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. Brian 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. Now 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 they'd 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 to turn up. SMS reminders 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 the Zoho Bookings platform, and so we have integrated Twilio, which is T-W-I-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, an 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, um, 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 onto 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, and you 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 0.04 cents, so not even half a cent, but, you know, less than, uh, 10%. And if I want to send it to a mobile number, it's 0.0075. 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 appointment with me, and it goes to me as well. So it should be an even number for those of you that are counting. But we sent 53 messages, um, at a total cost of £3.62. 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 and will charge you in effect for 2 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 on 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, Plivo, Bandwidth, Telenix, Zipwhip, MessageBird, Infobip, Voxbone, and GoReminder. And these all charge variously by individual SMS, or in the case of goreminder.com, it charges up to 20 appointments per month paid yearly £9, and you can move up, and according to the number of appointments you want to set, you can be charged up to £56 per month. And you can send reminders by email and by SMS and also by WhatsApp. So it really is an omnichannel 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, omnichannel, 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. It's clicksend.com. And within the space of 10 minutes of having found ClickSend, I've already been able to send myself an SMS from the dashboard, and it's cost me point 0.028 cents, uh, pennies rather. So actually it is not quite half, um, but 2/3 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 SMSs, 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 ClickSend seems to be a really interesting opportunity, um, 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, um, sort of be mobile but also have our individual computers, um, 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 this. So I'm going to be experimenting with ClickSend 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 Acuity. And I want to send an SMS that gives them a reminder with the Zoho— sorry, with the Zoom meeting ID and Zoom meeting password. Because I don't know about you, but I'm finding many people are ringing me or emailing me or not turning up saying they couldn't find the details because they arrived by email or got lost because the VA has sent them and they're not getting the email, they're going to 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 and email was the afterthought. But now email and WhatsApp, WeChat in China, are the norm. But an SMS is a great way to remind people because that actually has an alert and a 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@eastwestpr.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.