(SM-3) Using Autosend
Last updated
Last updated
Having learned how to manually send attendee and payment reminder messages in the previous two lessons, in this lesson we will learn how this process can be automated using Autosend.
For attendee messages, autosend defines a date and time after which a specific message will:
Be bulk sent to all attendee who have already booked
Be sent automatically at the time of booking to all attendees who book after that time.
Autosend is controlled from where you define each message for an activity:
You can see there is an option called Autosend, which defaults to being off.
Setting Autosend on gives you a new field where you set the date and time that the automatic sending of this message should begin.
Setting the time in the future gives a display of in how many hours time the autosend feature will commence.
At this time, a bulk send of this message will occur to all clients who are booked on the activity, and all those who book after that time will be sent the message at the time of booking.
Setting the time in the past displays the word LIVE.
A bulk send of this message will occur within the next hour to all clients who are booked on the activity, and all those who now book will be sent the message at the time of booking.
Once you have set Autosend option and clicked on [Save], the autosend (Paper Plane) icon will appear next to the listing of the message on the left hand side:
There is a similar autosend system available for Payment Reminder and Payment Overdue messages.
This also causes an autosend set icon [Paper Plane] to be shown in the message listing area:
You will see there is no time to explicitly set for these messages, as their timing is dependent on when the payments are due.
The message is automatically sent when a payment becomes due in five days time.
If the payment is not marked as received when the payment is due in 1 day's time, the same Payment Reminder message will be sent to the attendee again.
If the date of a scheduled payment is manually changed, it must fall within the window of being due in between four and five days time or zero and one days time for the message to be sent after the change.
The message is automatically sent when a payment becomes two days overdue.
If the payment is not marked as received when the payment is overdue by 5 days, the same Payment Overdue message will be sent to the attendee again.
If the date of a scheduled payment is manually changed, it must fall within the window of being overdue by between two and three days time or between five and six days time for the message to be sent after the change.
This automatic message sending function occurs in the background once every hour. At the time of writing this occurs between zero and five minutes past the hour, but this could change in the future.
We have seen how the autosend feature can be used to ensure that all attendee and payment messages are sent in the background, without you needing to consider each day if they need to be sent manually.
The whole idea of Workshop Angel is to clear your mind from needing to think of all the admin tasks that need doing, and this is a big time saver in helping you to achieve that goal!
In these first three lessons, we have looked at how messages are sent. However that is not the end of the story, as we also want to be sure that they have been received too. The next lesson looks at sending live messages and how we can monitor whether the messages have safely arrived with your clients.
If you wish to test this auto-sending function and have messages that are due to be sent immediately, you can click on the 'Autosend Now' icon on the top menu bar. This will invoke the autosend action immediately, rather than you needing to wait up to an hour for it to occur automatically.
