Mailing list & campaigns

Your mailing list is the audience you email about shows: one list of subscribers per venue, managed from Mailing list in the admin sidebar. The page is split into tabs — an Overview tab with your subscriber counts and the send buttons, View & export for the searchable list, Add & import, and Tags. Campaigns are email only. Platypus stores phone numbers but never sends anything to them.

How people join — and leave

Two ways onto the list:

• The public subscribe form. A visitor enters their email (and optionally a phone number) and gets a confirmation email — they're not a recipient until they click it (double opt-in). The confirmation link lasts 3 days; if it lapses, subscribing again sends a fresh one. The form never reveals whether an address is already on your list, and carries a short collection notice naming your venue and linking the privacy policy.
• Checkout opt-in. The ticket checkout offers a mailing-list tick box. When the order is paid, the buyer lands on your list tagged opt-in, plus whatever tags the event carries. A buyer who doesn't tick the box and isn't already a subscriber is left alone — no record is created.

Leaving is one click: every campaign email to subscribers carries an unsubscribe link in the footer (plus the headers mail apps use for their own Unsubscribe button). Following it removes that one person immediately. You can also remove any subscriber yourself from the list view.

Adding and importing subscribers

On Add & import, the Add a subscriber button opens a dialog for adding one person at a time — email, phone, name, with at least an email or a phone required. People you add are treated as confirmed (they'll receive campaigns straight away), so only add people who've actually agreed to hear from you. Adding an email or phone that's already on the list is harmless: nothing changes, and no duplicate is created.

For a whole spreadsheet, use the CSV import: a file with email, phone, and name columns (at least one of the first two). The form offers a template CSV with the right headings and an example row. You get a preview first: how many rows would import, how many are duplicates, how many are invalid and why. Nothing is saved until you confirm.

The import creates confirmed subscribers, skips duplicates, and counts bad rows without aborting; a summary panel reports the tallies. Tags picked at import time apply to every subscriber the file touches: new rows and the existing subscribers it matched. That makes re-importing a file the way to re-tag an audience — existing subscribers gain the new tags, and the rest of their record is left alone.

View & export shows the full list: searchable, sortable, filterable by tag, 25 per page, with a total / confirmed / unconfirmed breakdown that follows your filters. Export the whole list (or only the filtered matches) to CSV any time — exports include a tags column and leave out internal fields like confirmation tokens.

Importing from your mail provider

If your mail provider exposes its lists to Platypus (Mailgun or Resend with a verified full-access key), the Add & import tab also shows From your mail provider: your provider-side lists or segments with their member counts, each with an Import button. Importing pulls that audience onto your Platypus list — members become confirmed subscribers, deduplicated against people already on your list, and carry a provenance tag like Mailgun: Members so you can target (or untangle) them later. Invalid addresses are skipped and counted; members who unsubscribed on the provider side are never imported.

The same consent rule as the CSV import applies: only import people who actually agreed to hear from you. Once in, they're ordinary subscribers — every campaign email they get carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing here sticks for all future sends, whatever the provider list says.

Imports are a point-in-time copy (re-running updates rather than duplicates), capped at 2,000 members per source. The section only appears when your provider supports the import; on any other setup (SendGrid, whose member export Platypus can't read, or a key that can send but can't read lists) it stays hidden. If you expected it, see which key to paste.

Tags

Tags are labels on subscribers — up to 100 per venue, matched case-insensitively. Two are applied automatically and can't be renamed or deleted: subscribe (joined via the public form) and opt-in (ticked the box at checkout). Events can carry tags too: when a paid order is fulfilled, the event's tags land on the buyer's subscriber record, even for an existing confirmed subscriber who didn't tick the opt-in box. That's how a "Comedy" tag accumulates the people who actually buy comedy tickets.

The Tags tab lists every tag with its subscriber count — click a count to see those subscribers. Rename or delete your own tags from here; deleting a tag detaches it, and the subscribers stay. Renames and deletions go to your audit log.

Tags are how campaigns target: a campaign to subscribers can carry a tag filter and reach only people holding at least one of the selected tags. The composer shows a live recipient count as you change the selection, so you always know who a send will reach.

Sending a campaign

Campaigns are built in a short wizard (Type → Recipients → Compose → Review & send), reached from the Overview tab, the campaigns list, or an event's row menu. Each step is checked before you can move on. Opening the wizard from an event row skips the steps the link already answered: you land straight on Compose, and you can still step back to the earlier ones.

Type — three campaign shapes:

• Event page — pick one event; the email renders its title, description, date, location, and image with a link to the public page.
• Upcoming events — tick several upcoming published events, add an optional intro, and each renders in date order. An event that gets cancelled or unpublished before you send drops out of the email.
• General mail-out — write your own subject and body in the rich-text editor. It has the same formatting, lists, alignment, and inline images as the event description editor, minus video, which email clients can't play, and minus image placement, which they can't render; image resizing still works. The HTML is sanitised server-side, so pasted scripts and the like are stripped.

Recipients — subscribers (confirmed, with an email address; optionally narrowed by tags, with a live "would reach N" count as you adjust) or the ticket holders of one event, which for a multi-date event can be narrowed to a single performance. A Platypus segment quick-pick applies a segment's tag in one click: the system "Platypus signups" segment, or any tag's segment (every tag is one). Ticket buyers who never joined the mailing list are deliberately not a campaign audience.

Event rows offer Email subscribers and, once there are paid orders, Email ticket holders as prefilled shortcuts. A ticket-holder send reaches each paying buyer once; those emails carry no unsubscribe link (recipients are buyers, not list members) and their footer names the event instead. Recipients are locked in once the draft is saved — changing them afterwards resets the draft, though your subject and content are kept.

Review & send — reaching this step saves the campaign as a draft and shows the rendered email right on the page, with a link to open it in a new tab. Send from here (with a confirmation), or keep the draft and come back later. To fix something, Edit content returns you to Compose with everything intact.

Browsers and inboxes render differently, so there's also Send test: type an address and the exact campaign is delivered to that one inbox, subject marked [Test], without touching your audience or the campaign's status. The address is remembered in your browser for next time. Drafts reopen in the composer, which shows the same preview and test send beside the editor; the preview refreshes when you save, and is flagged as showing your last save while you have unsaved changes.

Two honest limits gate your first send:

• A mail provider. Campaigns and their test sends go out through your own mail provider; ticket and reminder emails are unaffected. If running a paid provider doesn't fit your venue, Platypus can configure your account for total hosted email support instead: campaigns then ride Platypus hosted email, sent from a Platypus address carrying your venue's name, with replies going to your own From address, and a notice under the send button asks you to use it considerately.
• A postal address. Every campaign footer carries one, as anti-spam rules require; without it, sends (test sends included) are refused. Set it at Settings → Contact → Public Contact Address.

Sending is queued and tracked per recipient: one bad address doesn't stop the batch, a re-run never emails anyone twice, and a send that would reach nobody is refused with a message rather than silently "sent".

The campaign page

Every campaign has its own page — click its subject in the campaigns list, or send one and you'll land there. While a send is under way the page updates itself: status and sent/failed counters tick along without a refresh. Once it finishes, any failed recipients are listed with the error each address returned, downloadable as a CSV for chasing bounces. Drafts show their edit and delete actions here too, and the email preview is always a click away.

Discounts moved

Tag-gated discounts (formerly the "member benefit" tab) now live on each event's Discounts tab, targeting customer segments; every tag doubles as a segment automatically. Any benefit you had configured became a deactivated voucher code with a generated code and its member restriction intact — it no longer applies by itself. To offer it again, open it on the event's Discounts tab, give the code a name you'd put in an email, activate it, and send it to your members in a campaign. Its redemption history is untouched.

Phone numbers

The subscribe form and the checkout both take an optional phone. Checkout numbers are captured only once the order is paid, stored unconfirmed, and deduplicated — a repeat buyer doesn't create a second row, and a capture hiccup never delays their tickets.

Phones are storage only. Platypus sends no SMS and makes no calls; the numbers exist for your own records and exports. A phone-only subscriber (no email) never receives a campaign.

Campaign delivery follows your mail provider (your own, or Platypus hosted email where we've arranged it), so when it misbehaves, start with the mail settings troubleshooting table. Anything it and the failed-recipients list can't explain is worth reporting — email support@platypus.tickets.