Hi! in this video I’ll show you how to send automated emails from KWHotel system. It’s one of the most useful features in our program and I’ll prove it to you in just a few minutes. First of all, you can greatly reduce the workload of your receptionists. Instead of wasting time for writing each email individually, everything can be handled by our program.
Secondly, you will upgrade your customer service. Look, Kotel can send directions to your hotel or a list of nearby attractions or even codes to your main gate and apartment. This makes a great first impression and gives you potential for better reviews. Furthermore, it gives you an amazing potential for marketing You can send discount codes or remind guests about your hotel 6 months after they departed These are just 3 simple advantages of using our tool Our users have found much more of them so I encourage you to try it out! In the meantime, I’ll show you the whole configuration.
Step by step. To begin with, we need to configure your email account in Kotel Go to Tools > Configuration > Email Now select option “Send correspondence from Kotel email account” This will unlock the mailbox configuration First, write down your signature It will be displayed to your guests in their mailboxes You can obtain the remaining data directly from your mailbox provider or a person who set it up for you Once you have finished the configuration, click the “Test” button If you see a positive response, we can proceed further Let’s now have a look at this option Many email clients will automatically save your messages to the “Sent” folder However, if your mailbox doesn’t support that, or you simply want to send copies to the front desk manager or someone else, you can write this address here This field has one extra use Before you fully enable the automated email sending it’s wise to test it first If you don’t enable the automated sending and instead type an email address here, every automated message will be sent there Once you have tested everything and feel satisfied with the results, you can click this button and enjoy the benefits of saving time and having a higher standard of customer service.
Now we can prepare the content of our first message For the purpose of this tutorial, I’ll create a simple booking confirmation message Please bear in mind that this is just a fraction of your possibilities First, go to the “Document templates” tab Here, you can specify the criteria for sending each message One item on the list = one message type Click “Add” and go past the welcoming screen Type the name of your message It will be displayed on your messages list Next, insert the subject of your message The shorter you keep the subject, the higher your chance that someone will open it Let’s write “Your booking confirmation” Now type the sender name In my case it will be “Mariusz | My Dream Hotel” The next field lets you specify the reply email This is where your guest responses will go to The following section gives you huge possibilities Look, with our solution you can handle more than just hotel guests.
If you manage apartment rental, for example, your message can be sent directly to apartment owners You can also improve communication within your team and send reports to staff members If you manage multiple properties in Kotel Pro, here you can enable this message for all hotels Let’s continue Here you can select a time when your message will be sent The detailed description of every time option is available here In my case I choose “After reservation is created” In the next window enable the option of automated document sending Now you have to specify the day and time when your message will be sent “Type the number of days” This field determines the delay of sending your message For example.
If during the previous step you selected “Before reservation starts”, Typing value “3” = send 3 days before reservation starts If you choose “After reservations is created” option, you can also type “0” This means “Send immediately after reservation starts” “Type the hour of sending” If Kotel will not be running during that time your message will be sent right after Kotel is started again You can also leave this field empty In such case, Kotel will send a message as soon as all criteria are met For example – send 1 day before departure and when a guest made full payment This solution works great if you want to make sure your client receives an apartment lock code 1 day before his arrival Next window lets you specify more advanced sending criteria Let’s start with the “Document language” There are 3 simple rules to follow here Let’s assume you are running a hotel in France.
Your nationality in Kotel is set to French The first rule – if you don’t pick any language in this field, Kotel will send this message to every guest, no matter what his nationality is Second, if you pick “French” here this message will be only sent to guests of your nationality Third – if you create a separate message and set it to English, for example, Kotel will send this message to all nationalities, except French To put things into perspective, If you plan to use bilingual booking confirmation, for example French and English, you can leave this field empty Otherwise, you should create at least two separate messages One in French and one in English This way you can handle reservations globally.
If you have plenty of customers from Germany too, you can simply create the third message and target it to German guests only The next option is “Payment status” You can use it for many reasons such as payment reminders, or sending apartment lock code only to those customers who made the full payment If you leave this field empty, the payment criterium will not be taken into account Next, we have the reservation source You can use it, for example, if you want to send different messages to people with a phone reservation and people from Booking.com You can also leave this field empty If you want to send customized messages and offers, depending on the room type or specific apartment, you can do it here This solution is very popular among our users who manage apartment rental.
It’s time to write our first message! The easiest way to write it is in the “Templates” tab For now, we pick any template from the list and save changes Go to the “Templates” tab As you remember, the template is simply a combination of content and attachment of your message In the “Confirmations” tab you prepare the criteria for sending your message and in the “Templates” tab you prepare the content of the message Then we combine them together Click “Add” First we need to insert the template’s title My booking confirmation This window contains two tabs Contents and attachment Let’s start with the “Contents” There are 5 options to choose from “FRX file” It’s the most complicated but also the most advanced message type giving you plenty of flexibility FRX format is used in our default booking confirmations, invoices and reports.
If you want to learn more about creating FRX files Search YouTube for “Fast Report tutorial” Fast Report is integrated with Kotel And can be used to create and modify the FRX files “SMS message” We’ll discuss this feature in a different video “HTML / XML file” It’s a default standard for sending emails I highly recommend you to write messages using this option First, if you cooperate with a marketing agency you can request them to create a great looking HTML template which you can populate with your text later What’s more, you can use special variables in HTML template.
These variables download data directly from Kotel This allows you to send payment links to guests or write their name and amount to pay automatically “Contents” This can be used to write a plain text, similar to Windows Notepad It can populated with variables too “URL” This option will be explained in a separate video To create our booking confirmation message easily, we pick the HTML option Click “New file” and start writing your message “Hi, Thank you for making a reservation from…” And here we can insert variables To do so, we click “Insert data” “Stay” and choose variables “From” and “To” This way you can prepare a message for every situation One more hint If you want to jump to the next line use “Shift” + “Enter” If you hit only “Enter”, you will start a new paragraph.
Let’s continue our email “Attached please find your booking confirmation” “Best regards, Mariusz, My Dream Hotel” Let’s finish our work by saving this HTML file It will be a base for your future templates Click “File” > “Save” and select the directory Now you can close this window The content will be saved Time to include an attachment When you create a new template, attachments are disabled by default Click “Add attachment” Here are the attachments you can pick from “FRX file” We’ve discussed this format before FRX files will be changed into PDF when sending your email “RDLC file” It’s a document format used in previous Kotel releases For example 0.44 “Any file”.
As you probably suspected this option allows you to attach any file “Please note, however, that you attachment must not exceed 2 MB “POST file” We’ll discuss this option in a different video In our case, we select the FRX file and load the default booking confirmation template You can easily find the Kotel templates folder by right-clicking on the Desktop shortcut and clicking “Open file location” now we navigate to Doc > EN directory If you’re using a different language version of Kotel, the final folder will be FR, RU and so on I choose the “BookingConfirmation.frx” file Now we save changes It’s time to combine our message content and sending criteria We go back to the “Confirmations” tab and edit “My booking confirmation” We navigate through the setup until we reach the templates selection menu Now we choose our message from the list Save changes again and that’s it Let’s test the automated message sending Now let’s create a reservation for me but I will use our Kotel Support email support@kwhotel.com I save my reservation The registry of all emails sent can be found in the bottom toolbar As you can see the message was successfully sent to my mailbox Now we can go back to the mailbox configuration and enable automated email sending And that concludes our tutorial.
I hope you enjoyed it! Remember, my Team can prepare the whole configuration for you. You’ll find the details in the description If you’d like to see more video on my channel, please let me know on my email Have a great day!
Discover more from Making Money Is Easy
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
