time.
• Build your content - Add and edit the content sections that make up the bulk of your campaign, as well as the campaign header and footer.
• Style your campaign - Use built-in styling options to match your campaign's fonts and colors to your brand's aesthetic.
• Encourage recipients to open with your subject line and preview text - The subject line and preview text is what displays with your email in recipients' inboxes. Crafting a compelling subject line and interesting preview text can increase audience engagement.
• Send the campaign - When you're ready to send, select your recipients, send a test email to make sure the content looks the way you want, then send or schedule your campaign.
• Track campaign performance - After sending your campaign to at least one mailing list, use email campaign analytics to measure how your campaign performs. You can track delivery rates, open rates, clicks, unsubscribes, and more.

Tip: All Squarespace sites automatically include a free trial of Email Campaigns, which includes three blast campaigns. Email Campaigns have different limits on the number of campaigns and sends per month. After trying out Email Campaigns, subscribe to the plan that meets your needs.

Keep your audience engaged

As you send more campaigns, use more Email Campaigns features to:

• Set up automated campaigns - Create automated campaigns to welcome new subscribers or offer discounts to customers. These campaigns send automatically when visitors to your site perform certain actions, like subscribing to your mailing list or buying a product. This engages new subscribers and customers without you having to send a campaign to the whole mailing list. Automations aren't available in trials or on the Starter plan.
• Personalize your campaigns - Use mail merge tags to to plug in personalized content, like the subscriber's name, to your campaigns. This personal touch helps you connect with subscribers.
• Create campaigns from your blog posts - When you publish a blog post, convert it to a campaign to send your content to subscribers immediately. Campaigns created from blog posts get your content in front of readers while encouraging them to visit your site for more.
• Include discounts for your online store - If you have an online store, add a discount section to your campaign to create a discount for your store directly in Email Campaigns. This is a great way to reward subscribers and discourage unsubscribes.
• Track audience engagement - Use traffic sources analytics to check how much of your site traffic is coming from your campaigns. With this data, you can evaluate what campaigns are having the greatest impact and tailor future campaigns to maintain subscriber interest.

Expand your audience

Continue growing your audience by encouraging site visitors, customers, and clients to subscribe.

• Add sign-up forms to your site - Add a newsletter block to a contact page to collect subscribers, or if you want it to appear on every page, add it to your site's footer.
• Create more mailing lists - As your subscriber base grows, create more mailing lists for different segments of your audience.
• Collect subscribers with a promotional pop-up - Enable a promotional pop-up with a newsletter signup so that visitors to your site or a specific page can subscribe
• Collect subscribers at checkout - If you have an online store, set up newsletter signup at checkout to build customer mailing lists
• Collect subscribers at point-of-sale - Enable a mailing list signup so customers can subscribe whenever you make a sale in person
• Collect subscribers with Acuity Scheduling - Set up the Email Campaigns integration so Acuity clients can subscribe during booking
• Upgrade your Email Campaigns plan - If you find you need more monthly sends as your audience grows, change your Email Campaigns or website platform billing plan.

More help

Visit our Email Campaigns guides for more in-depth information and step-by-step instructions, or get more hands-on help to start sending your campaigns:

• Attend an expert-led Engage Your Audience with Email Campaigns webinar
• Get advice from the community in the Squarespace Forum
• Hire a vetted Squarespace Expert to set up Email Campaigns for you