Demo: The Power of Text Messaging for Every Industry

In this live demo, Casey Loewenthal and Dave Asheim, explore industry-specific solutions, automated messaging, and customer engagement strategies. Find the transcript and time stamps below.

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[00:00:00] Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, thanks everybody for joining us today. I am the customer success manager at Engage by Cell. We my role here is really to help our current clients learn best practices, tips and tricks on the platform, and then ultimately just be successful with the services. And I'm joined by Dave Asheim, our CEO and founder of the company. So Engage by Cell's been around since early 2000s, about 16 years. We are a cloud based no download platform. Today we're going to be discussing text messaging. But we do have quite a few other products that if you're interested in learning about you can reach out to to our team and we can set a full demo with you.

But we work extensively with HR workforce development. As some of you have hopped on here. No. nonprofits, museums, cultural institutions, associations and that kind of goes up from there. As you guys know, text messaging is a very wide ranging tool that can be effective in a lot of different industries.

So if you can think about a way to use text messaging, it's more than likely a good resource and a tool for you guys to add on. So we're constantly adding new verticals and we have 4, 000 clients and currently work in 10 different countries. Right. A few of you may recognize your organization on here, but this is a sample of some of the few organizations or a few of the organizations that we currently work with now.

And you can tell or kind of a wide range of of industries here showing kind of our wide breadth of text message usage.  

[00:01:39] Dave Asheim: And Casey, we have room for more logos on this page.  

[00:01:44] Casey Loewenthal: Yep.  

[00:01:44] Dave Asheim: Absolutely. The logos won't  

[00:01:46] Casey Loewenthal: get smaller, the page will just get bigger.  

[00:01:48] Dave Asheim: That's  

[00:01:48] Casey Loewenthal: right. Alright, so let's dive into text messaging.

That's what you're all here for. So, sort of text messaging in a nutshell is To do business texting to consumers or to employees or to other businesses, you do need to work with an organization like ourselves in order to get approved by the phone carriers to do texting. We have both short codes and long codes available.

Difference of, of the two, short code is just like a 56512. And a long code is most organizations will get a unique 10 digit phone number in an area code near you which is unique to just your organization. And shows a little bit of like a local number for your employees or your visitors or your local Workforce clients that are looking to, to find jobs.

[00:02:41] Dave Asheim: Casey in the chat window, we've got a comment about using it for youth reminders. I mean, if there's a, if there's a group you want to text, it's the youth you try sending, let me know how, how your email was going. My guess is that texting is. probably 10 times more impactful than sending emails. So yeah,  

[00:03:03] Casey Loewenthal: absolutely.

And then with texting you, you purchase bundles of messages. So kind of like credits, you load up onto your account and consider each phone number that you push a message to, to be a credit. And you can kind of, Allocate your messages how you guys wish and use them as frequently as you want.

[00:03:25] Dave Asheim: Casey are people using a personal cell phones? I'll take the first part you can take the second as an admin, you know right now if you want to communicate with 20 job seekers or 20 people that To any employees or whoever, you've got to use your own personal phone, load them in and send a text and then they can reply all and it's kind of a mess.

So from an admin point of view, in 6 7 minutes, Casey will show you the screen, you have a portal where you'll be able to send this all out. Now Casey, from a recipient point of view, do you think most are using business phones these days or just using their own phone?  

[00:04:06] Casey Loewenthal: I'd say most is probably their personal cell phone certain industries and certain job roles.

You'll be given the kind of the work phone has its own kind of hurdles, I guess, in terms of text messaging, but in terms of communication, it's. It's the preferred communication way of communicating in 2024. We're all all over the place. You're in the office. You're working from home. You're on the road.

You always have your cell phone on you no matter where it is. So if a message needs to get across, whether it's personal or business related, that sending a text is, is the fastest way. There's the statistics are, are pretty high. It's 90 percent of messages are read within the first few minutes and that's.

Down from 20 percent of emails that are ever read in terms of open rates. So if the, if you have a text, it was read, I always like to use the example that I don't think anybody on this call, I'm going to go out on a limb. None of you have 50 unread text messages on your phone currently right now, but I bet we all have 50 unread emails in our inbox that we have zero intention of ever going to, to read.

[00:05:10] Dave Asheim: We should ask in the chat window. All right, who has the most unread text? Go ahead and fess up. This is a confession. It's probably, I bet the most is like two. Chantelle, you better not have 111. Okay, Stacey's got zero. Chantelle, if you really have 111. You should not be on this webinar right now. You should be going through those texts because you might have some great offers.

Nine. This is so funny. This is so good. Casey, there was a great question about, do I have to have permission to send a text? I'll, I'll take a crack at that. The best practices, what the carriers say is you should have permission from a person that you send a text to before you send a text. Now, having said that.

It, I think it depends a little bit on your audience. If you're sending a text message to your workforce, and when they started the company, they gave you their phone number, they might have had, you might have in your HR documents, a clause that it's okay to. Send me text messages. So I think an awful lot of our clients, they will send a text saying, would you like to remain on this list?

If not reply, stop so we can help you with the guidelines on that. Okay.  

[00:06:36] Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, the the double opt in is a good way but honestly everyone, like, receive, we may not receive as many as Chantel, but we get a lot of text messages throughout the day, so it's not as abrasive as it was. So every text you send out allows for kind of an opt out language, simply reply stop and they're removed, it's not.

It's not a big deal these days. Yeah.  

[00:07:00] Dave Asheim: In a nutshell, Casey, this slide is if you want someone to, to look at your message, you send it by text and every day we probably sign up five or 10 departments. Sometimes it's the, it's the, it's, it's a communication department at a park and rec or at a community college or.

It could be all of you that are on the call should have your own personal platform, whether you use ours or somebody's to send text messages, because if you want someone to read your material or to click that link, there is just nothing that gets people's attention like a text.  

[00:07:40] Casey Loewenthal: Absolutely. With the text you a simple text or SMS is.

About 160 characters, including the opt out language after that, it's around 130. You can also do what's called a multimedia message, MMS, and that allows you to include images short video and audio clips, GIFs, and then go a lot more in terms of the character count. And I'll, we'll do a little example in a little bit and I'll push out both SMS and MMS.

So you guys can kind of see the difference.  

[00:08:13] Dave Asheim: Lisa asked a good question. How can you distinguish between a mobile phone and maybe a work phone? It's pretty hard to do. I think it starts with when you communicate with somebody, whether it's an HR form or a workforce form, or in Diane's case, they're joining your association or something.

Have a, have a box. I give you permission to send me text messages, and here's my mobile number. Otherwise, through our platform, you can upload your whole list, Lisa, when it's sent out, and it hits the carriers. The carriers give us a code. Was that a mobile number, or was that a landline? And then we don't ever send them to landlines again, and then you can look to see that that was a landline.

[00:08:59] Casey Loewenthal: Absolutely. So that first initial push will provide you that kind of workable list moving forward, and it will just want to include it in future text messages, so you know who you're actually targeting.  

[00:09:11] Dave Asheim: Keep the questions coming.  

[00:09:13] Casey Loewenthal: We also have personal text options. So for some of you, you may know that the user's phone number or the name of their phone number associated to it.

You can actually include that in the message. So I can say, Hi, Dave. Your, your bill is due coming up this month. And then it's a little more personal in terms of knowing that you're trying to direct them. to them.  

[00:09:36] Dave Asheim: Casey, we've got great questions. So since this is informal, let's go through some of the questions.

Does the opt out count as a second message sent? If you upload a list and there are 50 cell phones and 50 unidentified phones, that will count as a text in the units to everybody. But then when you send them in the future, the 50 won't even go to the carrier. In case you, you, you, you answered that. Do we have a masked text message option?

Yeah, we've got two, two flavors here. We've got something called text chat, which in a minute or two, Casey is going to show all of you where you could send a text to 10 people and they can reply. And then it goes into a dashboard where Casey can have 10 different conversations going all through this dashboard, the recipient thinks, Oh my gosh, Casey is personally texting me, but it's really all coming through a dashboard.

You could also upload Casey. You have clients that send a million to 2 million texts. A month, maybe more. So plenty of clients use this for giant mass texting and then others use it for just one on one, one personal conversations. MMS, Casey answer Stacy's question about this ability to send images and clips.

Do they need a separate account or can it just be done through the same platform?  

[00:11:05] Casey Loewenthal: It can be done through our platform. You don't need a separate phone number or anything. It's just a turn on feature that we have. You do purchase different bundles. The messages bundles are priced differently with the phone carriers.

And then you'll have X amount of SMS, X amount of MMS to work with. The process of building out an MMS is slightly different. Both are super easy. To build just kind of a step by step process. So no, you, you do not need a separate account.  

[00:11:32] Dave Asheim: Xenia has got a question. If you're not comfortable using your cell phone for work related text, two ideas there, one, the organization.

Many organizations that are using our platform have different, different buckets. One is emergencies, one might be benefits, and one might be general news. So I think most people will opt into the emergency text notifications. So I think the answer is let people choose that bucket that they're interested in, but not get texts about 10 different topics.

We have a backup, which is an email system. So all of our accounts come with both a texting system and an email system. So for those 5 percent of people that don't want to get these messages that have been scheduled by text, they can still get it by email. Lynn, yes, we'll send you that recording. Casey, take the Jennifer question.

[00:12:37] Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, so simple answer is sort of. It's a really high number in terms of what the maximum is per day. And you would know that at some point based on kind of the carrier decisions. It's really like T Mobile is the one that isn't on board as much as the other carriers. So there is a daily limit of T Mobile numbers specific.

It's really high in the 20, 000, 30, 000, 40, 000. So we've hit that number. But if you are going to be sending upwards of a hundred, 200, 000 messages a day, then we would work with you to find out what that number is and kind of cap those daily batches. So you don't hit that number.  

[00:13:20] Dave Asheim: Yeah. It's pretty rare that any  

[00:13:22] Casey Loewenthal: of our clients ever hit that.

Yeah. So Glenda good to see you on here. Yeah. 800 numbers. You're fine. You can get to 8, 000, 80, 000 and probably be fine as well.  

[00:13:32] Dave Asheim: Yeah. It's when you send a million. It's interesting, everybody. What the carriers have done is pretty clever. They're trying to stop phishing, spoofing, and bad people. So when you fill out your paperwork to get your 10 digit phone number, they rate you.

Isn't that right, Casey? Yeah. It's like on a scale based on your use case. And then that will set up different levels for how much you can send. A political campaign typically can't send as many as, let's say, an authorized charity. So, it, it depends a little bit about your organization.

[00:14:09] Casey Loewenthal: Diane, yes, we will show the dashboard in just a moment. We're going to kind of walk through some of it and have you guys kind of take part. There is also a scan to opt in. I will be pushing out some messages here in a few minutes. So use this as an opportunity to pre opt in. So if you open up your camera on your phone and you scan this text.

or scan this QR code, it will open up a text message and you can opt in and then I'll be pushing out a couple messages in a moment. So we've kind of touched on some of these throughout the questions, but you do not use your personal cell phone your organization will be set up with a phone number and use our dashboard to push out messages.

Even message replies that you get will all be through the dashboard and you can use your personal device, to push messages back, but from the phone number set up on your guys account.

Building your list can be done a few different ways as Dave mentioned, getting people to opt in, so they scan the QR code just like you guys did, or they manually scan manually type in the text with the phone number. You can also upload lists of contacts through an Excel file or integrations that we can do.

You can segment your lists as much as you guys want, so unlimited amount of lists and unlimited subscribers within our platform. And there is the opt out language automatically in messages that go out.

So with your messages you simply write out the message you choose the list, and then you choose the date and time that it goes out. So I think that's one of the best features of this, is you can actually schedule when the message goes out. So you could be, have a slow Friday afternoon and schedule the next year and a half worth of messages to go out, choose the list, set the date and time.

Never even sign back in and those messages will automatically go out. With sending out batch messages from your personal phone, you got to create a group text and that message has to go out at the exact time that you do it. You can't say, Hey, it's 11 o'clock at night. I want this to go out at nine o'clock in the morning.

You got to come back in at nine o'clock and push out that message. So being able to schedule out the messages is is one of the best features. We do have what's called drip messages or sequencing where based on when someone opts in, they can receive a series of messages over minutes, hours, days, months that you guys set.

That's a popular one for our onboarding clients for maybe new hires to get a series of messages over the first 90 days or so to help kind of the onboarding process. And then we also have a text chat feature, which allows you to kind of, kind of like a help desk or responses in on the fly that allow you to do it both from your personal along with the dashboard and have one on one communications, whether you're a caseworker or help desk or a docent at a museum or art gallery answering questions.

That's pretty cool feature that a lot of our organizations are taking advantage of.

Back end reporting is robust, so you'll get all the kind of metrics that you guys need in terms of how many messages are sent how many are delivered If you include links, which is one of the most popular things to do within our system, is push out a message, have a link, take them to another action you'll have rates of clicks.

So who clicked the link? How many times was the link clicked? You'll also be able to pull the reverse of who didn't click the link and maybe target those phone numbers in kind of a different approach.

You guys have thrown some use cases on here, which is great, but some of the most popular use cases, reminders for events just general information, whether that's employee related job related embedding links, so forms, surveys, polls. Taking them to sign up for memberships. As I mentioned, you can attach photos, flyers, short clips.

Marketing promotions is a big one. Send a text to opt in to a contest. You can make a donation through the system as well. And one on one conversations. But if any of you guys have other use cases that you haven't mentioned yet, feel free to throw those into the chat.

Angela had a question about logging in. Yeah, so you can have as many login users on our system as you'd like. The configuration varies in terms of do they get their own phone number. That's kind of on a per case basis, but in terms of logins. You can have as many employees log in and we have different administrator roles that you can assign to them, which limits or provides more access to different parts of the platform.

[00:18:45] Dave Asheim: We have some clients, Casey, where there are 70 or 80 case managers and they all have their own phone number. So they all log in. They just see their 10 or 15 people they're working and that's just now part of their, their day. And they love it because people are replying. They'll send a text out at 9, 10, 9, 15, people are replying back.

[00:19:08] Casey Loewenthal: Correctly. All right. So we're about to dive into showing you guys kind of the system. If you haven't yet scanned the QR code to opt in feel free. Otherwise I am going to.  

[00:19:21] Dave Asheim: Or text in, you can either scan the code and it'll open up texting or you can text in. And now Casey is going to start sending out some text and show you how the platform works.

[00:19:33] Casey Loewenthal: All right. So when you guys texted in, you opted into what's called a primary keyword. This is kind of your standard response that someone gets when they text in and you're opted into a list today. I can see all of those subscribers. Some of you may have already been opted in from a previous list.

But other than that, it does not provide name information necessarily. So you'd have to retrieve that another way. But a lot of times you don't necessarily need the name. In terms of then pushing out a message, I can then create a brand new message and send it in. So thank you.

Appreciate you all joining us today. Please reply back to this text with a question. So this opt out language I've mentioned a couple times is automatically built in there. Character accounts are tracked here. You can also insert URLs directly from some of our other features, as well as copying and pasting your own links here.

And it'll use a shortened URL and also provide you that tracking details of those links. You choose the list or lists you want it to go to. So as I mentioned, unlimited lists. In the right hand side is the amount of subscribers you have on those lists. If I'm on 10 lists and I sent and I choose all lists, I would only receive the message one time.

So you're making sure that everybody gets the message, but you don't have to worry about sending someone five, six, seven messages. Then you choose the date and time that you want it to go out. Otherwise, in our case, we just want to send it, make sure, and then if all goes to plan, you guys received a text from 56512.

[00:21:30] Dave Asheim: Let us know in the chat window if you got a text, and go ahead and reply with anything you like. It can just be hi Casey, doesn't really matter. Angela, great. Thanks Chantel.  

[00:21:46] Casey Loewenthal: If you get a reply, there is sort of an out of office reply, so to say that you can set up. We have it turned off on this one, so you shouldn't get a reply back, but you can say what you guys want for specific.

Maybe this number's not monitored 24 7. send them to an FAQs on your website or a customer service phone number or an email to contact your team or a specific case manager via email. But in, in our case those responses are going into the text message Q& A and we can see different responses, and reply back directly to someone and say, Thank you for joining.

How can I help? And this is going directly to Angela. Hopefully that's all right. And now just that one communication is going to Angela. We're not doing mass group texts with, with people that you guys don't necessarily know.

Mentioned MMS messaging. So I'm going to push out a message to you guys from that section. So we have the. employee birthday. This is one that some of our organizations take advantage of. You can upload employee birthdays or anniversaries and our system can push out a message to them on that specific day, which is kind of a good employee morale.

But I'm going to just send this now. And you guys should all receive a little gif of one little company environment and that is our MMS feature where you can kind of use a lot more characters and make it a little bit more personalized.

I mentioned a sequencing feature just so you guys can have a quick look at it. This is building a day by day sequence. So day 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 of staggered messages based on the time that everyone opts in.

Now, some of you may have questions about costs of services. I'll let you take this one, Dave.  

[00:23:53] Dave Asheim: You know, we have a hosting fee that you either pay a year in advance or you can pay monthly. If you're a one man, one woman, small department, might be a hundred bucks a month or so and then goes up based on how many people in your department need to use it.

But the point is to get started, it's not, it's not a break the bank kind of a thing. You buy text message bundles. Couple hundred bucks gets you one bundle. And then as you buy more, the price comes down and then the phone companies charge 232 a year to get your own 10 digit number. So for a few hundred dollars, you can get started using texting, upload your list, make sure everybody is happy.

Send out some initial text messages. Casey is the guru here and we'll help you get that started. So within a day or two. You're ready to start working and engaging with your audience by texting. And it's designed to and the price is designed to not break the bank.

[00:25:00] Casey Loewenthal: So next steps, if, if we got you interested, at least to continue the conversation today. Just request a demo from our team you can shoot, put your email in the chat and we can have someone reach out to you, or you may have been contacted throughout the process of reminders, you can reply back to those emails as well to get ahold of us and then we'll, based on your use case, decide on a package size, goes through contract process, like most.

Kind of business to business and then once the paperwork is completed we set you up with getting set up through the phone carriers for your phone number, and then we get training on the board, whether that's with me or Fred de Guzman, some of you may know but we got a whole team behind you that help get you guys going and help you find the value in the services.

[00:25:49] Dave Asheim: Taylor asks a question about integration. Taylor, the answer is probably yes. We have something called an open API, and that means that other systems can come in and grab info, or we can come in and grab info. So, let's just set a time to get my software engineer on the call with somebody from your IT shop, Taylor, and we'll see how easy it would be to do that.

Question about a contractor in Texas, Casey, I don't think we work with a reseller, but we have about 30 workforce development and government contracts. Maybe one of those already has something that would help with getting through the procurement process. So maybe reach out to Casey or me directly and we'll see if we've got somebody already in place.

How long do carriers take to get the number? And you don't have to choose a carrier,  

[00:26:47] Casey Loewenthal: right, Casey? Yeah. So the phone number is approved across all carriers. So you don't have to worry about that. Even the, some of the smaller cricket wireless, they'll all receive the message. You don't have to worry about that.

It takes about as short as three days to as long as a couple of weeks depending on kind of the load of, of the carriers. In terms of how many phone numbers are getting set up, but not a long time is kind of the short answer.  

[00:27:14] Dave Asheim: Yeah.  

[00:27:14] Casey Loewenthal: We'll be waiting too long.  

[00:27:17] Dave Asheim: What are some of the other use cases you folks are thinking of as you, you know, all of you are in different use cases, Chantelle's in the museum industry and Taylor is in probably park and rec.

So what are some of the, the use cases that come to mind that texting might be helpful for go ahead and put them in the chat if you would. And ask any other question before we break for the day.

[00:27:49] Casey Loewenthal: Thank you all for joining us today.  

[00:27:51] Dave Asheim: Yeah. Yeah. We love talking about it because texting is just so powerful and the results are really instantaneous. Orientation flyers. Casey, how would you how would they send out an orientation flyer? I guess a couple of different ways, right?  

[00:28:10] Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, I mean from the onboarding process, you could have them in a list and, and push out that message.

They could scan a code to go directly to a message that, that has that included in it. So yeah, a few different ways to do that as well.  

[00:28:24] Dave Asheim: Could be an image and it's sent as an MMS. So they tap the image and up pops a flyer, something just that easy, or a link to a website.  

[00:28:35] Casey Loewenthal: Reminders to current board nurses.

Yep, exactly. You can set reminders in there. You could have them in different lists based on when they're set to expire. So monthly, weekly, however granular it gets and those messages will go out.  

[00:28:49] Dave Asheim: Mm hmm. All right. Bye Chantel.

Thanks, Stacy. By the way, anybody that wants a demo, email Casey or me, or put your email here in the chat. We'll set up a time, we'll do a Zoom call, Teams call, and let you all play with it. Get you set up, and I think you'll be hooked. It's just so darn powerful.

Tater's asking about different permission levels for staff. Tater, when you get this account, there are about five different levels, from a super admin user all the way down. So you decide whether that person in your, in your team has access to everything, or just this one phone number. But you can get as granular as you like.

We will send everybody the PowerPoint and send everybody a final text, just to thank you and a copy of the video for tomorrow. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Thanks for joining us today. We'll hopefully work with you in the future. See you soon.

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