Introducing Automations: marketing that acts on the moments in your venue

Automations lets you build a guest journey once and leave it running. Someone connects to your WiFi, a birthday comes around, a guest joins one of your segments, and the right message goes out without anyone having to remember. Available today in Engage.

The problem Automations solves

Every venue collects more about its guests than it ever manages to use. Someone connects to the WiFi, gives you their name, their email address and often their birthday, comes back three times in a month, and the only thing that happens is a row in a database.

The intention is always there. Send something to the people who keep coming back. Follow up with the ones who did not. Wish the regulars a happy birthday. It rarely happens, because it depends on a person noticing the right moment and having twenty minutes spare, and in most venues that person is also running the venue.

Most marketing platforms are good at deciding what to send and who to send it to. What they see is what your guests do online: what they clicked, what they opened, what they bought on a website. That is a real signal, and it is not the one that matters most to a physical business.

How it works

An automation is a journey. It begins with a trigger, runs through as many steps as you want, and treats every guest individually rather than sending the same thing to everyone at once.

You choose what starts it, from triggers that cover the things that actually happen to a guest: they connect to your WiFi at any of your venues or one in particular, a tag is applied, they join or leave a segment, they open an email or click a link, it is their birthday, or it is a year since they signed up. Each trigger can carry its own conditions, so you can narrow it to first-time visitors, one site, or whoever you like.

From there you build the journey on a canvas. Add a delay to hold someone for twenty minutes or three days. Add a branch to send returning guests down a different path from new ones. At each step you decide what happens: send an email, add or remove a tag, update a field on their record, unsubscribe them, archive them.

The emails use the same builder your team already uses for campaigns, with your brand kit applied, so an automated email looks like everything else you send. Before anything goes live, a review tells you exactly which step is unfinished. Nothing enters the journey until you activate it, and you can pause it, change a step and reactivate whenever you want. It can only ever message people who have opted in.

The moments that happen in your venue

Any marketing platform can send a birthday email. That is not what makes this different.

Most marketing platforms only see what happens online. Purple sees the visit, because the contact and the visit are the same record. Not two systems trying to agree with each other. No export, no import, no integration to maintain.

The interesting part is the combination. It is someone's birthday and they have just connected. Someone who has not visited for two months is back today. Someone who joined your loyalty segment last week has just walked in. Automations turns those moments into action, without anyone having to notice them first.

It also keeps your guest data tidy

Not every step has to send something. An automation can tag a first-time visitor, update a field, unsubscribe someone who has asked to go, or archive a contact who is no longer relevant, with nothing going out at all. Tag every first visit and the segment you would have built by hand builds itself.

See exactly what it did

Every automation shows how many guests entered, how many are still in progress and how many completed. Inside the builder, every step shows how many guests reached it and what it did to them: emails sent, tags added, records updated, which branch they took and how many are waiting in a delay right now.

Get started

Automations is available today in Engage. Open Engage, go to Automations, and start from a pre-built journey or a blank canvas. See how Engage works.