Edit your emails and texts

Change the wording, subject and branding of anything Booked sends.

Every email and text Booked sends comes from a template you can rewrite in your own words. There are seven moments Booked can message a customer, each with an email version and a text version, and they all live on one screen.

Find the message you want to change

Open Booked in your WordPress sidebar, expand the Customisation group and choose Notifications. The screen opens on Templates. Pick a channel — Email or SMS — then the moment you want to edit. Each event and channel is one saved template.

• 1Customisation › Notifications — everything customers are emailed or texted. The group is collapsed until you open it.
• 2Templates / Daily digest — Templates is what customers receive; the digest is a summary for your own staff.
• 3Email / SMS — swaps the whole editor between the email and the text for the selected event.
• 4The seven events — this list is fixed; you cannot add your own.
• 5Send this email to the customer — turns one message off without losing your wording. All seven emails arrive switched on, all seven texts switched off.

Write the subject and the body

The Subject field is email only and saves as plain text, though merge tags work in it. Keep it short and name your business, as the shipped wording does: "Your appointment is confirmed — {company_name}".

Below it, Email body is a visual editor with a small toolbar: B, I and U, a bullet-list button, Link, and </> to see the underlying HTML. Link opens a small box asking for a Link URL, pre-filled with https://. When you are done, press Save template; it reads "Saving…", then a green Saved.

• 1Subject — plain text, merge tags allowed. A text message has no subject.
• 2</> — flips between the visual editor and the HTML. Use it after pasting from Word or a web page, which brings hidden formatting with it.
• 3Insert: — click a chip to drop that merge tag in at your cursor.
• 4Save template — saves this one event and channel. Nothing else on the screen saves with it.
• 5Send test — mails the template to any address using sample data. Email only.

Put booking details in with merge tags

The chips labelled Insert: are merge tags: click one and it lands at your cursor, and the real detail replaces it when the message goes out. They work in the subject too. Tags are matched literally, so a typo like {customer_firstname} is left in the message exactly as typed, in front of the customer — use the chips. A few tags do not behave as people expect.

Test it on yourself first

Type an address into the box under Save template and press Send test. Booked sends whatever is in the editor right now, saved or not, using fixed sample details — Alex Sample, a Yellow Fever Vaccination with Priya Sharma at 22 Market Street, Manchester, at 10:30 for 85.00 — but your real company details, so the header and footer look exactly as a customer will see them.

• "Test email sent." — it left the site. Check your inbox, and your spam folder.
• "Could not send — check the site can send mail." — WordPress refused it. That is a delivery problem, not a template problem: fix it under Settings Emails & texts, usually by switching Send emails via to SMTP.
• "Enter a valid email address to test." — the address in the box is not valid.

{video_link} is not in the sample set, so a test email shows it as literal text. On a real video booking it becomes a link.

The branding around your words

You write the middle of the message; Booked wraps it in a shell that survives every email app — your company name as a coloured wordmark, a rule beneath it, a white card holding your text, and a grey footer.

• 1The wordmark and accent rule — your company name in the brand colour. It is text, not an image: there is nowhere to upload a logo, and the green is fixed. The Accent colour on the Booking Form screen styles your widget only and does not touch emails.
• 2The footer — built from Settings Company. Fill in Company name, Email, Phone and Website; leave them blank and emails fall back to the WordPress site name and admin address.
• 3The text version — no header, no footer, no formatting. Everything the customer needs must fit in one sentence.

Replies go to From email under Settings Emails & texts — there is no separate reply-to, so make it a mailbox somebody reads. Templates are global too: one Booking approved email covers every service, branch and member of staff, so keep the wording general enough for all of them.

Keeping texts short

Switch to SMS and the editor changes: no Subject, the field is called Message, the toolbar disappears and you get a plain four-line box. Pasted formatting is stripped on save, and there is no test button, so read it back carefully.

Texts are charged by length: up to 160 characters counts as one message, longer ones in 153-character blocks. Merge tags expand before that count is taken, so wording that looks short in the editor can tip into two messages for a customer with a long name or service. Lead with your business name, keep to the service, date and time, and leave the address out.

Putting a template back the way it was

There is no undo and no reset button here. Before you rewrite an email, open </>, select everything in the box and paste it somewhere safe — that copy is how you restore the original.