Knowledge BaseEmpty slot alerts
Offer unsold time and last-minute cancellations to the customers most likely to book them, and see what the alerts sold.
Every venue has time that goes unsold: a popular hour that is still free in the morning, or a booking cancelled too late for anyone to notice. Empty slot alerts offer that time to the customers most likely to book it, with a push notification in the Thril app.
One push to every customer does not work. One free hour can only be sold once, so one customer books it and the rest learn to ignore your messages. That is why the alerts go to a small, ranked group at a time, and why every customer gets one alert a day at most.
The best thing you can do is give each rule a customer list. People ignore alerts that are not for them, so send padel time to padel players and daytime hours to people who play in the daytime. Some lists that work:
- Active padel players, for evening time nobody has booked.
- Students and seniors, for the weekday daytime hours that are hardest to fill.
- Members who played last month but not this month, to give them a reason to come back.
A rule can also go to all your customers, but most of them will not care. Make your lists under Marketing → Customer lists first, then pick one on each rule.
Turning it on
- Go to Settings → Empty slot alerts.
- On the Rules tab, click New rule and save your first rule.
- Switch on Send empty slot alerts.
Send empty slot alerts stays greyed out until you have a rule, because without a rule no alerts go out. Switching it off pauses every rule at the venue. No rule is deleted.
What a rule decides
Make one rule per sport, not one per kind of free time. A rule for your padel courts and a rule for your badminton courts is the shape that matches how you think about your venue.
A rule offers two kinds of free time, and they work differently:
- Unsold time. Time nobody has booked today. Each customer gets one message with your venue's name and the first free time, however many resources are free.
- Last-minute cancellations. When a booking that starts in the next 24 hours is cancelled or put up for sale, the time goes back on offer at once.
Switch off Unsold time if you do not want to advertise free time, for example because customers could learn to wait for it. A last-minute cancellation looks like luck instead. You cannot switch off both.
Every rule also sets:
- Sports and Resources. Leave both empty to cover the whole venue.
- Customer list. The list the alerts go to. Leave it empty to use all your customers. The form shows how many customers can get alerts now before you save.
- Hours to offer. The part of the day that unsold time can come from. See below.
- Rule is active. Switch it off to pause one rule.
That is the whole rule. Thril sets the send times, the batch size and how often a customer can get alerts, so you have nothing to tune.
How the alerts go out
Unsold time
Unsold time goes out four times a day, also at weekends:
| Time | What it is good for |
|---|---|
| 09:00 | The earliest chance, with the most time to get a group together. |
| 11:30 | The busiest hour for booking a time to play today. |
| 14:30 | The last chance to get four people to an 18:00 start. |
| 16:30 | A late offer for the end of the evening. |
Thril sets these times, not you. They come from the bookings on Thril: bookings for the same day peak at 11:00 and 12:00, and almost nothing happens before 09:00. People plan tonight's game over lunch.
An alert never offers time that starts in less than two hours. Padel is four people, and an offer nobody can get a group together for only shows them a time they cannot use.
Each send goes to 20 customers for each resource that has free time. A bigger offer reaches more people.
Last-minute cancellations
A last-minute cancellation goes out at once, whatever the time of day. The time can start within the hour, and an alert that waits until morning is about a time that has already gone.
The alert goes to 20 customers at a time, 10 minutes apart, 5 times at most. Sending stops when someone books. Twenty people for one free hour means nineteen disappointments, but a batch of three rarely finds the one person who is free tonight. The next batch only goes out if the time is still free.
Who gets the alert first
Thril ranks the customers on the rule's list by what they do at your venue: the hours and weekdays they usually book, the sport they play, and how recently they were there. A customer who plays on weekday afternoons hears about the afternoon time. A customer who always books at six in the evening hears about that one. A customer who got an alert recently goes down the order, so the same names do not get every alert.
Who never gets the alert
An alert does not go to a customer who:
- has turned off alerts from your venue, or all free slot alerts
- has already got an alert about this time
- has already had an alert today, or three this week, from any venue on Thril
- already has a booking at that time
Nobody gets more than one alert a day, or three a week, from all of Thril. A customer who follows five venues would otherwise hear from all five at 11:30 and turn every one of you off by lunchtime. Thril sets the limit and the send times for this reason.
Choosing the hours to offer
From and Until set the hours that unsold time can come from. Only time inside these hours is offered, so a quiet Tuesday morning does not turn into a notification.
The default is 16:00 to 21:00, the hours most venues charge most for. Set your own hours if your venue is busy at other times. The range can run past midnight, so 20:00 to 01:00 is a valid evening for a venue that closes late.
Letting customers subscribe
Let customers subscribe is off by default. When it is on, your customers can turn the alerts on from your venue page in the Thril app, with Tell me about free slots. Only customers who have booked with you can subscribe.
Subscribers get alerts even when they are not on a rule's customer list. A rule for your padel regulars still goes to them, and subscribers come on top. The number on the rule form counts subscribers too.
The Subscribers tab lists everyone who subscribed, newest first. It shows whether each subscriber has the app, and how many bookings they made through alerts.
What customers control
Unless a customer subscribed, the alerts come without asking. Two switches let customers stop them:
- Stop telling me about free slots on your venue page in the Thril app turns off alerts from your venue only. A customer can always do this, even when the rule's list includes them.
- Free slots at your venues in the app's notification settings turns off alerts from all venues.
Alerts are push notifications only. They are not saved in the customer's notification list, and they expire when the offered time starts. A phone that was off does not show an offer for a time that has already started. A customer without the Thril app never gets one, so the number on the rule form counts only customers who can get alerts now.
Seeing what the alerts sold
When a rule has sent alerts, four figures show at the top of Settings → Empty slot alerts. They count the last 90 days:
- Times sold through alerts. Bookings that a customer who got the alert made for the offered time, after the alert. Cancelled bookings are left out. The card also shows how fast half of them were booked.
- Sales from alerts. The price of those bookings after discounts.
- Customers alerted. How many different customers got at least one alert, and how many of them booked.
- Offered times sold. The share of offered times that sold to a customer who got the alert. A resource's unsold time counts once a day, even when more than one of the day's alerts offered it.
A booking counts when anyone on it got the alert, so a player who asks a friend to make the booking still counts. Two alerted players on one booking are one sale. A booking on a resource the alert did not offer does not count.
The Results tab puts your rules side by side. Click a rule to show only its alerts in the list below. The list shows every alert that went out: the time and the resources it offered, why, how many customers got it, the result and the sales. The result is one of these:
- Sold through alert. A customer who got the alert booked the time. Click their name to see their details.
- Booked by someone else. Somebody booked the time, but nobody the alert reached. The alert gets no credit for it.
- Not booked.
- Sending. A last-minute cancellation that is still going out in batches.
The Rules tab shows what each rule sold in the last 90 days, so you can see a rule that sells nothing where you edit it.