The Homestays Add-On offers a few handy features to help automate email communication.
There are a number of steps that your guests and hosts need to complete. While the exact steps will be different for each Homestay program, some common steps are gaining admin approval, submitting payment, requesting a homestay, confirming a placement, and maybe going through an orientation or having an inspection.
Homestays can help your users get through each step of the process by sending emails whenever there's new information for the user, or some sort of action is required of them.
Some of these emails are sent automatically, such as reminders for upcoming placements. Others are sent as a result of admin actions you perform. In either case, you can customise your email templates to make sure your users get the information they need, when they need it.
There are just under 40 different email templates available to customise, including a "Signature" template which is inserted at the bottom of every email.
You can edit each template, using rich text formatting (e.g. bold text and links). Some emails have a button to help the user know what to do next.
This particular template goes out when a guest's homestay application is approved. Let's see how that works by approving an application. Here's one that requires approval.
Clicking the "approve" button brings up a window showing the email that will be sent, based on the template. You can make further changes here if you like, and then click "Approve this application" to complete this step of the process.
Now that the guest is approved, if you look on the right-hand side of the screen you can see that the guest has "1 email sent." Each email that is sent will be tracked on your system so that you can see a history of correspondence.
Emails are listed in reverse chronological order by subject. You can click any email subject to see exactly what was sent.
