Communication
Write it now. It goes out
Not everything should be said the same way. A reminder by SMS, some news by email, an invitation on WhatsApp. You choose the channel and the moment, RelAI follows the rule.
The flow
Delivered in March
Where they did not arrive
- 62 events
- A birthday, a basket left half full, sixty days of silence. You choose what has to happen for the message to go out.
- 26 actions
- Five send a message, the other twenty-one do not. A rule can end without the customer receiving anything and still have made something happen.
- 3 channels
- A hundred and sixty characters, a whole email, an open chat. The same message does not fit all three the same way: you write the text for the channel you chose.
The problem is not writing it. It is remembering when.
You think about your customers when you have time, which means Tuesday afternoon if nothing has come up. So someone born on the twenty-eighth of February gets their birthday wishes on the third of March, and the offer for people who have been away for a while also reaches the ones who were here on Saturday.
Inside RelAI you decide what has to set the message off. You set an SMS to go out twenty-four hours before a booking, and from then on the same rule applies to every booking. There is no day when you have to sit down and send the messages: nor is there a day when you have no time and skip them.
And you do not write the text blind. The number and the address are the ones the customer left when they signed up, what they bought last time is in their profile, and if they reply you find the conversation next to chats and calls. Before you write, you already know who you are talking to.
You say which tag they have to have and which one they must not. Then the consent for that channel filters who can actually receive it, with no lists to update by hand.
An SMS, an email and a WhatsApp do not have the same room or the same tone. You prepare the text for the channel you picked and, if you want to reuse it, you save it as a template.
The day before a booking, the morning of the birthday, after a stretch with no purchases. You set the condition once and you do not have to remember every send.
Write. Set. Check.
You write the message, you set the rule, you check the result. The work stays yours, what repeats does not.
You start by hand.
You choose the people, the channel and what you want to say. Sending by hand is for when you have something specific to say, and also for working out which messages you actually end up repeating.
Something happens. The rule goes off.
An automation starts from one precise situation. You decide what has to happen, who it applies to and what to do next. You set it once, and when the same situation comes round again you do not have to redo anything by hand.
A purchase, a booking, points about to expire, an entry at a club night. You choose the event the automation has to start from and it waits for that.
Then you narrow the group: only the ones with that tag, only above a certain spend, only the ones who said yes on that channel. If you set no conditions, the rule holds for everyone the event involves.
Sending a message is only one of the options. The same rule adds points, issues a coupon, assigns a tag, alerts whoever is on the floor or opens a task.
For every automation you see whether it is a draft, active or paused, how many times it went off, how many runs were skipped and when you last changed it. That way an old rule does not stay on without you noticing.
It is not only the birthday
The groups follow the places where you work, not the channels: if something happens at the till or at the door of a club night, there is an event there that catches it. A rule is not necessarily a marketing message: sometimes it is only a reminder for you. And the same event can leave RelAI too, if you need it: API and webhooks hand it to another system as soon as it happens, signed and with a log of the attempts.
Sending is not enough. It has to arrive.
A message that shows as sent but never gets delivered leaves you convinced it arrived. Here sending and delivery are kept apart, and you check how it went.
First you verify the domain
You decide how much is too much
You decide how many messages reach the same person over a given period. Past the threshold the sending limits skip the next send and the reason stays in the log. The rule you left on in January is not added on top of the one from March.
Who stays out and why
A rule does not go off for everyone it covers, and that is how it should be. The run log keeps a line for every skip with the reason next to it, so when a delivery is missed nobody has to guess.
The permission is per channel
The consents stay separate for email, SMS and WhatsApp on the customer profile, and every withdrawal keeps its own date. If a person drops one channel, the others do not change on their own. Unsubscribing goes through a public page that does not ask anyone to log in anywhere: whoever wants to stop does it without writing to you.
Fifteen tools. You choose the channel and the moment.
The reason changes. The settings do not.
- Shops and retail News to whoever has the right tag
- Restaurants and bars The reminder the night before
- Beauty and wellness Six weeks after the treatment
- Events and venues The invitation to the night's group
Several sites, a franchise or a special project? Let's talk about it
Questions about communication
How do I choose who gets a message?
You start from the tags that sit on the profile: you include one and exclude another. The card tier, the distance from the venue and attendance at a past club night are not available as criteria today, and you cannot filter by them.
Campaign or automation, what is the difference?
A campaign goes out on the date you choose; an automation goes off when an event happens and, if you want, a condition is met. It is worth starting from manual sends and automating the ones you find yourself repeating word for word.
Do I have to write a different text for every channel?
Yes, and it is better to write them at different moments than to translate one into the other. In the guided creation the text stays attached to the channel, and the template you get out of it stays tied to that one too: that way you do not end up with half a newsletter inside a hundred-and-sixty-character message.
Do my emails actually arrive?
Verifying the sender is not a delivery confirmation, and nobody can guarantee you will reach the inbox. What it does is establish that the address you send from is really yours, which is the first reason an email ends up in spam. If something is off it tells you now, not after twelve hundred emails have gone astray.
Can I use the name of my business as the SMS sender?
Yes, and it is something to sort out when you set the channel up, not on the day of the first campaign: in Italy the sender name has to be registered with AGCOM and cannot be used before the outcome comes back. The phone number the SMS go out from is not yours, and you do not need to have one.
How do I avoid wearing them out?
By watching who leaves, before there are many of them. The statistics show which groups you are contacting most often and how many unsubscribes come from each one. It is the only figure that warns you in time, because the people who get tired do not reply: they disappear.
Can I see how many emails were opened?
No, and we would rather be clear about it: in this installation email opens and clicks are not collected. You see how many sends went out, how many did not arrive and how many unsubscribes were recorded. They are delivery and pressure figures, not a measure of how much people liked it.
If someone unsubscribes, do I lose them?
You lose that channel, not the person. And the page for doing it is public on purpose: if unsubscribing is hard, people report spam, which is far worse, because from then on even the emails to everyone else struggle to arrive.
You write the first one. The second goes out
Try RelAI for free or book a call: we set up the first message together, the channel and the rule that will send it.