Squarespace Email Campaigns Review: Is It a Good Choice?

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In today's post, I want to give you a brief overview of Squarespace Email Campaigns, the email marketing platform that is built natively into Squarespace and go over the features it has to offer.

Before I go on, keep in mind that this won’t be traditional tutorial that shows you how to set it all up. Rather, I want to look at what is available in terms of features and go over some pros and cons to help you decide if this is the right choice for you.

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Squarespace Email Campaigns: Templates and Features

When you log into your Squarespace website, you can access Squarespace Email Campaigns by clicking on Marketing > Email Campaigns.

Once you click on that, you will see that there is a checklist to start sending. This checklist basically walks you through the steps necessary to set up your email template, create your email list, and then add your sender details. The sender details refers to the email address you will be sending the emails from. This email address needs to be verified by Squarespace to ensure that you're not sending spam emails.

So let's take a look at the email templates that are available. Squarespace has several templates that you can choose from, each with their own different designs, and you can see more options by scrolling through the option on the sidebar.

You can choose email templates that are geared for promoting a product or a service, classes or events, announcing a sale, or simply sharing an update. You can also choose any of the templates that you have in drafts or any of the emails that you already sent; once you start sending with Squarespace email campaigns. Or templates that you've used in automations, there is also an option to start a blank campaign.

So if you want to build your template from scratch, you certainly can. Once you’ve chosen your template, you will see that there are two tabs over here. You have a Style and an Email tab. Style is where you can apply styles to your emails. What's really nice about this, is that you can easily incorporate your branding into your email templates. You can do this by clicking on the

Quickly Match Your Site option.

If you don’t want to use your site styles, this is where you can choose your colors and upload your logo as well as choose a font pack for your email campaigns. It’s worth mentioning that the font choices are limited here. You can choose your font pack but you can't specify the exact font you want to use. So for example, if you're using Open Sans for your body text, there is no way to choose it here. You just have to deal with whatever is already preselected here from Squarespace themselves.

Under the Email tab, this is where you would add your subject and your preview text (the first line that is visible in the inbox). You will be able to designate specific recipients, include your legal address, and schedule your emails to be sent immediately or at a certain date and time.

Another thing that's cool about Squarespace email templates is that you're not limited to just what you see here. You can add more blocks to it. And editing is pretty simple. If you've used Squarespace, then you'll be used to the editor. All you have to do is hover over the template, click the plus sign, and then you can add text, line, button, a product, image, spacer, blog, or a discount. So this is super cool and useful. If you have products on your website, you can add them directly to your email campaigns. Similarly, if you want to showcase the latest blog post, you can easily insert it using the blog section here.

Squarespace Email Campaigns: Automations And Lists

Once you're in the marketing dashboard, click on Create to start creating your campaigns. You have several options to choose from. First you have a regular blast campaign, which is something that you send on a regular basis. Typically some people refer to it as a newsletter.

Then you have an automation that allows you to welcome new subscribers, which happens when somebody signs up to your list or when somebody fills out a form. Or you can choose a customer activity to set up an automation when somebody makes a purchase from you. So if they buy your product, you can send them an email that says thank you for your purchase, or something similar.

Under subscriber activity, there are a few more options to choose from. You can reward your subscribers by sending them a discount, or another free gift when they sign up. Or you can simply check in with them after a certain period of time has passed.

And then we have customer activity. Again, you can send the set up an automation that recommends additional products. So for example, if you sell digital planners you can set up an automation that promotes your digital stickers to go with the planner or covers or something like that.

Or you can send them a discount that applies to their future purchases and encourages them to come back and make yet another purchase. Again, there aren’t a lot of triggers here to choose from. But if you're looking for something simple to get started, this is more than enough.

And then finally let's talk about lists. You can create an unlimited number of lists of your email subscribers. And to create a list, all you really have to do is click on add, and then name your list, and then click save. This is useful because you can create different lists for different products that you have, or types of products that you have, or if you have different services.

Or if you have services and courses, you could create lists that basically target people who are interested in your services or those who are interested in your courses or something like that. So that is useful for organizing your subscribers.

And that essentially covers the features that you have available within Squarespace email campaigns. Now, let's talk about some pros and cons.

Squarespace Email Campaigns: Pros and Cons

One of the biggest pros of Squarespace Email Campaigns is that it's pretty simple and easy to use. If you have used Squarespace, you will be familiar with the editing interface. And speaking of that, it's super convenient that it's immediately integrated with your website, which means that you can easily use the built in Squarespace newsletter forms to connect them to your Squarespace lists.

Simply click on any newsletter form and then click the pencil icon to edit it. Once the editing interface pops up, under Storage, select Squarespace Campaigns and then add them to the list that you have set up.

Another pro of using Squarespace Email Campaigns is that it's pretty cheap to get started. It starts at $4 per month if you pay annually. If you pay monthly, then it's $7 per month. Again, this is pretty affordable. And if you're looking for something cheap and easy to get started with, Squarespace Email Campaigns is definitely a good choice.

However, now that we've covered the pros, I also have to mention the cons.

So as I've mentioned before, one of the cons is that you can't really customize the fonts within the campaign editor. However, that's not really a big con because you can't really do that in other email marketing platforms as well. One of the reasons behind this is because using too many fancy fonts is not supported in most email clients, such as Gmail or Outlook. Secondly, it also decreases your deliverability. If the email client can not render your font properly, chances are your email might end up in spam.

If you care about the looks of your email campaigns and want more customization options, I recommend you check out Flodesk. And I do have a tutorial on how to integrate Flodesk with Squarespace.

Another con that I need to mention is they have pretty hard send limits. On their most expensive plan, which is $68 per month, you can only send 250,000 emails per month. Now this may seem like a lot. But keep in mind that if you have a list of a hundred thousand subscribers, that means you can only send them two emails per month.

Now imagine you’re in the middle of a launch. Obviously two emails a month aren't going to do anything for your bottom line. So if you are looking for something more robust, that's not going to cap you in such a way, then Squarespace Email Campaigns might not be the best platform for you.

Also, if you are looking for more complex automations or automations that have more triggers or that you can really fine tune when you send a specific email to what subscribers, then Squarespace Email Campaigns is not for you.

But if you're just getting started and if you want something that's easy to use, that's you don't have to worry about logging into a different platform or, learning the ins and outs of more complex email marketing methods, then Squarespace Email Campaigns is definitely worth looking into.

The last con that I'm going to mention here, which relates more to advanced marketing methods, there is no way to AB test your campaigns.

Now, what does this mean? Usually once you start getting more advanced with your email marketing, you will want to test your emails, perform AB tests. This essentially allows you to send different versions of your email campaign to your subscribers.

For example, you can have two different subject lines to see which one performs better. That would be an example of an AB test. In that case, subject A, email with subject A is going to get sent to 30% of your list. And subject B is going to be sent to 30% of your list. And then once a certain amount of time has passed, your email platform is going to tell you, okay, subject A performed better. And it's going to send that particular version of the email to the rest of your email list.

Another example of an AB test would be sending at a different time, sending at 7:00 AM versus sending at 1:00 PM, for example. Again, and this allows you to get really, really good at your email marketing, because it allows you to send the right message at the right time to the right people.

So Squarespace doesn't have that and if you're looking for that, you're going to want to look into a different platform, such as MailerLite, ConvertKit, Constant Contact, Drip, or any of the more advanced email marketing platforms. However, also keep in mind that Squarespace is constantly adding new features to their products and services. So who knows, maybe one day we will see AB testing in the Squarespace Email Campaigns.

Final Thought: Is Squarespace Email Campaigns the Right Choice for You?

If you're just getting started, Squarespace Email Campaigns is a great way to get your feet wet with email marketing. If you want to keep things simple and avoid the hassle of having to log into different platforms to manage your website and your marketing, it’s definitely worth considering. But if you're looking for something more advanced, you might look into another platform. If you want more options to trigger your campaigns and fine tune exactly which subscribers get which email, then you’re going to want to look for a more robust platform.