Email marketing guide

Overview

Email marketing in Brainito is organised around four things: contacts (the people), audiences and segments (who a message goes to), templates (what it looks like) and campaigns and automations (when it sends). Everything else — senders, suppressions, reporting — exists to serve those.

If you are setting up for the first time, do it in this order. Each step depends on the one before it, and skipping the first is the most common reason a first send lands in spam.

1. 1

   Verify a sending domain

   Without this, inbox providers cannot confirm your mail is really yours.
2. 2

   Import your contacts

   A CSV upload, a store sync, or the API.
3. 3

   Create an audience

   A list you can send to, either fixed or rule-based.
4. 4

   Build or pick a template

   Use the visual builder or start from the template library.
5. 5

   Create a campaign and review it

   The review step tells you what will really happen before you commit.

Workspaces & members

A workspace is a tenant: its own contacts, audiences, campaigns, senders and billing. Agencies have one workspace per client, plus their own.

Owners can add members with a role. An invited person receives an email with a link straight into that workspace. If someone belongs to more than one workspace — for example their own plus an agency they work with — a workspace switcher appears in the header of the Email Marketing section, next to the workspace name. People with access to only one workspace never see it.

Senders & domains

Under Senders & Domainsyou add the address mail goes out as, and verify the domain it belongs to. A sender profile is a name and an email address — “Barestep Support” <hello@barestep.com>. The domain behind it has to be verified before a campaign can be scheduled.

What verification actually checks

You add DNS records at your domain provider and Brainito confirms they resolve. Three things matter, and the Check DNS panel shows each one:

Contacts & importing

Contacts arrive four ways: a CSV import, a store connection such as Shopify, the API, or a signup form. Every contact records where it came from, and the audience view shows that alongside when it joined the list.

Importing a CSV

Upload the file, map the columns, and Brainito checks each row before anything is added. Rows are split into three groups:

A fourth category, risky, is counted but never held back: disposable providers, role addresses like info@, and likely typos. These deliver perfectly well, so excluding them would make the import disagree with the sender.

Audiences

An audience is a list you send to. There are two kinds, and the difference matters:

Membership is not reach

This is the single most misread number in the product. A list containing 8,757 people might send to 7,587, because unsubscribes, spam complaints, suppressed addresses and confirmed-undeliverable addresses are removed at send time.

So when you pick an audience in the campaign composer, the number underneath it reads “7,587 mailable from 8,757”. The second figure is what the list holds; the first is what a send actually reaches. If more than half a list is unreachable the hint turns amber — worth noticing before you send, not after.

The contacts view

Inside an audience, contacts are listed with the most recently added first, each showing when it joined this list and how it arrived — API, CSV import, Shopify, signup form. Note that joining a list is a different date from when the contact record was first created: re-importing an existing customer gives them a fresh join date on that list.

Segments

A segment is a set of rules that selects contacts. Build one, preview the count live, then either use it directly or turn it into a dynamic audience.

Rules combine with match all (every rule must be true) or match any(at least one). Groups let you nest the two — “engaged AND (bought shoes OR bought boots)”.

Rule types

Timeframes

Anything time-based supports twelve windows, including in the last N days, at least N days ago, between two dates, more than N days ago, and anniversary matching such as day falls in the next 7 days — which is how you build a birthday flow.

Templates & the builder

Start from the template library or build from scratch in the visual builder. Templates are reusable, so the ones you use often should live here rather than being rebuilt per campaign.

The builder produces email-safe HTML, which is not the same as web HTML — inbox clients are far more limited. Building visually rather than pasting HTML is what keeps a design intact in Outlook. You can still paste your own HTML if you have it.

Personalisation

Merge tags insert contact data — {{first_name}} and similar — and resolve per recipient at send time. Always set a fallback for a tag that might be empty, or some recipients will see a greeting with a blank where their name should be.

Media

Images live in the Media library, organised into folders and reusable across templates and campaigns. Upload once and reference it anywhere.

Creating a campaign

A campaign is one message to one set of people at one time. The composer has three steps: Details, Content, then Review & Send.

Step 1 — Details

Sending to more than one list

The audience picker is multi-select. Choosing three lists sends to everyone across them, and each person receives the message once even if they appear on all three — the overlap is removed automatically, and the mailable count shown accounts for it.

You can also refine targeting: also include another list or segment, or excludeone. Excluding is how you send to “everyone except recent buyers” without building a new segment for it.

Step 2 — Content

Step 3 — Scheduling

Leave the schedule empty to send immediately, or pick a date and time. Scheduled campaigns can still be edited — see below.

The review step

This is the most useful screen in the product and the easiest to skip. It shows a live preview of the actual email — the exact body that will be sent, with the preview text applied — beside a summary and a set of pre-send checks.

What the checks mean

The summary also breaks down who is excluded and why — “7,587 of 8,757 will receive this”, with counts for suppressed, unsubscribed and undeliverable. If that gap surprises you, stop and look at the list before sending.

UTM link tracking

With this enabled — it is on by default — every link in the email is tagged so clicks show up in your website analytics attributed to this campaign.

So a campaign called End of Summer Sale 2 with all three left blank turns https://shop.example.com/sale into https://shop.example.com/sale?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=end-of-summer-sale-2.

What is never tagged

Unsubscribe links, mailto: and tel: links, in-page anchors, and any link you already tagged yourself — your own tags always win, which is how you override a single link. Existing query strings and #fragments are preserved.

Editing a scheduled campaign

A scheduled campaign has not sent yet, so it can still be changed. From the campaign list or its detail page, choose Edit to change the name, audience, sender, template or send time. Changes apply to the queued send — you do not need to cancel and rebuild.

Once a campaign has started sending, settings are locked — retargeting something already half-delivered would change what the report means. Use Edit as a copy to branch a new draft instead.

Automations (flows)

Where a campaign is one message to everyone at once, an automation sends to one person at a time, triggered by something they did. This is usually where most of the revenue comes from, because the message arrives when it is relevant.

How a flow is built

A flow starts with a trigger, then a chain of steps:

Ready-made flows

Templates exist for the common ones — abandoned checkout, post-purchase follow-up, fulfilment notice, win-back, refund follow-up, and a welcome series for new contacts. Start from one and adjust rather than building from an empty canvas.

Deliverability

Deliverability is whether your mail reaches the inbox rather than the spam folder. It is earned slowly and lost quickly.

Suppressions

The suppression list holds addresses that must not be mailed. Entries arrive automatically, with different consequences:

Soft bounces use an escalating cooldown — roughly a week, then a fortnight, then a month — before an address is treated as permanently gone. A temporary failure should never cost you a real customer forever.

Practical rules

Reporting

Each campaign reports delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained and unsubscribed, with a workspace-wide view under Metrics and Stats.

Integrations & the API

Store and ad connections

Connecting a store under Connections syncs customers and their order history, and produces the events that power commerce segments and store-triggered flows — placed order, abandoned checkout, fulfilment, refunds. Ad platform connections sync audiences outward.

The onsite pixel

The Tracking section gives you a script to add to your website. It records onsite behaviour your backend never sees — which products someone viewed, which pages they visited — enabling browse-abandonment flows. It only records events for visitors it can identify, so call identify once you know who they are, or enable form capture.

API keys

For programmatic access, create a scoped key under API keys and read the Email API reference. Keys carry only the permissions you grant. A contact created through the API is not subscribed unless you say so explicitly — this is deliberate, and it protects you as much as the recipient.