In order to start defining an SMS message sent to the customer which serves as a reservation start reminder, click on the “Add” button next to the “Reservation Start Reminder” label inside the SMS messages screen (see Figure 379). The following screen will be displayed.
Figure 384: Defining Reservation Start Reminder (step 1/2)
This contains two fields:
Message Text – field for defining the contents of the SMS message which can be used in combination with merge fields to further customize the message for each user
For example: you can define a message such as displayed in Figure 292 where you can address each user by his first name by inserting %%First_Name%% merge field; you can also enter information such as “This is to remind you about your reservation on:” and then add the event date and event time merge fields so that the customer would receive an SMS message containing the date and time (%%Start_Date%%, %%Start_Time%%)
Note: the maximum number of characters which can be defined is 160; this limit applies to the SMS with the values extracted from the merge fields, not the merge fields itself; in other words if you put %%First_Name%%merge field, the limit will apply to the person’s name e.g. John; therefore it is recommended to keep the SMS as short as possible because if they become longer than the limit they will not be sent
Merge Fields – as discussed above, the merge fields are used for further customizing the contents of the SMS message so that each customer would be addressed by his first or last name; these fields are also used for entering specific event related information for the customer such as starting date, event location, event name, etc; in order to insert i.e. apply a desired merge field double click it inside this list and it will appear inside the “Message Text” area
After defining the SMS message click on the “Create” button and the following screen will be displayed.
Figure 385: Defining Reservation Start Reminder (step 2/2)
The last step in defining the reservation start reminder is defining the timing for sending the SMS by selecting the desired number of days prior to first reserved session.