What is a Recustom template?

Recustom is designed to reach out to your customers at the right time with a customised message, to encourage them to make an action (usually, to make a booking).

So that you don't have to write out a new message every time, we set up a template and just enter a few pieces of information each time. This means the same template can be used hundreds of times to help bring customers back to your organisation.

A template is an SMS length body of text with placeholders for the information. We use an SMS to allow us to set up a process once, and use it repeatedly to improve our results.

Example business: Mechanic's workshop

We'll use a mechanic's workshop as the example business below, to show how we can reach out to their customers ahead of time to make the booking process early.

By reaching out ahead of time, we'll save the customer the hassle of finding a business card or phone number, working out the best time to call, and thinking about trying the new place that just opened!

A car service is also the perfect example of something we know we need to do, but can easily put off for later. Being on the front foot with your customer helps bring them back in the door.

Thinking in templates

To reach out to a customer to book their car in for service, some useful data might be the their First Name, the Make of their car, and when the car was Last Serviced.

Hi Mike, we last saw your Subaru in August 2021. Is it time to book in for a service? Reply YES and we'll call to book.

Notice with this SMS structure, we can use it over and over. Here's the same template with new information dropped in (called variables).

Hi Sally, we last saw your Toyota Corolla in January 2021. Is it time to book in for a service? Reply YES and we'll call to book.

Creating a Recustom account

Have you created a Recustom account yet? If not, head over to How To: Creating a Recustom account for some help or hit the register page: Create Account.

It's free to set up and get up and running.

Creating the first template

We'll continue the mechanic theme from above. If you've created your business account, don't worry - you can create the template, test it out, and then delete it.

Once you're signed in to Recustom, hit the 'Templates' option on the left navigation bar. You'll land on a 'View Templates' page, with a big green "Add New Template" button.

Press "Add New Template", and we'll continue with setting up a template.

The Add New Template Box

Using our text from above will help us work out the template name and body.

The name will be: "Last saw you / time to book".

The text will replace the information we entered with field names in curly brackets*. See the before and after below:

Before:

Hi Sally, we last saw your Toyota Corolla in January 2021. Is it time to book in for a service? Reply YES and we'll call to book.

After:

Hi {{firstName}}, we last saw your {{carMake}} in {{lastSawMonthYear}}. Is it time to book in for a service? Reply YES and we'll call to book.

*The double curly brackets style template is called a handlebars template.

A few things to note:

• Make sure there's no spaces in the variable names

• Make sure there's no special characters in the variable names, . $ # etc

• Make sure each variable name has two opening curly brackets and two closing curly brackets.

Once you've entered the template correctly and it's all working, the app will identify all of your variables (in green, below). Check that looks right.

Note we've got a firstName, a carMake, and a lastSawMonthYear.

Finishing the new template

Getting the variables working is the hard part, and that's done.

Now we just need to set how long until we get in touch with the customer. If they're paying their bill at the front counter now, when will we reach out to them again? For a mechanic, 3 months is a good amount of time. You can change this for each customer, it's just a sensible default.

Set the default interval to 3 months, and click 'Save Changes'.

Great! We've got our first template ready to go.

You can stop here if you were just getting up to scratch with Recustom templates. In the next post, we'll use this template to queue up an SMS message.

Queuing up your first SMS message with Recustom