Email campaigns

Send a one-off marketing email to a group of customers now or at a scheduled time, and understand the reputation guard that can pause sending.

A campaign is a one-off marketing email to a set of customers: a birthday offer, a restock announcement, a seasonal promotion. It is separate from your transactional emails, which fire automatically on order events.

Where to find campaigns: Customers → Campaigns

Customers → Campaigns in the sidebar. It is the first row under Customers, which is where the people a campaign goes to live.

That page lists every campaign you have sent or drafted, with its status, how many people it reached and what it brought in. It is also where you start a new one.

Seeing the customers is enough to open the Campaigns page. Writing or sending one still needs permission to edit customers, so a teammate with view-only access to customers sees the page, the numbers and the history but gets no New campaign button and no audience cards to press.

Starting a campaign, and choosing who gets it

Start from the Campaigns page

Press New campaign at the top of Customers → Campaigns. The first thing it asks is who the email goes to, so you no longer have to set the audience up on another page first.

Further down the same page sits a row of ready-made audiences, each with a live count of how many customers match right now. Press one and the email opens with that group already chosen:

Everyone who opted in. Every customer who ticked the box to get offers and updates by email.
Birthdays this month. Customers whose birthday falls in the current month. Anyone with no birthday on file is left out.
Customers who drifted away. Their last order was between 90 and 365 days ago. This is the win-back list.
Loyalty club members. Everyone who joined the club and agreed to marketing email. This card only shows up if your store has the loyalty club.
Your biggest spenders. Customers who have spent 500 or more with you in total, in your own currency, so 500 shekels in an Israeli store and 500 dollars in an American one. You can change that number inside the composer.

Those counts are who matches, not a promise of who receives it. Customers who unsubscribed, bounced or reported a message as spam are dropped afterwards, and a new store holds some people back while it warms up. The confirmation step shows you the exact arithmetic before anything is sent.

Start from the Customers list

Both of the older routes still work, unchanged:

Filter the Customers list, then press New campaign there, and everyone matching the current filter is the audience.
Tick specific rows in the Customers list and choose Send marketing email, and those rows are the audience.

Build the audience yourself

Build it myself sits beside the ready-made cards inside the composer. You can set a minimum amount spent, a minimum number of orders, how recently they last ordered, club members only, and customers with an account only (no guests). The count updates as you change each one.

Marketing consent cannot be switched off here. Only customers who agreed to marketing email are ever included, because a campaign is not allowed to reach anyone else, so there is no setting for it and no way to widen it.

Whichever way you came in, the composer tells you how many recipients it resolved to. Read that number before you go further.

Why fewer people got it than matched your audience

Some customers match your audience and still are not mailed. The composer shows that count separately, as "matched your filter but were not mailed", and there are exactly three reasons:

No marketing consent. The customer never opted in, or has since unsubscribed. Sending to them anyway is what gets a sending domain blocked.
A suppressed address. The address hard-bounced, was reported as spam, or unsubscribed. Mailing it again damages delivery for every other customer on your list.
Held back while your store warms up. Until your store has completed three campaigns, Brainerce leaves out customers who have never placed an order that stuck (cancelled and refunded orders don't count) and who signed up more than 90 days ago. Nothing is wrong with these customers and they are not unsubscribed; they return to the audience automatically once your store is warm.

None of the three is optional and none of them is a bug.

To see which of them applies to a particular person, look at the Marketing column in the Customers list. It names the reason per customer (Not subscribed, Unsubscribed, Bounced, Marked as spam, Blocked). Only Subscribed customers can be mailed.

Writing it

Give the campaign an internal name ("Birthday discount, July"). Customers never see it; it's how you'll recognise the campaign afterwards. The subject sits next to it, and the Sender button opens the from name and reply-to address.

The email itself opens as a complete, branded design: your logo on your brand colour, a headline, a paragraph and a button you can change, and the unsubscribe footer already in place. You work on it the same way you work on your transactional emails:

Click any text to edit it right in the preview. Click a button to change its label, colour or link.
Add block, the plus button above the email, drops in a hero, a paragraph, a button, an image, a divider, a footer, or products from your catalogue.
The AI assistant on the side changes what is already there: "make the headline shorter", "use our brand purple on the button", "translate it to Hebrew". Select an element first and the change applies to that element only. Each message you send costs 1 credit (the same as an email edit in Settings, see AI credits); clicking text to edit it yourself is free.
Write with AI drafts a whole new email from a description ("Birthday discount email, casual tone, 15% off") and replaces what is on the canvas. This costs credits; the composer shows how many before you run it.
Templates loads a campaign you saved before.
The device buttons show the email at desktop, tablet and phone width, Sample data fills in a sample customer name, and the code view shows the HTML if you want to edit it by hand.

Tick Save this as a reusable template if you'll want it again.

Adding products to a campaign

Press Add block and choose Products. Search your catalogue, pick up to twelve products, choose one or two per row, and press Add. Each product card shows the product's image, its name, its price (with the regular price struck through when a sale price is active) and a Shop now button that opens the product on your store.

Two things to know:

The price and image are copied in at the moment you add the block. If you change a price afterwards, the email keeps the old one until you remove the block and add it again. The link always opens the live product page.
The link needs your storefront's address. Product cards link through the domain set on your sales channel. If your store has more than one storefront, the picker asks which one the links should open. If no channel has a domain yet, products cannot be added to an email until you set one under Settings → Sales channels.

Can I test two subject lines against each other?

Yes. In the composer, turn on Test a second subject line, right under the subject field. A second subject field appears below it.

Your list splits in half. One half gets the first subject line, the other half gets the second one, and both halves are sent, in full. Nobody is held back waiting to see which one does better.

Does Brainerce pick a winner for me?

No. There is no automatic winner, and nothing switches over to the better subject line partway through a send. Both halves get their assigned subject and that is the whole of it. Deciding what to do with what you learn, for your next campaign, is up to you.

What the report shows for the two subject lines

Once the campaign has sent, the report shows both subject lines side by side, each with its own count. That count is clicks, once you have click tracking turned on, not opens: Brainerce never tracks opens, on any plan, so there is no open rate to compare here either, on either subject line.

Can I paste my own HTML email?

Yes. Open the code view (the </> button above the email), replace the HTML with yours, and it is kept exactly as you wrote it, then sent to your customers unchanged. Your tables, your <style> block, your background colours and your Outlook fallbacks all survive, because nothing rewrites them. Switch back to the visual view to click through it, add blocks and use the assistant on it like any other email.

Placeholders in your own HTML: ours are the only ones that get filled in

If your HTML came from another mailing tool it probably still contains that tool's placeholders, such as {{STORE_URL}} or {{UNSUBSCRIBE_URL}}. Those are not ours and they come out empty. A button built on one becomes a dead link that goes nowhere, and nothing warns you before the campaign sends.

These are the only merge fields we fill in:

{{firstName}} and {{lastName}} the customer's name, blank if we do not have it
{{storeName}} your store name
{{currentYear}} the current year, for a copyright line
{{unsubscribeUrl}} the opt out link for this specific recipient
{{supportEmail}} and {{supportPhone}} the contact details from your store settings
{{brand.primaryColor}}, {{brand.secondaryColor}}, {{brand.logo}} your store's colours and logo

Anything else inside double curly braces is replaced with nothing at all. Write your shop's web address into the HTML as a real address, such as https://yourshop.com, rather than as a placeholder.

You do not need to build the unsubscribe link yourself. If your HTML does not already contain one, we add the opt out link and your postal address to the bottom of the email before it goes out, inside the page rather than after it, so every inbox shows it. Your campaign is still refused if you have not set a postal address.

No. A campaign is an email and nothing more. There is no field anywhere on it for a promo code, a voucher, a gift card or an automatic discount rule, and no start and end date on the campaign itself.

If what you actually want is a short series that sends itself, like a welcome email or a post purchase follow-up, each of which can carry its own discount, that is a different feature. See Automatic welcome and follow-up emails.

To run a sale by email, create the code first under Marketing → Coupons, then type that code into the message you are writing here. The code lives in your words, not in a setting, so check the spelling before you send: nothing in the campaign validates it for you.

Who it comes from, and where replies go

Under the subject sit two optional fields that matter more than they look.

From name is the name the customer sees in their inbox. Left empty, it's your store name.

Reply-to address is where a reply lands. Left empty, Brainerce uses the default reply-to from Settings → Email, and failing that the account owner's email. The composer names the address it will use, so you can check it before sending.

What it never uses is the address the campaign is sent from. Whether that's a Brainerce address or your own verified domain, it only sends: nobody reads it, and a reply to it bounces back at the customer. That includes "take me off this list" replies, which is the reason a campaign with no reply address anywhere is refused rather than sent.

Your postal address: campaigns are refused without one

Every promotional email has to show a real physical postal address where the reader can see it. That is the law, not a Brainerce preference: CAN-SPAM in the US, and the equivalent duty for a "דבר פרסומת" under Israel's Communications Act. Brainerce puts it in the footer for you, next to the unsubscribe link, so you never type either into the email itself.

It has to be your address, and Brainerce has nothing to guess it from, because no business address is stored for your store anywhere else. So until you set one, the send is refused with "No postal address for this store", and the campaign stays unsent. Nothing is charged and nothing goes out.

You can set it without leaving the composer: the warning there has a field in it, so type the address, press Save, and carry on writing. Your draft stays where it is. It also lives permanently under Settings → Email → Business postal address, and you only ever set it once. A shop, an office, or a mailbox you actually collect post from all work; it is visible to every recipient, which is the entire point of it.

The same rule covers abandoned-cart and birthday-reward emails, which are promotional too: those stop going out just as quietly until the address is set. Order confirmations, shipping updates, password resets and other transactional mail are unaffected: they never carry a postal address or an unsubscribe link and are not supposed to.

The warning has no box to type in, so why can't I save the address?

Because saving it changes a store setting, and that needs the store settings permission. A teammate invited to run marketing does not have it by default: they see the same warning with no field, and the address has to be added by the store owner (or anyone with that permission), either from the same warning, or under Settings → Email.

Sending

The confirmation step restates the recipient count and warns you plainly: this is irreversible. Choose Send now and the email goes immediately to everyone selected. Choose Schedule and it goes out at the date and time you pick, without you pressing anything (see Can I schedule a campaign to send later? below). Either way there is no test send to yourself and no recall once it has gone.

Read the recipient number one more time here. It is the last chance.

A send can be refused at this step, and the refusal names the reason: no reply-to address anywhere, no business postal address in Settings → Email, an audience that changed since you previewed it, or one of the sending limits below. A refused campaign is not sent, not charged, and stays editable. Fix the setting it names and press send again.

Sending limits: how many campaigns per day, and how many recipients

Two hard limits apply at the moment you press send:

5 campaigns per 24 hours. This is a rolling window, not a midnight reset, so the sixth send inside 24 hours is refused with "Daily campaign send limit reached. Try again tomorrow." Plan a busy week around it; a big launch day is one campaign, not five variations.
50,000 recipients per campaign. A larger audience is refused outright and has to be split into several sends, and those sends count against the 5-per-24-hours limit too, so a 300,000-customer list needs six campaigns spread over two days.

Neither limit can be raised. There is no setting for either one anywhere in the dashboard. They are deliberate deliverability guards: a store that suddenly sends far more mail than usual is the exact pattern mailbox providers throttle.

Can I schedule a campaign to send later?

Yes. A finished campaign can be booked for a date and time up to 90 days ahead, and Brainerce sends it then, whether or not you are logged in. "Send this on Thursday at 9am" is exactly what it is for.

How to schedule a campaign: the steps

Write the campaign as usual and press Continue. The confirmation step opens with the recipient count.
At the top of the confirmation step, switch Send now to Schedule.
Pick the date and the time (24 hour clock, in 5 minute steps).
Drag the Drag to schedule slider all the way across, the same gesture as sending now.

The campaign moves to the Scheduled tab on the Campaigns page, with the booked date and time in the Went out column, and nothing is sent until that moment.

Which time zone a scheduled campaign uses

The time you pick is read in your store's time zone, the one set under Settings → General, not the clock on your computer. If you have never set it, the store is on UTC, and a campaign booked for 9:00 lands at 9:00 UTC, which is 12:00 in Israel in summer. Check the setting once before you schedule anything; the confirmation step shows the store time it is reading, and warns you if the store is still on UTC.

How far ahead, and how soon: the 5 minute and 90 day limits

At least 5 minutes ahead. A time closer than that is refused with "too soon", so you cannot book a send for "now plus one minute". Use Send now instead.
At most 90 days ahead. Anything further is refused with "too far". Campaign content cannot be edited once written, so a send booked half a year out is usually a forgotten one; plan the holiday campaign inside the 90 days.
Times snap to 5 minute steps. 9:03 becomes 9:00.

Who receives a scheduled campaign: the audience is recalculated at send time

The recipient count you see when you book is an estimate. When the campaign actually goes out, Brainerce works out the audience again from the same rules, so it reaches the people who match on the send date, not the people who matched when you booked it.

Concrete example: a Birthdays this month campaign booked on 28 September for 1 October mails the October birthdays, not the September ones. A customer who unsubscribes between booking and sending is left out; a customer who signs up and opts in between the two is included. Someone who was on the list on Tuesday and off it on Friday does not get the email.

When credits are charged for a scheduled campaign

Credits are not charged when you book. They are charged at the moment the campaign sends, on the real recipient count from that moment. Booking only checks that you have enough credits for the estimate; if there are not enough credits for the real count at send time, the send is stopped and nothing is charged (see When a scheduled campaign is stopped below).

How to cancel or move a scheduled campaign

Open the campaign from the Scheduled tab. The report dialog shows the booking: when it goes out, in which time zone, and the estimated recipients as of now, with two buttons:

Reschedule picks a new date and time, under the same 5 minute and 90 day limits.
Cancel schedule takes it off the calendar. Nothing was sent and no credits were charged. If you are still in the composer you land back on the confirmation step, where you can send it now or pick another time. From the report dialog the campaign simply stays in your list as ready; to send it after that, start a new campaign (a saved template brings the body back).

Both work until the moment it sends, and not after. Once the send has started the campaign is an ordinary sent campaign: there is no recall, exactly as with Send now. If you need to stop a campaign that is due in three minutes, cancel it now rather than reading on.

Can I edit a scheduled campaign?

No. While a campaign is scheduled its subject, body and audience are locked, and there is no edit button. To change anything:

Cancel schedule from the report dialog.
Start a new campaign. If you ticked Save this as a reusable template when you wrote it, pick that template and the body comes back; otherwise copy the body across.
Make the change and schedule the new one.

The cancelled campaign stays in your list as ready, and its report stays readable.

When a scheduled campaign is stopped: the "schedule stopped" message

Brainerce re-checks the sending rules at send time, the same ones it checks when you press Send now. If one of them fails at that moment, the campaign is not sent, no credits are charged, and the campaign goes back to ready with a red schedule stopped chip on its row. The chip, and the report dialog, show the reason.

You also get an email about it, sent to the store owner, that names the campaign, the time it was booked for, and the reason. Nothing in it needs urgent action, because nothing went out.

The reasons are the ones listed under Sending: the business postal address was removed from Settings → Email, the reply-to address is gone, the reputation guard has paused marketing, the day's sending limit was already used up by other campaigns, there were not enough credits for the real recipient count, or the audience had shrunk to nobody. Fix the setting the message names (when it is the postal address, the message carries a button straight to it), then book the send again from a new campaign; the stopped one keeps its report and its reason.

Why your campaign shows no clicks

Click tracking is off until you turn it on. Until you do, Brainerce sends your campaign without rewriting the links in it, so it has no way to know that anyone pressed one, and every campaign reports zero clicks no matter how well it did.

You can switch it on without leaving the page: while tracking is off, the Campaigns page shows a row about it with the switch right there. It also lives under Settings → Email. Flipping it changes a store setting, so it needs the store settings permission. A teammate invited to run marketing usually does not have that one and sees the explanation without a switch; the store owner can turn it on for them.

Turning it on only affects campaigns sent afterwards. A campaign that already went out cannot be measured after the fact.

Opens are never tracked, on any plan. There is no open rate anywhere in Brainerce and no tracking pixel in your emails, so do not go looking for one. What you can see per campaign is how many were sent, how many failed, how many bounced, how many were held back by the suppression list, how many people unsubscribed, and, once click tracking is on, how many clicked and which link they pressed.

A campaign sent before 3 September 2026 shows Not measured in the Unsubscribed column instead of a number. Opt-outs were only tied back to the campaign that prompted them from that date on, so an older send has nothing to count, and a 0 there would read as "nobody left" about something nobody recorded.

The Revenue column: what it counts, and why you cannot add it up

Every campaign that has gone out shows a Revenue figure: money from orders placed by the people who were mailed it, within 7 days of the send. Cancelled and refunded orders are left out. The column header repeats the 7 days so you never have to remember the window.

Read it as a signal, not as a receipt. It does not prove the email caused the order, and the figures do not add up to anything. If two campaigns went to overlapping groups of customers in overlapping weeks, the same order is counted for both of them, so adding the column up produces a number bigger than your store actually took. That is why Brainerce never totals it for you, and why you should compare campaigns against each other rather than summing them.

A campaign that has not gone out yet shows a dash here, because there is no window to measure.

The numbers above the list, and what they cover

Four tiles sit above the table: how many campaigns your store has, how many emails went out, the click rate, and your top campaign by the number of orders attributed to it. Below them, tabs split the list into All, Drafts, Sending and Sent.

As soon as you have more than one page of campaigns, those tiles and the counts on the tabs cover the page you are looking at, not your whole store. The campaign count is the one exception: that is always store-wide. The page says which it is in small print underneath, so read that line before you quote a number to anyone.

The click rate reads Not measured while click tracking is off, rather than a confident 0%. And there is no open rate in these tiles, because opens are never tracked anywhere in Brainerce.

What else is on the Campaigns page

Email that goes out on its own. Abandoned-cart recovery, the newsletter signup benefit, and the welcome email and post purchase follow-up are all listed here with an on or off badge and a link to their own settings, so every email sent in your name is visible in one place. A row only appears if you have permission to see that feature.
A warming strip, while your store is still new, showing how many campaigns are left before Brainerce stops holding customers back.
Saved templates. Every template you saved from the composer is listed here, and this is the only place you can delete one. Deleting a template never touches a campaign you already sent.
The report for one campaign. Press any row and its report opens over the list: who it reached, what happened to each recipient, and which links were pressed if tracking was on.

Unsubscribes and opting out

Every campaign carries a one-click unsubscribe: both the link in the footer and the header that makes Gmail and Apple Mail show their own "Unsubscribe" button next to your name. You cannot switch it off, and a campaign cannot be sent without it.

The footer link is written in your store's language, so a Hebrew store's customers read "הסרה מרשימת התפוצה" and a French store's read "Se désabonner". You do not set this and cannot change the wording: an opt-out a reader cannot recognise is the fastest way to be reported as spam instead, which costs you far more than the unsubscribe would have. The button Gmail and Apple Mail add themselves is worded by the mail app, in the reader's own language, not yours.

When someone unsubscribes:

Their badge in the Customers list flips to Unsubscribed, so you can see who left and when the list stops growing. That is a different badge from Not subscribed, which means someone who never opted in. See what the Marketing column means.
They are removed from every future campaign audience, not just this one. You do not have to remember to exclude them.
Clicking twice, or clicking after their mail app already sent the one-click request, changes nothing further. It is safe to be triggered more than once.

Unsubscribing does not stop order emails. Order confirmations, shipping and tracking updates, and password resets keep arriving exactly as before. Those are transactional messages the customer needs in order to complete and receive a purchase, and opting out of marketing never blocks them. A customer who says "I unsubscribed but I still got an email from you" has almost always received one of these, and that is correct behaviour, not a bug.

Yes, but only the customer can do it, and only by confirming through a link they already hold.

If someone who unsubscribed opens a "Confirm you want email from …" message from your store and presses the button on it, the unsubscribe is lifted: their profile goes back to Subscribed in the Customers list and they return to future campaign audiences. That click is the customer's own verified action, which is the only thing that counts as re-consent.

You cannot send them a new confirmation link, and there is no re-subscribe button. Nothing in the dashboard triggers a confirmation email. Nothing you do to the customer record helps either: editing the customer or re-importing them from a CSV both leave the unsubscribe standing.

Coming back through your own site does work, though. If your storefront has a newsletter signup form and the person enters their address there themselves, they get a fresh confirmation link, and clicking it lifts the unsubscribe. That is the customer coming back on their own, which is the one thing that counts. You cannot do it for them; you can only have a form on the site for them to find.

Bounced, spam-reported and hand-suppressed addresses never come back, even on a confirmation click. If the address hard-bounced, was reported as spam, or was suppressed manually, confirming does nothing at all: the customer is shown "We are unable to send email to this address" and stays out of every audience. Those are deliverability and compliance blocks rather than preferences, and a click cannot reverse them. The same holds when an address unsubscribed and then bounced or was reported: the bounce or complaint wins, and the confirmation is refused.

The reputation guard

If deliverability degrades, through too many bounces or complaints, Brainerce pauses marketing sending automatically and shows a banner explaining why.

This protects your sending domain. A domain that keeps mailing after a spike in complaints stops reaching inboxes at all, including your order confirmations, so the guard is protecting your transactional mail as much as your marketing.

When you've dealt with the cause, use Resume sending on the banner.

Transactional email is unaffected by the pause. Order confirmations keep going out.

Why a campaign can sit there without sending

There is a second, rarer reason marketing sending stops, and it looks different: the campaign stays in Sending and nothing goes out, with no banner and no error.

That happens when Brainerce stops receiving delivery reports from Amazon, the service that actually carries your email. Those reports are how bounces get recorded, how spam complaints get blocked, and how the reputation guard above knows when to step in. If they stop arriving while mail is still going out, every one of those protections is switched off without failing, so Brainerce holds marketing sending rather than mail thousands of people with no way to see the damage.

There is nothing for you to fix, and nothing in your settings causes it. It is a fault on our side, it is alerted to us automatically, and your campaign resumes on its own within minutes of it being repaired. You do not need to recreate the campaign, and nobody receives a duplicate when it restarts. If a campaign has been sitting unsent for more than an hour, contact support and mention that delivery reporting looks stalled.

Your order emails, shipping updates and password resets are never held by this. Only marketing keeps its brakes off at that point, so only marketing waits. Cart recovery emails and birthday rewards count as marketing here and wait with it.

What's next?

Customer profiles covers building the audience with filters and tags.
Customize email templates covers order confirmations, shipping updates, and other one-time transactional email.
Automatic welcome and follow-up emails covers the short series that sends itself when someone signs up or their order is delivered.

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