Squarespace Email Campaigns Explained

Squarespace Email Campaigns is a separate, usage-based email marketing subscription: you build mailing lists, send one-time "blast" campaigns or automated triggered emails, and pay based on your total monthly email sends rather than your contact count or your website plan. You don't need a Squarespace website to use it. The Starter plan sends up to 500 emails a month and keeps Squarespace's branding in the footer; every plan above that removes the branding and raises the send limit. Here's how campaigns, automations, and mailing lists actually work, sourced from Squarespace's own help center (checked September 2026).

What is Email Campaigns, exactly?

Squarespace's own framing: "Use Squarespace Email Campaigns to build mailing lists, send automated or blast marketing emails, and track your audience engagement with built-in analytics" (Squarespace, "Getting started with Squarespace Email Campaigns"). It's a genuinely standalone product: "While Email Campaigns are designed to work seamlessly with a Squarespace website, you don't need to have a website to sign up" (same source). To send anything, Squarespace lists three requirements: "An Email Campaigns subscription, At least one mailing list, Verified sender details."

The two campaign formats are distinct:

• Blast campaigns are "individual campaigns you send to one or more mailing lists," useful for a one-time announcement (Squarespace).
• Automated campaigns "are sent automatically in response to a visitor's action," like subscribing to a list, submitting a form, or buying a product.

Billing is genuinely separate from your website: "Billing for Email Campaigns is separate from your site subscription. If you cancel your site subscription, or let it expire, we won't turn off auto-renew for an existing Email Campaigns subscription, and you can continue using it" (Squarespace, "Email Campaigns pricing, billing, and invoices").

What can an automation actually trigger on?

Squarespace documents three automation types, each tied to a different kind of visitor action (Squarespace, "Sending automated campaigns"):

• Subscriber activity automations — "Sent after someone subscribes to a mailing list." Presets include welcoming new subscribers, following up with subscribers who opened your welcome email, and (with a connected website) offering a discount to subscribers who haven't purchased yet.
• Customer activity automations — "Sent after someone purchases a store product or digital product on your site, including free products." Presets include thanking first-time customers, rewarding frequent buyers, and reaching out to lapsed customers who haven't bought in a while.
• Form response automations — "Sent after someone completes a form submission on your site," provided the form collected an email address. This type doesn't connect to checkout or Newsletter blocks, which route to the other two types instead.

Each automation runs on a trigger plus a time delay you set yourself, "up to 730 days after" the triggering action, and an automation "can send up to 15 emails, including the first email" if you chain time delays and conditions into a drip sequence. Conditions can branch the sequence based on whether a recipient opened the previous email, clicked a link, submitted a form, or holds a specific tag.

One limit worth knowing before you rely on an automation for anything time-sensitive: "automations are only sent to subscribers once in any 30 day period," so a customer who triggers the same automation twice within 30 days — buying the same product-linked item again, for instance — won't get a second copy.

Do automations count against my send limit?

Mostly yes, with two named exceptions. Squarespace states plainly: "Automations count toward your monthly send limit" — that applies to every preset automation and every drip campaign email. The two exceptions are abandoned cart recovery and customer review request automations, which Squarespace says "don't count toward your monthly sends," though you still can't edit their trigger or delay timing, only the email content itself.

If you hit your monthly limit while a drip campaign is mid-sequence, Squarespace's own guidance is direct about the consequence: "If you reach your monthly send limit, the automations are paused, and you'll need to turn them back on in the next usage period or after you upgrade your plan. Subscribers and customers who were meant to receive emails while the automations are paused won't receive them, even after the automations are live again." That's a real gap, not a delay — a paused subscriber doesn't get a late send once you're back under the limit.

How do mailing lists actually work, and what are the limits?

A mailing list is just a named collection of email addresses, and Squarespace's own glossary defines the plan limits precisely (Squarespace, "Email Campaigns pricing, billing, and invoices" and "Build mailing lists"):

• Up to 20 mailing lists are allowed on any plan.
• No per-list contact cap, but a list's size can't exceed your monthly send limit in practice: "There's no limit to the number of contacts you can have on an individual mailing list, but mailing list size can't override other plan limits. For example, if you have a mailing list with 510 contacts on the Starter plan, that exceeds your monthly send limit and you won't be able to send your campaign to that list."
• CSV import caps at 500,000 contacts per file, with no more than three columns (email, first name, last name) recognized; extra columns are ignored, and duplicate contacts are automatically excluded on import.
• Squarespace's glossary defines a "send" precisely: "An email from you to a recipient on your mailing list. If you send one campaign to a mailing list with ten recipients, that's ten sends." Both blast and automated campaigns draw from the same monthly total.

What do the plans actually change?

Squarespace's own comparison is narrow and specific: "The Email Campaigns plan you choose affects your monthly send limit and your ability to remove the branding text that appears at the bottom of emails." The named reference point is the entry tier: "On the 500 email sends plan, you can't remove the 'Powered by Squarespace' text. You can remove it on all other plans." Beyond send volume and that one branding toggle, Squarespace doesn't document other plan-gated features in this help article — for current prices and the full plan list, Squarespace directs you to its own Email Campaigns page and pricing tab rather than printing numbers in the help center, and pricing pages that render by account or region shouldn't be treated as static figures here.

One practical detail if you're on an older account: "Some older plans have limited blast campaigns per month, and don't offer automated campaigns," and Squarespace warns that "if you move to a current plan, or cancel service, it's not possible to return to your old plan" — worth checking before you assume automations are available to you.

What about sender email and deliverability?

Email Campaigns needs "verified sender details" before it will send anything — the email address and name that appear in the From: line, set up separately from your site's regular email. Squarespace's own deliverability tip: "To avoid spam filters, we recommend you use a custom domain and email address (for example, yourname@yourwebsite.com) with Email Campaigns." How that custom domain and its mailbox actually get set up, whether through Squarespace's resold Google Workspace, Titan, or an outside provider, is a separate topic our guide to email on a Squarespace domain already covers in full; this post is about the marketing-send side, not the mailbox itself.

What should I check before I commit to a plan?

• Count your actual list size against the plan's monthly send limit, not against a contact cap — Squarespace's own example (a 510-contact list on a 500-send Starter plan) shows how easily the two diverge.
• Decide whether branding removal matters to you before picking the entry tier; it's the one feature difference Squarespace states directly for the base plan.
• Build any drip campaign with the 30-day repeat rule and the 730-day maximum delay in mind, and don't assume a paused automation will "catch up" once you're back under your limit.
• If you're moving off an older legacy plan for automations, know that the move is one-way.

Where does Figment fit into this?

Nowhere directly. Figment publishes a site from a Figma design through its Figma plugin; it has no mailing list product, no automation builder, and no email-send billing of its own. If what you actually need is a marketing site plus a separate email tool, that's a normal combination — Email Campaigns itself doesn't require a Squarespace website to run, so the two can operate independently either way.

Bottom line: Email Campaigns bills by total monthly sends, not contacts, with a hard branding-removal line at the entry tier and a small, well-defined set of automation types. The details most likely to bite you are the ones stated plainly in Squarespace's own docs: a paused automation doesn't retroactively send once you're under your limit again, and the same automation won't message the same person twice within 30 days.