Boat Dealer Follow-Up Sequences That Write Themselves

Most CRMs hand a boat dealer an empty campaign builder and call it done. Someone still has to write the first-contact text, the estimate reminder, the review request, the anniversary note. Nobody running a sales floor and a service bay at the same time has hours free to write two dozen campaigns from scratch. So the campaigns never get written, and the CRM turns into an expensive contact list.

Boat dealer follow-up sequences work differently when they ship already written. WakeWorks gives every store 29 ready-made campaigns: 25 sequences, 3 blasts you can send to a whole segment at once, and a weekly update email. Five of the sequences run the moment a store goes live. The rest sit written and off, one switch away, until a dealer decides to turn them on. Anything a dealer edits keeps the dealer's words, not ours.

Here is what is in that library, what starts running on day one, what a rep starts by hand, and what changed in the latest update.

What "ready-made" means

WakeWorks does not hand a store a blank canvas and call it a CRM. Every store starts with the full library already written. The wording, the timing, and the rules for who gets each campaign are set before the first login. A GM does not need a marketing person on staff to have a working set of follow-up campaigns.

Ready-made does not mean fixed. A dealer can open any sequence, change the wording, adjust the timing, or turn it off. Once a dealer edits a campaign, that edit is what ships. Library updates leave every campaign a dealer has edited exactly as the dealer wrote it, and they keep each campaign on or off the way the dealer left it.

The default state matters as much as the content. Five sequences run the moment a store goes live, because first-contact follow-up and service reminders need to work from day one. The other 20 sequences are written and off, so a dealer can turn each one on in whatever order fits the store.

Five sequences that start working on day one

Every WakeWorks store goes live with five sequences already switched on. No setup, no picking a start date. These are the ones almost every dealership needs from the first day.

• Speed to Lead. The first text to a new lead. If the store's instant lead auto-text already reached that person in the last 24 hours, Speed to Lead skips its own opening text so nobody gets greeted twice. If the auto-text is still queued, Speed to Lead waits for it before sending anything.
• Estimate Reminders. A nudge to a customer sitting on an open service estimate, so it does not go stale in an inbox.
• Service Follow-up Call. A task for the service advisor to call the customer after the work is done and log how it went.
• Upcoming Service Scheduled. Reminders ahead of a booked service date, so nobody forgets a drop-off. More on the timing below.
• Quote Follow-up. Call tasks on a quote sitting in the sales pipeline, so it does not die from silence.

These five cover the two moments dealers lose the most revenue to. One is a lead that never gets a fast response. The other is a customer left to remember their own appointment or their own open quote. See a real sales pipeline for how these sequences connect to deal stages.

Six more that run on their own once you turn them on

Six sequences are automatic but ship off. Once a dealer turns one on, WakeWorks enrols the right people without a rep lifting a finger.

• Purchase Anniversary. A note on the anniversary of a boat purchase.
• Abandoned Service Quote. Follow-up on a service estimate the customer never approved.
• Warranty Countdown. A heads-up as coverage nears its end.
• Service Reminder. A nudge to book when a boat has not been in for six months. It also reaches owners who have never had the boat in for service, 180 days after they bought it.
• Warm Welcome. The first touch for a referral lead, naming the person who sent them when WakeWorks knows who that was.
• Redeem & Ride. The first touch for someone who claimed a BoaterCoupons offer.

Warm Welcome and Redeem & Ride own the first touch for their leads. When one of them is on and will enrol a referral or BoaterCoupons lead, Speed to Lead steps aside for that person. When it is off, or that person would not qualify for it, Speed to Lead still sends. A new lead never falls between the two.

Leave a Review works differently. It does not go out on a timer. When the service advisor marks the Service Follow-up Call as Happy, Leave a Review shows up as a suggestion on the Customers page, and a rep starts it with one click. A customer who had a rough visit never gets asked for a review, because nobody marked that call Happy.

This split matters more than it sounds. A store that just went live does not need a Purchase Anniversary message before it has a year of purchase history. Leaving that sequence written but off until it is useful beats a blank builder, and it beats a locked default that fires before the data behind it makes sense.

Thirteen sequences a rep starts by hand

Thirteen sequences are never triggered automatically. A rep enrols a customer into one of these from the customer's own record, when the conversation calls for it. There is no separate campaign screen to hunt through first.

Sales

Persistent Pursuit for a lead that needs steady follow-up. Long Nurture for a slow buyer, with texts and emails on days 10, 21 and 45 ahead of a six-month call. Come See It for a customer who has not visited yet. Trade Appraisal Follow-up once a trade has been valued. Finance Pre-Qual for a buyer working through financing. We'll Find Your Boat for a specific search. Compare Us for a shopper weighing another dealership.

Lifecycle

Back on Track and Keep Warm for a customer who has drifted. New Rep Intro when a customer's rep changes. Trade-Up / Repower for an owner two years after purchase. Cold-Lead Win-back for a lead that has gone quiet. Post-Purchase Onboarding after a sale closes. Its email carries a Save our contact card button that downloads the store's contact card, so the store is one tap away.

Suggested on the Customers page

A rep does not have to remember which sequence fits. The top of the Customers page lists suggested sequences, one per person, with the reason it fits. The rep clicks Start to enrol the person, or Decline and picks a date to follow up by hand instead. When nobody owns the person yet, a manager sees Assign and Keep for myself instead. A person already running a sequence a rep started drops off the list. An automatic one, like a service reminder, does not hide the suggestion.

See the CRM and leads features for where that sits in the rest of the deal.

Service campaigns signed by the service advisor

A service customer knows their advisor, not the sales rep who sold them the boat. So the six service campaigns are signed by the repair order's service advisor: Estimate Reminders, Abandoned Service Quote, Service Follow-up Call, Service Reminder, Upcoming Service Scheduled and Warranty Countdown.

If that repair order has no advisor, the advisor on the customer's most recent repair order signs. If there is none, the store's default service contact signs. Call tasks from these campaigns land on that same person's list.

Service date reminders that follow the calendar

Upcoming Service Scheduled sends three reminders: 14 days, 3 days and 1 day before the appointment. The last one is the "see you tomorrow" text.

Real appointments move, so the timing handles that too. If an advisor books a date only five days out, the 14-day reminder is already past. The customer gets one confirmation right away instead of silence. If the date moves later, the next reminder moves with it instead of going out early.

A review page built for the store

Leave a Review sends the customer to a review page with the store's own branding. The page has a button for a Google review. For customers without a Google account, it also offers a Facebook review.

Opening the page stops the reminders. A customer who already clicked through does not get nudged again. The Google and Facebook review links live in Store Settings, and only staff who can edit store settings can change them.

Every text says who it is from

Texts are written in the rep's voice and end with the rep's name. Every text that ends with a name now names the store too, so a customer who has never saved the number still knows who is texting. Every email carries a signature block.

A message never goes out with an empty field where a customer's name should be. If a first name is missing, the message reads "Hi there" instead of a broken merge tag. If a step needs a detail the customer has not given yet, that step is skipped rather than sent half-finished.

Blasts, for a whole segment at once

Three of the 29 are blasts rather than sequences: one message sent to a segment at once, instead of a chain of steps tied to one customer. Seasonal Kickoff opens the boating season. Event Invite is for something happening at the dealership. Weather / Storm Advisory warns boat owners when a storm is coming.

Seasonal Kickoff and Event Invite reach boat owners plus anyone who picked up an interest tag recently. A shopper who asked about pontoons last spring hears about the season opening, even without a boat on file yet.

See exactly who gets each campaign

Each campaign page shows its rules in plain view. "Who gets it" and "Stop when" list the actual condition rows, joined by AND or OR. "Who gets it" shows a live count of how many people match right now. A dealer edits a row in place and watches the count change.

The "When" line reads in plain words instead of settings. The steps show as a timeline, so a dealer can see day 0, day 3 and day 10 at a glance. When a step has two versions, such as one text for a lead with a boat picked and one for a lead without, each version is labelled. Continuous campaigns also show a Manual or Automatic chip on the list and in the campaign header. Manual means reps enrol people from a suggestion. Automatic means everyone who matches is enrolled.

The weekly update email, built from blocks

One campaign in the library is not a triggered sequence at all. The weekly update runs every week and rebuilds itself fresh from the lot each time.

It is built from blocks laid out like any other campaign. Each block has its own conditions, a live count of who qualifies, an on/off switch, its own wording and a preview. Three blocks ship by default:

• New arrivals matching the makes a customer has already looked at, so someone browsing pontoons does not get a wall of center consoles.
• Seasonal, tied to the time of year. A customer gets it at most once every 75 days, and the count shows who can get it this season.
• More on the lot, pulled from what is in stock that week. It always sits last and is never on its own a reason to send.

Boat cards show each boat's cover photo, the same one WakeWorks uses everywhere else. The preview shows the same photos the email sends. A boat with no photos gets a card with no image, never a stock photo. In More on the lot, boats with photos come before equally good matches without them. Boats the person looked at and closer matches still come first.

Dealers can add their own blocks, reorder them and delete them. A block like "pontoon owners, show new pontoons" takes a few conditions and a line of wording. A new dealer block starts off until it is set up. One switch turns the whole update on or off.

Nobody gets a "nothing new this week" email. A person only qualifies when one of their blocks has something to show. Leads who have agreed to texts also get a short text when their weekly email has new arrivals in it, as long as the store has its website link set.

None of this replaces the dealer management system underneath it. The sequences read from the same lead, deal and repair order records the rest of WakeWorks runs on. That is why a text can name a real appointment date, a real advisor or a real trade value instead of a generic placeholder. The full list of CRM and campaign tools is on the features page.