Should You Use Squarespace Campaigns for Your Author Newsletter?
• This article contains affiliate links •
Every time I write about the topic of your author newsletter, I like to remind you that your readers want something more from you than just a stream of emails.
True success from email marketing comes from sending valuable content that your readers actually welcome.
And the best author email newsletter tool for you makes it easy for you to do that.
Even though I don’t recommend that you invite your website visitors to “sign up for your newsletter” — because I know you can create a much more compelling reason than that! — there’s no getting away from it: behind the scenes, most of us do use the term “newsletter” for the regular emails that we send to people who have opted to hear from us.
On the other hand, inside Squarespace, “Campaigns” is the name for the email marketing module. It’s only available if you’re using Squarespace for your website. But if you are, it’s a strong contender for your choice of author newsletter tool.
Just getting started with Squarespace? Save 10% off your first subscription of a website by using the code PAULINE10
A little terminology:
Mailing list: your list of subscribers who have given permission for you to send author news by email.
You can have different mailing lists inside your Squarespace account, for example, if you write in two genres, or offer both books and writing services. When you send a message to more than one list, Squarespace takes care of removing duplicates for you.
Campaign: the general name for a mass email message, typically either a newsletter or automated message. Every time you send something, that’s one campaign.
Good to know: even though you’re already paying Squarespace for your website subscription, there is an additional fee to use Campaigns. (See this page, near the bottom, for current pricing.)
Be aware, too, that Squarespace is continually rolling out new features, so some of the drawbacks I’ve identified may be addressed in future. Although I suggest that you don’t hold your breath :)
Related reading: I have a popular article on things to consider when choosing your author email platform, here.
Pros of using Squarespace Campaigns for your author newsletter
Here are some of the reasons Squarespace could be an excellent choice for your author newsletter needs:
Ease of use, especially if you are already comfortable with your Squarespace website
You don’t need to learn another tool, and everything you need is within a few clicks of where you’re managing your website pages.
After you’ve published a blog post, it takes just a few clicks to send it out to your email list.
Or, if you’re writing a newsletter later, it’s super easy to add blocks that reference past blog posts (or even products, if you have a Squarespace store).
One thing to note, here: the initial set up is not quite as intuitive as I’d like. Your best bet is to create a mailing list before you try to link a sign up form to it, so that your new subscribers get stored in a place that makes it easy for you to send messages to them later.
Features: you can do many of the things you’d expect from other newsletter tools (although not all of them without workarounds, see below in the Cons section):
Deliver a free resource automatically, to new subscribers
Create different opt-in forms for different freebies or projects (or, for example, to invite readers to join your launch team)
Sell digital downloads and products
Send emails triggered by a product purchase, for example more information, or an upsell (if your products are sold from within your Squarespace website)
Send multiple emails in a welcome sequence — although this one needs a workaround, see below
You can draft a newsletter, and schedule it to send later
Early in 2024, new email deliverability rules were introduced by Google and Yahoo, that caused tech headaches for many authors and solopreneurs. Read more about these rules here. Happily, if your domain name is also managed by Squarespace, they’ll take care of the necessary settings for you.
If you have a Virtual Assistant or Marketing Manager helping you, you can grant them access to your Squarespace Campaigns area, without having to share your password. They’ll log in with their own credentials.
Free support is available! As a Squarespace customer, there is a team who will answer your questions at no extra charge, 24 x 7.
Cons of using Squarespace Campaigns for your author newsletter
And here are some places where I feel Squarespace falls short.
Many of these will only bother you if you’re trying to build sophisticated email marketing capabilities, but as an author, volume is important and small percentages can make a big difference to your income and your long-term career. You’ll definitely get better results if you only send emails that are appropriate for each reader, and Squarespace makes this pretty hard.
To send a welcome sequence (instead of a single welcome email), you actually need to set up several different automations, with a different time delay for each one. This is super clunky, compared to other tools!
There are a few pesky irritations that suggest Campaigns is not a priority in the Squarespace ecosystem. For example:
When you add a newsletter sign up form to your website, you can choose between not asking for your subscriber’s name at all, or requiring both first and last name. Like thousands of other email marketers, I like to ask for first name only, and not require it.
The user interface for designing and building your newsletter is more like the older “classic” editor, not the newer fluid engine editor that you’re likely using, when working inside your website pages.
Squarespace doesn’t offer any help in getting your email newsletter discovered. In the last year or two, there has been a surge of interest in platforms like Substack, where there is an in-built community and more likelihood that you’ll get found by new subscribers. ConvertKit is now offering discovery help too, with recommendations from other ConvertKit users.
Cost. I don’t suggest you make decisions about your business tools based on cost alone, but for many authors, it’s a consideration.
Sending email newsletters from Squarespace is not included in the cost of your website subscription.
You can get started for (currently) $60 per year, but to send automated emails like a welcome sequence, you’ll need to be on the plan that currently costs $120 per year. So you’re definitely paying a convenience fee, for ease of use.
By contrast, if you’re just getting started, the free plan on MailerLite is impressive and lets you send automated messages.
Analytics are decent at a campaign level, but you can’t compare easily across different campaigns, or analyze what’s truly driving success in your author business. For example:
To find out which of your recent subject lines got the best open rates, you’d need to go into each campaign individually and compile the results yourself.
If you have many different lead magnets or promotional landing pages, measuring how many subscribers came from each will be hard.
If you create several automated emails to serve as a welcome sequence, you’ll need to go into each of them to see how your sequence is performing and where you might be losing people.
It’s hard, inside Squarespace Campaigns, to send targeted emails based on your subscribers’ interests or behavior. Segmenting can only be done by using the concept of a different mailing list. You can have up to 20 mailing lists, which is plenty to get started with your author email marketing, but falls far short of the “tagging” capabilities of other platforms. Sooner or later, as your author business grows, scenarios like these will arise:
You might want to send a different update or request to people who have downloaded a free book, versus those who haven’t.
If someone has attended a book launch party in the past, you might want them to get early notification, when you’re recruiting beta readers for your next book.
I don’t send my “regular” newsletter to new subscribers who are still getting my welcome sequence.
Related to this, there’s no way to set automated triggers to move subscribers between lists, based on behavior or something they tell you or something they do. One of the things I loved most about ConvertKit was the handy feature to tag subscribers, based on them clicking a preference link in an email.
And, if email marketing is a big revenue driver for you, you’re going to want to try things like A/B testing of your subject lines and content. In Squarespace, there’s no easy way to do this: their help page suggests a workaround of splitting your list in two, and creating each version manually! Ugh.
Similarly, I can find no way in Squarespace Campaigns to identify and remove inactive subscribers. Other email marketing tools provide lots of help and education around this, for two main reasons:
The deliverability of your emails is impacted by the percentage of recipients that open them. Big email providers like Google will notice if your open rates drop, and they’ll be more likely to send your messages to promotions or even spam folders.
You’ll end up paying for subscribers who never open your messages.
Integrating other tools with Squarespace Campaigns might be nightmare. Like many other providers in the online marketing space, Squarespace is making concerted efforts to offer all of the tools that you need, like courses, memberships, digital products, and so on. As a result, they don’t make it easy for you to integrate their email tool with other tech.
By contrast, I use MemberVault for my online courses and it happily communicates with my email list in MailerLite, so I can personalize who gets which messages.
If you use something like BookFunnel to deliver a free book and gather reader email addresses, you’ll likely need to go through a clunky export — import process, or get your head around an intermediary tool like Zapier, to get those subscribers into Squarespace.
And the information I couldn’t find:
While you can’t currently monetize your Squarespace newsletter, you can monetize your blog (or one of your blogs, since you’re allowed multiple blogs on a Squarespace site). This has some interesting applications and you can read more about different pricing options here, but I’m not clear on how easy it is to send a (segmented) newsletter only to the people who are allowed to see your premium blog content,
Other email providers have entire teams devoted to deliverability, that is, the likelihood that your messages will actually reach inboxes. For Squarespace Campaigns, I can’t find any data on their performance here.
Most other email tools let you create a simple website page, or landing page, to gather email signups before your own website goes live. (Note: don’t ever put a URL you don’t “own” inside a printed book - make sure you send readers to real estate that you control.) In Squarespace, my research indicates you’ll need to pay for your website subscription, in order to have a landing page that you can use.
Conclusion: should you use Squarespace Campaigns for your author newsletter?
Use Squarespace if:
You have a Squarespace website, and you don’t want to have to learn another tool
You (plan to) have a Squarespace blog, and you want to send blog posts to your email list easily
You’re willing to pay a bit more for these conveniences
Your email marketing (email newsletter) needs are simple: most of the time, you’ll be sending the same message to everyone on your list, regardless of their characteristics
If not, there are other email newsletter tools available that will serve you better in the long term.
Related reading: How to choose your author newsletter platform
•
Would you like me to design and build your Squarespace website?
Prefer not to spend your time and energy navigating decisions like this? As a professional specializing in strategic websites for authors and solopreneurs with books, I’m an expert in the features you need for a website and email tool that connect with your audience and get business results. If you’d like niche expertise, top quality design, and your technical headaches solved, consider hiring me.
Learn more, and then schedule a complimentary consultation.
Other resources for your author newsletter
Just getting started with Squarespace? Save 10% off your first subscription of a website by using the code PAULINE10