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Diner Birthday & Anniversary Outreach

Example prompt: "On the first of each month, look through our diner list for anyone with a birthday or anniversary in the coming month, draft a short personal email inviting them to book in to celebrate with us — mentioning their last visit if we've got a note on it — and leave the lot in a Gmail drafts folder for me to read through and send."

The Problem

The repeat diner is the one the restaurant economically depends on, and the birthday or anniversary is the cleanest reason to write to them — they came in last year for a milestone, the booking is still on the sheet, and a short personal email three or four weeks out lands at the moment the decision about where to go is being made. Every restaurant we know intends to do this and almost none of them actually do, because it requires sitting down with the bookings sheet on the first of the month, filtering for the people whose dates fall in the next few weeks, and writing a personal note to each one. It is twenty minutes of writing that lives in a part of the week nobody has twenty minutes to spare, so the emails do not go out and the rebooking does not happen.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow that fires on the first of every month and reads the 'Diners' tab in the bookings sheet — names, emails, birthday and anniversary dates where the diner has shared them, and the last-visit note. A conditional step picks out the diners whose birthday or anniversary falls in the coming month. An LLM step drafts a short personal email per diner — warm and unflashy, referencing what we have noted from their last visit if there is a note, and inviting them to book in for the date. The drafts sit in a labelled Gmail folder for the owner to read through and send by hand, because a generic mass email on a birthday reads worse than no email at all and the workflow is only worth running if the drafts are good enough to send mostly as written. Glass Box preview shows the diner list, the dates, and a sample of the drafts before anything lands in Gmail. The 'Outreach' tab in the bookings sheet logs who has been written to so we do not write to the same diner twice in a year.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (scheduled): On the first of every month at 9am.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Read the 'Diners' tab in the bookings Google Sheet — name, email, birthday or anniversary date if shared, last-visit date, last-visit note.
  3. Step 2 (conditional): Pick out the diners whose birthday or anniversary date falls within the next thirty-five days, and who have not already been written to in the last twelve months.
  4. Step 3 (llm): Draft a short personal email per diner — three or four sentences, warm and unflashy, referencing the last-visit note if there is one, and inviting them to book in for the date. No discount code unless the owner has specifically said to offer one.
  5. Step 4 (integration): Save each draft to a labelled Gmail folder named 'Birthday & Anniversary Outreach — [Month]' so the owner can read through them in one sitting.
  6. Step 5 (integration): Append a row per diner to the 'Outreach' tab in the bookings sheet with the diner's name, the date of the occasion, the date the draft was created, and a link to the Gmail draft — so the next month's run can dedupe against it.
  7. Step 6 (integration): Post a one-line summary to the owner's Slack DM with the count of drafts created and the link to the Gmail folder.

Integrations Used

  • Google Sheets — the 'Diners' tab as the source of names, emails, birthday and anniversary dates, and the last-visit notes that make the email personal; the 'Outreach' tab as the dedup log
  • Gmail — the labelled drafts folder where the per-diner emails sit for the owner to read through and send
  • Slack — the owner's DM with the monthly summary and the link to the drafts folder

Who This Is For

Owner-operators at independent restaurants, bistros, and gastropubs with a regular-diner base of fifty to several hundred names, where the bookings sheet has at least some birthday and anniversary dates and a few words of last-visit colour, and where the owner is willing to spend half an hour at the start of the month reading through the drafts and sending the ones that read right.

Time & Cost Saved

The half-hour at the start of the month is the difference between this happening and not happening, and the comparison is not "automated vs manual" but "drafts to read through vs nothing". A restaurant with two hundred regular diners typically has fifteen to twenty birthdays and anniversaries in any given month, of which six to eight will convert into a booking if the email lands well three or four weeks out — at an average cover spend of fifty to seventy pounds for two, that is two to four hundred pounds of revenue per month from a half-hour of the owner's time, before any repeat-visit value from the diner coming back at all.