Customizing your emails

Petsoft sends a lot of email on your behalf. Booking confirmations, vaccination reminders, review requests, payment receipts. The default templates work fine, but they sound generic. If you want customers to feel like the message came from you, not from a computer, you should rewrite them in your own voice.

Where to edit templates

Go to Organization > Settings > Email Templates. You will see a list of every template in the system, grouped by category:

• Booking confirmations and reminders
• Vaccination and agreement alerts
• Payment and invoice notices
• Marketing and review requests

Each template has an email version and an SMS version. They are separate. What works in an email paragraph usually does not work in a 160-character text.

System templates vs custom templates

System templates are the ones Petsoft provides out of the box. You can edit them, but you cannot delete them. If you break one, you can reset it to the original.

Custom templates are ones you create from scratch. These are useful if you have a specific message that does not fit any system category. For example, a welcome email for new daycare customers, or a reminder about your holiday closure schedule.

Custom templates show up alongside system templates when you are setting up automated triggers. You can use them just like the built-in ones.

Using merge fields

Merge fields are placeholders that get replaced with real data when the email goes out. They look like brackets with words inside.

Some fields you will use often:

Field	What it prints
[[CustomerFirstName]]	Sarah
[[PetName]]	Max
[[ArrivalDate]]	June 15, 2024
[[DepartureDate]]	June 20, 2024
[[FacilityName]]	Happy Paws Downtown
[[TotalAmount]]	$325.00
[[PortalLink]]	Clickable link to your parent portal

If a customer has multiple pets, [[PetName]] usually prints the first one. If you need all pet names, use [[PetNames]] instead, which prints a comma-separated list.

Be careful with merge fields in SMS. A long pet name like "Sir Fluffington McWhiskers the Third" can eat up most of your character limit.

The WYSIWYG editor

The template editor is a standard WYSIWYG tool. You can type text, bold things, add links, and insert images. It is not a full design tool, but it is enough for most business emails.

A few tips for getting good results:

• Keep the width narrow. Emails that are too wide look bad on phones.
• Do not paste text from Microsoft Word. It brings in hidden formatting that breaks the template. Paste into Notepad first, then copy into Petsoft.
• Images should be under 200 KB. Large images slow down loading and eat mobile data.
• Always include a plain text fallback. Some email clients block images by default.

Your logo and brand colors are pulled automatically from your branding settings. You do not need to add them manually in the template editor.

Testing before you send

Never edit a live template without testing it first. Click Send Test and enter your own email address. Check how it looks on your phone, your laptop, and a tablet if you have one.

Pay attention to:

• Whether the merge fields populated correctly
• Whether images loaded
• Whether links are clickable
• How the subject line looks in your inbox list

If you use Gmail, check both the Promotions tab and the Primary tab. Petsoft emails sometimes end up in Promotions depending on the subject line.

SMS templates

SMS templates are much simpler than email. No images, no colors, no bold text. Just words and merge fields.

Because SMS splits into multiple messages after 160 characters, keep templates short. A confirmation text should fit in one message. A reminder can stretch to two if needed, but three is pushing it.

Here is an example of a good SMS template:

Hi [[CustomerFirstName]], [[PetName]] is confirmed for boarding from [[ArrivalDate]] to [[DepartureDate]]. Reply STOP to opt out.

That is one message. Clear, short, and useful.

What happens if you break a template

If you delete something important or paste bad code, the template might not send at all. Petsoft will show an error in the job log.

If you are not sure what you changed, click Reset to Default on the system template. This restores the original text. Your custom templates do not have a reset button, so make sure you save a copy of any custom text before you experiment.