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, Campaigns, Bulk blast, Reputation, 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 run every 15 minutes and do the work: one enrolls new customers into a sequence, the other advances and sends 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 running) to open the "Pick your pace" picker: Minimal (3 touchpoints, low pressure), Recommended (5 touchpoints, tagged "Best for most shops"), or Beast Mode (8 touchpoints, maximum follow-through). Picking one creates the automation immediately with no further confirmation step. From there, open the automation to 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}}, and {{booking_link}} 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, Campaigns, Blasts — and the separate Win-back card
The Growth & Marketing hub's own descriptions draw the line clearly: Drip campaigns are multi-step SMS/email sequences you build and enroll people into yourself (an add-on that draws from your message allowance); Campaigns send bulk SMS/email to a segment you pick; Bulk blast is a one-shot send to a segment with a preview and dry-run step. 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.