How to adjust your SMS and email settings

Timely has a bunch of automated SMS and email notifications available that allow you to stay in touch with your customers.

You can customise your sms and email settings to better suit your business and your customers.

In this guide, we'll cover how to:

1. Set your SMS sending window.
2. Set your SMS and email delay.
3. Customise your confirmation and reminder emails.
4. Customise your email extras.
5. Send copies of your customer and staff emails.

SMS time restrictions

To prevent your customers from receiving disruptive SMS in the middle of the night, we have a built in SMS sending window.

This allows you to set when SMS can be sent and received in Timely. By default, this will be set to between

8:00am

and 

9:00pm

. However, you can update both the

Start

and 

End

 time of the SMS time restriction, if you want to make this earlier or later.

Important information

In our example we can see the  SMS time restrictions are set to start at 8:00am and end at 9:00pm. Any SMS that is generated after 9pm will remain in the Messages tab as Pending until at least 8:00am the next day. 

Emails will be sent at any time of the day, so bear this in mind when making changes to appointments. Notifications may be enabled on a customer's phone or device. 

To set your SMS time restrictions: 

1. Head to Setup > SMS settings in the main menu.
2. Scroll down to the SMS time restrictions section:

   

3. Under the Restrict SMS message sending to these times heading select the Start time. We recommend making this the same as your regular opening time.  
4. Then adjust the End time. This will ensure customers won't be sent SMS in the middle of the night. 
5. Click Save to apply your changes.

Set your SMS and email delay

By default, your SMS and email messages will remain in the Messages tab as Pending, for 10 minutes. This delay is in place to prevent a customer (or staff member) from receiving a bunch of messages when multiple changes are made to an appointment.

If you do make a number of changes to a booking, we'll make sure that the only notification sent includes the final appointment details.

Adjust your delay settings

If you like, you can adjust the SMS and email delay to an interval that suits you:

1. Head to Setup > SMS Settings from the main menu.
2. Scroll down to the SMS and email delay section: 
3. Select your preferred delay from the drop down:
4. Click Save to apply.

 Adding a delay also allows you to pause and delete any pending messages before they are sent. This is great if you'd like stop notifications from sending on a specific appointment.  Find out more.

Customise your confirmation and reminder emails

While the basic outline and format for email reminders and notifications can't be amended, you do have some options to customise your messages further:

1. Head to Setup > Email settings from the main menu.
2. At the top of the page, you will see an Additional text box: 

   

3. This allows you to enter a custom block of text to appear at the bottom of your customer emails: 

   

4. Click Save to apply any changes.

 You can use this to inform customers of any general additional information or include links to information they may need to read or complete before their appointment.  You can add links to this field but html or any additional formatting is not supported.

Customise your email extras

You can also decide to customise your emails a little further:

1. Head to Setup > Email settings from the main menu.
2. Scroll down to the Email extras section: 
3. You can then choose to:
   1.  Attach calendar files to customer emails, which will include a calendar event in the customer's confirmation email.
   2. Include the address of mobile locations (this will show the appointment address by default).
   3. Hide service and staff details... to protect a customer's privacy, or if you don't need the customer to see which staff member/service is booked.
4. If you choose to Attach calendar files to customer emails, you can choose which email address to set as the Organiser's email address:
   1. Online booking notification email: the email address set up under Setup > Staff notifications > Online booking notifications.
   2. Staff member's email address: the email address set up under the staff member's profile Setup > Staff > Edit > Email address.
   3. Account holder email: the email address of the Timely account holder.
      

      

Send copies of your customer and staff emails

If you'd like to stay in the loop with what's happening in your business, then you can be sent a copy (via BCC) of any customer and/or staff emails:

1. Head to Setup > Email settings from the main menu.
2. Scroll down to the BCC email section: 

   

3. Enter the email address you'd like the copies to be sent to.
   1. Check the box next to Receive a copy of email sent to customers.
   2. Check the box next to Receive a copy of email sent to staff.
4. Click Save to apply.