Transactional emails are ‘triggered’ by a change in the guest’s reservation. A guest making a reservation could ‘trigger’ the Revinate system to send a confirmation email. A change to that reservation could trigger a modification email and cancellation emails can be sent when a guest cancels their reservation.
Your Revinate implementations manager will have helped you set up your property management system to send the real-time-data necessary to automate the transactional email sends.
In this article we cover:
- Campaign Creation
- Email Alias'
- Merge Tags
- Room Translations
- Dynamic Content
- Segmentation
- Scheduling
- Modification Email Attributes
To fully set up your transactional emails you will need to create the email campaigns for cancellation, modification and confirmations as necessary, as well as create and assign proper segmentation. See information on segmentation here.
Creating your transactional emails will follow the same basic steps as creating any of your other email campaigns.
Campaign Creation
Navigate to the Create a Campaign button in your Campaigns page to open up the Campaign Builder where you will be prompted through all of the steps necessary to set up the automated emails.
You will have a selection of transactional emails to choose from, confirmation, modification, and cancellation. Select the one you wish to create, name your campaign for internal reporting purposes, and if applicable change the localization settings so that your campaign merge tags will display in the appropriate language.
As Transactional emails are informational emails and do not fall into the category of marketing emails all guests with valid emails will receive these emails. To remain compliant with privacy laws it is not recommended to add upsells to your transactional emails.
You may choose from your previously created email campaigns that have been saved as templates or from one of the pre-created Revinate templates. Revinate provides custom templates for all available campaign types to make creating your emails quick and easy.
For transactional emails, you will have the option of a shorter email type or a longer email type. Preview the templates by selecting the magnifying glass and select the template from there or select by clicking on the select button in the middle of the template image.
Email Alias
In your Account Settings, you will have set up your email aliases. In the design portion of your campaign builder, you can specify what email from name, from email to reply to email you would like assigned for your transactional email. See information on Email Alias’ here.
Merge Tags
Make sure you are customizing with merge tags your email subject line and providing good email preview text. Merge tags will personalize the email based upon data from the guest reservation in your property management system.
The merge tags provided in the template for the reservation information are provided as an example but can be added upon or removed based on the property’s preferences. Only include the information that makes sense for you and delete what does not.
Room Translations for Transactional Emails in Account Settings
In order to update the Room type translation to display the room type when using the room type description merge tag [ROOM TYPE CODE] select the user icon in the top right hand of the page and navigate to account settings. By default, you will be within the Data field mappings of account setting.
From there, select the yellow triangle. Within the room type row in the pop-up window update the translation for each room type code value accordingly and save. Now using the [ROOM TYPE CODE] merge tag will display the translation value for the respective room type code.
Update the translations in data field mapping under room type to associate the room type translation with the merge tag room type description.
Using Dynamic Content for Transactional Emails / Cancellation Policies
Make sure you include your cancellation policy. Add in a text module and copy/paste in your policy. If you have different cancellation policies based on rate code or OTA you may want to use dynamic content so that alternative versions of the cancellation policy generate based on the guest information. Follow all other steps for campaign creation and segmentation for transactional emails.
See our resources for information on Dynamic Content here.
You may link images to your pages. If you pick one of the long templates this is a great opportunity to provide your guests with additional information about the property but note that because this is an informational email is should not contain any marketing messaging but may contain informational content about the property, due to this email being sent to both subscribed and unsubscribed guests.
See our resources for information on Campaign Creation here.
Transactional Email Segmentation
For Transactional emails the most basic recommendation is to use a segmentation that makes all guests with an email address eligible. Everyone in the segment should be eligible subscribes or unsubscribes, as transactional emails are informational emails that are not marketing to the recipient. In order to make all guest eligible to receive your transactional campaign, you will need to create a segment that targets all guest with a valid email address.
If you wanted to one include or exclude based on rate code, stay date, or booking channel, for example, you further specify your segment through conditions. If you do not want guests that booked through an OTA to receive an email generated through your Revinate platform you may want to use this conditions feature.
Create your segment, see overview instructions on segment creation here and select it for your Transactional email campaign. Campaign exclusions do not apply to transactional emails so all you need to do in the Choose segment step of your campaign builder is to create and select your segment.
Scheduling
Scheduling transactional emails is different than that of one-time campaigns, here you will not be selecting a specific time and date. Your transactional email campaigns will be automated and because of this, you will want to ensure that the ‘based on guest event’ radio button is selected.
- For your confirmation emails, you'll want to select ‘when booking is confirmed’
- For cancellation emails choose guest event is when a booking is canceled
- For modification emails, it requires one additional step: after selecting ‘when a valid booking is modified’ you’ll want to select the attributes that will trigger the modification email. These are the eligible attributes and you'll only need to select the ones you want to have triggered the campaign. Most commonly used would be check-in date, check out date and room rate.
Modification Email Attributes
There are 10 Attributes to select from when determining what will trigger an email. They are:
- Check in date
- Check out date
- Room rate
- Room type code
- Rate code
- Room type charge code
- # of adults
- # of children
- Total amount Due ( This is PMS dependent)
- Guest name
More than one attribute can be selected, however we do not suggest selecting every attribute
To schedule your transactional campaign, in the review step, review everything related to the campaign.
and if everything looks good, click the ‘schedule’ button on bottom right hand.
Be aware that there are a few common mistakes in creating confirmation emails. Information on common mistakes can be found here.