Email Campaigns

An email campaign is a newsletter you write once and send to an audience that belongs to one of your pages. The screen is called Email Marketing, it sits under Marketing in the left sidebar, and everything on it, campaigns, contacts and sender settings, is scoped to the single page you opened it from.

Not every page type has it

Events have no email screen at all. An event borrows the email set-up of one of its promoters, which is why every presale invitation is sent from a promoter page rather than from the event. If you are looking for the mail that announces an event, start from the promoter that organises it, or follow the two-step flow in Presales.

The three page types that do have the screen share exactly the same one. Only the subtitle under the title changes, naming your promoter, artist or venue page.

Open the screen

1. Open Manage, then click the promoter, artist or venue page you want to send from.
2. Click Email Marketing in the left sidebar, under Marketing.

Three tabs run across the top: Campaigns, Contacts and Settings.

Without permission to read email on that page you get a single red line, You don't have permission to access this page., and nothing else. See Manage permissions.

Turn email on for a page

Email is off until somebody switches it on, once per page.

1. Open Email Marketing. On a page that has never used it, the whole screen is one card headed Set up Email Marketing, with the explanation Enable email marketing to start sending newsletters and campaigns directly to your audience.
2. Click Enable Email Marketing. The button reads Setting up… while it works.
3. An Email marketing enabled confirmation appears and the three tabs replace the card.

Only someone allowed to send email can do this. Everyone else sees the button greyed out with the line Admin access required to enable this feature. underneath. If it fails you get Setup failed with the reason attached.

On a page still on the free plan, an Upgrade button sits at the top right of the screen with the tooltip Upgrade your plan to unlock premium features. The screen itself is not locked: campaigns work on every plan. What the plan changes is how many contacts the page may hold and how much mail it may send.

Write a campaign

1. On the Campaigns tab, click New campaign. A full-screen editor opens, titled New campaign.
2. Type the subject in the field next to the title. It is required, and it does double duty: it is the subject line recipients see and the name the campaign carries in the list afterwards.
3. Pick the audience from the dropdown beside it. See Choose who receives it below.
4. Edit the message in the Code pane on the left. It opens on a ready-made design carrying your page name, a headline, a button and a footer line, so you are editing rather than starting from nothing.
5. Watch the preview on the right. It recompiles a moment after you stop typing, and the two small icons above it switch between a desktop and a phone-width rendering. Links are deliberately dead in the preview.
6. Click Save. A Campaign created confirmation appears with Your campaign is ready to edit and send., and the campaign joins the list as a Draft.

Close leaves the editor without saving. Help opens the reference for the markup the editor speaks.

The editor speaks MJML

The Code pane holds MJML, an email markup language, or plain HTML if you prefer. MJML exists because email clients disagree about everything; you write tags like <mj-section> and <mj-text> and it produces the table-based HTML that actually survives Outlook. The starter template is a working example of all of it.

The Errors tab

Beside Code sits Errors, carrying a count badge whenever the editor has something to say. It switches itself on as soon as an issue appears.

Two kinds of issue land there, and they do not behave the same way:

• Errors are red, and they block the send. Save stays disabled until the last one is gone.
• Warnings are amber and block nothing. The common one is a typographic character written as a named entity, such as a long dash or an ellipsis written with &. Those are rewritten automatically before the mail goes out, and the warning is there to tell you the substitution happened.

Each issue that knows its line number carries a small clickable line marker; clicking it jumps the cursor there. Below the list is a link to the MJML documentation.

One rule catches people out often enough to state on its own: a bare & inside a link is an error, not a typo you can ignore. Web addresses that join parameters with & have to be written & in the editor.

Choose who receives it

The audience picker is the small dropdown in the editor's top bar, immediately to the right of the subject field. It carries no visible label, and hovering it shows the tooltip Audience. It is drawn only while the campaign is still editable, which in practice means drafts: a scheduled, sending or sent campaign opens read-only and the picker is not rendered at all.

Two kinds of entry appear in it, and nothing else:

• Subscribers, always first and always preselected. It means everyone the page holds.
• One entry per other audience that already exists on the page, shown under the name that audience was stored with. A CRM segment appears under the segment's own name. A batch of presale codes appears under the name you typed when you distributed it, or Presale followed by the event's number if you left that blank. An audience the platform builds for you, such as the people who signed themselves up to a presale, was never given a friendly name and appears as a short code: presalereg followed by the event's number.

Your testers are not in this dropdown and cannot be put there. The screen strips the test audience out of the options before drawing them, so a campaign can never be aimed at it. Testing is a separate action, covered in Send a test to yourself first.

A list and a segment are the same thing here. Whether you built it by filter or it was created for you, it shows up as one more entry in the same dropdown and behaves identically.

Two entry points preselect the audience for you and open the editor already filled in:

• Send as campaign on a CRM segment, on a promoter page. The segment is refreshed first, then you land here with it selected and a notice reading Audience: followed by its name.
• The two presale buttons on an event, described in Presales. The one that only announces the presale leaves the picker on Subscribers, since a public sign-up link is meant for everybody. The one that distributes codes selects the audience holding the addresses you sent them to, and confirms how many people will get a unique single-use link.

Both prefill a subject line written in English, whatever language your admin is set to. Treat it as a placeholder.

People who have unsubscribed are excluded from every campaign, on every audience, with no setting to change that.

Read the picker before saving a duplicate. Duplicating copies the subject and the content but not the audience: the dropdown keeps whatever was selected last, which may be neither the original's audience nor Subscribers.

Send a test to yourself first

1. Open the three-dots menu on a draft and click Send Test Email.
2. Type an address in Recipient email.
3. Click Send Test Email. Test email sent to your address confirms it.

The dialog states the important part itself: This won't publish the campaign — it will remain in draft. A test costs nothing and touches no audience.

Only drafts can be tested. Once a campaign is scheduled, sending or sent, the option disappears from its menu.

Where the test list fits

The Contacts tab can hold a short bench of testers, kept apart from your subscribers. In Import Contacts, the row labelled Add to test list for preview offers two targets, Subscribers and Test list. Choose Test list and a counter appears on the right of that row, reading how many testers you hold out of five. Paste more than fits and the preview keeps only what there is room for and says how many it ignored. Import into a full list and it is refused with Test list is full and the instruction Delete a tester before adding new ones.

That bench surfaces in exactly one place afterwards: the audience dropdown above the contact table, where it is listed as Test Recipients. Choose it there to read or edit who is on it.

It is kept out of everywhere a campaign is aimed. It is filtered out of the campaign audience picker and out of the list picker in the CRM segment builder, so nothing addressed to an audience can reach your testers by accident. It is also not what Send Test Email reads: that dialog asks for one address every time. The test list is a place to keep the people you preview with, not a shortcut for sending to them.

Send it now

1. Open the draft's three-dots menu and click Send now.
2. The Send Campaign? dialog opens. Its opening line always reads This campaign will be sent to all subscribers immediately., whichever audience you picked. Read the Recipients: line under it instead: that one names the audience the send will really use.
3. Click Send Now.

Campaign sent appears with Your campaign is now being delivered., and the campaign's status becomes Sending… and then Sent.

The Recipients: line is a label rather than a copy of what you chose. Subscribers is spelled out, a CRM segment collapses to the single word Segment, and a presale audience shows its short code. When that is not enough to recognise the audience, reopen the draft and read the picker in the editor's top bar.

The dialog says This action cannot be undone. and means it literally. There is no recall, no pause window and no way to stop a message once it has left. The only safety net is the test send above.

Schedule it instead

1. Open the draft's three-dots menu and click Schedule.
2. Fill in Date and Time. They default to tomorrow at midday.
3. Check Timezone. It is a free-text field, prefilled from your browser, with the hint Auto-detected from your browser underneath.
4. Click Schedule.

The campaign turns Scheduled and its card reads Scheduled for with the date and time you chose.

Change your mind

1. Open the scheduled campaign's three-dots menu and click Cancel schedule.
2. Confirm in Cancel scheduled send?, which explains that The campaign will return to draft status and can be rescheduled or sent manually.

Schedule cancelled confirms it and the campaign is a draft again.

This is also how you edit a scheduled campaign. A campaign stops being editable the moment it leaves draft: its menu entry changes from Edit to View and the editor opens read-only, with no Save. Cancel the schedule, edit, then schedule it again.

While it is going out

A campaign in flight shows Sending… and gains a pause button beside its three-dots menu. Pausing confirms with Campaign paused, and the resume button that replaces it confirms with Campaign resumed. A campaign in the middle of sending cannot be deleted; the entry stays greyed until it finishes.

Read the results

A finished campaign shows three figures on its card: Sent, Open rate and Click rate. The two rates are percentages of what was sent, and they read — while there is nothing to divide by. Large counts are abbreviated.

One status deserves special attention. Not delivered is a red badge on a campaign that finished having reached nobody, with the line Delivered to no one — open the campaign, check it, and resend. underneath. It is deliberately not shown as a success. The usual causes are an audience that was empty by the time the send fired, or content the mail builder refused. Open it, look at the Errors tab, fix what it names and send again.

Work through the campaign list

Campaigns are cards, newest first, and the list pages once it grows.

• Search campaigns... filters on the campaign name across the whole list, not just the page you are looking at.
• The dropdown beside it filters by status: All statuses, Draft only, Scheduled only, Sending only, Paused only, Sent only.
• Select all on this page ticks everything visible. A count then appears as selected, next to a delete button and Cancel.

Each card's three-dots menu holds, in order: Edit or View, Duplicate, then on drafts only Send now, Schedule and Send Test Email, then on scheduled campaigns Cancel schedule, and finally Delete.

Duplicate is the fastest way to reuse a design. It copies the subject and the content into a brand-new draft and marks the subject as a copy; nothing is created until you press Save.

Manage contacts

The Contacts tab is the audience the campaigns draw on.

At the top, a Subscribers card counts what the page holds against the ceiling its plan allows, with a bar that turns amber and then red as you approach it, and the number still remaining underneath. Reach the ceiling and the import card disappears entirely, replaced by a warning telling you to upgrade.

Import contacts

1. In Import Contacts, choose Paste or CSV File.
2. Paste takes one entry per line, either an address on its own or the four comma-separated fields the screen lists as email, firstName, lastName, swayUsername. CSV File takes the same columns in a file, and the note confirms that (all columns except email are optional).
3. Click Preview. A table shows what was understood, column by column, under the headings Email, First Name, Last Name and Sway Username. Lines starting with # and a header row are skipped silently, and anything unparseable is listed as a parse warning above the buttons.
4. Check the table, then confirm the import with the button that counts the rows it is about to add.

The result appears as a summary of how many were imported, skipped and rejected, with a reason per rejected address. A malformed address inside a comma-separated row is not caught in the preview; it is refused on import and shows up in that list, so read the summary rather than assuming the preview was the last word.

Large pastes are uploaded in batches on your behalf, so a long list does not have to be split by hand.

Find and fix a contact

The table lists Email, Sway, Name, Added and Actions, and pages through your contacts. The dropdown above it narrows the table to one audience, and Refresh reloads from the first page.

The search box searches the page you are on, not the whole list. With a large audience, page to roughly where the contact should be before searching, or use the audience dropdown to narrow it first. An empty result reads No contacts match your search. and does not mean the address is absent.

The pencil opens Edit Contact, holding Email, First Name, Last Name and Sway Username. The bin asks Delete contact? and warns that This contact will be permanently removed from your list. Ticking several rows reveals Delete selected, with Clear to drop the selection.

Sender settings and your own domain

The Settings tab governs what recipients see in the From line.

Sender name is fixed to the page's own name and cannot be edited. Its tooltip explains why: This name appears in the "From" field of your emails.

Sender email is locked until you have verified a domain of your own. Until then the label carries Requires a custom domain and the hint Must use your verified custom domain, and mail leaves on a shared Sway sending address. That address is shown below with an Active badge and the note You are currently using the shared Sway sending domain. Add a custom domain for better deliverability.

Add a custom sending domain

1. Click Add custom domain.
2. Type the domain. The hint recommends what the placeholder shows: Use a subdomain like mail.yourdomain.com for best deliverability.
3. Click Add domain. A Domain created notice appears with Add the DNS records below to verify your domain.
4. Copy every row under DNS Records into your DNS provider.
5. Come back and click Verify DNS records. Verification started — keep this page open. confirms it, and the screen re-checks by itself while you stay on the tab.

The badge beside the domain reads Pending verification until it passes, then Verified. Once verified, Sender email unlocks; the address you set must end in that domain or saving is refused. Save settings confirms with Settings saved.

Remove takes the domain away, after a Remove custom domain? confirmation warning that Your sender email will fall back to the default Sway domain. This cannot be undone.

Who can do what

Someone who can view but not send sees the whole screen, reads every campaign and every contact, and finds every button disabled. Grant the sending right on the page's Permissions screen, described in Manage permissions.

Where the rest of the audience tools live