What is email automation? And how can you use it at your escape room?

Email automation is the process of sending the right emails at the right time to your players without any additional effort on your part. Put simply: it’s an automated marketing machine that’ll earn your escape room money and build long-term relationships that’ll work around the clock. The best part is, it’s incredibly easy to set up and, with Buzzshot, completely free.

How it works is that email automation is when you trigger an email automatically, based on the data you have about your players. These email touchpoints can be incredibly personalised down to the smallest details that are most important to you and your business. From birthdays, to team names, win states, to personal preferences.

Email automation is different from your regular email marketing campaigns, or as we call them in Buzzshot: broadcast emails. When you want to email all your subscribers at once about an upcoming deal, a new room, or a seasonal event, you’ll pick a list and send them a broadcast. Email automations on the other hand are your always-on campaigns that work in the background sending emails at the perfect time to each customer, to nurture long-term relationships and encourage more bookings over time. It takes some of the more repetitive tasks off your plate, meaning less time worrying about the small marketing details and more time doing what you do best, creating and running awesome escape rooms!

Why use email automation at your escape room?

Using email automation has many benefits, here are some of the main ones:

Stay Connected with a Personalised Touch

Email automation at its core is a personalised experience for the player. Email them when it makes most sense for them, such as a follow-up email to their escape room, or an email before their birthday. Over time, the personal touch builds up a better relationship with your target audience in order to grow your revenue.

Save Yourself Time and Money

Another of the biggest benefits email automation brings is to save you time and of course, money! Rather than creating many smaller emails throughout the year, you can set up one email automation flow to take care of your customers automatically. After all, email automation works for you round the clock to convert players into returning customers.

Re-engage the Unengaged Players

Let’s say you have a handful of customers who need a little extra push to get them to rebook. Maybe they’re on the cusp of unsubscribing, or maybe they visited once last year but not again since? A smart email automation system takes the guesswork out of it. Setup a one-size-fits-all automation flow to tag customers with filters to customise when and how they get emailed, with minimal extra effort on your side.

Promote Specific Escape Rooms

Sure, a general email to your marketing list is fine if you want to let them know about a great deal you have on your escape rooms, but the chances are those folks are on your list because they’ve already played at least one of your rooms. Instead you can set up an email automation that checks which rooms they’ve played and automatically emails them at a set time after their previous visit to entice them back with something new.

How to get someone to play all your escape rooms?

Let’s take a look at your average escape room customer, and imagine them walking the path of “customer journey” over the course of a year. There are so many opportunities to use email automation to remarket to this specific person based on their habits, and here’s how it looks in practice.

In December, your Julie visits your escape room for an office party. She had never visited an escape room before, but she enjoyed it enough to rate it 5 stars on Yelp. Great! But how can we use email automation to encourage her back?

A month after she visits, you send Julie an automated follow-up email. This email might contain details like her team name, her score, and her escape time as a way of enticing her back.

“Hey Julie, for scoring 960,289 points in Acme Lab, here’s 10% off a booking next month!”

When Julie books her next room, you can use your email automation machine to automatically schedule a series of informative emails. Perhaps an email ahead of time with an exciting preamble and her Games Master’s name. The same can be done afterwards in the post-game, such as:

“Thanks for playing The Pirate Ship, your Games Master was Ryan and you can leave a review here. Did you know, this escape room was built back in 2022, here’s a behind the scenes look…”

Next you email Julie about her upcoming birthday in June. Not that we need any convincing ourselves, but escape rooms are a fantastic activity to do on your birthday! Maybe Julie thinks so too.

“Escape in style on your birthday! Book a birthday escape package and get a cupcake and a glass of prosecco for each player”

Last but not least, since Julie’s very first visit was a corporate one, and a smart automated system can be set up to apply and understand tags like these, you could also email her in October or November about booking her business’s next event.

“Hey Julie! Early bird booking on corporate parties, here’s a special offer just for you since you also played last holidays.”

Email automation is a powerful marketing tool when you personalise each step of the customer’s journey. To recap, here are just a few of the automations you can use at your escape room:

• A pre-booking reminder with information about their game, and their Games Master
• A “thanks for coming” email with custom information about their game, their escape time, and their Games Master.
• Reminders to review a room on your local review sites.
• If you’re collecting the birthdays of your players, you can send them automatic birthday reminders a month before their birthday is coming up.
• Market a specific room based on previous booking history.
• 6 months after previous “corporate” booking, invite them back.
• Last but not least, educational emails tailored to the rooms they’ve played to keep them engaged.

Set up email automation for free on Buzzshot

Getting started couldn’t be easier, since our brand new email automation system is available for free for all Buzzshot users (subject to a “fair use” policy).

If you’re not yet a user, you can sign up for a free trial here. If you are, we have a handy help desk article which explains everything you need to know about your new automated marketing machine.

To create your first automation, simply head to Marketing then Automations then click

in your Buzzshot account, and choose from a list of presets, or get started building your own from scratch. From there you can drag and drop various triggers (things that cause your automation to begin) and events (things that happen, like sending an email). You can also create branches to send different emails to players in different categories like whether they have or haven’t done an action.

All in all, we’re super proud of our new email automation feature that goes hand in hand with our broadcast mailing, and we’d love for you to take advantage of it. If you’re a Buzzshot user, get started today. If you haven’t yet tried Buzzshot, you can sign up for a free trial now.