Bulk Email and Marketing Sends

Bulk email is for messages you want to send to many customers at once — weather closures, promotional newsletters, last-minute slot availability, holiday opening hours. This guide covers the bulk email tool, picking the right recipient list, and the consent and deliverability rules you need to know about.

Where bulk email lives

From the main menu go to Emails. The list shows every bulk email you've sent with its recipient count, send date, open rate (if tracked), and a copy link to duplicate as a starting point for the next send.

Click Compose to start a new send.

Picking recipients

The first step is choosing who gets the email. Three ways:

By booking filter

"Everyone with a booking on 2026-05-04" — perfect for weather closures or "your room is ready early" announcements. Pick a date range (or a specific date) and a room filter.

By customer filter

"Everyone who's booked in the last 12 months" — for re-engagement campaigns. "Everyone who's booked the Haunted Mansion" — for room-specific updates. "Everyone who's signed up for marketing" — for promotional content. Combine filters with AND.

Manual list

Paste a CSV of email addresses or upload a file. Useful when your audience comes from outside Booking Phoenix — e.g. a corporate client list.

Transactional vs marketing

This is the most important distinction in bulk email. Pick the right one or you'll either annoy customers or break the law.

The compose form asks which type you're sending. If you pick "Marketing", your recipient list is automatically filtered to opted-in customers only.

Composing the message

• Subject line — under 50 characters, specific. "Reminder: Holiday hours this weekend" beats "An important announcement".
• Preheader — the preview text shown in inbox lists. Optional but helps open rates.
• Body — rich text editor. Keep it short; mobile readers won't scroll past two screens.
• Merge fields — {{ customer_name }}, {{ booking_date }} if applicable. Personalisation lifts response rates noticeably.
• Unsubscribe link — auto-included for marketing emails. Don't remove it.

Preview before send

Three previews to use:

1. Desktop preview — how it'll look in Gmail / Outlook on a laptop.
2. Mobile preview — most opens are on phones. If it looks bad here, fix it before sending.
3. Send a test to yourself — click "Send Test" and pick your own email. See what it actually looks like in your inbox, in the spam-filter context, with images that may or may not load.

Sending

The send button shows the final recipient count. Click it once and you can't unsend — double-check the count before clicking.

For large sends (10,000+ recipients) the system delivers in batches over a few minutes to avoid being flagged as spam by recipient mail providers.

After sending

The email's stats update over the next few hours / days:

• Sent — the recipient count.
• Delivered — reached the recipient's mail server. Sent − bounces.
• Opens — tracked via a tiny image; many email clients now block these so opens under-count, but the trend across sends is still useful.
• Clicks — tracked links your customers clicked. The most reliable engagement metric.
• Unsubscribes — recipients who opted out. A normal rate is 0.1–0.5%; significantly higher means the content didn't match what they expected.
• Bounces — addresses the mail server rejected. Hard bounces (invalid address) auto-unsubscribe; soft bounces (full inbox, temp issue) retry.

Deliverability tips

• Send from your own domain — emails from noreply@yourvenue.com deliver better than from noreply@bookingphoenix.com. Configure SPF/DKIM/DMARC records via Email Deliverability.
• Don't blast cold lists. Low engagement on a cold list teaches mail providers to spam-flag you. Warm lists (recent customers) deliver well; old lists need re-permission first.
• Avoid spammy patterns — ALL CAPS subjects, multiple exclamation marks, "FREE!!!", embedded URL shorteners, and walls of image-only content all increase spam-folder placement.
• Watch the unsubscribe rate. If it spikes past 1% on a send, the content didn't match the audience — rethink before sending another.

Common pitfalls

• Wrong recipient filter. The classic: meant to send to "this weekend's bookings" but selected the entire customer database. Always check the recipient count before sending.
• Mixed transactional and marketing in one send. Promotional content in a transactional email annoys customers and creates compliance risk. Send them separately.
• Sending too often. One marketing email a month is a healthy cadence; weekly starts looking spammy unless your customers explicitly signed up for that frequency.
• Test send only on your own perfect inbox. Your inbox isn't representative — check on Gmail, Outlook, and a phone Mail app to see how the message renders for real customers.

SMS as alternative

For urgent messages (same-day weather closures, last-minute changes), SMS reaches faster and gets read sooner. See Sending SMS to Customers. SMS costs per message but the open rate is dramatically higher than email.