01
Promotional campaigns
Seasonal sends, menu launches, event announcements, offers and reopenings. Built around a calendar, tested subject by subject, measured against covers.
- Campaign calendar
- Template design
- List segmentation
- Subject testing
Promotional & transactional email · Hospitality
Campaigns that get
opened. Receipts
that always arrive.
We plan, build and send the email your customers actually receive — the seasonal campaigns that sell the table, and the transactional messages that confirm it five seconds after they book.
01 · Services
Two kinds of email.
Both handled
properly.
Promotional mail asks for attention. Transactional mail can't afford to lose it. Most agencies do only the first. Most platforms do only the second. We run both on the same account, with the same reporting.
02
Transactional email
The mail that fires after a customer acts — order confirmations, booking receipts, shipping updates, reminders, password resets. Templated and monitored.
- Order confirmations
- Booking receipts
- Shipping updates
- Account & password
03
Lifecycle & automation
The series that runs without anyone pressing send. Welcome, post-visit, birthday, win-back. Triggered by behaviour, not a monthly newsletter slot.
- Welcome series
- Post-visit & reviews
- Win-back flows
- Abandoned booking
04
Deliverability & setup
The unglamorous work that decides whether any of it reaches the inbox. Authentication, IP reputation, blocklist monitoring, honest reporting.
- SPF, DKIM & DMARC
- IP warm-up
- Blocklist monitoring
- Placement testing
02 · Delivery
A confirmation email
is a promise.
A campaign that lands in promotions is annoying. A booking confirmation in spam is a customer standing at the door with no table. We treat the second kind accordingly.
- 01
Separate streams
Transactional and promotional traffic separated at the sending level. A bad campaign week can't affect the confirmations going out on a Friday night.
- 02
Authenticated
SPF, DKIM and DMARC published and aligned on your domain. Not borrowed from a shared pool, not left at defaults that fail silently.
- 03
Monitored
Bounce rates, complaint rates, blocklist status, inbox placement. Checked on a schedule, not only when someone notices the receipts stopped arriving.
- 04
Tested before send
Every transactional template rendered in Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail and iOS. Every campaign tested on a live seed list before the real one.
03 · Selected work
In the inbox,
on the night.
Harbor & Hearth
Four restaurants sharing one booking system. Confirmation, reminder and post-visit emails rebuilt as one system, then a seasonal campaign calendar on top.
3.1× weekend reservations within one quarter.
Sinkwell Spirits
A first release with no list and no history. Waitlist, order confirmations and shipping updates built alongside the brand so the first thousand customers got a proper email at every step.
11 days to sell out a fourteen-month allocation.
The Verdure
Direct booking confirmations were landing in spam at two major providers. Authentication fixed, IP warmed, templates rebuilt — campaigns moved to a separate stream.
42% lift in direct bookings in six months.
Case studies shown are illustrative of the type of work we take on. Ask us about the current portfolio.
“They took the order confirmations off our developer's desk and made them look like they belonged to the brand. The promotional calendar got more attention — but the receipts stopped being an embarrassment.”
- Founded
- 2016
- Brands served
- 60+
- Transactional delivery
- 99.9%
- Client retention
- 94%
04 · About
We came from
inside the industry.
Most email agencies have never had to open a restaurant at 4pm on a Friday. Ours has. Before we wrote campaign briefs we wrote menus, ran pass, and answered the phone when a booking confirmation hadn't arrived.
That history is why we care about the parts clients complain about elsewhere — that the receipt has to render in Outlook 2016, that the confirmation has to arrive before the customer closes the tab, that "we're opening a new place" is a campaign, not a single Facebook post.
We're a small senior team. You'll work with the same people who pitched. No juniors on the account, no rotating cast.
05 · Common questions
A few things
people ask.
What's the difference between promotional and transactional email?
Promotional email is marketing — campaigns, offers, announcements. It asks the recipient to do something. Transactional email is a response to something they already did: an order confirmation, a booking receipt, a shipping update, a password reset. It's expected, time-sensitive, and should never share a sending reputation with the marketing stream.
Do you send on our behalf, or set up our own platform?
Either. Most clients end up on their own account with us managing it — your domain, your data, your list. We configure the platform, build the templates, run the calendar and monitor delivery. If you'd rather we send from our infrastructure entirely, that's available too.
Which platforms do you work with?
Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Brevo, Customer.io, Postmark, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Campaign Monitor and HubSpot, plus whatever your booking or e-commerce system already fires from. We're not tied to one vendor, and we'll tell you if the one you have is the wrong tool for the job.
Our transactional email is landing in spam. Can you fix that?
Usually. The cause is almost always authentication, IP reputation or content shape — sometimes all three. We audit SPF, DKIM and DMARC, check the sending IP against the major blocklists, and read the actual placement reports. Then we fix it and warm back up. It takes weeks, not days, and no template change solves it on its own.
What does a project cost?
A transactional email build — templates, authentication, testing, monitoring — starts around $6,000. A promotional retainer covering campaign planning, design and sending starts at $2,500 per month. Full programmes covering both start around $4,500 per month. If your budget is smaller, say so — a tight scope on one stream is often the right way to start.
06 · Contact
Tell us what
you're sending.
Campaigns, confirmations, or both — describe the current setup and what's going wrong with it. We reply within two working days.
- Emailhello@emssipsandtipsmarketing.com
- Phone+44 1234 567 890
- StudioBristol, United Kingdom