Growing the business
Marketing
Everybody who joins your queue gives you a way to reach them. Marketing is about doing something with that — carefully, with consent, and without putting the messages your customers actually need at risk.
Where to find it
Marketing.
Needs the permission messages.update (update messages) and messages.send (send messages). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.
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.
What actually gets stored
Not just a yes. The exact wording shown at the moment they agreed is stored with it, and a timestamp. Change your wording next year and existing consents keep the text those people actually saw.
This is the difference between a consent record that is worth something and a checkbox. If anybody ever asks what a customer agreed to, you can answer precisely.
Writing the wording
- Say who is asking — your business name, not a generic phrase.
- Say what you will send, and roughly how often.
- Say how to stop.
- Keep it to a sentence. Nobody reads two.
Do not pre-tick it, and do not bundle it
Consent has to be a positive choice. A pre-ticked box is not consent, and neither is burying it in the terms somebody accepts to join a queue. Beyond the legal position, a list built that way performs badly and generates complaints — which is what gets your number filtered and stops your “it's your turn” messages arriving.
Sending a campaign
Name it and pick a channel
The name is for you. The channel decides who can receive it: an email campaign only reaches customers whose address you hold, a text campaign only those with a mobile number.
Write it
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.
Send
It goes to everybody who has opted in and not since opted out. The count is shown on the page before you commit.
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
Campaigns go to everybody opted in
There is no segmentation yet — you cannot currently send to one branch's customers, or to people who have not visited recently. Every campaign goes to your whole opted-in list, which is worth knowing before you write something that only makes sense to some of them.
Anybody without the contact detail the channel needs is skipped rather than counted as a failure.
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 campaigns do not draw on the allowance at all.
A note on WhatsApp
WhatsApp campaigns need a registered sender and business verification with Meta. Until that is in place they are refused when you try to send, rather than failing quietly for each recipient.
Doing it well
- Send rarely. A list that hears from you once a month stays; one that hears weekly does not.
- 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.