Send a reminder email or SMS

Automating your booking reminders

Automated notifications streamline your communication with clients about their upcoming appointments, ensuring they're well-informed and engaged. 

The use of Email and SMS reminders significantly reduces the rate of no-shows by keeping your clients in the loop. They are not only beneficial for your clients but also provide essential reminders for you and your team members.

Each booking page comes with a pre-set reminder that alerts the booker one hour before their appointment begins. You can modify this preset reminder by clicking on it. This guide will walk you through the process of setting up multiple reminder emails and SMS for your clients, yourself, or your team members.

This feature is available on our Individual, Professional and Teams plans. In this article:

• Create an email reminder to booker
• Create an email reminder to yourself or team member
• Create an SMS reminder

Create an email reminder to booker

1. For the booking page where you want to add a reminder, use our simple settings search bar to go to Notifications Settings.

2. Click on 'Reminders before a booking' to edit that section.

For any email reminder to booker, you may choose to modify some default settings.

When will this action be triggered

Set how many minutes, hours or days before the start of the appointment will this email go out to the booker. 

For example if you set a 1 day reminder and the appointment is booked for Monday at 10am, the reminder will automatically send Sunday at 10am.

Sending name & email address 

By default, this reminder email to booker will send from the Account Owners email address. 

Click  Edit next to the email address to change both the name and email address sending the email. On a team booking page, you can choose to send it from the team member booked by selecting {TEAM-EMAIL} from the dropdown.

The sending email address must be valid and verified for use with YouCanBook.me. If your email domain is DMARC protected, emails will default to sending from notifications@youcanbook.me to ensure delivery. (What is DMARC?)

Receiving email address

By default, this reminder email will go to the email address the booker has entered on the booking form.If you wish to send the cancellation to multiple people, select Custom Email from the drop down list, and enter the email addresses that should receive this confirmation, separated by a comma. 

Email subject line

Give the email a subject line that will grab your bookers attention. You can add in shorthand codes to customize the title (i.e. "Your {TYPE-NAME} appointment starts in 15 minutes!" will display the type of appointment they've booked.) 

Email content

You can fully customize the body of the email that will send to your booker.

Use the styling toolbar to add bold or italic text, insert images or logos, hyperlink a website or personalize the email using shorthand codes from your booking form. 

Be sure to include the details of how you meet in this reminder email.

Create an email reminder to you or team member

In Reminders before the booking, you can also create an email reminder to yourself or to the team member booked. 

Click the + and follow the prompts to select email reminder to yourself or to team member. 

Just like with the confirmation email to team member,  you can modify when this email sends to you or your team member, as well as the content of the message. 

Create an SMS reminder

You may prefer to send a SMS message to yourself or your booker about the cancellation, or you may decide to send both and email and a SMS. 

For each SMS notification you set up, decide:

When will this SMS be triggered? 

Set how many minutes, hours or days before the start of booking the SMS will be sent. 

Recipient

In the Send to field, select the Phone number question from your booking form. If you are sending the SMS to yourself, select   Enter a custom phone number from the dropdown and enter your mobile phone number in the field below.

If sending the SMS to a custom phone number, the phone number should be entered in the format  +XXXXXXXXXXX, with the number starting with a plus sign and your country code. Incorrectly formatted phone numbers will result in the SMS not sending. 

The SMS message can send to multiple recipients. Select  Enter a custom phone number, and enter multiple shorthand codes from your booking page or multiple phone numbers, separated by a comma. 

SMS Message

Personalize the SMS message that will send as a reminder. Use the curly brackets in the styling toolbar to add shorthand codes from your booking page.

Do not format links in your SMS message - your link will become automatically hyperlinked when delivered to your client's SMS application.

Keep this message brief - 1 credit allows for 160 characters. Shorthand codes may expand to longer text, resulting in more than 1 credit being used in a single message. Use the counter on the top right corner of the message box to estimate how many credits your SMS will take.

For further questions, contact our team at support@youcanbook.me.

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