The Challenge
Pink Flamingo Party Co. is a balloon décor and events company, and much of its work comes round every year: birthdays, anniversaries, graduations and corporate celebrations. A past customer is the most likely source of the next booking, but only if they hear from the company at the right moment — early enough to start planning, and not so early that the message is forgotten by the time it matters.
Their bookings live in two places: orders placed through their Shopify store, and event projects managed in HoneyBook. Reaching past customers at the right time meant automating against both.
Our Approach
The engagement runs in two phases on the same idea. Phase one, now delivered, is an automation that re-engages past customers using their Shopify order history. Phase two, in build, applies the same concept to HoneyBook bookings as a production n8n workflow.
Timing is anchored on each project's event date rather than the date the booking was created, because the event date is what a recurring celebration repeats on. Each customer gets a reminder ten months after their event and a follow-up at eleven months unless they have since been excluded, leaving one to two months to plan. The workflow runs daily, so every customer is contacted at the right point rather than in a monthly batch, and it reaches back up to four years: a customer who booked several years ago and skipped a year is still worth hearing from.
The part that has to be right is state. The workflow keeps a ledger for every event — the original project, its event date, the customer, and each outreach with the date it was sent — so running it twice can never send a duplicate. Existing customer history comes in through a throttled backfill that writes to the same ledger, so the live workflow will not contact a backfilled customer a second time. Messages are designed to go out through HoneyBook where its API supports it, keeping them on the customer's project, and by email otherwise. The only call to action is a reply.
Key Deliverables
- Re-engagement automation for past Shopify customers, built on order history (phase one, delivered)
- Production n8n workflow connected to HoneyBook
- Event-date anchoring for every historical and future project
- Ten-month outreach and eleven-month follow-up, evaluated daily
- Up to four years of event history, so lapsed customers still qualify
- Per-event send ledger that prevents duplicate sends when the workflow re-runs
- Throttled backfill of the existing customer database, recorded in the same ledger
- Delivery through HoneyBook where supported, email otherwise
- Send logging and error handling
- Controlled test sends before activation, workflow export and a recorded walkthrough
Results & Impact
Phase one is live, re-engaging Pink Flamingo's Shopify customers automatically. The clearest result so far is the one that started phase two: the client came back to extend the same approach to the bookings they manage in HoneyBook. The HoneyBook workflow is in build, and its outcomes will be reported here once it has run through its first outreach cycle.