You’ve Got Mail

One of the most powerful features in Arctic and, until now recently, one of the least documented is the email feature. Emails are, in many cases, your most prolific points of contact with your guests and, in some cases, are the only forms of communication you may have with a guest prior to their arrival for their trip or activity. With this in mind, Arctic has you covered from creating templates and designs to customizing email senders, scheduling triggered emails and tracking external emails.

In the latest update to our support documentation, we added the Email Chapter, which explain how to set up email senders, how to create awesome email designs that will reflect your company’s style, and provide some great tips to stay “CAN SPAM” compliant so your important emails reach your guests. We have even added some helpful sections for some of the commonly used advanced coding techniques, like the popular and useful “IF” statements, as well as SmartContent formatting tips. All of these tools will help you create awesome personalized and informative emails for each of your guests.

Now that we have given you the tools, don’t forget to infuse your emails with your own style and “brand”. No matter what type of company you are, you all have your own lingo and style, so don’t be too hum drum with those emails. Make them reflect who you are as an adventure company. If you are running “Deliverance” style rafting trips complete with banjo music or if you are a snow cat company offering killer snow to shred, make sure your emails reflect that. Your emails should help get your guests excited about their adventure with you and when successful, help add to your mystique to make the experience truly unforgettable. Remember, your guests are coming for an adventure, so while you need to convey important information in your emails don’t forget to have some fun too. Your guests won’t forget it and will truly appreciate your efforts.

If you need any help creating your email designs or templates, don’t hesitate to contact support. We are always ready to help.

Keep Business Running Smoothly with a Back Up Gateway Provider

In light of the recent Authorize.Net outages and disruptions of payment processing capabilities, we would like to suggest that you consider a back up gateway provider. Arctic has the ability to support multiple payment gateways for the same installation. Having multiple payment gateways set up would allow you to select your back up gateway when your primary gateway or “default” gateway is having a service issue ensuring that you can continue to run your businesses smoothly and without hassle to you and your guests. Stripe is a good potential back up gateway provider as they do not have any associated monthly fees, so you would not be paying additional fees to have the safety and security of a secondary payment gateway. However, you could choose from any of the other supported gateway providers. These are Bluepay, Moneris and Payware.

To use a back up gateway, you would be able to keep your primary gateway as the default gateway and then when a service issue arises with your primary gateway manually choose to run transactions through your back up gateway. You could do this per transaction by selecting your back up gateway from the “Gateway” drop down menu as shown here:
Choosing a Gateway

Or you can make your back up gateway the default gateway for the day by going to the “Settings” page under “Credit Card Processing” and clicking the “Pencil” icon next to “Default Payment Gateway”. On the “Configure Default Gateway” page, choose your back up gateway from the “Gateway” drop down menu as shown here:

Default Gateway

Once the back up gateway has been selected click “Save Setting” to save your changes. If you set the back up as the new default gateway be sure you remember to change the default back to your primary once the service issue is resolved.

One thing to keep in mind when using your back up gateway, the other gateway providers besides Authorize.net do not offer automatic batching like Authorize.Net does. If you have your Authorize.Net gateway set up to batch credit card transactions automatically, you will have to manually record the transactions processed through your back up gateway to ensure that your End of Day Balance reports correctly reflect all of the business processed through your back up gateway. For more information on recording deposits see Section 13.12 of the Invoices Chapter.

The benefits to having a backup gateway provider are that you will be able to seamlessly continue processing payments through Arctic not only via the back end but your online guests will not notice an interruption either. This will keep the experience of your online guests top notch and eliminate the extra work generated by phone calls from customers who are unable to make payments or complete their reservations online. As always if you have any questions or concerns about setting up a back up payment gateway, feel free to contact support and we will be happy to help.