Tour schedule and email automation

[Craig Baute - Creative Density Coworking]

I use a Wordpress site with basic Contact Form 7 implementation for tour scheduling. It's a manual process, which is fine overall, but I know there are some good alternative solutions out there. I am looking for different ways that spaces approach the tour scheduling and tour, any automatic follow up, and any other tricks or hacks.

[Alex Hillman]

Tools we use for this (and lots of other things), what they're for, and how much they cost. 

GravityForms 

This Wordpress plugin lets you design really nice looking and easy to use forms for just about anything, without writing any code. In the context of tours, you can create a form that people fill out to choose a day and time for a tour. 

But the best part about GravityForms is that there's a HUGE ecosystem of plugins for it (even though it's a plugin itself) so you can connect it to just about any other tool you're using. GravityForms is crazy, crazy useful. 

$$ Get the developer license even if you're not a developer, $199/year. You'll most likely want all of the plugins that come with the dev license, including the one that lets you connect to....

Zapier

One of the things Gravity Forms can do is submit form information to Zapier, which basically tuns all of the webapps you use into building blocks. Here's a post where I covered a bunch of automations in detail, including our tour scheduling. In this case, Zapier gets "told" when the GravityForms form is submitted and then a bunch of things can happen, including:

- Automatically put an event on the calendar with a reminder

- Create a trello card

- Add them to our email system

- Trigger a new tour welcome email sequence 

- Trigger a follow-up reminder to be sent to our team

...etc. 

We've evolved our Zapier workflow quite a bit since I recorded the screencast in that post above, but the foundation will get you a long way.

$$ Free up to 100 tasks, we pay $15/month for 3000 tasks and it's plenty.

All of this fancy plumbing still really depends on the content to be warm and welcoming, feeling like it was written by a person vs a robot, but it does remove a lot of human error from the process, which was our biggest goal of automating apart from freeing up our team to focus on things that robots can't do as well ;)

-Alex

------------------

The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.

Better Coworkers: http://indyhall.org

Weekly Coworking Tips: http://coworkingweekly.com

My Audiobook: https://theindyhallway.com/ten

On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 3:48 PM, Craig Baute - Creative Density Coworking <bau...@gmail.com> wrote:

I use a Wordpress site with basic Contact Form 7 implementation for tour scheduling. It's a manual process, which is fine overall, but I know there are some good alternative solutions out there. I am looking for different ways that spaces approach the tour scheduling and tour, any automatic follow up, and any other tricks or hacks.

--
Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Craig Baute - Creative Density Coworking]

Thanks Alex.

I started with basic Gravity Forms after reading this but quickly jumped up to the Developer Plan for the great functionality with Zapier. I was using basic Contact Form 7, like most people before, and now Gravity with Zapier adds stuff to my Mailchimp, add tours to my calendar, and backups up contacts to a Google Sheet. I'm only scratching the surface because they also integrate with Stripe so when someone signs up they will get a welcome email with needed info, add them invited to the Slack channel.

This is supplementing the need for me to have coworking management software.

[Tom Lewis]

Had no idea gravity had got so good these days!

We use a standard form from one of our systems for tours (either Nexudus or Podio, can't remember which now, but it's not important as they would both work)

Main thing is that no one can join us without doing a tour, we've literally taken all the sign up stuff off our site- just that tour form.

Once they are in, they get added to Podio as a lead, and Nexudus as a contact, and mailchimp.  Lots of automation set up on the Mailchimp side using segments- they get reminded about their tour, then once they've done it they get kicked into the "trial day sequence" (if they don't turn up they get kicked into the "rebook a tour sequence"), and from there into the signup sequence (which contains the secret/nonpublic sign up links), and onto the 5 part "new member induction" email series.  Depending on whether they drop out of that funnel before they become a member, they end up either in the "member" or "general email" segment.

And when they join we've got a 9 stage zap which does all kinds of cool stuff and looks like this http://screencast.com/t/7En3trjD (it even checks if they have a LinkedIn and if so it includes the LinkedIn URL to their members intranet welcome message)

And I get a notification on my smart watch of their name and picture the first time they check in as a member, so I know to say hello when I see them!

[do...@meshworkapp.com]

Another good form builder that I used a ton at my last company was Wufoo. They also integrate with Zapier. As do we (we = Meshwork). It's pretty easy to have a prospect in Meshwork created for each person submitting a form. I imagine you could do it with some other coworking management platforms as well. Or with us you could just create an event for a tour and any non-members that attend would be created as prospects (and hopefully converted to full time members later). But however you do it, I would imagine that Zapier or IFTTT could be super useful.