Automations

Automations are event-driven workflows that run in the background. A trigger fires (a booking is created, a membership expires, a payment fails), the contact is checked against the automation’s entry conditions, and a sequence of steps then runs for that contact: send a message, wait, branch on a condition, add a tag, notify staff. Owners and managers build them, members receive the messages, and staff get notified when a person needs to follow up.

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When to use it

Automations take over the follow-ups you would otherwise have to remember by hand. Each one sends at the right moment for each member, without anyone on your team watching the calendar. Typical uses:

• Remind members before they train - turn on the built-in booking reminder so every booking gets an email and app notification 24 hours before it starts.
• Win back a member who cancels - a jiu-jitsu gym tags the member At risk when they cancel, waits three days, then sends a reason to come back.
• Collect reviews without nagging regulars - a padel gym asks players for a review two hours after they check in for a match, paced by sessions played, and invites everyone who leaves one to post it on Google too.
• Chase a failed payment - notify your admins and managers, then ask the member to update their payment details.

See Worked examples for step-by-step versions of these, and Blueprints for the ready-made workflows behind them.

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How an automation runs

1. A trigger event happens in the system (for example, a booking is created).
2. The contact is matched against the automation’s entry conditions (contact type, tags, pipeline stage, source). If they don’t match, nothing happens.
3. A run is created and the first step is scheduled.
4. The background worker picks up scheduled steps and executes them in order.
5. Each step records its outcome. A step that errors is tried up to three times before it and its run are marked failed.

Each row on the automations list shows how many times the automation has run, how many runs failed, and when it last fired.

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The automations list

Use Marketing > Automations to view, edit, and create automations. The list is split into two sections:

• Built-in automations - Seeded by 1club into every gym (the booking reminder, the membership-expiration reminder, and the marketplace review request). They carry a Built-in badge. You can adjust timing, channels, and entry conditions, but the step structure is fixed.
• Your automations - Custom workflows you build from scratch, plus any suggested blueprints you have accepted. Available on the Grow plan.

Each row shows the trigger, step count, total runs, failed runs (when there are any), and the last time it fired, plus an Active or Paused status. Click a row to open it in the builder. To delete a custom automation, open the row’s actions menu and choose Delete. Deleting cancels any runs still in progress. Built-in automations can’t be deleted. On the Automations page, click into the assistant bar (What can I help with?) to see suggested blueprints: ready-made workflows (onboarding drip, review request, win-back, and more) that match your gym’s setup. Clicking one drops a fully built, paused automation into your list and opens it for review. See Blueprints: prebuilt automations.

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Triggers

Choose one trigger per automation. Triggers are grouped by domain:

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Bookings

• Booking created - A member books a class or area.
• Booking cancelled - A booking is cancelled (by the member or staff).
• Booking checked in - A member checks in for their booking.
• Booking no-show - A booking is marked as no-show.
• Booking completed - A booked session is over and was neither cancelled nor missed.
• Booking upcoming - Fires before the booking starts. Configure how far in advance (minutes, hours, or days). Used for reminders.

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Memberships

• Membership created - A new membership starts for a contact.
• Membership cancelled - A membership is cancelled.
• Membership expiring - Fires before a membership expires. Configure the advance window.
• Membership paused - A membership is paused.
• Membership resumed - A paused membership resumes.
• Membership expired - A membership reaches its end and expires.

Every membership trigger except Membership cancelled has a Plans (any of) filter. Leave it empty to run for every plan.

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Payments

• Payment succeeded - A payment is successfully captured.
• Payment failed - A payment fails (card declined, insufficient funds, etc.).

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Messaging and reviews

• Message received - A contact sends an inbound message.
• Review submitted - A member submits a review.

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Contact lifecycle

• Contact created - A new contact is added.
• Contact type changed - A contact’s type changes, for example a lead becomes a member. Narrow it with From type (any of) and To type (any of).
• Pipeline stage changed - A contact moves to another stage of the leads pipeline. Narrow it with From stage (any of) and To stage (any of).
• Contact birthday - Fires on the contact’s birthday.
• Tag added - A tag is added to a contact. Optionally restrict to specific tags with Tags (any of).
• Tag removed - A tag is removed from a contact. Optionally restrict to specific tags with Tags (any of).

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Entry conditions

Entry conditions, shown under Run only for in the trigger’s settings, filter who the automation runs for after the trigger fires. Every field is optional, and a contact must match all the fields you fill in.

• Contact has any of these tags - Only run for contacts who have at least one of the selected tags.
• Contact is one of - Only run for contacts of the selected types (members, drop-ins, leads, lapsed members, contacts).
• In pipeline stage - Only run for contacts in one of the selected pipeline stages.
• Came from source - Only run for contacts from one of the selected lead sources.

If none is set, the automation runs for every contact the trigger applies to. Turn on Stop when the contact no longer matches to recheck the conditions before every step. The run ends as soon as the contact stops matching, so a nurture sequence for leads stops when the lead becomes a member instead of messaging them after the next wait.

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Steps

Add a step below a node to open the Steps palette, pick a step type, then configure it in the right sidebar. Steps run in order, top to bottom, except where a Condition step branches the flow. Messages in Send message, Send form, and Notify staff steps can use variables such as the contact’s name and your gym’s name. The variables on offer depend on the trigger: booking triggers add the booking’s date, time, and resource, and membership triggers add the plan name, renewal price, and expiry date.

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Send message

Send an App, email, SMS, or WhatsApp notification to the contact.

• Channels - Pick one or more delivery channels. App covers the notification center and an alert on the contact’s devices. Email and WhatsApp require the corresponding integration (see Integrations); SMS requires a sender set up under SMS. A text that can’t go out (for example no sender for the member’s country) doesn’t fail the step: its other channels are still sent.
• Template - Optionally pick a message template from System templates or Custom templates. Picking one copies its subject and content into the step, where you can edit them. Later edits to the template do not change what the automation sends. Templates that use variables the current trigger can’t fill are greyed out.
• Subject and Content - The message itself, written inline or starting from the template you picked.

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AI message

Generate the message content with AI at send time, using a rule and tone you provide.

• AI rule - What the message should say, for example “Wish the member a happy birthday and thank them for being part of the gym.”
• Tone - Professional, Friendly, Casual, or Formal.
• Mode - Auto-send generates and sends the message. Save as draft generates the message but does not send it, and it does not appear in the Inbox.
• Channels - Where an auto-sent message goes.

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Review request

Send a post-booking review request with a single-use link.

• Channels - Email or WhatsApp. SMS is marked coming soon.
• Instructor message style - Optionally show a personal chat bubble from the instructor above the review form: No instructor message, Casual & Friendly, Professional, or Motivational. Turn on Send from the instructor’s email when possible to send the email from the instructor’s address.
• Sessions between requests - Ask again only after the member attends this many sessions, counted across every club in your organization since their last request. Set it to 1 to ask after every session. Also ask after the member’s first session lets a brand new member hear from you right away instead of waiting out a full interval.
• Frequency limit - Cap how many requests a single contact can receive (Max requests per member, from 1 to 10) Per period (Week or Month). This is a ceiling on top of the session interval, and a request goes out only when both allow it.
• Enable Google review conversion - After a member submits their review, invite them to share it on Google. Everyone who leaves a review is invited, whatever their rating. Only shown for gyms connected to a Google Business Profile.

The two throttles cover opposite cases. The session interval paces the ask by how much a member actually trains, which is what protects infrequent visitors: someone who comes once a month never fills a 7-day window, so a time cap alone would ask them after every single visit. The frequency limit caps the member who trains daily and clears the session interval faster than you want to be asking.

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Send form

Ask the contact to fill in one of your forms, with a single-use link prefilled with what you already know about them.

• Form - Only forms with Sign up turned off are offered. A sign-up form would ask an existing contact to register a second time.
• Link valid for (days) - How long the link works. Defaults to 30 days.
• Channels, Subject, and Content - The message that carries the link. Use the form link and form name variables to place them in the message.

If the form is deleted or later switched to sign people up, the step skips sending and the builder asks you to pick another form.

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Wait

Pause the run for a fixed duration.

• Duration - Minutes, hours, or days.
• Measured from - Trigger event, Booking start time, or Booking end time. The booking options appear only for booking triggers.

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Wait until

Pause until a condition becomes true, with a timeout.

• Condition type - The check that, when true, lets the run continue. The same checks as the Condition step. It is rechecked every five minutes.
• Timeout - Maximum wait. When it runs out, the step is skipped and the run moves on to the next step.

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Condition

Branch the workflow. The condition is evaluated and the run follows the Yes path or the No path. Supported checks:

• Tag exists / Tag does not exist - Whether the contact has any of the selected tags.
• Has active membership
• Engagement above / Engagement below - Compare the contact’s engagement score (0 to 100, built from their recent payments, active memberships and services, visits, and activity trends) to a Threshold (50 by default).
• Booking in period - Did the contact book in the last N days, hours, or minutes?

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Modify contact

Update the contact in place.

• Add tag or Remove tag
• Update field - Set a contact field to a new value.
• Move to pipeline stage - Move the contact to a stage of the leads pipeline, or remove them from the pipeline.
• Assign to staff member - Assign the contact to a staff member, or leave them unassigned.

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Notify staff

Send an App, email, or SMS notification to staff.

• Who to notify - Staff by role (pick from Administrator, Manager, Front Desk, and Instructor), Assigned staff member (whoever the contact is assigned to), or Class instructor (the instructor of the booking, available only for booking triggers).
• Content - Subject and body, with variables for the contact and trigger event.

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Blueprints: prebuilt automations

A blueprint is a prebuilt definition of a complete automation (a trigger plus a full step graph) authored by 1club. A blueprint is never executed on its own - it becomes a real automation only when it is turned into an org-owned row. There are two ways a blueprint reaches your gym: it is either auto-provisioned (seeded and locked) or suggested (offered to you, and built only when you accept it).

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Auto-provisioned (built-in) automations

Three blueprints are seeded into every gym. They appear under Built-in automations and are locked: you cannot rename them, change their trigger or step structure, or delete them. Opening one shows the banner “This is a built-in automation. You can adjust its timing, channels and message.” The two reminders ship paused. Sending unconfigured reminders the moment a gym is created would be surprising, so they stay off until you turn them on. The Marketplace review request ships active. It applies only to bookings made through the 1club marketplace, asks the member to rate the visit, and never runs for a booking your own review request automation already covers. It has no session interval or frequency limit, since each marketplace booking gets one ask. For a built-in automation you can change:

• The advance window (how long before the event it fires).
• The channels used by the message step.
• The message subject and content (edit the step directly).
• The entry conditions (tags, contact types, pipeline stages, sources) and Stop when the contact no longer matches.
• The on/off state.

The step structure itself is fixed. Editing the message content or timing on a built-in automation, and turning it on or off, is allowed on any plan - that is the point of shipping them. To add steps or branches, build a custom automation alongside.

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Suggested blueprints

Suggested blueprints are never seeded automatically. On the Automations page, click into the assistant bar (What can I help with?) and they appear as one-click suggestions above it. They also show in the assistant chat panel when you open it on that page. Clicking one instantiates it: 1club builds a fully wired, paused, editable custom automation, stamped with the blueprint’s identity so the same suggestion won’t be offered again. A “Draft created - review and turn it on” message confirms it, and the new automation opens in the builder. A suggestion appears only when all three are true:

• Your gym is on the Grow plan (custom automations require it), and you can manage marketing (the marketing.manage.club permission).
• You don’t already own an automation from that blueprint (accepting is idempotent - one per gym).
• Every prerequisite the blueprint declares is satisfiable for your gym (see Prerequisites and gating).

The catalog of suggested blueprints: The Review request blueprint can also be turned on from the Marketing card on Home: its Turn on button creates the automation, activates it straight away, and opens it in the builder. Because it fires on check-in, gyms that don’t check members in by hand need Auto check-in at booking start in a booking policy for any request to go out. After you accept a blueprint it lands paused in Your automations. Open it in the builder, review and tweak the copy, timing, and channels, then turn it on. Because it is a normal custom automation, you can freely add, remove, or rewire steps.

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Prerequisites and gating

Each blueprint declares typed prerequisites - dependencies it needs before it makes sense. Prerequisites fall into two kinds:

• Providable - 1club can create the thing for you when you accept. Today this is tags: the tag is found-or-created (scoped to your gym) as part of instantiation, so a providable prerequisite never hides a suggestion. If instantiation fails, any tag it created is rolled back.
• Gating - 1club cannot create it, so the blueprint is simply not suggested until you have it.

So a brand-new gym with no classes, no plans, and no payments connected sees only the blueprints that don’t depend on those things (for example the onboarding drip and birthday celebration); the win-back and payment-recovery blueprints appear as you set the rest of the product up.

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Template catalog

The Send message step’s Template picker draws from a template catalog so you don’t have to write every message inline. The catalog combines:

• System templates - a curated set of 1club-authored message templates that are eligible for automations. If your gym has customized one of these templates, the picker shows your customized version.
• Custom templates - your own reusable message templates.

Picking a template copies its content into the step, so later edits to the template do not silently change what an existing automation sends. Templates that need variables the automation’s trigger can’t provide are shown greyed out.

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Building a custom automation

1. Go to Marketing > Automations.
2. Click Add Automation.
3. Give it a name and description.
4. Select the trigger node, pick a Trigger type, and configure its options.
5. Set entry conditions under Run only for if you want to limit who the automation runs for.
6. Add steps from the palette and configure each one in the right sidebar.
7. For each Send message step, choose channels and either write content inline or start from a template.
8. Click Save.

A new automation starts with the Active switch off, so it is saved paused. Review it, then turn it on when you’re ready (see Activating and pausing).

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Activating and pausing

New custom automations and accepted blueprints always land paused so you can review them before they touch a real member. When you’re ready, open the automation, turn on the Active switch next to Save, and click Save. Turn the switch off and save again to pause it without deleting. Pausing is always allowed, so a gym that leaves the Grow plan can still pause the custom automations it built, but it can’t turn them back on. Steps run for real once an automation is active - real emails, real SMS, real staff notifications. If you want to see how a workflow behaves before opening it to your whole audience, narrow the entry conditions to a tag that only a test contact carries, turn it on, trigger the event yourself, then widen the conditions once you’re happy.

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Limits and behavior

• Steps are executed by a background worker that polls every minute. Expect up to a minute of delay between when a step is scheduled and when it runs.
• A step that errors is tried up to three times, with a growing delay between attempts. If the last attempt fails, the step and its run are marked failed and no further steps run.
• Messaging steps are skipped when the trigger was recorded without notifying the customer (for example a booking made by a partner platform). Tagging, staff notifications, and conditions still run.
• For the Membership expiring trigger, a Send message or AI message step is skipped if the membership was renewed, cancelled, or switched to auto-renew between the trigger and the send.
• Completed and cancelled runs are archived after about 90 days; processed trigger events after about 30 days. Failed runs are kept indefinitely so you can investigate.
• One trigger event creates at most one run per contact per automation.

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Worked examples

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Membership win-back for a jiu-jitsu gym

A member cancels their unlimited plan. You want a considered follow-up, not an instant plea.

1. Accept the Membership win-back blueprint (or build the same shape by hand). It fires on Membership cancelled.
2. Step 1 tags the contact At risk so you can also see churn on the member list.
3. Step 2 is a Wait of 3 days - enough space to feel human.
4. Step 3 sends an email and App notification with a reason to return (a free open-mat week, say).
5. Optionally add a Condition on Tag exists before the message so members who already resubscribed drop out.

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Post-session review request for a padel gym

You want reviews from players who actually showed up, without nagging regulars.

1. Accept the Review request blueprint. It fires on Booking checked in.
2. The first step is a Wait of 2 hours measured from the Trigger event (the check-in), so the ask arrives once they’ve left the court.
3. The Review request step is set to ask every 10 sessions, with Also ask after the member’s first session left on. A regular who plays four times a week hears from you about once a month; a player who books once a month is asked once after their first match and then not again for the better part of a year.
4. The step also carries a frequency limit of one request per contact every 7 days, which caps the handful of players who train daily and would otherwise clear the 10-session interval every fortnight.
5. Turn on Enable Google review conversion so everyone who leaves a review is invited to post it on Google. The invitation goes to every reviewer, whatever their rating, because asking only happy members breaks Google’s review policy.

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Birthday message for a yoga studio

1. Accept the Birthday celebration blueprint. It fires on Contact birthday.
2. The single AI message step is set to Save as draft, so as shipped it generates each greeting without sending it.
3. When you’re happy with the AI rule, switch the step’s Mode to Auto-send so members receive their greeting.

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No-show win-back for a spinning studio

1. Accept the No-show win-back blueprint. It fires on Booking no-show.
2. A Condition on Has active membership splits the run: members who missed a class get a light “we missed you, rebook anytime” nudge on the Yes path.
3. Contacts with no active membership take the No path and get a stronger win-back offer instead.

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Tips and best practices

• Start from a blueprint. Even if you plan to customize heavily, accepting a suggested blueprint gives you a correct trigger, timing, and step graph to edit rather than a blank canvas.
• Keep automations paused until you’ve read every step. Content is copied from templates when you pick them, so proofread inside the builder, not in the template.
• Use entry conditions to avoid overlap. If two automations react to the same trigger, scope each one with a contact type or tag so a contact doesn’t get two messages at once.
• Anchor waits deliberately. On booking triggers a Wait can measure from the trigger, the booking start, or the booking end. The wrong anchor sends at the wrong moment.
• Pace review requests by sessions, not just by time. A time cap alone never fills up for an infrequent visitor, so they get asked after every single visit. Set Sessions between requests and keep the frequency limit as the ceiling.
• Notify staff, don’t just message members, on high-stakes triggers like failed payments - the sooner a human follows up, the more you recover.

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Troubleshooting

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Related

• Marketing overview - How automations fit alongside the website, forms, reviews, and the rest of the Marketing section.
• Templates - Reusable content you can start Send message steps from.
• Inbox overview - Conversations and one-off sends.
• Member list - Tags and segments used in entry conditions and Modify contact steps.
• Leads - The pipeline stages, sources, and assignment that automations can react to and change.
• Forms - Forms you can send with a Send form step.
• Marketing analytics - The Email Analytics dashboard, which includes automation sends.
• Integrations - Configure email and WhatsApp before using those channels.
• SMS - Set up your gym’s SMS sender before using the SMS channel.