Reach your audience · Grofomo Docs

Grofomo gives you several ways to reach people, and all of them are consent-gated: nobody is contacted unless they opted in, and every opt-out is honoured automatically. If an exclusion check ever fails, the send stops rather than risking messaging someone who asked not to be.

Email campaigns

The Emails tool under Promote is where email marketing lives. Build reusable templates in a visual builder that opens pre-seeded with your event's brand colours, fonts and imagery, then Create campaign to compose the send: hero image, headline, body and a call-to-action button. Personalisation tags like {{first_name}} and {{name}} are replaced per recipient in the subject and body, falling back to "there" when no name is on record.

At send time you pick the audience: ticket buyers, the mailing list, and prelaunch registrants, in any combination; anyone in more than one group receives the email once. You can narrow the audience to a segment, which is re-evaluated at the moment the email actually sends. Estimate the reach (sending is blocked until the estimate comes back above zero), then send now or schedule it in your venue's local time. Campaign history tracks every send with its status and counts, and every marketing email carries a one-click unsubscribe.

The mailing list

Your organisation has one mailing list shared across all its events. Enable it from an event dashboard's Mailing List card and signup forms appear automatically across your public pages: the event website, the ticket page whenever tickets are sold out or not yet on sale, and closed prelaunch pages. Signups leave an email and can optionally add a phone number for SMS and WhatsApp updates. Ticket buyers join through checkout consent too, so the list grows wherever your audience already is.

If your website is built somewhere else

Those automatic signup forms only appear on pages Grofomo hosts. If you run your own site, the signup box on it needs pointing at your list, and whoever built the site does that once.

You do not create a form for this, and there is nothing per-event to set up. Turn the mailing list on as above, then send them this address, with your own event slug in place of the example:

Two things to check while you are handing it over. Your site's web address has to be on the Allowed domains list (Create, then Connect your site) or a browser blocks the request, and that list needs their development address too if they want the form working while they build. Signups arrive in the same place as every other one, under Promote.

A caution worth passing on: there is also a general-purpose forms surface, and it is the wrong tool here. Only /subscribe records the consent wording each person agreed to against their signup, which is what lets you email them later.

Prelaunch

Prelaunch (under Sell) publishes a public register-interest page for your next event before tickets exist. Pick the event it sells, write the page (or hit Write it for me to draft it in your brand voice), choose which contact channels to ask for beyond email, and publish. Fans who register appear in the Registrations tab with their consents, ready to be emailed the moment tickets go live; there is a one-line path from Registrations straight into the email composer. You can also send a one-time app push that deep-links to the page, with a test-on-one-phone step before the real send.

Connect your own WhatsApp Business number under Settings, then WhatsApp: a short guided flow walks you through the options. Sending and reading live in two places, side by side under Promote: WhatsApp campaigns is where you write and send, WhatsApp replies is where the answers arrive. Keeping the number on the WhatsApp Business app is recommended, because you keep chatting from your phone while campaigns go through the API; a number registered API-only can never be used in the WhatsApp app on a phone, so only choose that deliberately. Marketing messages must use a template Meta has approved, which you create and submit from the same page. Meta usually takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to decide, and you do not have to sit and watch: we email you the moment it does, and if it is turned down the email says what to change. The templates list updates itself while you have it open, and shows the reason on any template that was refused or paused. A campaign sends an approved template to a consent-gated audience (ticket buyers, prelaunch sign-ups, mailing-list subscribers with a phone number), optionally narrowed to a segment: unlike email, a WhatsApp campaign's recipient list is locked in when you send or schedule it. Estimate reach, test on up to five numbers first (each test shows its delivery status, so you can watch it arrive and be read before committing), then send or schedule. Recipients messaged in the last 24 hours are held back automatically. Meta also caps how many different people an account can reach in any 24 hours (new accounts start around 250); a campaign bigger than the allowance is delivered in daily batches until everyone is reached. The allowance grows on its own as campaigns are well received, and it can also go down if too many recipients block or report your messages. We email you whenever it moves either way, so you are never surprised by it mid-campaign. If Meta raises a notice about your number, such as a missing profile photo or a hold on raising your allowance, it appears on the WhatsApp settings page and we email you what it means and what to do.

The WhatsApp inbox

When someone replies to a campaign, their message lands in a shared inbox your whole team can see and answer. Without it, replies would only reach whoever holds the phone with the WhatsApp Business app on it. You can reach it two ways: WhatsApp replies under an event's Promote menu shows the conversations on the number that event sends from, and WhatsApp inbox in your organisation's top navigation shows every number at once, with a badge counting anything nobody has read yet.

Conversations belong to your number, not to one event. That is a rule of WhatsApp itself, which keeps a single thread between any two numbers, so a fan who replies about one show and then asks about another keeps one conversation rather than starting a new one each time. It also means every event that sends from a number sees the same conversations: if you run two brands off two numbers, each brand's events show only that brand's replies.

Anything your team sends from the inbox also appears in the WhatsApp Business app on your phone, so there is one history instead of two that disagree.

One rule comes from Meta, not from us: you can only write a free-form reply within 24 hours of that person's last message. The thread shows how long is left and warns you when the window is closing. Once it has closed, the only thing that will send is an approved template, though replying from the WhatsApp Business app on your phone still works normally. Note that the clock is reset only by the customer messaging you: nothing you send extends it.

App pushes

Broadcasts under Promote is a different channel: push notifications to attendees who have the Grofomo app. Compose a title and message, pick a category (reminder, update or marketing, each respecting the attendee's notification preferences), choose the audience (everyone, or only people who favourited your event), decide what opens on tap, and send now or schedule. Pushes are quota-capped, so they stay special.

Abandoned basket recovery

When someone picks tickets, your storefront holds those seats for 15 minutes while they check out. If they do not finish paying, the hold lapses, the seats go straight back on sale and their basket is recorded as abandoned. No money is taken and no ticket is issued. You can see these on the Abandoned tab under an event's Orders.

Turn on Settings, then Marketing, then Abandoned basket recovery and each of those people gets one reminder, about an hour later, with a link back to the storefront and their choices already filled in. It is off until you turn it on, and it applies to every event your organisation runs.

The email is honest about what it is: it says the tickets are not being held, because they are not. Whoever clicks it starts a fresh checkout at whatever the current price and availability are, so a tier that sold out in the meantime is simply gone. There is no countdown and no false scarcity.

Who gets one, and who does not

Only people who agreed to hear from you at checkout. Someone who unticked that box never gets a reminder, and neither does anyone who has since unsubscribed. Every reminder carries a one-click unsubscribe like any other marketing email.

A few more never get one, by design:

anyone who has already bought since abandoning
anyone whose basket has nothing left on sale, so a sold-out tier is never chased
anyone whose event has already happened
anyone who abandoned before reaching the details step, because we have no address for them

That last one is the big one, and it is worth knowing before you judge the results. Most people who abandon do so at the basket, before typing anything, so they are unreachable no matter what. Roughly a third of abandoned baskets leave an email address behind. Nobody is ever emailed twice about the same basket.

Why some are deliberately skipped

A small share of eligible baskets, around one in ten, are held back and get no reminder at all. This is on purpose, and it is the only way to know whether the reminder is doing anything.

Plenty of people who abandon a basket come back on their own. If everyone got an email, every one of those returns would look like the email working, and the number would flatter itself. By leaving a small group alone, the Basket recovery panel on Sales insights can show the difference between the two groups, which is what the reminder is actually worth rather than what it appears to be worth.

The panel will tell you plainly when too few baskets have gone through to draw a conclusion yet. On a first event that is the normal state for a while, and a small honest number is more use than a large misleading one.