Managing email campaigns and transactional emails within one product requires more than just sending tools. It requires strong flexibility, security, and control to keep your email infrastructure performing smoothly. That’s why our Users and Subaccounts features are highly valued by customers.
Whether you’re part of a marketing team, an advertising agency, freelancer, or a reseller, these features help you organize your workflows efficiently and with full accountability. Sometimes it can make a real difference when comparing different email marketing software. In this guide, we’ll explore each feature in depth and show who can gain the greatest advantage.
Table of Contents
Users Feature – managing multiple team members within one Account
What are Users in Elastic Email?
With the Users feature, you can invite team members to your Elastic Email account and define exactly what they can access. Each person gets their own login credentials (login + password), and permissions can be tailored to their role in the company.
For example, you can invite a user who only has access to sending emails via SMTP and HTTP, without permissions to manage campaigns or templates. Using access tokens, this configuration works perfectly for a developer handling only integrations and transactional messages. At the same time, a designer could be given access only to templates, landing pages, forms, and files, without the ability to view contacts or generate tokens like API keys or SMTP credentials. With Users, each specialist gets exactly the access they need, keeping your team efficient and secure.
How the Users feature makes account management safer and smarter
Your employees or colleagues can simultaneously work on different aspects of their tasks without sharing a single access level. This improves efficiency, allowing each person to focus on their responsibilities. For example, technical staff can handle deliverability and domain configurations, while a project manager can access reports and logs to track overall email performance.
The Users feature is extremely useful for keeping your account secure and preventing accidental mistakes – like a programmer accidentally deleting all your contacts during tests. Often, it’s not malicious intent, just a simple error that can be easily prevented by setting appropriate access levels. It also adds an extra layer of protection against credential theft. If a hacker gains access to a specific user’s login, the potential damage is limited because not all permissions are granted.
That’s why we strongly recommend setting a strong password and enabling two-factor authentication to keep your account secure!
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Who should use this feature and why?
In-house marketing teams with multiple members managing email workflows often rely on the Users feature. Digital agencies benefit in a similar way, with designers, email specialists, and developers each managing their own responsibilities. Startups also appreciate the feature when freelancers handle different parts of email marketing independently.
How to invite Users to your account?
To access the Users tab, click on your avatar, then select Account. In the left-hand menu, open the Users tab. From there, click the “Invite User” button.
Now it’s time to enter the invited user’s information: email, first name, and last name (only the email field is required). Next, set up permissions- you can use predefined roles or customize them according to your needs. These permissions can be changed at any time from your main account. Once everything is set up, click Invite User and voila!
Subaccounts Feature – organizing separate accounts for teams and clients
What are subaccounts in Elastic Email?
Subaccounts might sound similar to the Users feature, but there are key differences. Subaccounts are fully independent accounts created under a main parent account. Each subaccount can have its own contacts, campaigns, and sending reputation, while billing and administrative control remain centralized with the parent account.
To simplify, you can think of Subaccounts as separate businesses or divisions managed under one roof. They allow each subaccount to function autonomously while giving the main account full oversight, without requiring separate subscriptions.
Benefits of Subaccounts – autonomy and centralized control
One of the main advantages of Subaccounts is independence. Each client or division can maintain its own contacts, credentials, and reports within the same parent account but with separate login details. This also brings financial savings – for example, freelancers managing multiple clients don’t need to create a separate account and pay a subscription for each client. Instead, they can manage everything from a single main account while keeping individual subaccounts for each client.
This autonomy and use of Subaccounts also make it easier to manage the reputation of individual domains or private IPs. Different clients send different types of content – some may only send transactional emails with very high open rates, while others send newsletters to tens of thousands of recipients, where contact lists are not always regularly cleaned. In these cases, subaccounts allow each client to build a separate sending reputation. Additionally, the main account can assign different private IPs to each subaccount, keeping each subaccount’s email activity separate and secure.
All of this is achieved while maintaining full control over billing and individual resources of each subaccount through the main account. This convenience is one of many reasons why Subaccounts are increasingly popular among Elastic Email customers.
Subaccounts – use cases for Teams, Agencies, and Freelancers
Internal research shows that Subaccounts are widely used by marketing agencies, freelancers handling several clients, large organizations with multiple teams or departments, and resellers who monetize Elastic Email under their own brand.
But in practice, why do marketing agencies and freelancers love the Subaccounts feature? Both manage multiple clients and their email needs, and subaccounts make this much easier.
For example, freelancer Mark has five different clients for whom he manages email marketing campaigns. Each client has a different domain, contact list, and sending patterns. With a single main Elastic Email account, Mark can create five subaccounts – one for each client – which he can manage independently. He doesn’t need to pay for five separate subscriptions; everything is handled under one billing account and one invoice from Elastic Email. Having simultaneous access to each subaccount, Mark can build their sending reputation without affecting other subaccounts and manage individual lists and templates safely, without worrying about GDPR compliance or other issues that come with managing multiple clients from a single account, for instance, incorrect custom fields issues.
If you’re a freelancer or marketing agency looking to partner with Elastic Email, contact us to discuss how we can work together.
Subaccounts are also an appealing option for our resellers. They can create unlimited subaccounts and use custom branding to personalize the user interface, login screens, and available templates. Managing billing, email credits, and other add-ons is straightforward, allowing resellers to generate revenue from Elastic Email’s product. Learn more about our reselling capabilities and terms.
How to create Subaccounts?
Subaccounts are managed from the Account Options tab in your dashboard. Click the “Add Subaccount” button and enter the required information. You’ll need to set a unique login, password, and assign permissions for the new Subaccount, which can be modified by the Main Account at any time.
Keep in mind that subaccounts cannot purchase email credits or private IPs for themselves. They can inherit the Main Account’s verified sender domain or verify their own at any time. The Main Account can limit the monthly email-sending volume, and all emails sent by subaccounts are counted toward the Main Account’s total. All options can be edited later if needed.
Choosing Between Users and Subaccounts
To sum up, both Subaccounts and Users play a vital role for companies, but they cannot be used interchangeably. In different situations, one of these pro features will be more suitable. For teams that need granular access control on a single account, Users is ideal. For managing multiple clients or reselling Elastic Email, Subaccounts provide the best solution. A comparison table is provided below for quick reference.
Keep in mind that both Users and Subaccounts are available in the PRO version of Elastic Email’s Email API and Email Marketing products.
These features make the PRO plan a must-have for many of our clients. If they could help your team, upgrade your account to PRO – and remember, you can still try other key features on the free plan first. Get started by creating your first User or Subaccount and see how Elastic Email’s PRO plan streamlines control and boosts operational efficiency!
Filip Blajet
Filip is a marketing specialist at Elastic Email, who spends a lot of time with data and ads. Outside of work, he loves football, binge watching tv series and travelling.
