325: Alex Beller On How To Do SMS Marketing The Right Way

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I’m thrilled to have Alex Beller from PostScript on the show to talk about the ins and outs of SMS marketing. And in just six short months, SMS marketing has already cracked my top five marketing channels for my store, and you’ll learn a lot from this episode. But before we begin, I want to thank PostScript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list.

00:29
And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my eCommerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without Postscript.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in eCommerce stores and eCommerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too. And with the holiday season rolling around,

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SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, who is also a sponsor of the show. Now it’s safe to say that most of us have been doing more online shopping lately. And if you’re an e-commerce brand, that means you might be seeing more first-time customers. But once they make that first purchase, how do you keep them coming back? That’s what Klaviyo is for. Klaviyo is the ultimate email and SMS marketing platform for e-commerce brands.

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And it gives you the tools to build your contact list, send memorable emails, automate key messages, and more. A lot more. That’s why more than 50,000 ecommerce brands like Chubbies, Brooklinen, and Living Proof use Klaviyo to build a loyal following. Strong customer relationships mean more repeat sales, enthusiastic word of mouth, and less depending on third-party ads. So whether you’re launching a new business or taking your brand to the next level, Klaviyo can help you get growing faster. And it is free to get started. So visit klaviyo.com slash my wife to create a free account.

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That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. Now on to the show.

02:18
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Alex Beller on the show and Alex is someone who I was introduced to by my friends over at Gorgias because I was looking for an SMS provider and I’m really glad that they did. Alex is the founder of Postscript.io, which is the company that I use for my text message marketing and they specialize in e-commerce, which is what initially attracted me to them and they’re reasonably priced and very easy to use. And since I’m a geek, I like how they have an API so I can do some more advanced stuff.

02:48
Anyway, I brought Alex on today to give us an overview of SMS marketing, how it works and how you can use it to grow your e-commerce business. And with that, welcome to the show Alex, how are you doing today? I’m doing great. Thanks for having me, Steve. I’m excited for this conversation. Yeah, I appreciate your patience. So what ended up happening this morning is I rebooted my Windows PC and all of a sudden it decided to install like 30 updates. And so I had to scramble and switch over to another computer and Alex was very patient. So I appreciate it.

03:18
No worries. So Alex, give us the quick background story and tell us how you got started with SMS marketing and how did you decide to start Postscript? Cool. So this goes back to the fact that I’m an e-commerce person. So before starting Postscript, I worked in e-commerce on the brand side for six years. And most of that was spent at a company called Stack Commerce in Venice, California. And what Stack Commerce does

03:48
is they’re an e-commerce platform that owns and runs and operates storefronts on behalf of digital publishers. So the way to think about it is like the Mashable store or the CNN store, Companies like that, that they depend on advertising, but they’re getting more and more interested in commerce revenue. That company, Stack Commerce, builds and operates branded storefronts and does all the sourcing and the fulfillment and the customer support. So it’s like a new revenue channel for those online publishers.

04:17
And so I got exposed to e-commerce through that. And it was very hands-on, very tactical, lots of like time-spending Google Analytics, optimizing marketing channels and things like that on behalf of these clients. And when I was there, a few different things happened. So the first was, because this was over the last like eight or nine years we’re talking about, it really became clear that every single year, mobile traffic as a percentage of

04:47
e-commerce traffic was just increasing. Every single year, the mobile share was getting larger and larger. And at the same time, we were seeing email performance, not decline by any means, but more just sort of plateau. It’s at that point, such a used and established channel. And so me and my now co-founder, who also worked with me at StatCommerce, I have two co-founders, but one of them, one you know, Adam, we were curious about like, what is the mobile first retention channel?

05:17
What is email for our phones? mean, this is the new platform that we’re spending all our time on and acquisition is huge there and Instagram and Facebook mobile ad programs are like huge sources of customers. But what’s the retention channel for it? Is it email or is it something else? And then that’s all the context. But then a friend of Adam’s who ran a lifestyle business on Shopify was complaining to him one day that

05:46
he didn’t have an easy way to text his customers. And so that seemed like a very specific problem for us to potentially solve, which is a good thing. I mean, you’ll relate to this because you if you like, you’re an entrepreneur and you think so much in terms of entrepreneurship. When we were getting started, the thought process was we want to make a product that we can sell to businesses. We want something with organic distribution, which in this case would be the Shopify app store.

06:15
a way to get our first customers just without paying for it or without chasing them. And the third was we wanted to be able to get our first customer within 90 days of starting to build the product. And so we didn’t know exactly what we were doing and we weren’t that familiar with this e-commerce ecosystem with all the platforms and the huge amount of entrepreneurship going on. But we immediately saw installs and customers. And just every single month it slowly grew to the point where after about three months,

06:45
We applied to Y Combinator and we got in and we went through that route and we went full time on what we originally thought was just going to be like a small side project that would be like a niche offering. And the reason is because it was more than just us thinking about mobile retention. And over the last two years since we’ve launched, which was in September of 2018, we’ve seen SMS go from like,

07:12
an idea that people are very skeptical about to what’s becoming a, still very early, but what’s becoming like a mainstream marketing channel in e-commerce. And so there’s lots of different ramifications of it, but it’s been really exciting to watch us go from the like skeptics phase into the early adopter phase where, you know, best practices are getting established and there’s just all kinds of interesting stuff going on.

07:36
So let’s talk about the skeptics, because I would say maybe last year or maybe a year and a half ago, I was one of those skeptics. And I’m pretty sure that there’s a lot of people in the audience that are skeptics. So let’s start from the beginning here. SMS text message marketing, people usually get texts from their friends and that sort of thing. And I’m sure there’s a lot of people listening to this thinking to themselves, I can’t imagine getting marketing messages in my SMS inbox.

08:05
What are just some typical response rates for text messages when consumers receive them from a company? Sure. So there’s a bunch of data around this. So response rates tend to be really high, but there’s still a lot of noise there. So even if you see 5 to 10 % responses, people texting back on an SMS campaign, not all of them are going to be

08:32
the most cogent things because people just were so comfortable sending texts. It’s not like an email that we perfectly format. So the funny thing is a brand will probably see a wide spectrum of texts from people saying, wow, this is awesome. I love this to, Hey, who is this? I’m driving. I’ll call you later on to like, you know, stop, which is how users unsubscribe. But the more interesting thing for me is the difference we see brand to brand. And this part’s a little predictable.

09:02
But if a brand is kind of approaching SMS, which is this new high engagement marketing channel, if they’re approaching it with their customer interests at the forefront, and if they’re using a personal voice, and if the brand is something that people feel loyal to, maybe because it’s high quality products or they have a great voice, we run sentiment analyses on the background on SMS responses. And brands like that, their users are replying in much, much, much happier ways.

09:32
So the example I’ve been using lately, there’s a company called Bloom, B-L-U-M-E. And they do really creative stuff with their SMS program where I’ve been on their list for maybe six weeks, their post-script customer, and twice they’ve sent out a campaign with a Starbucks gift card so that anyone that they’re sending it to can go get a free drink at Starbucks. they’re running, I saw because I was talking to their team,

10:02
currently running a book club with some of their users through SMS. Like there’s like 40 or 50 people that they’re like all like reading together. And so that’s like a very, very non spammy way to think about the channel is like, how can we just engage and retain and like be authentic with our brand voice to our most valuable customers verse the email first approach of like sending a 10 % off code.

10:29
four times a week to your entire list. That just doesn’t work with SMS. What does Bloom sell? Bloom sells, I want to get the exact right wording, it’s like feminine self-care. So it’s everything from like razors to skin products to acne oil to I think like feminine hygiene. Interesting. So they’ve just started a community, I guess is what it sounds like. Yeah. And that’s certainly one extreme, but

10:59
even more in the middle, like taking an automation heavy approach using campaigns or broadcasts, using them sparingly, writing texts so that they’re like in the voice of a human, maybe even personally coming from like the founder or figurehead of a brand. All of those are ways to just take a more targeted, more tailored approach than what’s standard in email that people like because they don’t want to hear from a brand four times a week via text. But

11:27
they might want to hear about really relevant things through text because they’ll actually see it. I know for myself personally, I only have maybe like a handful of companies that I let text message me. Can you just kind of comment on the differences in behavior for email versus text from the point of view of a consumer? Yeah, that’s actually a pretty insightful comment because we have this theory where there’s going to be a cap. So we don’t know it’s.

11:54
It’s still sorely in the channel. We don’t know where it’ll happen yet, but we think to your point that people will probably top out at a certain number of brands that they like welcome and sign up for via SMS, right? Maybe it’s five, maybe it’s 10, maybe over the next couple of years it’s 15. It’s certainly not the 200 different email lists I’m signed up for. So with that, we also think there’s this like first mover advantage in this space where people who are working on building their channel now,

12:23
and are taking care of those users and not just driving unsubscribes, they’re gonna have an advantage in the long term. So can we talk about, I guess, strategy for a little bit? So let’s say I have an e-commerce store and I have email, I have SMS, and let’s say I have chat as well, or messenger marketing as well. How do I grab those? Since everyone you said has like a limited attention span for SMS, how would I run these differently than an email campaign? Yeah, so the omni-channel question varies brand to brand.

12:53
But the best practices that I’ve seen come up change a little bit based on stage. So here’s what I mean. If someone is collecting subscribers in different ways and they’re just getting started with SMS, there’s a pretty good chance that their subscriber lists across different marketing channels may not be identical. Right? So that’s the first thing. Like if you’ve been collecting email forever and then you suddenly start collecting SMS, you may end up with like new people on SMS that aren’t on email and most your email list won’t be on text.

13:23
So that’s the first thing. The second thing is like realizing the power of omni-channel and timing. Like I’m more likely to watch a Netflix special that they just launched if I see a billboard for it, if I see a YouTube ad for it, and if a friend tells me about it, then I am just one of those things happens. And I don’t want all three of those things to happen to me at the exact same moment. That’d be weird. But I think a similar approach here, and that’s what the data is showing us. When people run A-B tests on

13:52
like post-purchase upsells. If they run it where they just send email, they just send SMS, and then they send email and SMS with staggered timing, that third option sees about a 15 to 20 % lift in revenue. So what we recommend is, look, you’re going to send emails many times a week. Instead of that for SMS, think about what’s the most important message you have coming up, what’s actually relevant for a text. Then do a little digging, see if there’s overlap between your lists.

14:21
and maybe just stagger the timings that email goes out Wednesday, the text goes out Friday and the text goes out to anyone who like hadn’t purchased yet. And so there’s ways to be a little bit more targeted, but in general, the data shells that tells us that omni-channel approach is a good thing. You just don’t want to be too simple with it. Interesting. So you advise to lead with email or would you rather text the message first and then follow up with email? I’m a little biased here and I try not to be biased.

14:50
I think it really just is situational. think email is incredibly important. I’m not one of those people who thinks it’s dead. And like, if you’re starting off and you have 10,000 people on your SMS list and 150,000 people on your email list, you know, there’s just not that much overlap. like, sending both out at the same time makes sense. However, with something like a flow, like an abandoned cart flow, the SMS will be higher engagement.

15:19
But I kind of think it’s smarter to lead with email because email is so much cheaper. Like you only want to fire that text if someone didn’t open or didn’t click or didn’t buy from that email. And so because text costs a lot more than email, you might as well save that money and go email first. The way I was thinking about it is that, and we can talk about this in just a little bit, but delivery rates, like for email, you might get like a 20 % open rate. I think that’s like the average. Whereas SMS, it’s like in the nineties, right?

15:49
Yeah, so from my perspective, at least when you send out a text, it seems like almost everyone’s going to get it. Whereas with email, you’re only going to get like a fifth of your people. So can you just kind of comment on that? Yeah, I mean, your stats are your stats are pretty much like dead on from what we see and on the click rate side of things with text, we see anywhere from like 7 % click rate up to like, I mean, people see like 40 or 50 % click rates when they do like

16:18
a new drop that users were excited about. I think what you just said makes sense. I’m personally try to avoid being too pushy of like an SMS only or an SMS first narrative just because that’s what people expect from me. But I think what you just said makes sense. And I think what it comes down to is like, is this promotion, is this message something that is very important and that you want users to see? And if it is, that’s a great use case for a text. If it’s more,

16:47
The same sort of thing that’s happening week to week. Maybe that should be either a more targeted text or that should be led with an email. I guess if we put numbers behind this, it makes it easier to understand. How much does it cost to send a text? So about about one cent. Okay. So about a cent and whereas email is significantly cheaper than that depending on it. Okay. So I understand. So just by sheer numbers, you probably want your SMS.

17:15
marketing messages to be a lot more focused, a lot more targeted, a lot more, you want the revenue per subscriber to be a lot higher. Yeah, that’s what I think. Because the other side of it too is that like we were talking about earlier, sensitivity and sensitivity to the channel and that people won’t subscribe to tons and tons of channels. So in my mind, if users or if stores take a little bit of a more cautious approach to SMS, not only will they keep their costs lower, but their unsubscribed rates will stay low.

17:44
And so their list will build much faster over time. So you mentioned abandoned cart earlier. And one of the things that you can do with Postscript is abandoned cart messages, similar to what you’d have in email. So would you advise someone with an e-commerce store to actually have, like there’s abandoned cart for Facebook Messenger, there’s abandoned cart for email, and now there’s abandoned cart for SMS. Do you advise that people have all three going? Yes. If you have a subscriber on all three channels, which I would expect,

18:12
The vast majority of subscribers would be on one or two channels. I absolutely recommend to have all three firing. And I would just say stagger the timing and have them cancel if the user buys. So if a user, if it goes email SMS, then Facebook, if the email goes out and the user doesn’t buy, then you send a text a day later and they do buy have the, have the Facebook automation watching that purchase completion so that it cancels if the user completes their purchase before the like third day.

18:39
Okay, that makes sense. Then you’re hitting them on all channels and hopefully one of those messages we’ll get through. Yep. And can you talk about frequency? Like how often are people sending these messages out? Yes. So totally decent framework for this is thinking like there isn’t really a cap on relevant automation flows. So things like targeted welcome series, abandoned carts, post purchase upsells, post purchase customer support check-ins or

19:08
shipping and tracking notifications. I recommend people go hard with all of those because users will find them timely, really build out an advanced automation strategy. For brands with subscription, application, there’s all kinds of other flows they can build as well. On the like campaign or broadcast side of things, I say slow it down. The best way, it’s not a hard number. It’s not like once a week to your whole list. That’s not it. Instead it’s like, what is our marketing calendar?

19:37
and when do we have something that’s relevant for a text. If you have a great piece of content one day and an amazing promotion one day and then a new product drop another day, that’s probably worthy of three texts in a week. But if all you have this week is another 10 % off coupon to try to drive purchases, that is like few and far between. So if someone is getting hit with a text once a week from a brand, I think that’s palatable and okay. If someone’s getting hit with a text three times a week, I think that’s over the top and

20:06
you’ll see a lot of unsubscribes. Can we talk about this welcome series? Is this welcome series that you’re talking about very similar to the email welcome series? Yeah, a lot of times it’s very similar. But to your point before, like the the engagement rate will be so much higher. And I view welcome series is actually one of the like underutilized things in e commerce, even though everyone does it. Because I think it’s the it’s someone has signed up, they probably haven’t purchased yet. And so they’re just waiting there halfway warm to be converted.

20:36
And that’s the opportunity to like build brand connection, educate them, overcome some of their like pricing, not pricing, some of their purchase concerns. And so doing that through a channel where people see it, you know, 95, 98 % of the time, that’s an awesome spot to overcome some of those objections and to build a little loyalty. And so I like to see brands doing it with a little bit of founder or a little bit of personal voice and then.

21:03
we see and subscribers feel a little bit more attachment, like interest in continuing to learn more. I’m sure because of running your company, you’ve probably encountered a whole bunch of welcome series. Can you just kind of maybe go over some of the more successful ones and how they’re structured? Yeah. Cause I know for my email sequence, I initially email very often in the beginning and then it kind of tapers off to once a week. I would imagine that for an SMS welcome series, you don’t want to be texting them like every day or every other day in the beginning either. Right? Correct.

21:33
Yeah, so I’m pulling up that other launch we had recently, Really Good Text. That was a shameless plug, but you can sort by Welcome Series on there. Well, so ReallyGoodText.com is a place where Postscript.io is posting all the great text messages that all its companies are posting. So if you want to get an idea of what other companies are putting out, then you should head over to this site. I’ve actually used it extensively for my store, but you guys actually had the data behind it too, so that’s why I thought I’d ask.

22:02
made by our friends Alicia. yeah, one of my favorite welcome series, this is spring, something up is from Judy. So Judy is a disaster preparedness brand. Um, so they sell like disaster kits, but what they use SMS for and what comes across in their welcome series is they take a more localized approach to awareness. So they sell these disaster preparedness kits and they’re, it’s very DTC and well-styled.

22:28
but they aren’t just trying to like shamelessly endlessly convert you with the welcome series. Instead, it’s a little bit more brand building and education. And what they then do over time is they’re tracking where everyone is by zip code. And then they’re sending out disaster alerts via text whenever something happens. So if there’s a tornado warning or if there was an earthquake or if there’s like a hurricane coming in, that sort of stuff. And so

22:54
setting the context for that in a welcome series and then asking for a purchase later of one of their kits, I really like that mix of content and conversion. So that sounds very interesting. Do you have a more generic case of just consumer products, maybe in the beauty or apparel space or something like that, where you don’t have something like disaster relief that someone actually really wants to get alerts for, for example? Yeah. So, right.

23:22
That’s kind of a funny comment. People want disaster alerts. That’s reasonable. Yeah. So we have a couple of welcome series templates that get prefilled in folks’ accounts. And the often split we do is one flow for if this is a new user that’s never purchased before, and one flow for if it’s a returning purchaser who this is just their first time signing up to the SMS list. Because SMS is new.

23:52
And because of compliance, how you have to start from scratch, we see a lot of that. And so both of these are three message templates spread out. It’s one message the first day, then it’s one message the fourth day. So three days later, then it’s one message a week after that. And the third one is for returning customers is when there’s like a call to action to buy. And the first two is like education and context setting. And then a little bit of just like a branding, sometimes a customer review gets included like

24:22
Check out one of our five star reviews on this product, that sort of thing. I see. And how long is like the average welcome series? Not sure about the average. I see them run anywhere from two weeks to a month, just depending really on like how high the bar is for a product. If it’s a stick of deodorant at a low price point, maybe only a couple of weeks. If it’s, you know, hundreds of dollars on a set of sheets.

24:50
I’ve seen Welcome Series run several months.

24:55
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

25:24
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

25:53
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s EMERGECONSCL.com. Now back to the show. I see. So in two weeks, that’s really only like three or four messages, right? In terms of the content of the messages, is it product focused or is it, which messages tend to work the best describing the brand story? Cause you have to be a lot more compact with SMS, right? So there’s less information or you have to be a lot more selective about what you convey.

26:23
What have you seen from the brands, like the exact sequence of what they’re sending out and how they’re compressing all this information in just a couple of sentences? They’re compressing it by really only tackling one topic per message. So maybe one message is like introduction, context setting, link to learn more, right? Just context setting for how the brand is going to use SMS. Maybe the next message is walking through all like the great features of their hero product.

26:51
Maybe the third message is validation, right? So customer reviews or including a quote from a customer or including an MMS GIF of a bunch of different quotes and like great reviews of the product. And then the fourth message is just a straight up like a call to action with a purchase incentive of 10 % off. So by tackling one thing in each, as opposed to trying to cram lots of different stuff in every single message, which you don’t have to do because people are reading every text.

27:21
Unlike an email where I may only catch, you know, one out of five of the welcome messages you send, the text I’m probably going to read every single one so you can break it out more. Interesting. And you mentioned earlier that you don’t want to be broadcasting to your entire list. So what should be your strategy for just broadcasting campaigns once you have them on your list? Yeah, relevancy. So everything comes down to relevancy and the framework of like, is this worthy of a text? know, just less is more here.

27:51
So to get specific, what that looks like is if you’re thinking about sending out to your entire subscriber base, it should be for something so relevant and worthy, right? It should be for a new product drop or a new collection. It should be for a substantial promotion of some kind. It should be for a piece of content. Or if you’re taking a more targeted approach, we like to see segmentation based on

28:19
user behavior or past purchase data. So what that can look like is like if someone has bought product X and you and your data show that product Y tends to go really well with product X, creating a segment of people who bought X but not Y and sending them a more targeted broadcast about product Y. Or doing a new product launch to people who bought last year’s version.

28:47
So segmentation of purchase behavior is a big thing. And then the other is just SMS engagement, where sometimes we hear from folks like, hey, I really only want to send to my most engaged users. How do I do that? So the other version is, if someone’s been running their SMS list for a few years, maybe they create a segment of people who’ve clicked in the last six months and hold back on sending to users who it’s been over six months since they clicked a message.

29:15
Are there penalties for sending to people who haven’t opened in a long time, like email, or does everyone pretty much get the message? Everyone gets the message. There aren’t penalties. It’s really just about unsubscribes. So you can’t send to anybody who has replied stop or replied cancel or unsubscribe or end or any of those things because of like a legal compliance angle from the TCPA, which is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

29:40
But as far as deliverability goes, it’s different than emailing that like a message sent is a message delivered. You know, one thing I just noticed recently, like literally just the other day was I now have a spam SMS folder on my phone. Yes. Yes. I noticed this too. This is, it turns out it’s something that I think Apple did. Do you have an iPhone? No, I don’t. I’m on Android actually. Interesting. So there’s an iPhone one as well.

30:05
and it’s not spam, but it takes unknown senders and breaks them out into a separate folder. Is that the same on Android? No, this one’s literally called spam. That’s pretty cool. Yeah. So we are expecting, as with email, eventually inboxes to be broken out and feature we’re working on right now that will be live soon is called contact cards. And so what that will allow is for you, for example,

30:33
to send out a text, especially in the welcome series, that includes a contact card that’ll be saveable with like the name of your store and an image and things like that. And so that way we’re gonna see brands start encouraging their subscribers to like save us as a contact so that once those inboxes start happening, messages won’t go there. Interesting, this is a similar principle to email, right? Where you’re adding them to your safe senders list essentially. Yep. Right. Interesting.

31:02
Okay, so what about a post purchase sequence? Can all these things be automated? Like if someone bought this, I want to send them automatically a text message with this product that’s like a cross sell after a certain period of time. Yes, absolutely. That’s a great use case. Okay. And so a lot of these things that I’m doing with email can be done with SMS and a lot of the segmentation principles, and correct me if I’m wrong, are very similar. So for example, if I have someone who signed on who hasn’t purchased yet and I’m just trying to get them,

31:30
to buy for the first time, I might send them a different message than someone who has purchased from me many times, for example. I think that’s right. just the frameworks are often correct. The difference is that SMS should be just even more targeted and sent even less often. Right. So this is not only from an economic perspective, since it costs more, but also from a unsubscribe perspective, right? Because your rate of unsubscribes are going to be higher as well.

31:59
Correct. It’s for both those reasons and the third, we call it for like NPS, right? Where it’s just easier to annoy end users through text messages. So even if they don’t unsubscribe and even if they still buy from you, it may change, it’s such a potent channel, it may change the outlook towards your brand if you’re sending them four to five texts a week. It might just feel that the brand’s a little annoying. Right. Actually, I’m already kind of annoyed at once a week.

32:27
for some brands actually, but I stick on because they send out like good promotions from time to time. I don’t wanna miss them. So, but one thing I wanted to ask you also are just some guidelines on what metrics to expect. So when you send out a broadcast, like what is a good unsubscribe rate or typical I should say. Yeah, so the mean unsubscribe rate for a campaign is 0.7 % that we see.

32:56
So that’s just like completely average across everything. The highest unsubscribe rates exist on welcome series and abandoned carts because that tends to be the message, like the first message a user has got, right? If they sign up from a pop-up or something or landing page, or if they opted in a checkout and then got an abandoned cart. So that’s pretty common where for abandoned carts and welcomes, you might see a two to 3 % cumulative unsubscribe rate because people like got the first message, got the code they wanted.

33:26
and then opted out of the list. Interesting. What you just quoted is significantly lower than some of the numbers that I’ve gotten from other SMS consultants, including myself too. But I assume that I’m not doing everything correctly yet since I just got started. But 0.7 % just sounds really low. So that is the completely overall aggregate number from all the postscript, which I know because…

33:54
We are working on benchmarks lately. Yeah, I’m sure you have the numbers. But that changes quite a bit by product category, which is interesting. let’s see, beauty and cosmetics and food and drink have lower unsubscribe rates than it seems home goods are the highest at 1 % for campaigns. Yeah.

34:23
So let’s talk about acquisition here. And I know just getting SMS subscribers is a little bit different than email, for example. So what are some of the best ways to actually get people on your list? So this is the spot that we’re seeing a lot of creativity. Obviously, the tried and true methods of get opt-ins at checkout, get opt-ins through a pop-up, those make sense. And we don’t want users to compromise their email collection. So what we recommend there is either focus

34:53
on email collection on desktop and SMS collection on mobile when it comes to pop-ups, or collect both. Maybe make a two-screen pop-up where first you collect email and then you ask for SMS or vice versa, have SMS as an optional field. That works really well. If we work with a brand who only wants to collect opt-ins at checkout and doesn’t want to do a pop-up, we will honestly say, hey, you know what? You’re probably not ready then because

35:22
We’ve seen that be a huge delta for success because you can’t have an opt-in box pre-checked at checkout. It has to be unchecked. So because of that, using pop-ups and other forms of collection is really important if it’s going to see any scale at all. But beyond that, we’re starting to see really interesting other forms of acquisition where, you know the keyword opt-ins, like text post script to 30303, that sort of thing? We’re seeing people start to include inserts in all their packaging that’s going out.

35:51
whether or not the sale came from an SMS user or even their e-commerce store. We’re seeing people include just keyword opt-ins in all their packaging as a means to, if they have a retail presence, get their retail buyers to become direct e-commerce subscribers or just to grow the list in general. That’s one cool method. Another cool method we’re seeing is for brands that have a nice large organic or influencer-led social media practice, we’re seeing people include keyword calls to action

36:21
on like their Instagram profiles, put them on Instagram stories, also include one click opt-ins on Instagram stories, like swipe up to subscribe. And then we’re seeing the paid side of this. So we’re just starting to see brands use Facebook lead ads as a way to gather compliant messaging. And the last and coolest thing. for the lead ads, sorry. So you’re at, people are actually physically typing in a number as opposed to using the keyword automations. Correct.

36:50
They’re typing in their phone number or if Facebook already has their phone number, Facebook can like pre-fill it and the user just essentially gives agreement. So we’re seeing some Facebook lead ads. We’re seeing Instagram stories and some Instagram ads with the click option as well, not the pre-fill that you mentioned. But probably the coolest form of opt-in that I’ve ever seen that I saw last week was a brand

37:19
worked with lots of influencers and they had one of their influencers talk about the keyword sign up. That was the call to action. The brand was trying to get those influencers subscribers to, or the followers to become direct subscribers to the brand. That was cool. But then I saw the same brand work with a TikTok influencer and the TikTok influencer made a screenshot video of him texting back and forth with the brand.

37:48
And it was a very funny conversation. The brand was like engaging really fast and that video went viral on TikTok. And so the brand saw tens of thousands of signups just from that. Interesting. Okay. So in general, like you mentioned the Facebook ad and just the different ways with the keyword automation and just typing in the number or click to subscribe. Which one do you find the best? Like for me, I know I would much rather text a word to a certain number than

38:17
type in my number, for example. Which form is like the highest converting one is basically what I’m asking you. Yeah. Your intuition is correct where the one click opt-in that like pre-fields a message or just calls to action on keywords, like text this to this, those convert higher than a form fill. Okay. And I know my best way of attracting subscribers right now is like right in the banner on every single page of our store, we have

38:44
text BBL to this number and you get a free product essentially. That’s smart. Yeah. I think that it’s still early in terms of just using like call to action banners like that, or even like collection on product pages, maybe like opt-ins for when a product is back in stock or opt-ins like wait lists via SMS. Those things haven’t really started yet, but I think they’ll start soon. Interesting.

39:10
I do want to touch a little bit about compliance since I’ve gotten questions from people where, oh, great, why don’t I just take my whole list from Klaviyo or whatnot and just start messaging them? So can you talk about, like, if you already have a bunch of numbers, like, how do you legally text message them? Yeah. So this is the most important thing we’re going to cover. SMS is different than email. You cannot do that. You cannot send a text to old customers.

39:39
who you happen to have their phone numbers. Unless they explicitly opted into SMS marketing, which means with the proper language, they like sent the first text or they checked a box at checkout or they put their phone number in knowing that they’d be signing up for SMS marketing. Even if you have their phone number, they are not eligible to be sent text to and the penalties for it are very high. 500 to $1,500 per message sent.

40:08
gets automatic class action status inside the US. So there’s this whole industry of lawyers who, what they do full time is they go around and they like try to find people who got a text accidentally and then they send a demand letter and they file a lawsuit. So if you have a big list of numbers that you’re exporting from Klaviyo or from Shopify or whatever, do not send them unless they are actually SMS opt-ins. And like with Postscript, Steve, we actually don’t have a way for users to…

40:37
just upload a list. They can submit it to our compliance team to like go through with them to ensure that these were proper opt-ins, but we put that in place. It’s not self-serve uploading just to try to prevent, you know, customers from getting themselves in trouble. So let’s say you have this list of numbers. What’s the best way to get them to opt in? You cannot send them a text to do it. The best way is if you have a list of phone numbers, it probably means they bought from you. It probably means that you have their email addresses too.

41:06
So what I recommend to brands is maybe send a couple part email series trying to get them to also opt into SMS. We have brands who send an email once a month or every quarter promoting their SMS list. We have brands who include a call to action to their SMS list passively in every single email, like at the bottom, right? Text this to this to sign up for our VIP list. So you can use their emails to send them an email.

41:34
You can use their emails to build a lookalike audience, to pay to get them to opt into your SMS list, not a lookalike audience, but to build that audience, but you cannot text them directly. I know for my store, I just kind of make an effort to cross pollinate everything in general, but I don’t think I’ve gone the other way yet. Do you know of any companies that have the phone number, but not the email and go for the email? Like send it, you mean send a text saying, hey, sign up for our email list here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I really haven’t seen it yet. Yeah.

42:04
I guess maybe it’s, I haven’t done that either yet. When I was doing Messenger, I used to cross pollinate my Facebook Messenger and my email all the time. But for SMS, I haven’t done that yet. think maybe it’s because my perception of SMS is it’s the holy grail of communication right now. Meaning like no one can take this number away from me and it’s pretty much a sure thing for correspondence. Granted, it costs money, but yeah, I just thought I’d bring that out because I wasn’t sure if any other brands were doing that. Really not seeing it yet.

42:33
This is kind of like more of a future looking question. How much longer do you think SMS has until marketers kind of destroy it? Like, yeah, so here’s what I think as an e-commerce marketer, email has had a 20 year run and it’s still going really strong. I think SMS is most similar to email because it’s an open protocol, right? Nobody owns the email platform.

43:01
There’s lots of different vendors. It’s the same with SMS. It’s an owned marketing channel. And that’s a little different than messenger or WhatsApp or Instagram, which is there’s rules governing it set up by Facebook. So I think we’ll have a very, very, very long run. think it’s, I mean, it’s clearly the dominant communication method of the next 10 years at least, but the norms will change. So when you say ruin it,

43:28
What I see is even more of the version I’m talking, I’m preaching already, right? Five years from now, but we see so many brands and some other platforms take an approach of like, send your whole list twice a week. Just, just blast them. I don’t think that’ll be happening in five years. I think it’ll be still heavily used, but a much more tailored approach, very targeted messages, very targeted automation flows. And also I think responses will get bigger and bigger. Right now we have a lot of our.

43:58
are customers that also run support through SMS. So if users reply with questions or had an issue with their order, the brand will manage that out of the help desk. And I expect we’ll see more and more of that, just the channel becoming more two-way, less broadcasty. Yeah, actually, I was just about to mention that. So I have Postscript hooked up to Gorgias. And one thing that I do for the post purchase, because you have to send them when they opt in a message, right?

44:27
And so I say, Hey, if you have any questions about your order, just reply and we actually get replies. And oftentimes we can actually even upsell during this conversation, which makes it sound a lot natural, a lot more natural. totally in that respect, I see it a lot different than email because they get an instant response. Yep. It’s like live chat that your customer takes with them everywhere they go. That’s pretty potent. Yeah. And so in that respect, it’s a lot more effective than email in my opinion, at least.

44:57
So Alex, I know you wanted to talk about this new certification that you have and we kind of touched on compliance. What is this all about? Yeah, so what it’s about is that this is a new channel. It’s new for marketers, even if they’ve done email forever. It’s new for e-commerce people. So we get the same questions over and over and over again when brands are looking to start out with SMS. They need to understand compliance. They want to know best practices. They want to know how to build an omni-channel strategy.

45:26
They want to know what best practices are for list growth and acquisition, how they should manage responses. Really a lot of the stuff we’ve covered today. And so what we decided to do is we took everything we’ve learned over the last few years and we boiled it down into the SMS marketing certification, which it’s live on Postscript.io. If you go over the learn tab, you’ll see the button. It’s completely free. It’s a several hour long video course and there’s some videos and then there’s some quizzes and

45:56
And if you, even if you fail the quizzes, we give you another chance to study up and take them again. It’s totally free and we’ve been testing it for a few months and we’re getting really, really good results and really good quotes back where we think it’s just going to lay the foundation for marketers to understand the dynamics of the channel and how to think about the channel and what are some initial best practices so that they can then really tailor it to their brand. And so we made a general one and we also launched what we called the Postscript

46:25
partner certification. And this one is, very similar, but it also includes some sections on like, how do I position it in cell managed SMS services? That one’s really made for agencies or other technology partners. But the general certification, that one just came out on Tuesday. It’s been getting just some like great engagement and feedback. There’s hundreds of people that are already taking it. And we’re just excited about like similar to really good techs.

46:53
providing another resource for the community to just learn about the channel. And the one last thing about it, I’ll say, is this is not meant to be Postscript specific. It’s really for anyone even not using Postscript that wants to better understand SMS in e-commerce. Yeah, and I know when I first got started using Postscript, there’s actually a lot of rules that you need to follow. There’s also stuff that you need to add to your privacy policy in your terms and conditions.

47:21
You know, I had a question in my mind, have you known any really large companies that have been sued for breach? Because I still get random text messages on my phone. And there’s clearly spam messages. Are they enforcing all this stuff? I hope there is an enormous amount of litigation here. Okay, if you like Google TCPA lawsuit, I mean, there’ll be millions of results. So yes, there are lots of stories within e commerce. There’s also some stories of like,

47:50
There’s a story of a very, very, very big brand that we work with who long before PostScript was created, I mean, back in 2010, they took all the phone, they didn’t know any better. And they took all the phone numbers of people who checked out at their retail locations and they started sending them texts and they were sued for a hundred million dollars and they settled for $10 million. And that one is public. That was before we existed, but that’s kind of just like the scope of things here. But the other thing is politicians and

48:19
and political fundraising, that’s where so much of this kind of texts come from, right? You didn’t sign up, but you just are suddenly getting texts from all these different candidates. And the way that’s working is because there’s a carve out in the law. When politicians pass the TCPA, they put a carve out in there for political fundraising and political communication. So they aren’t subject to the same opt-ins. Okay. Convenient. Yeah, actually come to think of it, most of the spam has been political.

48:49
Well Alex, this was very helpful and I hope and I just want to tell the listeners out there that I’ve been using text messaging for maybe half a year now and it is a fantastic channel. I’m probably gonna be posting my results. I actually don’t even have all the functionality implemented yet and it’s already become one of my top five channels for my e-commerce store. So if you guys aren’t on it yet, it’s probably the next own marketing platform. It’s not performing as well as email for me just yet because I have so many more email.

49:18
subscribers and I do text but per subscriber it’s it’s worth a lot more than an email subscriber based on my limited results here. So yep, awesome. We’re seeing the same thing. Well, thank you so much for having me. This is a great combo. Yeah, thanks for coming on Alex really appreciate it.

49:38
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now if you are not doing SMS marketing for your online store, then you should start right now. Seriously, it works so well and it’s probably 5x more effective than email at least. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 325. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

50:06
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

50:33
Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog. If you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and it’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.