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This walkthrough takes you from a blank account to a scheduled campaign, using the AI agent along the way.
Prefer screenshots? Follow the step-by-step guides: Get Set Up to Send Marketing Email, Design an Email in the Visual Builder, Build an Audience to Email and Create, Test and Send an Email Campaign.
1

Enable Email Marketing

Email Marketing is on every paid plan: Starter, Standard and Premium. On Starter it starts once your plan is paid for.
  • If you’re on a paid plan: you already have it. Skip to step 2.
  • If you’re in your free trial: choose your plan in Settings > Billing to start sending.
  • If a team admin turned it off: ask your admin to switch Email Marketing back on.
When Email Marketing is enabled for the first time, Hiveku auto-seeds a default memory document, four skills, three rules, and the AI Email Coach persona into your account.
2

Verify a sending domain

You cannot schedule or send until at least one sending domain is verified.Go to Settings > Email Service > Email domains (the Settings button on the Websites page) and click Add email domain. Enter a subdomain you own (e.g., mail.acme.com) and add the DKIM, SPF, and DMARC DNS records Hiveku provides to your DNS host.Once DNS propagates (typically 5-15 minutes), click Check Status. For the full DNS walkthrough, see Email Domains.
The AI agent will refuse to schedule a send until a verified domain exists — this is an intentional guardrail baked into the agent’s core rules.
3

Build an audience

Go to Dashboard → Marketing → Audiences.Click the Email AI chat launcher (bottom-right, sky-blue) and try:
Build a dynamic audience called “Engaged trial users” — lifecycle stage is “trial” and they signed up in the last 30 days.
The Email Coach will:
  1. Call email_audience_create with a filter_json of {"lifecycle_stages":["trial"], "created_after":"2026-03-23"} (or similar).
  2. Call email_audience_preview to show you the materialized size plus 10 sample contacts.
  3. Save the audience to your account.
You can always build audiences manually with the inline form on the same page.
4

Create your first campaign

Go to Dashboard → Marketing → Campaigns and click New campaign, or ask the AI:
Draft a newsletter for “Engaged trial users” about the features we shipped this month. Pull the stories from the content domain. Propose three subject lines.
The Email Coach will:
  1. Read the content domain memory for recently shipped stories.
  2. Read the branding domain for voice and tone.
  3. Draft three subject-line variants on different angles (curiosity, specificity, personal).
  4. Draft the HTML body and a matching preheader.
  5. Call email_newsletter_create which creates both a template and a draft campaign in one call.
The campaign starts in draft status. You can review and edit before scheduling.
5

Schedule or send

With the campaign draft ready, say:
Schedule this for Tuesday at 10am in my timezone.
The Email Coach will confirm the audience size, run the pre-flight check (verified domain, required fields present), and call email_campaign_schedule. You can also Send now, Pause, Resume, or Cancel from the campaign detail page or via the agent.After the send completes, the Email Coach can pull metrics with email_campaign_metrics and compare against your account’s rolling 90-day baseline.

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What happens under the hood

When you schedule a campaign, the Hiveku campaign pipeline:
  1. Flips the status from draft or scheduled to sending at the scheduled time.
  2. Materializes the audience — writes a frozen snapshot of who was targeted to marketing_audience_membership for auditing.
  3. Creates per-recipient send rows (marketing_campaign_send) with frozen merge data so personalization is stable even if contacts are edited mid-send.
  4. A scheduled job sends them in batches through Hiveku’s sending service, each with its own List-Unsubscribe header.
  5. Delivery, open, click, bounce, and complaint events stream back and update the campaign’s rollup counters.

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Next steps

AI Email Agent

Tune the agent’s memory with your benchmarks, winning subjects, and blackout periods.

Sequences

Build welcome flows, re-engagement cadences, and onboarding drips.

Deliverability

Watch bounce and complaint rates, stay on the safe side of AWS pause thresholds.