What this helps you do
Blasts gives your store a direct channel to the customers you have already won, with their consent. The simplest start is an email address: a customer who signs up at the counter, on your website form or through an import with their opt-in joins as an email subscriber and receives every message you send to their interests by email. When that customer installs the free Blasts app and connects to your store, the Hub notices and normal delivery moves to Blasts on its own, so a restock note or a change of hours lands on their phone, clearly marked as from you, instead of in a promotions tab. For people you invite one by one, the Hub picks the right path: someone already on Blasts gets a request in the app; someone who is not gets your invitation email with the enrollment code.
When to use it
Put the invitation at the moments you already own: the counter, the receipt, a card in the bag, a shelf talker, your newsletter signup and the order confirmation your online store already sends. It happens every day you are open, not at one event, and the person at the register can say it in one sentence: join, choose what you want to hear about, and hear about it.
How to do it
- Open Customers in your Hub and click Sync connections once so your enrollment code is published.
- Print the enrollment kit as a counter card, a shelf talker or a slip for the bag, and put the enrollment code or QR code on the receipt.
- Add the code, or the standing enrollment link where it is enabled for your Hub, to the order and pickup confirmations your online store already sends and to your newsletter welcome. You paste that line into your own template once: nothing connects to your store software for you.
- Add a customer by email at the counter, or point your website signup at the inbound webhook on Integrations or the Zapier app, so each new customer joins as an email subscriber the day they sign up.
- If your newsletter tool or online store gives you an opted-in customer list, export it and use Add many at once or upload the CSV. Tick the opt-in box for people who already agreed to hear from you and they join as email subscribers right away; everyone else is invited, checked on Blasts and spread out at up to 200 a day.
- When a customer enters your code in the Blasts app, a connection request arrives. With auto-accept on in Settings they are connected the moment they join; with it off, accept them under People who want to connect on Customers.
- Send everyone to the preferences page (the portal link is in Settings) to pick their interests: new arrivals, back in stock, events, offers, store updates.
Example
A neighborhood bookstore prints the kit as a counter card, puts the code on every receipt and starts taking email addresses at the register. The owner adds one line to the online store's order confirmation and uploads the newsletter export for everyone else. Six weeks later 700 customers are on the list, most of them by email, 240 of them on Blasts already, and when a title people kept asking about comes back, the note goes to the 180 people who ticked Back in Stock and to nobody else.
Good to know
- Connecting is consent-based: a customer can change their interests, mute you or disconnect at any time, so the list stays made of people who want to hear from you.
- This is not a way to message strangers or a purchased list: a customer must join, by email or on Blasts, before anything is delivered.
- Entering the enrollment code does not connect a customer by itself. It creates a connection request that your store accepts, unless auto-accept is on in Settings, in which case they are connected right away. Tell customers to expect that.
- Import columns: your file needs an email column. The Hub also recognizes name, first name, last name, phone, address, birthday, household, and interests (a column headed audiences, tags, groups or lists works too). Files are limited to 5,000 rows and 2 MB, with a preview before anything is sent.
- There is no point-of-sale, online-store, inventory or loyalty connector. Your customer list reaches the Hub as a CSV export, through the inbound webhook, or through Zapier.
- The Reach funnel on Customers shows where every customer stands (known, invited, requested, on email or connected) and how they arrived: code, import, webhook, request or Zapier.
- This is Blasts, not SMS: no per-message carrier fee, and no mobile numbers to collect.