1. In a nutshell

You can send automated email and SMS notifications to customers and relevant users when an appointment is booked, rescheduled, canceled, completed, or marked as no-show. Notifications serve as a confirmation or acknowledgment for customers while also keeping the user updated with business events. Additionally, you can set reminders that are automatically triggered at specified times before an appointment.

2. Feature availability

• Sending notification and reminders is supported for all plans. Customizing the message content for them is available only for a paid plan.
• Roles 

• Super admins and admins can configure notification and reminders for all workspaces
• Workspace admins can configure them for the assigned workspaces
• Managers and staff can only view the configurations of their assigned workspaces

3. Overview

Bookings allows you to send automated notifications and reminders during the below stages of an appointment to both customers and users. It lets you send both email and SMS messages.

• Booked - Sends notification when an appointment is booked
• Rescheduled - Sends notification when an appointment is rescheduled
• Canceled - Sends notification when an appointment is canceled
• Completed - Sends notification when an appointment is marked as Completed
• No-show - Sends notification when an appointment is marked as No-show

You can also configure the following for these alerts.

• Configure Sender, Reply to, CC email address
• Customize notification content

4. Setup notifications and reminders

4.1 Steps to setup email and SMS alerts

1. Go to the required workspace and click Event Types on the left side pane. The event types added under the selected workspace will be listed.
2. Hover over the required event type and click the options icon , then select Edit. 
   
   
3. Click the Notifications Preferences tab on the left.
4. Select Email to configure email notifications and reminders. Select SMS to configure SMS notifications and reminders.
   Note: To set SMS notifications, you need to add one of the SMS gateways under Admin Center > Integrations > SMS.
   
   
   
   
5. Click the To Customer tab if you want to set notifications for your customers. Click the To Users tab if you want to set notifications for your Bookings users.
   
   
   
   
6. Under the Notifications section, you can see five different statuses of an appointment: Booked, Canceled, Rescheduled, Completed, and No Show. Click the Options icon  in the required status card and select Enable for the status you want the notifications to be sent. Upon enabling, the notification will be sent automatically on the respective status change.
   
   
   
   
7. Under the Reminders section, enter the time duration before which the reminder email/SMS message should be sent for the upcoming appointment. The time can be set in days/hours/minutes. On enabling, the reminder will be sent automatically for every appointment of that event type.
   
   To send additional reminders, click +Add Reminders and set the time. You can set up to three reminders. 
   

4.2 Configure sender, reply to, cc email address

Note: Only users who have a Premium plan with Zoho Bookings can customize the sender email.

To configure this: 

1. Navigate to Event Types > Notifications Preferences > Email. 
2. Under Email Configurations, select the options for Send from, Reply to, or Copy (Cc). 
   
   
   
   
   You can choose among any of the five options available.                    

• Default Bookings email address (notification@zohobookings.com) - This is the default email address for all notifications.
• Super admin's email address  – Email address associated with the super admins' Zoho Bookings account.
• Business email address  – Email address of the business, which is added under Admin center > Organization > Basic Information. 
• Allocated staff's email address  – Email address of the user booked for the appointment.
• Workspace email address  – Email address of a particular workspace that the event type belongs to.

4.3 Customize notification content

Automated emails and SMS messages come with default contents. However, you can customize this to suit your needs. 

1. Navigate to Event Types > Notification Preferences.
2. Select Email to edit email content or Select SMS to SMS message email content. 
3. Click the respective notification or reminder to edit its template. For example, to customize the email notification to a customer when an appointment is booked, select the To Customer tab and click the Options icon   and Edit in the Booked card. 
   
   
4. A pop-up will appear with the message content. 

5. Edit the respective content. You can insert variables by clicking the Insert Variables button. These variables hold appointment-related details, such as customer name, appointment id, staff name, and so on. They help make your emails dynamic by automatically filling in personalized information. You can find the full list of variables here.
   
   
6. You can enable the Include Calendar File (ICS) checkbox to download event details in a calendar file format, making it easy to import and add the event directly to the calendar.
   
   
   
7. Click Save.
   
   

4.3.1 To add an image 

To include an image in the email notification, you need to use a public URL of that image. You can get the image's URL from your website by right clicking it and selecting Copy image address.

1. Navigate to Event Types > Notifications.
2. Under the required email template card, click the Options icon   and select Edit.
3. In the message editing window, click the Insert Image icon in the editor bar.
   
4. Paste the copied URL of the image in the pop-up and click Insert.

Note: To adjust the size of the image, click HTML in the options bar and go to the respective image URL. Add the height and width as per your requirement.
eg: <img src="https://zylker.com/sites/default/imagesemail/zylker.png" width="500" height="600">

5. Points to note

• To send advanced notifications, like sending an email notification after one hour of the appointment end time, you can use the workflows feature.

6. Related links

• Event type settings

• Event types and its categories

• Booking pages