Invitations Feature

Overview

Reach out to customers proactively with the Loop invitations feature to promote convenience and generate more Loop traffic. With support for multiple invitation templates, at the time of sending invitations a Loop user may select the specific invitation template to use.

Configuring Invitation Templates

The Template Configuration Page

In order to configure new Invitation templates, login to Loop (/login), access the Account administration page (accessed through a user account that has admin or ops permissions), and access the Templates page from the Content menu as shown below:

If your account has invitation templates configured, the will be listed here. The account below has no templates configured:

 

Creating a new Template

Click on the  button to add a new template. You will be redirected to a new page where you can provide the title, the location scope of the template (available to all or a single location), and the message content:

The template fields are as follows:

Title                          The name of this template. Used to select a template before sending invitations.

Type                         Select ‘Invitations’

Location                For invitations that only apply to a specific property/location, select that location here. Users sending invitations will only see this template if they are sending on behalf of the selected location. To make a template available at all locations, select All (Default).

Email Subject     The subject line content that will appear in delivered emails. Invitation Smart-Fields (see below) are supported.

 

Email Body           The email body content that will appear in delivered emails. Invitation Smart-Fields (see below) are supported.

SMS Text               The SMS text content that will appear in delivered text messages sent to mobile numbers. Invitation Smart-Fields (see below) are supported.

Invitation Smart-Fields                                                                                                                                                                   

The following Loop Smart-Fields are supported in the Customer Content for invitation templates:

Loop Smart-Field:	Field Code(s):	Scope:	Behavior:	Example (template and result):
Customer Name	{{ name }} {{{ name }}}	IT	Replaced by the customer name (if imported or known by Loop) or email address.	“Hi {{ name }},” “Hi John,” or “Hi john@abc.com,”
Create Conversation Link	{{{ createLoopURL }}}	IT	Replaced by a long-form link to the Create Conversation page.	"…please click {{{ createLoopURL }}}” “…please click http://abc.blazeloop.com/004?_uid=...”
Create Conversation Link	{{{ createLoopShortURL }}}	IT	As above, but a short-form link.	“…please click http://short.link123.”
Company Name	{{ companyName }}	IT	Replaced by the configured Company Name for this account.	"…your patronage at {{ companyName }}” “…your patronage with The Forks Group”
Location Name	{{ locationName }}	IT	Replaced by the configured Location Name for the selected location.	"…your stay at {{ locationName }}” “…your stay at The Grand Forks Hotel”
Location Number	{{ locationNumber }}	IT	Replaced by the configured Location Number for the selected location.	"…hotel number #{{ locationNumber }}” “…hotel number #3102”
Location SMS	{{ locationNSms }}	IT	Replaced by the well-formatted SMS number assigned to the selected location.	"…text us at {{ locationSms }}” “…text us at  +1-555-555-1234”
Sender Name	{{ senderName }}	IT	Replaced by the sending user’s name.	“…from {{ senderName }},” “…from Steve, General Manager”

IT = Invitation Templates

Date Formatting

‘Pretty formatting’ for Date custom fields in the Invitation emails is supported.

Example syntax for the email template: {{formatDate startdate 'YYYY-MM-DD'}} where “startdate” is an existing enabled shortcode for a custom field of the Date type. Other Moment.js formats are supported as well, please see Moment.js format documentation online for the complete list. The formatting is flexible and allows presenting the date with or without time, day of the week, year.

 

Sending Invitations

For information on sending invitations to customers, please refer to our article on Sending Messages, Invitations to Customers.

 

CSV Invites

CSV Format

If using a manually uploaded CSV for sending invitations, the following CSV fields are supported:

CSV Column Label:	Field:	Type:	Format
name	Customer Name	Text	First Last
sms	Customer Mobile Phone	Text	1-NNN-NNN-NNNN
email	Customer Email Address	Text	a@b.com
language	Customer Language Preference	Text	en|fr|etc…
area	Area or Internal Location	Text	(any)
scheduled time	Deferred Send Time	Date	YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM
(any custom fields)	(misc.)

• The area (internal location) field will be automatically assigned all customer conversations when invite link is used.
• The scheduled time field will, instead of sending the invitation message immediately, delay the invitation until the date and time specified. Please note this time is UTC.

An example simple CSV is below:

name	sms	email	Language	area
Joe	613.555.1234	joe@example.com	en	4401
Jim	501.555.2345		en	2012
Jess		jess@example.com	en	pool

A different example CSV import file is below:

Notice the use of two date custom fields – start and end in the file. The invitation messages for this file are sent at the time specified under “scheduled time” column. Each of the customers will receive a personalized link and their name, start and end dates will be already prefilled when they access Loop via this link.

As each row of the CSV file is processed, invitation messages are sent by SMS, Email or both if a valid mobile phone number or email address (or both, respectively) are provided. Only valid addresses or numbers will receive invitations.

In the above example, Joe would receive both an email and text message, Jim a text only and Jess an email only.

 

 

Invitation Stats

Please see the related article Invitation Stats for detail.

Internationalized Invitation Templates

Loop supports invitations in multiple languages. Your account must be provisioned with alternate languages to use this feature. E.g. A Loop account with English, French and German enabled would provide a template creation option as shown in the figure below:

Example Multi-Language Templates:

The following example shows a single template that supports three languages.

English:

French:

German:

    

The Title will display the Template Name in the current language of the sending user (associate), but does not affect the sending language of the invitations.

 

Sending Multi-Language Messages

All ad-hoc invitation messages sent from the Invitations Page are sent in the default language (default is ‘en’), regardless of the language of the current user.

All invitations sent via CSV-import are sent in the denoted language, or otherwise default to ‘en’. The format for the CSV language field is captured below:

name	sms	email	language
Joe	613.555.1234	joe@example.com	en
Jim	501.555.2345		de
Jess		jess@example.com	fr
Joan		joan@example.com

Where each party would receive message(s) from the selected template in the language as follows:

Joe                            English email and SMS message

Jim                            German text message

Jess                           French email

Joan                          English email (defaults to EN when omitted)