Marketing

Where to find it

Marketing shows how many customers have opted in, how many campaign messages went out in the last day, week and month, and every campaign. The opt-in wording is under Account settingsMarketing opt-in.

Needs the permission marketing.view (view marketing), marketing.create (create and edit campaigns) and marketing.send (send and schedule campaigns). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.

Changing the opt-in wording needs marketing.settings (change marketing opt-in settings). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.

Location managers can create and send campaigns too, to their own locations’ customers. Editors, Staff and Readers can’t see Marketing unless you give their role these permissions.

Consent comes first

Nothing is collected until you switch it on. Once you do, a tick box appears on your join and booking forms with wording you write — unticked, optional, and irrelevant to whether somebody can join.

Sending a campaign

1. 1

   Start a new campaign

   Press New campaign on the Marketing page. The name is for you; customers never see it.

2. 2

   Choose the audience

   Pick locations and, if you like, narrow it down. The number of people it reaches updates as you go.

3. 3

   Choose the channels

   Push, email and text, in the order you prefer. Each customer gets one message, on the first of those channels they can be reached on.

4. 4

   Write it

   A short message for text and push, and an email subject. The email can have a longer message of its own. Short, specific, and worth the interruption: a message that reads like a form letter earns an unsubscribe from somebody who was happy to hear from you.

5. 5

   Review, test and send

   Save it, and the review shows how many people it reaches on each channel, who is skipped and why, and how much of your message allowance it uses. Send a test to me sends the email to your own address and the text to the test numbers you added. Then send it now or schedule it.

Sending happens in the background rather than while you wait. A campaign to a few thousand people is minutes of work, and it is drained steadily — so a campaign that is interrupted resumes rather than starting again or sending twice.

Who receives it

Only customers who opted in and haven’t since opted out. Within that:

• Locations. A location’s customers are anyone who joined its waitlist or booked there. Leave every location unticked to reach your whole list.
• Visited recently, or haven’t visited for a number of days, to welcome regulars or win back people you haven’t seen.
• Used a service, for an offer that only makes sense to some customers.

Someone who can only manage some locations can only send to those locations’ customers, and only sees campaigns for them.

Channels

The default order is cheapest first: push, then email, then text. Text is only used for people with no free way to reach them. Choose Only one channel if you’d rather send everything one way. Anybody the channels can’t reach is skipped rather than counted as a failure.

WhatsApp isn’t offered for campaigns: WhatsApp only allows businesses to start a conversation with pre-approved templates, and a campaign is your own words.

When it goes out

• Quiet hours. Nothing is sent between 21:00 and 08:00 in the location’s time zone. A campaign still going at 21:00 pauses and carries on in the morning.
• One a week. A customer gets at most one campaign every 7 days, whichever location sends it. Anyone who heard from you more recently is skipped.

Results

Open a campaign to see how many were sent, still to go, skipped and failed, on each channel, why people were skipped, and how many unsubscribed within a week of it. Sent messages are split by their delivery receipt: delivered, not delivered (a bounced email or a text the network couldn’t deliver), or no receipt. Push notifications never send a receipt, and some text networks don’t either.

Unsubscribes

Every campaign carries a link to a preferences page where the recipient can withdraw consent. That withdrawal stops campaigns and leaves their own visit updates alone, because those are the thing they came to you for.

Somebody who replies STOP to a text is opted out of everything, including their visit updates. See sender numbers.

What it costs

Marketing draws on the same monthly messaging allowance as everything else, but is counted separately so you can see where it went on your usage report.

When the allowance runs out, campaigns are refused while visit messages keep sending. Marketing is the discretionary spend, and that is the right place to draw the line. Email and push do not draw on the allowance at all, and only the customers who get a text count towards it.

Doing it well

• Send rarely. A list that hears from you once a month stays; one that hears weekly does not. The one-a-week limit is a ceiling, not a target.
• Send something useful. A genuine offer, a change of hours, a new service. Not “we are still here”.
• Watch the unsubscribes. They are the honest measure of whether the last one was worth sending.
• Never disguise it. Slipping an offer into a “your table is ready” message is how a business loses the ability to send either.