Squarespace Email Marketing Review: Pros, Cons, How To, And More

Squarespace officially rolled out an email campaign feature in 2019 - promising a unique way for store owners to grow and communicate with the audience while staying true to the brand’s distinctive design - which has been a trademark for Squarespace users.

Until then, Squarespace users have had to use a third-party email marketing platform (like ConvertKit or Mailchimp) and sync it to their website either by a piece of code or a form block.

Now, with the introduction of the latest feature, Email Campaigns, Squarespace is clearly heading in the direction of becoming an all-in-one eCommerce and marketing platform: one that allows users to manage content, build a list, and create email communications all in one place.

The email marketing feature from Squarespace offers beautifully designed email campaigns that users can easily create, edit, and automate. The website builder, along with its theme templates, is helping store owners create a beautiful online presence.

This, of course, will be beneficial for many Squarespace users. But the question is: Is Squarespace email marketing proper for you? Can Squarespace Email Campaigns really replace popular email marketing products like Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, or AVADA Email Marketing?

Before you ditch your email marketing platform for Squarespace email marketing, consider reading this review first.

What is Squarespace email marketing?

First, let’s start with the introduction of Squarespace as an eCommerce platform.

Squarespace is a website building and hosting platform which is based in New York City, United States. It offers software as a service for website building and allows users to use beautiful pre-built website templates with drag-and-drop elements to create and customize web pages for an online store.

Squarespace provides 100+ flexible templates that are fully adaptable to mobile devices. While the platform has been continuously improved in recent updates, getting used to using Squarespace can take a while due to many usages. Pricing of Squarespace starts at $12/month.

Squarespace Email Campaigns is one of the many features that the platform offers. The email marketing feature can be integrated with the Squarespace website and store. The company promises the feature to help send on-brand emails that look beautiful, just as the brand’s website.

The main features of the Squarespace email marketing tool are advertised as:

• Do email marketing more efficiently - Update your website and send campaigns with the same interface. You can pull content like your brand logo and blog posts directly into an email campaign.

• Enhance the brand - Craft email marketing campaigns that are a seamless representation of your site and brand.

• Track more analytics - Integrated analytics give users a more holistic understanding of the site visitors and subscribers.

We will take a closer look at these features to see if they are as good as advertised.

Squarespace email marketing features

Squarespace Email Campaigns is a fantastic option for beginners because it allows users to do all of the essential things when it comes to email marketing. At the same time, the tool keeps things simple for Squarespace users because it’s built into the platform, and they don’t need to worry about integrating another email marketing software.

Let’s go over the essential features to see what the app offers:

Feature 1: Email newsletters

With the Squarespace email marketing tool, you can send out regular newsletters to your subscriber list.

To get to the email campaign section in Squarespace Email Campaigns, click marketing => email campaigns.

If you want to send out a regular newsletter email, you just need to click on create and then choose ‘Blast’, which is what they’re calling the action in Squarespace.

In true Squarespace fashion, the email marketing tool has so many gorgeous professionally designed email templates that you can choose from and then modify them to match your brand.

The email editor works very similar to Squarespace, which is fantastic for users since they don’t have to get used to a new layout and using style. Once you get comfortable with the platform of Squarespace, you can also get very comfortable with the email marketing tool.

Additionally, you have advanced email marketing tools like contact list management and personalization to optimize your email campaigns. Especially with personalization, you can include the subscribers’ names in the email’s subject line or your campaign’s body, adding a personal touch to every email you send.

Feature 2: Schedule newsletters

With Squarespace Email Campaigns, you can also schedule email newsletters to go out on selected timing. If you want to schedule your newsletter campaigns, click on ‘Schedule campaign.’

If you want to send your newsletters immediately, click on ‘Send to mailing lists.’

Feature 3: Automated emails

Now, you can send automated emails as well with the tool. With Squarespace Email Campaigns, you can do this either after your subscribers have signed up for your newsletter or lead magnet. You can also set up an email to send to customers after they have completed a purchase.

To set this up, click on Create => Automation.

You’ll see that you have two options at this stage.

• Subscriber Activity - this type of email lets you welcome new subscribers or follow up after leads of a lead magnet.

• Commerce - this type of email lets you send thank you emails to customers after a purchase to upsell, cross-sell, or get reviews.

Feature 4: Sign up Forms

How do you get your website visitors to actually sign up to join your list and receive your emails? All you need to do is create an insert point and then insert a beautiful sign-up form or the newsletter block. This form is where people type in their name and email address to sign up for your list.

To connect this sign-up form to your automation, simply click on the form section inside and connect it to your correct mailing list.

What about sending emails after purchase? You just need to go back into the automation section, click Add commerce and this time choose the email for ‘Thank you, customers.’

You can then customize the email for your brand and connect it to the correct products to cross-sell or upsell. You can then have an email sequence that will go out after a customer purchases a product.

Feature 5: Integrated analytics

Last but not least, you can use Squarespace Email Campaigns to measure, analyze, and refine your campaigns with native email analytics. You can analyze all the most important metrics, from open rate to conversion rate and click-through rate.

You can also see the real-time performance of your email campaigns, which means checking how they are doing while they are still live to make in-time adjustments.

The Squarespace email marketing tool’s analytic feature is integrated with Squarespace’s website analytics, so users can easily see organic vs. marketing traffic and how email marketing is helping the overall marketing strategy.

Feature 6: Customer support

Squarespace helps users with an award-winning customer support team that is available 24/7. You can contact Squarespace support via phone or email, and you can visit the Squarespace Help Center to find the answers to your questions.

Also, there are a number of free Squarespace webinars where you can learn the basics and refine your skills using the platform. Email marketing is just one tool of Squarespace, so you’d be better knowing how to run and combine all of the platform’s features to achieve the best results.

Squarespace email marketing pros and cons

Now, knowing all the best features of Squarespace email marketing, let’s get to see the pros and cons of using the tool:

Pros

Let’s start with the reasons why you may want to use Squarespace Email Campaigns:

• The unique Squarespace style is a good reason. All the email newsletter templates are very ‘Squarespacey’ — attractive in their nature and provide brand consistency between your website template and your newsletters. Squarespace’s email campaign templates feature 30+ beautifully designed layouts for all popular types of emails.

• You can import content from the Squarespace eCommerce site straight into the email templates.

• You can use the tool to manage your email communications and your online store in one place, which is very convenient.

• The tool is extremely easy to use (as you can expect from Squarespace). I’d say the Squarespace email tool has one of the best email editor interfaces that I’ve used (and I would love to use some elements for AVADA Email Marketing as well). Squarespace’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor is user-friendly without a huge learning curve involved to create and customize your online email campaigns.

• You can have an infinite number of subscribers on Squarespace Email Campaigns! This makes the tool a much more reasonably-priced option for businesses with large lists. If you host a list with 100k subscribers, it can cost a lot of money on other email marketing platforms - maybe hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month to have that number of subscribers on some competing solutions. But if you use Squarespace Email Campaigns, the most you will have to pay is only $68 per month.

• Squarespace integrates neatly with the email newsletter sign-up forms, making email capture much easier (you don’t have to mess around with embedding an HTML form onto your Squarespace website or setting up software to get Squarespace working with a third-party email marketing tool). Similarly, the email marketing tool is tightly integrated with other Squarespace eCommerce features, making it easy for users to send post-sales emails to customers.

Going deeper into the gorgeous email templates that Squarespace provides, the layouts are suitable for many types of emails, which are for:

• Announcing a new project

• Sharing a blog post

• Promoting a product

• Announcing a sale

• Asking for support

• Saying thank you

• Writing a newsletter

• Sending an invitation

Cons

And here are some reasons you might want to avoid using the Squarespace email marketing tool:

• The number of email templates available is a little limited — at the time of writing, there are only around 50 Squarespace email templates (by contrast, Mailchimp offers around 100; and Aweber 700). That said, the templates that Squarespace offers are very contemporary in design and eye-pleasing, which is not easy to find on any email marketing platform.

• The send limits may not be suitable for some users, particularly businesses with larger lists. The maximum number of emails per month that you can send with Squarespace is only 250,000. If you hit that limit, you are prevented from sending any more emails until the start of the next billing period. So, for example, if you want to send 3 emails per month to a list with 100k subscribers, you won’t be able to with Squarespace Email Campaigns.

• The automation features are limited if you compare it to a dedicated email marketing software. Essentially, Squarespace Email Campaigns is suitable for sending simple automated follow-up emails based on the visitors’ actions of subscribing to a list or purchasing a product. On the other hand, professional email marketing solutions like AVADA Email Marketing allow you to make use of a much more sophisticated range of triggers and automation.

• The segmentation feature is extremely limited. You can create different lists which associate with various activities of the audience, but the only details you can capture from subscribers are name and email address. This means that you can’t segment your subscribers’ data in a, particularly more meaningful way.

• By using it, you’re putting all your power in one place. Your website and email list will be united in one account with the Squarespace email marketing tool. This can be a serious issue if you accidentally lose access to it (particularly if you also register your domain with Squarespace. If anything happens to your Squarespace account, you can lose all the key assets of your online business). If you do use Squarespace Email Campaigns, make sure you backup your email list periodically.

• There is no A/B split testing. This can seem like a small disadvantage, but if you can A/B test your emails with subject lines, content, design, and more, it would greatly impact the number of emails getting opened.

Squarespace email marketing pricing

Squarespace Email Campaigns is a paid tool. Although, you are free to set up a Squarespace account and trial the tool with up to three email marketing campaigns or try out the features. After this, you need to pay a monthly fee based on the type of package that scales depending on the number of campaigns and emails you wish to send per month.

Depending on how you structure your email marketing strategy, the plan can impact the end cost of the Squarespace email marketing tool. A good advantage is that all plans provide unlimited subscribers so that you can have a large email list.

Here is a breakdown of the Squarespace Email Campaigns pricing plans:

• Starter - $5 per month - 3 campaigns and 500 emails per month, no email automation

• Core - $10 per month - 5 campaigns and 5,000 emails per month, with email automation

• Pro - $24 per month - 20 campaigns and 50,000 emails per month, with all features

• Max - $48 per month - unlimited campaigns and 250,000 emails per month, with all features

The pricing plans above are annual; if you decide to pay monthly, the cost would be up by about 29%. For example, the cost per month for the Max plan would be $68 per month.

How to start using Squarespace email marketing tool?

Before you begin using Squarespace Email Campaigns, there is something you need to do first:

First, you need to have an active Squarespace website subscription to start sending email campaigns. If you haven’t bought a site yet, visit the Squarespace website to make one (even just with the free trial). Second, to avoid spam filters, I would recommend your website to have a custom email address and domain name (for example, [email protected]).

After that, to open the Email Campaigns dashboard, click on Marketing in the Home Menu, then select ‘Email Campaigns.’ If you are using the Squarespace mobile app, tap Settings, then select ‘Email Campaigns.’

All accounts have a free Email Campaigns trial, which means you can send up to three email blast campaigns during the trial period. If you want to upgrade your Squarespace plan, click Upgrade Now in the Campaign Dashboard. You can choose the Monthly or Annually billing cycle and the pricing plan that fits your budget.

Before you can start sending email campaigns with Squarespace, you need to have at least one email list and a sender profile. The email list is the collection of email addresses that you collected. A sender profile contains the email address and the name that your subscribers would see when they receive an email from you.

Then, you are ready to start sending blasts or automated email campaigns.

• Blast campaigns are single email campaigns that you send to your one or more mailing lists.

• Automated campaigns are sent automatically in response to the action of a visitor. For example, you can automatically set up an email campaign when a visitor subscribes to your mailing list or purchases a product on your site.

Squarespace email marketing’s competitors/alternatives

If you want some other options rather than Squarespace email marketing tool, here are somes names to check out:

AVADA Email Marketing

Avada Email Marketing is an ideal and convenient solution for businesses to transform and develop long-term email connections with a wide range of email marketing features. The AVADA app is designed to optimize automated email and SMS campaigns, creating a seamless communication with subscribers and customers.

AVADA Email marketing with an user-friendly and intuitive interface is easy to use even for non tech-savvy users. The app offers ready-to-run and well-fit email templates that you can easily edit as well as create an automation workflow. Furthermore, your contact list can be managed conveniently with automatic data from your Shopify or online store.

Another thing that makes AVADA Email Marketing a good email marketing choice is its affordability. Paid plans start at $9/month and it is free to start using. At $9/month, you will have up to 1,000 contacts, send unlimited emails, and have full features inside. You can always upgrade to higher plans as you have more contacts in your list.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an email marketing platform that provides many services for emails, SMS, advertisements, landing pages, and more. With Sendinblue, users can simplify email marketing and send bulk email campaigns every day. With the recent addition of SMS features, it is much easier for users to target leads via different channels.

The only downside of the Sendinblue is the lack of email templates that restrict the ability of email marketers to send creative emails. That said, Sendinblue is still fantastic to design easy workflows, automate email sequences, and adopt automation factors such as unique actions taken by users or responses with previous emails, and so on.

SendInBlue has a free plan without any time limits and you can send up to 300 e-mails a day and you have an unlimited number of contacts. The Lite plan is $27 a month and the price goes up based on the number of emails and features.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a versatile email marketing app for eCommerce businesses that want to have all their data on the cloud. It is an easy-to-use solution that allows users to personalize, refine, and track their email marketing campaigns. The platform also includes tools on data so users can unlock insights for a better approach with emails.

Klaviyo’s pricing depends on the number of email, SMS, and subscribers. The costs can be adjusted as your business grows and there are many pricing options for Klaviyo users to choose from.

For a more in-depth review of Klaviyo, you can read our Klaviyo Review 2021: Features, Pricing, and More!

Is Squarespace email marketing right for you?

Yes, if…

• You value an easy-to-use and nicely designed interface.

• You have a simple email marketing strategy.

• Brand consistency with great design is important to you.

No, if…

• You have in-depth funnels and more complicated marketing strategies

• Organizing and understanding your subscribers is vital to you

Either way, Squarespace allows users to test out their tools and new features for free! Feel free to take it for a test drive and see if it is the right fit for you.

But if you want to try a more robust email marketing software, AVADA Email Marketing is at your service!