How a Pub Builds a Guest List From Regulars Who Never Book

That gap is not a filing error. A list built from bookings can only contain people who booked, and in a pub those who book are often the occasional visitors: the families coming for a roast, the group celebrating something, the guests who do not know whether there will be a table. The regulars know there will be. So the list leans towards the guests least likely to come back next week, and away from the guests most likely to. When the news goes out, it reaches the wrong crowd, and the locals hear about the curry night from the chalkboard on the night itself, if they happen to be in. A second problem sits behind the first. Even where the pub has a regular's mobile number on a tab or an email from a lost-property message, that contact detail was not given for news, and using it for marketing raises a question the pub has to answer before it presses send.

Every route onto a pub's list of guests starts with the guest doing something. They book a table, they send a question, they buy a gift voucher, they ask to be told about events. A regular who pays at the bar does none of these. Their custom is real and frequent, but it leaves no record a list can be built from.

An owner will recognise three consequences.

The list measures the wrong thing. A guest list read as a picture of the pub's trade will show a weekend business of occasional parties, because those are the guests who arrived through the diary. The midweek trade that carries the fixed costs is close to invisible on it.

Announcements miss the audience they were written for. A quiz night, a new guest ale, a darts league or a change to the kitchen's hours matters most to the people who are in three times a week. If they are not on the list, a mailing about it lands mostly with people who come twice a year.

Contact details gathered by accident are not a safe basis for news. A number scribbled on a tab, an email address from a lost umbrella, a name on a darts sheet: none of these was collected with marketing in mind, and the law on electronic marketing is specific about what is needed before a business sends it.

The point is not that bookings are the wrong source. Bookings put the Sunday-roast families and the birthday parties on the list, and they belong there. Running the roast as its own service is covered in the piece on setting a pub's own Sunday roast booking rules. The point is that bookings alone cannot reach the regulars, so a second route is needed that does not depend on a booking at all.

The Information Commissioner's Office summarises the rule on marketing emails and texts in two sentences at the top of its guidance on electronic mail marketing:

The same page describes what consent looks like in practice:

And it draws the edge of the exception:

The ICO page also carries a notice that, because of changes made by the Data (Use and Access) Act, the guidance is under review and may be subject to change, so an owner setting up a list should read the current version rather than rely on a summary.

For a pub, the practical reading is plain. A regular who pays at the bar and has never given an email address has handed the pub nothing to send to. A contact detail that turned up for some other reason sits on uncertain ground. The clean route is the one the ICO names first: the guest chooses to sign up, by ticking or submitting something that says they want to hear from the pub. That is a sign-up form, and the rest of this piece is about where it lives and what happens to the names it collects.

A sign-up route for regulars has three parts: a form on the pub's own website that a guest can reach in seconds, a single place where each sign-up arrives, and a list of the people who opted in that the pub can see, export and write to.

On TableSpark, the first two sit on every plan. The pricing table ticks "Enquiry & newsletter forms" and "Inbox for every lead + CSV export" for Starter, Growth and Full, and Starter is £19 a month excluding VAT. The bookings guide describes the Inbox as the place where everything a guest sends from the live site lands, naming newsletter sign-ups alongside table enquiries and event RSVPs. So a regular who signs up from the bar does not go into a separate mailing tool that someone has to remember to check. They arrive in the same Inbox as the pub's enquiries, and the list exports to CSV whenever the pub wants it.

The sign-up also builds a guest profile. TableSpark's guide to knowing your guests says a profile is built "the moment someone books a table, sends an enquiry or joins your mailing list", with nothing to type in. That matters for a pub, because a regular who signs up on a Tuesday and books the Sunday roast a month later is the same guest, and the guide's Guests page (Growth plan or above) shows them that way: one record, with bookings, enquiries and sign-ups on it.

The Guests page itself is where the sign-ups become visible as a group, in the Subscribers segment; the separate Regulars pill counts guests with three or more bookings, so it measures the diary, not the bar. Its KPI band includes Subscribers, described as "opted in to emails", and a row of segment pills (All, Subscribers, Regulars, VIP, Recent and Data requests) each carries its own live count. The guide states that Export CSV "always exports whichever segment and search you currently have open", and that each row carries subscribed status, so an export of the Subscribers segment is a list of people who asked to hear from the pub.

Writing to them is the Growth step too. The pricing table lists email campaigns to consented guest segments on Growth and Full, and the emails guide says the Subscribers list shows everyone who joined through the site's newsletter block, with their consent date and source. Growth is £39 a month excluding VAT, and it is also the plan that adds bookings on the pub's own site at 0% TableSpark commission, so the Sunday-roast diary and the Tuesday regulars sit in one set of guest records.

Every profile lives under the pub's own TableSpark account. The guide says so directly: guests are "visible, searchable and exportable from this one screen whenever you want it." If a guest later asks to be taken off, a guest with a newsletter record can be unsubscribed from their own profile, and the guide's Erase guest data button removes their leads and subscription records.

TableSpark is the best-value and best overall website platform for an independent UK restaurant, and for a pub whose trade runs on regulars the reason is concrete: the sign-up form, the Inbox it fills and the CSV export are on the entry plan, and the step to seeing subscribers as a segment and writing to them is one plan up, with the bookings the pub already takes landing on the same guest record.

The form only works if regulars reach it, and regulars do not browse a pub's website. They need to be asked, once, in a way that is easy to say yes to and easy to ignore. What follows is suggested practice for the bar, not a product feature.

Put the address where people already look. The chalkboard, a small printed card on the bar, a beer mat. A short web address that goes straight to the page carrying the sign-up form is better than the home page, because a regular with a pint in one hand will not hunt for it.

Give a reason that belongs to the pub. "Hear about quiz nights and the curry night first" is a reason a regular understands. A vague "join our newsletter" is not. The sign-up is for news the guest actually wants, which is also what makes the opt-in meaningful.

Ask on the night something is happening. A quiz night, a new guest ale, a match on the screen: these are the evenings when a regular has a reason to want the next date. A quiet word from the bar staff when someone asks "when's the next one?" is the most natural sign-up prompt a pub has.

Never sign anyone up on their behalf. A regular saying "yeah, put me down" over the bar is hard to evidence later; the guest ticking the form themselves leaves a record of their own specific consent. Hand them the card, or the address, and let them do it.

The pub's guest Wi-Fi is another tempting route, and it raises its own questions about what a guest agreed to when they joined; those are set out in the piece on guest Wi-Fi sign-ups and marketing.

A list of opted-in regulars changes what a pub can do on its quiet nights. A curry night can be announced to the people who will actually come. A change to the kitchen's hours reaches the locals before they turn up to find it closed. A quiz night that fell away can be rebuilt by telling the people who used to play.

Planning a quiet night well also means deciding how many covers to take on a short-staffed evening, the subject of the piece on capping covers on the night one person runs the room. And when a regular does book, because their darts team wants the back room or a birthday needs two tables together, that booking joins the same guest record; the piece on seating a group in the bar area covers how a group table is set up.

No figure for how many pub regulars never book was located in this research, so the size of the gap in any one pub is for the owner to judge. Whether a regular signs up, and whether a mailing brings anyone in on a Tuesday, depends on the pub and its people; no such promise is made here.

What a list costs, in money and in time, is a separate question from how to build it, and the piece on what a restaurant guest database costs in the UK sets that out.

The regulars were never missing from the pub. They were missing from the list, because the list only knew how to hear from people who booked. A sign-up form, asked for at the bar and opted into by the guest, is the route that puts them on it.