Send Message lets you put one short line onto the loyalty cards your customers are already carrying: that you are closed on Monday, that there is something on this week, that the shop has moved. It goes to people who chose to keep your card, and to nobody else.
How to send one
- Open Send Message from the menu.
- If you run more than one Loyalty Program, choose which one this goes to. A message goes to one Program at a time, and the three totals under the message are counts of that Program. With one Program there is nothing to choose, so the Program box is not there at all.
- Give it a title if you want one. The Title box sits above the message and takes up to 80 characters. Leave it blank and your business name, from Business branding under Settings, is used instead, which is what the phone above shows until you type one.
- Type your message. The box is empty until you do: the grey line in it is an instruction, not a message, and nothing is sent until you have written one. You have 120 characters, which is about one plain sentence. The phone above the box shows roughly where it stops.
- Choose who it goes to from the "Send to" list: all cards, cards with at least a number of stamps, cards with a reward waiting, or cards not used in a number of days. It is one list with one answer, and the two that take a number show a box for it, marked Stamps or Days, once you pick them.
- Press the purple arrow. Nothing has been sent yet: you get one more screen, or a box on top of the page, with the final count of customer cards on it.
- Read the count, then press Send to go ahead, or Cancel to come back and change it.
- The message is then on its way. It goes out in the background, a batch at a time, and the note at the top of the page links to its own record, which follows it card by card and reloads itself while it goes out.
A message cannot be recalled once it has gone. That is why there is a check step, and why the count on it is a real count of real cards rather than an estimate of your list.
Where the other two live
- Send Message is this page: where you write one and choose who gets it. The three totals under the message are a real count of your real customer cards on that Program, and they follow your choice as you make it.
- A Loyalty Program’s Notifications tab is where the messages that go out WITHOUT you are switched on: Scan updates, Reminders and Birthdays. They belong to that one Program, so open the Program you are setting up and everything on the tab is its own.
- Reports, then Audit Log, is everything that has gone out, yours and the automatic ones alike, with what happened to each customer card. Choose Messages in the Event box to see only those.
The title
The title is the heading a customer reads above your sentence: Google Wallet shows it as the header of the message on the card, and Apple Wallet uses it as the label on the line your message becomes on the back of the pass. It does not change what a phone shows when it buzzes, which is your sentence on its own. The title is fixed at the moment you press Send, so renaming the business afterwards does not change a message that is still going out.
Every message asks for a notification
There is nothing to choose here. Every message you send updates the card and asks Apple Wallet or Google Wallet to put your sentence in front of the customer. The wallet decides whether it does, and the daily limit below decides whether we are allowed to ask at all.
The message also lands on the card itself, so a customer who opens their card later reads it whatever their phone did at the time.
One notification per customer a day
A card can be notified by one message every 24 hours. If you send a second one inside that window, the people you already messaged still get it on their card, quietly, and their phone is not interrupted twice. The check page tells you how many that will be before you send, and the results afterwards tell you how many it was.
This limit is ours rather than the phone’s. It exists because a loyalty card that buzzes three times a day stops being a loyalty card, and the customer removes it.
What you can see afterwards
Every message you send is listed in your Audit Log, under Reports: choose Messages in the Event box and you get one row per customer card, saying what that card actually got. Straight after a send, the note at the top of the page links to that message’s own record, card by card, including what Apple Wallet and Google Wallet each said.
While a message is still going out, Send Message shows it at the top under Still on its way, with how many cards are done so far, and each card appears in the Audit Log as it is written down rather than all at once. A card that was counted and then left alone, because its Program was switched off in the meantime or a newer message reached it first, is listed under Left alone on the message’s own page, with the reason beside it.
What nobody can tell you is how many customers saw it. Wallets do not report that back to any business, so any product claiming to know is guessing.