Increase your appointment attendance with effective SMS reminder strategies. Explore 10 actionable methods that improve communication.
Whether you run an oil change shop, a beauty salon, a dental office, or some other type of business, it’s crucial that you control missed appointments and can ensure that your customers are on time for their upcoming ones. There are tons of ways you can try to do this, including:
Text-based appointment reminders are simply reminders about an upcoming appointment in the form of text messages. With Sakari’s SMS scheduling software capabilities, you can send a text message to your customer as an appointment reminder.
However, before you start going on to spend appointment reminders within your business, you need to ensure that your text reminders are structured and formatted the right way. Below, we’ll discuss 10 tips to make your SMS messages more compelling, memorable, and most importantly, successful.
First and foremost, remember to keep things personable. Call the customer by name – generally by first name. This will depend on your type of business, of course, as the ways in which customers are addressed can vary from industry to industry.
In almost all instances, though, keeping it personal with a friendly reminder can make things feel less formal and less like a marketing message. With Sakari’s SMS integrations, you can use personalization tokens to customize your text messages.
Make sure that you time your text message correctly. If you send your SMS reminder too early, your customer is still likely to forget. If you send it too late, it might make it impossible for your customer to reschedule if they are unable to make their appointment and had forgotten about it.
Generally, tie your text reminder timing in with your policy on appointment rescheduling, or go with the 24-hour rule (send the reminder 24 hours beforehand).
Resist the urge to make your text messages too long (you can calculate your character count with our SMS Length Calculator. Keep things simple and effective. Include a brief, personalized message that includes your customer’s name, as well as the date of the appointment. It also helps to include the type of appointment.
For instance, a general cleaning/dental checkup for a dental office, or an oil change and tire rotation for an auto maintenance shop.
One benefit of using SMS appointment reminders is that they help you reduce no shows, not just by reminding customers about their appointments, but by encouraging them to reschedule if they cannot make it, rather than just skipping.
Use text reminders to make rescheduling simple – include a phone number or email address specifically for that purpose (make sure to explain that purpose, of course).
Some of the most effective text message reminders are those you don’t send. Consumers value their privacy greatly. If you send too many reminder notices, you’ll quickly invade their personal space.
That can cause serious problems, including tarnishing your reputation. And you can bet that the customer will be unlikely to keep his or her appointment, too. So, how often is too often? It can vary a lot, but the best option seems to be not to send a reminder more than once 24-hours prior.
Be sure that your reminder text includes all the information that your customer should know. For instance, if you send reminders about appointments at a beauty salon, some of the pertinent information to include could be:
Despite your best efforts, you will still have some appointment cancellations. However, you can turn even those to your advantage with SMS messages.
If your customer cancels an appointment, send a text message confirming the cancellation. You can even automate this process with SMS workflows for appointment reminders inside of HubSpot or ActiveCampaign.
We suggest giving other dates for your customer to return. This can help turn a cancellation into a reschedule.
While you probably don’t want to go overboard with this method, it can help to decrease no shows and ensure that your customers show up to their appointments on time.
Just tie in some sort of financial savings – a 5% off coupon for making an appointment is a great incentive to help encourage your customer to keep that appointment.
Again, use this in moderation, but it can provide significant traction and improve your results.
While you don’t want to message your customers too often, you also don’t want to do it too little. While one message 24 hours prior to the appointment is a good rule of thumb, some customers may benefit from more than one reminder.
For instance, you might choose to send a text message a week before the appointment, and then again 24 hours prior to the appointment.
Finally, it’s important that you have someone monitoring the replies from your customers. In most instances, an automated system can handle pretty much anything you’ll see here, but that’s not always the case.
Often, customers don’t realize that you’re using an automated SMS system, and will reply to you directly – they might have questions, concerns, or want to reschedule, and believe that replying to your text is the best way to do that.
Just make sure there’s a real person monitoring replies to handle these situations.
In the end, sending SMS reminders can give you a vital edge, reducing the incidence of no shows and appointment cancellations.
By using the simple tips we’ve covered above, you can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your text appointment reminder system, improve customer service and satisfaction, and deliver a better overall experience.
As a note, working with the right SMS integration provider is an essential consideration – you need the right SMS system in place to ensure that you’re able to reach your customers in a timely manner, and that you’re able to customize the experience to each individual.
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