We Tried to Set Up 56 Appointments Just By Texting. The Results Are Staggering.

As you’ve probably come to realize, we’re pretty tired of the same old follow up processes here at FranFunnel. For years, we’ve seen the same mistakes being made repeatedly. And we know why.

1) Change is hard

2) People are busy

3) Results are “good enough” that we can keep the lights on

(I think the phrase is that “necessity is the mother of invention” so perhaps there hasn’t been a necessity?)

But we like to think that those days have come to an end for franchises. The dark days of not getting a hold of leads is over.

And while FranFunnel works as a complete solution to this problem, one of the things we’re really excited about is the ability to text message leads. Our friends over at FranchiseHelp have written about repeatedly about the issues with calling people from a number they aren’t expecting a call from. And we couldn’t agree more.

So one of the mediums of communication we’re pretty excited about is text messaging. With one of our beta testers, we’ve attempted to set up appointments with 56 unique leads using a text message that reads like this:

(Shouldn’t be too hard for you to imagine a similarly worded text for your franchise.)

So we sent a total of 56 text messages.

Any ideas how many texts we got back?

33.

That’s a 59% response rate.

And these aren’t just people telling our tester to shove off. And to prove it, here are all 33 responses:

So at the highest level, simply from text messages, what are we looking at:

• 1 opt out (“No I couldn’t find the franchise”)
  
• 1 foreign language (“After 6:00pm in Spanish please only spanish”)
  
• 1 gobbledygook (“Ill be available rpm today”)
  
• 1 question back (“When?”)
  

So if you take those 4 out, then what do you get?

29 APPOINTMENTS! Yes. You get a 52% appointment rate with just a single medium!

Tired of your low appointment rates? Get your FranFunnel!

This article was written by Eli Robinson, General Manager of FranFunnel.