Message Reminders: How to Send SMS, Emails, or Voice Calls

Reminders can significantly increase the number of people who show up or who follow whatever course of action you want them to take.

One example is with getting more people to attend healthcare appointments. One study concluded, “Notifications improve attendance and reduce ‘no shows’” and further found that “two or more notifications increased attendance by as much as 19% over and above sending one notification.”

Another study found an increase in attendance to a marriage workshop when sending a simple reminder text message.

This data coincides with what we all know intuitively: we all have busy lives, and we need reminders!

There are at least 6 specific reasons why businesses send message reminders…

Appointments

When clients forget about appointments, your business suffers, because you’re missing out on the revenue they would bring in.

That missing revenue can impact your bottom line.

So if there’s anything you can do to help reduce the no-show rate for your appointments, you’d do well to take advantage of it.

Sending message reminders for appointments helps ensure that your client doesn’t forget about the appointment, so that you can get that revenue.

Events

The more people that show up to your events, the better.

More attendance means more people taking advantage of what your event offers—often leading to more sales and customer retention.

After all, if no one shows up to your event, why host it at all?

Sending message reminders for events gives would-be attendees that added bump to get them to attend, in the midst of their busy schedules.

Webinars

Webinars have an excellent conversion rate (up to 15% by some reports).

So the more people you can get to come, the more sales you can expect to have.

Which means… you want as many people to attend your webinar as possible!

You can send message reminders to your webinar registrants to help boost that attendance rate.

Meetings

Meetings are a regular part of business life.

Whether it’s internal meetings within your company or meetings with clients, these meetings can be a huge time-suck.

Time wasted on meetings is especially an issue if people forget meetings or simply don’t show up.

Message reminders can help alleviate this problem.

You can send reminders to keep your meeting time top of mind for attendees, and to give them all the details—such as agenda, Zoom link (if it’s an online meeting), or location (if it’s an in-person meeting).

Doing that can help you make sure your meetings are attended… and are attended by the right people.

Deadlines

Life is full of deadlines.

Whether that’s in the workplace in which you have to have a timeline to complete a project…

Whether that’s in your personal life in which you have to accomplish certain tasks before a due date…

Whether that’s in business in which you only have a set period of time to take advantage of a discount…

How can you remind people of these deadlines so that the deadlines are met in time?

Message reminders will help.

People will see the reminder on their phone, for example, and then they’ll be prompted to complete whatever it is you want them to complete by the specified time or day.

So deadline reminders are good both for your marketing, and for your internal office communication.

Cancellations

Although not technically a reminder, you can send messages letting people know about cancellations.

Let’s say you need to cancel an appointment or an event.

An SMS, email, or voicemail notice (or all 3) can help make sure people are in the know about what’s going on.

That way, you don’t have a bunch of confused people who still try to show up for the event.

There are at least 3 different types of reminder messages you can send:

• SMS
• Emails
• Voice messages

There are benefits to all 3 of these types of reminders.

And you can actually use our SMS platform to send all of them.

SMS

SMS is one of the most effective ways to reach people, since read rates are as high as 98%.

To send an SMS from the platform, it just takes a few steps:

• Log in to the platform
• Add contacts into the database
• Go to the “Send a Message” page
• Select the recipients for the message
• Type out the message
• Click “Send”

Your text message will be sent to all your recipients.

Email

Email is a classic mode of communication for a reason.

To send an email from the platform, you can follow the steps outlined in the “SMS” section above and select email contacts from your contact database.

If you’d like to send both an SMS and email together, you just need to do the following:

• Log in to the platform
• Go to your account “Settings”
• Select the “Send messages to emails and phones”
• Follow the steps outlined in the “SMS” section above

Your message reminder will send to your recipients as both an email and a text message.

Voice Reminder

Phone calls are going more and more out of style but can still be a useful tool as a reminder.

You can use the Mobile Text Alerts SMS platform to send out phone calls as well.

To send a message reminder via phone call from the platform, you’ll first need to contact support to get “Phone Alerts” added to your account.

Once that’s enabled, all you need to do is…

• Log in to the platform
• Visit the “Phone Alerts” page
• Click the “record” button at the top of the page and record your message from your computer’s web browser
• Select the recipients for your phone call
• Select the recording you’d like to send
• Click “Send”

Your phone message reminder will be sent to your recipients—if they answer the phone, it will play back your message, and if they don’t answer, it will leave a voicemail.

We’ve seen that sending reminders can be highly valuable in businesses for many purposes, including reducing no-shows (and therefore increasing show-ups) for appointments, events, and meetings.

We’ve seen that businesses of all kinds can benefit from sending these reminders.

So how are you using reminders for your own business?

You can explore sending message reminders for your own business in 5 minutes or less. Get a free Mobile Text Alerts trial (no credit card required) and get 50 free messages for 14 days!