Xola's Abandoned Reservation Recovery feature allows you to configure automated remarketing that engages customers who started making a reservation through one of your checkout buttons but did not complete the purchase. It's a great way to gain incremental revenue that may otherwise have been lost.
What's covered in this article:
- How to enable Abandoned Reservation Recovery
- How to customize Abandoned Reservation Recovery
- How Abandoned Reservation Recovery works
How to enable Abandoned Reservation Recovery
- Navigate to the Xola App Store by clicking the App Store tab on the left.
- Locate Abandoned Reservation Recovery and select the App Store tile.
- Click the green Install button
- All is set up and ready to go!
By default, Abandoned Reservation Recovery emails have the following text, and the timing is sent out 8 hours after the cart was abandoned:
How to customize Abandoned Reservation Recovery
After navigating to Marketing > Abandoned Reservation Recovery:
You can choose to override this content and create your own email by simply editing the body of the email. You can learn more about Abandoned Reservation Email Best Practices in this article.
If you override the default, you can customize the Subject, From Name, and Reply to Email. In addition to your own text, you have several Variables to choose from when adding custom content to your email. These variables will dynamically populate content in the email based on the abandoned reservation in question.
- Arrival: will auto-populate the start date entered by the customer
- Company: Your company's name, as entered in the settings tab
- Company email: your account's primary email address
- Company communication email: your account's communication email address
- Company phone: your company's phone number, as entered in the settings tab
- Company website: your company's website, as entered in the settings tab
- Customer name: will auto-populate what the customer entered in the name field
- Experience name: will show the name of the experience that was abandoned
- Quantity count: will show only the number of demographics entered by the customer
- Quantity: will show the number and name of the demographics entered
- Resume button: will display a green button that reads "Resume Booking". This button will open up a checkout window for the reservation that was abandoned.
- Resume link: allows you to customize a link that leads to a checkout window for the reservation that was abandoned.
Pro Tip: You can see a preview of your email by clicking the Generate Preview button, under the email body.
Email send timing
By default, abandoned reservation recovery emails are sent 8 hours after the reservation has been abandoned. Reservations are considered abandoned after 1 hour of inactivity from the customer. If the customer drops off of the Payment Details page and does not return within an hour, that reservation is now considered "abandoned". You can choose to override these settings and implement your own custom timing.
Timing Delay: This parameter allows you to designate how long after the one hour of inactivity you'd like to have your Abandoned Reservation recovery email be sent.
Send Window: Here you can choose between:
- Any time: This means the email will be sent as soon as your specified timing hits, no matter what time of day that moment occurs.
- Within time range: here you can specify a "window" of time within which you'd like to allow Abandoned Reservation recovery emails to be sent. If your specified send timing falls outside of your Send Window, the email will be sent at the beginning of your send window the next day.
How Abandoned Reservation Recovery works
If a customer begins the checkout process by entering reservation information on the Reservation Details page of one of your checkout windows and reaches the Payment Details page but does not follow through with the purchase, this reservation will be considered "abandoned" after one hour of inactivity.
They will then be sent an email inviting them to finish the reservation they started.
If a customer does come back and complete their purchase, the purchase will automatically be tagged with a "rescue" tag.
You can also see an Abandoned Reservations Report, which contains information about abandoned reservations, including a column indicating whether or not they were recovered and reserved via Abandoned Reservation Recovery.