Overview
Electronic Direct Mail (“EDM”) Marketing provides the means to engage with guests by email post-visit and gain repeat business. Use cases include:
- Inform guests of new venue openings
- Promote seasonal and holiday menu offerings
- Invite guests to visit for anniversary and birthday
Core Concepts
- Customer Data: The EDM feature only sends mails to your customers who have opted-in to receive marketing mails. The opt-in typically happens at the time they book a reservation, however, there are other opt-in touch points as well. Customers can unsubscribe (opt-out) from receiving mails at any time.
- Opt-In Form: Configurable webpage where diners can opt-in for marketing, accessible by QR code.
- Campaign: A marketing campaign which you wish to run, for example, “Spring 2025 Terrace Dining Promotion”. The emails sent are tagged by Campaign, and you will be able to see open-rate and booking success rate per campaign.
- Mail Template: The contents of each marketing mail, including text, images, and links. In general, you will create a new Mail Template for each Campaign.
- Mail Theme: Defines the brand colors, fonts, standard header and footer which is standardized across each mail you send. Mail Themes can also be controlled centrally by HQ if needed so that individual properties don't change them.
- Audience: The target audience of your Campaign, i.e. to whom you wish to send mails. By default, Campaigns are targeted at all guests who have opted-in for marketing. You may create more fine-grained targeting, e.g. "Customers with VIP tag that spend over $100 per visit on average".
Step-by-step Instructions
The EDM feature consists of various components that are shown as different tabs on TableCheck Settings system. They are listed below:
- Campaigns
- Senders
- Audience
- Opt-in Forms
Below is a guide on how to create & send a mass email through TableCheck.
1. Campaigns
In order to create a new campaign, click New campaign.
Enter/ select the parameters under the respective fields.
Name
Give a suitable name to the template. The name is only for internal reference and will not be displayed anywhere in the email.
Sending Rules
You can choose one of the 3 available options:
- Send now: The campaign will be sent immediately.
- Schedule: You can set up a later time at which you want the campaign to be sent out.
- Recurring: You can set up a recurring schedule at which you want the campaign to be sent out.
Please note that by default a Monthly recurrence is selected, the other options available are weekly, every 2 weeks/ 2 months, every 3 weeks/ 3 months, every 4 weeks & every 6 months.
Also an optional end date for a campaign can be selected.
Content Editor
This is where the email template is created. Click Open Editor to design the EDM template.
Enter the parameters on the left side as shown in the below sample.
Sender: Select already created sender email ID or click + New EDM Sender to create a new one.
Reply-to: Create/ select an optional but highly recommended Reply-to address to which guests can reply in case of any questions on the EDM.
Subject: Enter the subject line of the email, which will be visible to guests. Keep it short & catchy. The optional personalized fields that can be inserted & the commands for them are:
- Customer Full Name: {{customer_name}}
- Customer Last Name: {{customer_last_name}}
- Customer First Name: {{customer_first_name}}
- Unsubscribe URL: {{unsubscribe_url}}
Preview: This is the text that is displayed right after the subject in the same line.
Move to the right side of the page to configure the EDM design.
Theme: Select your property theme from the drop-down list. You can also create a new theme by clicking + New Theme.
Header, Footer & Social links: These are all part of the theme, hence locked in this view, however you can add these while creating a theme.
Click Add Section to add content into the email body. You can add various components as shown below.
Add the desired parameters and click Done to continue adding more sections.
Text: Select when you want to add only a block of text.
Text + Image: Select when you want to add text next to an image.
Advanced: Select when you want to add image and text as columns. You can select up to max 3 columns.
Button: Select when you want to only add a button.
Click Continue when you are done adding all desired sections. The content is now saved as below.
Click Send test to send a test email to yourself.
Audience Filters
You can create a new audience and add it here, or select an already existing one. It is possible to either include or exclude an audience for a campaign.
There are a variety of filters available for segmenting your audience, such as tags, visit history, spend values etc.
Analytics Tagging
You can add optional tags to your campaign. On clicking Add tag, you are able to add other tags such as Source tag, Medium tag etc. as shown below.
Please note that the system will only consider audience (customers) who have opted-in to receive marketing emails (i.e. Marketing in customer profile is enabled).
Finally, click Save at the top right of the page and save the campaign as an active/ inactive one.
2. Senders
Under the Senders tab, you will be able to see all the senders & reply-to addresses created. Click New address if you want to add a new sender/ reply-to address.
3. Audiences
Your created audiences are displayed here. You can click New audience to segment your customers based on your preferred filter conditions.
4. Opt-in forms
Click New opt-in form.
There are 3 tabs - Basic, Content & Links.
a. Basic
Enter the fields as shown below:
Name: A name for your form
Venue theme: The field will always be disabled since the default theme for your Opt-in form is always the brand theme which is hard-coded.
Promo code: An optional field where you can select a promo code that you venue/ property is using.
Email input: Required by default, can be made optional/ hidden but strongly recommended to keep it as a mandatory field.
Phone input: Hide by default, can make it optional/ required.
Birthday input: Optional by default, can hide it or make it required.
Birthday year input: Optional by default, can hide it or make it required.
Marketing Prompt: Default is Hide (Always On), can be changed to Show (Default On) or Show (Default Off). When Show is selected, a field for entering Marketing Opt-in Text appears in the form.
b. Content
Most of the fields under Content have default text, which you can leave as-is or customize as per your preferences.
Content - The text just under the Title, can be a short description of what the form does.
Fine print - The lighter text that appears right above the CTA button.
CTA button label - Text appearing on the CTA button.
Success message - The message displayed after the user clicks the CTA button.
Success CTA button label - Optional CTA button that can be displayed on the Success page.
Success CTA button URL - The URL for the above Success CTA Button.
Click Save at the top of the page when done.
A URL as well as QR code are generated for the created EDM Opt-in Form.
c. Links
If you want to create multiple links/ QR codes for opt-in via different channels, you can do so by adding them under Links.
Click Add link and enter the details as desired.
Clicking the URL will show the below (default) example page.
Viewing Campaign Results
Once the campaign is sent, the results are shown under Campaigns.
Click the arrow icon on the right against the campaign for which you want to see the results.
You will see a list of metrics along with some numbers. You can also click Open Insight to view the campaign performance details on our Advanced Analytics tool - Insight.
- Recipients - Number of messages successfully sent. Includes any delivered message, including ones which went to spam folder.
- Opens - Number of people who viewed the email at least once.
- Clicks - Number of people who clicked at least one CTA button/image in the mail.
- Reservations - Number of reservations booked due to the email.
- Pax - Number of covers booked due to the mail.
- Spam - Number of messages which were delivered but were put in the recipients spam folder.
- Bounced - Number of messages which were sent but failed to deliver to the user’s inbox.
- Skipped - Number of receipts who were skipped, for example, due to not sending to the same email address twice.