Helping Appointment Based Businesses Recover After COVID
Appointment-based businesses were some of the hardest hit during the worldwide COVID-19 economic shutdown. Now, as the world begins to re-open, it’s important that you (as the owner of manager of an appointment-based business) recover from COVID-19 as quickly as possible and in a safe manner.
To ensure a quick and safe recovery for your business, it’s important to keep your clients informed about your plans for re-opening and give them an easy way to reschedule their missed appointments, so we’ve added some key features/tools that make it easy to do just that. These new features will also be useful after we’ve all recovered, so we wanted to highlight them piece by piece. Please read on to find out more.
Thanks!
– Frank Cort, Founder, Apptoto
P.S. the “Campaigns” feature is now available to everyone. Also, sending blasts of messages to your appointments can quickly use up Apptoto messaging credits, so we are adding 200 messaging credits to all paid plans during May, June, and July of 2020 to make it easier to re-open. Have questions about Campaigns? Schedule time to talk with our best-in-classs Customer Support Team.
6 New Features to Help Your Business Recover After COVID Faster
Better Appointment Search Filtering
We’ve added search “Chips” that let you quickly choose a date range while searching for appointments.
You can quickly access this new feature by clicking the “Magnifying Glass” in the search bar inside Apptoto.
Quickly “Compose to All”
Once you’ve performed a search and filtered the result set down to a group of appointments, you can blast a Text, Email, and/or Voice Call to all of them using the new “Compose to All” button.
This is done through the new “Compose to All” feature… and we’ve written up a blog post showing how it works here: Introducing “Compose to All” Appointments.
Ask ANYONE to Reschedule (i.e. pick a new time)
You can now use Apptoto to ask anyone to reschedule their appointment. It doesn’t matter if the appointment was booked online or manually added to your calendar. Your client will receive a special link that lets them pick a new time on your calendar.
To learn more on how this works, read this blog post: Easily reschedule any appointments on your calendar.
Easy access to “Favorite” message templates
One-time message templates can now be “Favorited” on the “Settings” > “Message Templates” tab and then easily sent from the “Actions” menu.
Calendar Campaigns (i.e. Recall Campaigns)
The above features are great for asking clients to move their existing appointments or sending non-marketing blast messages. But, if you want your clients to book a NEW appointment with you, or if you want to send messages only to clients who haven’t been back in a while (i.e. recall messaging), then you’ll want to use our “Campaigns” feature.
We’ve recently made Campaigns available to all users. Before, they were only available on certain premium plans. We’ve also added the ability to target contacts on an existing Calendar, not just in an Address Book. This means you no longer have to export your appointments to then import them for Campaign purposes.
Phone Banks (for more than 200 unique recipients a day)
If you are planning on sending text messages to more than 200 unique recipients in a day, it’s important that we set up a “Phone Bank” for you. Phone Banks are groups of phone numbers that are reserved specifically for your account and can send messages on your behalf. Apptoto is able to use phone banks to avoid carrier filtering. Let us know if you anticipate sending messages to more than 200 unique recipients in a day as you and your business recover from COVID-19’s impacts.
