4 Easy Steps to Using Personalization for Appointment Reminders

Many of you run businesses that mainly operate offline where your customers make appointments or reservations.  Do you find yourself getting stuck in the rut of having to make countless phone calls to confirm or remind people of them? This time consuming tasks can also cost you money.  VerticalResponse can help out. Why not try doing ONE weekly email marketing campaign using personalized reminders based on the specific date and time of the appointment because ONE email definitely sounds better than 50 phone calls. How do you do it? It's a lot simpler than you think.

1. At the beginning of each week have all of the appointments in one spreadsheet. You'll want email address, first name, date of appointment or reservation and the specific time, each in their own fields.

2. When you upload your list, simply select the corresponding field name for email address and first name, then choose either the field names provided or choose "custom field" like I've done below for TIME and DATE. Just remember which ones you used you'll need that information in the next step.

3. When you create your email marketing campaign you'll include these field names with curly brackets in your content. For instance:

Dear {FIRST_NAME},

We're sending you this email today to remind you of your upcoming appointment
Your appointment is scheduled for:

Date: {DATE}
Time: {TIME}

See you there!
Sincerely,
The Team at Company ABC

4. All of the dates and times that correspond to each email address when you upload your list will then automatically populate those brackets into your campaign. Voila!

And don't forget, if an email bounces back, you might want to call up your recipient to get their updated email address. Then you can remind them of their upcoming appointment while you have them on the phone.

Got any new ideas of how to use personalization? Let's hear them!

Comments

[Steve]

Great suggestion!

Does the email address need to be "double opt in"' to our mailing list to make this happen?

[Joshua Feinberg]

The salesforce.com idea is very interesting and our goal is to provide "triggered" email capabilities as a new addition to our feature set.

For salesforce.com specifically, we'll check their API documentation to see what appointment-related data we can access and try to come up with a hassle-free way to push these reminders out to Leads and Contacts. Thanks for the feedback!

[Janine]

For Aleks - You'll only need to spend time setting up your email once. Then all you need to do is "copy campaign" for each time you want to do your email which takes less than 5 seconds. Uploading your list each week takes less than 3 minutes. So in reality, you'll only spend a few minutes per week doing this. If you've only got a few calls to make the choice is yours.

[Aleks V.]

Good idea but how long will it take to populate a list and create one each weak? Will the phone calles be faster and easier? We might be able to place the confirmation phone calls by the time we put together and send the reminder email. Janine (above) has the right idea. Also, some of the new spa software programs will do this automatically.

Best Regards.

[Janine]

Ooooh, good one Jon, I'm going to punt that one to Josh, our VP of Product Management. Josh, any ideas?

[Jon Moss]

What would be even cooler, and more convenient is for VR to read the weekly appointments in SFDC via Appexchange and automatically configure the emails & lists rather than having to create lists. Now that would be a huge time saver!

[Janine]

For Jo - I've included more visible screen shots above and this is for a mass emailing where each email will be personalized to look like it's a different email.

[Teri McCready]

Hi Janine-

"4 Easy Steps to Using Personalization for Appointment Reminders" is a great idea of all service businesses!

Regards,

Teri McCready
http://www.360webmarketing.com/

[Susan Le Gresley]

Hi, What a great idea!

I will also add something like 'special purchase' for the week ahead..

and 'Reccommend a friend' for a £5 voucher each!

I have a Hairdresing salon in Jersey UK.

I will definately use this as part of my marketing strategy

[SUDHANSU JETHI]

Sir,
Thanks a lot for the information you have posted to me. Really it is excellent.
Please keep sending shuch information.
Thank you once again.

Yours sincerely,
Sudhansu.

[Jo Prabhu]

Your instructions to send email are unclear. The windows you show for examples are also not clear because they appear grayed out and the text is hard to read.

The unclear part of the instruction is how to send mass emails or is this just for one email at a time.

Appreciate a response.