If you have an appointment-based business you know that when a client fails to show up for a scheduled appointment or when you show up but the client is not there the opportunity to earn revenue in that time slot is usually lost forever. The key to success is relatively simple—the more appointments you can service in a day the more money you make.

Customers generally have good intentions but they lead busy lives too. When an appointment fails to show, your time is wasted and there is unhappiness all around. Generally you have to then figure out how to fit that person into an already full schedule on another day.

Text Messaging is a Solution

Today, everybody texts. Here are five easy ways to use text messaging to boost your business by reducing the no-show rate of appointments.

#1 – Confirm the appointment when you make it

Text your customer at the time you make the appointment. This gives the customer the opportunity to validate the appointment and correct you if you have somehow gotten the value wrong. It also gives the customer something to refer to later when trying to get the appointment into their calendar. This is far better than writing it on the back of a business card, which is often lost long before it can be useful.

Here’s an example of how such a text might look to the customer.

You’ll notice that the time and date is underlined and in blue. How did that happen? The phone did it automatically. If you include the date and time of the appointment written out in the text of your message, most modern smart phones will recognize the date and present options if the user clicks on it.

When the end user clicks on the underlined text, a menu will appear. In the case of an iPhone you will get several options, including Create Event, and Show in Calendar. Show in Calendar gives the user the immediate chance to check their calendar to see if there is any conflict with the proposed date and time. Create Event will create an entry in the user’s phone, making it even less likely that the appointment will be forgotten.

#2 – Ask for confirmation 48 hours in advance

If the customer has a history of cancelling appointments or simply not showing, it might make sense to ask for a confirmation a day or two in advance. If the customer confirms, they are more likely to honor the commitment. If they do cancel at this point, you still have time to fill the slot.   Some businesses have found that the easier you make it to cancel an appointment the more cancellations you get so you will probably want to experiment with this one. It will make sense for some customers and not for others.

#3 – Remind customers the day of the appointment

On the day of the appointment, about two hours prior to the appointment send a text reminding the customer of the upcoming appointment. Two hours in advance is ideal.

#4 – Broadcast messages to all customers (exclusive offers, etc.)

Depending on your business, it might make sense to periodically broadcast a message to all of your customers with a special offer or announcement.

Case Study – Viking Cooking School

The Viking Cooking School has sixteen locations throughout the United States. Each year they have over 70,000 people attend their program. Viking schedules classes with the objective to fill each one to capacity.

To help speed up registration and more importantly fill in each spot, Viking decided to use an SMS as part of its marketing strategy. It started with a pilot project at one of its locations. Viking sent their current and past students in this location an email to get them to opt-in to SMS. In a three month period they got nearly 300 opt-in members.

Each week Viking determines which classes they have open seats and they send a text message to their audience. One message stated

“Girls Night Out in Vegas! Cook shrimp to perfection, make herbed melt in your mouth biscuits and grilling meat to perfection Sun 4/18 5PM-8PM call 898-8345.”

As a result this one text generated eight registrations at $79.00 each. Yet this text message cost Viking less than $15 total, netting them about $617 for just one class. Now they make SMS strategy part of their promotion.

#5 Last minute changes

Life happens. Sometimes you need to cancel a block of customers at once. If you are sick, have to attend a funeral, lost an employee, etc. A great way to communicate with many people at once in your personal life is to send out a bulk message, but in the business world this does not work. Customers do not want you sharing their name and number with your other customers.

Implementation Strategies

All five texting techniques can be done from your personal phone, but in reality this doesn’t really work. Sending out all these texts is a labor-intensive effort that requires a fair bit of discipline and organization. It’s easy to get so involved with a current appointment that you forget to send a reminder for the next one.

Just A Friendly Reminder…

It’s far better to use software to do this work for you and the good news is that it less expensive than you might guess. Just A Friendly Reminder is a browser- based service that functions as a smart calendar. When you add an appointment to your JAFR calendar, software in the background sends out the confirmation text, asks for a 48-hour confirmation (if you select that option for a specific customer), and sends out a reminder two hours prior to an appointment (unless the appointment is in the morning, then it will send the text the night before).

When customers confirm or cancel and appointment, your calendar is updated automatically. If you need to send out broadcast messages to all or some of your clients, you can do this very easily and each client will get an individual message sent just to them.

Google, Outlook, Apple, and Yahoo Calendars

You may be used to using a calendar system you like already. If you do don’t worry–it is easy to stick with what you like.   Just A Friendly Reminder creates an industry-standard calendar feed (iCal) which you can “subscribe” to with most calendar systems. This way whenever you add an appointment in JAFR it will automatically appear in your calendar of choice.

The post Five Easy Ways to Boost your Business with Text Messaging appeared first on Just A Friendly Reminder.