Newsletter Steps

Creating a Newsletter

To create a newsletter, you need to access the Marketing Module.

From the top menu bar, click on the Modules icon and select Marketing

In the main menu, click on Campaigns and then select Email Campaigns.

To create your first newsletter, click on + ADD Campaign.

Newsletter Attributes

The first part of creating your newsletter consist of confirming the various elements that the newsletter recipient will see when they receive your newsletter.

Email Reference: This is the name that you want to give to your newsletter as an internal record off what the Newsletter is about.
Email Subject: This will appear on the header of the email when received by your guests (see above).
Email Preview Text: This will appear on the header of the email when received by your guests (see above).
Sender: This will appear as the sender of the email on the email received by your guests (see above).
Reply To: This is the email address that the email recipient will get when replying to the email.

Analytics

You can track information about each newsletter that you send. To do so, select the relevant box for:

Capture Read: This will show the number of emails that have been opened and read - so for example, if you sent 1,000 emails and you have 750 shown as Capture Read, then you know that 75% of your target audience has opened your newsletter.
Capture Click: This will show you how many people have clicked on a link in your newsletter (this can be a button (call for action) or url to a specific page on the web.

This information will be shown on your main newsletters dashboard for each newsletter.

Selecting a template

The next part of creating your newsletter is to select a template. Click on the template of your choice…

… then click on Save & Continue.

Designing your Newsletter

The easiest way to build your newsletter is to add elements as needed, from the Design Elements library. All elements are added with drag & drop and can easily be moved (as a block) within your newsletter. For more information about elements available, please click here.

Once you are happy with your newsletter, click on Save & Quit.

Test Email

At any stage during the creation and design of your newsletter, you can send yourself a test email to see how your newsletter will appear when sent to your guests, by clicking on the Send Test Email button.

Enter your name & surname (optional) and then the email address to which you want to send your newsletter. Then click on SEND.

Scheduling your Newsletter

When your newsletter is finalised, you can then schedule it to be send. As part of that process, you can select:

The date and time when it will be sent;
The segmentation of which guests the newsletter should be sent to;

To schedule your newsletter, click on the Edit button for that newsletter.

Scroll down to the bottom of that page and click on Schedule Campaign.

Step 1 allows you to specify when you want to send your newsletter.

Select the date (Send On:) and time (Time:) then click on SCHEDULE.

Step 2 allows you to segment your guests database to specify who should receive the newsletter, with the following options available:

Site: For multiple site operators, select a particular location (if the newsletter applies to a particular restaurant only) or select All Sites. Your guests database will be filtered accordingly.
Gender: You can send your newsletter to all guests, or select Male or Female only. An example might be if you want to send a ‘Girls Lunch Special’ offer that you only want to send to female guests only.
Occasion: You can create an unlimited number of occasions in the system, which can then be used as flags for your guest cards. This includes things like birthdays or anniversaries. Occasions also have a Month filter attached to it.
Internal Flags: You can created an unlimited number of specific flags in the system, which can then be allocated to your guest cards. You may want to send a newsletter promoting your new Vegan menu in which case only want to email guests that have a ‘Vegan’ flag attached to their record. You can select any number of flags to further segment the recipients for your newsletter.

The Filter Options includes the following:

All guests
New guests since:
Guests who have visited during a particular date range:
Guests who have not visited during date range
Visit frequency: > = number of times in the last number of days

You also have the ability to exclude cancellations & no shows from that list.

Final segmentation can include only guests who have interacted with a previous newsletter (opened/read the newsletter or click on the selected newsletter.

Once you are happy with your settings, click on SEARCH

The system will filter your guests based on your criteria and return the number of guests that will be included in your mail-shot. Click on SCHEDULE.

The email is now marked as Scheduled in your newsletter list.

It will automatically be sent at or around the date & time you stipulated. Once it had been sent, it will change its status to Sent and will display the total number of guests who successfully received the email (as some email addresses in your database may be wrong or no longer active). This will also indicate the time and date it was sent at.