Sending notifications & alerts from e-txt
“We find using e-txt™ a great asset to the Promotional People agency as with such a large database of people who sometimes need to be contacted at short notice, e-txt™ has really has saved the company valuable time and money by being able to send messages to a large group of people instantly.”
Julie Kingdon
The Promotional People Agency
“I find e-txt™ invaluable I use it to deliver emergency Pubwatch & Offwatch Calls to all Licensed Premises in Prestatyn & Rhyl. I also use it to send information to North Wales Police Officers & our local CCTV control room.
I am the Chairwoman of Prestatyn & District Pub/Offwatch and before I started using e-txt™ some 5 years or more ago I used to operate on a ring around system. However human nature being what it is the Pub at the end of the chain would possibly not get the original message. Even then delivering messages to 23 Pubs would take 28 minutes or more to get around.
"e-txt™ has vastly improved how our organization works, it has been used in the past by North Wakes who had been looking for a lost child and also an elderly gentleman who was suffering from Alzheimer’s both instances were successfully concluded and also saved a lot of Police resources.
Well done e-txt™.”
Norma Vaughan MBII
Prestatyn & District Pub/Offwatch
“My main use of e-txt™ is to keep in touch with members of my Explorer Scout Unit. The Explorers are girls and boys from 14 to 18, and they all are depend on their mobile phones to keep in touch with each other. By using e-txt™ we can remind them about activities and let them know about changes of plan quickly and easily thanks to the e-txt™ group function - and without getting RSI from prodding mobile phone keys.”
Ken Mackenzie
“I use e-txt™ to remind the players in my badminton team that they have a match. Not all of them use email but most have a mobile phone. I usually have to text at a time when they are travelling between work and home so it is quite convenient to use e-txt™. I find it easy because I can touch-type but I am very slow at using a mobile phone to enter text, so being able to use a PC to text is great!”
Marcus Lesniak
Wolverhampton City Council’s Youth and Play Services are responsible for developing youth services to include regular activities, meetings and projects. The council has also used a unique text-in number on publicity and promotional material for summer activity programmes such as One Big Summer, and the Krash Project, a teen magazine. Other uses of an e-txt inbound number include a text-in voting mechanism within the youth council elections, incorporating an automated reply system to confirm the vote – and an Anti-bullying service.
“It (e-txt™) is really straightforward to use and makes getting in touch with young people so much easier. We get them to sign a consent form to say they’re happy to receive messages, and they can always opt- out - although very few do. It means I can write a text like an email in the morning and know that people will be at the centre for a meeting in the evening.”
Sommer Dillon, Wolverhampton Youth and Play Services
“It looks cool, young people expect to see that kind of thing now, and know that they can get in touch by text,”
Mr Potter, Wolverhampton Youth and Play Services
Open to anyone between the ages of 10 to 26, Young Farmers offer a wide range of skills and experiences from organising events and running meetings in local communities, to arranging trips and competing in a wide range of competitions at county, regional and national level.
“It (e-txt™) has been really successful. We’re finding a significant increase in the numbers of members attending meetings after they’ve been reminded by the text messages.
We’re also finding that we receive apologies in advance for absences, in direct response to the messages. These arrive directly into our e-txt™ inbox and are very helpful too.”
Elizabeth Johnson, County Co-ordinator
Yorkshire Federation of Young Farmers’ Clubs
“We have been using e-txt™ for about 8 months with its main aim being improved communication with 6th form students. We have piloted the implementation with about 45 year 12 and 13 students studying ICT, and their parents.
These were grouped by the course studied and year of study, allowing texts to be sent to individuals or groups of students/parents easily.
Typical types of usage are:
- to alert parent to upcoming coursework submission dates
- to let students know of lesson/room changes
- to remind students of hand in dates
- to get feedback from students on brief surveys
- to allow students to communicate information back to teachers
We’ve found a number of benefits which make this a preferred method of communication over email in some circumstances:
- speed of communication
- availability of communication (students check their texts far more frequently than their emails)
- ability of students to communicate with teachers without revealing the teachers’ personal mobile numbers
- parental involvement
Parents and students seem very supportive and costs of texting back have not been an issue.“
Stuart Firth
St. Joseph’s College
“e-txt™ is an utterly brilliant tool we use to communicate with our ‘harder to get hold of’ students. Working in sandwich placements, and being the middle woman between student and employer, you would think that they would want to respond to your emails/pick up the phone when you try to get in touch about employers / interviews. However, this is not always the case….luckily help is at hand in the form of e-txt™; even when students don’t check their emails or pick up their phones, we know they will always pick up a text.
Thanks for providing this great communication tool!”
Jenny Perreau
Placement and Employment Administrator
Nottingham Trent University
“We use e-txt™ to contact clients when we are cancelling or rescheduling classes. All students at our colleges have mobile phones and this is the easiest way to contact them at short notice. We also use the system for social event updates, party invites and college news.”
Luke Simmons
Malvern House International
“My company is TheatreServe and I provide production management and other support services within the world of theatre. I use casual personnel and rely on e-txt™ to check crew availability and give crew calls – especially useful as the messages are waiting for them when they reach a break on their current work or after a show.”
Geoff Wheatley
TheatreServe
“I run a mobile disco business and with the advance with technology for the actual disco, including computer controlled lighting effects and digital players such as MP3 I felt it was time to upgrade to the latest communication devices.
The texting system has come in very handy for contacting clients especially to those who have booked for a wedding. It is always a manic time and just sending a few texts to reassure them that the disco will be there for there special day. It is quick, convenient and does not eat into the client’s manic time of worrying if they have thought of everything.”
Alastair Craig
NightLights Disco
“Vertex Mortgage Services are a leading provider of mortgage business process outsourcing and arrears management for a number of well known mortgage lenders using our own internal mortgage servicing system, staff, and collections expertise.
In our arrears management service we always strive to achieve the maximum returns for our clients and any other key objectives they may have through our highly focused and flexible service. We therefore chose and implemented the e-txt™ messaging software over a year ago as a simple, yet cheap and effective means of contacting our mortgage customers who fall into payment arrears. We actually saw it as a quick and easy means of contacting borrowers who have missed a monthly payment on their mortgage, prompting them to ring our mortgage associate teams to arrange alternate payments.
We were able to easily integrate the software with our back office mortgage servicing system by creating a daily list of Contacts, for import into e-txt™. Response rates are immediate and high. Prior to e-txt™ this texting was undertaken manually for upwards of 200 customers a day, thereby saving us at least 2 man hours effort a day (depending on daily volumes). The cost benefit case for us was a ‘no brainer’ as implementation effort was minimal and cost savings immediate and significant.”
Colin P Whittle
Chief Operating Officer
Vertex Mortgage Services
“I use e-txt™ in a number of ways:
• to send out updates to members who have joined FORCES FITNESS
• to confirm appointments 24hrs before with prospective members
• to send out information to prospective members special offers and new services
My company has been operational since early January and I definitely made the right choice when deciding to go with Dynmark and use e-txt™, it has aided me in closing a number of sales and helps me keep in touch with my members regularly.”
Sean Molino
Forces Fitness
“First of all I wrote a Diary and POS system in Access for our salon and we use e-txt™ to automatically send out appointment reminders each night to clients with appointments the next day. This has really helped clients not to forget their appointments. We can also market clients directly with salon offers using e-txt™.
I also wrote an Internet shop for the business and we use e-txt™ to inform clients when their orders are dispatched.”
The-Salon.net
“We use e-txt™ for our monthly event in asking people to confirm their attendance. It has been so popular that we are now shifting from using the telephone to make calls to merely texting reminders.
In the past we have also used e-txt™ for voting in a competition. Again it proved so popular with the participants that we anticipate to use the same method every year.
We are now looking to integrate e-txt™ with our Sage CRM system which will in effect allow us to roll out a complete solution for our clients.”
Jay Patel
Technology Innovation Centre
“Suffolk Youth & Connexions help young people find employment and training. Our own research suggests that young people prefer to receive information by text message than post or email and are more likely to respond to this medium of communication.
We use the e-txt™ system to communicate with the young people of Suffolk. We send them vacancy details by text and also find it a useful method of sending details of upcoming events to a large number of people quickly and cheaply.
e-txt™ also helps our business by speeding up the recruitment process helping us to fill employer's vacancies more quickly and giving our young people the best chance possible to find quality employment and training.
We use the e-txt™ system on a daily basis and believe that its existence is crucial to our success.”
Rachel Bell
Suffolk Youth & Connexions Service
“We utilise e-txt™ via our interactive recruitment website. Each time we add a new vacancy to our website database it matches up with candidates looking for a new position and then sends them a text message. The response is great and a real added benefit to all our users. Well done e-txt™.”
Mark Lennard
JPL group
“I have to say that the effectiveness and ease off your text programming is fantastic.
It helps us to stay in touch in a very personal way with large sections from our database.
We get some great feedback from our customers and prospects when they receive one of our personalised e-txt’s.
We use it to confirm attendances at events, seminars. We use it to announce new products and special deals, and also to send out friendly welcome messages to our new students.”
Gerard O'Donovan
Noble Manhattan Coaching Ltd
“We use it on thegadgetroom.com to text our customers. So as soon as an item leaves our warehouse, courier tracking numbers are text to customers and again when shipment is due out for delivery.
We plan to expand usage to include product alerts and other marketing offers.”
The Gadget Room
“e-txt™ has been a great solution for us. We’ve started using it to text regular customers offer codes which they can use at the online check-out to get money off certain items.
We’re also looking into implementing an automated system whereby online customers are notified when their items have been despatched to them so they can know when to expect their products.
Another idea to appeal to high street shoppers is to schedule messages to be sent at 10am on a Saturday morning, telling people about the offers that we have on in stores. Hopefully people will then forward these on to their friends too.
The possibilities of exploiting the software are extremely broad and the message rates themselves are very reasonable, so we plan to make the best use of it!”
Kris Bezdyk
Field & Trek
“We use e-txt™ for several reasons, mainly…
A) to inform customers of access code changes in our marinas – meaning customers not only definitely know but they can keep the new code with them on their phone
B) to remind customers of their early payment discount deadlines – encourages people to call and pay when they get their text – less easy to ignore/forget than a letter
C) to remind customers of forthcoming events – just allows us to hit a lot of people quickly and they can’t totally ignore a text!”
Lucy Thomson
Premier Marinas Limited
“I have used e-txt™ to offer clients the option to receive an SMS alert whenever we make new coverage available to them in their members area. Webitpr offers a news distribution and monitoring service, so we need to alert them whenever new coverage becomes available. We do this primarily via email, but e-txt™ has allowed us to offer the option of receiving these alerts via SMS - which can be priceless for a client out of the office and away from email.”
Jonathan Dolby
Webitpr Limited
“It’s proved to be a life-saver when there’s been an emergency shortly before events. We have had times when any other form of communication wouldn’t have been received and we would have been in danger of disappointing our customers. But e-txt™ came to the rescue. Having directions to events with them at all times has also been a hit – people always appreciate confirmation that an event is proceeding, and clarification about where it is.
The facility to run occasional promotions to our database of customers is also a great, cost-effective option.”
Mario Lafond
Xdate (Speed-dating agency)
“Texting has become a way of life and as a leader of a large multi generational church I use texting to keep in touch with people who are involved in leading groups, running team, involved in Sunday services and generally as a way to encourage them.
I send out a weekly bible verse to over a hundred people – mainly university students and singles at work and they find this both helpful and inspirational as it brings something special to where they are, at a time which is not expected. It allows people to feel they belong even if they cannot attend a service or meeting.”
Clive Collier
Hazlemere Church
“I can use e-txt™ to update my rugby teams - can be up to 30 texts at a time - the rugby players really only look at their email irregularly so this is a reliable way of organising a bunch of 18 to 22 year olds playing rugby. I even manage to get last minute info through using this system!”
David Judd
“For Saros the benefit of e-txt™ is the immediacy of a text message. It enables us to get the interception of a phone call -i.e. we control the timing and content - without the cost or intrusiveness of a phone call. For our work, we use SMS to invite or remind people about research events - for the invites, the lack of irritation/ intrusiveness is key: Recipients can review the message at leisure and respond if they want more information, at a time that suits them.
For reminders of events people are registered for, it's the timing that's paramount... we are always striving to improve turnout rates at our events, and there's nothing like a quick beep in their own pocket, confirming the address etc, to get people turning up at the right time and place!”
Maya Middlemiss
Saros Research Ltd