The venue calls on Thursday afternoon. A pipe burst in the room you booked, and they have moved you next door for Saturday.
Forty-something people bought tickets. Every one of them has the old room written down.
You need to tell all of them, today, and you need it to say the right room and the right time. You already have their email addresses. You collected each one when they bought their ticket, and they are sitting in your WordPress admin right now.
Having the addresses and being able to write to them are two different things. Writing to them normally means standing up a second system: an email marketing service to subscribe to, a connection between it and your site, then something to carry each ticket buyer into it as they sign up. That last piece is usually Zapier or a bit of custom code. Four moving parts before anyone has written a sentence.
Say hello to Notify Attendees
Sugar Calendar Events can send that email itself. You pick the event and write the message, and Sugar Calendar handles the sending. The list of people comes from the event, because the event is where they signed up.
No second subscription. Nothing to connect.
The list builds itself
Open Notify Attendees and start typing in Select Event Attendees. Choose your event and Sugar Calendar gathers the people holding a ticket or an RSVP for it, then puts the number right on the send button.
Events with nobody to email yet are greyed out in the list and marked (no attendees), which tells you why one cannot be picked.
Your speaker can go on the list too. Tick Add Custom Recipients, add their address, and they get the same note as everyone else rather than a separate email from you.
One message, written to each person
You write once. The details that differ per person get filled in when the emails go out, using smart tags you drop into the subject line or the body.
There are nine of them: the attendee’s name and their email address, the event title, the event URL, the start date and the end date, the start time and the end time, and your site name.
So a subject line of `A room change for {event_title}` arrives as “A room change for Saturday Family Show”, and a message opening with `Hi {name},` greets each person by their own name.
Read it before anyone else does
Preview opens the finished message with the tags already resolved against a sample attendee, and it tells you which event it drew those details from.
This is the part I would not skip. A wrong date in a message to two hundred people costs you an apology and a lot of replies. Reading it once first costs you ten seconds.
Long lists look after themselves
A big attendee list does not tie up your admin while it sends. Sugar Calendar queues the emails and works through them in the background, in batches, and tells you what went out when it finishes.
A Saturday show, moved
A community theatre sells tickets to a family show through their own site. One order is a family of four, so four tickets bought together, four named people.
The pipe bursts. The organiser opens the Tickets screen, clicks Notify Attendees, picks the show, and writes four lines about the Garden Room. The subject carries `{event_title}` so it names the event. The body opens with `{name}` so each person is greeted properly.
Four tickets, four emails, one to each of the named people on that order.
Who will feel the difference
- Community organisers running a handful of events a year, who need to reach a room full of people without paying for a second tool to do it.
- Anyone selling tickets on their own site, who deals with a changed time or room several times a season.
- Organisers with RSVP events who have the headcount and the names already, and would rather not push that list into a mailing tool to send one message.
- Whoever inherits the calendar next, because there is no integration between two services to explain to them.
Sending your first one
1. Open the panel from your tickets. Go to `Events » Tickets` and click Notify Attendees in the header.
2. Choose the event. Start typing in Select Event Attendees and pick it from the list. The send button updates with the recipient count.
3. Set who it comes from. Send From Name and Send From Email are filled in from your settings, and you can change either one so the message arrives from the name your attendees recognise.
4. Write it, with tags where the details differ. Use the tag button beside the subject, or type a tag directly.
5. Preview, then send. Read the resolved version once, then send it.
Need more than the outline? The complete guide to event emails walks through every field.
Getting it
Emailing the people holding tickets for an event comes with Sugar Calendar Events, once that event is set up to sell tickets. There is nothing extra to buy for it.
Emailing the guests who RSVP’d uses the RSVP add-on, which is included in the higher plans. If you are running free community events and collecting names rather than payments, that is the one to look at. The pricing page shows what each plan includes.
Why this changes the job
There is a habit built into how event sites usually get assembled: the attendee list is treated as an export. You collect people in one place and talk to them in another, and the join between the two is yours to build and maintain.
Treating the list as something you can write to directly makes a schedule change a five-minute job instead of a small project. That matters most when you are the one who has to send it, on a Thursday afternoon, with two days to go.
If you have been putting off a mailing tool because of the setup, try this first. It may be all you needed.
Thank you to everyone who keeps telling us how you actually run your events. Those conversations are what we build from.
Gregor Capuder
Product Manager
Frequently asked questions
No. Ticket receipts and RSVP confirmations are automatic emails of their own, and they carry on doing their job. Notify Attendees is for the message you decide to write yourself, like a room change or a thank-you afterwards. The two work alongside each other.
Yes. Tick Add Custom Recipients and add the addresses yourself. That is how your speaker, a caterer or a colleague gets the same note as everyone attending.
Not yet. Today you choose when to write and what to say. Automatic event reminders are coming.
The nine listed above, covering the attendee, the event and your site. They work in both the subject and the body.
It uses sample details and names the event they came from, so you can read the message the way a recipient will without picking someone from your list.
It sends in batches in the background rather than all at once, so your admin stays responsive, and you get a summary of how many recipients it reached.
That is almost always the site itself being unable to send mail reliably, which is a hosting problem rather than a calendar one. WP Mail SMTP fixes it by routing your site’s mail through a proper sending service instead of the server’s own mailer. We recommend setting it up with SendLayer, which sorts it out in a few clicks with no technical DNS setup on your part, and SendLayer gives you 200 emails for free.
