For less than £0.028 you can text message a customer for life.

Hello, and welcome to this episode of speak PR. My name is Jim James Bryan is taking a break, he's back in the box. So I'm here just to talk about the power of SMS and reminders and the impact on your own reputation. I'm thinking about this because I found myself forgetting about a meeting that was going to take place, it was an appointment that someone has set up on LinkedIn. And that used Eventbrite on LinkedIn. And I'd signed up actually for the webinar. And it didn't send an ICS file. So I didn't have that downloaded into my iCal, which then synchronizes across all of my devices. So how often have you been in a position where you've either not turned up not through any fault of your own necessarily, but just the number of different platforms or you've been waiting for someone to turn up? SMS reminder can solve that. So I've been doing a bit of digging, because for East West PR, we've been working on getting an SMS reminder when people book with us. Now we currently use these Zoho bookings a platform. And so we have integrated Twilio, which is t Wi l i o. Now, Twilio is one of the market leading SMS gateways. But it's much more than that it has what they call an editable application program interface and API. And so you can actually add other functions like voice and SMS, and you can communicate to WhatsApp or email. And in a way, that is one of the challenges. I've asked my VA to help sort out the integration. And we've done that she's done a brilliant job of connecting Twilio, to the Zoho bookings using a Zapier integration connection. The difficulty seems to be editing the text of the messages that we're getting. So whenever someone books an appointment, it is sending them a message saying they've booked this speak PR podcast appointment, for example. And it's telling them to be prompt. That's obviously good message. But we'd like to give them more information than that we want to give them a phone number. And just to remind them to try and be in a quiet place. And with a microphone, for example. We spent the last two weeks on to the Help Desk on Twilio. And I decided I would help my VA out by logging in myself. And I couldn't quite understand previously why she was having so much trouble until I tried to edit or even find the place on Twilio to edit the SMS. Now the SMS platform itself is comprehensive. And I can have a phone number, according to the country that I want to pay more money for that. Or you can have it coming from a generic number if I want to then send messages to a local number. And in this particular case, I've got a UK number, it's costing me point 04 cents. So not even half a cent but no less than 10%. And if I want to send it to a mobile number, it's point 075. In other words, it's extremely cheap to send an SMS. Now since we've installed this Twilio gateway on our Zoho, we have sent 53 messages. And what happens it goes to the person who's booked an appointment with me and it goes to me as well. So it should be an even number for those of you that accounting but we sent 53 messages at a total cost of 3.62gbp now what happens with Twilio is it counts the number of characters that are in your text. And so if you want to have a longer message to people, it truncates that will charge you in effect for two messages every time you communicate with people. So you just have to be a bit careful with that. So because we are struggling to actually modify the message, I decided to go a little bit of a hunt and find an alternative to Twilio. And there are a list as there always are on platforms like capterra but the one I've found was not on capterra but it's the one that I'm really already liking. So on the list on Capterra we have Vonage, Plinvo, Bandwidth, Telnyx, Zipwhip, Messagebird, Infobip Voxbone, and Go reminder, and these all charged variously by individual SMS or in the case of go reminder.com. It charges up to 20 appointments per month, paid yearly, nine pounds, and you can move up and according to the number of appointments you want to set, you can be charged up to 56 pounds per month. And you can send reminders by email, and by SMS, and also by WhatsApp. So it really is an omni channel messaging platform, as many of these are, the issue now seems to be not so much that these channels are there. And they are, as they call them, omni channel, it's managing them the integration, I found one that I've just tried, called ClickSend, and ClickSend has a free trial. And I'm going to try that's clicksend.com. And within the space of 10 minutes of having found clicks, and I've already been able to send myself an SMS from the dashboard. And it's cost me point zero to eight cents, pennies, rather. So actually it is not quite half, but two thirds of the price of the Twilio system. So it's already promising to be a bit cheaper than the big multi platform system. Now I want something quite simple. But this clicksend also has a very nice dashboard. And I can send individual customized SMS, I can send template based campaigns through SMS. And also there is a very nice integration through Zapier to Zoho bookings. And there are also integrations with other platforms. If you're using Microsoft calendar, for example, Outlook. There are integrations for all of the main calendar and also all the main CRM platforms that you might want to use. So click Send seems to be a really interesting opportunity for me, and if you are interested, it is just at clicksend.com. And the opportunity, I think, and the requirement is to start to make it easy for people in this time, when we have so many platforms where we're being invited to webinars, and we're inviting other people to webinars. And we're trying to sort of be mobile, but also have individual computers. And connecting and adding calendar events through VAs' and all these different platforms, SMS i think is going to be a really good way for us to start to remind people of the way that they're going to get in touch with us. So I'm going to be experimenting with clicks, and over the next week or so. And we'll send you updates, because I'm going to be trying to include the zoom meeting ID. Because when people book on my Zoho bookings, they get a Zoho meeting Id just as they might through calendly, for example, or the acuity. And I want to send an SMS that gives them a reminder with the Zoho so with the zoom meeting ID and zoom meeting password because I don't know about you, but I finally many people are ringing me or email me or not turning up saying they couldn't find the details, because they arrive by email or got lost, because the VA has sent them and they're not getting the email, they go into spam. So just thinking today about the way that we can remind people with the device that they use most and in the channel that is now the least used, which is SMS. Things have changed from when SMS was first introduced an email was the afterthought but not email and WhatsApp WeChat no in in China are the norm. But an SMS is a great way to remind people because that actually has an alert or notification on the phone. So leave that with you clicksend.com I'm going to be trying that and if you've got any yourself, feel free to send them to me jim@ewpr.com or put them in the reviews. Because the goal of this podcast is to share best practice new tools that can help business owners to get noticed without using a lot of resources but by using technology. So thank you for listening, I hope this is useful. And I will put these in the show notes. And in the meantime, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business and that if you've got appointments to make with other people try and get an alert through an SMS to help them out. And maybe if you're having a meeting with me, I won't forget that either. Have a great weekend.