Overview
Newsletter Campaigns
Write a newsletter campaign in HTML, preview it against real subscriber data, test it on yourself, then send or schedule it. Read what happened from eight numbers that each mean one thing.
The scary part of a newsletter is the send button.
Two thousand people, your firm’s name at the top, and no way to pull it back. So the composer is built to let you check: a preview drawn with real merge values, a test to your own inbox, and a final step that names the exact number of people about to receive it before anything leaves.
Write it
Subject, reply-to, and your HTML. Merge tags in single braces.
Check it
Preview it with the footer attached, then send yourself a test.
Send it
Pick who gets it, then send now or schedule. A first wave goes out ahead of the rest, so there’s still time to stop it.
The campaigns list
Section titled “The campaigns list”Open a newsletter and the Campaigns tab is where you land. One row per campaign, drafts and sent alike:
Name, Subject, its Status, the Size of the HTML, the Date it went or was last touched, and then Delivered, Opens and Clicks. Search across the top, Create Campaign on the right.
The icon at the start of each row says where it opens. A chart opens a sent campaign’s report. A pencil opens a draft in the editor.
The row menu on a sent campaign holds Duplicate and Send to new subscribers. On a draft it’s Duplicate and Delete, and a scheduled campaign adds Cancel scheduled send.
The form
Section titled “The form” Starting one
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From the newsletter’s Campaigns tab, click Create Campaign.
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Give it a Campaign name. Only your team sees it, so name it the way you’ll look for it in the list, like Q3 LP Update (final).
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Write the Subject line.
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Check the Sender card. Send from is your organization’s newsletter from address and comes from Team Settings.
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Set a Reply-to email if replies should go somewhere specific. Leave it blank and it falls back to your team’s newsletter sender identity.
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Add your Email body: paste HTML into the box, or Upload HTML file to bring in an
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Save draft.
Save the draft before anything else. Send test email and Next are both disabled until you do, and they say so when you hover them.
Where your HTML comes from
Gatsby doesn’t design the email. The body of a campaign is HTML you bring. Three common sources:
An email tool you already use. Mailchimp, HubSpot and most others let you export or copy the HTML of a finished design. Gatsby strips scripts, iframes and forms out of whatever you paste, so a template built for another platform is safe to bring across. An embedded signup form in it simply won’t render.
A designer. Ask for a responsive HTML email around 600px wide with the CSS inlined, and for the images to be hosted rather than embedded in the file.
Your own HTML. This works well for a text-led campaign. Use tables for layout, inline your CSS, and link images from somewhere public.
Whichever you use, send yourself a test before you send it to two thousand people.
Mail-merge tags
Tags use single braces, and they have to match exactly, braces and capitalization included. A tag Gatsby doesn’t recognize renders as an empty string rather than as an error, so a typo removes itself quietly. Expand Available mail-merge tags under the body box to see all eight with descriptions, and copy them from there rather than typing them.
| Tag | What it becomes |
|---|---|
{firstName} | The subscriber’s first name |
{lastName} | Their last name |
{nickname} | Their nickname |
{email} | Their email address |
{newsletterName} | The name of this newsletter |
{companyLegalName} | Your organization’s legal name, from Team Settings |
{companyAddress} | Your organization’s mailing address, from Team Settings |
{unsubscribeUrl} | That subscriber’s unsubscribe link |
The last three come from Team Settings → Newsletters. You don’t have to place them: Gatsby appends the compliance footer with all three in it whether or not they appear in your HTML. They’re available for the times you want the address or the unsubscribe link somewhere else in the email as well.
Note the syntax difference from the event email editor, which uses the #firstName form. Newsletters read single braces only.
Size limit
The counter under the body box reads something like 703 B of 85 KB (est. with link tracking).
Two things about that number. It measures the whole composed email, not just what you pasted, so the footer and Gatsby’s additions are already in it. And it’s an estimate, because turning links into tracked links makes them longer, and how much longer depends on how many you have.
The 85 KB ceiling exists because Gmail clips messages past roughly 102 KB, and a clipped message is one where the unsubscribe link at the bottom is behind a “view entire message” link. Staying under the cap keeps the whole email, footer included, in front of the reader.
If you’re bumping against it, the usual culprit is an image pasted in as a base64 data URI. Host images and link to them.
Link tracking
Track link clicks is on by default. It rewrites the links in your HTML so opens and clicks show up in this newsletter’s metrics.
Turn it off and the campaign sends with your links untouched. You lose the clicks number and the Top Links breakdown for that campaign.
What Gatsby adds to your HTML
Two things, on every campaign, whatever your HTML says:
The compliance footer, appended at the end. Your intro line, your social links, then your legal name, your physical address, and the unsubscribe link. The last three can’t be removed. See Newsletter Settings.
Sender identity, applied from Team Settings so a campaign author never sets it per send.
Checking it before it goes
Section titled “Checking it before it goes”Two checks, and they answer different questions. Use both on your first campaign.
Preview
Preview opens a drawer showing the email as a subscriber receives it: the from address, the subject, your content with merge tags filled in, and the footer attached underneath.
The To line reads Each subscriber, at their preferred address, which is worth knowing. Gatsby resolves each person’s address at the moment of sending rather than freezing it when they were added, so a subscriber who changed their email last week still gets this campaign.
This answers “does it look right and did my tags work?”
Send a test
Send test email, bottom left. Your own address is prefilled, and Add another recipient lets you copy a colleague.
The subject arrives prefixed with [TEST]. Test sends don’t touch your subscriber list and don’t count toward the campaign’s metrics.
This answers “does it render in a real inbox?” which the preview can’t tell you. Outlook and Gmail disagree about HTML email in ways no preview pane reproduces. On your first campaign, and after any template change, send the test.
Sending and scheduling
Section titled “Sending and scheduling”Next, at the bottom of a saved draft, opens a full-screen flow headed Send campaign to [newsletter]. It has two steps: who gets it, then when.
Step 1: Select subscribers
The step asks Who should receive this campaign? and offers two cards.
All subscribers sends to everyone subscribed to the newsletter, and shows how many people that is.
Leave out people who received other campaigns skips anyone who got the campaigns you pick. Click Choose campaigns and pick any sent or scheduled campaign in your organization, or a whole newsletter from the Newsletters tab. The dropdown at the start of the box flips it to Include, which sends only to people who received what you picked. The card shows its count once you’ve picked something.
That covers the sends people usually ask for: a note to everyone who got last quarter’s LP update, or this month’s campaign to everyone except the people who already got the preview.
Under the cards is the subscriber list itself. A This send column says Will receive for each person, or why they won’t. Three more ways to narrow it:
- The Deliverability filter keeps only one status, such as Healthy.
- Untick a row to leave that person out.
- Search a name or a domain, then Exclude all [number] matches to leave out everyone it found.
The bar above the list reads SENDING TO with the count, and every rule you’ve set shows as a chip beside it. Clear all at the right end drops them. Show switches the list between All, Included and Excluded, so you can check who’s being left out.
This step only narrows. Everyone in it is already subscribed, so reaching someone new means adding them as a subscriber first. See Newsletter Subscribers.
Step 2: Schedule or send now
A summary of Recipients, From, Subject and When, beside a preview of the email. Change next to Recipients takes you back to step 1.
If you haven’t sent yourself a test since your last edit, the step says You haven’t sent a test of this version., with Send test to me beside it. It doesn’t stop you sending, but it’s the cheapest check there is.
The recipient count comes with your rules in plain words, such as Excluding people who received “Q3 LP Update”. When subscribers are being skipped, a line says who and why: 14 subscribed contacts are excluded: 9 opted out · 5 with no valid email. If that gap is bigger than you expect, find out why before you send.
Choose Send now or Schedule, then confirm with Send now or Schedule send. If any images in the email couldn’t be checked or loaded, the step says so and the button reads Send anyway. Back returns to step 1.
When it’s done, a confirmation names how many subscribers it’s on its way to, or when it’s scheduled for.
Scheduling
Pick a date and time. The picker opens on the next full hour that’s at least an hour away, and the caption names the timezone it’s using: your team’s, or your device’s if your team hasn’t set one.
The list is built when it sends. Anyone who subscribes between now and the send time is included, and anyone who opts out in the meantime is skipped. A search you removed with Exclude all matches is the exception: Gatsby saves the people it matched when you scheduled, so someone who subscribes later and would match it still gets the email.
To call it off, use Cancel scheduled send in the campaign’s row menu, or on the banner at the top of the editor. The campaign goes back to a draft and nothing is sent.
Sending to new subscribers
Your list grew after a campaign went out, and the new people should get it too. In the sent campaign’s row menu, Send to new subscribers makes a copy and opens it straight in the send flow. The second card, Only people who haven’t received it, is already selected, and it skips everyone who got the original or any earlier send of it.
The copy is named [campaign name] (new subscribers). Close the flow without sending or scheduling and the copy is deleted.
If you stopped the original partway through, the same item reads Send to the rest, including new subscribers, and covers everyone it didn’t reach.
Switch to All subscribers instead and step 2 tells you how many people will get the email twice, and the button reads Send anyway.
Drafts
Save draft keeps everything and puts the campaign in the list with a Draft status. Reopen it and carry on.
The row menu on a draft has Duplicate and Delete. Deleting names the draft in the confirmation and can’t be undone.
Duplicate works on a sent campaign too, and gives you a fresh draft with the same subject and body when you want to edit before sending again.
The first wave
Section titled “The first wave” What goes out first
Gatsby sends to a tenth of your subscribers, up to 300 people, and holds everyone else for ten minutes.
The report says so while it’s happening: First 300 sent. The rest go out at 10:15 AM. The status stays Sending the whole time, and the tiles fill in from the first wave as the numbers come back.
The hold is ten minutes whether you’re sending to 500 people or 50,000, and nothing is throttled once it lifts. Audiences under 20 skip the hold entirely and go out in one go.
What the window is for
Two things, and the first one is you.
The mistake you only see in your own inbox. The link that goes nowhere, the merge tag that didn’t fire, last quarter’s numbers in this quarter’s letter. Preview and a test send catch most of it, and the rest you notice about forty seconds after you commit. Stop sending is how you keep it away from the rest of your list while you fix it.
Dead addresses, which nothing reveals until you mail them. Someone left the firm a year ago and their address still looks like every other address on your list. You find out it’s gone when their mail server refuses the message, and that refusal takes about a minute to reach Gatsby.
A send outruns a minute. With no hold, the entire list is mailed before the first refusal lands, and the first thing you learn about the list arrives too late to act on. The hold creates the one stretch of time where results exist and the rest of the send hasn’t happened yet, so a first wave that bounces hard pauses the campaign before it reaches anybody else.
Addresses that bounced on an earlier campaign are already held back, so a list you mail regularly carries little of this. The exposure is a list you’ve just imported. It’s worth the ten minutes because a bounce costs more than the message: mailbox providers score a sender on them, so today’s dead addresses make the next campaign likelier to land in spam.
If you don't want to wait
Send the rest now on the report sends the remainder straight away instead of at the time the hold names.
The button is dimmed for the first two minutes, and the caption says why: You can send the rest early once the first wave has had two minutes to report back. Those two minutes are what the first wave’s bounces need to arrive, so pressing it skips the waiting and keeps the check.
The confirmation spells out what you’re skipping. The first wave has already gone, and a high bounce rate still pauses the campaign whether or not you press it.
Stopping a send
Section titled “Stopping a send” Stop sending
Stop sending sits in the report header for as long as the status is Sending. Use it the moment you spot a broken link, the wrong merge tag, or last quarter’s numbers.
The confirmation tells you how far it got, because that part is settled: 1,284 of 12,000 sent already, those can’t be recalled. Email that has already left can’t be pulled back from anyone’s inbox, by Gatsby or by anyone else.
What stopping does is keep the rest from going. A handful of messages already handed to the mail servers will finish, and everyone still waiting stays waiting. The campaign moves to Paused and the report carries a Sending stopped banner naming who stopped it.
A second banner runs across the top of every Newsletters page for as long as the campaign stays paused, so nobody on your team misses it: Sending was stopped on “[campaign name]”, with who stopped it, how many it reached, and a Review campaign button that opens the report.
Then fix it, or don't send the rest
A paused campaign gives you two choices, both on the banner.
Resume sending picks the send back up from where it stopped. Nobody gets a second copy.
Don’t send the rest ends it for good. The remaining subscribers are marked Not sent, the campaign closes, and there’s no resuming afterward. The report keeps a closing banner with who stopped it, when, how many received it and how many didn’t.
Reach for resume when you’ve fixed the problem somewhere else, like a broken link on your own site. Reach for not sending the rest when the issue is in the email itself, since the email that already went is the email that would keep going.
When Gatsby pauses a send
Gatsby pauses a campaign by itself when too much of it is bouncing. The banner reads Paused automatically or Paused by Gatsby rather than Sending stopped, which is how you tell it apart from something a colleague did. The banner across the Newsletters pages says Sending is paused on “[campaign name]” and that too many emails bounced.
Your options are the same with one exception. Some Gatsby-owned pauses ask you to contact support before resuming, and the banner says so instead of offering the button. Don’t send the rest is always yours.
A pause like this is worth reading as information. Something about the list is wrong, and the campaign stopping is what kept it from reaching everyone.
Stopping a send is about the people who haven’t received it yet. For the ones who have, the fix is the next campaign, not this one. A short, plain correction sent to the same list does more for you than a resend of the original with the typo quietly repaired.
The eight numbers
Section titled “The eight numbers”Each tile has an information icon that repeats its definition in the product.
| Tile | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Delivered | Accepted by the recipient’s mail server. One per recipient. |
| Opens | Recipients who opened at least once, including automated opens by inbox privacy services. |
| Clicks | Recipients who clicked at least one link. Automated link scans by security software are filtered out. |
| Bounced | The address rejected the message permanently. It no longer exists, or it refuses mail. |
| Blocked | Refused temporarily by the receiving server. Three refusals in a row block the address. |
| Suppressed | Not sent. Mail to this address has failed before, so it’s on your bounce list. |
| Dropped | Never sent. Usually the address had already bounced, unsubscribed, or reported spam. Sometimes a technical error. |
| Unsubscribes | Recipients who unsubscribed using this campaign’s link. |
Treat opens and clicks as directional
Opens run high, and Gatsby says so on the tile. They include automated opens from inbox privacy services. Apple Mail Privacy Protection fetches the tracking pixel whether or not a human looks at the message, so a chunk of your open rate is software.
Clicks are closer to human. Corporate security software follows every link in an inbound email to check it’s safe, and Gatsby filters those scans out. The campaign report’s Clicks tile says how many automated clicks it removed from that send.
Both numbers are worth reading as a trend. Compare this campaign to your last six. Don’t quote the open rate to your partners as a headcount.
Bounced, Blocked, Suppressed, and Dropped are four different problems
Bounced means you tried and the address is dead. Someone left the firm. Remove them.
Blocked means the receiving server refused this one message, often because the mailbox is full or the server is being cautious. The address is probably fine, and the next campaign tries it again. Three refusals in a row and Gatsby stops sending to it.
Suppressed means Gatsby didn’t send, because the address is on your bounce list from an earlier failure. Click the Suppressed status on their row to Edit email address, or to Unblock this address once you’ve confirmed it works.
Dropped means it never went out at all. Most often the person had unsubscribed or reported spam, so sending would have been the wrong thing to do.
Rising Bounced is a list-age problem, and the answer is to clean the list. Rising Dropped usually means you’re mailing people who’ve told you not to.
The campaign report
Section titled “The campaign report”Open any sent campaign for the full picture.
What's on it
The header carries the status, subject, and the exact time it went. A line under it says who it went to: Sent to everyone subscribed when it sent, or the rules you picked in step 1, with a link to any campaign they name. Refresh pulls the latest numbers, and View sent email shows exactly what was delivered, footer and all. Duplicate is in the row menu.
Then the eight tiles, a Top Links table of which links got clicked, and the recipient list.
The recipient list
Every person the campaign touched, with their Name, Email, Status, and Last activity.
The Status filter narrows to one outcome and shows counts and percentages as you open it: Delivered, Opened, Bounced, Blocked, Suppressed, Dropped, Unsubscribed, Removed before send, Opted out before send, and Not sent. Search by email or name, and Export CSV takes the current view out.
Clicking a row opens that person’s contact panel on its Newsletters tab, where you can see every campaign they’ve received. The row menu offers the same thing as View contact, plus Remove from newsletter.
What to do the day after a send
Filter to Bounced and remove them. It takes a couple of minutes and it protects the next campaign’s deliverability, because repeatedly mailing dead addresses is one of the things receiving servers score you on.
Then look at Unsubscribes against your usual number. One campaign that spikes it is telling you something about that campaign, not about your list.
The Metrics tab
Section titled “The Metrics tab”The same eight numbers across every campaign in the newsletter, rather than one at a time.
Time ranges
Last 30 days, Last 90 days, or All time. The exact date range and the number of campaigns in it appear alongside, so you always know what you’re looking at.
Each tile shows a comparison against the previous period of the same length.
Counts are per send, not per person
The line under the tiles says it: a subscriber who received twelve campaigns can count up to twelve times in each number.
So the Delivered figure on a quarterly view is deliveries, not people. That’s the right way to count a newsletter, and it’s the wrong number to quote as audience size. Your audience size is the subscriber count in the newsletter header.
Trends
A chart under the tiles plots all eight over the selected range, with a chip per metric to toggle lines on and off.
Delivered usually dwarfs everything else, so the chart is most readable when you switch it off and look at the smaller lines against each other. Watch for Unsubscribes and Bounced climbing together over a quarter, which is the pattern that costs you deliverability if it runs.
Top Links underneath aggregates clicks across every campaign in the range.
Common Questions
Section titled “Common Questions” Why can't I click Next?
Hover it and it tells you which of three things is missing. The draft isn’t saved, it has changes you haven’t saved, or your organization’s legal name and mailing address aren’t filled in under Team Settings → Newsletters yet.
If something is holding sends back, there’s a banner at the top of the Newsletters pages naming the reason. It’s usually a from address that isn’t set, a SendGrid connection that needs attention, or a campaign that’s paused and waiting for someone to resume or end it. See Newsletter Settings.
A merge tag didn't come out right.
Newsletters read single braces, {firstName}, and the tag has to match exactly, spelling and capitalization included. It fails two different ways depending on what you typed.
The tag printed as text. You used the double-brace form, {{firstName}}, or the #firstName form from the event email editor. Neither is substituted, so the reader sees the tag itself.
The tag vanished. You used single braces but the name inside didn’t match, {firstname} for {firstName} say. An unrecognized single-brace tag renders as nothing at all, which is the worse failure because the sentence around it still reads as a sentence.
Gatsby watches for both while you write. Anything questionable raises a note under the body box headed N mail-merge tags need a look, with a line per tag. It’s advisory and never blocks saving, so read it rather than clicking past it. Preview then shows you the result with real values filled in.
Can I send to only some subscribers?
Yes. Step 1 of the send flow narrows the list: leave out or keep only the people who received campaigns you pick, filter by deliverability, or untick people one at a time. See Sending and scheduling.
Narrowing only works within the newsletter’s subscribers. If two audiences should never get the same campaigns, they’re two newsletters, each with its own subscribers and its own unsubscribe.
Can I cancel a campaign after I hit send?
Partly, and faster than you’d expect. A scheduled campaign can be canceled any time before its send time. A campaign already sending can be stopped with Stop sending on the report, which holds back everyone who hasn’t received it yet.
What can’t be undone is mail that has already gone. Gatsby sends a first wave of up to 300 people and holds the rest for ten minutes, so stopping inside that window usually means most of your list never receives it. See After you hit send.
Is there a BCC field?
No field in the composer. If your organization has Gatsby’s org-level BCC turned on for compliance or CRM logging, newsletter campaigns respect it automatically, the same way event email does.
Do test sends cost anything?
No. Test sends don’t count toward your subscriber billing and don’t appear in metrics. See Plan & Billing.