How do I send a marketing email?

Compose a campaign from a prebuilt template or your own HTML, pick recipients, send a test, then send — with the safety checks explained.

You send a marketing email by clicking New campaign on any Marketing page (or one of the Overview's quick starts, which open the composer with the right design ready — two of them also pre-pick the audience; a specific event or offer is picked inside the composer). The composer walks you through four steps — Design, Content, Recipients, then Review & send — one question per screen, with a running summary alongside ("A one-off email to 214 subscribed customers using the Seasonal design…"). Campaigns go out straight away, or at a date and time you choose — see Send it later below. Marketing is Available on Pro plan and above, and included with a paid Gift Cards, Loyalty, Tickets or Order & Pay product. Staff need the marketing draft permission to build a campaign; the actual send needs the send permission (without it the send button is disabled with "You can prepare campaigns but not send them — ask an owner or admin").

• Open Marketing and click New campaign (or a quick start on the Overview).
• Design — pick how the email should look. Designed by AI (Pro and Complete, first in the list) lets the AI lay out the whole email from a couple of lines — see How do I design a whole email with AI?. The nine prebuilt designs — Promotion, Event, Newsletter, Reactivation, Loyalty, Birthday, Seasonal, Gift cards and Booking enhancer — each ask for a short set of fields (headline, details, button label and link, and so on). The Gift cards design adds two gift-specific slots — your bonus promotion or price discount in a highlighted box, and the amounts customers can pick — and fills its button in with your own gift page address so you don't have to go and find it. Or pick Custom HTML (advanced) to write your own HTML in a code editor.
• Content — on Pro and Complete a Write it for me panel sits at the top: give the AI a couple of lines and a tone and Draft it — 1 credit fills the subject and every field for you (free subject ideas and quick touches too — see Can the AI write my marketing emails?); everything it writes stays editable. On the Event design, a Fill from one of your events dropdown fills the title, date, description and booking link from an upcoming published event. Then fill in (or check) the Subject and From name (both required — the from name defaults to your restaurant's name; emails are sent from marketing@marketing.resoflow.co.uk on behalf of your restaurant, and replies go to your reply-to address), then the template's fields. On a prebuilt or AI-designed campaign, an Attach a promotion dropdown lists your live promotions: on a prebuilt design, attaching one fills the Promotion template with the offer's headline, details and dates — everything stays editable; on an AI-designed campaign the AI works the offer into the layout next time you generate. Switches appear when the offer supports them, all on by default: Include the code (shows the shared code as a code chip inside the offer box) and Add to their account (loyalty members get an "Add to my account" button that saves the offer to their account). Offers with one-per-person codes show Give each recipient their own code instead — every recipient gets one of the promotion's unused codes in the offer box, locked to their email address (you can also type {{uniqueCode}} anywhere in your copy); if unused codes run out mid-send, the rest still get the email, just without a code, and the campaign's detail view says how many. Test sends show a sample code and never use up real ones. If you have live showcase offers, a Feature what's on picker lets you add up to 3 of them to the bottom of the email as announcement cards — no code and no claim button. In custom-HTML mode, Insert image opens the image library picker (reuse an image, pick a ready-made one, or upload new) and adds the picture to the end of the code, and the tags {{firstName}} and {{tenantName}} are filled in automatically for each customer.
• Recipients — pick an audience in plain words: Everyone opted in (the default), Haven't visited for a while (last booked more than 2, 3, 6 or 12 months ago — your choice), Loyalty members (shown when you run a scheme), or Build my own group for the full criteria builder (tags, visit counts, birthdays, join dates, lifetime spend and whether they've bought tickets or a gift card — combined with AND; see Who receives my campaigns — and who is skipped?). The panel shows a live count — "Will send to 143 customers" — plus how many were skipped. Only customers who have opted in to marketing can ever receive a campaign, whatever segment you pick.
• Review & send — check the summary and the preview (switch between desktop and mobile widths, and light or dark).
• Click Send test to me — it emails only your own address and doesn't use your monthly allowance. Always worth doing before a real send.
• Click Send 143 emails (the button shows your live count). A pop-up asks you to type SEND and add a short reason of at least 10 characters — the reason is recorded in your activity log. For sends of 10 or more people you'll also be asked to confirm your password. Then the send runs and you'll see a result like "Sent to 143 customers." Or click Send at… to schedule it instead — see the next section.

Send it later

On the Review & send step, next to the send button, Send at… schedules the campaign for a date and time instead of sending it now:

• Pick the Date and Time — in your venue's own time zone (the dialog names it). It must be at least 5 minutes ahead and no more than 90 days away; the dialog tells you if the time won't work. The time moves in 5-minute steps, and scheduled sends go out on those five-minute marks — a time typed in between (10:03, say) goes out at the next one (10:05).
• Fill in Why are you sending this? — the same short reason a normal send asks for, kept in your activity log.
• Click Schedule send. Identity confirmation works exactly as for a send now — for 10 or more recipients you confirm your password (or a manager PIN) at the moment you schedule, not when it fires.

One scheduled send per draft: while one is waiting, the Review step shows a Scheduled for banner above the buttons with a Cancel scheduled send button, and Send at… stays disabled until you cancel it. Every scheduled send is also listed under the Scheduled filter on the Campaigns page — each with a Cancel button while it's waiting, and afterwards its outcome for the last 30 days.

When the time comes, ResoFlow re-checks everything as if you'd pressed send yourself — your credits and sending limits, who is opted in at that moment (the audience is worked out fresh, so people who joined or unsubscribed since count correctly), and any hold on your account — then sends. You get a bell notification either way: "Scheduled campaign sent" when it went out as planned, or "Scheduled campaign needs a look" if it didn't send, only partly sent, or reached a very different number of customers than expected — the Scheduled list says why.

The daily limit on new senders

While your sending reputation is new, ResoFlow gently caps how many marketing emails can go out per day: 100 a day for your first week of sending, 1,000 a day until day 30, then your full monthly allowance. This protects your deliverability — big blasts from a brand-new sender are exactly what spam filters look for, and the ramp-up keeps your emails landing in inboxes.

If your audience is bigger than what's left today, nothing fails: the recipients panel and the confirm pop-up both tell you plainly, for example "Will send to 100 of 460 today — the rest are paused by your daily limit", and the send goes to that capped number. The rest aren't lost — the campaign is marked Partly sent in the Campaigns tab, and ResoFlow remembers exactly who has already received it. Once the limit has room again (usually the next day), open the campaign under Recent campaigns and click Send to the remaining N — only the people still waiting get it, never anyone twice. Nothing sends automatically, though, so it's still worth planning big blasts for after your first month.

If you're not ready to send, click Save as draft — saved drafts appear under Marketing → Campaigns (the Drafts filter) on any device. Leaving part-way is safe too: the composer keeps your work-in-progress on the device you're using (the exit button says so — "Exit — saved on this device"), and the next time you start a new campaign it picks up where you left off, with a Start afresh link if you'd rather begin again.

Related: Who receives my campaigns — and who is skipped? · How do I reuse drafts, templates and images? · How did my campaign perform?