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, Tags, and Unsubscribed & blocked for the addresses Platypus keeps campaigns away from. 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 open the link and press Confirm on the page it lands on (double opt-in; the button is there because some mail scanners follow every link in a message, and a scanner must never be able to confirm on a person's behalf). 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. A buyer who unsubscribed earlier, or whose sign-up was never confirmed, isn't put straight back on: ticking the box sends them a confirmation email, and they're a recipient only once they press Confirm.

Leaving is one click, and it sticks. Every campaign email to subscribers carries an unsubscribe link in the footer, plus the headers mail apps use for their own Unsubscribe button; either route takes effect immediately, with nothing to log in to and nothing to confirm. Platypus remembers the address: the person stays on your list marked Unsubscribed, and no later import, checkout tick box, or manual add can put them back on campaigns. Only they can undo it, by subscribing again and pressing Confirm. You can still remove any subscriber yourself from the list view. Removing deletes the record; unsubscribing keeps it, and that memory is what stops a re-imported spreadsheet from emailing someone who asked you to stop.

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. An address that has unsubscribed is refused with a message saying so; that person can rejoin only through the subscribe form.

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 kept out because that address unsubscribed, and how many are invalid and why. Nothing is saved until you confirm.

The import creates confirmed subscribers, skips duplicates, leaves unsubscribed addresses out, 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 or by status (Unsubscribed shows who has left), 25 per page, with a total / confirmed / unconfirmed / unsubscribed breakdown that follows your filters. Export the whole list (or only the filtered matches) to CSV any time. Exports include a tags column and an Unsubscribed (UTC) column, so a list you take elsewhere still shows who must not be emailed; internal fields like confirmation tokens are left out.

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, and neither is anyone who has unsubscribed from your Platypus emails (they're counted as kept out).

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 and re-imports, 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.

Unsubscribed & blocked

The Unsubscribed & blocked tab lists every address Platypus keeps campaigns away from, newest first, each with its reason: Unsubscribed for people who used a link, Blocked by you for addresses you added here. Unsubscribing or blocking stops campaigns only; emails about an order, such as ticket confirmations, are unaffected.

To block an address, type it in (with an optional note for your own records) and press Block. A blocked address never gets a campaign, however it turns up again: a CSV or provider import, the checkout tick box, or the add-a-subscriber dialog. Blocks and releases go to your audit log.

Release lifts a block you added. An unsubscribe isn't yours to lift: only the person can reverse it, by subscribing again and confirming. A released record stays in the list, greyed out, so you can see what changed and when.

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, and not unsubscribed or blocked; 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, leaving out anyone who has unsubscribed or been blocked; 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.
• Your identity. Every email must say who sent it and how to reach you (Spam Act 2003, s17), so a send (test sends included) is refused until Settings → General has your Organisation Name and there is a way to reach you: a Public Contact Email under Settings → Contact, or the From address under Mail. The footer prints that name, your ABN when set, and whichever contact details you've filled in; a postal address is welcome there but not required. Mail settings shows the footer in full.

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 the sent/failed counters tick along without a refresh, alongside how many recipients unsubscribed from that email and how many were Suppressed (skipped at send time because they unsubscribed or were blocked between the draft being saved and the send). 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.