Hanna's marketing starts from a gap in next week's diary and works backwards to the handful of guests who actually fit it — using what they ordered, when they come and what they're worth. From your address, in your voice, and never a discount on a night that would have filled itself.
One note · six steps
Marketing starts with a night that needs filling. Everything else follows from that.
Next week · forecast against capacity
Tuesday is the night worth filling. Friday and Saturday are already full, so anything sent to those guests would cost you money and gain you nothing — which is why Hanna won't.
Replaces: a calendar of campaigns nobody asked for
Not everyone on the list. The people whose own habits say they might come on a Tuesday.
Replaces: emailing the whole list and hoping
Hanna proposes something worth turning up for, drawn from what these guests already order.
A discount moves the same guests to a cheaper night. A reason brings different guests at full price. Hanna will send a discount if you write one — it just won't be the thing it suggests.
Replaces: discounting a night that would have filled
Written against the actual record, from your own address, and yours to edit before it goes.
From: [email protected] · to 161 guests · drafted Sunday 09:12
Good morning — it was a pleasure having you in on Friday.
We've a gluten-free tasting on Tuesday evening, with a Junmai flight alongside it. Given how you were looked after last week I thought you'd want first refusal. Reply here and I'll hold you a table.
Warmly,
The team
Replaces: a template that sounds like a chain
The guest replies in their own words and Hanna takes it from there — same diary, same rules.
Nothing was re-keyed. The 26 covers are in the same diary as every other booking, with the same allergy flags, and they'll appear in Tuesday's briefing like anybody else.
Replaces: asking people to "call us to book"
What followed, counted properly — and the one thing nobody can honestly tell you.
What Hanna won't claim: that those 26 covers wouldn't have come anyway. There is no control group in a forty-cover restaurant, so any return-on-investment figure would be invented. You get a count of what followed, not a number designed to flatter the tool.
Replaces: never knowing whether it worked
The guardrail
Not as a stylistic preference — as a rule in the system. Hanna knows which nights are forecast to fill, and a discount offered to guests who were coming anyway is a straight transfer out of your margin into theirs.
Sends the same offer to the whole list because the list is all there is. A proportion of the people who redeem it were already booked, or would have booked. The night looks busy, the covers look up, and the margin quietly falls — and because nobody measures the counterfactual, it gets repeated next month.
Excludes the guests whose night is already full, writes only to the ones whose own history says they might come on the night that isn't, and proposes a reason rather than a reduction — an event, a dish, a table held back. If you decide to discount, it will send it. It simply won't be the recommendation.
The same rule runs everywhere else in the platform. Business Insight won't recommend a discount either, and neither will the weekly findings. A system that can see your margin should not be in the business of proposing you give it away.
The record
A guest record in Hanna is a by-product of running the restaurant, not an administrative task competing with it. Which is the only reason it's accurate — data entry that depends on a busy floor remembering to do it never survives a Saturday.
From the booking
Who they are, how often, how far ahead they book, what they told you about allergies and access.
From service
What they ordered, what they drank, what they avoided, which table, how long they stayed.
From the bill
What they spent, how it split, what they're worth across every visit rather than this one.
From the pattern
Which night they come, whether they've stopped coming, and roughly when they're due back.
The Osborne party
First visit March 2024 · 4 visits · midweek · books 3–4 days ahead · £612 lifetime
That record is why a note can mention the gluten-free tasting rather than "our latest offer", and why it lands as a message from a restaurant that remembers you rather than a mailshot from a database.
Consent and data
The guests are yours. That is not a slogan — it is an architectural fact, and it is worth being specific about because the alternative is what most of this industry does.
Marketing consent is asked for explicitly at booking, stored against the guest with a date, and kept separate from the transactional messages a booking requires.
Immediate, permanent, across every send. A guest who opts out still receives their confirmation and reminder, because those belong to the booking rather than to marketing.
Every venue's guest records are isolated at the data layer, not merely filtered in application code. One venue cannot see another's guests, and neither can we casually.
We have no advertising business and run no marketplace, so there is no commercial reason for your guest list to go anywhere — and no quiet incentive to change that later.
The whole record, in a standard format, whenever you ask. Including on the day you tell us you're leaving.
Guests see your address and reply to you. Hanna is the machinery behind the note, not the name on it.
In service
Each name here will take your call.
Before you ask
Book a demo
Tell us your quiet night and we'll show you how the audience is built — and which guests Hanna would leave alone.
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