Booking email templates
Online Reviews: How to get your customers to write one
Let’s face it, we all want to be liked. This is true for individuals as well as your business. You’ve worked hard to provide an excellent service to your customers, and it’s a great 
reassurance when customers sing your praises.
Online reviews are key if you want to attract more customers to your rental, activity, or tour business. Nowadays, travelers and adventure seekers use online reviews when deciding where to go and what to do. Beyond a personal endorsement from a friend or family member, an online review is the next best thing.
How do you encourage your customers to write a review without seeming too pushy or violating a rule on the review sites? It’s a fine line indeed, so let’s share simple ways it can be done tactfully.
Make it easy
Have links to your review sites posted on your website as well as in your storefront or shop. In addition, after their visit send them a follow up email thanking them for their visit, and add a link to your review site. If you use an online booking system, many will offer automatic emails that can be set up to send a day or two after their visit.
Get clever
Come up with a creative way to entice a customer to post a review. A great idea is to give your parting customers a small gift, such as a key chain, water jug, or coaster that includes a note card on it asking them how they liked their experience. “How’d you like us? We’d love to know.” Add the link to your Yelp or TripAdvisor page to the note, so they will know where to go. This simple gesture will likely stand out to your customer enough that they’ll want to share it. After all, it’s the little things in life that mean the most.
Just ask
At the end of their visit, ask them to write a review. If they had an awesome time, then this is a easy task for a customer to do. Asking may feel uncomfortable, but if it’s done in a gracious and humble way, then it will be appreciated. If you’re sure they’ve had a great time, then say something like, “I would appreciate it if you told your friends and family about us. In fact, if you go to our page on Yelp, you can write about your experience.” Give them the link, and say thank you.
In the end, it’s important to recognize that as a small business, good or bad reviews can be the deciding factor for choosing you. Provide an excellent service, engage your customers, build rapport, and this will naturally bring people to review you. In addition, respond quickly and appropriately to negative reviews. Doing so, will show a potential customer that you care and want to make things right if it wasn’t. That type of business mindset speaks volumes. Cheers!
Want to make the most of your WebReserv booking system? Check out 3 amazing features and try them for FREE with a GOLD account trial.
The Gold account is the most advanced account in WebReserv. It unlocks all options and features of the system and allows you to make the most of the system. Let us present you 3 features of the GOLD account that really can take your business to another level.
1. Email customization: Convert your emails into a marketing weapon
When a customer makes a reservation through the booking system, WebReserv automatically sends him a confirmation email. This is a great feature because it gives your customers instant notification, all the details of their reservation and the assurance that they have successfully made the booking. But, can you do more? Can you improve the customers experience even further? The answer is yes, Read the rest of this entry »
Add barcode to reservation confirmations
You can now include a barcode in reservation emails and printouts. The keyword is #barcodeimg
To add a code128 barcode to the a reservation (or printout), you need to create your own template and insert the keyword #barcodeimg in the template where the barcode is to be inserted.
The barcode will be added to the email or print template when formatted.
Customizing Business Notifications
You can now customize the notification that is sent to the business when a new reservation is made. To use your own notification email, create a new template in the email template section and make sure that you select business notification as the template type.
Next, go to Setup – Product Information – [Product] – Email Notifications and select the new template.
You can also create a reminder email that is sent automatically before the arrival date. The reminder email can be used to notify frontdesk, cleaning personnel or other individuals to perform activities before or after the guest arrival.
Email Opt-in/Opt-out
You have probably seen this before while shopping the Internet – a checkmark next to or below the customer email address asking if you want to receive future offers. This checkmark indicates to the business that the customer is interested in getting notified for future deals and offers.
Now you can do the same with your booking calendar. To enable the opt-in/opt-out checkmark, go to Setup – Business Information – Advanced Options and set email opt-in/opt-out to Yes.
After enabling the opt-in/opt-out, your customers will have the option to opt-out for future mailings. You can view their selection in all reservations and you can generate customer reports that exclude customers that opted-out for future mailings.
You can also use the opt-in/opt-out when using contact management systems for email newsletters and offers. Most contact management systems allow you to upload a CSV file with customer email addresses. You can download this file from the reports section on WebReserv:
To download email contact list:
1. Log on to your WebReserv account
2. Go to Frontdesk – Reports and select customer report
3. Check the exclude opt-out customers checkbox
4. Right-click on CSV and select download to disk
5. Upload the CSV file to your contact management system
Note: Reservation emails (confirmations, cancellations etc.) will always be mailed to the customer, regardless of the opt-in/opt-out checkmark.
Auto confirm and Decline
WebReserv.com will auto confirm all reservations made for your business, this is easy to use and customers love it. However, there might be situations where you want the reservation system to mark a reservation as pending and review it before accepting the reservation. A typical example of this is when you need to verify the reservation with a third party.
You can change the default auto confirm behavior on the Reservation Rules page for each product.
If you set the Auto Confim rule to pending, you will be sent a pending notice whenever a reservation has been made. To confirm or decline it, open the reservation and click the Decline or Confirm button.
The customer will automatically receive an email specifying whether the reservation was confirmed or declined.
To modify the email templates for confirmed and declined emails, go to Setup – Emails.
Click on the following link for more information about our reservation rules.
Email notifications
A customer will automatically receive a reservation email under the following circumstances:
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A reservation is made
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Reservation status changes from Pending to Confirmed or Confirmed to Cancelled
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Start date/time or end date/time is changed
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The product has been changed
In any of these circumstances a reservation email is automatically sent to the customer. In addition to the emails automatically sent to customers, you will receive a notification email whenever a new reservation is made.
For more information about Email notifications, click here
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