Sending a marketing email used to mean two jobs. First you made it look presentable in a plain text box. Then you worked out who should get it, which in practice meant guessing who had ever said yes to hearing from you. Most venues managed the first and crossed their fingers on the second.
We've rebuilt MarketingNinja around both. There's a new block email editor that already knows what your venue looks like, and new ways to grow a mailing list you can trust. If you have MarketingNinja today, every part of it is already yours, with nothing new to buy and no charge per email.
The two-minute video on this page walks through all of it. It's narrated with an AI voice.
Start from a template
Click New Campaign and the first thing you see is a choice of 23 starter designs, sorted into Everyday, Events, Offers, Seasonal, Families & play, Food & drink, and Gift cards & members. There's a monthly What's on, a newsletter, a "we miss you" note with a thank-you code, party packages, a holiday club, Christmas, Halloween and plenty more. If you'd rather start from nothing, pick Blank email.
Every thumbnail is drawn with your own logo and colours, so you're choosing between versions of your email, not somebody else's. When you've built one you like, Save as template keeps it for next time.
Your brand is already in it
The editor reads your Brand Kit (Settings, then Brand): your logo, your palette, your heading and body fonts, how rounded your corners are and whether your buttons are filled or outlined. You set those once and every email picks them up, along with your booking pages and your marketing graphics. Text on a coloured button or band switches between white and dark on its own, so it stays readable whatever colour you pick.
The brand is read each time an email is drawn, so if you change your colours next spring, your saved templates follow. The only exception is a block you've deliberately given its own colour.
Blocks you drag in
Emails are built from blocks: headings, text, pictures, a picture beside text, buttons, price lists, icon lists, columns, coloured bands, social links and a few more. Drag one from the left into the email, click it, and its settings open on the right. Each block can be styled on its own if you need to, and left alone if you don't.
Live content that fills itself in
Four of those blocks don't need typing at all. Upcoming events, Gift cards, Membership plans and Guest reviews pull straight from what's on your booking pages when the email goes out. Put an Upcoming events block in a monthly automation and each month's email shows that month's dates. If a block has nothing to show, say your events are all in the past, it's left out of the email rather than sent empty, and the preview tells you why.
A unique code for every guest
The offer code block can now hand each person their own code instead of one code for everybody. Switch Code to "A unique code for each person" and the block takes the rules itself: a percentage or an amount off, the most it can take off a booking, how many days the codes last after sending, which sessions they work on, which days of the week, and the party sizes they apply to.
Each code works once. It isn't locked to the person it was sent to, so a guest can pass theirs to a friend and it still counts. The codes are made as the email sends, and the campaign results show how many were used and the discount they gave. That's the number you actually wanted when you sent a voucher out: did it bring anyone in?
Preview shows the email the way a guest gets it, on a computer or a phone, with a sample name filled in and your live blocks showing what they'd contain right now. Before you send, it also checks for the things that make an email look broken, such as a button with no link or an image with no picture, and won't send until they're fixed. Send Test Email puts a copy in your own inbox.
The audience count is honest now
Underneath the email, Who'll receive it counts the people it will go to. It only includes guests who agreed to hear from you and have a working email address. Previously, customers with no email at all could sit inside that number, which made the list look bigger than the send. Now the number on the screen is the number of emails that go out.
Every email also carries the headers that let Gmail and other email apps show their own unsubscribe button. A guest who has had enough can leave in one click, which is a much better outcome for you than being marked as spam.
Grow your list
There's a new page in MarketingNinja called Grow your list. It gives you four ways for guests to sign up:
- Your signup page. A link to share on your social profiles, your email signature or your receipts.
- A QR code. Download it for table cards, posters or the till, or open Design a poster in Marketing Graphics.
- An embed code. Paste it into Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or another website builder and the signup form appears on your page.
- The Mailing list signup block. Add it to any page of your BookingNinja website.
The same page shows how many people are on your list, who joined in the last 30 days and where they came from, so you can tell whether the QR code on the café tables is doing any work.
What guests see
The signup page uses your Brand Kit too, cover photo and fonts included. A guest types their name and email and taps Sign me up. They aren't added straight away. We email them a link first, and they only join once they confirm. That's double opt-in, and it means nobody ends up on your list because somebody else typed their address.
A record of every yes
Each time somebody agrees to hear from you, BookingNinja notes the date and how it happened: ticking the box when they booked, say, or confirming a signup. It's on their customer page under Marketing consent, next to the button to opt them out.
If a guest ever asks why they're getting your emails, you can tell them, with the date.
Bringing a list with you
Moving from Mailchimp, a till or another booking system? Import the file and BookingNinja now asks how those people agreed to hear from you. Choose Not opted in and they arrive as customers you can't email; choose Use the file's marketing column and only the rows marked yes are opted in. If you opt anyone in, you write down where and when they agreed, and that note becomes their consent record. Anyone the file marks as unsubscribed stays unsubscribed, and nobody who has unsubscribed from you is opted back in by an import.
Got the wrong file, or the wrong column? Every import can be undone from the import screen. The customers it added are removed (unless they've booked or been emailed since), and any details it changed go back to how they were.
What it costs
Nothing extra. MarketingNinja comes with BookingNinja plans that include marketing tools, and none of this changes that: the editor, all 23 templates, live content, unique codes, the signup page, the QR code, the embed code, consent records and import undo are all part of it. Your Brand Kit is part of BookingNinja itself. We don't charge per email, and we don't charge per code. You can send up to 10,000 emails a day from each venue.
Your old campaigns and automations still open. The first time you edit one, its content is moved into the new editor as a single block, so nothing you've already written is lost.
Find it under MarketingNinja in the module switcher. Tell us what you'd like it to do next.