Text reminders

Business → Automation → Text reminders. Connect a Twilio account and Meridian sends each client a text message the evening before their shoot.

Photographers who turn this on stop having no-shows. It is one of the cheapest things you can do.

What you need

A Twilio account of your own. Twilio is the company that actually sends the texts. From your Twilio account you need three things:

• the Account SID (it starts with AC);
• the Auth token;
• a phone number you have bought from Twilio to send from.

Twilio bills you directly, at their rates. We do not add anything or resell texts, so there are no credits to buy from us and none to run out of mid-season.

Setting it up

On Business → Automation → Text reminders, under Your account:

1. Paste your Account SID and Auth token.
2. In The number they come from, type your Twilio number in full international

form: start with +61 and leave off the first 0 of the number.

1. In What it says, write your message, or leave it blank to use ours (see

below).

1. Tick Send a text the evening before each shoot.
2. Press Save.

Once it is working, the top of the screen shows how many texts went out this month and how many failed.

When it sends

Six in the evening, the day before the shoot, in your own timezone.

• Nothing before 8am or after 9pm. A text that would fall outside those hours waits until 8am — and never arrives after the shoot has started.
• Somebody who books tomorrow's slot this evening is texted straight away rather than not at all (within those same hours).
• One per booking. Even if something goes wrong on the way, a client is never texted the same reminder twice.

Only confirmed bookings get one.

What it says

Leave What it says blank and the text reads like this:

Ashgrove Studio: see you tomorrow at 10:00am for your family session at 42 Beach

Road.

To write your own, use these words in curly brackets, and they are filled in:

Keep it under 160 characters. A longer text is billed as two.

Phone numbers

Clients type their number the way they always do. It is read in the format of your country — the one set as Where you are under Tax in Settings → Settings.

A number written the international way — +61 4… — works wherever you are, as do numbers starting 0011 or 00.

A landline, or a number that cannot be read as a mobile, is skipped rather than sent to and charged for. Those clients still get the reminder email the day before, so nothing breaks.

Replies

Clients do reply, usually to say they are running late. To receive replies, Twilio needs to know where to pass them on:

1. Under Replies, copy the web address shown.
2. In your Twilio account, open the settings for your phone number and paste that

address where Twilio asks what to do when a message comes in. Save it there.

From then on, each reply is:

• emailed to you, at the reply-to address under Settings → Settings;
• shown at the top of your Overview until you read it.

Replies are matched to the most recent booking that number was texted about, which is almost always what they are replying to. A text from a number that was never texted is still kept rather than dropped — it is somebody who has changed phones, or a wrong number, and both are worth seeing.

Nothing is answered or moved automatically. "Make it 3" might mean a different day, so it comes to you.

Every reply is checked with Twilio before it is accepted, using your auth token, so nobody can send you a fake one that looks like it came from a client.