Let’s talk about automating your business! Releventful’s robust functionality provides you with the ability to design custom automations to streamline your business workflows and schedule client communications. These automations can be customized for each of your unique event types, or you can choose to apply the same set of automations to all your events across the board.

All of the portal automation settings will be stored in the portal templates area of the system. To locate this menu, select the “templates” icon from the left-hand navigation bar and select “portal templates.”

On the portal templates page that appears, you will see a tab at the top of the page for each of your event types. As a reminder, you can add, edit, or remove any of your event types by navigating to the settings gear on the left-hand toolbar, selecting “business setup” and opening the “event type” menu from the list that appears.

For each of the event types, you have the option here to set the specific automations that occur in the system for that event type within the tab here in portal templates. On the very far right of the available event types, you will see a tab labeled “any event type”. The any event type is used to capture automations that apply to ALL of your event types. For example, if you have the same initial welcome email that goes out to all of your clients regardless of the type of event, this email can be cued up in the “any event” template. Any automations that you build in the any event template will truly apply to any event in the system.

The any event template does have a setting in the right-hand corner that can be toggled off. When this setting is disabled, the any event template will ONLY apply to events that do not have a designated event type. If enabled, the automations will be applied to all events in the system.

For each of the event portal templates, you will see a breakdown of three steps – Step 1 pertains to the sales and lead management of the event type. Step 2 consists of settings around booking the lead.

By configuring steps 1 and 2, you can set up a partial or fully automated sales & booking process where a lead would fill out your website lead form, receive a proposal where they can make selections, sign a contract, and receive a requested first payment. The automations settings within these two steps can fully automate this process or you can choose to step in at any point for additional touch points.

Step 3 contains all the emails, to dos and event portal customizations which is typically after the event is booked.

In this tutorial, we will review the automation settings in step 1 and 2. Please refer to our additional portal template tutorials for information regarding automation and setup of step 3 in the portal templates.

Under “website lead form” in step 1, you can indicate that leads coming through a specific lead form should be automatically applied to the event type you are configuring in this portal template. For example, if you have a certain lead form that your wedding clients fill out, you can attach that lead form here with the edit pencil.

If no lead forms are indicated in this step, by default, leads coming through your website lead forms will be automatically tied to the event portal templates based on their selected event type. For example, in your website lead form there is a drop-down for “event type”. The event type the client selects when filling out the form will assign them the portal template on the tab that matches their event type.

Underneath the website lead form, you will find “sales campaigns.” To see if there are already sales campaigns enabled for this event type, select the “view” option here to display those if applicable. You can directly apply a sales campaign to this event type by selecting the edit pencil. You will need to have the sales campaign created first before being able to activate it from this edit pencil. The pop-up window will reflect all the existing sales campaigns that you have configured in the system. You can activate one of these for this event type.

The last setting in step 1 is selecting your proposal template for automation. This option only applies to proposal templates. Line-item proposals will need to be created uniquely for each client and cannot be automated. To apply a proposal template to this event type, select the edit pencil to locate and attach the appropriate proposal template to this automation.

Once added, you can proceed to select the settings gear and configure the automation trigger to indicate when the proposal template should be sent to clients in this event type. By default, the setting will be set to “do not send proposal.” Select the drop-down menu to change the trigger. You can send the proposal immediately after a lead comes through the website lead form or based on a specific sales stage or event status.

It is common for proposal templates to be sent on the “proposal sent” sales stage. If that is an automation that you would like to enable, select sales stage here. In the next drop-down list, select the “proposal sent” sales stage from the list of available sales stages.

You can send the proposal template as a brochure. This setting disables the selection process from the proposal template. The clients will be able to review your offerings, but not be able to make any selections. The client will still need to select the “submit” button at the bottom of the proposal template to notify you that they have reviewed the options in your brochure and they are ready to discuss next steps with you. For additional information on creating your proposal and providing instructions to your client on submitting their proposal selections to you, please refer to our proposal template tutorial at help.releventful.com.

Set the delivery method for the proposal template and a welcome note to accompany the delivery of the proposal.

The first setting in step 2 is to attach a specific contract. To select your contract for this event type, select the edit pencil and proceed to add your contract template to the portal template automation.

By default, Releventful will automatically mark an event as booked when payment is received from your client. You can override this default behavior and choose when you would like the event to be booked by selecting a new default in the available booking settings.

The invoice helpers section will allow you to automatically adjust the sales stage and event status of your events based on actions taken by your client. Select the edit pencil here to pull up these settings. After the contract is signed and payment is received, you can have Releventful automatically change the event status and sales stage after these actions have been taken. To set these automations, open each of the drop downs listed in this pop-up window to indicate the event status and sales stage that you would like the event set to when these actions are taken.

Apply a standard payment schedule to this event type. Select the view button to see if a payment schedule has already been applied to this event type. To add a payment schedule, select the edit pencil and activate an existing payment schedule for this event type. This payment schedule will apply to all events that fall into this event type category.