Campaigns and Mailchimp

The campaigns surface adds three tabs to the Communications hub — Campaigns, Bulk sends and Settings — for marketing and bulk messaging.

Availability

Campaigns are rolled out per organisation. The tabs only appear when the feature is enabled both globally and for your account, so availability depends on your plan — if you don't see them, they haven't been switched on for your facility yet. While the feature is off, nothing campaign-related is fetched, shown or sendable.

Campaigns

A campaign is a recurring message to a saved segment. Each run re-evaluates the segment against today's data and messages only the customers who match that day — a customer who settles their balance overnight simply stops matching, with no manual list maintenance. Opt-outs and do-not-contact are always respected.

To create one:

1. Save a segment on the Customers page first — campaigns are built on saved segments, and the New campaign button stays disabled until you have one.
2. On the Campaigns tab, click New campaign.
3. Name it, choose the Segment, and pick the Channel — SMS or Email.
4. Set how often it Runs (Daily, Weekly or Monthly) and a Cooldown in days (1–365) so no customer is messaged too often.
5. Write the message — or use Draft with AI: describe what you want to get across and WagDay drafts it in your facility's voice for you to edit. Use {{customerName}}, {{petName}} and {{paymentLink}} to personalise per customer. Emails also need a subject.
6. Create campaign saves it as a draft.

Campaigns are marketing-only for now. New campaigns are saved as drafts — use the switch on each row to activate one when you're ready for it to send on its cadence, and switch it off again to pause. The table shows each campaign's segment, channel, cadence, cooldown, last run and total sent, and you can delete a campaign at any time. Only Managers and above can create, activate or delete campaigns.

How an active campaign sends

Once activated, a campaign runs automatically on its cadence — each run re-evaluates the segment and messages only the customers who match that day. Sends are queued and delivered in the background, so a large segment drains over successive runs rather than timing out.

A few safeguards shape every run:

• Cooldown — a customer is never re-messaged by the same campaign inside its cooldown window, even if they still match the segment.
• Quiet hours — a customer inside your facility's quiet hours isn't skipped; their message is held and delivered after the quiet window ends, evaluated in their own timezone.
• Frequency cap — your organisation-wide marketing cap is enforced across every campaign and bulk send, so one busy week of campaigns can't flood a customer.
• SMS credits — campaign SMS draws on the same credit balance as everything else; recipients held by quiet hours or caps don't consume credits.

Every run appears in the Bulk sends tab alongside one-off batches, with the same delivered, skipped and failed tallies — a skipped recipient is an opted-out customer or one the cap protected, not a delivery error.

Arming campaigns for your facility

The Settings tab of the Communications hub has a Campaigns switch that arms the auto-send runner for your organisation. It only takes effect when campaigns are also enabled environment-wide, and only Admins can change it. With the switch off, campaigns stay drafts and nothing sends automatically.

Bulk sends

The Bulk sends tab is the history of every batch message: when it went, the channel, the message, who sent it, and how it landed — recipients, delivered, skipped and failed — with a status of Pending, Sending, Completed, Partially failed or Failed.

Skipped is shown apart from Failed on purpose: a skipped recipient is an opted-out customer whose preference was respected, not a delivery error. Search and sortable columns make long histories manageable. One-off bulk messages are sent by selecting customers on the Customers or Pets page.

Brand voice

The Settings tab of the Communications hub holds your Brand Voice settings — how the AI drafter should sound when it writes customer messages. Everything is optional:

• Tone — a few words describing how you talk to customers.
• Sign-off — how you close a message.
• Words to avoid — words or claims never to use in your name.
• Sample of your writing — paste real copy you're happy with; the drafter imitates its rhythm and vocabulary, not its content. The single most useful setting.

With nothing set, drafts use a neutral, friendly Australian tone. The settings shape drafts only — staff always review and edit a message before it sends. Managers and above can edit the brand voice.

Mailchimp

If you run email marketing through Mailchimp, connect it at Settings → Integrations. Only Admins can manage integrations.

1. In Mailchimp, copy your API key and audience ID.
2. On the Integrations page, enter them in the Mailchimp card and connect. WagDay validates the key against the audience before saving, and stores it encrypted.
3. The card shows the connected audience and the last sync time, and you can disconnect at any time.

Once connected, WagDay syncs your marketing audience automatically on a schedule. The sync pushes customers who have opted in to marketing, are active, and have a pet or a booking with you — added or updated in Mailchimp as subscribed, with their first and last name and a wagday-customer tag.

Suppression is taken seriously, as the Spam Act requires: marking a customer do-not-contact unsubscribes them in Mailchimp immediately, and every sync force-unsubscribes every do-not-contact customer again, so a transient failure can't leave someone subscribed.

The Mailing List Export report

Not on Mailchimp? Reports → Mailing List Export produces an export of your marketing opt-in customers for use in whatever email tool you prefer.

What's next?

• Sending messages: SMS and email
• Call lists and follow-ups