Quiet hours and opting out

The thing that goes wrong with automation is not that it stops working. It's that it keeps working at 2am, at a client who told you to stop, in a month you weren't watching.

Three settings and one client-level switch exist for exactly that, and they apply to every flow you have.

The three rules

Flow settings → Send settings on the flows list. All three hold a marketing message back rather than throwing it away, and none of these three touches a transactional message — a reminder or a confirmation is never held by anything on this screen.

Quiet hours. On by default, 9pm to 8am, in your business timezone. A marketing message that comes due inside the window waits and goes out when the window ends. This is the setting to leave alone.

Appointment reminders have a quiet window of their own, separately switchable and off unless you turn it on. Same idea, different messages, different screen — What clients are sent covers it, including why a last-chance reminder ignores it.

Monthly send budget. A dollar cap on what your flows spend in a month. Reach it and flow sends pause until the month turns over. Leave it blank for no cap. Texts are what cost money here; emails are treated as free. It's worth setting even if you set it high — a flow with a wait loop and a busy trigger is the one thing in the product that can quietly run up a number.

Skip marketing to unhappy clients. Off unless you turn it on. When a client's last conversation in the inbox read as negative, marketing from flows is held so a person can follow up instead of an automation. A client who has just complained is the last person who should get a cheerful promotion.

How a client stops hearing from you

Two routes, and they work independently of each other.

They opt out themselves. Every marketing message from a flow carries an unsubscribe link, and a text can be answered with STOP. Either one takes effect immediately, for that client, on that channel, permanently — and STOP is honoured whatever RewireBox has been told.

You set it for them. Open the client's record and find Automated messages. Each channel — text and email — has three settings:

• All automated messages — the default.
• Reminders only — no marketing — they still get appointment reminders and confirmations; flow marketing stops.
• None — nothing automated on that channel.

The middle one is the useful one, and it's the setting people reach for after a conversation at the desk. "Stop the promotions but keep telling me when my appointment is" is what most people actually mean by "stop texting me", and setting them to None loses them their reminders too.

This switch covers campaigns too. Set somebody to Reminders only and they come off your campaign list for that channel as well — you don't have to find the marketing contact settings a few centimetres away and remember to change those as well. The same is true the other way round: a client who replies STOP to a text, or uses the unsubscribe link in any message, is out of both.

The one thing worth knowing is that these are still two records, so the client record can show a client as a marketing contact and still not send them anything, because the Automated messages setting above it says not to. The send is what matters, and the send honours whichever of the two says stop.

Marketing or not

Every message step is classified when it's written, and the classification is what all of the above hangs off. A thank-you after a visit and a reminder before one are not marketing. An offer, a promotion or a win-back is.

That's why these quiet hours can be on and a reminder still arrives at 7am, and why a client set to "Reminders only" still hears from you about their booking.