Automation Hack: Send SMS From Airtable
If you’ve spent any time around here, you’ll already know about our love for Airtable, an epic database tool that’s customisable to support any and every type of business, no matter the area of activity. Airtable’s functionality makes it attractive to operations of all shapes and sizes, in and outside of the office.
This automation hack escalates your Airtable abilities to a whole new level: enabling automated SMS functionality from right within Airtable itself.
Through the magic of Airtable, Zapier and Twilio, this automation hack uses Airtable fields to trigger SMS messages in an instant.
The applications for this tool are as customisable as your business needs, but easy examples include the ability to automate appointment reminder SMSes to clients, or the potential to follow up leads via an Airtable field trigger.
Whatever your field of focus, Airtable fields can be shaped for natural integration into your workflow, with SMS triggers adaptable to your specific needs. Perhaps you want to thank your customers automatically once your team in the field mark a task as complete — whether it’s about the big things or the small touches, strategically timed SMSes can level up your entire customer experience.
SMS marketing has been proven to build customer engagement. While promotional emails can remain unread or end up sent straight to the trash, studies have found that SMS achieves an open rate of 98%, with 90% of those opens occurring within the first three minutes of the message receipt.
The format of an SMS’s limitations (with only 160 characters to get your message across) also encourages clear, to-the-point messaging designed to drive your customer to take further action.
Long story short: if you want to speak to your customers, doing it via SMS may just be the shortcut to catching their attention. Whether you’re looking to use SMS for sales and promotions, provide customer service, build an ongoing relationship or generate action, delivering content via SMS increases your chances of cutting through the noise and landing right in the palm of your customer’s hand.
What do you need to provide us with to get this underway?
A template for the SMS, and a note about which field in Airtable you’d like to trigger the SMS.
And that’s as strenuous as it gets.
If you’re in need of more than one automated SMS, further Airtable fields can be customised to trigger custom messages, working alongside each other to enhance automated communication and customer management. For those who are looking to open up two-way text communication with their customer base, our SMS chatbot may be the solution you’re after.
Looking to jump onto the automation hack bandwagon? Check out our other Airtable-related automation hacks, including our New Team Member Onboarding hack or this solution for deleting Airtable records automatically.
