Marketing & newsletter

With marketing campaigns you send newsletters and offers to your guests in a targeted way — for example after a visit, for a birthday or to win back inactive guests. Every campaign can be filtered, designed and analysed.

Create a campaign

In the sidebar, open Marketing and click New campaign.

1. Assign a name and choose the type (post-visit, birthday, inactive or custom).
2. Write the subject and content in the editor — placeholders such as the guest name are inserted automatically for each recipient.
3. Optionally link a coupon or an event and set a booking link.

Consent (double opt-in)

You may only send newsletters and offers to guests who have explicitly consented (section 7(2) no. 2 of the German UWG). VidiReserve collects that consent in two steps:

1. The reservation, event and voucher forms contain an empty, optional checkbox. It is never pre-selected and never mandatory — either would make the consent worthless.
2. If the guest ticks it, they receive one neutral email with a confirmation link. Only the click makes them a recipient. The link is valid for 14 days.

You can see the state on every contact (Guests → open a contact): confirmed, pending, no consent or unsubscribed, including the date and the form the consent was given through. The guest list can filter by it and export it. At the state pending there is a button Send confirmation email again.

You cannot enter a consent yourself — not even for guests who told you on the phone. That is deliberate: only what the guest confirmed themselves can be proven.

The top of the marketing page shows how many of your contacts have confirmed. If the number stays low, it is usually because consent only builds up with new bookings — existing contacts never gave one.

Exception for existing customers

Section 7(3) of the UWG allows an exception: guests who have booked with you may receive advertising for your own similar services if you point this out when collecting the address and in every email, and if objecting is possible at any time. You will find the switch at the top of the marketing page. It applies only to the “Thank you after visit” template and the review request after the visit, never to unsubscribed guests, and is off by default. When in doubt, leave it off — meeting the requirements of the exception is up to you.

Filter recipients

On the right you narrow down the recipients: VIP guests only, certain tags, a minimum number of visits, guests inactive for a number of days, a birthday month or guests with a review. The live counter always shows how many guests the current filters reach; via the preview you check the finished design.

Send & automation

All campaigns go out through the automation — in small batches spread over the day, never all at once. In the overview you see for each campaign how many mails were sent and how many links were clicked.

Send a custom campaign

1. In the list, click Send next to a custom campaign (type “Custom”). This schedules it: the message tells you roughly how many recipients there are and in which time window it goes out. No email leaves at this moment yet.
2. The list then shows “Sending · X sent” — X grows with every pass. Once all recipients have been reached, the campaign is Sent.
3. Stop halts the sending (status “Stopped”), Resume continues it. Nobody who already received the email gets it a second time.

If sending to an address fails, VidiReserve tries again six hours later at the earliest, at most three times. After that the address counts as undeliverable for this campaign: the list shows the number next to the status, and the campaign still completes.

Switch on automated campaigns

Recurring types (post-visit, birthday, inactive) you set up as a quick template. They start as a draft; only the Switch on automation button in the list makes them active. From then on they run every day by themselves and only write to a guest when it is their turn (on the birthday, for example). Pause halts an automated campaign, Resume lets it run again.

Automation

The automation sends small batches every 15 minutes between 6 am and 6 pm so that the emails do not stand out as bulk mail; whatever does not go out today follows the next day. This covers your active automated campaigns, scheduled custom campaigns and the review request after the visit. All of them share the batch of each pass; date-bound emails go out first — birthday, thank you after the visit, then the review invitations — and are caught up for up to two days if there were too many on their day. Inactive guests and scheduled custom campaigns come after that. The Run automation button triggers the same pass for your business right away — with the same batch sizes. The message afterwards tells you how many emails were sent and how many will follow spread over the day.

So that your emails do not end up in spam filters as bulk mail, VidiReserve sends campaigns throttled: with a short pause between two emails and only a small batch for your business per pass (currently at most 10). A newsletter to 300 guests therefore takes a few hours, with very many recipients even more than a day — that is intended.