In this video, we will explain you how to modify your booking templates.
Transcript
Hello! In this video, we are going to learn how to create booking templates in TourCMS.
First of all, we once again head to Configuration, System and Setup. As you can see, there are two booking templates: Email Templates and RTF Templates.
- Email Templates, as the name suggests, are used to send emails to customers.
- RTF Template stands for Rich Text Format, which allows you to create documents for your customers like invoices, receipt letters, or welcome packs.
Both of them are set up in a very similar way.
Setting Up Email Templates
First of all, we're going to start with a booking template. To create a new booking template, you just give it a name, and then you can select if you want to assign a specific channel language to the template or inherit from the channel setting, which is also the default and recommended setting here. You save the Changes, and you can already see the new template. It's a template, but it's already created. So once you enter our template, you can enter your email text here, and then save the Changes, and your email template is created.
I already created one for our little video here, a booking confirmation in this case. As you can see in the email text, I use tokens to get the information from the database into the template. So, where can you find tokens? Good question! Well, there's a document for that, which can be found at https://www.tourcms.com/support/overview/TourCMS_documentation.pdf. Or you can just Google for "TourCMS tokens," and the first result will be this document. And here, starting from page 8, you will find a complete list of the available tokens to create your email.
Once you set up your email template, you might want to send it to a customer. To send an email to a customer, we go to Bookings. We enter the booking we want to send the email for. We scroll down a little, and in Advanced Note Entry > Send via Email, you can send an email to a customer and use our booking confirmation template. As you can see, the token is automatically converted into the text. So we have the customer name here, the booking ID, the booking status, the name of the tour, the start date, and all the information we put in the token. You can send it straight away to the customer.
Setting Up RTF Templates
So let's have a quick look at an RTF template that works similarly. If you want to create a new RTF template ("New RTF" for instance), we need to create the document beforehand. An RTF document, as I was saying, stands for Rich Text Format, and it can be created in Microsoft Word, for instance. The big advantage of RTF documents is that they work on all web browsers, and when you create the document, you can edit it before sending. Very important here: the RTF document in TourCMS cannot exceed one megabyte. Keep that in mind, especially when adding images to the document.
So, we select the file (maybe we have it already here in our RTF files, if not, we choose it from our computer). We just choose the file we want to upload, and upload the File. Then it appears here on this list, and we can add it to our template. You can add a note if you want, or a display order. If you don't have a lot of templates, it's not really necessary to change this number; the lower the number, the higher it will be listed. You can assign it to all products or just to a specific product, so you could create different RTF document templates for different products. We just leave it as default, and the language setting is the same as in the email templates. So, we Create Our New Template, and we already have the new RTF template here.
Also, I prepared one for this little demo here for this little video. So if you download this template I prepared here, "The Welcome Letter," if you open it, you can see it uses the same tokens as we use in the email templates, like contact name and today's date. So if you want to print a document for one of your customers, it's almost the same process as sending an email. You just go to the booking you want to print the document for. You choose Docs and Comms here. And then you can just create, let's say, your welcome letter with the customer name, with the actual date, also the customer name here, and all the other token information you might have added to the template.
So basically, this is how to create email and document templates in TourCMS, which is a very useful feature.
You can also configure automatic emails, which will be sent automatically to the customer in the channel manager. So for each channel, you can set up automatic email templates. We will discuss this in a different video.