Emails

The emails tool lets you reach your customers from inside Thril, using the customer data you already hold. You can write a rich, branded message, target it precisely (everyone, a specific customer list, or a hand-picked set of contacts), schedule it for the right moment, and then see exactly how it performed. There is no separate mailing platform to wire up and no list to export: your customers, their marketing consent, and your venue branding are already here.

This page focuses on what you can send, how to target it, and how to read the results, rather than walking through every button. You will find emails under Marketing → Emails, where each email shows its type, status, recipient count, and send time.

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Marketing or transactional: the first decision

Every email is one of two types, and the choice is not cosmetic. It decides who is allowed to receive the email and what the footer must contain.

Marketing

For anything promotional: newsletters, campaigns, offers, event invitations, "we miss you" win-backs. Under GDPR, marketing messages may only go to customers who have given marketing consent, so Thril automatically narrows the recipients to consenting contacts. If you target "all customers" or a customer list, non-consenting contacts are dropped before sending, no matter how the list is defined. Marketing emails also carry a mandatory unsubscribe link in the footer, and they are the only type that produces engagement statistics.

Transactional

For service messages that every customer needs regardless of consent: a closure notice, a schedule change, an important account update. Transactional emails bypass the consent filter and reach all selected recipients, and their footer explains that the person is receiving it because they are a customer of your venue.

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What goes into an email

You build the message across a few focused stages. Each piece has a clear purpose:

• Internal name and notes. A label and optional note used only to find and recognise the email in your list. Customers never see these.
• Content. A rich-text body with the formatting you would expect: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, headings and font sizes, ordered and bulleted lists, links, text colour and alignment, and inline images. You can also drop in emoji where it suits your tone.
• Subject. The line recipients see in their inbox. This is what earns the open, so make it specific.
• Preview text. The short snippet shown next to the subject in many inboxes, up to 100 characters. Some email clients show the first lines of the body instead, so treat it as a helpful extra rather than a guarantee.
• Reply-to address. Where replies land. This does not change the address the email is sent from; it only routes responses to the inbox you choose.
• Footer. Generated automatically from your venue name and address, and always included. It updates on its own if your venue details change, so there is nothing to maintain. Marketing emails add the unsubscribe link; transactional emails add the "you are receiving this because you are a customer" line.

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Who receives it

Targeting is where the customer data you keep in Thril pays off. You choose recipients in two layers: who to include, and who to leave out.

Include either:

• All customers, scoped to either the current venue only or company-wide across every venue in your company. This is the broad reach option.
• Selected recipients, where you pick any combination of customer lists and individual contacts. This is how you target a segment, for example everyone who has played in the last 90 days, or a hand-built VIP list.

Exclude any contacts or lists you want to hold back. Exclusions always win: an excluded contact will not receive the email even if they also fall inside your included audience. This is the clean way to suppress a group, such as leaving staff or a recently-contacted segment out of a blast.

As you adjust the audience, an estimated recipient count updates live so you can sanity-check your targeting before committing. For marketing emails this count already reflects the consent filter, so it shows who will genuinely receive the message.

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When it sends

You can send immediately or schedule for later. A scheduled email defaults to the next day at midday in your venue's time zone, and you can set any future time from now onward.

The two modes differ in one important way once you confirm:

• A scheduled email stays editable right up until it sends. You can refine the content, retarget, or delete it in the meantime.
• An email sent immediately cannot be edited afterwards, because it is already on its way.

You can also save as draft at any point and finish later. A draft sends nothing and holds all your work until you return to schedule or send it.

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Test before you send

Send a test email to yourself or any chosen recipients to check the layout, links, and content in a real inbox before it reaches customers. Test emails go out regardless of the recipients' marketing consent, since you are explicitly choosing who receives the preview. Sending a test to your own inbox first is the simplest way to catch a broken link or an awkward line break.

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Reading the results

After a marketing email sends, its statistics tell you how it landed. (Transactional emails do not collect engagement statistics, since they are service messages rather than campaigns.)

The headline rates:

• Delivery rate. The share of attempts that reached an inbox, excluding bounces and other failures.
• Open rate. The share of recipients who opened the email, with both unique opens and total opens shown.
• Click-through rate. The share who clicked a link, again split into unique and total clicks.
• Unsubscribe rate. The share who opted out after receiving it.

Below these, a delivery breakdown separates delivered, bounced (rejected by the recipient's mail server), and undelivered (failed for other reasons), and an engagement breakdown compares opens and clicks at a glance.

A dedicated spam complaints figure tracks how many recipients marked the email as spam.

To go deeper, open the email's recipients list to see every contact with their individual delivery status, from delivered through to bounced, suppressed, or filtered as spam. This is where you trace exactly what happened to a specific customer's copy.

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Managing your emails

Each email in the list carries a status that tells you what you can do with it:

• Draft. Still being written. Fully editable, and you can schedule or send it when ready.
• Scheduled (pending). Queued for a future time. Editable until it sends.
• Sent. Delivered, or on its way. No longer editable.
• Failed. Sending did not succeed.

Two actions are always useful:

• Duplicate any email to create an editable draft copy. This is the fastest way to run a recurring campaign or branch a new version from a proven one.
• Delete an email while it is still a draft or scheduled.