6 ways to automate ClickSend SMS

With a million things vying for your customers' attention at any given time, it can feel impossible to keep your business on their radar. Your best bet is to be flexible, responsive, and available on whatever communication channel works best for them. 

ClickSend SMS is a multi-channel business messaging app that lets you interact with your prospects and customers over text, voice, email, and even traditional channels like mail and fax. You can use ClickSend to juggle multiple messaging channels and create effective communication strategies from one accessible hub.

But as your customer base grows, it can still be hard to manage your contacts and stay on top of crucial conversations. Thankfully, you can use a few Zaps—our word for automated workflows—to connect ClickSend SMS to the other apps you use every day. Automatically send messages, streamline your contacts across marketing tools, and cut down on manual importing and exporting. Here are some of the top ways to help you get started. 

Skip ahead

• Connect with leads

• Save new contacts to a spreadsheet

• Connect your marketing communication tools

• Keep your team in the loop

• Auto-reply to texts

• Connect to your other apps with webhooks

Connect with leads

There are seemingly endless ways to find leads, from social media ad campaigns to inbound email inquiries and form submissions. But no matter where you find a prospect or how you store their contact information, one thing stays the same: you need to follow up with them immediately. 

The best time to contact a lead is when they're most interested, and that means sending a text right after they click an ad or submit a contact form. Automating ClickSend SMS lets you set up templates for multiple messaging workflows—from transactional SMS messages to marketing funnels—so as soon as a prospect appears on your radar, they receive the right message at the right time.

From spreadsheets

Maybe you capture leads using a Google Form or you export customer purchase information to Google Sheets from an eCommerce tool. Instead of manually inputting these new contacts into your messaging tool, use these Zaps to send SMS messages for new or updated rows in Google Sheets or Excel. Send welcome messages to new leads or notify members of your team by text or email whenever a new contact appears.

From form submissions

Form builders are great tools for collecting information from leads, but you still need an easy way to transfer their contact info to your messaging app. These Zaps start a conversation with leads by sending an SMS in ClickSend whenever a new form is submitted in your form builder.

From ad campaigns and funnels

When a prospect clicks on your Facebook ad or visits your ClickFunnels landing page, it's important to follow up with them right away. But hopefully, you're getting too much traffic and interest to keep up with this activity manually. These Zaps will send SMS messages to new leads instantly, no matter how much attention your social presence gets.

Save new contacts to a spreadsheet

When it comes to storing and organizing essential business information, very few things beat a spreadsheet. Maybe you want to keep a detailed record of responses from leads. Or maybe you receive texts for other important business activities like shipping notifications and completed job applications. No matter the context, a spreadsheet can help you organize and access that activity over the long term. 

The more texts you receive, the more useful it is to save those conversations to a spreadsheet.  That way, you can keep yourself organized and make sure no important notifications fall through the cracks. The problem is, the more texts you receive, the harder it is to keep up with manually saving them to a spreadsheet in the first place. 

Thankfully, you can use automation to monitor incoming texts and organize each new message in a spreadsheet. These Zaps create new rows in Google Sheets or Excel for every incoming SMS detected in ClickSend. 

Pro tip: If you're only interested in saving specific texts or conversations, add a filter step to tell Zapier which texts to watch for.

Connect your marketing communication tools

Part of an effective marketing strategy is meeting leads and customers in the most convenient channel for them. But when you're present in every channel from email to social media and SMS, contact management can quickly become a full-time job. Keeping your contacts list updated across marketing tools simplifies your work and boosts your communication efficiency. 

Maybe you use Mailchimp or Klaviyo to manage your email newsletter, HubSpot as your CRM, and ClickFunnels to design landing pages. You can use these Zaps to create a contact in ClickSend SMS whenever you receive a new subscriber in one of your other marketing tools. That way, you'll be ready to follow up with contacts through text, without needing to manually add or import contacts first. 

Keep your team in the loop

When you get a new text from a prospect, it's important to respond quickly. Leaving them hanging for more than a few minutes is not only unprofessional, but it risks losing momentum on their buyer's journey. 

But unless you receive your ClickSend SMS messages on your personal phone, it can be hard to stay on top of incoming messages without being glued to your ClickSend dashboard. Instead, use one of these Zaps to send Slack or Teams messages to notify yourself or your team when you get a new text in your ClickSend account.

On the other hand, if you like the idea of using ClickSend to send text notifications to your personal devices, you can use these Zaps to keep yourself on track. You'll get a text when a meeting is about to start in Google Calendar or when you receive an email matching your specifications. If you stress about missing important notifications when you're away from your computer, these Zaps could give you and your team some peace of mind.

Auto-reply to texts

Because it's important to reply to incoming messages from leads and customers quickly, an auto-responder system can give you a bit of breathing room. Automatic responses via text or email can let contacts know you received their message and will send a more in-depth reply soon.

You can also use these Zaps to send messages to yourself or others when you receive a text from a prospect. For example, maybe you want to forward messages to your personal phone or pick up new text conversations in your email inbox. Sending customized messages when you receive incoming texts in ClickSend keeps you on top of your conversations with minimal busywork.

Connect to your other apps with webhooks

If the app you want to connect to ClickSend SMS doesn't (yet) have a Zapier integration, you can still create a custom workflow. Just use a webhook—an automated message sent from one app to another based on a trigger.

For example, you might want to alert your IT team via text when you get an error message in a critical business app. Or maybe you'd like to add new contacts in your CRM system when you receive an incoming SMS in ClickSend. These templates can help you get started.

Simplify communication by automating ClickSend SMS

Staying on top of your customer communication means not only using multiple channels—from phone and email to SMS and social media—but appearing present on each channel, all the time. That task can present a huge hurdle, no matter the size of your team. 

Automating your communication tools can help you save time and be present for your customers without needing to be glued to multiple inboxes all day. Send automatic follow-ups with leads, update contacts across communication tools and databases, and send notifications to the right people at the right time. 

And this is just the start of what you can do with ClickSendSMS and Zapier. What will you automate first?