Sending an email campaign

Sidebar: Marketing. The page shows messages sent, open rate, click rate, unsubscribes and bookings influenced, then your campaign list.

Email is the working channel. SMS appears in the builder but is greyed out — text messaging is not connected yet.

The builder

Create Campaign opens a four-step wizard: Campaign Setup, Audience, Content, Schedule and Review. You can save a draft at any point.

1. Campaign Setup

Name it, optionally describe it, set the From Name for this campaign, and choose the type:

• One-time — a single send to whoever matches your audience.
• Automated — fires on a trigger: re-engage inactive clients after 30 to 180 days, pet birthdays, welcome a new client, follow up after a visit, remind about vaccinations, or when a tag is applied.

2. Audience

Build the audience from filters, and save it as a segment for reuse:

• Booking activity — days since last visit, has an upcoming booking, total bookings
• Service history — has used, has never used, last service type
• Client info — has or does not have a tag, client since, lifetime value
• Pet attributes — birthday month, species, breed, age
• Vaccinations — expiring within N days, expired, or by vaccine type

Two suppression rules sit underneath, and both are worth leaving on: skip clients who already have a future booking, and skip anyone contacted in the last N days. Alaga estimates the audience size live, with consent and suppression already applied, so the number you see is the number who will actually receive it.

3. Content

Pick a template from the library or build one with the drag-and-drop editor: header, text, image, button, video, two-column, divider, spacer, social links and footer blocks. Merge tags available include the client's first name, the pet's name, last visit date, next booking date, your business name, a booking link and the unsubscribe link.

Send yourself a test from the row at the bottom before you commit.

4. Schedule and Review

Send immediately, or schedule for later, then review and confirm.

When it actually sends

Sending queues the audience; the queue drains every few minutes, so a large campaign trickles out over several minutes rather than landing at once. Automated campaigns are evaluated once a day.

Unsubscribes

Every marketing email carries a personal unsubscribe link. Clicking it opts that client out of marketing email immediately, and they are excluded from all future campaigns. Transactional email — confirmations, reminders, invoices — is unaffected by a marketing unsubscribe.

Reporting

Open a campaign to see delivered, open rate, click rate, bounces, bookings influenced, performance over time, top clicked links, and a per-recipient delivery log you can export as CSV.