Email Designer & Automations

Email is one of the most important parts of a membership site, but it is also one of the easiest things to overlook. The sales flow might look polished, the course area might be beautiful, and the member dashboard might feel premium, but if your login emails, onboarding messages, access notifications, and reminders still feel generic or unclear, the overall experience feels disconnected. The Emails module in BricksMembers is there to fix exactly that.

The point is not only that your emails should look better. It is that you should control the onboarding experience properly. New members often need specific information right away: where to log in, what they just bought, how access works, what to do next, how billing or invitations work, and which content to start with. If those messages are weak, confusing, or inconsistent, people get a worse first impression of the entire membership site.

The Emails module gives you a visual email system inside BricksMembers. You can design transactional emails, create reusable components such as headers and footers, automate messages from member events, override WordPress core emails, and manage queued or scheduled sends from one place. That gives you both better communication control and better branding consistency, so your emails do not just look good individually, but also feel clearly like they all come from the same business.

Why Transactional Email Matters for Membership Sites

Membership sites depend on trust, continuity, and a strong first impression. People need clear communication when they register, get access, lose access, receive an invitation, unlock content, reset their password, or come back to continue something. They also need onboarding emails that actually help them understand what to do next. If those messages are inconsistent, badly formatted, unbranded, or difficult to automate, support volume goes up and the member experience gets weaker.

BricksMembers Emails solves that by bringing design, automation, onboarding control, and operational control together. The result is a more professional WordPress membership email workflow without having to bolt on a separate email-builder plugin just for your transactional messages.

What You Can Do With the BricksMembers Emails Module

• Create full email templates for transactional and automated messages
• Build reusable components such as headers, footers, and shared callout blocks
• Trigger automations from membership and site events like level assignment, drip unlocks, registrations, and more
• Override WordPress core emails like password reset and account-related notifications
• Schedule delayed or reminder sends instead of sending everything immediately
• Review queue and log data so you can inspect, retry, and manage email jobs

How the Emails Module Works in BricksMembers

The workflow is easy to understand:

1. Enable the Emails module
2. Create one or more email templates
3. Build reusable components if you want a shared brand wrapper
4. Create automations or WordPress mappings that decide when each template is sent
5. Use the queue and logs area to monitor scheduled and delivered jobs

That gives you one email system for both BricksMembers events and WordPress account lifecycle emails.

Step 1: Enable the Emails Module

1. Go to BricksMembers → Settings → Modules
2. Enable Emails
3. Save settings
4. Open the new Emails area in BricksMembers

Once enabled, the Emails area gives you separate sections for Templates, Components, Automations, WordPress Emails, Queue & Logs, and Settings.

Step 2: Create Your Email Templates

Templates are the full emails that get sent by automations or WordPress email mappings. They are the foundation of the system, so this is usually the best place to start.

1. Go to BricksMembers → Emails → Templates
2. Create a new template or start from a built-in starter
3. Design the layout with sections, columns, text, images, buttons, and other builder blocks
4. Set the subject line, from details, and content structure
5. Use placeholders like {{user_display_name}}, {{user_email}}, and {{level_names}} where needed

This is where you create the branded email experience your members actually see. For many sites, a welcome email, an access email, and a password-reset email are the best templates to create first.

Step 3: Create Reusable Components

Components are reusable blocks you can insert into multiple templates. In practice, they are perfect for headers, footers, logos, legal sections, and common content blocks you do not want to rebuild over and over.

1. Edit an email template
2. Build the section you want to reuse
3. Select the relevant block group
4. Use Convert to component in the inspector
5. Name the component and reuse it in other templates through the Component block

If you ever need to update the shared component, edit it once and the templates using it stay aligned. That is one of the easiest ways to keep your transactional email branding consistent.

Step 4: Build Email Automations

Automations decide when a template should be sent. This is where the Emails module becomes more than just a designer. It turns site activity into structured communication.

1. Go to BricksMembers → Emails → Automations
2. Create a new automation
3. Choose the trigger family and the specific trigger
4. Select the template to send
5. Choose whether the send should happen immediately, later, or as a reminder
6. Save and enable the automation

The automation table is designed for practical day-to-day management, so you can quickly scan trigger, timing, template, status, and available actions without dealing with oversized cards or unnecessary complexity.

Automation Timing Options

• Immediately when you want the email to send as soon as the event happens
• Delayed when you want the email queued for a later time, such as a follow-up or onboarding sequence
• Reminder when the email should be planned relative to a date-based event

Delayed automations need at least one positive day or hour value. A delayed send with zero delay is not treated as a valid delayed configuration.

Some automations are also useful before the recipient even has a WordPress account. For example, Group Invitation Created can send directly to the invited email address. The User Login trigger also works with custom Bricks login pages that use the built-in login action.

Step 5: Replace WordPress Core Emails

The Emails module is not limited to BRM-specific notifications. You can also replace or wrap standard WordPress account emails such as password reset, new user, email change, and other lifecycle messages.

1. Go to BricksMembers → Emails → WordPress Emails
2. Select a template for each WordPress email key you want to control
3. Save the mappings

If you enable the catch-all wrapper in BricksMembers → Emails → Settings, those mapped messages can wrap the default WordPress email body inside your BRM template. If you prefer, you can also fully replace the body with your own content and placeholders.

Mapped WordPress core emails are rewritten directly at send time. They do not create queue rows in the BRM email log.

Email Placeholders You Can Use

Placeholders let your templates stay dynamic instead of static. They are replaced with real values when the email is sent, but the exact output depends on the email context. A placeholder that exists for WordPress password-reset emails will not magically produce a value inside a totally unrelated automation.

• {{user_display_name}}, {{user_first_name}}, {{user_last_name}}, {{user_username}}, and {{user_email}} output the obvious user identity strings for the user attached to the event or email context
• {{level_names}} outputs the relevant BRM level names only when the email context actually includes membership or access changes
• {{site_name}}, {https://bricksmembers.com}, and {{admin_email}} output site-level values from WordPress settings
• {{reset_link}} outputs the real password-reset URL and {{login_url}} outputs the real WordPress login URL in WordPress account-email contexts
• {{old_email}} and {{new_email}} only have values for WordPress email-change notifications
• {{wp_original_subject}}, {{wp_original_text}}, and {{wp_original_html}} expose the original WordPress email subject and body before BRM rewrites it, so you can wrap or partially reuse the native message instead of replacing it completely
• Comment and moderation placeholders such as {{comment_author_name}} and {{comment_content}} only have values in comment-notification and moderation-email contexts

For Group Invitation Created automations, you can also use invitation-aware placeholders such as {{group_name}}, {{recipient_email}}, {{claim_url}}, {{inviter_name}}, and {{invitation_role}}. Friendly aliases like {{invite_email}}, {{group_invite_url}}, and {{group_role}} resolve to the same values. Outside that invitation context, those placeholders should be treated as context-specific rather than universal.

Queue and Logs

The Queue & Logs area is where the Emails module becomes operationally useful. It shows queued, scheduled, sent, failed, and cancelled jobs so you can inspect what happened and decide what needs attention.

• Review queued and scheduled messages
• Inspect failures and retry when needed
• Process the queue manually if you want to trigger handling right away
• Clean up old rows once you no longer need them

The queue list is paginated, so larger histories remain manageable. Also note that the designer’s Test Send is a preview-style direct send and does not create a queue row.

A Good Starting Point for Most Membership Sites

If you want a practical first setup, start with these pieces:

• Create a branded wrapper or component first, so every email feels consistent
• Build a welcome template, a password-reset template, and at least one access-related template
• Turn on WordPress email mappings early, because default WP emails usually stand out in the wrong way
• Add one or two high-value automations first instead of trying to automate everything on day one
• Check Queue & Logs after testing so you know what your operational flow looks like

Common Use Cases

• Member onboarding with welcome messages, login information, and first-step guidance
• Access automations when levels are assigned, changed, or content unlocks through drip rules
• Invitation workflows for Groups or team-based onboarding
• Branded WordPress account emails so reset and lifecycle messages match the rest of the site
• Reminder campaigns tied to dates and event timing instead of manual follow-up

Settings

In BricksMembers → Emails → Settings, configure the business details and related defaults your templates rely on. That helps keep placeholders and footer-style content consistent across the whole email system.