Automate & Optimize Your Messaging in Check Cherry – Email, SMS & More

0:04 youall ready to party again I sorry say it again youall ready to party again yeah yeah we I like the webinars they're hold on one second you ready and Matt's gonna drive again so he'll be here in a few e hey Jud hey everybody hey

1:16 Matt you made it decided to join um we're almost at six yeah I guess I'll do the intro Matt's going to drive more lighting here we'll get started in a minute all right you ready Matt I think so okay cool so uh this is automate and optimize your messaging in check Cherry our latest webinar and long story

2:08 short uh this is going to be for beginners and Advance um and basically Matt's going to show some features and we'll give some tips throughout kind of how to set up email SMS you know things you might do best practices templates um you know avoiding common pitfalls that typee of stuff of course if you have questions go ahead and leave them in the chat uh also feel free to raise

2:34 your hand um and we'll you know specifically take questions towards the end uh you know over audio if you want but anytime during feel free to chat um and I'll sneak them in to Matt I'll be moderating the chat so um yeah Matt why don't you go ahead and take it away awesome thanks for joining us everybody so we're here in uh enjoying a nice rainy day

2:57 here I can find my browser window share it see okay and scen and so I guess just to uh just kind of at a high level you know what we're going to go through today um first off I would say if if anybody's completely new to cze Cherry um you know we did a webinar last week uh just kind of very very beginner you know just kind of a high level

3:32 overview so I would check that out first um today we're kind of going be going through some of the you know how to send messages how to automate messages how to use templates um that type of thing so um so I suppose kind of the the simplest you know starting point is you know that you want to just send somebody a message manually and so the way check Cherry does messaging um you know

3:56 all of your bookings all of your proposals all of your leads they're all going to have a messages tab where you can go and see what was sent on that um you know so if you ever just need to quickly send somebody a message um you know whether it's your staff your customer um anybody else um it's going to prefill in the customer's email address there but of course you can put in anything and um

4:20 you know it's pretty simple you know subject message attachments we do have a send later feature so if you want to delay that you know maybe you're writing a message tonight you want to kick it out in the morning or something like that you can um but um but yeah kind of the thing to keep in mind is this messages tab is real helpful not just for sending messages initially um

4:41 but for kind of seeing what you know what went out for a booking and just kind of keeping on top of things so if you're curious you know what your customer has seen you know once you've got a bunch of automated messages going out to somebody you know to your proposals to your leads um going to that messages Tab and either see the threaded which will kind of Nest it you know Nest that that

5:03 top message with with a bunch of um replies or the unthreaded which will just show everything chronologically um those are real helpful for just kind of yeah if I can hop in worth noting this is on a lead a booking and a proposal um you can't just send somebody a message without one of those objects in Czech Jerry actually right maybe appointments as well so appointment appointments

5:28 as well you kind of have have a reason or you know some some type of a some some object to attach messages to so we show this really helpful um your account comes pre-built with a ton of Common Sense automations that you can modify from there but yeah and um we'll go into some of the text messaging stuff a little bit later but worth noting that you can also once your account

5:51 is set up for text messaging you can also trigger a text message there too so so that's kind of the simplest possible you know you want to send out a a message manually but I want to save time Matt come on what's going on why would I why would I do why would I do my manually so um so of course Czech Sherry has a lot of automation that you can take advantage of so um you'll find your automated

6:14 messages under the manage menu manage automated messages and um the first thing you're going to see is just a bunch of existing automations already in your account um so if you're looking you know for something that's already going out you know when when you first sign up for Check Cherry if you've been with us for a long time you're going to see a lot of these are already

6:34 ready to go in your system so you don't need to set up say a receipt you know a payment receipt email or um customer booking confirmation um but if you you know have a message going out to your customers like that booking confirmation and you want to edit it um it's really easy to make changes so um you know you can of course you know scroll through get an idea of what's

6:56 in there U but I recommend you know just try the search too that'll usually bring up you know if you're looking for the something payment related you know just try searching for it it'll probably come up you know that'll search subjects titles you know things like that as well so um so let's go to Let's edit our customer booking confirmation because I think if you're getting

7:17 started with check Sharry to me that's the easiest one to to kind of edit and take a look at so um this is the email that gets sent to a customer when they book you um you know and by default you know we have a pretty generic email um looks like we've got some some uh filler we've been been playing around with on our Tex account but in general it's going to be something like this

7:40 with just the details of the booking you know how much they owe what where the venue is things like that but I would recommend you know personalizing this a little bit more um this is the first thing your customers going to see once they book you so this is a good one to kind of outline your next steps um so things like like you know what to expect uh you know what you're going to need from

8:03 them um if you're going to have them pick out you know fill out questionaires that's a great chance to send them a link to a questionnaire page or if you need them to pick designs um you know this is a great email to do that and so um so let's kind of just take a quick look at some of these fields um starting from the top description can be literally anything that's just for you you'll

8:27 see this what to-do section um you know by default that's going to be send email but you can change that to send SMS once your account is set up to do so um you'll see this uh you know this uh selector here will let you change to different types of you know basically control like you know when somebody books you do you want to send this immediately or do you want to send this a little

8:50 bit after you know say an hour or a day or week after somebody books you um using that drop down um you can control that and then you can even you know set it to manual which basically means it's not going to go out automatically and that can be useful if you're just kind of testing things out or you just want to trigger off something manually and then under conditions um there are different

9:13 conditions you can set up um you know depending on the use case maybe we'll look at some of these in more details but you know if you're sending out a questionnaire follow-up email um you might only want to send that to people who have an incomplete questionnaire so um recipients uh uh you know if you want it to go to your client that's going to be client account um we have some other options

9:34 things like staff admins you can also just type in an address here so if I want to send Jud at cherry.com um I can just typ hey don't get my email out come on and uh and you know include as many as many different things as you want so I'll I'll give my email out too so well we've seen that people use that like let's say they have somebody they work with specifically for a

9:58 certain task like designing a photo booth overlay or doing some setup or something like that they're not really they don't need to be in the system as a user of check Cherry uh that can be helpful I would say that's kind of one of the use cases and so um and so we we'll dig into a little bit later some of the different you know types of automation you can do with this but for now we'll just kind

10:21 of keep going through these so um you'll also see the sender field um that's going to default to business contact which which is basically you you know your your business email uh whatever you have listed listed under manage business settings for your company um you know info ad or support at check Cherry whatever you you know whatever your your business-wide email is that's going to be

10:45 the default um you can also have um changed that to other things though so like for instance if you want emails to come from the employee that's assigned to the booking um you can do that and so for and sometimes um you know on the DJ side maybe the DJ is the one that's going to be working with them on um you know planning things out or uh you know things like that so um worth keeping in mind

11:13 on this sender field so that's who it's going to appear like it's from when that message goes out and then the other thing is that that's who any replies are going to be sent to so if I have this set to the employee then when the customer replies to that email it's going to come back to um to that employee similar if I have it set to business contact then any replies are going to

11:33 go to my business email then we'll show a bunch of you know any other staff accounts you have as well um subject self-explanatory uh worth mentioning you can include um tokens you know we've got some tokens we'll look at in a second you can include uh customization tokens in there if you want and I think I I think putting the event TI in uh the automated messages makes a lot of sense it helps

11:56 with threading on other platforms like Gmail thatp type of stuff makes the subject unique to that client that type of stuff so I recommend putting a event title in in subjects absolutely and it's probably worth mentioning that you know any so anytime a message goes out to Czech cherry or from Check Cherry you know say it goes to your customer if your customer replies to that we'll

12:17 log that reply and then forward it along to you um so you're still going to see that in your Gmail account or wherever you know whatever you use for your own email um those replies are going to get sent along to you and so as Jud mentioned sometimes like having a title or something to kind of you know give some context to that reply is helpful um so it doesn't all just get

12:37 lump together in a in a big list and then uh the message you know that's the message text that's going to go out um obviously you can do you know headings and and bold and underline all you know all that type of stuff um you can also um do links so if you want a link to something um you know you can highlight it and click this link icon and you know we can add a link to google.com or something

13:08 or to your website or to you know some other service that you use you can also link to merge tags which is worth mentioning as well so for example the questionnaires link fill out this questionnaire the designs link pick a design here you know stuff like that and that'll be dynamic and specific to the booking which is it and then um and then we can add photos here as well so if

13:32 I click this it'll let me upload a photo uh you know we can see uh have that inserted in line here um we can also choose from our media Gallery so any photos that are in your media Gallery uh you'll be able to see those as well so uh that's under manage business settings uh media I think media gallery and so that's helpful for anything that's kind of reusable and you can also um you

14:02 can link to images too so if I click that image and click the the link icon um you know it'll show my little uh you know uh link down there and so I can put in questionnaires link and get save so um lots of options there um you know um and then of course tons of different tokens you can put in here so um if you don't you know if you just insert something like uh this event link here

14:31 then we'll just show the the full URL you know when they click it which can be you know it's not as pretty but um you know makes it a little bit easy for them to to just click and go to um and then over on the right here you'll see this customize your message panel and that's where you've got you know all kinds of different tokens and things that you can substitute into the email

14:55 um that can be things like and and these are going to vary based on you know on the context so what's available for a confirmed event you know things like invoice date or invoice link um those are going to be different than what is available to a lead that doesn't have any of that information so um you know um hopefully most of the tokens are pretty self-explanatory um you know I would say

15:21 things like the the booked date you know when it was booked uh brand signature is real common that's going to be your you know business-wise signature that you can put in client name if you ever have questions also you know just chat with us from within the app keep remember that um and this list has grown over the years so um I could see us adding some search features and some other

15:44 enhancements here to make it easier to know what's going on and what's what certainly an improvement that I think everybody will benefit from but yeah this list is just kind of got bigger and bigger longer and longer bigger and bigger yeah and deping on what um if you have extra questions loaded up in your account those are going to show up here too so we've got quite a bit in this in

16:05 this demo account that um you might have a little bit less in your own um another thing that's real helpful so a lot of these links um say this make a payment link When U we substitute that in if we're sending it to a client you know assuming they have access to uh to see things like pricing and make payments um we'll include a token with that link that allows them to basically make a payment

16:29 without logging in uh similarly the questionnaire link you know they can click that and fill out their questionnaire um so a lot of times customers don't even need to log in to do things in check Cherry um you know if if you have that that payment prompt you know they'll go straight to the payment page and be able to make a payment and um no login or anything like that is necessary

16:51 um kind of the only time they need to log in specifically is if they're going to change something that affects the pricing um in that case we want to make sure we have a record of of who is making the change um so we do you know that's kind of the the one time that we do need to log in and then I guess finally um you know you there are handful of like attachments as well so uh if

17:14 you include the invoice attachment or the calendar attachment or things like that those will actually be attached to the email you know as a PDF file or as an IC file as well so you can drop those tokens in anywhere and they'll just basically show up as attachments then finally you can add tags um tags are mostly just useful for yourself if you want to group things so if you've got a bunch of um

17:42 you know customer payment emails that you want to tag and and make it easy to search on or you know um onboarding or you know whatever kind of however you you want to organize those you can um you know sometimes we get kind of request for like to have like folders to put emails in um the tags kind of work like folders where you know you you tag it with something and then um and then you can just

18:09 uh nrow things down to uh to just that tag pretty easily um he mat yeah there's some confusion about what a token is in the chat uh two people kind of like what's a token like how does this work do I need you know and so maybe we just take a step back and explain and show the preview feature probably of check Cherry um and so so we've kind of gone through and and we've added these little

18:33 we call them tokens but basically uh variables right basically variables and so um you know if if you're sending imagine somebody books you and you want to include a a link to have them make a payment um obviously that's going to be different for every single booking or if you want to include the date of their event um that's going to be different for every single booking that goes

18:57 out and so the way we kind of accommodate that is that when somebody when we send out one of these automated messages we substitute in these variables and so if I click save and go it's going to take me to a preview and it kind of you know comes through gives me a little preview here um it uh tags all of these little variables or these tokens in blue and then over on the right hand

19:22 side I can actually preview what that's going to look like with real data um so you know over here we add add this questions link and then if I go over here it's actually going to have a link to that um to that questionnaire that I can click and kind of make sure everything works you know this event link is going to get substituted for this um this page over here and in the drop down here

19:47 you can preview it with different events um you know just to clarify this is it's just kind of a live preview tool if you don't have any bookings in your system yet you know we can't we can't give you real data we'll try to give it some sample data but ideally you know maybe add a test booking or something like that to see what it's going to look like with with your specific bookings

20:08 and the tokens have uh a certain syntax to them will'll add which is these uh kind of curly braces or handlebars if you will and two on each side basically but the whole list you just copy and paste what's on that right side and drop it in and'll replace that with some something specific to the booking the customer Etc um I think one thing to mention is the recipient name I think

20:35 that's a good thing to just highlight because we have like client first name and like lead first name and other but the uh contact first name but the recipient first name is a bit smarter about how it goes um so so everything will automatically populate with the proposal created so everything will populate based on the yeah the proposal data or the booking data or the lead data it

20:59 depends and you can use the preview uh to see and also I'll mention if you have something specific that you'd like to accomplish open a chat with us and tell us what you want to do and we can show you how to do it exactly and so um so let's go back to this editor again um few other things we can look at while we're here um you know we have you'll see the package selector in the top

21:24 right um a common thing that we see in cck Cherry is that people have different emails or different you know different things they want to do for different um different packages for instance the email or the email campaign that you want to send your your weddings might be very different than what you want to send to a corporate event and so the packages typically lets you do that so

21:46 you can come in check what the uh you know what packages this wants to go to but by default it's going to go out to everybody similarly there's a brand selector um if you got multiple Brands enabled in your account you can limit it to just certain brands as well and then this feature is kind of cool um I think it's basically it's called review messages and by default you know

22:10 when a new booking comes in or when something happens if you've got an automated email set up for it that's going to get up get sent directly to the customer um however sometimes it's nice to be able to have a chance to uh review those messages first um and so if you change this to yes instead of going directly to the customer it's going to go into kind of a you know a Quee a a

22:34 a list where you can um can take a look at those first and that's useful for just kind of making sure that things are working as you're expecting you know when you're first getting started um it can also be nice to add a little bit of a customization to things so uh for example if you have a review message that goes out like say 5 days after your event you want to have an email

22:56 that goes out to the customer you know ask asking for a review U maybe you know that gives you a chance to kind of personalize it a little bit and make it seem a little bit less um less automated even though it kind of started out as an automated message I've got another question here Andre said is there a way to send bulk automated emails I would like to let our past clients know about

23:17 their referral link and the short answer is no we don't have a mass email or bulk email uh feature um Never Say Never um but we really want emails from chech Char to get delivered and sending mass email is something that will um probably harm that frankly uh yeah when they see a kind of a bulk email come out from your account they'll tend to think that you know oh you're using you

23:46 know this is coming from a bulk email platform like MailChimp or something and they'll basically start to label all of the booking confirmation and proposals and you know things like that you know planning emails um are just much more likely to end up in a in a uh promo folder or spam folder or something like that so um so we recommend uh using you know just using a separate service

24:07 because then that generally won't affect your your delivered through uh yeah there's a ton of great email service providers that do mass email um and very coste effective free plans all that stuff so take a look at that Dylan says do we get a notification on the app for those messages those messages the messages that get cute I guess he's saying and so check Cherry has an iPhone and

24:31 Android app and so that's what he's referring to uh I I don't think we do I think we send an email uh once a day if you have stuff in there is my understanding yeah we currently send out a um a uh a daily Roundup I guess of all the all the emails in your queue um that said I mean I I could see us adding a a push notification on that so um you know I think we're I think we're open to add

24:55 push notifications on the app it's uh you know let us know if it'd be helpful in yeah Steve Masa says are there any plans to accept crypto payments and so no and it doesn't come up as a feature request um ever I think when crypto was really like newish you know I think we got some uh requests for people that wanted to take crypto but um but it has not come up as a feature request from

25:21 customers at all so um Brady says I would love push notifications on the app yeah makes sense yeah and um there's a question too about you know if you can download all the client emails so it's a common question um Under reporting if you go to sales reporting and uh um that's the easiest way that'll have all your emails and just hit download and you're good to go um you can also customize it

25:49 with things like phone numbers and whatnot if you need to I also think it's worth mentioning that if you are going to send mass emails you want to keep your list warm right like you don't want to just send once a year um you probably want to be sending on a regular basis and and uh you know that that's going to help your deliverability that's going to help um you get the most value

26:08 out of the service you're using and sales and all that stuff um so find ways I guess maybe that's another uh webinar we could cover but find ways to basically be in touch with your mailing list on a regular basis once a month I would say at least once a quarter at least um if you can't send once a quarter I mean I you know I think you're going to get a lot of spam complaints basically because

26:29 people are going to forget about you another question from Michelle how do we check what is already automated as the new this messaging is probably the hardest to understand how do we know if the questionnaire has been completed is the questionnaire automatically added to the proposal so um the questionnaires will be automatically added if you set that up right um we mention that

26:51 create a proposal click on the questioner tab you'll see um if it's not there chat with us we can help um um and you'll know if it's completed there's a mark and finalize and I believe there's an email that gets sent when it's been marked finalized um and if not you can send one I think there's a default one um and then early on we talked how do you know what what's already

27:12 been automated um if you look at a a booking or proposal or lead you can see the messages uh tab um and see the emails that went out for that um yeah and I would say you know if you go to manage and automated messages these are the ones that are already set up in your account um a lot of these are just kind of going to go out you know they're they're edge cases you know somebody

27:35 cancels and we'll send out an email uh somebody you know makes a payment we'll send out an email I would recommend looking at the customer booking confirmation um I think that's that's the one that I would recommend uh you know taking a look at um you know for other things you know you can read through them they're pretty self-explanatory um you know something like send the business owner

27:58 a notification when this customer has submitted a form or things like that so if you read through you know they should be pretty self-explanatory um and so you'll kind of see um I guess a few categories or a few uh you know types of things over on the on the left here um we group them by whether they're bookings whether they're proposals whether they're leads um and so there's going to

28:23 be different uh messages for those as well so um you know the emails that you want to go out to a proposal that you're still hoping to close are going to be completely different than what you want to send to a confirmed booking that's already signed and paid so um you know so depending on what you're working on you know if you're specifically concerned with proposals um you

28:45 know just just click the tab to see those similar um your leads are going to be the people that haven't that you haven't provided pricing for yet so um you're typically still kind of collecting details still figuring out what it is you want to do um and so go to that leads Tab and that'll have a nice um you know that'll have all the the lead emails that are already configured um but

29:07 in general um you know we're going to have kind of the basics in your account and then if you're looking to do something more complicated like uh set sending a reminder like three days after when something happens then that would typically be something that you would add and so once you're ready to actually you know you decided okay like let's set up a new reminder you know I want to

29:29 have a new automated message go out um just click that new automated message button and you'll see a bunch of different triggers that we support um you know again they're going to be grouped by bookings proposals leads things like that um I would say the most common ones are toward the top uh for your confirmed bookings um most common things that people are going to do is either have

29:53 an email set out you know when somebody books you shortly after somebody books you you know based basically B based on the booking created time or you're going to have emails going out in the runup to the event so you might send out an email three days before the event with you know information uh to your staff or you might have um you know the day before you know a confirmation to the customer

30:19 just letting them know you'll be there things like that so um these are going to be the most common triggers maybe the payment due date one too but um but yeah those are kind of the most common and if you click pre-built templates we're going to have a bunch of kind of pre-built ones for you that you can use so that can be things like sending the customer a reminder um a week after

30:41 the booking if they haven't yet filled out their questionnaires or um you know if if uh they've not yet chosen a backdrop or you know things like that so if there's something you're looking to do um I would say kind of you know figure out like okay when you know when do I want this to go out you know based on after it's booked or before or after the scheduled date of the event itself

31:05 and then um check out the templates you know those have a lot of the common use cases covered um and so like I say these top few are the most common but there's a lot of different edge cases that come up in cck Cherry you know we have a lot of different things you can do so that can be things like you know when you assign your staff to a booking um you might have different automations

31:24 for that or if you take advantage of the um the staff request features um you know we've got triggers for that or you know if somebody uploads something um so there's lots of different edge cases that come up um but in general just look at these top couple we've got a questions in here so hey Dylan um let's keep it on top he's asking about proposals and except we can cover that

31:46 towards the end there um you know but this is but he does have an automatic message or question Auto do automated proposals wait ALS to automated proposal creating based on an incomplete lead so in other words you want to create a proposal when a lead comes in that's incomplete is that do I understand that correctly and if that's the case no yeah yeah that's the case no that's not

32:13 something um I guess like you know tell me more about that is that like what if we didn't have the data um so basically the example is someone comes through the booking uh booking engine they would key in everything else but they do not complete their prop uh like the whole booking with the system so based on those information if it can be automated you can do there is a link to continue

32:44 booking so you can send an an incomplete uh if you go to leads there's an incomplete booking uh uh incomplete signup over there I guess we call it yeah and there's a link to continue booking so you could give them a link that drops them right into the spot where they can basically pay yeah or wherever they were it's cool because like let's just say they stopped

33:07 at before the payment page they can get dropped into there but you can't automatically create a proposal yeah and so um and so you can kind of like I like Jud says that that's real helpful for just kind of letting somebody pick up where they left off um and this resume booking link that'll pre-fill everything and even if they didn't come through the online booking um this

33:29 will actually work uh it'll still walk them through the booking process and just pre-fill whatever information you have um you know if they didn't come through online booking then they'll be starting at the the beginning but all their name and you know whatever details you've managed to collect will be pre-filled for them so they can make changes if they need to um but it's a it's

33:48 a nice way to kind of prompt them to you know continue your booking or you know pick up where you left off or things like that it's also really easy to convert it's just a click to convert and a click to send it's like three clicks or something like that so the don't have a convert a lead to a proposal automatically is ultimately it's just at that point you're you're kind of it's just online

34:14 booking with extra steps you know with kind of a chance to that they don't get an email or things like that um so if possible we we you know we try to drive people to use the online booking um I think in in other platforms it's common to have like like a bunch of emails going back and forth when you know our goal is to cut out the busy work and that you know that they can just book like

34:35 that you know they don't need to wait for emails you don't need to follow up with them about you know like oh did you get my email all that kind of stuff like ideally we want it to be as as easy as possible they can literally do everything without um you know without any any work on your part but um but you can um you know you can of course uh take that lead convert it to to a proposal um or

34:59 you can uh copy that link you know manually if you want to just manually copy the link to continue booking um you know and you can uh send them a message that way too you say Hey you know blah blah blah if you have any questions and do that b so um so going back to the automated messages um you know some of the use cases so um for bookings you know we kind of looked at that booking created

35:21 schedule date proposals that the main use cases I like for proposals are obviously you know a followup couple follow-ups after a proposal um goes out um you know I think is helpful uh you can also in check Cherry proposals can have an expiration date and I think that's useful especially if you're holding the date for somebody um you know but but also I think it gives a little

35:46 bit of urgency and you can have um automated messages go out based on that expiration date so say your your you know your proposals are valid for a week you might send out an email uh you know a day or two before the expiration saying hey just you know just a heads up uh you know your your proposal expired or is about to expire let me know if if uh you know need an extension or I

36:10 mean who know and also consider using uh email and text and a combination of it yeah and I think a good practice is you know to use some of these touch points to just open up the conversation touch base with the client it's not going to do the selling for you um keep it short hey you know do you have any questions are you going to go forward you know something like that and just

36:31 see what they you know see what they say and then give them the option of course to accept uh the proposal and uh exactly and then and with those expirations you can even have even an email go out after it expires and just say oh your proposal's expired just let me know if you need more time or you know if you need me to reopen it um so it's good excuse to reach out and not you know yeah um

36:57 the uh there's another one uh do we have an appointment token so I guess you can show them with the appointments yeah so um yeah so I guess going down the list real quick um we we'll come to appointments in a sec so the lead creation is real common you know I want to send out an email one day after a lead comes in three days after you know Bal followup things like that and

37:22 then under other there just see kind of some of the other you know miscellaneous stuff so we've got appointments in there um you know for when you receive an SMS time off requests and things like that so and when you do when you when you're on a certain type of message and you click choose the only the tokens that are relevant to that uh type of object if you will um are going to show

37:45 so here he's got appointment stuff in the right in the uh tokens and then Brady uh clarification on what I said I'm not sure I said use email and text I think use EMA a combination of email and text messages like because like not everybody responds to email not everybody responds to text I mean I don't you know yeah I think it's a good idea if you mix it up on on some of this stuff to

38:07 to reach them um and I think you know specifically on the proposals I mean like some people might say no you know I think hey you're too too expensive or you know it's like good okay let's close that out move on or hey I can offer a deal or me just you know keep moving but yeah email or text yeah and so um so on the appointments so we do have um as you mention you know as you go to different

38:28 types you'll see different tokens available um you know this is going to be this is more for like after an appointment is scheduled you know when an appointment is created this will have all the details we're going to already have this loaded in your account so I mean in most cases that's going to be sufficient but um uh but I think the question was how can I include a link

38:50 to my um you know to allow somebody to schedule an appointment with me um for now we don't have a token for that but what you can do is just um just use your scheduling link so if you go to manage or if you go to click on your name go to appointment scheduling um you can copy that that scheduling link and use that in an automated message the reason we don't have a token for that is that

39:21 technically you might have a bunch of different appointment links that are possible uh and I'm not quite sure how that should work so basically you know like you might be taking appointments one of your other staff might be taking appointments and then with uh with a new feature that's going to come out pretty soon um you'll even be able to have like multiple calendars so um so I yeah How's

39:44 that gonna work so I couldn't figure out how to make a token for that so um we'll figure it out and use that but um but you can use that you know copy and paste it or um or of course use it as a uh you know in a uh in a link as well yeah and Bray's asking about texting I think we're going to get to texting I don't know if Matt wants to do it now but we'll get there and show you um

40:09 kind of how that works U but I think there's some other stuff to cover in here just terms of layout especially the custom templates probably worth mentioning yeah and so um so I think those are the main automation things um you know there's there's always more to be said on it but um you know different like I say I would you know if you click choose that's a good place to kind of see you know

40:33 explore some of the conditions some of the the tokens things like that and definitely let us know like you know if you're stuck um just let us know what you're looking to do and um that makes it easy for us to give an answer because it's usually pretty straightforward if as long as we know what what you're looking to do yeah U the problem is everybody runs their business a little different

40:56 and so some people are looking to get question you know have people fill out questionnaires and some people are more you know sending out lead follow-ups and things like that so really it it just depends on on you know what you're looking to do so just some best practices on automating messages to clients right is just be respectful of your clients inbox um try to be helpful um I

41:20 would say you know I've seen people really kind of Nag via email I don't think it works very well um you know if somebody's not responding to Via via email maybe you need to pick up the phone and call um that's okay um I think you just want to say like hey I'm just trying to be helpful and remind you um obviously um you know might not be their number one priority for the day and you you

41:43 know and it is for you um to get something done a questionnaire filled out or something of that nature but just be respectful of your recipients it's going to be good for your business people like doing business with you better also use email as a way to open up the conversation um as opposed to you know doing your fullon you know customer service sales pitching uh stuff

42:04 you know I think just opening the conversation helpful touches um timely touches basically yeah and I would say to uh you know watch out for sending you know particularly on on the lead side is I think where where I see it where people have you know elaborate campaigns to follow up with people and just keep in mind there is a cost to sending email in terms of your own reputation

42:28 um if you have a lot of emails that b basically email providers look at engagement rates now in order to uh you know prioritize things and so we have a a webinar on deliverability and so if you're sending out a lot of emails and nobody's looking at them they're hting spam hitting delete um that is going to hurt your deliverability of of everything so um so yeah so I would you know

42:51 sometimes less is more on some of these things um so you know so those are kind of the auto messages um we also have the concept of I guess message templates um and we'll we'll go to a booking a look at how that works but with templates so an automated message is something that's going to go out automatically you know when somebody books you send out a message you

43:15 know three days after a lead comes in send out a message templates are going to be things that you send out yourself they're never going to go out by them themselves themselves and and so um where that can be useful is things like FAQs you know if you constantly get certain um you know certain types of questions uh creating a template for that can be uh uh really helpful um things

43:42 like uh you know proposal follow-ups or if you've got you know some great information selling your company you know maybe you've got a a um a pitch deck things like that that you want to include um creating templates for that can be a really easy way to um to kind of automate that and so works pretty much the same as the automated messages you can create a template let's just show them where

44:06 it's at first let's just show them because I think that'll make more sense to any of our bookings our proposals our leads and we go to um couple ways you can get there actually let's use this quick send because that's the quickest way to do it so if I click quick send I'll see all of my templates toward the top and then all my automated messages below um we just added the search makes it nicer

44:34 you can type invoice you can type you know staff and see just everything that comes up um or you can go to messages here create a new message and um you can also choose your templates there and so if I choose my really boring templates here it'll basically uh pre-fill in everything in there so um so let's make maybe customize this a little bit more so it looks a little nicer um

45:02 you know let's say thanks for reaching out uh click here to schedule and appointment squ and then I'm going to add my scheduling link here and so now if I um go back to that booking and choose that template it's going to pre-fill in all that information for me and so it's just a quick way to um to avoid kind of some of that you know having to uh do a lot of busy work kind of more

45:33 of a traditional CRM is feature in yeah and so um so yeah so that's helpful and then um where you can edit that is under um you know under that message templates um that's where you'll see all of your existing templates and once you edit that it's going to be almost identical to the um to the automated messages there's just no like when you know there's nothing to trigger it to go out by

46:01 itself and you're going to have you know a lot of token still a lot of different options um so feel free to you know play around with that as well um and then if you um you can also click this view templates to just jump straight to those templates as well so sometimes that's a little little easier to do um and then the last I guess category under those message templates or the autom

46:27 messages are what we call system templates and so if we click that these are going to be a bunch of kind of predefined um you know bunch of predefined stuff in stuff you can't delete honestly is kind of what it hows up they don't want you deleting we need it to exist we want you to be able to customize it but we can't let you delete it um and so an example to me the best example of that

46:51 would be a proposal so I come in I've just created a proposal I've got this quick short cut send email um and that's going to have your proposal template there so it's going to pre-fill it all out be ready to go um we don't want you to delete that because then then the button would break and that be problem so um some other common things under designs there's some some automations

47:16 U but I would say that that proposal one is by far the most common that people want to customize and Ed and I think you can customize just about every message in check Cherry these days and we've kind of slowly migr it over I mean there might be maybe the password reset You Can't customize I suppose and I don't think we've ever had a feature request for that um but just about all of them you

47:37 can customize and we maybe it's time we talk about SMS yeah so SMS um so if you go to manage business settings and then Integrations um we integrate with a service called twilio for SMS for text messenger and a lot of people in the you know if you've already got like a photo booth and things like that it's real common that people already have twio accounts for other services um if

48:07 you're not you know just go to twilio.com um sign up there is a bit of a registration process now in terms of you've got to register your your business um you know with twio basically um basically what happens is uh because of all the spam spam text messaging that goes out um there's a bit more of a registration process and a little bit you know more of more Hoops to jump through to be able to

48:36 send text messaging now um but once you set that account up then basically what you can do is link it to Chet Cherry um we've got some instructions here for how to find that information uh basically there are some credentials you need to add and once you add those then anything that you can do with email you can now do with textt message as well um and so I guess going back to a booking

49:03 here because I linked my um toio account you know I don't only show a new email I also show a new text message option here and works about like you'd expect you know you can send a recipient and then some content similar under my proposals um I can now send an SMS via text to that proposal and because um we're linked to your twio account um you know if they do reply to that we know that

49:31 it's associated with your business um we generally know what you know what booking what proposal it's associated with so we're able to tie that back you know tie that response back to the uh to the original message um and yeah basically um as you oh and then I guess under automated messages you know if you're creating a new automated message um it's just going to be this this first you know

49:57 what to do send email or send SMS and when you send an SMS the the text fill changes subject line there's no HTML no subject yep no bold it's you know text messaging is just text um so you can't do all of the cool stuff you know you can't uh have pretty links but you can include a link in there um you know it's just going to invoice link will be kind of a long a long link that they can

50:26 click but um but no h2l or anything like that it's possible all right so we're getting some uh so do we have any other stuff we have some unrelated questions that we can cover I think that's yeah I think if you have questions that yeah if anybody has questions so um you know somebody's asking if you can show us how to add the terms so chat with us we can show you uh how to add your contractor

50:49 I guess Matt could show real quick um it's under business settings um how to add your contract um somebody says can you please show that on the SMS so um on SMS go to business settings Integrations and then there's a twillo uh button to start there chat with us again if you have questions um Sammy is it possible to send send both email and text messages at the same time rather than separately

51:16 um no and I wouldn't recommend it I would say that would be pretty annoying um personally but I think technically I guess you can it's going to be two automations but I mean you can set uh two automations up that go out when a booking is created I think you might annoy customers with stuff like that I would just I would do an email or a text or do them kind of you know stagger them

51:37 out a little bit hey if you know the first two emails don't work we're going to send a text or something like that um the contract where to add that um business settings and then terms yeah and chat with us if you have questions um and then Dylan said something along Ong the lines of I'm looking for his earlier about proposals is there a way to I think it was along the lines

52:02 of is there a way for somebody decline a package and a proposal they sent a proposal with multiple packages and so um over no there's not right now um there's two kind of things going on there one is over the years we have had people actually want to decline button on proposals and we've resisted that um we think putting a call to action that says don't do business with me is probably not

52:24 good for sales um you cannot send kind of multiple offers multiple proposals with one link currently it's totally something we should add we thinks it makes a lot of sense um it's it comes up uh common it's a Common Thread I think there's definitely a signal there customers want that we will offer it um it's a little more complicated uh than one would first think um but absolutely you'll be

52:52 able to send proposals but there's no decline kind of package button and no plans to add something like that um in there but we will have multiple proposals with one link option yeah yeah to where yeah kind of a thing that comes up you know oh send me a link to your silver and your gold package and then you know let them choose um so we'll do something there soon um I think that's

53:13 real high L sense and would probably work that if they accept one then all therefore the other are taken out it's not a decline thing exactly you know and so if you have any other questions feel free to raise hands or I will mention two on the proposals you can add add-ons um and they can add and remove those assuming your your permissions allow it so um so that can be you know sometimes

53:38 that's useful but yeah and we got MD saying can you expand the appointment link to be larger than two hours or even better open it up uh to no realistic time constraint and so tell me about the use case there why you would want somebody to kind of book off your time in infinitely um I I think we would have to even for scheduling purposes in order to deliver on our promise I

54:02 don't see why we couldn't have um installation and breakdown scenario um so in other words the appointment is for breaking down the the event am I getting that right yeah and so um it's not necessarily A use case that we're you know thinking of with appointments um but I don't see why we couldn't had more time I don't think anybody's asked for that yeah no it's interesting

54:30 um yeah I started out with it being a thing you typed and then it was kind of like I don't somehow that was annoying so I I made a drop down but um yeah we extend that um we do need some kind of a length though because we need to be able to sync with uh Google Calendar which so we have certain constraints there um and we want we should have a better you know solution for sometimes the breakup

54:54 and set up yeah I think that also comes up you know yeah it's probably a separate feature at some point too with yeah for people to break up because also I know different people do it and it just you know we have a lot of a big variety of customers I guess everybody from you know just one person operating and doing a few gigs a month to um large operations that have people

55:15 dedicated to certain tasks even so but yeah it's interesting yeah I think we kind of considered it more for like um you know I want to set up a a call with somebody or a zoom or things like that so good to know that that's that's something that you're looking to use says we'd love to have one software to rule them all that's our solution yeah yeah I mean I think you

55:34 know um yeah I mean I think know one all-in-one software is popular these days um you know and I think that um you know we continue to roll out features and I think there's you know ways there's some benefits right to having a system that kind of works together um obviously one of our challenges is everybody runs a business a little bit different but I don't see why we

55:57 couldn't have appointments you know go longer than two hours I don't know yeah I we don't really care yeah I don't I think probably it was just put in there at two hours and you know and again like I think these are the things where you know just using it in a way to you know just chat with us if you have questions but yeah but I think using it for tear down and setup is it's

56:18 kind of outside the scope or the spirit of the feature so you might kind of run into some snags there and we should have a better way um of doing that yeah yep but we can expand it yeah certainly awesome and trying to think if there's anything else I think that's about about all I can think of um I would say you know definitely chat with us with uh

56:49 um with any questions yeah yeah um and so thanks for coming everybody we appreciate it um you know and always like I say chat with us from within your account uh we're here to help uh we want to hear your feedback and help you guys uh answer questions um get feature suggestions all that stuff um it's where check Cherry is today you

57:15 know it's results of customer feedback so we really appreciate it um and Matt great job appreciate you driving um and that's kind of our automated message webinar thank you guys guys