A campaign, without the campaign tool.

Our other guides cover one-to-one mail: an agent reads a spreadsheet and writes something specific to each person. This one is the opposite case. Same message, lots of people, and it should look like you meant it.

That's the job a campaign platform exists to do, and it's worth asking what you're actually buying. Usually it's three things: an editor, a list, and a send button. If your list already lives somewhere and an agent can write the HTML, you're paying for the editor.

HTML email is genuinely horrible, which is the point

Let's not pretend otherwise. Writing HTML email by hand is miserable work. You're writing for clients that stopped updating their rendering engines years ago, so it's nested tables, inline styles, no flexbox worth trusting, and Outlook doing something creative with your padding. Then it has to survive dark mode, a 320px phone, and the image blocking that's on by default in most corporate mail.

Every one of those constraints is written down somewhere. They're tedious, they're well documented, and they don't change much. That's exactly the sort of problem a model handles well, and exactly the sort a person does badly at four o'clock on a Friday.

So ask for it plainly:

Write the September product update as an HTML email.
Table-based layout, inline styles, 600px max width,
readable in dark mode, and it has to degrade to something
legible with images off. Plain text version too.
Save it as a template called product-update-sept.

What comes back is a template you can look at before anyone else does. If the padding is wrong in Outlook, say so and get another one. That loop takes a minute, which is less time than finding the right panel in most editors.

Keep the copy on our side, not in your repository

The reason to use template_manage rather than pasting HTML into every send is boring and important. Copy changes. If the wording lives in your codebase, changing "September" to "October" is a pull request, a review and a deploy. If it lives as a template, it's an edit.

It also means the agent can revise a campaign without touching your application at all. You can give someone in marketing the ability to change what goes out without giving them the ability to change what ships.

POST /broadcasts
{
  "template": "product-update-sept",
  "audience": "customers-active",
  "from": "Waymail <news.yourdomain.com>",
  "subject": "What we shipped in September"
}

Then broadcast_send, and the agent can read the result back with email_metrics when you ask how it did. No dashboard, no export, no CSV of opens that you then have to interpret.

Send bulk from a subdomain. Always.

This is the one piece of advice in this guide that isn't optional, and it's the thing most teams skip.

Send your campaigns from news.yourdomain.com, not from yourdomain.com. Reputation attaches to the sending domain. If a campaign goes badly, and one eventually will, you want the damage contained somewhere that isn't the domain your password resets and invoices depend on. Mailbox providers treat the two as separate senders, which is the whole point.

It costs nothing. We don't limit domains the way most providers do, so there's no plan upgrade hiding behind this advice. Verify the subdomain and use it.

What you stop paying for

Run it for a list of ten thousand. A campaign platform at that size is commonly $80 to $150 a month, and you're paying it in the months you send nothing, because you're being charged to store contacts rather than to send mail.

We don't meter contacts. A monthly campaign to ten thousand people is 10,000 emails, which sits inside the $9 plan with room left for your transactional traffic. The template lives with us, the list can stay wherever you keep it, and the bill follows what you actually sent.

The saving isn't really the point though. The point is that there's one fewer system holding a copy of your customer list, one fewer login, and one fewer place where the data has quietly drifted out of date since the last import.

Where a real platform still wins

We'd rather tell you this than have you find out in month three.

If you need a preference centre where people choose which categories they hear about, buy a platform. If you need consent records with timestamps and proof of opt-in for a regulator, buy a platform. If non-technical colleagues need to build and schedule campaigns without asking anyone, they want a UI, and an agent prompt is not a UI.

We handle unsubscribe links and suppression, so the legal floor is covered and a recipient who opts out stays opted out across everything you send. That's not the same as consent management, and we're not going to dress it up as one.

The version of this that works is a small team, a list they own, and a handful of campaigns a year that need to look decent. That describes a lot of companies who are currently paying for considerably more.