Your email list

Your email list (called Contacts before) is everyone who asked to hear from you: people who signed up on your site, and customers who ticked Email me news and offers when they sent a form, booked or ordered. You can add people yourself, import a spreadsheet, download the list, and send it to Mailchimp. It's included in every plan.

To see everyone you do business with, whether or not they joined this list, see Customers. To send emails to your list from the editor, see Send a newsletter.

How people join

• The Newsletter signup section. Set its Email service to This site. When someone signs up, we email them a link to confirm. They join your list when they tap it, so mistyped addresses and signups made in someone else's name never get your emails. See Add a newsletter signup.
• The "Email me news and offers" box. It's off until you turn it on, in three places:
  • a Form section: open the section and turn on Ask if they want your news
  • Bookings › Settings: Ask if they want your news, for booking and event sign-up forms
  • Store, under Settings: Ask if they want your news, for the cart. Customers join once they've paid.
  
  People who tick the box join right away: they gave you their email to do business with you. Nobody joins without ticking it.

Signups on your Spanish pages get the confirmation email and pages in Spanish.

See your list

Click Email list in the left menu of the editor. Each person shows their email, name, tags and how they joined. Use the search box to find someone by name, email or tag, and the menus above the list to show one status or one tag.

What each status means:

• Subscribed: gets your newsletters.
• Not confirmed: signed up on your site but hasn't tapped the link in our email yet. They get nothing until they do.
• Unsubscribed: asked to stop. They can sign up again on your site.
• Bounced: emails to this address don't arrive.
• Marked as spam: marked one of your newsletters as spam, so they get no more.

Tags

Tags let you send a newsletter to part of your list, like "Workshops" or "Wholesale". Tick the people you want, type the tag in the bar that appears above the list, and click Add tag (or Take tag off). You can also change one person's tags and name by clicking them.

Add people yourself

Click Add a person, type their email (and name and tags if you like), and tick They agreed to get emails from my business. Only add people who asked for your emails, for example on a paper signup sheet at your counter. Emailing people who didn't ask is against the law in many places, and it gets emails marked as spam.

Import a spreadsheet

You can bring in a list from another service, a point-of-sale system or a spreadsheet.

1. Save it as a CSV file. Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets can all do this (File › Download or Export › CSV). Mailchimp, Square and Google Contacts exports work as they are.
2. In Email list, click Import (CSV), and choose the file.
3. We find the columns by their headings: an email column, and a name (or first and last name) and tags if there are any. You'll see how many people we found, the first few of them, and how many rows had no usable email address.
4. Add tags for everyone in the file if you like, for example "From old list".
5. Tick These people agreed to get emails from my business, then click Import (it says how many people).

Up to 2,000 people can be imported at a time. People already on your list get any missing name and the new tags. People who unsubscribed, bounced or marked your emails as spam are skipped and never added back.

The first newsletter to people you've never sent to before goes to at most 500 of them at first. See the first send to a new list.

Remove people

Tick the people and click Remove from list, or click one person and click Remove from list there. They're taken off your list. People who unsubscribed, bounced or marked your emails as spam are remembered without their name, so an import can't add them back by mistake.

Download your list

Click Download (CSV). You get a spreadsheet of the people shown (everyone, unless you've searched or picked a status or tag), with their status, tags, how and when they joined, and what they agreed to. The first column is called Email Address, which Mailchimp, Kit and Constant Contact recognize when you import it there.

Send to Mailchimp

If you send your emails with Mailchimp, you can copy your list there in one step.

1. In Mailchimp, open your profile, then Extras › API keys, and click Create A Key. Copy it.
2. In Email list, scroll down to Send to Mailchimp, paste the key and click Connect Mailchimp. We keep your key locked away on our servers; it never shows on your site.
3. Choose the Mailchimp audience to send to.
4. Click Send … people to your audience. Subscribed people are added (or updated) there, and people who unsubscribed, bounced or marked your emails as spam are marked unsubscribed there too, so Mailchimp never emails them. People who haven't confirmed yet stay here.

Send again whenever your list has grown. To stop, click Disconnect, and delete the key in Mailchimp too.

What it costs

The email list is included in your plan, with up to 10,000 people. Sending newsletters from the editor comes with the Business plan or the Newsletter sending add-on ($4 a month). See The Business plan.

Related: Send a newsletter, Add a newsletter signup, Forms and your inbox.