Email Campaigns

Updated Jun 3, 2026 Promotions & Growth

Email Campaigns is TitanCart’s built-in newsletter tool. You build mailing lists, collect subscribers from your storefront, and send email campaigns to them — all from one screen, Growth → Email Campaigns. It’s part of TitanCart with nothing extra to install, but it’s switched off by default, so the first step is turning it on.

Note: There are two sides to this feature. Subscribers and lists are the people you can email and how they’re grouped. Campaigns are the emails themselves. New subscribers go through double opt-in — they confirm their email by clicking a link before they’ll receive anything — so your campaigns only ever reach people who genuinely asked for them.

1. Turning on Email Campaigns

Open Extensions, find Newsletters, and enable it. The Email Campaigns item then appears under the Growth menu.

The page is organised into tabs across the top:

Email Campaigns — the newsletters you write and send.
Templates — reusable email layouts to start a campaign from.
Autoresponders — emails sent automatically when someone joins a list (your welcome / confirmation email).
Tracking Campaigns — optional labels for grouping related sends.
Subscriber Lists — your mailing lists.
Subscribers — everyone who has signed up.

A Newsletter Settings button (top right) opens the settings for batch size, the storefront sign-up surfaces, and the mail server — covered in sections 4, 6, and 7.

2. Mailing lists

A campaign is always sent to one or more lists, so lists come first. On the Subscriber Lists tab, create a list with a name (e.g. “Newsletter”, “VIP customers”) and an optional description. Each list has a few switches:

Show on checkout — adds an opt-in checkbox for this list to the checkout page (when the checkout sign-up surface is on; see section 4).
Show on registration — adds an opt-in checkbox for this list to the account sign-up form.
Autoresponder — the email automatically sent when someone joins this list. This is how the double opt-in confirmation email is delivered, and it’s also where a welcome email lives (see section 5).

The list shows a running subscriber count, which updates as people join or leave.

3. Subscribers and double opt-in

The Subscribers tab lists everyone who has signed up, with their email, name, which lists they’re on, and their status. Summary tiles show totals for active, confirmed, and unsubscribed subscribers.

When someone signs up — from your storefront or because you added them — they start unconfirmed. TitanCart emails them a confirmation link (the list’s autoresponder, carrying an activation link). When they click it, they’re marked confirmed and the link stops working. Campaigns only go to confirmed, active subscribers — this double opt-in keeps your list clean and your sending reputation healthy.

Active — a normal subscriber. If they’re also confirmed, they’ll receive campaigns.
Unsubscribed — opted out; automatically skipped on every send (see section 8).
Bounced — their address failed; also skipped from then on.

You can add a subscriber by hand from this tab — useful for importing a known contact — and choose whether to mark them already confirmed. If a subscriber never received or lost their confirmation email, they can simply submit your sign-up form again and a fresh confirmation is sent.

4. Collecting subscribers from your storefront

TitanCart can gather sign-ups in four places. Turn them on under Newsletter Settings:

Footer form — a “subscribe” form in your storefront footer. New sign-ups here join all your active lists. (Show subscribe form in footer.)
Subscribe popup — a one-time signup modal. In the Subscribe Popup settings, enable it and pick the list it subscribes people to, then tune the trigger (after a time delay, on exit intent, or either), the delay, how long to wait before showing it again, and the heading, text, and button label. The popup won’t appear until you’ve chosen a target list.
Checkout checkbox — an opt-in checkbox on the checkout page, one per list flagged Show on checkout. (Show subscribe checkbox at checkout.)
Registration checkbox — the same idea on the account sign-up form, one per list flagged Show on registration. (Show subscribe checkbox at registration.)

Whichever surface they use, the visitor still gets the confirmation email and has to confirm before they’ll receive campaigns.

5. Writing a campaign, template, or autoresponder

There are three kinds of email, all written in the same editor:

Email campaign — a one-off newsletter you send to chosen lists. Created as a draft until you send it.
Template — a reusable starting point. Build your house style once, then copy it into new campaigns.
Autoresponder — sent automatically when someone joins a list it’s attached to (assign it on the list). This delivers the confirmation email and any welcome message.

Each email has a subject, an HTML body, and (for a campaign) the lists to send to and an optional tracking campaign label. You can personalise the body with merge tags, which are swapped for each recipient’s details when the email is sent:

%SUBSCRIBER_EMAIL — the recipient’s email address.
%FIRST_NAME / %LAST_NAME — their name, if you have it.
%ACTIVATION_LINK — the confirmation link, for use in an autoresponder (this is what makes double opt-in work).

Tip: Before sending to a whole list, use Send test to mail the campaign to a single address — your own — and check it renders the way you expect in a real inbox.

6. Sending, with live progress, pause and resume

When you send a campaign, TitanCart doesn’t try to email everyone in one go — that would time out on a large list. Instead it queues every recipient and sends them in batches in the background, a batch at a time, roughly once a minute. This keeps sending reliable no matter how big the list is.

While a send is running you’ll see a live progress bar with a breakdown of sent, failed, skipped, and bounced, plus a percentage complete. You can pause a send and resume it later — handy if you spot a problem partway through.

Recipients are the confirmed, active subscribers on the lists you targeted. Unconfirmed sign-ups aren’t included.
Skipped recipients are addresses that are suppressed — unsubscribed or previously bounced (see section 8).
A failed send is retried a few times on later batches before it’s marked failed for good.
Set Emails per batch in Newsletter Settings (default 10, up to 200). Larger batches finish a send sooner, but each background pass takes longer — the default suits most stores.

Note: Background sending relies on your site’s scheduled-tasks system (WP-Cron), which runs when your site gets traffic. On a brand-new or very quiet site a send can sit waiting until the next visit; once traffic picks up it drains on its own. A very high-volume store may prefer a real server cron for steadier delivery.

7. Sending newsletters from a different mail server

Email only actually leaves your site if an outgoing mail (SMTP) server is configured. By default, campaigns use the same SMTP settings as the rest of your store’s email — the ones under Settings → General → Emails — which is the right choice for most stores: one set of credentials, everything goes out together.

If you’d rather send newsletters through a separate service (for example a dedicated bulk-email provider, kept apart from your order and account emails), open Newsletter Settings → Mailing Server and switch on Use custom SMTP for newsletters. Then fill in:

SMTP host — your provider’s server, as the hostname or host:port (for example smtp.example.com:465). Without a port, 587 is used.
SMTP username and password, and tick SMTP requires authentication if your provider needs a login (most do).
SMTP encryption — None, TLS, or SSL, to match your provider.

Use the Send test button on this screen to mail yourself a test through the exact pipeline a real campaign uses; the result tells you which mail route was used so you know your settings took effect. If the override is on but you leave the host blank, TitanCart safely falls back to your store’s main email settings.

8. Unsubscribes and suppression

If someone asks to be removed, open them on the Subscribers tab and set their status to Unsubscribed. From then on they’re automatically skipped on every campaign — you don’t have to remember to leave them out. The same automatic suppression applies to any address marked Bounced, and it works across all campaigns, not just the one where it happened.

Note: Unsubscribes are currently handled by you from the Subscribers tab; a recipient-facing one-click unsubscribe link is on the roadmap. Until it ships, make sure every commercial email tells people how to opt out (for example, “reply with UNSUBSCRIBE to be removed”) and process those requests promptly. Sending bulk commercial email also carries legal obligations that vary by country — typically a genuine opt-out, your real postal address in the email, and only emailing people who agreed to hear from you. Check the rules that apply where your customers are before you send.

What Email Campaigns do — and don’t

Note: Email Campaigns sends email to people who subscribed and confirmed — it isn’t a way to email every customer who ever ordered. Campaigns go out in the background in batches, so a large send completes over several minutes rather than instantly. Sending depends on a working outgoing mail server, set either store-wide or as a newsletter-only override. Subscriber data lives in TitanCart’s own tables. There’s no built-in sync to outside email platforms — TitanCart manages your lists itself.

Troubleshooting

“No recipients found” when I try to send. A campaign only goes to confirmed subscribers on the lists you chose. Check the targeted lists actually contain subscribers who have clicked their confirmation link — newly added, unconfirmed sign-ups don’t count.
My emails aren’t arriving. Email needs an outgoing mail (SMTP) server. Confirm one is set under Settings → General → Emails (or switch on the newsletter override and fill it in), then use Send test on the Mailing Server settings. Also check the recipient’s spam folder; note that placeholder addresses like name@example.com are rejected by mail servers, so test with a real inbox.
A subscriber is stuck “unconfirmed”. They need to click the confirmation link in their email. They can re-submit your sign-up form to get a fresh one, or you can edit the subscriber and mark them confirmed yourself if you’re sure they opted in.
The send looks stuck partway. Campaigns send in background batches roughly once a minute, driven by your site’s scheduled tasks — a quiet site may pause between batches until it next gets traffic. You can also pause/resume a send deliberately.
The subscribe popup isn’t showing. Enable it in the Subscribe Popup settings and choose a target list — it won’t appear without one. It also stays hidden for a set number of days after a visitor dismisses or subscribes.
How does someone unsubscribe? For now, set their status to Unsubscribed on the Subscribers tab; they’re then skipped automatically on all future sends (see section 8).