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.
Accessing Email Settings
Navigate to Communications in your admin dashboard. This section expands into three areas:
Emails
Headers & Footers
Subscription Types
Each section controls a different part of the email experience and is outlined below.
Emails
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. Alerts are sent when you are getting close to the email limit.
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, 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.
Creating an Email
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:
Sent to allows you to select up to 10 segments to receive the email
Don’t send to allows you to exclude specific segments
Scheduling and Finalizing Recipients
When you save and schedule an email, you’ll be prompted to finalize the segment list. You can choose to:
Automatically update the list as members are added to segments, or
Lock the list so it never changes
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.
Editing and Managing Emails
In the top-right corner of the email editor, the Actions dropdown allows you to preview the email, send a test email, or duplicate/copy it for reuse. 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.
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.
Merge Values
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.
The ability to use more values is coming soon.
Member Data | Merge Value | Community or Event |
First Name | {{first_name}} | Community and Event |
Event Name | {{event.name}} | Event |
Event URL | {{event.url}} | Event |
Event Start Time | {{event.startTime}} | Event |
Attendee Ticket Type | {{attendee.ticket.name}} | Event |
Headers & Footers
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
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.
Email 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 Emails, and Workflow emails.
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, and workflow emails. Previously scheduled sends will not be delivered during the suspension period.
Pre-bounced email addresses are shown under the Skipped tab instead of Bounced, with the skip reason listed as Blocked by blacklist.
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.
Customized Emails for Events
The ability to create custom event emails is available upon request. The email builder is the same, but you access this under an event’s email settings. Some settings are unable to be customized (such as email sender) as it is being pulled from the event settings.
If you chose to schedule an email, it will send to the current receipt list at the set sending date/time. This way you can pre-plan scheduled emails and ensure everyone who is registered will received them (even if they weren’t registered when the email was created and scheduled).
Event custom emails also contribute to your 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 the suspension is lifted. Scheduled event emails may also show Failed or Partially Failed statuses if they are not fully delivered.
Currently only dashboard admins and event admins can customize event emails.
Email Limits
Each community has a customized email limit that controls how many emails can be sent out per month. Each member/recipient can receive a maximum of 15 marketing emails per calendar month
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]!