Email people who aren't customers yet

Your project can email the customers who have signed in to your site. It can also email three groups of people who haven’t:

• people on a list you upload, such as a guest list, a team roster, or a mailing list you already have
• people who join a waitlist on your site and confirm their email address
• friends of your customers, when a signed-in customer sends them something from your site, such as an invitation, a gift, or a postcard, and for a while afterwards, when your site follows up with them

Everything your project sends these people is marketing email. Each message has an unsubscribe link, and daily limits apply.

Upload a list

You need to be an owner or admin of the project’s organization.

1. Open your project in Spark and go to Project settings → Email.
2. Under Lists, choose Upload list.
3. Choose a list, or choose New list and give it a name.
4. Paste the people, one per line: an email address, then a comma and a name if you have one. To use a CSV or text file instead, choose Choose a file.
5. Check the box to confirm that these people know your business and expect to hear from it, and that you didn’t buy or scrape the list.
6. Choose Upload.

Spark checks every address before adding anyone. It leaves out duplicates, people already on the list, and anyone who unsubscribed from your project’s email. If more than 1 in 10 addresses can’t receive email, for example because of a typo in the domain, Spark doesn’t accept the upload. Remove those addresses and upload the list again.

Spark then emails a link to the address you sign in with. Open it and choose Add to list. The link works for 3 days, and nobody is added until you use it.

See and change your lists

Lists shows each list and how many people are on it. Choose View to see everyone on a list, and Remove next to a person to take them off. Delete removes the list and everyone on it.

Your site and internal tools can read each list’s name and how many people it has, but not who’s on it. To see the people, open Project settings → Email.

Add a waitlist to your site

Ask Spark for a waitlist or sign-up form, for example: “Add a waitlist form to the home page.”

When someone enters their email address, Spark emails them from your project and asks them to confirm. They join the list only after they open that email and choose Confirm. Anyone who didn’t sign up can ignore it, and nothing happens. The link works for 7 days.

The form gives every visitor the same answer. Someone who is already on the list, or who unsubscribed from your email, sees the same message and gets no new email. An address gets at most one confirmation email from your project in 24 hours.

In your site’s preview, the form doesn’t send email or add anyone to a list. Publish your site to try it.

Let customers email their friends

Your site can let a signed-in customer send an email to people they choose: an invitation, a referral, a gift, or a digital postcard. Ask Spark to add it, for example: “Let customers send a birthday card to a friend.”

Spark adds two lines to every email a customer sends this way. The first, at the top, names the customer and your project, such as “Sam sent you this with Party Planner.” The second, at the bottom, says the person got the email because the customer entered their address, next to the unsubscribe link.

A customer can email up to 10 different addresses a day through your project, or 25 when your project sends from your own domain. One address can get up to 3 of these emails a day from your project, counting every customer who sends one.

Email the people a customer invited

Your site can email these people again later, without them signing in. A game can tell a player it’s their turn, and a party page can remind a guest the day before. Ask Spark for it, for example: “Email each player when it’s their turn.”

These emails come from your project. At the bottom, they say which customer entered the person’s address, next to the unsubscribe link.

Your site can do this for 30 days after a customer last emailed the person, or 90 days when your project sends from your own domain. Another email from a customer starts the 30 or 90 days again. It stops when the customer who entered the address no longer has an account with your project. After that, a customer has to invite the person again.

One person can get up to 10 of these emails a day from your project, or 25 when your project sends from your own domain.

Send email to a list

Your project sends to a list through a feature Spark builds. Ask for one, for example: “Add an internal tool where I can write an update and send it to my waitlist.” A scheduled email works too, such as a weekly newsletter to a list.

Someone who unsubscribes from an email sent to a list can stop email from that list only, or all marketing email from your project.

Limits

This email doesn’t count toward your project’s daily limit on email to customers. All email your projects send, to customers and to everyone on this page, counts toward your organization’s daily limit on email recipients across projects, so sending a big list leaves less room that day for receipts and other email to customers. Daily limits reset at midnight UTC.

Spark refuses a send that would go over the day’s limit. A list with more people than one day allows goes out in parts, over more than one day.

Waitlist confirmation emails have a daily limit of their own. See Limits and supported features for these limits on each plan, and the rest.

If this email is paused

Spark pauses your project’s email to people who aren’t customers when too many of those emails bounce or are reported as spam. That stops email to your lists, waitlist confirmations, email your customers send to friends, and your site’s emails to the people they invited. Email to your customers keeps sending.

Spark emails your project’s owners and admins about the pause, and it appears in Project settings → Health. The pause stays until Spark support lifts it. Before you contact support, check where each list came from and that everyone on it agreed to hear from you.