We surveyed top performing users to get their personal tips and advice for automating your sales communication with leads and customers in Skipio.
Managing Your Leads and Customers
Always Get Consent from Contacts Before Texting
If you’re not sure you have permission to text someone, don’t put their contact info in Skipio.
Using Skipio to text people who haven’t consented to receive communication could get your messages marked as spam. The mobile carriers might also block your number. The recipients of your texts could even pursue legal action against you.
Need help updating your process for getting consent to text your leads and customers? Meet with our customer success team for a free opt-in audit. This is a free service for all Skipio users!
Clean and Organize Your Contact Data Before Uploading a CSV
Skipio walks you through exactly what information your file needs to include before it can be uploaded. The bare minimum info you need for each contact is first name, mobile number, and email address. Organizing your contact data before uploading will help you avoid adding contacts to Skipio that you don’t have phone numbers for.
Part of cleaning your contact data before you upload it is preparing separate CSV files for current leads, past leads, current customers, past customers, etc. That way you can immediately create groups for those specific contacts.
This is much faster and easier than uploading literally every contact and then trying to add them to specific groups. That would take you HOURS.
Segment Your Contacts Using Groups
At the very least, you need two groups in Skipio: 1) leads and 2) customers.
This allows you to send targeted messages that will get people to act rather than generic messages that get ignored. Think about it: Someone who has never been a customer doesn’t need the same information from you that a long-time customer does.
Top users further segment their contacts into specific groups, especially based on date ranges. This is done both manually and with group automations. Many of them will create new groups for:
- leads generated with different ads
- booked appointments
- held appointments
- missed appointments
- recent customers
- past customers
By segmenting leads and customers not just based on their actions but the week or month the actions took place, top users get a clearer look at how their communication is going. That makes it much easier to know who to reach out to and when.
The number of groups you have the types of groups depends on how you’re generating leads and converting them into customers. The important thing is that you can see at a glance which customers may need to hear from you.
Let Drip Campaigns Do the Work for You
Stop Chasing Leads & Doing Manual Follow-Up
Top users say that Skipio drip campaigns that handle follow-up for you are the best way to stop wasting time chasing leads.
Any user on any plan can build drip campaigns to do personalized outreach and follow-up when you get new leads and customers.
The most common way these top users set up drip campaigns is for reaching out to leads who filled out a form on their website.
1. When a new lead fills out the contact form, each one gets added to a drip campaign.
2. The lead continues getting the messages (based on the delays) until they reply, schedule, etc.
3. This all happens without the user having to remember to follow up with leads again and again.
There’s a reason this is the most popular way to use a drip campaign in Skipio. No lead gets forgotten and the user doesn’t spend excessive time doing manual follow-up tasks. Because even if you don’t have think it’s difficult to manually send the first message to a lead, you must remember to send every single follow-up message after that. Which you’re never going to do.
Not sure what to say in a drip campaign or what delays to set between messages? Look through the templates provided in the Resource Center. Then choose which ones to import with the click of a button. New campaign templates are published 2x/month.
Use Your CRM or Other Apps to Automatically Start and Stop Drip Campaign Messages
You can manually add new leads to drip campaigns as you generate those leads. It doesn’t take long to add a contact to a campaign.
But top users integrate their CRMs, calendars, and other tools so they can set up rules that will trigger drip campaigns to send (and stop) follow-up messages. This means they don’t have to do manual tasks like:
- Uploading new contacts
- Adding contacts to campaigns
- Removing contacts from campaigns
- Confirming appointments and sending reminders
- Adding contacts to groups depending on campaigns they’re in
- Moving contacts to other groups when campaigns start or stop
Skipio’s most popular direct integrations are Zapier, Calendly, and HubSpot. With Zapier, top users link with almost any tool, app, or spreadsheet to build communication processes with Skipio.
Need Help With an Integration?
Meet with our integrations specialist. You might decide it’s worth it to have our team set up and fully manage your automations for you so you don’t have to worry about it at all.
Don’t Let Your Customers Think You’re Spam
The registration process that the mobile carriers require all businesses to complete does help stop scam artists and fraudulent “businesses” from taking advantage of consumers.
As a legitimate, verified business, you already have an advantage in getting your messages delivered.
But just because the carriers deliver your messages doesn’t mean your contacts still can’t think of them as irrelevant or a waste of their time.
Schedule Messages to Your Segmented Groups
Your messages will look spammy if you’re mass texting every contact every time. Your leads and customers may think that it’s just a bot and not bother responding. The mobile carriers may still flag your messages if the messages are repetitive and overly salesy.
Even if your messages get delivered, you also don’t want to give your contacts any reason to report your messages as spam. Texting your leads and customers too often will make them think you’re spamming them.
By sending relevant messages to specific groups of contacts, you avoid these problems. Top Skipio users send targeted messages to particular groups to generate more responses, booked appointments, and even sales.
Here are top user tips for segmenting your contacts.
Test Your Messages
Especially before sending a message to a large group of leads or customers, top users will send that message to themselves or to someone on their team. That way they can see exactly how it will appear on a phone. This can help you determine if a message appears too long or confusing.
Shorter messages with clear questions or directions are more likely to get a customer to take an action.
Testing your messages can also include sending a message to a smaller group of contacts to see what their responses are like before sending it to a larger group. This can help you decide on the exact language or offer you’re considering. If those contacts don’t reply or take an action, that’s the indication that you need to change something about your message.
Avoid Link Shorteners Like Bitly
Links sent with Bitly or other third-party link shorteners hide the true destination of a URL. Top users avoid including shortened links because those links look suspicious. Contacts will avoid clicking on them.
Shortened links also look suspicious to the mobile carriers and your messages may get blocked. This can happen even when your business has gone through the registration process.
We recommend that you put links at the end of your messages so that your contacts’ phones will generate a preview of where the link will send them. That helps you build trust with your customers.
You’re Not Just Paying for Texting
Schedule Time With The Consulting Team
Skipio offers both free and paid consulting services. You have access to our consulting team to get help with tasks like…
- Compliance & opt-in audits: We’ll make sure you’re maximizing potential opt-ins and double-checking that you won’t have issues with the mobile carriers
- Account setup & implementation: We’ll set up your entire account with you and assist you in uploading contacts, organizing groups, etc.
- Integrations setup: We’ll connect your other tools (think CRMs, calendars, etc.) and build automations. For example, we can set up ways to automatically upload contacts, trigger messages to leads, and send review requests to customers.
- Custom message writing: We’ll teach you how to write effective drip campaigns AND write your campaigns for you
- Automation management: We’ll take care of your Zaps and other automations so you don’t have to worry about how they’re running
Request information about consulting here: https://info.skipio.com/request-skipio-consulting
Use The provided Resources to Learn About All The Features & Functionality
You have access to Skipio’s gated Resource Center. This is for customers only. In the Resource Center you’ll find:
- Written how-tos and guides
- Interactive walkthroughs
- Video tutorials
- Prewritten message and campaign templates
- Best practices for communication
The articles, guides, and videos talk about features you’ll want to use to accomplish specific tasks in your business.
Customize the Prewritten Campaign Templates
New drip campaign templates are published 2x/month in the Resource Center. You’ll see these labeled as the “Campaign of the Week” when published.
There’s also a whole library of previously shared campaign templates. Top users import these campaigns into their accounts for quick customization. These campaigns have already been tried and tested, so all that’s left for you to do is make them sound like you.
Get Guidance on Common Business Problems
The Skipio blog is an ungated resource you won’t want to ignore. It covers a wide range of topics relevant to local, service-based businesses. New posts are published at least 1x/week. Sign up for the newsletter to get these updates sent directly to you.
We publish content related to sales, marketing, and communication for small business owners specifically.
Here’s a few recent posts to check out:
- Get More Referrals and Reviews Using Text Messaging
- Maximize BFCM Campaigns Using Skipio
- Understand the Customer Journey