Newsletters

Overview

A newsletter is an email you compose and send to a schedule's audience: its followers, its email subscribers, its ticket buyers, or a list of your own. Open Newsletters in the sidebar. Newsletters are on every plan, with a monthly allowance that counts recipients.

Newsletters are for a schedule's owner and its admins. A team member with view-only access does not see the schedule here. On eventschedule.com an admin also needs the schedule to be on the Enterprise plan, which is the plan that includes team access.

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The section is one page with four tabs, which become a dropdown on a phone. Create Newsletter sits at the end of the title row on every tab. If you manage more than one schedule, a schedule picker sits beside it: each schedule has its own newsletters, segments and templates, and changing schedule keeps you on the tab you are on.

The builder lays out your email as a stack of content blocks with a live preview beside it, and audience segments decide who receives it. A newsletter never sends itself: you compose it and choose when it goes. Two other kinds of mail do leave on their own, and neither spends your allowance: the automatic new-event digest to confirmed email subscribers, and the emails people on an event's interest list signed up for. Recipients & Segments sets out who is on which list.

Monthly Allowance

The allowance counts individual recipients, not newsletters. One newsletter sent to 100 followers uses 100 of the allowance, so on the Free plan a single send reaches at most 10 people.

Connect your own mail server in the Email Settings row of the schedule's Integrations tab and the cap is lifted for that schedule, because the messages leave through your provider and not ours.

While a schedule has a limit, a meter reads "5 of 100 newsletter emails sent this month" with what remains: beside the opening line of the Newsletters tab, and at the end of the title row on the Create and Edit pages. Test sends are excluded from the count. Sending is checked against the whole recipient list up front: if a send would push you past the limit it is refused outright, never delivered in part, so trim the segment or upgrade first.

Newsletter Builder

Click Create Newsletter to open the builder. The page has a link back to Newsletters above its title and the allowance meter at the end of the title row. When the schedule has saved templates, a Start from a template card comes first. The editing panel is split into three tabs, with a live preview pinned beside it on wide screens, and a bar along the foot of the page holds what saves and sends it.

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The Bar Along the Foot

The bar says when something has not been saved yet, and the browser asks before you leave the page with unsaved changes. If a save is refused (a subject left empty, say), the bar says why and the builder opens the tab to fix it.

Block Types

Build your newsletter by combining these content blocks. A new newsletter starts with your profile image and header banner (when your schedule has them), a heading, two text blocks, an events block and your social links, all of which you can remove.

Content Blocks

Layout & Utility Blocks

Auto-populated Blocks

Templates

The Style tab opens with the five built-in designs, under Design. Picking one rewrites the colour, font and button settings in a single click; your blocks, your footer text, your preview text and the layout chosen on the Events block are left alone, so you can try designs on a finished draft without losing work. If the colours you are replacing were your own, Undo beside the picker brings them back for a few seconds.

Every value stays editable afterwards, so a preset is a starting point rather than a lock-in. A preset is also a layout of its own, which stays whatever colours you give it: Modern is a rounded sheet with the title on a band of your accent colour, Classic a framed page with a nameplate and outlined buttons, Minimal a bare page of text links, Bold heavy type on a page that starts dark, and Compact a tight digest. System is the reader's own interface font (San Francisco, Segoe UI or Roboto, whichever their device has).

Saving Your Own Templates

Once a design works, keep it. A saved template stores the blocks, the preset and the style settings under a name of your choosing. There are two ways to make one:

• On the Style tab of the builder, click Save as Template and give it a name. The newsletter is saved first, so the template holds what is on screen
• On the Templates tab of the Newsletters section, click Create Template to build one from scratch in the same builder

The Templates tab shows each template as a card with the colours it was saved with, its name, its preset and the day it was made. Use starts a new newsletter from it, Edit reopens it in the builder, and Delete removes it after asking. Newsletters already made from a template are not affected. Whenever the schedule has at least one template, the Start from a template card at the top of the Create Newsletter page offers them too.

A template has no subject line and no recipients: those belong to the newsletter you create from it, so the template builder has no Settings tab.

Style Customization

Below the preset picker, the Style Settings panel controls the whole email. Each colour has both a swatch picker and a hex field.

The layout of the Events block is not a global setting: choose cards or list on the block itself.

Email Subscribers

Signing up asks for nothing but a name and an email address. A signed-out visitor can give your schedule an address directly, and those people become your email subscribers. They appear in their own list on the Followers tab, separately from account holders who pressed Follow while signed in. Confirming an address given through the sign-up form also sets up an account for them that follows your schedule, so they are listed once, under Email subscribers, with an Account badge. They can choose a password on the confirmation page itself, or any time afterwards from the Manage your account link in the footer of anything you send them. An address collected at checkout is already confirmed and does not create one, unless the buyer asked for an account on the ticket form itself.

Where People Sign Up

Automatic New-Event Emails

This is the promise made to people when they sign up, and it is kept for you. When you publish new events, your confirmed subscribers are sent a single short digest listing them.

• One digest covering every event in the batch, never one email per event, listing up to 25 of them, soonest first
• At most one every 72 hours per schedule, however often you publish
• Only public events. Drafts, internal, unlisted and password-protected events are never announced
• Only events your schedule created. An event another schedule created and lists on yours, such as a venue's show naming you as the act, is not included
• Only events still to come. Back-filling past dates sends nothing
• Every digest carries a one-click unsubscribe link

Turn it off per schedule with Email subscribers about new events, in the Notifications row of the schedule's Settings tab. Account followers are not included: they are reached by a newsletter you compose and send. On eventschedule.com the digest follows the same verification rule as newsletters, so a schedule with more than 50 confirmed subscribers needs its own email settings or a verified phone number, or those events are not announced.

Recipients & Segments

The Recipients panel on the Settings tab offers two choices. The first is everyone: your followers and your email subscribers together, which is where a new newsletter starts. The second, Chosen segments, lists your saved segments with a live recipient count beside each one; tick as many as you need and the lists are merged. With none ticked the newsletter still goes to everyone, and the panel says so. Under the choices, and under the subject on the Content tab, the To line names who the newsletter will reach and how many people that is.

Three Lists, Three Kinds of Mail

Three lists of people can hear from your schedule by email, and only two of them can be sent a newsletter:

The interest list belongs to one event and ends with it. See the interest list in Selling Tickets.

Segment Types

Who Actually Receives It

• Addresses are matched case-insensitively and de-duplicated, so someone in two segments is emailed once and counts once against your allowance
• Anyone who has unsubscribed from this schedule is removed, as is anyone who has turned off emails on their account
• Every recipient is resolved at send time, so a follower who joins after you draft the newsletter is still included

Managing Segments

Segments are reusable, so build them once and pick them from the Settings tab on every future newsletter. They live on the Segments tab of the Newsletters section, which the Manage Segments link in the builder also opens. The tab lists the schedule's segments first, each with its type and its current recipient count, and the Create Segment form sits under the list.

Creating a Segment

1. Open the Segments tab
2. Under Create Segment, enter a name
3. Choose the type: All Followers, Email subscribers, Ticket Buyers, Manual, Waitlist or Sub-schedule (listed once the schedule has a sub-schedule). A line under the choice says who that type reaches
4. Fill in whatever the type asks for next: an optional event filter for Ticket Buyers and Waitlist, the sub-schedule for Sub-schedule, or the address list for Manual (one per line, with an optional name after a comma)
5. Click Create Segment

Editing and Deleting

Edit, or the segment's name, opens the segment's own page, with a link back to Segments above its title. There you can rename it and see its type, its recipient count and the day it was made. A Ticket Buyers or Waitlist segment can be narrowed to another event, or to all events, and a Sub-schedule segment pointed at another sub-schedule; the type itself is chosen when the segment is created, so to change it, create a new segment. Renaming a segment leaves its event or sub-schedule as it was.

Under that, the page lists the people in the segment. On a manual segment you can add one by name and email under Add Subscriber, correct an entry in place, or delete it, and Import emails in bulk opens the Import Emails tab. Every other type is worked out afresh each time, so its list is read-only and shows the first 50 recipients.

Delete asks first. A segment that is still attached to a draft or scheduled newsletter cannot be deleted: detach it there first, then delete.

Importing Emails

Bring an existing mailing list across on the Import Emails tab of the Newsletters section. Up to 10,000 addresses can be imported at a time, on every plan.

Choosing a Segment

The first card, Select segment, decides where the contacts land: Create new segment with a name you provide, or Add to existing segment. Imports always go into a manual segment, so only manual segments appear in that dropdown, and the second choice is offered only once the schedule has one.

Import Methods

The second card has a tab for each way in. Paste Emails and Upload CSV both end by filling the Form Entry rows, where you can still correct them, and Confirm Import there is what saves.

Whichever method you use, the rows are validated first and any bad or duplicate address is reported by row number so you can fix it before confirming. Addresses already in the target segment are skipped, not duplicated. After a successful import you land on the Segments tab, with a message saying how many addresses were added.

Sending

Review and send in the bar saves the newsletter and opens a last look before anything goes out. It names the subject and the preview text, who the newsletter goes to and how many people that is (each address counted once, after unsubscribes), and how much of the month's allowance will be left. If the newsletter cannot go (the allowance is spent, nobody is in the chosen segments, or a verification is needed), it says so there, with a link to what fixes it, instead of after you press send.

Verification Above 50 Recipients

On eventschedule.com, a newsletter going to more than 50 recipients needs either your own email settings on the schedule or a verified phone number in your profile. Up to 50 recipients it goes out without either, and so does a test. Until you have one, a notice on the Newsletters tab and in the builder says so and links to both, and a larger send, whether now or scheduled, is refused. The automatic new-event digest follows the same rule. Selfhosted installs are not affected.

A/B Testing

An A/B test sends two versions of one newsletter, variant A and variant B, to a small sample of your audience, waits, and then sends the version that did better to everyone else. Open the A/B Testing panel on the Settings tab of a newsletter.

Setting Up a Test

1. Click Create A/B Test to open the form
2. Under Field to Test, choose what the two versions will differ in: Subject or Content Above Events
3. Set Sample Size (%), from 5 to 50 (20 by default), and Wait Hours, from 1 to 72 (4 by default)
4. Under Winner Criteria, choose Open Rate or Click Rate
5. Click Create A/B Test under the form. Your newsletter is saved and becomes variant A, and a copy is created as variant B, which opens for editing so you can make the change you want to test

From then on each variant's A/B Testing panel says which one it is, what is being tested, and links to the other variant. On the Newsletters tab variant B is listed under variant A, each with an A or B chip. A newsletter can belong to one test only, and a test always has exactly two variants. Variant B goes to the same people as variant A, so its Settings tab has no recipients of its own: the test splits one audience.

Sending the Test

On a variant the bar's last button is Send A/B test. It opens the same last look as any newsletter, and says what will happen: how many people get variant A and variant B now, and that after the wait the variant with the better open or click rate goes to everyone else. The sample is drawn at random from variant A's audience and split between the two. Either variant can send the test, and it goes out once.

A variant is never sent on its own, now or scheduled: that would mail the whole audience one version, and the other one again later. The whole audience counts against your allowance, as one newsletter would.

Comparing the Results

Once a variant is sending or sent, its statistics page carries an A/B Test Results card with both variants side by side: the subject, the sent count, the open rate and the click rate of each. The comparison needs enough recipients to mean anything: on a list of a few dozen people the difference between variants is usually noise.

Analytics

Once a newsletter is sending or sent, its subject on the Newsletters tab, and the Stats link at the end of its row, open its statistics page. The page is titled with the newsletter's subject, says when it was sent, and has a link back to Newsletters above the title. View email beside the title shows the newsletter as it reads, drawn again from what was saved, so its events are the ones that stand today; Clone starts a new draft from it. The list itself also carries sortable Recipients, Open Rate and Click Rate columns.

Opens are measured with a tracking pixel, so a recipient whose client blocks remote images counts as unopened even if they read the email. Treat the open rate as a floor and a trend rather than an exact number. Clicks are counted by routing each link through a redirect, which is also why link addresses in the delivered email look different from the ones you typed.

Managing Newsletters

The Newsletters tab lists every newsletter of the selected schedule, 20 to a page: its subject, its status with the time it was or will be sent, once it has gone out its recipients, open rate and click rate, and the day it was created. Click a column heading to sort by it; the newest are first until you do. The subject opens the builder for a draft or a scheduled newsletter and the statistics for one that is sending or sent, and the links at the end of the row are Edit or Stats, Clone and Delete. With more than one schedule, the picker at the end of the title row switches between them.

Cloning

Clone copies the blocks, style (preview text included, so rewrite it for the new send) and recipients into a fresh draft and opens it, leaving the original untouched. Statistics and any A/B test are not carried over. This is the quickest way to run a recurring digest.

Deleting

Delete asks first, then removes the newsletter from the list. A newsletter that is currently sending has no Delete link; wait for it to finish.

Unsubscribes

Every newsletter footer carries an unsubscribe link. One click opts that address out and it is excluded from every future send for that schedule, automatically and with no work from you. Unsubscribes are per schedule, so someone who leaves one of your schedules still hears from the others. Recipients can also turn off all email from their own account settings, which removes them everywhere.

See Also

• Sharing Your Schedule - Grow the follower list your newsletters go to
• Event Graphics - Generate shareable images for social media
• Creating Events - Add events that appear in your newsletters
• Analytics - Track how newsletters drive schedule views
• Selling Tickets - Set up ticketing, waitlists and buyer lists