While Demio doesn't offer native support for sending SMS notifications on your events, you can use Zapier to build a workaround solution and notify your registrants via any instant messaging tool.

Using these steps, you'll be able to notify registrants about their specific session across an entire event and include their Unique Join Link in your message.

For example, if your team conducts a product tour webinar twice a week, you'll be able to text Jane about their Tuesday session and John about their Thursday session—all through this single automation.

Here's a quick break down each step:

Let's get started! 💯

Before getting started, you'll need to ensure a few things are already in place:

*Here are a few popular choices: Twilio, ManyChat and ClickSend. Additionally, you can opt to use an instant messaging platform, such as Facebook Messenger, to notify your registrants.

Once you have those items ready, you can create the Zap! For your first step, you'll need to set a Trigger from Demio.

From the list of available options, select the New Webinar Registration Trigger.

Next, you'll want to select your connected Demio account and the specific event you wish to enable SMS notifications for.

Hit Continue, pull in your sample, and we should be set on the first step!

3. Preparing the Phone Number

Next, you'll want to add an Action to format the phone number you captured on your registration page into a standard one that the SMS tool can use.

For this, you can use the native Formatter tool by Zapier. Once you've selected the app, select Numbers from the Choose Action Event dropdown.

You'll want to select Format Phone Number from the Transform options, set the Input to the Phone Number field that you're using on the Demio registration form, and then select the To Format choice to a format that is supported by your SMS tool of choice.

For the next Action, you'll need to add a time-based delay to ensure that the SMS notification is sent to the registrant when their event is supposed to start.

This will allow this automation to work across your entire event for any of the available sessions.

For this step, you can use the Delay tool by Zapier. You'll want to choose the Delay Until option from the Choose Action Event dropdown.

From the available options, you'll want to set the Delay Until time—or in other words, outline exactly how long you'll want to wait before triggering the SMS notification to be sent.

Since you'll be sending the notification out based on when the registrant's specific session is starting, select the Upcoming Webinar Date value.

You can also set up notifications to be sent out for a specific time before the event is supposed to start. For example, you may want to notify the registrant 10 minutes before the session's start time, or even 10 hours.

To do so, you need to include a datetime modifier to adjust the value that is being added. Zapier has a great reference for the available modifiers, but here's a quick cheat sheet:

For example, if you wanted to send the notification 15 minutes prior to the session's start time, you'd add -15m like so:

For the second option of handling dates in the past, we recommend un-setting it by opting to clear the current choice or set it to Continue if it's up to 15 minutes. This will be available as a fallback option, in case the Zap fails to fire and you need to replay the Zap—of course, any longer than 15 minutes and it won't make sense to send them the notification for the event that has already ended.

With both our Formatter step (which will take the phone number text field we added and turn it into a standard phone number we can use) and our Delay step (which will ensure we're waiting until the actual event's start time) in place, we're ready to set our final step—the SMS notification itself.

As we outlined earlier, there are a few different tools that can be used to accomplish this step. The exact options that are set may differ, but each option should use similar steps. For the sake of our example, we'll be using the Twilio app to send out notifications.

Just as we did with each step in our Zap, connect the App and select the appropriate action from one of the available options. For Twilio, we'll be using the Send SMS option.

Connect and select the specific app's account, and you'll be brought to the customization options. Again, these may differ slightly depending on which tool you're using to send the SMS notifications, but here are a few notes to keep in mind:

Once you're done that, you're all set!

To quickly recap, you've created a Zap that allows you to capture phone numbers on your registration page and send any registrants an SMS reminder containing their Unique Join Link right based on when their specific session is about to start.

With this, you should be able to use SMS (or any instant messaging channels) to drive further attendance to your webinar events!

Of course, our team is always exploring additional feature requests—including the option to allow for native SMS notifications directly from Demio.