Sometimes, the right message is all it takes to get a meeting with your contacts. And text messaging is the perfect medium for setting appointments. It helps you ask simple questions and get quick answers back, just what you need to fill your calendar.
Here are 9 text messaging templates to help you book meetings faster with your contacts.
John Oliver joked recently that “nothing is harder than an 8-minute phone call with another human being. Nothing. Nothing at all.” And though he’s, of course, exaggerating, he’s also on the pulse of something true about the way our culture has changed -- a phone call is now a big ask.
In fact, communications coach Anne Ricketts says that an unscheduled phone call is intrusive. “If you don’t schedule [a phone call] beforehand … people think it’s an emergency, their heart rate goes up.”
Text is a great way to schedule beforehand. Even asking to call the same day or to talk in a few minutes may be preferable to a lot of your contacts than calling them out of the blue.
Once you’ve gotten permission to call, you can use text to schedule phone appointments. Be sure to give your audience a variety of specific time suggestions to increase the likelihood you’ll be able to connect.
Tools like Calendly and Hubspot Meetings take scheduling to the next level. Instead of going back and forth about availability with your contacts, you can send them a link to your public calendarso they can select a time that works best for them.
Texting out your calendar link makes appointment scheduling even easier. It helps you avoid the clutter of your prospect’s email inbox and get noticed in their text messaging inbox instead.
You can also combine the scheduling techniques from above with your calendar link -- this gives your contacts even more options.
At conferences, trade shows, and other big meetups, you’ll likely want to schedule a lot of meetings with a lot of contacts. But you don’t want your outreach and other connections to seem generic.
Sending personalized Group Broadcasts helps you target your messages to individuals and make the most of your in-person opportunities.
One of the trickiest parts of scheduling meetings is coordinating the calendars of multiple people. Whether you’re looking to put together a group interview or organize a team demo, getting a lot of people in the same place (IRL or virtually) at the same time can be time-consuming and complicated. Often, the entire process can be held up if a single person doesn’t respond to an email. Group Broadcasts can help you eliminate those bottlenecks and get down to business quicker.