changelog

Send emails based on subscriber lifecycle dates

September 20, 2025

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Happy Friday (or what is left of it)! We're making it easier to send targeted emails based on when subscribers joined, upgraded, or churned.

You can now send emails to subscribers based on three key dates:

  • Subscription date: When someone first joined your list
  • Upgrade date: When a subscriber became a paying member (for those with paid subscriptions)
  • Churn date: When a paid subscriber cancelled (also for paid newsletters)

This opens up a bunch of useful possibilities. Want to send a hearty welcome to everyone who joined in the last 30 days? Done. Need to reach out to subscribers who upgraded during your Black Friday promotion but later cancelled? You can target them specifically. Planning anniversary emails for long-time subscribers? Now it's actually possible.

How to use it

When composing a new email, click on the audience selector and you'll see these new date-based options in the filter dropdown. They work just like our other date filters — you can target subscribers before, after, or between specific dates.

For those of you with paid newsletters, the upgrade and churn date filters will appear automatically. If you're running a free newsletter, you'll just see the subscription date option (which, honestly, is still incredibly useful for welcome emails and reaching out to longtime readers).

Why we built this

We've been working on giving you better tools to send the right message to the right people at the right time. Yesterday we shipped churn date tracking, and today's update lets you actually use that data to send targeted emails.

These filters combine with all our other audience filtering options, so you can get really specific. For example, you could send emails to:

  • Everyone who joined in the last 90 days AND has a specific metadata value
  • People who churned last month AND were tagged as "high-value"

The data has always been there — now you can actually use it to send more relevant, timely emails to your subscribers.

As always, if you have questions about these new filters or ideas for other date-based segments you'd like to see, let us know!

Buttondown is the last email platform you’ll switch to.