Running marketing campaigns

Automated emails do routine tasks. They send booking confirmations, reminders, and requests for reviews. Use campaigns to send a message to a specific group of customers. For example: a message about a spring discount, a warning about a vaccination deadline, or a "we miss you" message to customers who have not booked in the last six months.

info

You must be on the Professional or Enterprise subscription plan to use campaigns. If you do not have this feature, the Campaigns page shows a View Subscription Plans button instead of your campaign lists.

The Campaigns page

Organization > Manage > Campaigns shows three lists:

• Upcoming Campaigns are campaigns that are scheduled but have not started sending. The Cancel Campaign button deletes a campaign completely. You cannot undo this action, and you can only use it before the campaign starts sending.
• Drafts are campaigns that you saved but did not schedule. You can still edit a draft.
• Recent Campaigns are campaigns that have already sent. This list shows the recipient count and the send date for each campaign.

The three lists, side by side. This example shows a draft that is waiting to be scheduled.

Creating a campaign

Click the green plus button in the upper right corner of the page. This button's name is New Campaign.

Set the delivery method, the message, and the send time. Then, preview the customer list that your filters select before you send the campaign.

You need:

• A Campaign Name. Only you can see this name.
• A Delivery Method: Email or SMS
• A Subject Line. This field applies to email campaigns only.
• The Message Template
• A purpose for the campaign and a target audience

Use the campaign name to identify the campaign in your own records. Customers do not see this name. For example, use "March Slow Week Promotion," not "Campaign 1."

note

Each campaign uses only one delivery method: Email or SMS, not both. If you want to send the same message by both methods, create two separate campaigns.

Why the SMS option may be missing

The SMS delivery method appears only after two things happen: your organization's SMS number becomes active, and the phone network company approves the number for campaign messages. This approval process usually takes 2 to 3 weeks. If your organization is new, expect this delay. The SMS option is not broken; it is simply not yet available. See SMS configuration to set up a number and see what the wait looks like.

Choosing your audience

Here, you choose the customers who will receive the campaign. In Customer List Preview, you can filter the customer list by:

• Services: for example, everyone who has used daycare
• Pet Type: Dogs or Cats
• Date: a Start Date and an End Date
• Location: use this filter if your organization has more than one facility
• First visit within the past month

Services, pet type, date range, location, and the opt-in exclusions. Click Search to build the list.

You can combine filters. For example: dog owners who booked in July and who are assigned to a specific facility.

warning

Two filters behave in ways you may not expect:

• The date range filter matches any reservation that is not cancelled and is scheduled to start or end within that date range. It does not look only at checkout dates.
• First visit within the past month ignores the date range that you set. It always looks back exactly one month from today. If the end date of your date range is more than one month before today, this filter returns no results.

Exclusions are opt-in

The Exclusion Criteria section has five checkboxes:

Exclude banned pets · Exclude unaltered pets · Exclude expired vaccinations · Exclude missing vaccinations · Exclude incident instigators

danger

Petsoft does not select these exclusions for you. On a new campaign, only the Exclude banned pets checkbox is selected by default. If you want to exclude pets with expired vaccinations from a promotional campaign, you must select that checkbox yourself. Petsoft does not select it for you.

Who gets filtered out automatically

Petsoft filters out some customers automatically. This filter works differently for each delivery method:

• Email: Petsoft excludes any customer who opted out of the campaign's purpose.
• SMS: Petsoft includes only customers who opted in.

As a result, an SMS campaign usually reaches far fewer customers than the same campaign sent by email. This is not an error. It happens because of how SMS consent rules work.

Writing the message

Select the campaign's purpose: Alerts, Service Announcements, or Marketing. Customers use this purpose to decide whether to opt in or out. Select the purpose that correctly describes your message.

Keep the message short. For an email campaign, write no more than two or three paragraphs. For an SMS campaign, a message longer than 160 characters splits into more than one text message. The message field for SMS allows a maximum of 640 characters.

Use the insert buttons to add customer and organization details automatically. Campaigns support exactly four placeholders:

[Organization Name] · [Facility Name] · [Pet Parent Name] · [Pet Names]

The following practices work well:

• Use the placeholders to mention the customer's pet by name.
• Include a clear instruction that tells the customer what to do next, such as a link to book online.
• Add the date the offer ends.

The following practices do not work well:

• Subject lines written in all capital letters. Email providers often mark these as spam.
• Long web addresses. Use a link-shortening service or the Pet Parent Portal booking link instead.

Sending and scheduling

Click Search to preview your recipient list. You must search before Petsoft will let you save a campaign to be sent. The results show exactly who will receive the message, together with a Count.

Then, select Send campaign immediately or Schedule to send at a specific date and time. Click Save Campaign to save the campaign, or click Save Draft to finish it later.

note

Petsoft creates your recipient list when you save the campaign, not when the campaign sends. If a customer becomes eligible after you save a scheduled campaign, that customer will not receive the message.

Petsoft shows this message about timing: "Campaigns may take up to five minutes to start processing and may take hours based on the number of messages and rate limits set by the SMS/email provider."

Tracking results

On the Campaigns page, the Upcoming Campaigns and Recent Campaigns lists show the real recipient count for both email and SMS campaigns.

The Reports tab shows only email campaigns. On this tab, the Recipients, Opened, and Clicked columns always show 0. Petsoft has not yet built open and click tracking, so do not use these numbers to judge a campaign. The CSV Download file has the same limitation. Only the name, subject, and sent date columns contain real data. The Recipients, Opened, and Clicked columns are always zero.

To find out how well a campaign worked, watch for an increase in bookings, or ask your customers.

tip

Test the campaign on yourself before you send it to customers. Create a filter that matches only your own customer profile. Send the campaign to yourself. Check how the message looks on your phone and on your computer. This is the best way to confirm that the message appears the way you want.

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Campaign creation workflow

Email vs SMS comparison

Factor	Email	SMS
Who receives it	Everyone who has not opted out of the campaign's purpose	Only customers who opted in
Availability	Included with the Email & SMS Marketing feature	Also needs an active SMS number registered with the phone network company
Length	No fixed length limit	Splits into more than one message after 160 characters; 640 characters maximum
Reporting	Real recipient counts on the Campaigns page. The Reports tab shows recipients, opens, and clicks.	Real recipient counts on the Campaigns page only. This method has no Reports tab.
Best for	Detailed promotional messages and newsletters	Urgent reminders and short offers

Pre-send checklist

Check	Details
Recipients previewed	Click Search and check that the Count is correct.
Exclusions selected	You must select exclusions yourself. Only Exclude banned pets is selected by default.
Purpose matches content	The purpose must match the message content, because customers use it to opt in or out.
Subject line checked	Do not write the subject line in all capital letters. Keep it short.
Placeholders correct	Only the four placeholders listed above work. Any other bracketed text sends exactly as typed.
Links working	Test every booking link and portal link in the message.