Send emails, campaigns and journeys

The emails you don’t have to send

Open Settings → Email and scroll to “Emails we send your guests.” TableSpark emails guests automatically — you never write or trigger a single one. There are 14, grouped exactly the way the booking, order and gift-card engines that fire them are grouped:

Editing what each one says

Still on Settings → Email, scroll to “What your emails say.” Click any email to expand it — Booking confirmed, say — and you get three fields: Subject line, Heading and Message. Click a tag like {{guest_name}}, {{restaurant}}, {{date}}, {{time}} or {{party}} to drop it in at the cursor — the exact set of tags on offer changes per email. Press Save wording and new emails use it right away.

A “Customised” pill marks any email you’ve edited. Nothing here can break sending — booking details, buttons and your branding are still added automatically, and Reset to standard deletes your version and puts the shipped wording straight back.

Choosing how they look

Below the wording sits “Email design” — the visual shell every one of those 14 emails wears. Pick a template from a gallery of ten: Spark, Noir, Bistro, Journal, Salon, Maison and Gallery open on a cover photograph; Ink, Linen and Plate keep it to type. Set an accent colour for rules, links and buttons; choose a header layout and rounded or sharp corners; upload a logo and a cover photo (or let your website’s own hero photo stand in until you do); add a closing sign-off line, footer links and social icons. The panel on the right is the real send-time template rendering your choices — what you see there is what lands in the inbox.

Switch the preview’s tab between Booking confirmed, Reminder and Order confirmed to see the same design carry across email types, then press Save design.

Sending as your own restaurant

Two more cards on the same page, above the wording, set the identity behind all 14 emails. “How they introduce themselves” sets the name on the email (usually your restaurant’s name) and where guest replies go — an inbox you actually check, such as the info@ mailbox from the email-address guide. A live line shows exactly how it reads in an inbox.

Below it, “The address they’re sent from” shows where those 14 emails actually come from — bookings@tablespark.uk until you connect your own. Type a domain you already own and press Connect: TableSpark shows the DNS records to add (or writes them for you, if the domain was bought through TableSpark), and once verified every automatic guest email sends from bookings@your-domain instead — your name end to end, and inboxes like Gmail trust it more. Connecting your own sending domain is included from the Growth plan.

This is the same identity the email-address guide sets up from the domain-and-mailbox side — if you haven’t bought a domain or a mailbox yet, that’s the two-minute prerequisite for sending on your own name.

Writing a one-off campaign

Open Emails from the sidebar for the channel you press send on yourself — a single email to your newsletter list, separate from the 14 automatic emails above. Subscribers lists everyone who joined through your site’s newsletter block, with their consent date and source. On Compose, choose an audience — All subscribers, Regulars, VIP, Recently joined or Win-back (lapsed) — each pill showing its live subscribed count.

Open “Draft with AI”, pick a Goal (restaurant news, an event, an offer, a win-back note, something seasonal) and a Tone, optionally type an offer to mention, and press Generate draft. It writes a subject and a full HTML body grounded in your restaurant’s real name and menu — it only states a promotion you typed yourself, and the draft is yours to edit freely before anything goes out. Set the From name and Reply-to, and the live preview on the right updates as you type.

Press Send test to my email first — it sends one copy straight to your own signed-in address so you can check it in a real inbox. When you’re happy, press Queue campaign: a dialog names the exact subscriber count and audience before it queues recipient-level delivery, and every email carries your restaurant’s details and a personal unsubscribe link, as UK anti-spam rules require. History keeps your drafts ready to reopen, and tracks each sent campaign’s delivery.

Building an automated journey

Open Journeys from the sidebar (or the link at the top of Emails) for a versioned, branching sequence that starts itself — set up once, it runs on every matching guest without you sending anything. Press New, then build the flow with Add a node: Trigger, Delay, Condition, Email, SMS or Exit. Nodes append to the flow; reorder by dragging the handle or the ↑/↓ buttons.

Every journey needs exactly one Trigger, chosen from a fixed list — order.fulfilled, order.refunded, order.cancelled, reservation.finished, reservation.no_show — and at least one Exit. A Delay waits before the next node; a Condition tests a field against a value (typed as, for example, total_pence gte 5000) and splits the flow into a yes branch and a no branch, each pointed at its own next node. Email and SMS nodes send the message at that point in the sequence. The editor checks the graph live and will not let a broken one publish.

Save draft keeps working on an unpublished version. Publish version freezes it — published versions are immutable, so editing a live journey means Continue in new draft, which opens a fresh editable copy without disturbing guests already partway through the version that’s running. Pause journey stops new guests entering without touching the version itself.

Put together: the 14 automatic emails need no ongoing attention once their wording, look and sender are set — campaigns and journeys are the two channels you drive yourself, one message at a time or on autopilot.