Remembering customers between visits

The list work of a grooming business has two ends. New customers matter, and the intake form and the booking widget carry that end. The other end is quieter: someone who groomed once in September and would book again in December if something reminded them the shop exists. That reminder competes with everything else in the day. It loses.

Two senders went into Slickerbook this month for the quiet end. A pet birthday greeting fires once a year from the date of birth already on the pet record. A one-off blast puts a single message in front of an audience with each customer’s consent checked first. Both start from data already in the system.

The birthday that is already in your book

Pet forms gained a Birthday field in the same change (migration 089). Fill it as you go. Switch on Pet Birthday Greetings under Company, then Features, and write the template. Four placeholders are available: {pet}, {name}, {company} and {url}.

On the pet’s birthday, a scheduled task sends one text at 10am on the company’s clock. An owner with no phone number gets an email instead. The pet record carries a greeted stamp in the company’s date, so a retry or a second task running in the same hour cannot double-send, and the same stamp makes the greeting annual. A pet greeted on 29 February hears from you on 28 February in the other years.

The greeting counts as promotional, so customers who opted out of promotional texts are skipped. A pet with no birthday on file is never greeted.

The blast, previewed before it sends

The blast lives in the Inbox. Press Send a blast (admins and managers), pick an audience, pick text or email, and say whether the message is about service or an offer. The audience is a filter over your customer list, not a pasted selection: customers with an appointment in a date range of up to 31 days, customers who have lapsed (no completed visit in a stretch you set, nothing booked), or everyone active.

The preview shows every matched customer and, beside each skipped one, the reason: no phone on file, an opt-out on record, no email address. If a date range came out wrong, the preview is where you see it before the send does.

Say storms roll in at 2. One blast to the customers with appointments today says you are running behind, and it is out before the apology calls start.

A send is capped at 200 recipients, so a filter built on the wrong range cannot text a whole client book by accident. The send goes out over the same routes the reminders use. A customer who opted out is a skip reason in the preview, never a delivery, and the outbound pause a company set still holds. When the send finishes, it is recorded with the message and the counts.

What both retire

Neither feature makes a decision for you. The birthday list is only as good as the dates on the pets, and the blast reflects what each customer agreed to. Both retire the end-of-day scroll through names, wondering who to text.