Automations are marketing emails that send themselves. Where a campaign goes out once, an automation keeps watching your guest list and emails each guest who matches it — a welcome after a first visit, a we-miss-you note after a quiet spell, a thank-you for your regulars. Set one up once and it keeps working. This article covers creating an automation, choosing who it emails, how often a guest can hear from it, and reviewing sends before they go out.
Where automations live
Open Campaigns in the sidebar and switch to the Automations tab. Each automation is shown with its audience, whether it is Running or Paused, how many guests are waiting for your review, and how many emails it has sent.
Creating an automation
Select New automation. You can start from one of the recommended automations — the audience and email arrive prefilled and everything stays editable — or start from scratch:
- We miss you — guests who haven't visited in a while (60 days to start with). Can email the same guest again if they come back and later drift away.
- Welcome — guests after their first completed visit.
- Loyalty thank you — guests who have reached a number of visits (five to start with).
- VIP thank you — your highest-spending guests.
The email itself works exactly like a campaign: subject, preview line, plain-text message with the guest's first name filled in, an optional photo and button, and your sign-off, all shown in the live preview with your email branding. As in the campaign composer, Write it for me has AI draft the whole email for you — see Email campaigns for how it works. An AI-drafted automation email is written to read well in any week of the year, since it sends whenever a guest matches.
Choosing the audience
An automation's audience is a set of guest filters — visits, spend, time since last visit, tags — or one of your saved segments. A guest receives the email when they match the filters, and only if they have opted in to marketing email; guests who unsubscribe are left out automatically. You can also describe the audience in your own words with Describe who you want to reach, and apply the suggested filters once you have checked them.
How often a guest can hear from it
Each automation sends to a given guest either once ever, or again after their next visit. The second suits win-back emails: a guest who lapses, is emailed, comes back, and later drifts away again can receive the email a second time. A guest is never emailed twice by the same automation while nothing has changed — but separate automations work independently, so a guest who matches two of them can hear from both, even on the same day.
Approving sends
Every automation starts in You approve each send mode: guests who match wait in a review queue on the automation's page, and nothing is sent until you approve it. Approve or skip guests one at a time or all at once — a skipped guest counts as handled and won't be queued again.
Switch to Send automatically when you trust the automation to run on its own. From then on, newly matching guests are emailed without waiting for you, once a day in the morning.
Automation emails share your restaurant's monthly allowance of 1,000 marketing emails. If the allowance runs out, emails that fall due wait on hold and send automatically once it renews — see Monthly email allowance for how the limit works.
Pausing and deleting
Use the Running / Paused control to stop an automation at any time — nothing sends while it is paused, and switching it back on sweeps any newly matching guests into the review queue. Deleting an automation also deletes its send history, so a recreated automation may email guests the old one had already reached.