We have been excited to see our outfitters embrace video and photo sharing and using new email notifications to maintain closer contact with guests. We want to continue to encourage use of these features, but they place a substantial burden on the system with close to a million photos and hundreds of hours of video being stored today. As a result, we will need to introduce usage-based pricing to help cover the increased load generated by particularly large collections of photos and emails. Starting on January 1, 2017, Arctic Reservations will be introducing usage-based pricing. The majority of outfitters will see no change in their monthly charges. All affected outfitters have already received email notifications and can see estimated charges on their invoices. For those that do see an additional usage charge, we aim to keep the pricing manageable and will be adding some new tools to help you reduce usage as needed or desired.

When the new usage tools go live, you will be able to access them by going to the “Settings” page under “General Settings” and clicking the “Pencil” icon next to “Usage”.

On the “Usage” page, Arctic will display all of your current usage statistics. At the bottom of the page, you will find two buttons, a “Clean Social Sites” button and a “Clean Photos For Sale” button.

When you click either of these buttons, you will be able to specify a date and Arctic will remove all social sites or photos for sale for trips prior to the date that you entered. By default, Arctic will choose a date one year prior to the current date. You can alter the date to be any date you prefer.

Once you have selected your date, you will be able to then review your date selection before permanently deleting the social sites or photos for sale.

Note: Once the photos or social sites have been cleaned, they cannot be recovered. All content will be permanently deleted.

As mentioned, these tools are still in development but should be live by the end of the month to give any effected outfitters plenty of time to manage your usage before the usage-based pricing takes effect in January. We will announce when the new usage management feature goes live, so keep an eye on our Twitter feed on your dashboards.

With the usage tools provided, you will be able to easily maintain your usage within an acceptable range of expense for your installation. If you have any questions about the usage-based pricing or how to use the usage management tools when they go live, please feel free to contact support and we will be happy to help.

Recently, we launched a cross-promotion feature that provides a simple way to help guests identify other potential activities or services of interest, and to increase online sales. The cross promote feature allows you to highlight additional trips, rental items and e-commerce categories once a guest has added an item to his or her cart. With this feature you can, for instance, cross promote camping or cabin rentals with your rafting or zipline trips. You can also promote an e-commerce category that includes guide books, maps, and waterproof bags that you offer in your e-commerce stores to help guests prepare for their upcoming trip. You can even cross promote other tours. For instance, you can suggest a zipline or rock climbing tour in addition to the rafting trip already selected by the guest.

This feature allows you to suggest other offerings to the guest during their online visit by making them aware of the other services or items that you provide that are complimentary to their current selection. The cross promote feature works differently from the package feature in that no discount is required to be offered on any of the activities that are cross promoted, and you can use it to promote e-commerce categories.

When using the cross promote feature, keep in mind that you do not want to promote too many other options as this can overwhelm guests with choices and may hurt conversion rates for guests moving through the checkout process. I would recommend adding no more than three options to any given trip, rental item or retail item. Also note, if you are using the package feature, you should avoid selecting the same items to cross promote as both will be displayed and may be confusing.

For more information on how to use the new cross promote feature check out the support documentation and, of course, feel free to contact support with any questions.

Today I want to point out one of the new email features that has been added to Arctic which will help ensure you get all the needed information and forms from guests. We have recently added a couple of new email trigger options called “Before Trip – Missing Details” and “Before Rental – Missing Details”. These new trigger options will allow you to specifically target guests who are missing registration information or have not signed their waivers.

You all know what a chore it can be to collect all of the necessary information and how much time and energy it takes from you and your staff to track down guests who have not filled out their forms. These triggers will help with that. Now, you can allow Arctic to automatically message your procrastinating guests and urge them to complete their registration and waiver before arriving. You can create as many of these triggers as you need.

The beauty of the “Before Trip – Missing Details” and the “Before Rental- Missing Details” triggers is that they will only be sent to guests who are either missing registration information, have not signed their waivers, or both, depending on how you configure them.

This means you are not bothering the guests who completed their forms months ago when they made their reservations — your audience will only be the procrastinators. The “oops, it slipped my mind procrastinators” will most likely complete their forms after the first trigger but the “procrastinators of epic proportions” will get as many reminders as you care to generate. You might not want it to look like the scene out of Harry Potter where there are letters everywhere and owls overpopulating the neighborhood, but then again, for the really bad procrastinators that might be what it takes. 😛

Each “Before Trip – Missing Details” or “Before Rental-Missing Details” trigger can be worded specifically because your target audience will only be the guests who are missing details. Each subsequent reminder can also have the tone increase in urgency as the activity start dates get closer.

Bottom line; this will be a great way to remind your guests to complete their forms which should reduce the amount of paperwork that has to be completed upon arrival so your operations can run smoothly for you and your guests. And best yet, Arctic is doing the heavy lifting and will seamlessly and effortlessly track down your wayward procrastinators for you. It’s a beautiful thing. 🙂

We have recently added a small but handy feature to Arctic. It is the ability to send evaluation follow-up emails to your guests who take the time to complete your evaluation forms. This feature gives you the ability to set up multiple email templates that you can use to send to your guests after they complete their evaluations. These emails, like all other email correspondence sent to guests from Arctic will be stored on the “Email” tab of their “Person” record for easy reference should you need them again in the future.

In many instances, when setting up the templates, you will want to leave the templates mostly blank pulling in only a small amount of “automated” information from the placeholders so that you and your reservationists can then personally address the feedback, good and bad, submitted by your guests. Arctic provides placeholders for pulling in basic reservation information for the guests as well as placeholders for the recipient and sender so that you can create personalized greetings and signatures for the emails.

The follow-up emails are sent from the “View Response” page. If you have multiple templates set up then Arctic will allow you to choose the template you want to use.

To set up Evaulation Follow-Up email templates, go to the “Email” menu and choose “Templates” on the “Browse Templates” page, scroll down to the “Evaluation Follow-Up” section and click the green “+ Setup Template” button.

If you have any questions or need help setting up an evaluation follow-up template, feel free to contact support and as always we will be happy to help.

Well, more useful anyway. 🙂

Are you tired of having to keep up with the new clients who have subscribed to your email list, entering them in both Arctic and your email marketing provider? Then you will be delighted to learn that Arctic, coupled with Mailchimp, can do this tedious and annoying task for you. By using the Email List Integration feature in Arctic, you can keep your Arctic contacts and your email marketing lists in sync. When a guest is added to Arctic and subscribed to your list, Arcticwill send her/his email information to Mailchimp to ensure that they are part of your email list (but don’t worry, it will only add them if they are not already on the list). This process also works in reverse, if you use a subscription widget on your website where guests can subscribe to your email marketing list, Mailchimp will send new subscriber information to Arctic. If the email address is associated with an existing customer in your Arctic database, Arctic will update his/her email subscription information. If the email address is not associated with an existing record in your customer database, Arctic will not add the email address as a customer record since these entries are most often just email addresses and do not include names or other pertinent information. This also ensures that your Arctic database is only filled with guests who are either solid customers or solid inquiries and is not polluted with entries for those people who are only tangentially interested. The same works for un-subscriptions. If a guest unsubscribes from your email list, Mailchimp will send this information to Arctic as well which will then unsubscribe the guest from the “Email List”. If you select “No” in the drop down menu for the “Email List” field for a guest who was previously subscribed, Arctic will also send this un-subscription information to Mailchimp.

When setting up the mail integration between Arctic and Mailchimp, it is a simple process. However, Arctic and Mailchimp will only manage future mailing list data, all past mailing list information will not be transmitted. To sync Arctic and Mailchimp initially, we recommend that you run a filter of your Arctic database that will pull all of the guests currently subscribed and then import the results into Mailchimp. Again Mailchimp, will only import new email addresses to avoid duplication. This will ensure that your Mailchimp database has all of your current Arctic information and the integration can start keeping Arctic and Mailchimp in sync.

To set up email list integration, go to the “Settings” page under “Integration”. There you will be able to link your existing Mailchimp account or set up a new Mailchimp account to link to your Arctic installation.

If you are settting up a new Mailchimp account you can easily import your marketing database from your old mail marketing service into Mailchimp. Once you have imported your existing mail marketing list into Mailchimp, then import the list of existing Arctic customers who are currently subscribed to your mail marketing list. Once you have this completed, Arctic and Mailchimp will start automatically managing the new list subscriptions and unsubscriptions and you can rest assured that your marketing list is up to date. For more information, on setting up Email List Integration or for an example of the filter for exporting your current Arctic guests who are subscribed to your email list, see the “Email List Integration” chapter of the support documentation and as always if you have additional questions or run into any hiccups getting the mail integration feature set up, feel free to contact support and we will be happy to help.