Most of your marketing in BookingNinja has been one-off so far: you write a campaign, pick who it goes to, and hit send. That works well for a specific announcement, but it leaves a gap. The customers who quietly drift away don't do it on a schedule you can plan around, and nobody has time to log in every Monday, find this week's lapsed regulars, and email them by hand.
Marketing Automations close that gap. You write the email once, describe the kind of customer it should go to, and choose how often it runs. From then on BookingNinja checks your rule on its own and emails whoever matches at the time. Set up "email anyone who hasn't visited in six weeks" and it keeps finding newly-lapsed customers every week, without you touching it again.
A rule, not a list
This is the important difference from a normal campaign. A one-off campaign goes to a fixed list of people, captured the moment you send. An automation isn't a list, it's a rule, and it gets re-checked every time the automation runs.
That matters because the people who match a rule like "no visit in six weeks" are different every week. Someone who came in last month isn't lapsed yet; in a few weeks they might be. Because the rule uses a rolling window instead of a fixed date, the right people fall into it naturally over time, and the automation keeps working months after you set it up.
Describe who it's for
You build your audience with the same filter builder you already use for campaigns and the CRM. Stack up conditions like booking count, last visit, the session type someone booked, no-shows or when they joined, and the editor shows you how many customers match right now as you build.
For automations, date filters can use a rolling window instead of a fixed date. "No Visit Since, 6 weeks ago" re-reads as a fresh cut-off every time it runs, which is exactly what makes a win-back rule keep working.
Two things are handled for you and can't be switched off:
- Consent. Only customers who have opted in to marketing are ever contacted, whatever your rule says.
- Frequency cap. Nobody receives another automated email within your cap window, which is four weeks by default and adjustable. So even if someone matches every week, they won't hear from you every week. Your manual one-off campaigns don't count towards this cap, so you can still send a tactical blast when you need to.
Choose the schedule
Pick how often it runs (daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly), which day, and what time. Times are in your venue's local timezone, so "Monday at 9am" means 9am to you.
Flip it to Active and it starts running on its schedule. Pause it any time and it stops sending until you switch it back on. There's also a Run now option if you'd rather fire it by hand, and it still respects the frequency cap when you do.
See how every send performs
Every run is a full campaign under the hood, so you get the same tracking you're used to, rolled up across the whole automation. The analytics page shows lifetime totals: runs, emails sent, open and click rates, how many individual customers you've reached, and how many opted out.
The engagement chart plots open and click rate across every run, so you can tell at a glance whether the message is landing or starting to go stale. Underneath, the top clicked links show what people actually do once they open: book a table, look at the menu, check the Taco Tuesday offer.
Switch to the Runs tab for the full history: every scheduled send, how many it reached, and how it performed, with a link through to the per-recipient detail of any single run.
A few ways to use it
- Win back lapsed regulars. "No visit in six weeks", weekly, with a small reason to come back.
- Keep a newsletter ticking over. A monthly email to everyone opted in, without having to remember to send it.
- Re-engage a specific crowd. Anyone who booked your quiz night but hasn't been back, nudged every fortnight.
- Follow the seasons. Customers who visited last summer but not since, emailed as the weather turns.
Your emails can be personalised with merge tags for first name, your venue's name and so on, and every automated email includes an unsubscribe link automatically.
Available now
You'll find it under Marketing → Automations on any plan that includes our marketing tools. Write your first rule, set it running, and let it handle the part of marketing that's easiest to forget.