How to send automatic birthday, welcome and win-back messages

The best time to thank a guest is the day after their visit, and the best time to invite them back is before they’ve forgotten you. Nobody has time to do that by hand for every guest. Automations send the right message at the right moment, every time, once you’ve set them up.

How an automation works

Each automation is a guest journey:

1. A trigger starts it, such as Reservation completed or Birthday approaching.
2. Steps run in order: send an email or text, wait, check something about the guest, or add a tag.
3. The guest reaches the End of journey.

Open Marketing > Automations to see yours. The top of the page shows how many are live, how many guests are in a journey, how many have finished and how many messages were sent in the last 30 days.

Step 1: Start from a template

Select Start from template and pick a journey. Each one is ready to edit:

Template	Starts when	What it does
Welcome new guests	Reservation completed	A thank you after their first visit
Birthday celebration	Birthday approaching	Invites guests to celebrate with a dessert on you
Bring regulars back	No visit in a while	Reconnects with guests you haven’t seen recently
Follow up after a no-show	Guest marked no-show	Follows up with guests who missed their booking

Or select New automation and Start from scratch.

Step 2: Set the trigger

Select Guest enters when at the top of the journey and choose the event. Some triggers have their own settings. For a birthday, choose how many days before the birthday the guest enters. The template uses 7 days.

Under the journey settings, Guests can re-enter after (days) stops a guest getting the same journey too often. For the welcome journey, First visit only means only guests completing their first visit enter.

Step 3: Build the steps

Select + to add the next step:

• Send a message: Send an email or Send a text.
• Timing & eligibility: Wait, or Only continue if guest matches.
• Split the journey: Did they open or click?, Check guest details, Has enough time passed? or Which channel can we use?
• Update the guest: add or remove a tag, or add them to or remove them from a segment.

Select any step to edit it. For a message, write the subject and text, and use Personalise to add the guest’s name.

For example, a welcome journey could run like this:

1. Reservation completed, first visit only.
2. Wait 1 day.
3. Send an email: thank them and invite them back.
4. Wait 14 days.
5. Did they open or click? If they didn’t, Send a text.

Step 4: Publish

The Before you publish checklist confirms you’ve chosen a trigger and added at least one step, and that every step is ready to run. Select Publish.

From now on, Save draft keeps your edits without changing the live journey. Select Publish changes when you’re ready. Guests already in the journey finish the version they started.

Keep an eye on it

Open an automation to see who’s in it and what has happened:

• People lists the guests in the journey and their current step.
• Activity records publishing, status changes and guest entries.

Use Pause to stop an automation for a while and Resume to restart it. Archive retires it and makes it view only.

Tip: Guests only receive messages they’ve agreed to. Each guest’s Marketing consent on their profile shows whether they get automations by email and by text.