Text It Helper

Hello and welcome to MyFusion Helper. My name is Troy Broussard and in this short video I’m going to explain how to use our Text It Helper. Now the Text It or SMS Helper allows you to send short text messages out from Infusionsoft directly from Campaign Builder and it’s super easy to use.

So, we’re going to start out with showing you how to set up a simple text message helper inside of MyFusion Helper. Then after that we’re going to show you how to deploy it into Infusionsoft and some of the things that you might want to do in conjunction with text messaging. Then lastly, we’re going to come back and talk about some of the use cases for this in your business and how it could help you out. All right. So, let’s go ahead and jump right in.

So, here we are already logged in to MyFusion Helper and the first thing we want to do is click on the big green button here. We can just type in text and it’ll go right to it, the text or SMS. Then we can give it a name for our helper. So, I’m just going to call it Text It Demo. Then we’ll go ahead and click on configure to create this helper and set it up.

Now the way this works is that you’re going to select a phone number from where you want it to be sent from and there’s just a few options here. It’s just if you want to show it coming from the west coast or the east coast or whatever. It’s not all that important. But you probably want to use the same number consistently in your messaging so that they see the same number as a return all the time on their phone.

Now, the next thing you want to do is select the field that you want to use. Most everybody is going to send to the phone one but if you have another field set up for your cell phone. Maybe you used phone one for the business and phone two for cell phone, however you want to do that. You can select that field.

Okay. So, when we create this message we have the ability to merge information in through merge fields from Infusionsoft custom and standard fields. So, you can create a message like this and put “Hey,” first name, “just a quick reminder for our upcoming phone call for tomorrow. Here’s that link again.” I do recommend that you use some type of a link shortener and put in short links in here, even if they’re going to click on them. Because many times people get the text message but they’re going to open it on their computer sometimes if it’s got a link attached, so best practice. That’s a strong recommendation. All right.

Then we’re almost ready to go. The last thing to note is that you do have to agree to our terms of service for the overage charges. Okay? Text messaging, you get a hundred free SMS messages each month. Then over a hundred we charge you at $0.04 per message on the same card on file that you have for you subscription. So, this is just a reminder that you do have to confirm that and that you are going to pay a per fee message. Now you get a hundred of them free though and a lot of people are using these to confirm registrations for webinar attendance and small stuff. You’re not typically doing this to ten thousand at a time. It’s typically used for small transactional. That’s that way it works. Okay.

Then you go ahead and click create helper. Just like any of the other helpers when you go to deploy it you simply copy and paste the URL. So, we can copy the link here for Infusionsoft and then we can switch into Infusionsoft. What I did here is set up kind of an example for you to follow. I’m going to go ahead and show you this. We’d go ahead and go in here and the HTTP snip it and post in that URL, paste it in here, and you would be good to go. So, that’ all it would take to set it up.

But what I wanted to show you in this sequence is that this may be useful for you as well. We have another helper that we use all the time in conjunction with the Text It Helper and that is one that checks for the phone validation. So, you might have something like this where there opting in and maybe they’re providing a phone number and maybe they’re not, so you may want to route it through a check first to say if it’s a valid phone number then send them a text, if it’s not don’t do anything, right? That’s something that you may want to look at as well. That is also covered in MyFusion Helper. If you went into there and Look Up and Validation Helper that’s the one you would want to use to do that. So, that’s a common thing that we build into these unless you know for a fact that you’ve already got their phone number because it’s a required field, it’s something you may want to consider. Okay?

That’s all there is to it. Like every one of our other helpers it’s a simple copy and paste in of the API and everything is really configured here inside of the app itself. All right. Makes it very easy to send out text messaging just right involved in the middle of your campaign wherever you want to.

Okay. So, we talked about how to set it up. We also talked about how to deploy it into Infusionsoft and how to also use it with the Phone Validation Helper as well to kind of verify that you’re sending to the right people.

Then another thing that I wanted to talk about is just some examples of when people are using text messaging. One of the most common is as a reminders to boost attendance on their webinar. So, when somebody signs up for a webinar giving them the ability to request text messaging reminders is a strong recommendation. That is going to allow you to just ping somebody a few minutes before the webinar. Remind them and get them on the webinar. You can’t sell them anything if you can’t get them to show up, right? So, text messaging for webinar reminders works very, very well.

Another thing that our clients are using them for is like specials and promotions and creating like a VIP list. It looks just like a subset of their marketing list that they do text messaging promos and stuff too. You’re guaranteed almost a 100% open rate and so it’s a great way of taking that hyper responsive part of your list and giving them even more access to you and the ability to push stuff to them quickly and easily.

Lastly, another example that some of our clients are using this for is with billing failure issues and expiring credit cards. So, obviously we have the automation inside of Infusionsoft, a trap for these scenarios but taking it one step further and hitting them with a text message as well is a great way of following through with that, right? Because most anybody that is paying on credit card will have provided their phone number to you already as part of that process. If it happens to be a cell phone which most people are using their cell phones nowadays, then the likelihood is that you can reach out to them and engage them to get their billing failures and credit cards straightened out with you that way. Okay?