Email Communications

Gradual's Email Sending feature allows you to build and send emails directly from your community. This feature lives within the Communications tab and includes tools for creating emails, managing global headers and footers, and defining subscription types.

This feature must be enabled by the Gradual team. Please contact [email protected] to discuss getting this enabled for your community.

Navigate to Communications in your admin dashboard. This section includes:

Each section controls a different part of the email experience and is outlined below.

Rate limiting & caps allows community admins to control how frequently individual recipients can receive customized emails. These limits help prevent members from receiving too many emails within a short period of time.

The Emails section is where you create, customize, and send emails to your community members.

From this page, you’ll see a list of any existing emails as well as numbers relating to your current email usage. You can also access Email Analytics to review sending performance, including sends, opens, bounces, spam complaints, and usage across your community emails. Usage is broken down by email type, including Community Customized Email, Event Customized Email, Club Customized Email, and Workflow emails. Club Customized Email includes club announcement emails and club-level customized event emails. Alerts are sent when you are getting close to the email limit.
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If your community’s bounce or spam complaint rate becomes too high over a rolling 30-day window, Gradual may show a warning and temporarily suspend custom email sending to protect deliverability. This applies to community custom emails, event custom emails, club custom emails, and workflow emails.

Emails on this page may also display Failed or Partially Failed statuses. These statuses can also be used in the status filter to help identify scheduled emails that were not fully delivered.

To create a new email, click Add Email in the top-right corner.

When creating a new email, you can either select a template or start from scratch. Additional templates will be added over time.

On the left-hand side of the editor, you can edit the email’s basic information, including the subject line, sender email, and sending time. Emails can be sent immediately or scheduled for a later date.

If email sending has been temporarily suspended for your community due to a high bounce or spam complaint rate, sending and scheduling actions will be blocked until the issue is resolved. Failed and Partially Failed emails are terminal states and cannot be retried automatically or manually. To resend, clone the email and update the recipient list as needed.

By default, sender email will be set to your community's default email. You can add more email domains to use for email sending by following this process.

You’ll also define who should and should not receive the email:

When you save and schedule an email, you’ll be prompted to finalize the segment list. You can choose to:

This ensures the email is sent to the intended audience. We only support sending to emails that are currently added as members in the community.

In the top-right corner of the email editor, the Actions dropdown allows you to preview the email, send a test email, duplicate/copy it for reuse, or view its Audit Log. Click the edit design button below it to edit the email body.

For emails with a Failed or Partially Failed status, available actions include viewing the email, sending a test email, and cloning it for reuse. Partially Failed emails can also be reviewed in View Statistics to see which recipients were delivered successfully and which were not. Send Now and Schedule to Send are not available for Failed or Partially Failed emails.
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Inside the editor, clicking any existing element opens its settings on the right-hand side. From there, you can adjust content, padding, button actions, and more.

On the left-hand side of the editor, you’ll find draggable elements such as text, buttons, and images, along with dividers and containers for layout. Containers allow you to place elements side by side instead of stacking everything vertically.

You can revert to the default template at any time, preview your email, or send a test email to see how it looks from the recipient’s perspective. Be sure to click Save to preserve any changes.

Each customized email has its own Audit Log, allowing you to review who made changes to the email, what was changed, and when the change was made.

To view it, open the email and select Actions > Audit Log. The Audit Log shows the Updated at, Updated by, and Activity for each change, with the most recent activity listed first. You can filter the log by date range or by the person who made the change.

The Audit Log tracks changes throughout the email lifecycle, including creating or copying an email; changes to the email name, recipients, sender details, subject, preview text, subscription type, and send time; saved edits to the email content; scheduling or canceling a scheduled send; and sending the email.

Recipient changes are also recorded. Depending on the type of customized email, this can include segments, CSV files, event attendee or ticket types, registration sources, and club spaces. When individual email addresses are added to or removed from a recipient list, the Audit Log records the number of addresses added or removed rather than storing those addresses in the entry.

If several fields are changed at the same time, each changed field is recorded as a separate entry. Fields that were not changed do not create an entry, and actions that fail are not recorded.

Audit Log entries remain available after the email has been sent and do not expire. Anyone who has access to the email in the dashboard can also view its Audit Log.

Merge values are placeholders that can be used in email builder text elements. Merge values will automatically insert contact-specific information when used in the email builder. They pull data like a recipient’s name from your member list to personalize each email. You can use merge values in community level emails and in event level emails. Learn more about customized event emails below.
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The ability to use more values is coming soon.

Headers and footers are applied globally to all emails sent from your community.

From the Headers & Footers section, click Edit next to either the header or footer to open the editor. The same drag-and-drop elements used in email creation are available here, including text, buttons, images, containers, and dividers.

Due to legal requirements, a physical address is required in your settings before you can design headers and footers. The address and unsubscribe link must remain in the footer and cannot be removed.

Subscription Types allow you to categorize the different kinds of emails you send, such as newsletters, product updates, promotions, or weekly updates.

Members can choose to subscribe to one or multiple email types. You can view how many people are unsubscribed from each type by clicking the number shown on the right.

These communication preferences are also reflected in each user’s profile settings, allowing members to manage subscriptions outside of individual emails. Once a subscription type has been used/sent, it cannot be removed from the list.

Members can also opt in when they sign up, if you show the Marketing email consent checkbox on your sign-up form. A member who accepts is subscribed to all of your current subscription types. See Community Code of Conduct and Privacy Policy.

Rate limiting & caps helps control how frequently an individual recipient can receive customized emails from your community.

Community admins can configure two sending limits:

These limits apply across customized emails sent from your community, including Community Customized Emails, Event Customized Emails, Club Customized Emails, and Workflow emails.

To update these limits, navigate to Communications > Rate limiting & caps in the admin dashboard and adjust the settings for your community.

The minimum time between emails helps prevent multiple messages from reaching the same recipient too close together. If another email is evaluated for that recipient before the configured time has passed, that email will be skipped for the recipient.

The monthly recipient cap limits the total number of applicable emails an individual recipient can receive during a calendar month. Once a recipient reaches the configured cap, additional emails will be skipped for that recipient.

Skipping a recipient does not prevent the email from being sent to other eligible recipients. You can review skipped recipients and the reason they were skipped from the email’s statistics.

After an email has been sent, performance metrics are available through the Actions dropdown. You can view statistics such as opens, clicks, bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes to understand how your email performed.

You can also review community-level Email Analytics from Dashboard > Communications > Emails > Email Analytics. This page defaults to a rolling 30-day view and includes summary cards for total sends, open rate, bounce rate, and spam complaint rate.

Email Analytics also includes overall plan usage for the current billing cycle, including used quota, remaining quota, scheduled sends, and a breakdown of usage across Community Customized Email, Event Customized Email, Club Customized Email, and Workflow emails. Club Customized Email includes club announcement emails and club-level customized event emails. Workflow emails count toward this same overall usage, and quota is checked when the workflow email action runs. If that action cannot send because the remaining quota has been reached, the send will be recorded as Failed.

If your community’s bounce rate or spam complaint rate reaches a warning or suspension threshold, a banner will appear in Email Analytics and in email-related areas of the dashboard. Selecting View Details will open Email Analytics, and may first show a notice explaining the current warning or suspension state.

When a community reaches the suspension threshold, custom email sending is temporarily disabled. This blocks new sends and scheduled sends for community emails, event emails, club emails, and workflow emails. Previously scheduled sends will not be delivered during the suspension period.

Recipients who were not sent an email are shown under the Skipped tab, along with the reason the email was skipped.

Skip reasons related to sending limits include:

For Reached spacing rule and Reached monthly cap, hover over the skip reason to see more information about the rule and your community’s current limit. When viewed from the main dashboard, Community Customized Email, Event Customized Email, and Workflow email statistics also include a link to Rate limiting & caps, where these limits can be managed.

Scheduled emails may also show Failed or Partially Failed statuses. A Failed email means that no emails were delivered. A Partially Failed email means that some emails were delivered successfully, but others were not. These states can occur if custom email sending is suspended or if there is a service outage from the email provider while the send is in progress.

For Partially Failed emails, delivered recipients remain visible in the Sent tab and undelivered recipients appear in the Failed tab on the Statistics page. Failed and Partially Failed emails are terminal states and are not automatically or manually retried.

Event emails are made up of two parts: System-generated Emails and Customized Emails.
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System-generated Emails are used for standard event actions and are sent automatically based on the event timeline. These emails support the core event experience and include the registration confirmation email, reminder email 1 day before the event, reminder email 30 minutes before the event, and post-event survey. For more information about these emails, please see Customizing Event System-generated Emails.

This section is focused on Customized Emails. Unlike System-generated Emails, which are used for standard automated event communications, Customized Emails are designed for planned event outreach that your team controls. You can use them for updates, reminders, preparation details, follow-up messages, or other event communications based on your goals for the event.

You can access Customized Emails in Event Setup > Emails > Customized Emails.

With Customized Emails, you choose who should receive the email and when it should be sent. Customized Emails can be sent to Event Invitees or Event Attendees, and you can narrow the audience further by attendee type, ticket type, and registration source. This makes it easier to send the right message to the right group at the right time.

Some email details, such as the sender, come from the event’s settings and are not edited within Customized Emails. If you schedule a Customized Email, it will send to the people who match your selected audience when the scheduled send time arrives. This allows you to plan event communications in advance while still sending to the correct recipients.

Event custom emails also count toward your community’s overall email usage and reporting in Email Analytics. If email sending is suspended for your community because of a high bounce or spam complaint rate, event custom email sending and scheduling will also be unavailable until sending is restored. Scheduled event emails may also show Failed or Partially Failed if they are not fully delivered.

Currently, only dashboard admins and event admins can customize event emails.

Each community has a customized email limit based on its plan. This overall limit includes Community Customized Emails, Event Customized Emails, Club Customized Emails, and Workflow emails.

In addition to the community-wide email limit, recipient-level sending limits help control how frequently an individual recipient can receive applicable emails. Community admins can configure the monthly recipient cap and minimum time between emails under Communications > Rate limiting & caps.

When a recipient reaches the monthly recipient cap, additional applicable emails will be skipped for that recipient until the limit resets. If an email is sent before the configured minimum time between emails has passed, that recipient will also be skipped. These skips appear in the email’s statistics as “Reached Monthly Cap” or “Reached Spacing Rule.”

The minimum time between emails applies to each recipient even when emails are sent to different segments. For example, if the same recipient is included in two different segments that receive applicable emails within the configured spacing period, the recipient will be skipped from the second email.

If you have questions about Gradual’s email sending tool, Email Analytics, scheduled email failures, or a warning or suspension related to bounce or spam complaint rates, reach out to [email protected].