Welcome again to Elevated, the podcast dedicated to helping you build a better kitchen and bath design business. I'm your host, Brandy Lawson, and in today's episode, I'm sharing the specifics on how we created and use templates for client communication here at Fiery Effects. In our business, we send a lot of routine messages to clients, and most of them need the client to take some kind of action. But here's the thing. These messages don't always originate from the same place. Sometimes they're sent from Gmail, other times MailChimp for email marketing, or even from ClickUp so that client communications can be paired with specific tasks. And let's not forget about those Google Doc comments. So with messages going out from all of these different platforms, we quickly realized we needed a way to create templates that could be used consistently across all of them. Enter TextBlaze. But, before we get into the magic of text plays, let's talk about how we actually created these templates. We started by pulling the last several messages that have been sent for each routine task. Things like email reviews, social concept reviews, social post reviews, monthly dashboard deliveries, and ad reviews. Then, we pasted these into AI, telling it our objective for each communication to have it help us craft templates based on these real world examples. So, now we have a Google Doc with all of our templates. Yay! And so, how do you use them? Back to TextBlaze. This handy Chrome extension allows us to use our templates in any app that we use in the browser. Gmail? Check. MailChimp? You bet. ClickUp? Google Calendar? Google Docs? And even Monday. com? TextBlaze has got us covered. Each team member just needed to install the Chrome extension and sign into our TextBlaze account. Oh. You're wondering how much this fantastic tool is going to cost you. There is a free forever tier that we started with to try it out and see how it will work. We did end up wanting to go to the paid pro tier for up to a thousand templates and it only set us back 36 for the year. I think we got our return on investment in the first three uses. But the real power of using templates and text plays is that they can include variables and pull in outside information. For example, when we're sending monthly social reviews, we can use a variable for the month so the template always references the correct time period. Or when we're sending an email review, we can instruct clients to respond in the click up task and link it by having the task URL pulled from our clipboard. If you want to get real fancy, you can even set up dynamic rules like if then statements or pull in a larger set of data from a spreadsheet. The results of using templates and text blades have been transformative for our client communication. We've achieved absolute consistency in our messaging, no matter who on the team is sending it. This makes delegating tasks a breeze, because we know that the communication will always be on brand and include all of the necessary information. Plus, our templates provide clarity on what we need from clients, making it easier for them to respond and keep projects moving forward. And for us, using templates has brought a new level of ease and efficiency to our processes. It even made creating standard operating procedures a snap, because we can reference using the TextBlaze template. So, if you find yourself drowning in routine client communications, consider creating templates and using a tool like TextBlaze to implement them across all your platforms. Trust me, your future self and your clients will thank you. What will you do this week to help improve your client communications? I'd love to hear what actions you're taking, so you can message me on Instagram using at FieryFX. Next up, we'll switch gears from clients to finances. Tune in to the next episode where we'll talk about using AI on the money side of your business. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to Elevated so you never miss an episode. And if you found value in this series, I'd be forever grateful if you could leave a review. Your feedback helps us keep making the show better for you.