If you own or work for a small business you will be well aware of the constant battle with keeping costs down. You can find yourself trying to cut costs wherever possible, and in line with this behaviour, avoiding expenses—unless absolutely necessary.Here’s the scenario: you’ve just realised that sending an SMS to your customers or staff is great way to save time and effort, especially when contacting multiple people. It is also a less intrusive way to get in touch. Imagine you are running a hair salon (or similar business), you want to send out appointment reminders to your customers so that they won’t forget, and thus reducing missed appointments—as I’m sure you’re well aware that if this happens to you, it is both a waste of your time and you’ll have to book them in for another time anyway.You have decided to use your own mobile phone to send out these SMS messages. As you start to send these on a day to day basis, you begin to realise that it’s perhaps not the most efficient use of your time. It’s taking you a good 30 minutes each day to pull up your spreadsheet, manually type in each phone numbers, text and customise the time and date for each appointment. You have about 10 appointments each day, so that means typing out the message 10 times a day. Even with a smartphone, using the copy & paste function, you still have to edit the time and date for each customer. Errors can easily made here.This is where an online SMS platform can dramatically help. With the use of dynamic fields, you can simply create one template, upload your spreadsheet with all the personalised details, and send out an SMS to everyone you need to contact. It will still look like it is from your same number, if that’s what you want, or you can use a Sender ID, which helps increase trust and makes you look more professional.Another advantage to using an Online SMS platform like Esendex, is that you can schedule your message sends for a future time and date. So if you want the SMS to go out the day before the appointment, you can spend just one night scheduling them all to go out throughout the week.All in all, this alone can save you hours of manually sending SMS messages to each of your customers. Even with a good manual system in place, it will take a lot longer than using an online SMS platform. The real question is: How much is your time worth? Surely more than a few cents per SMS.With Esendex it costs just $110 for 1,000 SMS messages, and it will take just a few minutes to send out 1,000 personalised SMS messages with all the details your customer would need. Just imagine how long it would take to do the same job on your mobile phone.To see if using an online SMS platform is right for you, sign up for a free trial today and use the free 25 messages to test it out for a couple of days. You won’t look back.Call us on 1300 764 946 for more information, to start a free trial or for some advice.
