Appointment confirmation and reminder by SMS – is it worth it for viewings?

In short: The automatic email reminder 24 hours before the appointment is included in every timum plan and does most of the work – it lowers the no-show rate from 20–30 % to under 10 %. The additional SMS four hours before the appointment is an add-on option in the PROFESSIONAL plans. It reaches the prospects who no longer open emails on the day of the appointment – your own cancellation rate shows how much difference that makes for you.

Whether the extra cost is worthwhile depends on three questions: How far do you travel to an appointment? At how short notice are your appointments arranged? And how old is your target group on average?

What is included and what costs extra

	Included in every plan	PROFESSIONAL + add-on option
Confirmation immediately after booking	✓
Email reminder, 24 h before	✓
2-click cancellation in every message	✓
SMS reminder, 4 h before		✓

The SMS does not replace the email, it is sent in addition: first the email the day before with the address and cancellation link, then the short SMS on the day of the appointment. The option is activated by our service team, not via self-service – call us or write to us if you would like to try it.

When the SMS pays off

Long journeys. If you drive 40 kilometres to a viewing, a no-show doesn't cost you thirty minutes but half the morning. The more expensive each individual appointment is, the faster the SMS pays for itself.
Short-notice appointments. Nobody still remembers an email from the day before when the appointment was arranged on the same day. In exactly that case, the four-hour SMS is the only reminder that arrives in time at all.
Saturday appointments and walk-in traffic. Weekend appointments are the most likely to fall through, and on Saturday morning nobody reads the inbox from Friday noon.
Target groups that hardly use email. For rentals in the lower price segment and for older owners, SMS is often the more reliable channel.
As part of your service. The SMS is not just a memory aid but also something prospects and owners notice: anyone who receives an SMS with the address and cancellation link for their appointment experiences a level of care they aren't used to from many agencies. In the conversation with the owner, you can point this out — "we confirm our appointments by email send an additional reminder by SMS" describes a process that not every competitor offers.

When it doesn't pay off

If your appointments mostly take place with existing clients and business contacts who already have the appointment in their calendar, you gain little with the SMS. The same applies if your no-show rate is already in the low single digits: getting from 8 % to 5 % is a different matter from getting from 30 % to 10 %, and you have already made the first leap with the included email reminder.

And the SMS doesn't fix a process that isn't right to begin with. If prospects cancel because they don't know the address or don't know who they are meeting, a second message with the same gaps won't help.

Decide with your own numbers

Don't guess – first measure for one month with the included email reminder. Under Settings → Statistics you can see bookings, attendance rate and cancellation rate for any period (Appointment statistics). Then do the math:

Tip

A simple comparison for your decision: How many appointments do you lose per month, and what does each one cost you – travel, preparation and the slot that someone else would have needed? With ten appointments per week and a 10 % no-show rate, that is around four per month. After four weeks, your own rate will be in the appointment statistics – then you are no longer working with assumptions, but with your own numbers.

You can find the plans with the SMS option under PROFESSIONAL; what else the reminders can do is described on the Appointment reminders page.

Next step

Start with the included email reminder and decide after four weeks based on your cancellation rate. Try for free – 30 days, no credit card.