Introducing Email Hub and 10+ other updates
In 2020, my co-founders and I did over 1,000 demos of Circle.
A question we were asked over and over again was whether we’d ever consider building email features.
Back then, the answer was no.
We had our hands full with a roadmap which included events, chat, payments, courses, and so on.
Flash forward a few years.
It’s 2022, and I’m having lunch with one of our most successful customers.
They tell me about how much they love our product, but then go on a tangent about how complicated it is for them to run their email marketing, and how important it is for us to eventually build this into Circle.
Initially as I heard them speak, I was taken aback by the fact that they thought this was Circle’s problem to solve.
But introspecting on it later, I came to a realization:
1) They’re not alone. 90%+ of our customers probably have to deal with a version of what they shared with me.
2) If a customer thinks it’s our problem, it is our problem. Even if it has nothing to do with our core product.
Over the next few months, the team and I opened up to the idea of building an email feature.
It started off as a very simple idea: allowing communities to email their members.
And over the course of the past year, it’s turned into something truly special.
Today, I’m excited to introduce Circle’s Marketing Hub — a new email platform which gives you the power to unify your audience and community right within Circle.
Marketing Hub introduces three new building blocks to Circle:
- Email marketing: Send or schedule personalized emails broadcasts
- Marketing automation: Engage your audience with personalized email journeys
- Audience CRM: Manage your members and contacts in a unified CRM
To activate it for your community, simply navigate to the Marketing tab in the left navigation menu in your admin area and click the Activate Marketing Hub button.
Once activated, you can send personalized email campaigns, automate engagement, and manage your audience — all in one place, and all on Circle.
(See FAQ for pricing details.)
Let’s dive in…
1. Email marketing
Starting today, you can run your email marketing directly in Circle.
This opens up a brand new channel to engage and communicate with your audience — and ultimately turn them into engaged members.
Send personalized email broadcasts
With email broadcasts, you can send personalized newsletters, announcements, reminders, promotions, and more without ever leaving Circle.
Design beautiful emails
Our new email editor gives you a simple way to design beautiful email broadcasts, with easy linking to conversations, events, and courses in your community.
Track end-to-end engagement
Once a broadcast is sent, you see how your audience engages with your community content by monitoring deliveries, opens, and clicks.
Use cases
- Newsletters: Create and send your newsletter, linking to valuable content in your community — like popular posts, comments, upcoming events, new members, courses, and special offers.
- Announcements: Announce a new community initiative, product, course, or event with targeted follow-ups.
- Event promotions: Email your audience to drive RSVPs for your events with email reminder sequences to maximize attendance.
- Promotions and offers: Promote a special offer or sale with hyper-targeted and personalized email campaigns.
- Community growth: As you grow your audience, nurture top-of-funnel contacts so that they convert into engaged community members. Use email to build the relationship, and then send offers for your membership, courses, and other products.
- Learning engagement: Use email to create reminders and accountability for your students, clients, and members so they further engage with your course, coaching, cohorts, and other learning experiences.
Learn more about email marketing →
2. Marketing automation
Marketing automations let you scale your audience and community engagement without the manual effort.
Email workflows
Once you activate Marketing Hub, you’ll unlock a Send email action in workflows — and soon, audience segments.
You can use this action to build email-centric workflows for personalized member experiences, automated engagement paths, and rewards for successful actions in your community.
Multi-day sequences
With time delays, you can create multi-step email journeys which unfold over days or weeks.
Community triggers
You can send emails with automated workflows based on any event trigger in your community — for example, a new sign-up, a course completion, a level unlock, or an event RSVP.
Use cases
- Onboarding journeys: Set up a workflow automation to welcome your new members, guide them through setup, and help them get introduced to your community.
- Example: A professional network creates a three-part onboarding email series to new contacts, introducing them to services and inviting them to join a free member networking event.
- Automated rewards: Recognize and celebrate member achievements automatically, such as completing a course, attending an event, or unlocking a gamification level.
- Example: A learning community sends a congratulatory email with a badge when a member finishes a course, encouraging them to attend an event for new graduates and enroll in the next course.
- Event follow-ups: Automate follow-up emails for event attendees, sending reminders, resources, or next steps.
- Example: After a virtual summit, attendees automatically receive a thank you email with links to recordings and a special offer for joining the community.
- Re-engagement campaigns: Identify inactive members or contacts and trigger personalized re-engagement emails with offers or reminders.
- Example: A fitness community sends automated reminder emails to members who haven’t logged in for 30 days, offering a special discount to reactivate their membership.
Learn more about marketing automations →
3. Audience CRM
Until now, you could only manage your members in Circle.
Starting today, you can now use Circle as your unified CRM — a single source of truth for your contacts, members, analytics, and workflows.
Collect email contacts
Navigate to the Forms tab in Marketing to embed an email sign-up form in your website builder.
Now when someone signs up to this form, they’ll be automatically added as a non-member contact in your Circle database.
Import your existing audience
With the import contacts feature, you can also bring your entire database of contacts into Circle from any third-party email platform.
Unifying your audience within a single platform means having a fully integrated experience for your analytics and workflows, with your audience and community in a single database.
And it gets better: on average, you’ll save 30% on your email platform when you move your contacts over to Marketing Hub.
Segment your audience (soon)
Launching in December, you’ll be able to create dynamic, real-time audience segments based on a wide-range of criteria like purchase activity, event attendance, community engagement, member behavior and more.
With your audience and community members in one place, you can manage your segments in a single platform without juggling multiple products.
Use cases
- Single source of truth: A business-focused course consolidates all their contacts into Circle, allowing the team to save 30% on their email platform and send targeted promotions to both members and prospects.
- From contact to community: A health and wellness club embeds a form on their site, capturing new contacts and starting them on an email nurture to give them tips and case studies. Once the contact is nurtured, they can send them an invitation to join an exclusive membership group in their community.
- Public event to private members: A fitness community hosts a public live stream for all their non-member contacts. During the live stream, they share a special link to sign up to the private community and attend member-only events.
Learn more about the audience CRM →
We’re just getting started with Marketing Hub
There’s a lot we’re launching today with Marketing Hub, but we think of today’s launch as the beginning of a journey — not the end.
We know there’s a lot more to build. Some of you may find today’s features more than enough to get started, while others may choose to hold off until you see the upcoming roadmap come to fruition.
Over the coming months, we hope not to disappoint.
We have a jam-packed roadmap ahead of us in coming quarters with improvements like:
- Dynamic segments
- Conditional filtering options
- Expanded imports with full contact attributes
- The ability to send marketing emails from your own custom domain
- Workflow triggers for email opens and clicks
- Conditional workflows
- A richer CRM with more powerful custom profile fields
- More options and control for forms
- And much more
FAQ
How much does Marketing Hub cost?
Marketing Hub is available as an optional upgrade for existing communities — you don’t have to opt-in unless you think it’s worth it.
Once you opt-in, it’s free for up to 100 contacts. After that, pricing is based on the number of contacts in your database.
We’ve tried to make this a win-win for our customers by pricing it roughly 20-30% cheaper than other email alternatives.
For the full pricing breakdown, click here.
Can I use a custom domain for email sending?
At launch, Marketing Hub email sending will use Circle's shared domains. You can set your sender name and reply-to email address for a personalized touch.
Custom domain support for email sending is planned for future releases, so you can fully brand your communication.
If you have branded email notifications in Circle your community notification emails will continue to send from the domain you have set up. Currently, only emails sent through Marketing Hub will use Circle’s shared domains.
What features are included in Marketing Hub today?
Marketing Hub includes email broadcasts, email automations, email sign-up forms, contact management, and email analytics. Additional features like dynamic segments and conditional workflows are coming soon.
Can I import my existing contacts into Marketing Hub?
Yes! You can easily import contacts from third-party email platforms to centralize your audience within Circle.
How does Marketing Hub integrate with workflows?
Marketing Hub allows you to automate your marketing and engagement through workflows. Send emails when members complete a form, RSVP to events, or join your community. Create email journeys with time delays for personalized communication and build audience segments with tags based on community activity.
Can I track how my emails are performing?
Absolutely! With email analytics, you can monitor open rates, click rates, and other key metrics to optimize your campaigns and improve engagement.
Is Marketing Hub available for all Circle plans?
Customers on any Circle plan can opt-in to Marketing Hub and unlock all its features today. Marketing Hub is billed as an add-on product to your base community plan.
What type of forms can I create with Marketing Hub?
You can create forms to capture emails, contacts, and event registrations. Forms can be embedded on external websites, landing pages, or directly in your Circle community.
Can I send emails to non-members?
Yes, Marketing Hub allows you to send emails to both members and non-members (contacts) for broader reach and engagement. You can now reach your audience everywhere.
Can I email existing community members?
Once you activate Marketing Hub, every existing member in your community can be reached with email.
How do I manage unsubscribes?
Marketing Hub automatically manages unsubscribes for you. Any contacts who choose to opt-out will be removed from future Marketing Hub emails.
Other updates
Add buttons to posts and lock screens: Using the text editor, you can now add buttons to your posts and lockscreens to drive higher engagement for your CTAs.
To add a button to your post or lockscreen, you can type the command /button into the text editor and the Add custom button modal will appear. You can then add in your custom text, URL, and select your preferred background color.
Moderation improvements: We’ve made some improvements to our moderation feature including fixing report counts, updating the moderation modal to be more intuitive, making it easier to approve or reject flagged content from multiple tabs, exempting moderators from being auto-flagged or reported, and more.
Reorder communities on the switcher sidebar: You can now reorder Circle communities on the community switcher sidebar by clicking on the ellipsis and repositioning each community tab in your desired order.
Redesigned member profile with leaderboard ranking: Member profiles have a fresh new look and now incorporate leaderboard scores.
Refreshed live room and live stream design: Our live room and live streams have been updated to have a sleeker, more intuitive, and modern UI.
Invite members to join events while live: From the live room and live stream Participants sidebar, hosts will now be able to invite members to join the event by clicking on Invite Member.
Exclude moderators from gamification leaderboard: You can now choose if you’d like to include moderators in your community leaderboard. To exclude moderators, navigate to Audience > Gamification and switch off the Include moderators on the leaderboard toggle.
SGD currency support for paywalls: We’ve added support for payments using the Singapore Dollar (SGD).
Mobile sidebar reflects custom preferences on web: We’ve updated our mobile apps to reflect the custom navigation preferences as displayed on the web application.
Consolidated Feed settings: You can now find all settings for your community Feed under Options on the dropdown menu on the Feed page.
iOS improvements
We also shipped a few improvements to Circle’s iOS app:
- Typing indicator added to chats
- Mark notifications as read when opening push notifications
- Minor visual updates
- Performance, reliability, and UI/UX improvements
Android improvements
Plus, here are some improvements on Circle’s Android and Circle Plus branded apps:
- Typing indicator added to chats
- Support for buttons on posts
- New filters to member directory
- Minor visual updates
- Performance, reliability, and UI/UX improvements
Join us on October 29 at 12pm ET for a hands-on session on how Marketing Hub can help you maximize engagement within your community. Whether you’re new to email marketing or you’re considering migrating your email list from another platform this session is for you.
We’ll cover:
- Marketing Hub essentials: Learn how to set up email broadcasts, create contact capture forms, and import your contacts.
- Automated engagement: We’ll show you how to set up custom onboarding journeys that guide new members through your community, automate re-engagement emails members, and trigger personalized follow-ups based on audience behavior.
- Real-world use cases: We’ll explore specific scenarios like promoting events, distributing exclusive content, and nurturing non-members to bring them into your community.