SMS Campaigns for Booknetic

If you’re running a busy booking business, “sending an SMS” isn’t the hard part — sending the right message to the right customers at the right time is.

SMS Campaign for Booknetic adds a full SMS campaign system inside your Booknetic admin panel so you can run promos, re-engagement campaigns, announcements, and customer updates without exporting lists or relying on external tools.

Because it works directly inside Booknetic, your customer data, appointment history, filters, logs, and campaign actions all stay in one place.

Why you’ll use it

Target the right audience

Pick from ready-made segments like:

Customers who booked in the last 7/30/90 days
Customers with upcoming appointments in the next 7/30 days
First-time customers, repeat customers (3+ appointments)
Inactive customers (90/180 days) with history
Customers with canceled/rejected appointments recently
All customers with a phone number

Then narrow down with advanced filters:

Service
Location
Status
Minimum appointments
Suppression exclusions

Send safely with queue + retries

Campaign sending is built for real-world reliability:

Recipient list is snapshotted before sending so results stay consistent
SMS messages are processed in batches of 25
Automatic retry policy with backoff:
1st failure -> retry after 120 seconds
2nd failure -> retry after 240 seconds
3rd failure -> permanently failed
A runtime lock prevents overlapping queue runs
Works with Booknetic cron via bkntc_cronjob
Processes up to 5 campaigns per tick

Clear progress while sending

When you start a campaign, the add-on shows a built-in progress wizard so the process feels active and understandable.

Preparing -> Sending -> Finalizing stages
Large progress bar with live counters
Total / Sent / Failed / Pending stats
Live status line during the run
Hide and continue in background
Re-open progress anytime
Clean completion state with logs access

Pause / Resume mid-send

Need to stop a campaign quickly?

Pause instantly while queued or sending
Resume anytime
Continues from queued state without starting over unnecessarily

Built-in templates plus your own

Start faster with 4 built-in templates:

Re-engagement (90 days)
Loyal customer offer
General announcement
Seasonal campaign

Create unlimited custom templates, then use them to pre-fill the SMS body for new campaigns.

Per-recipient logs + CSV export

Every recipient is tracked:

pending / sent / failed
attempt count
last error message
sent timestamp

Export up to 5,000 rows to CSV per campaign when you need reporting or troubleshooting.

Suppression list with double protection

Maintain a “never SMS” list for customer preference and safety:

Add phone + optional reason
Duplicate adds are ignored
Search by phone or reason
Checked twice:
During recipient query
At send time as final safeguard

What you can do inside Booknetic

1) Create a Campaign

Go to Booknetic -> SMS Campaigns and fill:

Name
Segment
SMS message body
Optional template
Optional filters

Important behavior: editing an existing campaign resets it to draft and clears its logs, so you always work from a clean state.

2) Preview your segment before sending

Before you save or send:

See total recipient count
Browse a sample list
Verify filters are behaving correctly

3) Send campaigns manually or via cron

Standard send:

Click Send
The add-on snapshots recipients into logs with pending
If no recipients are found, campaign becomes failed
Each trigger processes one batch of 25

Cron queue send:

Hooks into Booknetic cron
Processes up to 5 campaigns per tick
Continues batch progression automatically until completion

4) Test SMS before going live

Send a test SMS to any number.

Shortcodes render using a dummy customer: Test Customer
Test SMS bypasses normal customer lookup
Requires send permission

5) Manual one-off SMS outside campaigns

Send a one-time SMS in two modes:

Customers mode: search Booknetic customers and send using real data
Freeform mode: paste raw phone numbers

Manual SMS respects suppression, so blocked numbers are skipped and counted.

Smart personalization with shortcodes

Use shortcodes in the SMS body, resolved per recipient at send time:

{customer_full_name} / {customer_name}
{customer_first_name}
{customer_last_name}
{customer_phone}

If a customer name is missing, full-name shortcodes safely fall back to the phone number.

Campaign lifecycle

Statuses:

draft -> editable
queued -> waiting for engine
sending -> processing batches
paused -> stopped mid-send
completed -> finished
failed -> finished with no successful sends

Rules that prevent mistakes:

Queued/sending campaigns cannot be edited or deleted
Completed campaigns cannot be sent again
Duplicate campaign creates a fresh draft copy with no logs

Dashboard analytics

Built-in dashboard includes:

Total campaigns
Completed campaigns
Total sent / failed / pending
Recent campaigns list

SaaS-ready permissions & multi-tenancy

Designed for Booknetic SaaS environments:

Tenant gate: sms_campaigns
Granular capabilities:
sms_campaigns
sms_campaigns_create
sms_campaigns_send
sms_campaigns_delete
sms_campaign_templates
sms_campaign_logs
sms_campaign_suppressions

All campaign data is tenant-isolated with tenant_id.

Requirements

To send SMS campaigns, you must have:

Booknetic core plugin installed and active
Twilio SMS action for Booknetic workflows add-on active and configured

If the Twilio SMS workflow add-on is missing or inactive, all send operations fail clearly and the UI prompts you to activate it.

Installation details

Upload and activate like any WordPress plugin.

On first load, the add-on automatically:

creates required database tables
runs schema migration if needed
seeds built-in templates
adds SMS Campaigns menu item in Booknetic backend

Perfect for

Seasonal promos
Re-engagement campaigns
Loyalty and retention messages
Announcements
Special offers
Schedule change notifications
Customer update campaigns