Automated payment reminder services are a simple and effective way of collecting payments and debt from your clients and customers. Whether you implement your existing CRM as a payment reminder service, or sign up for a standalone service, the benefits are tangible and immediate.

Payment reminders can be customized to alert the customer that they need to pay, or to alert you when it’s time to collect. Interested? Here’s a brief rundown on how to get started!

1) Choose The Right Service

First, decide whether you’d like the payment reminder to send automated messages to you or to your customer; the latter works better in terms of actually collecting payment, but the former is a bit less invasive to your customers and gives you the opportunity to contact them personally instead of with an automated message.

There are a number of services out there to choose from – and you might even have features that are similar already available in your CRM. Whichever you choose, be sure it integrates into your business seamlessly; the whole point of this is to save both time and effort… not make things harder!

2) Program your Automated Payment Reminders

Once you’ve decided on the service you’ll be using, it’s time to program the messages themselves. Here are some general tips for programming your messages:

• Identify your business and make sure the messages are coming from your domain or your business address
• Change the language/tone of your message depending on the payment status of the account. If this is just a simple payment reminder, let the recipient know! However, if it’s a majorly delinquent account that is about to come over to us for collections, you’ll want to let them know that as well.
• Spellcheck and proofread all your messages. Misspellings are not just unprofessional, but can lead the recipient to believe they’re being scammed.
• Always Include the account number and/or the invoice number your hoping to collect on
• Include how much is owed
• Itemize what is owed as much as possible in the body text of the message. Simply attaching a PDF will not be as effective since attachments are often filtered as spam.
• Include normal, late, and delinquent due dates for their account/invoice

Catering the messages specifically to the client and scenario greatly increase your chance of getting paid.

3) Integrate and Launch!

Train up your team, integrate your programs and protocols, and set a hard launch date – meaning the invoice for every service rendered from here on out will be thrown into the automated payment reminder queue. There will be some growing pains and quirks at first – there always are! However, the sooner you smooth things out and make these reminders just part of the process, the sooner you’ll be getting paid.

Still Having Trouble Getting Paid? Contact the Professionals!