Cutting Appointment No Shows

Here is a snippet of an article I wrote on Appointment Reminder about cutting and reducing customer no shows.

One of the most frustrating things for any business owner is when a customer simply does not show up. When this happens, not only has the time now gone to waste, but you are not making the money that you thought you would. While there isn't really anything you can do to prevent customers from no-showing entirely, there are some steps that you can take that should reduce the amount.

You can read the full article by following the link below.

7 Ways To Reduce  Customer No Shows

Outlook SMS Appointment Reminders

Recently I had been approached by a couple of financial planning advisors in Australia looking for a way to send their clients text appointment reminders directly from Outlook.

If you're in the financial planning game then each appointment matters, can lead to a decent sale and you don't want to loose that opportunity to close a deal.

Appointment Reminder has this ability and it works really well, sending SMS reminders. Each reminder does an extra 30 seconds or so per appointment but it has been a good ROI for these clients.

Steps:

1. Goto http://appointmentreminder.com.au and signup for a FREE trial.
   
   
2. You'll need to download the correct version depending on which version of Outlook you using.  The software supports Outlook 2010, Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016.
   
3. Once installed go into you calendar and right mouse click on any event in the calendar.  You will see a new option called "create appointment reminder"
   
   
   
   
4.  When you click on create appointment reminder you will need to enter the details of the client so they get the SMS reminder.
   
   
   



Reminder Details Screen



5.  Click save and you're done.

Pretty cool aye? There are also options for changing the wording of the SMS message so it's tailored to your business, ability to send them 24 hours before, 48 hours before or whatever suits your business the best.

If you're wanting to reduce your no show rate or want to add another level of communication with your clients check out Appointment Reminder for sending sms/text reminders.

Text Appointment Reminders

Text Appointment Reminders: The Benefits

Reminding clients of when their appointments is important. While it may seem easy enough, there are many businesses out there who fail to provide reminders – doctors, chiropractors, massage therapists, plumbers, lawyers, and even tax consultants. If you have a business where appointments are scheduled, text appointment reminders are a must. This will make it easier for you to manage your appointment, provide reminders, and more. There are some amazing benefits to this service and it is easier to implement than you might think.

Read More: Text Appointment Reminders

SMS Appointment Reminder Templates

I've been helping out a number of businesses to get started with sending SMS appointment reminders.

They have seen a decent decrease in the number of no show's, added better communication to their clients and overall has meant their business is seen in a more positive light.

We generally have been advising clients to send reminders 24 hours before the appointment and ALWAYS asking them to reply if they need to confirm or decline their appointment.

Asking clients to reply  has resulted in about 80% reply rate, which is really great.  By asking clients to confirm really really has reduced the no show rate.

Clients feel more committed to the appointment if they have replied with a yes and less likley to not show, or at least get in contact to re-arrange the appointment time.

Here are some good appointment reminder templates you can use to get started.

Umbraco + Windows Live Writer

Distraction free writing is pretty important when putting together blog posts and I find live writer a pretty good tool to achieve this, means you don’t have your web browser open and aren’t inclined to jump around to other tabs.  You could use another text edit but with being able to publish directly from live writer to Umbraco is pretty neat, also with the ability to upload images it's my number 1 choice for writing blog posts with Umbraco.

Please head over to MatthewSkilton.Me to follow my step by step tutorial on how to setup windows live writer with Umbraco.

Facebook removing default landing page

Wow... Last month we finally got around to creating a default landing page for our facebook fan page (OHbaby Fan Page) then just 1 month later we've been upgraded to a "timeline" layout and lost the ability to show gated like content.

At first this was quite frustrating because we had great success with the default landing page, the old default landing page would ask people to like our fan page and if so they could then enter a draw to win an ipod tocuh in exchange for joining our website. This resulted in lots of new fans to our facebook page and new members to our website.

The solution to the problem was to create a promotional post (and link it to our facebook tab page) on our timeline and then "pin to top" in the post settings.  This results in the post staying at the top of timeline and any new visitors will see this post.  This does mean the new user will have to make an extra click, however we have found that if the post has the right message then the click through ratio will be quite high anyway.

Good Luck :)

Pay With A Tweet

Yesterday after watching a video on SEOMoz I noticed them talking about way to get more back links.  They were talking about "paying with a tweet" a method in which you give something away but only if the user links to your site via a Facebook Post of Twitter Post. This sounded pretty intriguing to me so I quickly Googled pay with a tweet and found the website paywithatweet.com.  Went through the process of creating a button which was pretty simple and at the end gave me some iframe code which I could place on my website.

ohbaby.co.nz is a popular New Zealand Baby Magazine which has articles that are only available to members who subscribe to the print magazine.  We decided to add a pay with a tweet to some of these articles in an attempt to get some more back links from social media.

You can see an example by going to Natural Labour Preparation.  If you're a "max" member you'll be shown the full story otherwise you will need to subscribe or pay with a tweet.  Quite impressed how easy it was to setup, however one issue discovered is that after paying with the tweet the full article is displayed in the pop up window, not ideal because there are no scroll bars, you could paste the address to another window but for the average Internet junkie this might be too hard especially with the address bar greyed out. 
Also it would be really cool if the paywithatweet.com website had an api so we could generate the code on the fly and apply the methodology to all our "max" articles so we could have a special weekend where all articles were free with a tweet or facebook post.  I presume an api is in the making.
Pay with a tweet a service that I presume might become quite popular.

Anyone else using it? Thoughts/Comments?