Interview with Jozlyn Miller, Senior Education Manager at Boulevard

 

As a senior education manager, my role involves either working directly with our customers or building easy-to-consume educational resources those customers can use to ensure that they get the absolute most out of their investment in Boulevard. That often involves drawing on my own experience in the self-care industry to help them come up with new and innovative ways to save time, increase revenue, and create memorable experiences for their clients. So, my job is really to do everything I can to help our customers thrive. 

 

 

Countless benefits come with reaching clients instantly and directly with relevant campaigns and messages, but ultimately, text marketing is about boosting bookings, driving revenue, and maximizing client engagement. Compared to more traditional marketing tactics, text marketing has dramatically higher open and click-through rates and much faster client response times. It’s a fast, efficient, and, importantly, modern way to connect with clients and engage them in conversation. 

 

 

As with everything we do, it is and was about our customers. Their clients’ communication habits and preferences are evolving to the point that text marketing is a must-have for these self-care businesses. That’s the inspiration — making sure we are empowering our customers with every possible tool they need to connect with and deliver incredible experiences to their clients. 

 

 

Your clients are always on their phones and they’re always texting. That’s reality, so if you want to connect with them with any degree of speed and efficiency, that’s where you have to do it. When you meet clients where they are, and do so with a campaign that’s super relevant to them, it becomes so much easier to engage them in conversation and get that next appointment scheduled.  

 

 

We launched in early June and the feedback has been incredible. What’s been most surprising to our customers is how simple and easy it is — and how quickly they see results. You hear about something like text marketing and it’s natural to think it’s going to be too complicated and too complex and I’m not going to be able to keep up with it. But we’ve built the feature in a way that it really is incredibly easy to use and the results come almost immediately. 

 

 

We made it a priority to ensure that our text marketing campaigns are two-way enabled and integrate seamlessly with Boulevard Messages. For clients, being two-way enabled means you can respond to marketing texts as you would any other direct message. For our customers, integration with Boulevard messages means that staff can continue the conversation and answer questions directly from the same Boulevard platform they use to book appointments, process payments, download reports, and do everything else they need to run their business. That seamless experience on both ends is essential to turning a marketing message into a casual conversation and eventually a booked appointment.

 

 

Unlike many competing offerings, Boulevard’s text marketing capabilities leverage a dedicated phone number unique to each business location. All text communications from Boulevard, marketing or otherwise, are sent from the same dedicated business number, which ensures client recognition and greatly improved marketing response rates. We consider this the single most important part of any text marketing campaign — and yet it’s often so overlooked. 

 

 

One of the things that makes our industry so special is that every self-care brand is unique. We’ve developed an easy-to-use campaign builder that enables our customers to create customized campaigns that are tightly aligned to their brand with just a few clicks. 

 

 

It’s a very simple and intuitive process. You start by tailoring your target audience. This is super important — not every message is relevant to every client, so don’t send everything to everyone. Boulevard makes it easy for customers to create highly targeted, segmented campaign lists. That’s step one. From there, we allow you to create your campaign with custom verbiage and custom links so that your texts look and sound like they came from you. And lastly, we give you access to a variety of reports and metrics so that you can refine and optimize as you go. 

 

10.  What future innovations can we expect from Boulevard for self-care businesses?

 

I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll just say you can continue to expect Boulevard to do whatever it takes to help our customers deliver memorable experiences to their clients. Whether that’s through platform capabilities like text marketing or programs like Boulevard Capital that are designed to elevate both our customers’ businesses and the industry at large, we’re constantly looking for ways to raise the bar.