Campaigns

A campaign is a one-off broadcast - a newsletter, an event announcement, a “we’re back this weekend” nudge - sent to an audience you choose. Campaigns live under Marketing → Campaigns, and they’re the counterpart to Automations: where an automation sends itself when a guest hits a moment, a campaign is something you send, once, to a group.

You can reach guests on email, SMS or push.

Building a campaign

The composer walks you through four steps.

1. Compose & preview

Channel - pick email, SMS or push.
Use an existing template - start from a saved email design (email only), or write from scratch.
Campaign name - an internal label, just for your team.
Subject - what guests see in their inbox (email only).
Body - your message. Email supports HTML; SMS and push are plain text, and push is kept short.
A live preview shows how it will look on a device as you type.
Add A/B variants - optional, on any channel. Use the + tab above the composer to add another version of your message (see A/B testing).

2. Settings

Setting	What it does
Preview text	The short preheader shown after the subject in most inboxes.
From name	The name guests see the email is from. Use your venue or brand name.
Sender email	Set for you automatically - campaigns send from your brand name via Sidedoor’s managed marketing domain.
Reply-to	Where guest replies should go. Defaults to the venue’s marketing reply-to, but you can set a different address just for this campaign.
Advanced tracking (UTM)	Optional `utm_source` / `utm_medium` / `utm_campaign` tags for your own web analytics.
Track opens / Track clicks	On by default - see Tracking & results.
Tags	Your own labels for organising campaigns.
Internal notes	A team-only note; guests never see it.
Respect quiet hours	Hold the send during an overnight do-not-disturb window.

3. Reach

Choose who to send to:

All guests across your venues.
Recent visitors - anyone who’s visited in the last few months.
Lapsed guests - guests who haven’t visited in a while (a configurable window of 30 to 180 days), your ready-made win-back audience.
A single venue’s guests.
A saved segment - your most precise option.

As you pick, Sidedoor shows the reachable audience: total guests, how many are eligible, how many are reachable on this channel, how many are suppressed or unsubscribed (and skipped), the estimated send volume, a new-vs-returning split, and your historical open and click rates so you know roughly what to expect.

The Reach step also shows the estimated cost of this send: campaigns draw from your plan’s monthly sending allowance for the channel (email, SMS or push), at one credit per recipient, and you’ll see how much of that allowance is left this period. If a send would go over what’s left, Sidedoor blocks it and offers to upgrade for more allowance, so nothing goes out unexpectedly. (You’ll also see a heads-up on the Marketing dashboard when a channel’s allowance is running low.)

4. Test & confirm

Send yourself a test email first (defaults to your own address) to see the real thing, merge variables and footer included. Then send now, or schedule it for a future time.

A/B testing

A/B testing tries different versions of your message against each other, then sends the version that performs best to the rest of your audience. It works on email, SMS and push campaigns.

Add your variants

On the Compose step your message is Variant A. Use the + tab above the composer to add Variant B, and add more the same way, up to five variants in total. Each variant is its own mini-composer. What you can change from one variant to the next depends on the channel:

Email - a different subject line and message content (with the same template picker and editor as Variant A).
SMS - a different message text.
Push - a different notification title and message text.

Everything else (the sender name, tracking, audience and so on) is shared from the campaign.

Adding at least one variant is what turns A/B testing on - there’s no separate switch. Remove a variant (from its tab or its Remove button) to turn it back off.

Set the split and the winner

Once you’ve added a variant, the A/B options appear on the Settings step:

Setting	What it does
Test audience	The share of recipients who get the test versions: 10%, 20% (the default), 30% or 50%. They’re split evenly across your variants.
Winner by	The metric that decides the winner. The choices match the channel: email can use Opens or Clicks, SMS uses Clicks (link taps), and push uses Taps (a notification tap).
Decide after	How long to wait before picking the winner: 1, 4 (the default), 8 or 24 hours.

Sidedoor sends the variants to the test audience, waits out the decision window, then automatically sends the winning variant to everyone remaining. If two variants tie, the earliest one wins (Variant A before B, and so on).

Follow the test

Open the campaign to watch the test run. While the decision window is open it shows a testing status, and once a winner is picked it switches to show the winner going out to the rest. Each variant’s test results sit side by side, with the winning one marked, so you can see how they compared.

Scheduling & managing sends

A campaign moves through draft → scheduled → sending → sent. While it’s scheduled or sending you can pause, resume or cancel it. The Campaigns list shows every campaign with its Channel, Status, Recipients, Sent count and Date, plus a Results by channel summary. You can duplicate any campaign to reuse it as a starting point.

Personalising your messages

Campaigns support the same merge variables - {{first_name}} and friends - as automations, so you can greet each guest by name and reference their own history. See the full list and how fallbacks work in Automations → Personalising.

Every campaign send skips anyone who’s unsubscribed from that channel or been suppressed - you don’t manage any of that by hand. See Consent & preferences.

Segments - build the precise audience you send to.
Templates - reusable email designs to start from.
Tracking & results - opens, clicks and the bookings a campaign drove.