How to Design a Perfect Appointment Confirmation Email

Your sales email worked pretty well and your potential client has agreed to meet you? You’re just halfway there. Anyone can forget about the meeting. But as it’s you who is interested in this meeting, you need to send a perfect appointment confirmation email that will remind your prospective client about a meeting and will not let him or her skip it. Besides, this is a polite gesture you need to make :).

So, how to create an appointment confirmation email that actually works and makes your clients show up to the meeting?

You can use any prebuilt email template from our collection:

Use this template

Or build your own emails. 

If you choose the second option, then this post is for you :).

Three key ingredients make a perfect confirmation email. These are content, design, subject line to get emails opened.

1. Appointment confirmation email content

Content is the essence of these emails, which is why you need to pay close attention to it. 

It does not matter if you are going to meet recipients online or offline, you need to make your emails informative and descriptive enough.  

So, what data should you include in your emails?

You need to start such emails with greetings! 

• Introduce yourself

Remember to introduce yourself. Of course, you have agreed that you need to meet for an online call or an interview, etc. And you have even set the date. But a friendly reminder would never hurt. Specify just your name, your position, company name, and say what this email is in reference to.

Not only is this a kindly reminder who the sender is, but also it is required by the rules of business correspondence.

Don’t make recipients guess who you are.

• Specify the purpose of the meeting

Your clients will appreciate it if you remind them of the purpose of the meeting — which questions will be discussed (for negotiations and online calls). If this is possible, ask clients to try your product out. Once they come prepared, the meeting will be more effective.

If you remind an applicant about an interview, specify what documents he or she should have. 

• Remind the time and place of the meeting

Don’t make them guess or read through the thread to figure out when the meeting is about to happen. Clearly, you are writing this email to confirm an appointment. Thus, data like time and date of your meeting will never be excessive.

Also, here you need to mention once again where the meeting is going to be:

a) for online meetings:

Skype, Hangouts, Google Meetup, etc. Be sure to provide a link to the meeting room or notify that you will send the link to the meeting an hour before the event per see.

(Source: Really Good Emails)

Important to note:

If you have not scheduled the meeting yet, and you want your users to decide when it is better to meet, then you should tell them when you are free.

We have already shared the results of our studies in one of our blog posts which say that the fewer actions a client has to take, the higher the chances he or she will do it.

So, here's what you can do:

Embed a list of the time slots when you are available and let recipients choose the best one for them.

Use the template

How to embed active time slots with Stripo

You will only have to slightly customize the template above:

• open this template in the editor;
• customize its design according to your brand style;
• click the row with the time slots in your email;
• in the code editor, which opens automatically, you edit time in the slots;

Important:
Time from the left part of your code will be delivered to your server. Time from the right part of your code will be indicated in the time slots. Thus, it is important that the time from the two parts of the code coincide.

• by default, in this email, we ask users to enter their phone number and email address. If you do not want them to do it, then just remove the highlighted element from the email code as shown below:

• one last thing: you need to build an end-point on your server and embed it in your email:

In fact, you may just ask your developers to build one for you. It will take them just a few hours. It is worth it because it will make your emails look way more professional and will make them more convenient for your users.

In our "Mock Server" blog post we in detail show how to build and embed endpoints in your template to receive actual data to your server.

So, if everything is done right, your recipients will be able to book time slots right in your emails as shown above.

Important to note:

You will need to connect emails to Stripo Data Source, and remove/add timeslots manually every time before you send this email to your clients.

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b) offline events

Kindly provide recipients with the physical address of where the event will take place. Or even add a map in your emails to make it easier for partners and applicants to find your office/store as this appointment confirmation email sample shows:

(Source: Really Good Emails)

• Include the “Add to calendar” button

First of all, you are doing it for yourself — once a client adds this event to his or her calendar, the chances that he or she will forget about it significantly decrease.

(Source: Really Good Emails)

So, if you write a confirmation email, make sure you add this “magic” button in your emails.

How to add buttons with Stripo:

We strongly recommend that you design your buttons when you only start building emails — in this case all these settings will be applied to all buttons in your template.

• From the appearance tab, go to the “General Settings” tab;
• then enter the "Button" section;
• set fonts, colors, borders, etc. for your buttons.

Design buttons

In our Email Call to Action Best Practices post, we show how to optimize your buttons for Outlook and how to apply hover effect to your CTA buttons.

• Say “No” to excessive call to actions/offers

The aforementioned “Add to calendar” button and the “Reschedule” button should be the only call to action in your appointment confirmation emails. Do not distract clients with excessive information. No extra buttons, no other offers will drive your profit. It might be quite the opposite — clients get distracted by other offers, forget to add your appointment to the calendar and as a result do not attend your meeting.

The only button allowed is the “Reschedule” one.

Need we say that such options are useful as attendees do not cancel negotiations if they can’t make it for your meeting, but just reschedule it.

• Share the agenda of the meeting

If your meeting will last more than an hour and many questions will be covered, please provide attendees with the agenda of the meeting.

If there is going to be a break, you may even name a few cafes nearby.

• Include contact information

Even though your appointment seems to be set, anything can happen. And clients need to be able to reach out to you in case of an emergency in any possible way. 

There is no need to build an extra element for your appointment confirmation emails. Just use the one you normally add in the footer of your promo and triggered emails.

Important to note:

Stripo provides a library of personal content modules. This means that you can save, store, and reuse email modules again and again for your future campaigns.

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This is a great appointment confirmation email example as it meets all the aforementioned key elements.

2. Appointment confirmation email design

In emails of this kind, design matters a lot. To create an efficient meeting confirmation email template, it's vital to stay on brand, highlight the goal of your message, work on your email signature design, and include a map for offline meetings.

• Stay on brand

First of all, you should stay brand consistent. Need we say that elements, such as logo, corporate colors and font type, are mandatory for all your correspondence? Clients are not that familiar with your brand yet. Sticking to corporate style will make your appointment confirmation emails recognizable at first site.

• Keep your email goal in focus

Highlight or write the time and day of the meeting in bold.

Center align your CTA buttons. Make them big and noticeable.

Remember to make these buttons full-width and font size 16+ pixels for mobiles.

How to make full-width buttons with Stripo:

• go to the “Appearance” tab;
• open the “Mobile View” section;

• here you can also set a larger font size for the buttons.

Try Stripo out

• Remember to work on the email signature design

It is impossible to overrate the importance of email signatures in sales and appointment confirmation emails.

Here, you need to make sure your photo is big and clear enough, of course, if you like to add one. Feel free to spotlight your contact information, such as social media icons. And, of course, you must not forget to add your cell phone number. 

To build your signatures for future dedicated emails in no time, you just build it once and save to personal content library. Next time when building a new appointment confirmation email template, you just drop this module in it. Done!

Include map

This only concerns offline meetings.

You may upload your map as an image and add a link to Google Maps when building your appointment confirmation email template.

This will be perceived by your clients as a polite gesture.

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3. Subject lines for your appointment confirmation emails 

Apparently, when you are talking about appointment confirmations, the recipient is quite familiar with you and they are likely to open these emails. Yet, a descriptive subject line will be of great use.

Examples of good subject lines:

• "Appointment reminder";

• "Here's the time, place and agenda of our meeting";

• "Meeting at… ";

• "Please, confirm tomorrow's meeting";

• "Rescheduling our meeting";

• "Name + name meeting";

• "Things to discuss tomorrow" Etc.

Final thoughts

To design an appointment confirmation email that really works, you need to:

1. Write a descriptive subject line.

2. Keep the email short - just stick to the point.

3. Accent your CTA buttons so that prospective clients add your meeting to the calendar.

4. Pay close attention to your signature.

5. Remember to send a follow-up email if this one remains unanswered.

I sincerely wish you the best of luck! May all your clients show up for appointments and may the latter be productive.

Pretty busy? Save your time by using our prepared appointment confirmation email templates.