Email and SMS marketing automation
Marketing automations
An automation is a trigger, some conditions and a short sequence of steps. Most of the triggers in ibakepro are operational: an order was placed, a payment is overdue, a batch of stock fell below its minimum. Four of them are marketing, and they are the ones that go and find the customer rather than waiting for the customer to do something.
Why the marketing ones are separate
A bakery's mailing list is the asset most likely to get a business in trouble. "Send everyone an email" is easy to build and hard to build responsibly, because responsibility means knowing, per person and per channel, whether you are allowed to. Every message is either transactional or marketing, and only marketing can be blocked by an opt-out. A receipt always goes out; a win-back email does not.
You will find the four marketing ones under Marketing, Journeys, rather than mixed in with the operational automations, and each has a ready-made template you can start from and edit.
The four marketing triggers
Abandoned checkout. Someone started a checkout, gave their email address and did not finish. ibakepro picks these up automatically and fires once, once the checkout has sat unfinished for a while. The template sends a single email that can carry a link back to where they left off.
Win-back. Customers who have gone quiet. ibakepro works out each customer's stage from their own order history, without you tagging anybody: someone who has ordered recently is active, past that they are at risk, and longer still they are lapsed. The win-back trigger covers customers at risk or lapsed, and it will not fire again for the same person for another month, so a quiet customer is not chased weekly.
Segment entered. A customer newly matching a saved segment starts a journey. Segments are the ones you build yourself, so this covers "became a repeat customer", "started ordering wholesale", "has not ordered since the Christmas rush". You can set how long before the same customer may enter the same journey again.
Customer date. A date recorded against a customer coming round again, such as an anniversary mentioned at the consultation.
What a journey can do
The steps are plain: send an email, send an SMS, wait a set amount of time or branch on a condition and take a different path. A step that waits three days waits three days. Every run is recorded in the message log, so you can see what was sent, to whom and what failed.
The test send renders a single email step with sample data and delivers a real email to your own address, with a "Test" prefix on the subject, so you can read the message the way the customer will. The trigger itself proves out in the message log once the journey is live.
Consent, which is the part worth reading
That ordering is the whole point. A journey built last month against a segment that was accurate last month cannot mail somebody who unsubscribed in the meantime, because the decision is made at the last possible moment against the customer record as it is right now.
What has to be true before a marketing message goes out
- The customer has explicitly opted in for that channel. Not "we have never asked", not "they did not object". The flag has to be a yes. A recipient with no customer record at all is refused, because consent that cannot be evidenced does not exist.
- They have not unsubscribed. An unsubscribe blocks marketing on that channel and leaves transactional messages alone, so unsubscribing from your newsletter never stops someone's order confirmation.
- They are not blacklisted, which blocks everything.
- They have not already had a marketing message recently. Email is capped at one per person per day, SMS at one every few days, across every automation and campaign you run.
Every marketing email gets an unsubscribe link and a preferences link added to it automatically, plus the header that makes the unsubscribe button appear in the mail client itself. If that link cannot be generated for any reason, the email is not sent at all. An email you cannot unsubscribe from is worse than an email that did not go.
Design decisions
- Consent comes from the customer opting in, on your storefront or wherever you asked. The engine only spends consent, it never assumes it.
- The split is fixed by design. Reminders about money, such as the payment chasers described in taking a deposit, are transactional and always go. Promotional triggers are marketing and always respect opt-out.
- Once enrolled, a journey runs its steps to completion, with consent still checked at every send.
Marketing emails count against a monthly allowance that is separate from your transactional sending, so a busy month of order confirmations never eats the budget for a campaign, and vice versa.