Should you use Squarespace Email Campaigns? Pros, Cons, and Alternatives
Email marketing is an essential part of every business’s marketing strategy! It gives you a direct line of contact to customers who want to hear from your business, and it’s one of the most effective ways to drive sales.
On our blog, we’ve previously talked about why and how to get started with email marketing, but with the plethora of platforms that are now available, how do you know which one is actually best for you?!
In this post, we’ll take an in-depth look at Squarespace's Email Campaigns and share how it adds up in comparison to other email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Kit, and Flodesk. We’ll walk through the pros and cons of each so that by the end, you’ll have the knowledge and confidence to make the right choice for your business.
Let’s dive in!
Why is Email Marketing Important?
Email marketing is the easiest way to create a direct line of communication with the people who are most interested in your business and what you have to offer!
These days, it’s really a non-negotiable in your marketing strategy because of the benefits it has for conversion rates and driving sales. The people who join your subscriber list are going to be the most motivated customers when you have new products, offers, or promotions, so it makes sense that the emails they receive should be functional, pleasant to look at, and easy to navigate for them.
Now, getting people to join your email list can be the trickiest (and most daunting) part of this whole process. But don’t worry, there are ways to make it easier and more enticing for your website visitors.
Our favorite way to get people interested in signing up for a newsletter is by offering a freebie!
Freebies can be anything from a workbook to an online training and are meant to motivate people to sign-up and join your community. They’re super helpful in growing your list which is why we’ve created Freebie Add-On pages for all of our Premium Squarespace Templates.
Example from our Nyx Premium Squarespace Template
These pages allow site visitors to view information about your free offer and sign up for your mailing list directly from your website. You can purchase them as a bundle with any of our website templates (to get 30%off!) or on their own, so adding a freebie to your site is always an option no matter which stage of business you’re at.
Example from our Shelley Premium Squarespace Template
👉 Everything You Need to Know to Create Freebies That (Actually) Grow Your Email List
👉 Why you NEED an Email List
Okay now, without further ado, let’s get into the specifics of Squarespace Email Campaigns!
Squarespace Email Marketing Overview
Squarespace first launched Squarespace Email Campaigns in 2018 and since then, they’ve made several tweaks to this marketing tool to create a more streamlined, efficient, and all-encompassing experience.
Squarespace Email Campaigns allows business owners to grow and communicate with their audience while staying true to their brand! It keeps all marketing endeavours in-house and makes email marketing a simple and beautiful process with templated emails, audience management, and marketing analytics.
Pricing
You can add email marketing to any Squarespace website, but it is an additional charge on top of your regular Squarespace subscription price.
Pricing for Email Campaigns starts at $8/month (if you pay annually) to send 500 emails each month and increases as your email demand increases. The great thing about this is that it’s super affordable for someone who is just starting out and not sending a large amount of emails. There’s room to grow and you aren’t immediately forced to pay a large amount for features that you won’t even be using.
Plus, all Email Campaigns plans include unlimited contacts, premium email templates, marketing automations, and more!
Pros & Cons
If you’re an existing Squarespace user, here are some pros and cons to staying within the platform and using their Email Campaigns tool.
Pros:
Keeps everything within the same platform
Using Squarespace’s built in email marketing allows you to streamline integrations and access any content that you have already previously uploaded like logos, color palettes, fonts, and more.
From a UX perspective, you’ve already learned the process of using Squarespace templates, blocks, and other editing features so drafting your emails will be a breeze.
Pricing is affordable, especially for someone just starting out with email marketing
Beautiful and convenient email templates to get you started or provide inspiration
Intuitive to use and easy to understand, even if you don’t have a ton of experience with Squarespace
Email scheduling and automations are available
Access to email campaign analytics (delivered, opened, clicks, unsubscribed, etc.)
Great support (one of the things we love most about Squarespace!)
Cons:
Not as extensive as other email marketing platforms
Squarespace has greatly enhanced their email marketing capabilities over the years, but because Email Campaigns isn’t ALL that Squarespace does, there are some features that are a bit more basic. For example, if you are looking for more advanced audience tagging or a multi-step onboarding series for large audiences, this platform is probably not going to cut it.
Somewhat limited design capabilities
There’s no option to use custom code or way to upload your own custom email layout, so other than colors and fonts, the design of Squarespace’s emails is on the simpler side.
Hard send limits on emails per month (you cannot go over the amount that you pay for!)
No A/B split testing or other built-in advanced conversion rate testing
Varying deliverability
Because a lot of the Squarespace Email Campaigns templates make use of images and fancy text to spruce up the design, they are more likely to get caught in spam filters which is definitely something to be aware of.
Alright, now that you know all there is to know about Squarespace Email Campaigns, let’s do a bit of comparison to other popular email marketing platforms out there!
Flodesk Overview
Flodesk is one of the newest email marketing platforms on the market. It’s most praised for its beautiful, design-forward templates and easy to use interface. We are actually huge fans of Flodesk here at Big Cat Creative and have we were early adopters when it first came out.
It was sufficient for us for a while, however, we don't use it anymore due to it's lack of advanced features. We now use Kit for this reason.
Pricing
Flodesk has three main subscription plans depending on your needs. Their price structure is also based on how many subscribers you have, however you’ll find that they have slightly lower prices than the other platforms we’ve talked about! Their Lite plan starts at $19/month and things go up from there.
They also offer a free plan to get you started and familiar with the platform, however you aren’t actually able to send emails on that plan, so once you start to grow your list, you’ll need to upgrade.
👉 View all of Flodesk’s pricing details here
👉 Use this link to sign up and get 50% OFF your first year of Flodesk!
Pros & Cons
Pros:
Easy to use (the platform is very simple and intuitive)
Simple pricing structure with no hidden additions
Basic yet robust analytics
Flodesk doesn’t offer a ton of very advanced analytics, but the ones they do provide are super helpful in terms of how the platform functions
Beautiful templates (note, this is "Con" too, see below!)
Flodesk puts design at the forefront of their email strategy, which we love! They also make things super easy with templates and layout blocks so that you don’t have to do all the work if you don’t want to.
Code free
Plenty of resources via the Flodesk community
Affiliate friendly
Cons:
There isn’t really an “entry level” or free to start plan, so you have to dive right in with a cost commitment
Lack of advanced workflow triggers, A/B split testing, and other more advanced metric tools. While they are always adding more, it's still way behind compared to Kit, for example. If you need more advanced workflows, conditions etc, Flodesk is pretty limited.
Somewhat limited customer support
Flodesk doesn’t have a live support chat or quick way to contact someone at any time. You have to send their support team and email and wait to hear back. This is better than nothing, but can be a bit frustrating if you need an answer quickly as they are usually pretty slow to respond.
It can be a bit slow and clunky to use, you often have to wait for things to load and it takes a while to navigate around.
There are also cons to having "beautiful templates" at the forefront. While Flodesk’s image-forward, design-heavy emails look beautiful, they aren’t always the most effective. Because the designs are image-rendered. These image-rendered emails can load slowly, be blocked by email clients, and hurt accessibility and deliverability, meaning your message may never fully reach the reader. Text-based emails in general are lighter and more reliable when it comes to deliverability/readability.
Kit Overview
Kit (formerly Convertkit) is a creator marketing platform that focuses on growing your business through simple email creation, intuitive automations, and seamless audience management. This platform was created with accessibility in mind so that creators could grow their business without wasting time on impossibly complicated systems.
From our experience (we use Kit exclusively now!), it's a really advanced and robust platform. It's not perfect, but after using a lot of different builders, it's our top pick!
Pricing
Kit’s pricing isn’t necessarily affordable, but the structure is pretty simple. The more subscribers you have, the more you pay! They do have a free plan for up to 10,000 subscribers, but don’t get too excited, because the features under this plan are pretty limited.
Their higher tiered plans do come with a 14 day free trial and you can always contact their team if you need help with choosing a plan that’s best for you, or if you need a custom plan.
👉 View all of Kit’s pricing details here
Pros & Cons
Pros:
Excellent deliverability
Kit’s emails are set up with the least amount of potential spam triggers possible
Flexible and advanced user management (easy tagging and sorting)
In-depth segmentation and sequences
Kit makes it really easy to categorize your audience which creates the perfect base for creating targeted email sequences
Option to offer a paid newsletter subscription to your audience
Offers a ton of automation tools and resources to help make sending sequences easier
Offers various form types as well as a rudimentary landing page builder to help build your audience (if you don’t already have a Squarespace site!)
It's really FAST to use. The platform itself never lags, and is really fast to navigate.
Great support team. Fast, friendly, and easy to talk to a human.
Robust email design
While they don't have beautiful templates out of the box like Flodesk, Kit has put a bit more focus on design capability in recent years, and their editor is a lot more advanced than it used to be. However it's less intuitive and not "templated", so to do more advanced design, it takes quite a bit of messing around.
Analytics
There's a lot of analytics they offer, especially compared to Flodesk, but not as many as Mailchimp, however usually pretty sufficient for small business owners.
Affiliate friendly
Cons:
Expensive
Like we said above, Kit’s pricing isn’t super affordable, especially if you have a really large audience.
Does offer some A/B testing, but in a limited capacity
Templates can be relatively basic and the design tools aren’t super intuitive
If you don’t have at least a basic understanding of design, then you might find it tricky to create something pretty on this platform.
Mailchimp Overview
Mailchimp is an email marketing service that was created back in 2001. It is wildly popular amongst all different types of businesses and entrepreneurs and probably most known for its low barrier to entry (it’s free to use for the first 250 contacts!).
Pricing
Mailchimp has four main plans - Free, Essentials, Standard, and Premium. The price for each of these plans (minus the free one) increases as your subscriber count increases, so you could be paying anywhere from $13/month to upwards of $300+/month depending on how large of a subscriber list you have.
They do offer a 14 day free trial for the two lower prices plans, which is really nice for dipping your toes in and getting a feel for what the platform is like!
👉 View all of Mailchimp’s pricing details here
Pros & Cons
Pros:
Free version for small audiences
Integrates easily with Squarespace and many other platforms
In-depth analytics and comparative metrics (on higher tiered plans)
Offers templates to start your emails with
Offers a variety of add-on features for when your business expands
Includes in-depth email automations, onboarding sequences and audience segmentation capabilities
Decent deliverability (not as susceptible to spam filters)
Has a mobile app for creating emails and tracking performance on your phone
Frequent updates, meaning that the platform’s software is always up to date which leads to less issues for you as a user
Cons:
Subscriptions plans get very pricey as your subscriber count goes up
Mailchimp prohibits affiliate marketing
In general, you are still able to use affiliate links in your emails, however the platform does not allow affiliate marketers who are generating business for someone else or the use of denylisted URLs. If you aren’t sure where you fall in this matter, it’s best to just do the research and cover all your bases. You can find Mailchimp’s policy on this here.
Less focus on Audience lists
Mailchimp recommends that you only have one main audience list and then use tags to categorize your subscribers. If you’re okay with this, then it’s no problem, however it might be less convenient for someone who relies on multiple lists for organizing their contacts.
Templates can be relatively basic and the design tools aren’t super intuitive
If you don’t have at least a basic understanding of design, then you might find it tricky to create something pretty on this platform.
Frequent updates
Yes, this is also a pro, but if you don’t use the platform frequently, it can be hard to keep track of the constant platform updates.
So, Should you use Squarespace Email Campaigns or Another Platform?
The short answer here is that no one can tell you explicitly which email marketing platform is going to be best for your business. However, shopping around and learning about the unique functions of each platform can help you make a more informed decision!
Squarespace Email Campaigns is a great start and super easy to use if you already have a Squarespace website. However, if you’re looking for something more advanced, Kit or Mailchimp might be the way to go for you. And if you want something that’s more design focused, you should definitely check out Flodesk (and don’t forget to use our special link to get 50% off your first year!).
To help you out some more, here’s a comparison table that you can use to easily judge which platform is best for you in specific areas.
| 🥇 | 🥈 | 🥉 | 4th | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Squarespace | Flodesk | Kit | Mailchimp |
| Ease of Use | Flodesk | Squarespace | Kit | Mailchimp |
| Design | Flodesk | Squarespace | Mailchimp | Kit |
| Analytics | Mailchimp | Squarespace | Kit | Flodesk |
| Advanced Features | Mailchimp | Kit | Flodesk | Squarespace |
| Deliverability | Kit | Mailchimp | Flodesk | Squarespace |
| Support | Squarespace | Kit | Mailchimp | Flodesk |
We hope that this article provided the in-depth analysis of Squarespace Email Campaigns that you were looking for, and that it was useful in helping you find an email marketing platform that aligns with your business needs!
Want more small biz tips? Check out the posts below:
How to Deliver an Opt-In Freebie Instantly in Squarespace
How to Attract Clients and Grow your Business on Instagram: A Guide for 2025
Crafting the Perfect Sales Page on Squarespace
Should you Host Your Course on Squarespace? (Pros, Cons & Alternatives)
8 Pages you Should Have on Your Website as a Small Business Owner
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