Automating Win-Back and Cold Lead Follow-up

Where to find it

Automations lives at Growth & Marketing → Automations (the rail item is "Growth & Marketing," which opens a hub of cards on its default "Growth" tab).

Automations is one card among many in that hub — alongside Drip campaigns, Bulk blast, the Review wall, a separate Win-back card, Reviews, Promotions, Loyalty, Marketing, and Lead forms.

The page's own tagline sums up the pitch: "Set it once. Let it run while you focus on installs."

Unlike most of the other cards in that hub, Automations isn't something you compose and send — it's a standing rule that runs in the background and enrolls customers on its own.

What's actually live (and what isn't yet)

Three automation kinds have a real backend behind them: Win Back Old Customers (internally "BOOK_AGAIN"), Follow Up Cold Leads ("LEAD_FOLLOWUP"), and Review Request.

A fourth, Weather Auto-Reschedule, is marked "Coming soon" in the product — there's genuinely no weather-fetch or reschedule logic built for it.

Its card shows a disabled "Notify me when it's ready" button instead of a "Set up" button, and if a shop had already turned one on before that distinction existed,

the app now shows that existing row the same disabled treatment with the note "Not running yet — no messages have actually been sent," rather than letting it look live.

How customers get enrolled — you don't send anything manually

Two scheduled jobs do the work: one enrolls newly qualifying customers once an hour, and the other runs every 15 minutes to advance and send the next due message.

For Win Back Old Customers, a customer qualifies once their most recent completed appointment is older than the automation's no-visit window (90 days by default)

and they have nothing currently scheduled, confirmed, checked-in, in-progress, ready, or pending deposit — in other words, they've genuinely gone quiet, not just between visits.

For Follow Up Cold Leads, a customer qualifies if they were created in roughly the last two weeks but more than 24 hours ago,

have zero appointments on file, and haven't already received an outbound message — the moment they book or you've already reached out, the automation leaves them alone.

Every send also rechecks your plan and account status first: if a shop gets downgraded off automations or frozen/locked mid-sequence, the send is skipped (not lost) and picks back up automatically once that's resolved, and SMS sends respect a customer's opt-out status.

Setting one up

Click "Set up" on a kind's card (or "Add another" once you already have one) to open the "Pick your pace" picker: Minimal (low pressure), Recommended (tagged "Best for most shops"), or Beast Mode (maximum follow-through). Each kind has its own starter messages, and the picker shows how many touchpoints each pace sends for that kind. Follow Up Cold Leads and Win Back Old Customers run 3, 5, or 8 touchpoints, and Review Request runs 1, 2, or 3.

Picking one creates the automation switched off and opens it, so nothing sends until you've reviewed the messages and turned it on.

On that page you can edit each step individually — its delay (a dropdown from "Immediately" up to "1 month"), its channel (SMS or Email), and its message copy, with merge-field chips like {{first_name}}, {{shop_name}}, {{booking_link}}, and {{review_link}} (your review link, used by the Review Request templates) to drop in.

The enable/disable toggle on the main list lets you pause or resume a whole automation without opening it.

How this differs from Drips, Bulk blast — and the separate Win-back card

The Growth & Marketing hub's own descriptions draw the line clearly. Automations and Drip campaigns sit together under the "Follow up automatically" heading: Drip campaigns are multi-step SMS/email sequences you build yourself (or start from a template) and enroll people into, included with your plan and drawing from your message allowance;

Bulk blast sits under "Send a message now" and is a one-time send to a segment you pick, with a choice of audiences (including lists handed off from AI tools) and a no-send test run. The older Campaigns page no longer has a card of its own; Bulk blast links to it as "Older campaigns".

Automations is the one that doesn't involve picking a list and hitting send — it watches your real appointment and lead data continuously and enrolls matching customers itself, unattended.

Don't confuse this with the hub's separate Win-back card.

Despite the name overlap with the "Win Back Old Customers" automation kind, Win-back is a different, manual tool: it lets you pick a dormant-customer cohort (90–180 days, 180–365 days, or 365+ days), edit a templated SMS, and click "Send to all" yourself —

nothing about it runs on its own or re-checks continuously the way Automations does.

Gotchas to know before you turn one on

Automations requires the Growth-tier plan or higher — it isn't included on the base Starter plan.

If the page comes back blocked, the message you see is deliberately specific to why: no shop selected, account frozen, account locked, or plan doesn't include automations, so don't assume every blocked automations page just needs an upgrade.

Also worth knowing: the preset picker's message copy is written specifically for tint shops (it references "ceramic tint" and film options),

and the create request always sends the tint vertical regardless of what your shop actually does — PPF, detail, and wrap shops should plan on rewriting the wording on each step after picking a preset.

And the detail page only lets you edit each step's timing and copy — the underlying enrollment window itself (the 90-day no-visit cutoff, the lead-age window) isn't exposed as a setting on that page, so those thresholds stay at their defaults unless changed elsewhere.