Bulk Subscriber Enrollment
Bulk enrollment lets you import a list of email addresses and immediately grant them active subscriber access — no payment required, no bridge interaction. It is designed for onboarding a founding cohort, fulfilling a Kickstarter backer reward, or migrating subscribers from a platform whose export you can’t run through the standard Migration Wizard.
Bulk enrollment requires Built-in Membership (Phase 2) to be active on your show.
Opening the Screen
From the Subscribers screen, click Bulk enroll (the person-with-plus icon in the screen header). This opens the Bulk Enrollment screen at /subscribers/bulk-enroll.
Preparing Your List
The input accepts one email address per line or a comma-separated list. Blank lines and duplicates are ignored. The maximum per job is 1,000 addresses. For larger lists, split them across multiple jobs — Benecaster processes one job at a time per show and will queue a second job if one is already running.
Enrollment Settings
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Tier | The membership tier to assign. Only active native tiers are shown |
| Email list | Paste or type addresses, one per line or comma-separated |
Running the Job
Click Enroll to submit. Benecaster runs the job asynchronously in the background via WP-Cron. The screen shows a live progress indicator — addresses processed, successful enrollments, and any addresses that were skipped.
Skipped addresses — an address is skipped if:
- It is already an active subscriber on the selected tier
- It does not correspond to any WordPress user account (Benecaster creates subscriber access only for existing users — it does not create new user accounts during bulk enrollment)
- It belongs to a user who has an active subscription on a different tier (they are not moved; you would need to cancel the existing subscription first)
After Enrollment
Enrolled subscribers receive a welcome email, same as an organic sign-up. The benecaster_subscription_activated action fires for each successful enrollment with $source = 'admin_enrolled', so you can distinguish bulk-enrolled subscribers in automation or reporting code.
If you want to suppress the welcome email for bulk enrollments, add a short snippet filtering benecaster_email_should_send and returning false when the activation source is admin_enrolled. See Suppressing Emails for Specific Activations for a working example.
The benecaster_bulk_enrollment_complete action fires once when the entire job finishes, with a summary of the outcome. See the developer reference for the argument list.
For Developers
REST API endpoints for programmatic bulk enrollment are documented at Bulk Enroll REST API.
Relevant classes:
BulkEnrollmentProcessor— synchronous core; can be called directly without WP-CronBulkEnrollmentJobRunner— async orchestrator; enforces the one-active-job-per-show constraint
