31 | Set an Away Message on Meta [TDTH Challenge #1]

Running a creative online t-shirt business doesn’t have to mean sacrificing your personal time or sense of balance. Establishing an away message can help manage customer expectations, combat burnout, and maintain professionalism, making both you and your customers feel valued.

• Setting boundaries helps prevent burnout and maintain work-life balance 
• Customer expectations need to be managed through clear communication 
• Away messages enhance professionalism and reduce feelings of being unresponsive 
• Redirecting customers to resources while they wait can keep them engaged 
• Crafting an inviting away message is essential for effective communication 
• Testing and tweaking your message ensures it meets customer needs 

Share your new away message on social media, and don’t forget to tag me @sunkissedvirtualassistant

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Chapters

• 0:02 T-Shirt Business Away Messages Setup
• 13:02 Automating Away Messages for Business

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to the Turn Down the Hustle challenges. So this is a new series I'm going to start hosting weekly inside of my podcast. We're going to focus on small, actionable tasks to help you move the needle forward in your t-shirt business without burning yourself out. Now these weekly challenges are all about simplifying, strategizing and making progress one manageable step at a time, and I'm going to break all that down for you Now. Each challenge is pulled directly from my product drop organizer. It's a powerful tool I designed. This is the fourth year I've released it. It's to help you stay ahead of your planning, your product drops and promotions with ease in your handmade business. So if you're ready to streamline your business and let me handle the heavy lifting, check it out at wwwsunkissedvacom. Now let's dive in today in our first challenge and take the first step towards building a thriving, sustainable business that works for you.

Speaker 2: 1:10

You're listening to Turn Down the Hustle, the podcast dedicated to transforming how you run your creative online t-shirt business by working smarter, not harder, so you can spend more time with your why, people and passions that matter most in your life. So throw on your favorite graphic tee and turn up the heat. Press, because it's time to turn down the hustle. Here's your host digital marketer. Cold brew lover, t-shirt maker, freckled hype girl and owner of Sunkist Virtual Assistant, amy.

Speaker 1: 1:41

How many times have you scrambled to respond to a customer at 11 pm, or even maybe while you were trying to record a kid's soccer game? You kept getting notifications or messages and you didn't want that customer to feel ignored, so you quickly responded and left the current moment that you were in. This today's Turn Down, the Hustle Challenge, is going to fix that. We are going to set up an away message on Facebook Messenger, and it can even translate over to your Instagram messages too. Why should we set up an away message? First things first, customer expectations. We are in the age of instant gratification. People expect a quick response. They expect that you are a business owner 24-7, which I guess you are, but we're not working 24-7. However, our customers want to feel valued and they want to feel attended to. In a way, message shows you that you are attentive, even if you're not available at that exact moment. You can keep your customers informed without adding pressure on yourself to reply immediately. Also, when you set up an away message, this sets boundaries for yourself.

Speaker 1: 3:01

Running your business can bleed into every aspect of your life. That's kind of the double-edged sword of being an online business owner. It's not as simple as oh. Walking into the boutique, turning the lights on and then turning them off at the end of the night. We run our business from our mobile device, which we have on us all the time, so setting up an away message can help you protect your personal time. Also, this can help aid in preventing burnout, giving yourself permission to unplug without even showing a sense of any unprofessionalism or anything like that, which, on that note, setting an away message also builds trust and professionalism. That auto response the moment your customer hits send shows that their inquiry has been acknowledged, and it also helps you build credibility by providing instant clarity and answers. So maybe they don't even really need you to respond. Your away message can take care of that for them. Lastly, why you should set up an away message is it could help you avoid missed sales or even frustrated customers. Without that timely response, customers may decide to shop elsewhere. Maybe they're wanting to ask how to shop or where to find this item. Your away message can help them. You can also redirect them to resources like your website or your FAQs to keep them engaged while they wait for a personal reply. Most likely they might be asking a question that you have already answered, or maybe you have published this information on your website and you can redirect them.

Speaker 1: 4:37

Now let's talk about what happens if you don't take this step. So this is going to be a theme in our Turn Down the Hustle challenges. I'm going to give you the why, what happens if you don't, and then I'm going to walk you through how to complete the challenge. If you don't take the step, customers may assume that you're unresponsive, which isn't necessarily the case. You just might be living a life at 8 pm on a Tuesday night, or it could be unprofessional in their eyes again in the customer's eyes leading to lost sales. Then, turning it inward, the stress of those constant notifications can take a toll on your mental health and productivity. We are not here for the short game. We are in here for the long haul. So we need to set up systems that are going to allow you to stay in business and not burn out. Also, it could be a missed opportunity to set expectations for response time to your customers. This could alleviate any possible chance of any unnecessary frustration for both you and your customers. Right, we're managing expectations.

Speaker 1: 5:40

Okay, now what I want you to do is hit pause on this episode if you need to, or if you're consuming this content on YouTube, pause the video, open up another tab and I'm going to walk you through the steps on how to create this away message. The first thing you're going to do is access Facebook Business Suite. So go to your Facebook page, go to your Facebook Business Suite, and then I want you to go to the inbox tab. It should look like a little chat bubble. From there you're going to select. It's actually like an icon. It has like crossing. It kind of looks like a Star Wars, kind of look to me like a world or something like that. Click that. That's going to be the automations button. Okay, so once you're there, you can select create automations in the top right, and it's going to give you quite a bit of different options. You can either start from scratch or you can use some of the templates they have already provided.

Speaker 1: 6:38

If you look under the goals, the first goal that you can set up is greet people. You can do a instant reply. Maybe you want to reply with a greeting when someone messages you for the first time like hello. Thank you for checking out Sunkiss Virtual Assistant. Here are my top links. Here are my top podcast episodes you might want to check out how can I help you Something to make sure they feel acknowledged. Or you can also set up whether you're online or away. You can also set this based on your business hours so you can have an automatic away message. So, whenever Facebook picks up hey, we know that she said that she's not going to be available on Saturday and Sunday this is the message that they'll share.

Speaker 1: 7:17

The next goal is share information. So you're frequently asked questions. So when someone asks a question, you can already have some canned information like where is my order or when will it ship, something like that and you can remind them of your turnaround time. Also, you can redirect them to log into their account so they can see the fulfillment status in their order. Next is location. So if you have a storefront, you can plug in some data here on where they can find your business. Next, contact information. Maybe if they're wanting to know more about how they can get a hold of you or email you for a custom order, that'd be a great automation. To use Hours, that's self-explanatory.

Speaker 1: 7:57

Now, these two I really want to bring your attention to. There are custom keywords or comment to a message. How you can use this is. So we know that Facebook currently does not like links at all. They want you to stay on the platform, right? So you can set up custom keyword where you tell them to message you a certain word and you'll either send them back a discount code, or maybe you'll send them a link to a tea party, or maybe information on how to host their own tea party, something like that and that's going to do it automatically. All they have to do is just send you that word tea party could be an example and then you can send them an automated message based on the custom word that they send.

Speaker 1: 8:39

Currently, it looks like that you can only do this with up to five keyword or phrases, so keep that in mind. Maybe you want to have a staple five or maybe two items that are. Maybe you only want to have two words that are consistent year round, maybe like email, so you can send them information on how to sign up for your email list, and then maybe use the three other words that are rotating, promotions and drops and things like that. You can use this automation on both Messenger and Instagram, so if you get a comment on your page that has a specific hashtag, you can send them a response based on that, so you can say comment, hashtag, tea Party to get more information direct to your inbox. This currently only works for Messenger, but it is a very cool tool to use.

Speaker 1: 9:30

Now let's get more into specifics on setting that away message. So whenever you're crafting your away message, you want to first make sure you acknowledge their message and you appreciate that they have sent you a message like hey, thank you for reaching out. Or like hey, I'm glad to see you made it to my inbox, something like that. Make sure you're using your own brand voice too, so when they read the message, they start to get a feel for the owner behind the message. You can also provide some helpful information like I'll get back to you within 24 hours, or my response time is between Mondays and Fridays, something like that. I also recommend you include some kind of link, maybe like a link to your FAQs or your website, so you can say like well, while you're waiting for me to get back to you, in the meantime you can check out all of my new releases here and keep that collection to new releases, because you're constantly, maybe, updating your new release collection, so no matter when they check it, it's always going to be the most current products you have released and then encourage them to engage, so say feel free to browse, or you can follow us on Instagram for updates too Something like that. That'd be a great structure to create an away message.

Speaker 1: 10:43

Now, while you're also doing that, I do want to draw your attention back to your active hours so you can adjust your schedule to specify when the away message will be sent, so like outside of business hours, weekends or vacations. Away message will be sent, so like outside of business hours, weekends or vacations, and it's really important that you are transparent on when your customers can expect a reply. Again, setting up and managing those expectations is really important. So what I want you to do, before you just assume it's all working, is we need to test it out. Make sure that, whatever automation you've set up, that it actually works and sends correctly. You can ask a spouse or a kid or a friend to test this out for you and make sure it works. Also, I want you to read this message out loud. Make sure it sounds inviting and warm and helpful, right? We don't want to make sure it doesn't come off rude, and that's why getting a friend to help you out can probably help make sure that this is accurate and then, as you get feedback or maybe you're starting to see which customers take action you can continuously update these messages and tweak it based on customer feedback. So, again, this is really helpful because it'll save you time, so it could alleviate you from having to answer repetitive questions, and also sets those clear expectations and maybe keeps those customers around versus just leaving your store.

Speaker 1: 12:07

So it's time to take action. This all sounds great, but knowledge without action is meaningless. So we're going to take action today. So what I want you to do? Head to your Facebook business suite. I want you to draft your message using the steps we discussed. Test it, tweak it, take a screenshot of your new away message, share it in your stories and please tag me so I can cheer you on.

Speaker 1: 12:32

If you're in the product drop organizer club, make sure you go find the corresponding post to this challenge, screenshot your completion so I can get you added in and give you credit for completing the challenge. So you might be thinking, okay, great, that is cool to know, amy, but I still don't know how I'm going to write this. Okay, if you need help crafting this away message, check out the show notes. Wherever you're watching this video, you can head to my website, sunkissvacom 31.

Speaker 1: 13:02

This is episode 31. You can go grab an away message that I have crafted for you to help give you an idea. Okay, cool, you ready to take action? All right, so go knock out this challenge and then meet me back here next Monday because we are going to tackle the next challenge, which is also in the automation category. We are working through challenges that are all related to automation, and next week we're going to automate another message and I'll walk you through it. So, step by step, taking these tiny actions will help move the needle forward in your business. Thank you for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe and rate and share my podcast if you found this episode valuable. Thank you.