408: A Strategy That Gives 10X Better Returns Than Email With Adam Turner

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now recently, I attended the eCommerce Fuel event in Norfolk, Virginia, and my own eCommerce conference over at the Seller Summit. And I found that most eCommerce entrepreneurs are not using SMS marketing yet. And I was actually pretty shocked. Now I can understand why you might think that text message marketing is intrusive, but it works. In fact, I would say that my SMS list

00:29
converts at roughly 10x the revenue per subscriber as my email list. Anyway, in this episode, I have Adam Turner on the show to talk about the current SMS marketing landscape and how to quickly grow your email list. But before I begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store. It depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores

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And here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who’s shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife.

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I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. If you run an ecommerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. This is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top 5 revenue source in my ecommerce store. I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in ecommerce, 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,

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and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your audience. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

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No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now on to the show.

02:41
Welcome to the My Wife, Quartermaster podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Adam Turner on the show. Now, Adam is the CEO of Postscript.io, which is the text message provider that I use for all of my businesses. Now, what is hilarious about Adam is that when I first installed Postscript on my store, Adam was actually my designated support person, but I had no idea that he was a CEO. So I kept asking him questions that got more and more technical.

03:09
Like we were talking about actual code snippets, the API calls, and the man knew the answers to every single question that I asked. And during this time, I was thinking to myself, damn, the tech support at Postscript is fricking amazing. Like most support folks can’t speak to this level of depth with their products. And it was only later that I discovered that Adam was, was a CEO. Anyway, today what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about the ins and outs of SMS marketing from someone who lives and breathes it. And with that, welcome to the show, Adam.

03:39
How you doing today? Appreciate it. I feel like this has been a long time coming, so I’m very excited. remember that email thread very, very well. And it’s interesting. the early days, we are obsessed with our customers, right? And I got so much of my inspiration from those conversations with customers early on. And one of the things that all the co-founders did early on was that

04:05
we had our on-site chat widget hooked up to all of our cell phones. And so if anyone chatted in, it would ring our phones no matter what time. And so I remember like the week of Black Friday would be ringing at 3 a.m., 4 a.m. Everybody’s trying to set up their pop-ups, set up everything for their Black Friday campaigns. And it would just ring, we’d hop on the call. I remember I just had, you know, wiping my eyes like trying to wake up and talk with customers.

04:34
We’ve tried to scale that that ethos up to now and we’ve got a great team of customer support support folks that have been built from that ethos and It’s been yeah, I just thought it was hilarious because when I found out I was like, oh my god, okay I’m not gonna ask this guy anymore, know, if I’m gonna ask it’s gonna be like a really I always try to ask really intelligent questions But I was actually more careful, you know, more careful once I found out Appreciate that. So, know, what’s funny is I had Alex which is

05:03
Adam’s business partner a while back. But I actually never did get the full story about how you guys got together to start Postgres. Like what was your relationship when you decided to start this company? Sure. So I met Alex through a company called Stat Commerce. He and I were working there. And what we were doing, we ran essentially, this is a very basic explanation of it, white labeled e-commerce stores for publishers. And so we ran like the Mashable store, or the CNN store.

05:32
And these publishers would drive traffic to that store and we ran everything on the backend. And so we ran sourcing vendors, doing all the fulfillment and drop shipping, doing all the marketing. We were basically running hundreds of brands and I was doing a lot there. was doing some tech. was doing data engineering. was doing product, lots of stuff, 60 person startup wearing lots of hats. And Beller worked on the go-to-market side of the business. So partnerships and sales and that type of thing. And he was by far the best. He brought in all of the big logos.

06:01
He absolutely crushed it. And I was like intimidated to talk with him when I was new. He’d been there for like four years. I was intimidated. And then one day we just decided, hey, we’re just going to go out to lunch. We’re going to hash this out. And we became basically like best friends over lunch. And from there, my brother, who’s one of my other co-founders, Colin, he and I were building the product. I started showing Alex a little bit. And I knew that, you know, as a co-founder, you want to have

06:29
other co-founders that fill in your gaps, right? Because if you have a lot of overlapping skills with your co-founders, then you’re just going to be doing the same things and there’s going to be huge gaps within the business. But if you find people that fill in the gaps and generally, you know, I’m sometimes more interested in tech than I am in people, though I love people. But Beller lives and breathes people. He’s like, like a peacock all the way. He like loves like this type of thing. And

06:57
And I thought that that would be great. And he did close our early big customers and he helped teach me how to be working with customers and everything like that. So, Bellar came in there and it’s been awesome to have someone who’s so focused on the go-to-market side of the business while I can focus on product engineering, design, finance, all that type of good stuff. Yeah, you know, there is something about Alex that I just can’t put my finger on, but he’s just really personable, like a really great people person.

07:26
it comes I mean it’s if you think it’s good over zoom it comes off 10x in person if you get to like he’s just a great hang and you can get along with anyone that’s a special thing if you find something like that then you want to well maybe I can convince one of you guys to stop by seller summit I mean you guys are sponsoring you should just stop by the event hang out for a couple nights or something that would be awesome that would be awesome we’d love to you know so Adam what I want to do today is talk about the current landscape with SMS marketing and what’s new

07:55
When I had Alex on here, I can’t, maybe a year or two ago, say SMS was still kind of pretty new. I actually just got back from an e-commerce conference and you know, I’ve been using SMS now for, I want to say two years, but I found that at the conference, there’s still a lot of people not using SMS. Can you just give me an idea of what like you feel like the adoption rate is in the current landscape right now? That it’s interesting because

08:24
because there’s a couple different ways to measure this, right? You can measure it anecdotally just by talking with folks. We had, I think that in early 2021, a company called Commerce Stacks came out with a report and they said that at that time Postscript was the most widely adopted SMS product at 0.5 % of the market, right? Which is totally wild. And basically if you combined all of the players, it would be around 1%. And so, but then when you look at something like, okay,

08:54
email product adoption, that Commerce Stack support said it was at something like 40%, which is, don’t think true. think that basically 90 plus percent of folks are using email. And so if you normalize that out a little bit, then you’re still talking what I would say was low single digit percentages last year. And maybe we’re reaching into the mid to mid high single digit percentages. So maybe 7%, 8%, something like that. Yeah, lots of room to grow in that aspect.

09:22
What is your general feel, and I can give you my opinions after I get your answer here, but how do customers feel about getting text messages, marketing text messages in today’s landscape compared to just a couple of years ago? That’s the question. Because really when we talk with folks that are doing SMS today, the number one quote unquote objection that we hear is that people don’t want to bother their customers, which is absolutely great because that means that you are thinking about your customers and you care about them.

09:50
right? And you care about not bothering them because you want to build a great relationship with them. And so that’s one of the interesting things when we were starting Postscript, that was a unique insight that we had, which is we had access to the opt-in data for a lot of our stores. And we saw that if we gave people the choice to give an email address or a phone number, that for many of our stores, people would give the phone number more than 50 % of the time as their main contact information. And so basically they were saying, hey, if anything’s up with my order, please just text me.

10:20
email me. And there may be many reasons for that. But that was an interesting insight that we had early on. And that was three years ago. Or another good example of what folks might say is, maybe I have an older demographic. Maybe I’m selling to the 40 to 60 age range. And when you think about that, those folks still use their phones just as much. They use them, if you’re talking about a parent, they’re constantly texting with their kids. They’re probably not emailing with their kids.

10:48
So they’re texting potentially even way more than they’re emailing. And we’ve seen brands have a ton of success within that age range too. And so I think that right now, the biggest reason why people are hesitant to pull the trigger is because they don’t want to annoy their customers. And what I would say to that is within the data set across roughly 8,000 of our customers, we don’t see massive unsubscribe rates. As long as you are respecting the relationship that you have with your customers, then…

11:13
as long as they’re opting in, then that’s saying, please text me, right? The folks that don’t want texts, they won’t opt in. The folks that no longer want your texts, they will easily opt out. But what you end up with is a highly engaged new asset for your business, right? And that’s critical for your business to make sure you scale. it’s really important because what we’re seeing, Postscript has been around for roughly three years, three and a half years. What we’re seeing is that the brands who started two, two and a half years ago.

11:40
Very large brands, we’re talking multiple millions of dollars of GMV. Once they decided to lean into SMS, it took them about two years for SMS to surpass their email revenue. They’re doing that with a list that’s about one-tenth the size as their email list. Maybe they have 5 million emails and they have 500,000 SMS subscribers. Those SMS subscribers are surpassing their email revenue. It’s important to get over that initial hump of not wanting to bother your customers because

12:08
This is becoming the number one revenue channel for brands that are doing it for two years plus. And in the earlier you start, you bet the better off you’re going to be. You know, it’s funny you use that 10 X number. I did a case study on SMS versus my email list. I want to say it was over a year and a half ago and that was the number actually 10 X because my email list was 10 X larger than my SMS list and it was doing about the same in terms of revenue. So.

12:37
That’s definitely a case. So my experience, if anyone out there listening is comparing this to email, the unsubscribe rates are going to be higher. So I think mine hover around one to 2%. I don’t know what the average is. Mine might be higher or lower. That would be roughly. I think it depends on the brand, but best brands, maybe it’s 0.5%. But you know, but one to 2 % on average is definitely fair. Compare that to email, which is, I don’t know, 0.1%, maybe. I don’t know what the average unsubscribe rate is.

13:07
But I guess the people that do stay on, like you said, tend to stay on and actually buy. And I’ve just noticed this about my own behavior. It’s actually a couple of restaurants that I stay on their SMS lists. So whenever they send out coupons for like a free burrito, like I’m there. I actually want the coupons for those deals. And then there’s actually a select number of e-commerce companies. I would say less than five for sure.

13:31
where I actually wanna know when they’re having some deals or whatnot, because I just love buying like the gadgets and whatever new stuff that they sell. I don’t know if you have this information, Adam, but would you describe my behavior similarly to people who are actually using SMS as a customer? I would say that, and obviously this all depends on the brand. Sure. But I would say that folks are probably subscribed to even more SMS, even more stores over SMS than five.

14:00
And I would say that this is highly dependent on the relationship that that brand builds with those consumers over the channel. And let me give you some examples and some data with that. If you have a brand that’s essentially copied and pasted their email strategy where, maybe even leaned in even more on SMS where they’re just saying, I’m going to send a message three times a week and it’s going to be a 20 % off coupon. And I’m just going to try and get as much revenue in this month as possible. That will probably make you the most revenue that month.

14:30
But it will sacrifice your subscriber LTV, right? The lifetime revenue of your SMS channel. so what you’re doing is essentially you’re mortgaging your future for short term revenue. there are ways to maximize your subscriber LTV without just sending more messages, right? And the primary way that we see folks do that,

14:54
is initiating their customers with actual conversations, right? Hey, how can you drop by the store today? I saw that you were looking at this. I can help you out with anything. And it’s hard for some stores to do this because you might not have the customer support staffing that will be able to handle everybody responding to every message, right? And so what Postscript does is we try to make it easy for you to manage a lot of these conversations at scale. And we do that by working on our Flow Builder, right? So you think about Flow Builder, maybe Klaviyo pioneered

15:24
idea of this flow builder. And really, what we think of our flow builder as is not only can you orchestrate the messages that are being sent out, but you can orchestrate all the replies that are coming in and the actions that you can take off of those replies. So if someone says, oh, I’m just here looking at new shirts, then you can custom tag that subscriber as, OK, they’re interested in shirts. And that means that the next campaign or automation that you send out can be targeted towards people who have just been looking at shirts or something like that.

15:53
And why this is so important from the data perspective is because if you’re able to have two-way interactions with your customers, you can generate significantly more revenue. And so we did A-B testing with our customers. And basically we had a single brand have customers reply back to them. And they replied, they had a conversation with one cohort of those customers and they didn’t reply to the other customers, right? And so they left one cohort untouched and they had a conversation with the others.

16:20
The cohort that had the conversations generated four times more revenue in the next two months. It’s seriously meaningful for these customers. And you can think about it, right? If you use your marketing channel as your customer support, as your sales channel, as this product discovery channel, then you’re much more likely to stay subscribed in the long-term because you know that Joey on the other end is listening to you and you can reply back at any time.

16:47
And so I think that that’s what makes this channel so special. And that’s how you’ll see merchants maximize their revenue over the channel, rather than just defer back to typical kind of marketing automation campaign every, every now and then that sort of thing. Yeah, I would a hundred percent agree. So I actually have Postscript hooked up to Gorgias and that’s where we manage all of our channels. And I find that if someone asks a question via text, it’s almost like a hundred percent conversion rate. Right. Yep. Like if I’m helping them via text.

17:16
And then that actually makes them more receptive to getting texts going forward. So in that way, at least for our company, and again, I don’t have a larger sample set here, but it actually works better than the phone and it’s much easier than the phone is what we found. I guess the only issue is, I did want to ask you about this, because I actually turned off like all the abandoned cart stuff. Is that still like an effective strategy for brands to use an abandoned cart in SMS?

17:45
It absolutely is. And since you’ve talked with Alex and since we’ve been billing, we have lots of different ways in funnel. have browse abandonment, these types of things. Though those are lower down in the funnel, those are higher converting subscribers anyway, we have found that you can still increase the conversion rate from the baseline from people that wouldn’t receive those messages by sending out those messages. And whether that’s because you’re having a conversation with them,

18:14
or because you’re just reminding them that there’s something in those cart. If you take browse abandonment or abandoned cart compared to baseline or not sending the message, then you’re going to see higher conversion rates if you actually send the message. what you want to be careful of there is obviously watching the unsubscribe rates, right? And we tend to find that customers tend to send way less than they should to optimize their revenue. And of course, they don’t want to bother their customers. They don’t want to increase their unsubscribe rates. But what we find is that

18:42
Customers should send up to a point that they’re comfortable with unsubscribes and then set that as their strategy versus go in with a strategy. And if unsubscribes are low, then they’re like, great. Because what we found is that for some customers, one of our merchants sends almost every single day, basically every weekday. And the reason is because they have deals that are different every single weekday and their customers use their text thread as like a newsfeed, right? And they’re getting much more exposure than that brand might on.

19:11
Instagram or Facebook or anything like that. And so there, I wouldn’t suggest that for every brand, not by any means, right? But if your brand has a strong audience that wants to hear from you, then you can probably maximize your SMS revenue by sending more often. Well, let’s talk about best practices then. So how do you actually establish that community and get people receptive to getting your messages?

19:37
That is a great question. First, it starts with having a great brand and a great product. I’ll just say that all of the natural e-commerce intuition that you have applies here. And so you want to start with a really great foundation. And then you want to make sure that you are setting the tone with the initial messages that you’re sending about how this relationship is going to be. What we find, one of the worst strategies, for example, is to start collecting SMS on your site passively.

20:06
into the first message that someone gets is, thanks for subscribing. And then they don’t get any message from you until a month later when you’re running a discount. Because that person will get that text a month later and say, who is this again? I don’t understand. So you need to have those initial welcome series flow setups so that someone can get to know your brand. And depending on when you collect them in the funnel, if you collect them right when you land on their site, then you’re probably doing more product discovery. You’re probably doing more brand discovery, that type of thing.

20:36
If you collect their phone number at checkout, then it’s probably a much different conversation. It means that they might have abandoned checkout for a specific reason. If you collect it after the order or as a part of a QR code in a package that you send out, then it’s a much different conversation. It’s about supporting them in what they just purchased. Hey, do you have any questions about your order? Would you like to write a review? Can you send in a photo? We have a lot of customers, lot of merchants that are collecting UGC through customers sending photos back. so really dependent on the funnel, you want to have a different tone.

21:05
But to make sure that you have a specific cadence after people sign up to make sure they understand what’s going to happen over the channel and how the relationship is going to be established. But the number one, the worst performing strategy that I see is to not set up a regular cadence of sending for these customers and to just kind of collect phone numbers and send during Black Friday Cyber Monday when it’s the highest. Yeah. So when you’re talking about a welcome sequence, is that similar to like a

21:33
an email welcome sequence? I mean, you have less characters to work with. So what would you say like among your customers, what’s a really good high performing welcome sequence? So I would say that, so for example, something that we found with an SMS is that you want to get someone a contact card, right? You want your contacts saved in their phone so that you can continue to have deliverability so that they know who’s texting when you text them, that sort of thing. But what we found is that

22:00
is super tactical, but that if you put the contact card further down in the Welcome Series in the third or fourth message, you actually have a better chance of having that customer stay subscribed because they know what they’re going to be getting. I think that personally, some of the best performing Welcome Series that I’ve seen are top of funnel. So they’re collecting through a pop-up, they’re collecting when people land on their site, and it’s a lot of brand discovery. People are telling their story through the Welcome Series versus trying to force a conversion.

22:28
And what that looks like is a good example of a brand that does this is Gunnar Kennels. So Gunnar Kennels is, I have one for my dog. It’s like a crash test rated crate for your car to keep your dog safe while you’re driving. And what they do, and they were made because the owner had a dog named Gunnar and he wanted to like keep him protected during travel.

22:50
And that story means a lot to dog owners, right? Everybody can, everybody who’s a dog owner can connect with that story. And so what they do in their welcome series is they send out YouTube videos, links to YouTube videos so that the customer can get to know because it’s a high AOV order, right? The customer is probably not going to purchase the first time they’re on the website. But if you get to know their story, you’re much more likely to purchase it, increases conversion rates significantly. And so I think that being your authentic self as a brand and

23:19
starting that conversation. The next thing that I see tactically within Welcome Series is to try and start a conversation. Well, hey, how did you come to the site today? Is there anything I can help you out with? And again, if you have the staffing to do that, or if you have the automated flows within Postscript to handle a lot of those, then you’re going to be much more successful. And it takes a lot of work. It’s going to be a lot of work, but it’s going to be absolutely worth it. It’s going to significantly increase the conversion rate for potentially your entire website.

23:49
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.

24:17
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.

24:47
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. Yeah. So for our store, we tend to use it as a conversation piece. Like if you have any questions, this is the best way that you’ll get an instant answer. And then if you can get them to just hit reply, that’s almost an instant conversion right there.

25:14
What are you seeing in terms of frequency? I know you just mentioned someone who texts every day. I can’t imagine that’s the norm. How often do you see the typical store that doesn’t do daily deals send out SMS messages? Sure. To start high level about what we’re trying to accomplish, again, I’ll reference subscriber LTV. This is the revenue per subscriber that you’re going to drive over the lifetime, the lifetime value of that subscriber.

25:43
And the way that we think about that is a few different ways. One of them is acquisition rates. So how many phone numbers are you getting for the traffic that’s coming to your store? Do you have the right ways to collect them? The next is the revenue per message that you’re making that you send out. That comes down to targeting, that comes down to content, that comes down to different conversion mechanisms, like a one-click checkout or anything like that.

26:11
If you have the next is the number of messages that you’re sending per subscriber, the frequency that you’re talking about, and then the unsubscribed rate, right? It’s divided by the unsubscribed rate. And so that’s going to basically determine the lifetime value. And so if you increase M, if you increase the frequency, you’re going to make more revenue. But if your unsubscribed rate spikes because of that, then you actually might negate all of the revenue because you’re going to be losing that in the future. So what we do with our brands is we try and

26:40
we try and manage this relationship between the frequency and the unsubscriber rate. And so what I see with most brands, which is not the correct thing to be doing, is that they might send four times a month. They might send once a week. And that seems like a reasonable cadence. That seems, you send someone a text once a week. That’s super easy to understand. It’s super easy to plan for. But really,

27:03
What we see when we say, hey, what if you said twice a week, how much more revenue would you generate? And what would the unsubscribed rate be? You need to be able to A-B test to these different frequencies. And generally what we see is that people can double or triple their frequency without significant increases to their unsubscribed rate. And so what that is, it’s great, right? It’s revenue that you didn’t have yesterday that you now have today because you decided to increase your frequency. And I would say that the main caveat to all of this is what you should be paying attention to is your unsubscribed rate.

27:32
That is the number one thing you should be paying attention to. But you should be constantly experimenting with your frequency to understand what is going to be best for your store, what’s going to maximize revenue over the long term. And so that’s kind of how we think about it. And generally I say the number one things that brands do is they don’t send often enough, which is very counterintuitive, but you have to take a look at the data and understand if your customers are getting annoyed or if they’re not. And that’s the unsubscribed rate. I mean, the answer you just gave is the same with email.

28:02
I mean, people often don’t send enough and it’s a matter of managing your unsubscribes with the additional revenue. I guess the only difference between SMS and email is it actually costs money per send, whereas email, doesn’t. I mean, you pay like a monthly fee typically. Right, right. And I mean, with the Clayvio changes to pricing, it’s been a little bit different where they’re… sure, sure. But it’s not totally free anymore. But…

28:30
I would say that yes, it’s different than email because the cost that the carriers charge is higher. But especially for right now, like we were mentioning before, the 10x number, the value is so much higher. The subscriber LTV is about 10x higher. And so it’s a little bit between something very cheap like email and something very expensive like Facebook. If you can get someone from Facebook, maybe you paid $20 to get them.

29:00
to your website, maybe that’s expensive, but five to $20 for a click. If you can get their phone number right away, that means that it’s only going to cost you less than a cent to get them back to your website the next time. And so it’s definitely more towards the email in terms of cost, but it is more expensive. And that’s another thing you have to keep in mind is the ROI. And I think that, you know, generally our customers see over 30 X ROI on the platform. So they’re doing very well. So how are people mixing email and SMS?

29:30
So I’m just thinking about that first example that I gave you with Abandon Cart, where would you want to send an email Abandon Cart as well as an SMS Abandon Cart? Like how do you merge the two communication platforms? Or how are people doing it, I should say? That’s a good question. So we’ve seen people try everything, right? And one of the things that we’ve done, we’ve built two different iterations of our integration with Clayview, because it’s so important to make sure that

29:57
the orchestration between the email platform and the SMS platform is well-defined. In the new iteration, basically, it pulls all your Klaviyo data into Postscript, and we push all of our data into Klaviyo. And so if you want to send an email, if someone doesn’t see an SMS or doesn’t click an SMS, you can do that. If you want to send an SMS when someone does or doesn’t get an email or click an email, you can do that within Postscript or Open or anything like that, right? And so…

30:24
We try and make the platform as flexible as possible so that people can try all of these different things. What we’ve seen is that the best behavior is to send, for Abandoned Cards specifically, is to send both an email and an SMS. If you are trying to minimize the cost of your SMS program, you might want to say, okay, if they don’t open that email, then send an SMS, and so you’re sending less volume. But we see net-net a 15 % increase in revenue if you send both at the same time.

30:53
And so that usually always pays for itself in terms of the volume that you’re sending for SMS. And again, that was counterintuitive to me. It didn’t make sense because for me as a consumer, I check both my email and my phone and I would just be getting the same message on both. But I think if you go back to kind of best practice marketing, you want to increase the frequency that they’re seeing the messages, right? Especially if it’s the right message, just like seeing, you know, if you see two billboards for something, you know, you’re not going to get negative ROI from that.

31:22
And so by hitting them in these two places, you’re staying in contact. And because SMS is more synchronous, right, you’re going to check your phone more often and you’re going to be able to reply and emails more asynchronous, you’re probably getting them at different times. And so that’s what we’ve seen. I think the other difference now is email open rates are all out of whack anyway. So I could say it’s open, but they didn’t even see it. So I guess it makes sense to send both today. Yeah. How accurate are like the open rates?

31:50
with an SMS message. Is that all measured? Sure. So that’s something that we wish that the phone devices would actually send back. We don’t have actual open rates, right? We can use the industry standards. People say 98%. That’s kind of when you see an ad for an SMS platform, you’ll see 98%. And that’s just taken from a bunch of that have been done. I think that you can expect that that might go down to 97%, 96 % over time. But

32:19
It’s hard with the open rates. And that’s why we focus a lot in terms of the attribution that Postscript drives. We focus a lot on the click through rate attribution, right? Because we want to make sure that we’re actually sending folks to the website. With that though, we are able to track cross device attribution. And so if someone receives an SMS and then they go on site two minutes later on their desktop, then we’re able to see that transition as well. And I think that that’s really important because

32:45
happens to me a lot, right? Like I have my phone right next to my computer right now. And if I get a text, and I want like to shop on my desktop, I’m probably just going to type in the type in the website. And then you’re going to have in Google Analytics, direct to none as the source, right? When really, it’s because I saw the text. And so it’s important to like, try and get that cross device attribution when you can’t get the exact view event from the device. Ah, interesting. I didn’t realize you could do that. Okay.

33:14
So back to the original question with email and SMS, how are you finding people, like if I land on a site, I want to grab ideally both an email and an SMS, right, together. So how are people prioritizing the two, given that SMS is in theory more valuable than email subscriber? Yeah, it’s based on the data that I see every single day. I would say that from

33:42
from an economic perspective, financially, it would behoove every merchant to be collecting phone numbers first. And obviously I’m going to be biased in this because I run an SMS company, but from the data, because you just, like you mentioned before, an email is potentially worth one-tenth the value of a phone number, right? And phone numbers might be harder to get now than email addresses because it’s a paradigm shift in what’s going on. And so if you…

34:12
collect the phone number first and then you collect the email, you’re probably going to maximize your total stores revenue over time because the phone numbers are more valuable. But there are things that you can do in your phone number and email collection to try and get both at the highest converting rate possible, right? And this includes, you know, different stepped pop-ups, right? Where you collect email first and then phone number, collect phone number first and then email. And what you wanna do is you wanna make sure or have the customer

34:39
believe that they need to give both in order to get whatever incentive you’re giving them, whether that’s sweepstakes, whether that’s a discount, whether that is VIP support, anything that you’re giving the customer in exchange for that information, you want to make sure that it’s clear that they need to give both. And what we’ve seen from a conversion rate perspective is the copy matters with this, right? Where if you just say, oh, thanks for your email address, your coupon should be in your email inbox, now give us your phone number.

35:06
no incentive for them to continue giving information when they already have that. so having the customer understand that they need to give both is going to result in the highest conversion rate. Because I don’t think that merchants should have to choose. I think they should always be collecting both potentially in different parts of the funnel. Postscript is working on many different ways to collect phone numbers. One of them is we have our new back in stock module. And so that instead of just giving away a discount to get a phone number, you can now have customers put in their phone number to be notified when something is back in stock.

35:35
then they also are opting in for marketing messaging there too. And so you’re delivering the customer value by saying you’ll be the first to know when something’s back in stock and then you’re also getting the phone number. so I would say that it’s not just about focusing on what does my main store pop-up show. It’s about where am I collecting? Am I collecting on checkout? Am I collecting on pop-ups? Am I collecting through QR codes? Am I collecting in retail? If I’m in retail, any sort of those opportunities. so I would say that

36:03
It’s good to optimize and make sure that your content is correct, but it’s also good to go broad and collected every step in the funnel. You know, as more and more people adopt SMS, I know from for me, at least I’ve been getting a lot more spam. Have the rules changed? Have they gotten more strict over time? So generally, the rules within the in the US SMS sending is governed by the TCPA and what the TCPA the TCPA.

36:30
says that basically you cannot send a marketing message to someone who is not opted in, right? And usually double opted in, right? You’ve confirmed that they all opted in. It’s more strict than even the GDPR when it comes to making sure that someone’s or even can spam, right? Everybody knows that you shouldn’t upload a list to email and send to it, but it’s actually illegal to do that if they have an opted in over SMS. And so the US created the TCPA and it’s actually the strictest in the world for telecommunications. And so

36:59
Things haven’t changed there except for we’ve seen states start to adopt this. And so the Florida just created their own version. Florida created their own version of the TCPA and that governs different waking hours that you are allowed to send. So periods of the day that you’re allowed to send marketing SMS to people in Florida. And so the Postscript platform is built so that you don’t even have to think about this, right? Basically we won’t send during those times. If you try and send a campaign during that time,

37:28
we will filter out Florida subscribers or delay them until the next day so that they can actually, you can actually follow the rules without you. You don’t want to be on the Florida TPA website, Steve, learning about these types of things, right? You don’t have time for that. And so we try and take care of that for you. And so things aren’t getting necessarily stricter, but the laws are changing. And so as a platform, we try and make sure that our customers are up to date on all those laws as soon as possible. So what is…

37:54
the most effective way to actually get subscribers that you’ve seen your customers use. I mean, it’s a higher friction point than giving out an email, right? So what’s working? Sure. So everything comes down to the different parts of the funnel, right? Whether it’s the, just landed on how much they know about your store, how much, what their intent is before they come, the incentive that you’re giving them, which is the discount code that they’re going to be getting. And then

38:23
what you’re delivering to them after doing the experience, right? How they’re going to be interacting with you. And I would say that obviously the fastest surefire way to get SMS subscribers is to give a large incentive early on in the funnel. And that gives you an opportunity to get a much higher conversion rate on the traffic to your store because you have that phone number. Like I said, you don’t have to pay Facebook $5 again to get them back onto your website. You can get them on for one cent and those economics work out really well. would say that- we’re talking about like a discount? Is that-

38:52
Is that what you’re saying? discount code, something like that. Yeah. And I think this differs for every single store, but I think that, and I think that you can mess around with different incentives, discount codes, sweepstakes, things like that to try and tinker like A-B test your pop-up to see different conversion rates that you’ll get. And you should constantly be testing because it’s very different for every single store. I would say the thing that matters the most is how you engage with your list afterwards though. And I will go back to…

39:19
making sure that the interaction is more conversational, making sure that you’re keeping the frequency up so that people understand that you’re not just collecting their phone number to send during a single moment where you have a sale, making sure that you’re following up with people, making sure they know that there’s customer support on the other end. All these types of things will maximize your subscriber LTV. The acquisition rates, I would say that anywhere where you’re collecting email, collect phone numbers and you’ll probably be good.

39:47
commonly get asked about SMS is because of the nature that it’s like a messaging platform and not email, the expectation is that someone’s going to get a reply almost right away if they send a message. So how, for the organizations that you’ve worked with, do they have like a dedicated person or team managing the conversations that are developed? Because I know for us, we try to respond right away. someone’s kind of on gorgeous at all times. But is that required? And how have you seen companies manage this?

40:17
Sure, so it’s definitely not required. And there are some really creative ways that you can set expectations with your customers so that they aren’t like, you what the heck is going on? I would say that the number one error that you can make is not have any sort of reply. So not have an initial reply and then not have any sort of follow-up so that someone’s replying back and they get sent into the ether. It’s just nothing. The next big mistake I see brands make is that they have an auto reply.

40:45
that says, thanks for sending something back. Can you email us? Right. And I think those are the platforms that don’t have great integrations with customer support tools like Gorgias, like Postscript and Gorgias. And so I think that that’s the reason why people do it. But I think that to really surprise and delight your customers, the best way to do it is if you have live support to start responding as soon as possible with that live support. And if you don’t have the staffing for live support, what I see really work is if you use the Postscript Flow Builder,

41:14
and you have a response, when someone replies, you can auto respond to them and say, hey, thanks so much for replying. We’re monitoring this channel right now, or we’re going to have someone take a look at this within the next x hours or x days, and they’re going to reply to you back here. And just setting the expectation, customers don’t need the immediate reply as long as they know that someone’s paying attention to them and that they’re going to get a response. And obviously, you have some cranky customers that might want our response right away, but that’s not who you’re trying to optimize for. You’re trying to optimize for a great experience with

41:44
the vast majority of your subscribers. And I think that by automating a lot of that, by trying to triage the requests before you get in, right, if you have macros or common ways to auto respond to people, those will work here. Right now, Postscript analyzes the sentiment of a response and the classification of response. So if something is a question and it’s a negative sentiment instead about shipping, you can prioritize those.

42:12
so that within Postscript, you can make sure that you respond to those first versus anything that’s positive sentiment like, thank you so much. You don’t need to get to those first, right? And so we try and help our customers triage the responses that are coming in so that they don’t say, okay, we’re gonna respond to every single person that writes it. We’re gonna make sure that it’s only the most urgent responses that get responded to. I didn’t even know that feature existed actually. It’s about a month old and- Okay.

42:38
sentiment analysis is based on classic sentiment analysis. It’s nothing special, but the category responses, we’ve trained data over millions of responses for e-commerce specifically so that we’ve got, I think, 12 or more different categories that replies can fall into, whether it’s about shipping or payment issue or anything, a subscription issue, anything like that. It’s really, really cool to see that in the responses tab. So far, we’ve been talking about flows and broadcasts in SMS that

43:08
are kind of a lot like email. Are there any other cool applications that you can do with SMS that you might not necessarily be able to do in email or other mediums? Yeah, so something that we announced last year and that is very close to being fully released to customers is our Postscript Pay product, which allows people to respond to purchase a product, right?

43:34
And so whether it’s an abandoned cart or browse abandonment or a campaign or any message that you’re sending, as long as you associate a cart or a dynamic card, right? If it’s an abandoned cart, the card’s already created. And so if you’re trying to increase your conversion rate within SMS, you can have somebody just reply yes and purchase. And very exciting news. I can’t talk specifically about what it’s going to look like, but very exciting news coming out soon about that. And then I would say that where things are going.

44:03
is a lot, is very similar to that sort of interaction, right? What we’re doing there is we’re trying to increase conversion rate. But if you imagine a world where you can have a customer reply return to initiate a return, right? Or with our recharge integration, you can reply skip to skip a subscription that’s coming next month, or you can reply yes to add something to your subscription, right? If you’re getting razors delivered, maybe you can upsell them with shaving cream, right? And so,

44:30
Thinking about these different ways where you can use that two-way interaction to programmatically increase average order value or increase repeat purchase rate or increase replenishment, anything like that. That’s really what’s coming down the pipe for Postscript is increasing that automated interaction. And that is really what you can’t do with email, right? Email is typically one way people can respond, but the idea that you could purchase a product in message or…

44:55
automate your customer support or anything like that is really interesting and what we’re really leaning into with Postscript. Yeah. Are chat bots kind of out or on the horizon? Sure. when it comes to, chat bots are, the term kind of triggers me, but within our flow builder, any two way messages can be orchestrated, right? And so that means that if you have an abandoned cart,

45:23
and you have a mystery discount associated with that, but someone has to reply mystery to get it. Absolutely, you can do that with our Flow Builder. We’re releasing all of these different parts of the Flow Builder this month, and you’ll see it at our product drop event at the end of the month, and this is in April. And so you’ll be able to build chatbot-like functionality. And then we also have folks that have been building on top of our developer and partner API that allows for much more deeply integrated two-way interaction so that you can be…

45:50
collecting different information like a subscriber’s birthday or their favorite color or anything like that and adding these attributes to the subscriber flow so you can send more targeted messages, more personalized messages, all these different types of things. definitely a lot of two-way interaction being built inside our flow builder. Our partner API is getting a lot of interest in work done, work built on top of it. And then those products like PostgrePay and sentiment analysis, all these things are

46:18
We’re building everywhere and we’re seeing a lot of great feedback from our customers with it. Yeah, no, that’s amazing. I remember a while ago I jumped on the Facebook Messenger chatbot bandwagon, but I mean, with all the changes that Facebook did, I kind of put less emphasis on it. But if I could reproduce something even remotely similar on SMS, it’s just, it would be really exciting because everyone has SMS. I mean, the reason why I asked you that question is like, if I could even potentially collect emails through SMS.

46:48
Yeah. And have that go directly to my email provider. That sounds pretty exciting also. Yeah. Yeah. That’s super exciting. But Adam, if anyone wants to get tech support from you personally, where can they get ahold of you or find out more about your company? So there are the obvious channels. If you go to Postscript.io, you can check out our new brand and check out case studies or anything like that. Sign up for the product. We have a 30-day free trial. give people

47:17
thousand dollars of credit. So basically, you know, there’s there, it doesn’t hurt to try this out. Check out the unsubscribe rates for yourself. Check out the conversations that you can have with our customers. We see a lot of a lot of brands learn a lot about their customers and learn a lot about their customers questions just by having chats with them over SMS. So if you haven’t tried it, try it out. If you need support from me personally, I mean, it’s it’s easy adam at postscript.io. That’s my actual email address. And

47:47
If you hit me at the right time, you might just get the custom tech support from me. 3 a.m., right? Right. Also, I wanted to mention that I think Alicia, which is a Postscript employee, put together a site. If you just want to see what other companies are sending out on SMS, do remember what the website is off the of your head? I can’t remember.

48:08
If not, I will post it in the show notes with this episode. Posted in the show notes. We have a few websites like that. One of them is smstemplates.com. And then we have a separate website that shows examples from every single brand as well. Yeah, definitely put that in the show notes. basically, if you’re just doing email right now and you want to have an idea of what other people are sending out, it might be useful for you to just check out the types of messages that people are sending. Hey, one last question. I think fantastictext.com. That’s what it was. Yeah.

48:37
One last question, which just popped into my mind. When I send text messages, there’s always an option to include an image, right? But it costs more credits. What has been your data in terms of, you know, click rates with an image and without? And I know there’s a lot of variability here, but you probably have some general trends. Sure. So this is where you know I’m telling the truth, because if I were just looking to increase our revenue at, say, Senate MMS, costs more for the carriers and that sort of thing.

49:07
Actually, from the data, if you just send an SMS, it will perform roughly the same as an MMS. I know that people with especially visual brands think that a photo is make or break. What we see from the data across the board is that it isn’t. And so I would say if I were running the brands, I would be sending SMS right now. Right. Without a photo. Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks, Adam. This is really helpful. And I’m really excited for the features that are coming up around the corner. Likewise. Thanks, Steve. Appreciate the time.

49:38
Hope you enjoyed that episode, and if you’re not using text message marketing yet, then you should give it a try. There really is no risk in trying, and I’m willing to bet that it will work as well or better than email for you. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecluderjob.com slash episode 408. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card 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 mywifecoupterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifecoupterjob.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. Now we talk about how I these tools on my blog.

50:36
And if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free 6-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.