Send Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Book a Return Visit to Your Property

Triggers give you a powerful way to communicate automatically. You can respond to guests with personalized messages or notify third parties without lifting a finger! To read more about triggers, check out our Trigger overview and Triggers - Setup & Configuration support articles. We've also created a small library of trigger examples to help get you started.

In this example, we're dealing with a booking for the following scenario:

Scenario: Send Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Return Visit to Your Property

Good guest communication is essential for a positive guest experience and can entice guests to book a return visit to your property. Clear and timely communication can greatly influence guests' perceptions and impact their reviews. This scenario assumes that your departed guest has already provided you with their contact information (e.g., email address, and phone number).

By setting up an email or SMS template and trigger, you can send your departed guest a brief thank you message that includes a discount code for a repeat stay following their departure. OwnerRez can do that for you with message triggers.

Here are the steps for how to set up a template and trigger for this scenario:

1. Create a Booking Message Template to Send Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Return Visit to Your Property
   • Send by Email
   • Send by SMS
2. Create a Trigger That Applies to Bookings toSend Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Return Visit to Your Property
3. Variations

Create a Booking Message Template to Send Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Return Visit to Your Property

Go to Settings > Templates to configure the "booking" template type message you want to send to your guest. 

There are two choices for the type of template you can create - email and SMS.  These are the delivery methods that will be used for your response.  To send these types of templates, the booking must have contact information you can reply to.  For instance, if you want to send an SMS message as your reply, the guest must have provided a phone number with their booking. 

Send by Email

First, we'll create an email template, so go to Settings > Templates > Email tab > click the Create Email Template button > select the "Booking" option.  This will open an email editor with some sample field codes filled in.  For detailed information about how email templates work, check out the email templates overview article and field codes article.

Copy and paste the following values into your new email template.

Name:

Send Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Return Visit to Your Property Email Template

{MYCOFULL}

{MYEMAIL}

{CFULL}

{CEMAIL}

Subject:

We'd love to host you again at {PDISPNAME}!

Body:

Hi {CFIRST},

We want to thank you again for choosing {PDISPNAME} for your {BARR} to {BDEP} stay. And we hope that you want to return again!

As a special enticement, we'd like to offer a special 10% discount code, FANCYSTAYAGAIN10 (2-night minimum stay), that you can enter during the checkout process on our website, {MYURL}.

Booking directly with us saves both of us a lot of fees--usually hundreds of dollars. It's not too early to start planning your next stay at {PDISPNAME}! 

Again, thank you {CFIRST} for choosing {PDISPNAME} and we hope to host you again soon!

{MYFIRST}

If you're wondering what those field codes do, check out the field codes support article or use the "Preview" button on the booking to take a live look.

Here's a quick preview of what the above email message looks like:

Notice how clean and personalized the content is. The subject line is dynamic to the booking by including the property name {PDISPNAME} field code. In the email body, we included the booking arrival {BARR} and departure {BDEP} field codes as well as your website {MYURL} field code and a discount code for the guest to use for future stay. The body addresses the guest by name, so it looks like the body was written by hand. In other words, it looks like a hand-written manual response, even though it wasn't.

After copying and pasting the above subject and body into your template, feel free to play with the words and styles to make it your own. However, remember that we are creating a message that is specific to "bookings."  This message assumes that all bookings as it responds to are bookings with guest contact information, so make sure to customize accordingly. 

We are now armed with an email to Send Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Return Visit to Your Property. But what about an SMS message template?

Send by SMS

Some bookings that arrive in your account will already include the guest's phone number. This typically happens when a guest books on your book-direct website, using your Book Now widget, or on a listing channel that passes guest contact information at the time of booking, such as Vrbo.

Using our SMS premium feature, you can reply directly to their cell phone via SMS. For detailed information about how SMS templates work, check out the SMS Templates and field codes support articles.

To create an SMS template, go to Settings > Templates > SMS tab > click the Create SMS Template button > select the "Booking" option.  This will open an SMS message editor with some sample field codes filled in.

Copy and paste the following values into your new SMS template.

Name:

Send Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Return Visit to Your Property SMS Template

To Phone Number:

{CPHONE}

Body:

We miss you, {CFIRST}, and we hope that you want to return again! We'd like to offer a special 10% discount code, FANCYSTAYAGAIN10 (2-night minimum stay), that you can enter during the checkout process on our website, {MYURL}. {CFIRST}! 😁

Once again, smack that Preview button to see how this looks live! SMS templates are similar to channel templates in that they are plain text with no colors or formatting options, but you can still dress them up with personalized field codes and light-hearted emojis.

Here is a quick look at how the above SMS template looks in preview mode:

Not a fan of emojis?  No worries, edit that part out!

You'll notice that this SMS template differs from the email templates in that it is much shorter but still includes your return discount code and your website {MYURL} field code. If you'd rather say something else - that's totally fine. Or you could send a larger message body, as the email template above does.

Now that we have some message templates created, it's time to configure the trigger that will send them.

Create a Trigger That Applies to Bookings to Send Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Return Visit to Your Property

Since each trigger can only send one message template, you'll need to create a trigger for each type of reply you send.  Above, we crafted replies for email and SMS, so we'll need to create two triggers to send each one.

First, we'll create a trigger to send the email message. Navigate to Settings > Messaging > Triggers > and click + Create Trigger to pull up the new trigger screen.

Here is a list of all the settings the trigger needs to have:

• Type: Scheduled Time
• Scheduled: After > 30 > days after > Booking departs > at 9:00 AM
• Add Condition > Email Address on File is One Of > Has Real Email Address
• Action > Email Template:  Send Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Return Visit to Your Property Email Template

Now, let's talk about what the above settings mean!

The Type and Event fields will trigger your email template to be sent at a scheduled time 30 days after your guests' departure at 9:00 AM.

Since we are targeting "bookings" for guests for whom we already have contact information only, we want to add a "Condition" to the trigger that will stop it from sending out messages for other bookings. Adding the "Has real email address" condition status covers that.

You may want to add other conditions, but for now, this is enough to make our trigger send the Send Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Return Visit to Your Property Email Template message 30 days after their departure.

Finally, the last thing we select is the "Action" for the email template we want to send. Since this trigger is supposed to send an email message, select the email template and be careful not to select a channel or SMS template.

At this point, your trigger should look like this:

Nice and simple!

Click Save, and now you have a trigger ready to go. These actions do exactly what they say. 30 days after your guest departs at 9:00 AM, the trigger runs and sends your Send Your Departed Guest a Discount Code to Return Visit to Your Property Email Template. That's it!

Variations

You work extremely hard to get return bookings. If you're like most hosts, it can take a decade to build a good list of return guests, and the more you have, the stronger your reputation (and easier your marketing) will be.

• Staggered Scheduling
  • Consider creating a detailed schedule of staggered messages for your departed guests. Triggers can only send templates no more than 30 days after departure. Consider sending an email guest thank-you message with a review request 7 days after your guests depart, then following up with an email message to your departed guests 14 days after their departure that includes discount codes with an SMS follow-up message 30 days after departure.
• Return Discount Code Offers
  • Consider including specific return discount codes in your email and SMS guest thank-you messages. You could also offer discount codes of varying amounts or percentages on a specific schedule to tempt your guest to book again.
• Include a Social Media Like or Follow Request
  • Consider including a request to like or follow your social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube) in your templates by including your social media field codes ( {MYFACEBOOK}, {MYINSTAGRAM}, {MYTWITTER}, {MYYOUTUBE}, {MYTIKTOK}).

Or even consider a combination of these ideas!