Event notification emails

If you need to cancel or make changes to an Event Instance, you can inform your customers by sending an Event notification to everyone who has purchased tickets.

Event notification emails can be delivered as a Customer Service Email in Spektrix. You can also use this feature to notify customers of important Event information, such as changes to venue, seating, or cast.

Before getting started, make sure you’re familiar with:

How does it work?

Customer Service Emails can be used to deliver event notification emails to customers of specific Instances.

Once set up, you can quickly send out these emails to customers from within the Spektrix Admin Interface. This means that if an incident occurs over the weekend, it’s easy to send an email out to all customers, even if no one from the marketing team is around to set up a new Dotdigital email.

Customer Service Emails can be sent directly from the Event Instance in the Admin Interface. To set up Customer Service Emails, you will need to set up a Triggered Email Campaign in Dotdigital using the Spektrix Service Email template we’ve created.

When an email needs to go out, you can send this from the Instance in the Admin Interface. The email will be sent to all active customers with a valid email address. You’ll be able to click to download a CSV containing any customers who are inactive or without a valid email address. You’ll need to contact these customers manually through the phone or a postal mailing.

Customers who have a Reservation will not receive an email.

How to set up your triggered email in Dotdigital

To send a Customer Service Email, you’ll need to create a Triggered Email Campaign using the Spektrix Service Email template in Dotdigital, follow the steps below:

In Dotdigital, under the Automation menu, create a new Triggered Email by clicking the pink + button:
From the custom templates menu, choose the Shared Templates folder:
Choose the template named CSE: Event Notification Template
Name your campaign:
Set the campaign details:

TIP: You can use the @EVENTNAME@ data field to personalise your subject line with the Event name.
Click SAVE & CONTINUE.

Editing the event notification triggered email

In the triggered email you set up using the Spektrix Service Email template, you can add your organisation’s styling and branding elements.

Some elements of the event notification email are editable and some are not. To preserve the functionality of the email, some parts of the template must be retained.

Take a look at the annotated template below to understand more about the event notification email.

Number	Meaning
1	Liquid Script. Do not edit or delete this line.
2	Salutation. Personalise this to your organisation's preferences.
3	Data fields and Liquid Script. Change or add your own text. You can add or remove the merge fields in this section to include different pieces of information. You can also edit the date and time format using Liquid Script. To learn about how to edit the way the date and time are displayed, read the How to format dates with Liquid Script article.
4	Spektrix free text. This field is populated with the free text you enter when sending your email in the Spektrix Admin Interface.
5	Unsubscribe. Do not remove the unsubscribe link.

You can also make text edits to add copy around Liquid Script blocks and around the merge fields. You should always test how this is displayed before sending it out to customers.

Merge Fields

The Merge Fields blocks in your event notification email are indicated in green boxes on the annotated images in this article.

You can edit these blocks by:

Changing the time and date format. To learn about how to edit the way the date and time are displayed, read the How to format dates with Liquid Script article.
Adding or removing data fields. Merge fields can be used to dynamically include information about the customer’s ticket in the event notification email.

By default, the template includes:

Event name
Date and time

You can also use the following data fields and Liquid Script objects can be used in your notification email:

Data Field	Liquid Script	Example data
@FIRSTNAME@	{{data.firstname}}	Sarina
@LASTNAME@	{{data.lastname}}	Longwell
@TITLE@	{{Data.title}}	Mx
@CUSTOMERID@	{{data.customerid}}
@EVENTNAME@*	{{Data.eventname}}	Priscilla Queen of the Desert

* If you want to include the Event Name in the Subject Line of your email, you will need to use the Data Field version of the Event Name merge field.

WARNING: The Liquid Script fields listed in this article cannot be used in any other type of Dotdigital email.
If you need to copy and paste a liquid script object from this article into your Dotdigital email, use Control+Shift+V (paste without formatting). Copying directly from the article and pasting with formatting will cause the email to fail.

Creating a Plain Text Version

To create a plain text version of your Event notification email, click SAVE & CONTINUE from within the Easyeditor.

Emails containing Liquid Script cannot be automatically turned into plain text by clicking the GENERATE PLAIN TEXT VERSION button. Therefore, you will need to write the plain text version using Data Fields as Personalisation.

Hi @FIRSTNAME@,

This is a message about your visit to see @EVENTNAME@ at @INSTANCESTARTTIME@.

@FREETEXT@

Can't read this email? $CANTREAD$

Plain text versions must not contain:

Sharing links
Social links
Forward to a friend links
View in browser links

WARNING: These features must be removed from the plain text version of the email.

Save your Triggered Email

Before saving your Triggered email, make a note of your Campaign ID as you’ll need this to set up your schedule.

You can find the Campaign ID in your browser’s address bar.

For example:

To save and close your Triggered email:

Click the SAVE & CONTINUE button
You will receive a Campaign save warning about invalid data fields
Close the Triggered email

How to send an event notification

Event notification emails can be sent from the Admin Interface at the Event Instance level.

TIP: To access the Admin Interface, you’ll need the General Administrator Role. If you don’t have this Role, ask the Settings Administrator in your organisation to add this Role to your User Account.

To send a Customer Service Email, follow these steps:

Navigate to the Instance that you want to send the email for.
Click the Customer Service Email button at the bottom of the Instance Details page:
Enter the campaign ID of your Triggered campaign in Dotdigital and click Validate:
If the Triggered Email you have set up is valid, you’ll see a success message. To proceed click Next:
Additional Info: enter any free text that you’d like to display in the event notification email. This text will replace the @FREETEXT@ data field in your email. There is no character limit for free text. Click Next:
Send Options: for Event notification messages, click the All radio button:
Confirmation: Confirm that there are no marketing communications in your e-ticket delivery email and click Send Campaign:
Summary: a message will display to confirm that the email has been sent:

For customers that are inactive or do not have a valid email address, you’ll be given the option to download a CSV containing their details. You’ll need to contact these customers by phone or post.
Click Finish to complete sending the Customer Service Email.