Send email campaigns

Email lets you write an email to a property's subscribers in LopeBase, once or every week or month, and send it through the email service you already use. Right now that is Sequenzy. Your subscribers stay in Sequenzy: LopeBase reads the names and sizes of your lists and segments, never the people on them, and never adds, removes, or tags anyone. Sequenzy sends the email and handles unsubscribes.

Before your first campaign

Only an admin can write, approve, and send campaigns. Building, previews, tests, counts, checks, reading your changelog, and sending are free on every plan. Only writing with AI spends AI credits.

1. Connect Sequenzy for the property

   Open the property on Email. Without a Sequenzy connection it shows Connect; that opens the Sequenzy form on Connections for that property. Use an API key that is allowed to manage campaigns. See Connections.

2. Fill in the settings

   Open the Settings tab. Set the From name, a From address on a domain Sequenzy has verified, an optional Reply-to address, and a Postal address. Under Approval, pick Review or Autopilot (see Review or Autopilot). Then press Save settings. A campaign cannot be approved without the from address and the postal address. Open Email settings

3. Add your changelog

   Optional, but it is what product update emails are made of. See Read your changelog.

Read your changelog

The Changelog tab lists what the property shipped, read from where you already write it down. Each source is read again every six hours, and Refresh reads them now. Open Changelog

Press Find sources to look for feeds on the property's site (the ones its pages declare, and common addresses like /changelog.json or /changelog/feed.xml), the repositories its GitHub connection covers, and an adapter changelog. Press Add next to the one you want, or pick a kind, paste the feed address or owner/name, and press Add source.

When two sources describe the same thing, it is listed once, with the fuller description. An entry marked Sent already went out in a campaign. Press Hide on an entry to keep it out of campaigns, AI drafts, and agents; Show brings it back. Removing a source removes its entries too.

Write a campaign

On the Campaigns tab, press New campaign. The campaign opens with three tabs on the left and the preview on the right. Changes save on their own a moment after you stop typing.

On Content, set the Subject and the Preview text (the line inboxes show after the subject), then build the body from blocks:

Move a block with the arrows on its card, or remove it with the bin. Every link to your own site gets utm_source=email, utm_medium=email, and the campaign's own utm_campaign (a tag a link already has is kept). Links to other sites are left as you wrote them. That way visits and signups from the email show up in its Stats and in your pageview counts by campaign.

Every campaign ends with a footer you cannot remove: your from name, your postal address, and an unsubscribe link Sequenzy fills in for each person. The Internal name at the bottom is only for you, in LopeBase and in Sequenzy.

Write it with AI

At the top of Content, Write it with AI asks what the email is for, then writes the subject, preview text, and blocks from the changelog entries not sent yet, recent published articles, and a few facts about the property, like how many people the email goes to.

Press Write draft. The draft replaces what was there, and you can keep going while it runs. Other subject lines it suggests show under the button; click one to use it. Your choices stay with the campaign. Press Make this the default to start every new campaign, and every email the Product update email template writes, from them.

With a long changelog, the draft does not list everything. LopeBase ranks the entries by how much a subscriber would care: new things people can use first, then improvements, then fixes. Chores, dependency updates, and other behind-the-scenes work are left out when there is enough else to say.

It writes in the property's brand voice, and when that is empty, in the voice you set for its articles under GrowContent. Your content house rules, and no dashes if you turned that on, apply too.

Before it is saved, the draft is checked: links go only to your own site, your main button's link, or a changelog entry or article it was given, a changelog block names only real entries, and a paragraph with a number that none of those facts back is taken out. Read it before you send it anyway.

To rewrite one heading, paragraph, or button, press the sparkle on its card, say how to change it if you like, and press Rewrite. A button keeps its link.

A draft and a rewrite each spend a few AI credits; the button shows the estimate first. With your own AI key they spend none. See AI credits.

Preview it

Every campaign is drawn in the property's brand and template: its logo (or its icon and name), its brand color on buttons, links, and highlights, its page and text colors, its fonts, and its button shape, laid out as Classic, Banner, Letter, or Digest. Set them on the property's Brand tab. Colors that would be hard to read are adjusted, so button text and links always stand out.

The preview shows the email at desktop or phone width, in light or dark colors. Until you run the checks it is LopeBase's own render, with a sample name in place of each person's. After Run checks it shows Sequenzy's own render of the saved draft, labeled Exact, from Sequenzy. Some inboxes, like Gmail on a phone, recolor email in dark mode on their own, which no preview can show exactly.

Pick who it goes to

On Audience, pick from Send to: every active subscriber, one of your Sequenzy lists, or one of your saved segments, each with its count. Press Count now for a fresh count of who the campaign goes to. A campaign sent in waves goes to its waves' lists, so pick those on Sending instead.

Choose how it sends

On Sending, How it sends has up to three choices. Changing it after approving puts the campaign back to draft, like any edit.

Waves only use lists you already have; LopeBase never makes a list or tags anyone. Before it saves the waves, it asks Sequenzy to count the lists one by one and then together, and saves them only when the two agree, so nobody is on two lists and gets the email twice. The same check runs again right before sending. When waves cannot be offered, for example with fewer than two lists, How it sends says why. Segments cannot be waves, because Sequenzy cannot count two segments together.

Check, test, approve, and send

1. Run the checks

   On Sending, press Run checks. LopeBase saves the draft in Sequenzy, counts the recipients, and checks the subject, the from and postal address, the unsubscribe link, that every link and image uses https, that the email is under 100 KB (Gmail cuts off longer ones), and any merge tag with no value. Sequenzy's own content check runs too, with its grade. Errors block approval; warnings do not.

2. Send yourself a test

   Under Send a test, tick who gets it and press Send test. Tests only go to people on your workspace's team.

3. Approve it

   Press Approve. The checks run again with a fresh count, and the approval holds for exactly this email and audience. Edit anything a reader would see after approving, and it goes back to draft: approve it again.

4. Send it now or later

   Press Send now, then Send it to confirm; it goes to Sequenzy and sends in about five minutes. Or pick a time under Or send at and press Schedule. A scheduled campaign goes to Sequenzy up to 15 minutes before its time, after one last check and count, and Unschedule takes it off until then.

Right before a campaign goes to Sequenzy, LopeBase counts the audience again. If there is no count, a check fails, or the count changed by more than a tenth (or more than 25 people, whichever is more) since you approved it, the campaign is Held and nothing is sent. The Sending tab says why. Every step, from approval to the hand-off, is in the audit log.

If something stops LopeBase halfway through handing a campaign to Sequenzy, it asks Sequenzy what it already has before trying again, and never sends the same email twice. An answer it does not understand keeps the campaign held for you.

Review or Autopilot

Approval in Email settings decides who approves a property's campaigns. A campaign you write and send yourself is always approved by you on its page. The choice matters for the product update email that writes itself.

Autopilot sends only when all of these are true:

• Sequenzy gave an exact count of who it goes to, taken just now, and again right before sending.
• That count is at or under the Autopilot limit in Email settings, 5,000 people unless you change it (up to 50,000).
• The property has sent a campaign before that a person approved. A property's first campaign always needs a person.
• The count did not move by more than a tenth, or 25 people, since it approved itself.

After it approves itself, it waits for the Cancel window in Email settings: 60 minutes unless you change it, and never less than 15. While it waits, the campaign page shows Sending soon with a Cancel button, the bell shows a notice, and the people who get the property's content notices get an email. Press Cancel and it is never sent.

Send a product update every week or month

The Product update email template on Pipelines writes and sends an update email from what shipped. Its steps are Gather what shipped, Write the update email, You read the email, and Send the update email.

1. Set up Email for the property

   Connect Sequenzy, fill in the from address and postal address, and add a changelog source. The template cannot start until the property has these, and says what is missing.

2. Run it on a schedule

   On Pipelines, open Product update email and add a schedule for the property, every week or month. See Run it on a schedule.

3. Approve each email, or let Autopilot

   Each run writes one email with AI from the changelog entries not in an email yet. On Review, the run waits for you: open the email from the notice, read it, and press Approve and send on its page, which also moves the run on. On Autopilot, the check step is skipped when the email approved itself, and it sends after the cancel window.

A run with nothing new in the changelog writes nothing. A scheduled one does not start at all, and the schedule says it was skipped and why. Writing the email spends AI credits, so a run only starts when the workspace has enough for the most it can cost. Every email a run writes shows on the Campaigns tab like any other.

After it goes to Sequenzy

Press Check status to ask Sequenzy where it is now; LopeBase also checks every 15 minutes. Until it starts sending, Cancel campaign cancels it in Sequenzy too, every wave of it.

The bell and the Notifications page show a campaign waiting for approval, one sending soon on Autopilot, one held, one that failed or only partly sent, and one Sequenzy is reviewing. An email from a scheduled run that waits for your approval, one sending soon on Autopilot, and one held while LopeBase was sending it on its own also come by email, to the people who get the property's content notices (every admin, unless you chose addresses in Content settings).

See how it did

Once a campaign is sending or sent, its page opens on the Stats tab. LopeBase asks Sequenzy for the numbers every hour on the first day, then once a day for 30 days; Update now asks right away.

• Email: sent, delivered, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces, and complaints, from Sequenzy. A number Sequenzy does not report shows as Not reported, never as zero; Sequenzy does not report complaints. Opens are approximate, because some email apps load images on their own and others block them.
• Clicks per link: the links people clicked most, from Sequenzy.
• On the site: visits that started from a link in the email, and signups or other conversions credited to it, from LopeBase's pageview counter by the email's utm_campaign. Without the counter on the site, they show as Not reported.

Let an agent help

An agent connected to LopeBase's MCP server with the manage scope can read your changelog, read and set the property's brand and sender, preview any email as it will look, hide a changelog entry, write a campaign with AI (with a goal, tone, and main button) or by hand, choose how it sends, count who it goes to, send a test to your team, read its stats, unschedule it, and cancel it. Approving a send to your subscribers stays with you: in the property's Email settings, Let agents approve sends is off unless you turn it on. While it is off, an agent that tries is told to ask you, and nothing is sent.

Where to go next

• Connections: connect Sequenzy for a property.
• Pageview counter: see visits and signups by campaign.
• Pipelines: schedule the Product update email.
• AI credits: what AI drafts cost.
• Team: who is an admin.