We all forget things. It’s part of life. Though habitual forgetfulness leads to lack of trust and poor relationships, which ultimately means a failing business.
Asking Siri and Google to help you is great, but take advantage of texting too and you’ll be in even better shape. Here are a few simple ways to use texting to help your own forgetfulness.
Send Confirmations
Make it a habit to confirm with people and you get the primary benefit of helping someone else remember and you create one more touchpoint to help yourself remember as well.
We often think of confirming appointments or meetings. But what about for attendance to classes, workshops, or events? Or even assignments and due dates for projects?
This could be as simple as sending a text to a coworker after a meeting that says, “Just confirming that I’ll need to give you the quarterly report and monthly review by Friday at 3. Did I forget anything?”
Even a text like, “Can’t wait to see you on Wednesday at 9 AM for the new weightlifting class!” gives the opportunity to build a relationship with a customer through very practical means.
Of course, you always need more than just confirmation messages to remember when things should be happening. It’s still a great first step everyone should take. Because even if it just leads you to later thinking, “I feel like I have something scheduled for Friday,” it will prompt you to go and check.
Schedule Messages
Think about all the times you’ve said to someone, “Wait, let me write this down now so I don’t forget.”
If you immediately follow up with someone right when you think of them, you’ll never have to worry. But that moment might not be the right moment to text them. You respect their time, so you don’t text them right then.
If you do that, you’ll probably forget.
Instead you make a mental note – or maybe a physical one – cross your fingers, and hope you remember again later when it is the “right” time. Correct?
You need to utilize a texting platform like Skipio that lets you schedule your messages. That way the moment you think about messaging a specific person or group of people, you write the message and schedule it for the most convenient time for the recipient(s) to read it.
Make a Drip Campaign
Scheduling a one-off message works great in a lot of instances. But what if you could schedule all your follow-up messages before you could even forget and remember and forget again?
Skipio’s drip campaigns ensure you never forget because Skipio does it for you. That means you get texting to help forgetfulness with you having to do very little manual work.
For example, when you create an event in Skipio, you set up a reminder campaign. By personalizing each text in your reminder campaign through the use of custom fields, you’re able to send individualized messages to confirm, to remind, and to follow up. No matter how many people you’ve invited or who have RSVP’d via the shareable event page, each text is personal to them.
And that’s just the simplest way to use a drip campaign. When you really want to keep a conversation going, you need a SMART Campaign.
Create SMART Campaigns
With a Skipio SMART Campaign you designate rules that automatically move people to other drip campaigns, add people to groups, or stop messages altogether. It’s all based on how people respond to your messages.
For example, you’re a gym owner. You create a “Kickboxing Class 1 Follow-Up” campaign for anyone attended a kickboxing class for the first time. The first message asks for feedback on whether or not they enjoyed the class.
You create a rule associated with that first message that says if someone replies positively – “Yes, I absolutely loved it. Can’t wait to go again!” – they then get removed from the original campaign and added to a “Kickboxing Class Schedule” campaign. This new campaign immediately sends a message about signing up for the next class. Future campaign messages include other relevant information.
You also create a second rule that says if someone replies negatively – “No, it was really hard to follow along and I didn’t feel very welcomed…” – they then get removed from the original campaign and added to a “Kickboxing Negative Feedback” campaign. This new campaign immediately sends a message asking for further details about the class, instructor, etc.
By sending out the first message in the “Kickboxing Negative Feedback” campaign immediately after they reply negatively, you’ve basically eliminated any customer service wait time and shown how important their experience is to you. You’re one step closer to getting that person back in your gym.
At any point during normal drip campaigns or SMART Campaigns you of course send individual, one-off messages to people as well. The campaigns keep conversations going when you aren’t available so when you do need to step in “manually,” you know exactly what’s been going on.
View It All
So that’s how texting helps ensure people and messages don’t slip your mind. But with all those messages and appointments getting scheduled and automated reminders going out, you still need a place to keep track of them.
Obviously the answer is a calendar. But any old calendar won’t do. Fortunately, all appointments, events, messages, or campaigns you create and schedule in Skipio appear on your dashboard’s calendar. Quickly review what’s coming up this month and in month’s to come.
Past creations don’t disappear from your calendar either, so if you want to see what messages you sent or what appointments you had last month, hit the “Previous” button.
Are you ready to use texting to help your forgetfulness? Start using SMART Automations and let Skipio follow up for you.
