Development Blog: Email Triggers

Read the thoughts and ideas of the developers and contibuters to Arctic Reservations, an online reservation management tool.

 
by Zachary Collier

Email Triggers

I hope you're ready to start another project soon. I've been thinking quite a bit about "email triggers." The idea here would be that we have emails sent some number of days after (or before) inquiries, reservations, deposit, or trips. I see a system much like the one set up for creating payment plans where we can manage the emails sent.

This is what I'm thinking. When someone makes an inquiry, the system would send a follow up email some number of days after. Then when they make a reservation, the system would send them an email the day before their deposit is due (as a reminder..and this email would eventually link to a way to pay). Then they would get an email a few days before final payment is due (if they haven't paid it). Then maybe a pre-trip email and definitely a post trip email that would invite them to the photo site and/or ask them to fill out an online evaluation.

I think that the "triggers" would be different for each trip type so we'd set them up in the trip type definition. We should also set it up so that we have to check a box on the invoice to send these emails as we don't want to "harass" some of our guests.

And, finally, we'd like to be able to customize these emails (subject and body) by river as well. It would be really cool if we could upload a text and html version of the email and send them as Multipart/Alternative.

December 16, 2005 11:43AM • permalink

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