Marketing: segments, campaigns and automatic messages

Back Office → Marketing does three things: saves questions about your customer list, sends messages to the answers, and sends the messages you'd otherwise forget.

27.1 Segments — saved questions

A segment is a question, not a list. "Gold customers we haven't seen in 90 days" answers itself every time you look at it: someone who comes in tomorrow drops out on their own, and someone who drifts away drops in.

Fill in only the boxes you care about — everything you fill in has to match. Count them tells you the answer before you write a word of the message, which is the whole point: better to learn the segment is four people now than after you've written to them.

Two things worth knowing:

• "Hasn't visited in X days" doesn't include people who have never visited. They haven't gone away — they haven't arrived. Sending them "we miss you" reads badly. To reach them, use at most 0 visits instead.
• Tags ignore capitals. "VIP" and "vip" are the same tag, because they're typed by hand at a busy till.

Segments say who matches and how many you can actually reach separately. A segment of 200 where only 40 have opted in is a 40-person campaign, and the page says so — otherwise you'd blame the message for a disappointing result that was really about consent.

27.2 Campaigns

Pick a segment, pick WhatsApp or email, write the message, send. Before you send, the dialog tells you how many of the segment this channel will actually reach.

Personalising. Use {firstName}, {name}, {tier}, {points}, {spend}, {credit}, {venue} or {link} and each person gets their own version. A name you don't have becomes "there", so nobody ever receives "Hi ,". Mistype a placeholder and Aura refuses to save it — better a red message now than a thousand broken ones later.

Who it reached. After sending, Who it reached groups everyone by outcome, because each group is a different job:

• Delivered — done.
• Not contacted — with the reason: hasn't opted in (offer them a reason to), no phone number or email (data entry), or this channel has no credentials set up (ask whoever set up your account).
• Failed to deliver — the message went out and bounced; the error is shown.

Nobody is ever silently skipped. Sent + not contacted + failed always adds up to the audience, so the numbers can be trusted.

A sent campaign can't be edited or re-sent. It's a record of what actually went out. Send the same thing again by making a new campaign — and nobody gets it twice from one campaign, however many times the button is pressed.

27.3 Automatic messages

The ones you'd forget: a birthday greeting, a nudge to someone who has stopped coming, a welcome after a first visit, a request for a review.

Set one up per occasion and channel and it looks after itself. Run now checks immediately; normally it runs on a schedule.

Each customer gets each message once per occasion. One birthday greeting a year. One nudge per time someone drifts away — and if they come back and drift again, that's a new occasion and they'll hear from you again, which is right. Press Run now ten times and nothing is sent ten times. This matters more than it sounds: without it, "hasn't visited in 90 days" stays true tomorrow and the day after, and a daily check would message the same person every day for a month.

Saving an automatic message for a trigger you already have replaces it rather than adding a second one — two birthday messages would mean every customer hearing from you twice.

27.4 Consent, and proving it

Every customer has a separate WhatsApp and email preference. Opting out of one doesn't touch the other.

Aura keeps a history of every change: which channel, which way, how it happened (at the till, in the back office, from a QR menu, from an import, or by replying to unsubscribe) and any note. Opting back in adds to the history rather than erasing the opt-out, so if anyone ever asks you to show that a customer agreed — or that you honoured a withdrawal — the record is there. That's what POPIA expects, and a tick-box on its own can't answer it.

Opted-out customers still appear in segments (they're still your customers), but campaigns and automatic messages will not message them, and say so in the results.