Q&A w/ Arri Bagah, SMS Marketing Consultant
Worried mobile messaging will annoy your customers? Not if you do it right.
We ask SMS marketing consultant Arri Bagah listener submitted questions like...
Arri Bagah became an expert in the mobile messaging space and is invited to speak at large conferences including Traffic and Conversions Summit, and Conversations Conference and DTC DAY. Arri is the founder of Conversmart, and served in the US Army.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
12/29/2020
Kurt Elster: I wish I had the SMS noise as my intro, but I’m not a monster, so I keep my phone muted at all times. Are you worried about mobile messaging annoying your customers? Well, I think the ROI is there and I think if you do it right, it won’t annoy your customers. But I need someone smarter than me to convince me and to convince you, so I’m joined today by Arri Bagah, who is an expert in mobile messaging. He has spoken at conferences like Traffic Conversion Summit and Conversion Conference, and DTC Day, all things I have not even been invited to speak at yet.
Arri’s the founder of Conversmart. He has served in the U.S. Army. He’s a smart guy. He knows more about SMS marketing than anyone else I know. And so, what I did, I posted in my Facebook group and I said, “Hey, what are your SMS questions?” And I got a whole list of great questions here to ask him, but the thing I want to start with, Arri, is the FUD around SMS. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. People are… Well, merchants anyway seem terrified of SMS marketing, but like don’t think twice about sending an email blast to an ill-gotten email list, right? At least based on the sheer number of newsletters I know I didn’t sign up for but still somehow I’m on. But SMS, they’re afraid of it.
The question I want to open with you for our Q&A, Arri, is a gentleman who said, “I don’t do any SMS marketing presently because I personally hate it as a consumer, but that’s really the only research I’ve done on it. I find it incredibly intrusive and curt.” Oh my gosh, this poor man. And so, that was his setup. He’s tortured by SMS. If you text him, he just wants to die. And his name’s Jeff, and so his question there is are there any stats tracked about loss of customer affinity, like fewer repeat orders, unsubscribes? It seems like the financial ROI is there in the short term, but I worry about the long-term loss of good will. Please, put this to rest.”
Arri Bagah: Yes. Let’s do it. So, first of all, thank you for having me on your podcast. Super excited to talk about SMS. And this is one of the things that I hear all the time. So, every time I talk to marketers, it’s either someone is really pro-SMS, or they’re really against SMS. That’s kind of what we’ve seen talking to many direct-to-consumer eCommerce marketers. Or people have received like calls from telemarketers trying to sell them something, so people are very reluctant to give away their phone numbers.
So, a lot of the time it’s more of a personal thing, where people have had that experience, like we’ve all experienced this. I remember when I was in New York and I got probably 10 different messages from President Trump. I never remember ever opting in for any presidential campaigns ever, but I got like 10 different ones, so this is probably like people who have experienced things like this, and they never opted in, so it’s like okay, them doing it now feels like they’re doing what the spammers are doing. But like you said, it’s the same people who would go and email a full list that probably didn’t opt in, that are still scared of sending those messages out via text.
But the thing is, we’ve done the research. We have tons of data on it. We have launched the 2020 State of DTC text marketing report with a lot of information. And what we found out is that there’s no reason for someone to be scared of text marketing and here’s why: The average consumer is spending more and more time on their mobile device. Over 90% of Americans can be reached via text. And demographics between ages of 18 and 62 prefer text over any other communication method. And if you really think about it, when we communicate with friends, family, coworkers, we use messaging apps, right? And SMS is probably one of the primary apps that we use.
And it doesn’t matter who it is, everybody opens their text message. Like I’ve seen people who have never opened their emails, but when it comes to texts, they always open every single text message. And that’s the first thing we need to know, that consumers are on that channel. And the thing about marketing is that like businesses have to go where the consumer is at, so it’s the same thing here, where personally you might think that it may not work, or it’s invading, and no one should ever sign up for it, but the data shows otherwise. The consumers are signing up to get these t text messages. They’re receiving text messages from presidential campaigns, two-factor authentication, order delivery confirmations.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. A lot of customer service stuff starting to happen via SMS. Like our internet went out. Oh, so I called, and it was entirely automated, said, “Hey, do you want to text us with updates?” Yeah, of course. That’d be really convenient. So, I signed up for it. Or I drop my car off for service, same deal. I start getting text messages about it. And like I know it felt like I didn’t opt into it, but I was thrilled at the convenience of it. And so, like once we went from like, “All right, it’s for friends and family,” to, “It’s for customer service. It’s for notifications.” You’re just so close to, “SMS can be used for marketing messages,” that I don’t see the issue. Right? It’s like that mindset shift has already happened, whether or not you want to accept it.
Arri Bagah: Yeah. And this is just the start. There’s a lot of building going on in the text space, where text is gonna be a very important channel where you can do transactions via text. You can have a conversation with a brand directly, get things updated, et cetera, so there’s a lot of things that are being built within the text platform. So, right now what we’re doing is getting messages to those customers who have opted into receive those messages. So, yeah, text marketing, it’s something that you have to try. And like I said, you are not your customer, and just because you think that you might not like it, your customers might like it. So, we always recommend trying it and usually when the revenue starts to come in, I see people turn to pro text pretty quickly.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, we’ve got… I looked up right before our call a client who does a fair amount of SMS. And for them, a bad SMS campaign was like 15% clickthrough rate with four figures in revenue, and that was a low performer. But it’s not like… You know, we’re not sending it to some huge list. It’s a fraction of the email list size, but they’re hyper engaged, the people who opt into SMS. Because we’re not spamming people and we’re not forcing them into it. They volunteered, and confirmed, and then stayed opted in. I think that’s the big difference there.
So, when people sign up for SMS, what are they looking for? What are their expectations? What do they want? That’s what Alexandra Pup asks.
Arri Bagah: Sure. So, when it comes to the opt ins, first of all, in order for an opt in to perform, there needs to be some sort of value that you you’re giving away. Whether you’re giving a discount, dollar amount, or percentage off, you’re doing a giveaway to opt in to win something… Whatever the value is, what you want to do first is deliver that value instantly, so when that customer opts in for the discount, they confirm their opt in and then they get that initial text message to say, “Hey, thank you for joining our list. Here’s your discount code. Here’s a link to buy it.” Right?
And we all know that the average consumer doesn’t buy… I think it’s like over 90% of consumers do not buy the first time, so I think a lot of the value comes from following up. So, when we think about text and email, we’re really doing it because we’re spending all this money driving traffic to the website. A lot of people aren’t gonna buy the first time. How can we capture them so we can keep nurturing them, sending them content that is relevant, so that they can eventually make that purchase? So, this is the same thing that we’re doing here, where we get their phone number. If they purchase the first time, great, but we have a whole series of automated text flows that we want to send, and from the welcome series, from that initial message, we have another maybe three or four messages, and sending one maybe every three, four, five days or so, depending on the audience. Some brands can be a little bit more aggressive.
But for the welcome series, what we want to do is provide benefits of the products, social proof, some urgency to get them to redeem that coupon, so we’re doing some of these short text messages with creative. We do a lot of creative within these text messages to illustrate the products that we’re trying to sell. So, think of it as like an email welcome flow, but more in a conversational way, where you’re not really texting like super serious, like brands do in email. It’s very casual, using emojis, and .gifs, et cetera, and just making it fun for the consumer, just because that’s how people text.
Some of the top-performing text messages that I’ve seen are just like that, very casual, emojis and stuff like that. People really like that.
Kurt Elster: Can you think of one example off the top of your head?
Arri Bagah: Yeah. So, there was a text message that we’ve sent… So, first of all, this client has been doing really great in terms of their revenue, right? They’re doing over 1.5 million a month in text marketing alone.
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Arri Bagah: Yeah, that’s pretty crazy. For this client, we did a campaign where they have this guy in the warehouse who is actually making sure stuff is getting delivered, so it was like a .gif of the guy in the warehouse preparing orders for the brands, like hey, this is this guy, he’s working in the workshop, he’s working really hard to make sure that your order gets there in time. If you purchase, you get your order before this holiday. Something like that. It was very personable, and it performed really, really well, and the .gif made it really fun, like having the picture of the person, the products, et cetera.
So, things like that that you can do. Some other things is like even sending a picture of the founder and like the people behind the brand. It’s really personal and it works. And we’ve also done really fun things, like if you have a fun product, for example, we have this brand that sells dog products, so we have a lot of fun with that, doing different animations of puppies and stuff like that. But I don’t believe in sending .gifs from GIPHY, like just going there and just grabbing one and sending it. We do really branded .gifs, so it illustrates your brand, how fun it is, and the product, and with a call to action.
So, typically those are some of the content that we do.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so it’s creating original content, but it’s fun, it’s bite sized, it fits the medium.
Arri Bagah: Yes. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, Rachel Reid had asked, she said, “Well, what are some examples that makes SMS feel different than email?” And this is a question I’ve wondered, as well. If someone’s on your SMS list, it’s likely they’re probably also on your email list. Does it matter that they’re getting the same thing twice? Does that make things better or worse? Should they be separate content? Should it be on different cadences? I really don’t know. So, what’s the right approach here? It sounds like you have ideas.
Arri Bagah: Yeah. This is a really great question and the thing about text marketing is that someone is giving you access to their personal inbox, right? So, it’s people are not just out hanging out, handing out their phone numbers, because it’s a private channel. So, the thing is the content in text has to be different than the content that you see on your email list or on your website, and the promotions that you send have to be somewhat special or exclusive to your text list. You need to make that text audience feel very exclusive. So, if you’re doing any sort of sale, maybe sending it a day or two earlier to the list performs really well.
If you’re just sending regular content with a discount, make sure that that discount is not the same offer that they can already get on your website, because then what’s really the point of being on your text list if they can get it on your email list? But I like to play the devil’s advocate here, because when it comes to seeing content fatigue, seeing an ad more than once or twice, we all see the same ads all the time. And a lot of marketers like to make a big deal out of it, but honestly, it’s not a big deal. We see like a Nike ad on the phone, on Instagram, on Facebook, and then you go outside, you see it on the billboard. No one really complains about it, so it’s not really a big deal if someone sees your message more than once.
And also, another thing that we have to think about is that the open rates on email, if you’re really good you’re looking at around 20%, whereas on text, collectively as a space, we’ve decided that it’s close to 99%. So, a lot of the text messages that you’re sending, because consumers are opening… A lot of the consumers are gonna be opening those text messages, so there’s higher chance that they’re going to see that text versus seeing that email that you’ve sent. So, most of the time it’s very small amount of people that might be seeing that same message twice, and that’s also if you’re sending the same message. But I highly recommend making the messaging unique for text, because it’s more casual, and leveraging that creative to make it a different experience for those customers that subscribe via text.
Kurt Elster: Okay. So, with SMS, are you segmenting these people? Or is it a mass broadcast? Or both? And if it is a mass broadcast, how often do you do it? That’s what Will Roya wants to know. “How often do I mass broadcast?”
Arri Bagah: That’s a great question, and honestly, here’s something that we found. So, a lot of consumers are already receiving these text messages more often than people actually think. So, if your weekly cadence is once or twice a week, that’s not an issue at all. We’ve had brands that were sending like once a month because they’re so afraid that they might annoy their customers and then we take over, we start doing once a week, then maybe twice a week, and we actually increase revenue and lower their unsubscribe rate because having that much lead time between text messages, people might forget that they’ve actually opted in. So, that’s another thing to consider.
And the most important thing here is the content, right? How relevant is that audience and how relevant is that content to the audience, which leads to segmentation. Now, with segmentation, it’s really important… I’m not a big fan of just sending the same offer to everybody, because what’s really the point of doing that? I’m a big fan of segmentation. Segmentation based on things that people have clicked on, segmentation based on collections that people might be interested in, products that were purchased in the past, activity, text messages that they’ve engaged with, so being able to segment is very important. And honestly, you shouldn’t be sending the same message to someone who has purchased versus someone who has not purchased, because with someone who has purchased, you’re trying to get them to make another purchase, and that also depends on if this is a product that they only need once a year, and then if you want them to buy again are they gifting it to somebody? Friends, family, et cetera?
So, the language should definitely be different for those who have purchased and those who have not purchased. And for a product that is more related to weather, with text marketing you can segment based on different zip codes and stuff like that. So, we have a client that sells covers for cars, so in the winter if you don’t want your car covered with snow, if you’re in the Midwest, we can hit you up, say, “Hey, that snowstorm hit last night. Do you have your car covered?” So, things like that, that you can do, that’s more relevant to your audience makes a big difference.
Kurt Elster: As an aside, I think segmentation by weather event, and this sounds like a joke, it’s really not. I think segmentation by weather event is a wildly untapped opportunity. Because it’s just not a way we’re used to thinking. You know the weather 10 days out across the entire country, and you know, and you can segment your audience by geographic location, so if it like in any way makes sense, I think it’s a really clever way to go. Especially with something as immediate as SMS.
Arri Bagah: Yeah, so there’s a lot of things that you can do based on location. If you have a retail store, this is perfect. Targeting based on people who are in the specific area could work. So, I’m a big fan of segmentation. I think it’s very underutilized for marketers. Here’s another thing that I’ve noticed, though. A lot of workers who are used to email marketing, as their list grows, creating different content for different segments becomes really hard, right? Because why would I do that if I can just blast to everybody at the same time? Especially if you don’t have all the resources, you have one, couple people working on the email team. So, one of the things that ends up happening is that because you’re sending to everybody, the value of the list starts to decrease, so not everybody starts to open up those emails because not all the content that they’ve seen is relevant to them, then your open rates start to drop, your clickthrough rate starts to drop, and that’s how you end up with like 500,000 subscribers on your email list with like a 5% to 8% open rate, because you are not segmenting and tapping into these different segments that are more relevant.
So, what we don’t want to do is do the same here, where everyday we’re just sending to the same people, sending the same content. Then people are seeing the same content, so there’s no need to open anymore, because they kind of already expect what you’re going to be sending, so that’s why I really believe that the content in text needs to be unique and also we need to segment to ensure that people are getting the right message at the right time.
Kurt Elster: So, I really… What I’m hearing at this point is if it seems like, “Well, I don’t want to do SMS because it’s gonna be annoying and it’s gonna be the same as my email.” Well, that’s because that’s what you chose to send. The examples you gave were like, “Okay, people are creating unique original content specific to SMS as a channel.” Well, suddenly SMS sounds exciting. Like if you’re into this brand to begin with, that you’re willing to opt into SMS, and now that brand is gonna give me actually original, novel content, oh, all right. I’m in! That sounds great. That’s the running theme I’m getting here. I like this.
So, I’m sold. I want to get more people onto my SMS list. And John Carlson asks, “When should we be capturing text subscribers?” Where’s the opt-in happen? Do we do it at checkout? That’s his core question is do we do this at checkout and what are best practices? But I think I’m looking for like what are the opt-in points? When and how do I get people onto this list so I can send them my fabulous .gifs?
Arri Bagah: Yeah. Surprisingly, a lot of people think that because it’s a phone number, it’s completely different how you would acquire it, but everywhere you can acquire an email, you can acquire a phone number. It’s just a matter of adding that phone field. But some of the things that we’ve always done is collect that phone number at the same time as we’re collecting email, because sure, text is great, but always with different channels, you never know what’s gonna happen in the future, so it’s always best to get that email and that phone number, so if anything happens to text messaging, not that anything’s going to happen, but it’s always safe to just grab both.
So, some of the opt ins that we always launch, we’re asking for the email address first and getting the phone number second. But we also have brands that are only doing only phone number on mobile, and then doing email and phone number on desktop. That’s probably the best use case that I’ve seen work. So, you have your popup, your on-page popup when someone lands on your page. Maybe they scroll 50%. Or exit intent works great. And if you’re using apps like Privy, et cetera, I know if someone is on a specific product, they’re exiting that product, you can set up an opt-in to collect phone numbers. And at this point, every app has a phone number opt-in. If they don’t have it, you should probably leave them.
But a lot of the opt-ins come from getting the subscribers on your high traffic pages. So, if you have most of your traffic on your homepage, getting that opt-in on there to get them to subscribe. Checkout is also a great way to collect those subscribers. At checkout, most brands are collecting phone numbers, so it’s just a matter of having a checkbox at checkout. Shopify Plus makes it really easy to get that text opt-in, because you can get that checkbox. If you’re on regular Shopify, I’m sorry. They don’t do it on regular Shopify yet.
But also-
Kurt Elster: Do you know if there’s any rumors there? And this is purely speculation.
Arri Bagah: No, this is true. It’s always been like that.
Kurt Elster: No, no. I know. I’m saying do you think it’ll… Is there any chance it changes in 2021? And I get we’re guessing.
Arri Bagah: Probably not, because the Shopify Plus allows you to customize the checkout page, but the regular Shopify doesn’t really let you do that. Unless you have a separate checkout, like CartHook. You can definitely have your text opt-in with the checkbox.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Gotcha.
Arri Bagah: Yeah. And then you have other channels. You can leverage your email list to also grow your text list. Reason why you would do that, you get much higher open and clickthrough rates via text, so you can email your list and say, “Hey, we just started this new channel. It’s our exclusive list. If you join, you get early access to our holiday discounts, New Year discounts, et cetera.” You can also do that. You can leverage paid traffic, like let’s say you want to do a giveaway to a landing page where you’re collecting both an email and phone number. Social posts also work great. People can text a keyword to a number to get opted in.
Honestly, the options are endless. Anywhere you can capture someone’s email, you can capture their phone number, as long as it is compliant. But the main thing is that you need to get those subscribers, and it starts with getting somewhat of an opt-in up on your page. Just to start testing things out. And for the most part, by the time you’ve installed your opt-in, if you get any amount of traffic, you should generate revenue within like 48 hours, and that’s just being conservative. But a lot of the brands that are launching their opt-ins, text just makes it really easy for someone to opt-in for like a discount that most brands offer on the homepage anyway. They get opted in quickly, they get that confirmation, and then they redeem the discount right away and they are on your list.
So, I would say that getting opt-ins is really important and anywhere you’re collecting your email, you can collect that phone number, as well.
Kurt Elster: Okay. This is a good one. So, Mark Mendel has a database of 10,000 SMS subscribers, but has never sent them an SMS. What should he do? Can he approach this and start sending SMS without it being spam? How do you go about this? Also, I don’t know how he managed this.
Arri Bagah: So, what you should do is… Well, depending on how you’ve collected those subscribers, because I don’t want people to think that if people have bought from your store in the past 10 years and you have their phone numbers, they don’t qualify to receive any text messages from you, because they didn’t really opt-in to get those text messages. So, always make sure that you’re being compliant with these lists, because you can’t take your customers list and just start texting them.
But if your subscribers have opted in compliantly, what you can do is start with engaging them not by offering a discount but sending them a quick update about your brand and some of the new products that you’ve launched. That we’ve seen work really well, especially if you use creative, like really illustrate the products in a way, and the benefits, and social proof. One of my favorite lines that I always use that works is if you have a lot of customers, join over 250,000-plus customers that are using this product. That always works.
Kurt Elster: It’s that social proof.
Arri Bagah: Yeah, that’s massive social proof. And then you have the URL. That always works really, really well. So, engaging them with massive social proof works really, really well. But one of the things that I’ve seen brands do is like they always want to restart with discounts all the time, and I know a lot of marketers think that text is just like a promotional channel, where you always have to do a discount to make it work, but most of our clients, we don’t do that many discounts. We refrain from doing discounts anyway unless there’s like a sale that they want to do, so you really don’t have to do any sort of discount.
Now, we typically use discounts to reengage customers that are not really active. So, if you have that huge list, you sent one or two text messages, there’s no response or engagement, what you can do is like how can you offer a much bigger discount to get those people to maybe reengage? Maybe pricing might have been an issue, so there you can do a much bigger discount to say, “Hey, this is just for an exclusive group of our list. Here’s this big discount that you can redeem here.” Just to see if those people would give you some sort of activity, so you can get them back into your active list.
So, it’s a really great way to leverage bigger discount to reengage a part of your list that has not really engaged at all, so that’s something that you can use on that end.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Good approach and good warning there. All right. We got last two questions here and they’re both good, I promise. Kenny Wave Azama asks, “Outside of welcome and abandoned cart flows, are there any flows we should consider building,” and again, here we go, “without being too annoying or aggressive?”
Arri Bagah: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Everyone’s so scared of text, but how many text messages do you send and receive a day?
Arri Bagah: Yeah, exactly. That’s a good question. People are receiving many, many text messages every single day. So, I’m sure one text message from a brand that they’ve opted-in for is not going to make them kill themselves. So, I think people are just crazy, like, “Oh, they’re gonna think so wrong of my brand. They’re never gonna shop there again.” But people are receiving text messages already.
So, that’s a great question. I think one of the flows that works really well on top of the welcome series is a coupon reminder. Now, this flow is probably one of my favorite flows. It works just as well as a welcome flow and I haven’t seen many brands apply this. So, how it works is from the initial message, right? Someone opts in, they get that first text, let’s say they don’t make the purchase. You have another flow that has maybe one or two messages. Basically, you follow up 24 hours later and saying, “Hey, just making sure that you saw the discount. Here it is if you haven’t seen it. Let us know if you have any questions. Otherwise, just click here to redeem your discount before it expires.” Or you can say something more like, “Hey, don’t forget to redeem your discount code. It’s expiring within 24 hours.” Or 48 hours, whatever it is. And that flow works really, really well.
So, a lot of the times when someone is in the buying stage, sure, they might want the product. They might be having other tabs open researching the product. But a lot of the times, they want to buy the product, but for some reason they don’t buy it. But with the coupon reminder, it works really well at getting people back to site the following day, so that’s something that you can throw in there on top of your welcome flow that’s gonna perform really, really well. And every single brand that we’ve ever done it with works really well.
And also, an order confirmation. Order confirmation, sure, a lot of the customers think this is just a flow to tell them, “Hey, your order has been processed. Thank you for making a purchase.” But when someone is in buying mode, they’re more likely to buy again. So, a lot of the time we’ll do an order confirmation flow, and it will be a big revenue generator, because we say, “Hey, thank you for shopping our website. Your order is being processed. Here’s a discount for your next purchase.” And people will go back and buy again, even though they just purchased.
So, when someone’s in buying mode, they’re already in buying mode, so if you can find some great offers to send them right when they make a purchase, they might come back and purchase again, so that’s another flow that I’ve seen work.
Abandoned browse is also an amazing flow. Abandoned browse captures more people who have seen product pages and have not made a purchase. So, with abandoned browse, you can collect more people than the abandoned cart flow, for example, so you can send people messages to get them to come back to the website because they’ve seen certain pages, and you can customize those messages to get them to purchase again.
Kurt Elster: Those browse abandonment flows; I think those are totally underutilized. And the real magic is in like if you know, “Okay, this product or this collection is… These top 10 products are 80% of my revenue.” You do a browse abandonment flow like specific to those, maybe with like a link to an FAQ post, and that really kills.
Arri Bagah: Yes. And another underutilized flow is customer support. Now, when it comes to text, obviously we’re sending these messages to customers. Sometimes customers have questions. And a lot of the times with text, you get a lot of casual responses, right? Sometimes you send a text, people will say thank you, they’re just sending back emojis and stuff like that, and it doesn’t cost you anything. But sometimes people have questions about products, so getting people to… Maybe getting your support team to respond to those text messages is also a great way to add on revenue. And the reason why I also like to do it is because text is a two-way communication channel.
So, you’re texting someone, they respond, and you text them back. So, using text marketing, if your customers are responding you should be replying back to them if they have questions about product. And a lot of times, they’re ready to make a purchase and they just want to be heard, and what one of our team, like managing brands, we respond to our brands’ customers on their behalf. We make sure that it’s on brand and all that cool stuff. And what we’ve noticed is that sometimes people are… They just want to be heard. They just want to make sure that there’s someone on the other side of the brand that they can talk to before making their decision.
So, when you get those customers their answers, they’re more likely to also make a purchase. And also, just good… A good impression on your brand if someone is texting you back to just respond back, because text is a two-way communication channel and that’s how it should be used.
Kurt Elster: You know, and that’s the interesting thing about email, is it’s actually really hard to get replies to an email, and that kind of sucks, because getting replies to an email helps improve deliverability and get you into the inbox. Whereas like SMS really lends itself to replies. I don’t know why this happened, but like you’ll get a way… Often, you’ll see a way higher reply rate with SMS than you do with email by far. And then if you can actually reply to it, that really impresses people, because it’s a good indicator to them like, “Hey, the care.” And if I do have an issue post purchase, I’ll probably be able to get a response from somebody. It’s very… That two-way street with SMS is very positive.
Not that you can’t do that with email, of course, but being able to do it with SMS is cool, and it’s very fast, and it’s very personal.
Arri Bagah: Yeah, and I love customer support via text. It’s one of those things where you want to text in your question and then you go on about your day, right? And they respond back, you get it, and respond back. I think it just makes it very easy to talk to customers through text. But yeah, those are some of the flows that I recommend, and I think… I don’t know if people have platforms, but I can also go into some of the platforms that-
Kurt Elster: Tell me about your tools. What are you favorite tools, Arri?
Arri Bagah: Yeah. I don’t have any favorite tools, but there’s some tools that we’re using right now that I think will do the job. One of them is… So, Attentive is more for like if you’re doing much more revenue and traffic, Attentive is really great, and also they work with every platform, whether you’re custom or not. Postscript is a really great one. If you’re on Shopify, you want to quickly integrate, get those opt-in live, you can actually do that like right now, and I guarantee you if you have traffic, you’ll probably generate revenue by tomorrow.
So, Postscript works really great. Yotpo is also building a great text product. It’s called SMSBump, that you can quickly launch and set up those flows. So, those are some of the top three that I recommend for those that are… whether on Shopify or any other platform, and their pricing is great, and don’t worry about pricing, though, because the ROI on text… I have so many customers always worry about the cost for text, but once they start to see those revenue numbers come in, they kind of forget about how text can be expensive.
But because the ROI is so high, it just makes it very insignificant, so don’t even worry about that. But these platforms have really great costs to get started with. I know Klaviyo also is doing text marketing. They’ve launched a lot more opt-ins, a lot more different ways that you can implement it, so if you’re using Klaviyo, that could be a great way to also start testing within Klaviyo itself, but personally I’ve always been a fan of standalone platforms. I haven’t really found a platform that does everything really well yet.
Kurt Elster: Interesting.
Arri Bagah: If you know of one, please let me know.
Kurt Elster: All right. If you had to wave a magic wand, what’s the dream feature? What’s the thing that’s missing from SMS right now?
Arri Bagah: The one thing that is really missing from text I would say is being able to purchase directly via text. And obviously, like if you have… Right now, you can kind of do it, but it’s not like as good as we would hope it would be. So, right now through ReCharge, if someone already has subscribed to a purchase, you can get them to purchase again, or if they’re on a trial, you can get them to commit via text, like reply yes to subscribe, et cetera.
But where we need to be is I can send you a text with a product and you can buy it directly within text. So, I think that’s something that’s definitely going to come, and I think it would be really cool if you could through iMessage buy the product directly with Apple Pay. I think that would really change things up.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That would be awesome.
Arri Bagah: Yeah, that would be really amazing. Increase a lot of conversion rates for brands. But I think that’s where we’re heading towards. Like I said earlier, text is working really great right now, but people haven’t really seen what this channel is gonna be able to do.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. We’re scratching the surface on this thing and we’ve been having this conversation for like two years now.
Arri Bagah: Yes. Yeah. So, there’s a lot of things that are going to come for this channel and it’s just gonna keep getting better and better. So, definitely excited.
Kurt Elster: Oh, that would be such a good spot to wrap this up, but we’ve got a final question, and I don’t… There’s some others I cut. This one, I really don’t. When we talk about SMS, it’s very North American specific. You know, we were talking about the U.S.’s Federal Trade Commission in regard to this. And so, Meri Geraldine from Gardens of the Sun asks, “Should we get into SMS if we’re not based in North America, but two thirds of our revenue is from sales to customer in North America?” So, she’s in Bali, but most of her customers are here with us in the U.S. What should she… Should she still invest in it?
Arri Bagah: Oh yeah. 100%. As long as your customers are in the U.S., that’s perfect. We had a brand that is in the U.K., but most of their customers are in the U.S., so they’re using text marketing for that. So, it doesn’t really matter if you’re on the beach in Hawaii and your customers are even like in Europe, like you can use other tools to text them in the different country, even though you’re in a different country. So, same, like if you’re in Europe, you can text your customers that are in the U.S.
So, if you want to do international texting, though, ManyChat is a great tool for that. They serve a lot more countries and their cost is really great, as well. So, that’s a platform that you could use if you want to do… If you’re in the U.S., your customers are in Europe or other continents, you can use that.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Anything I missed?
Arri Bagah: I think we covered a lot. We covered a lot of the main points.
Kurt Elster: We did. That was a good one. Okay. Arri, where can people go to learn more about you? You mentioned the State of DTC SMS marketing report. I found it. I linked to it in the show notes. That looks really good and I linked to your agency, Conversmart, so people can hire you if they’re like, “Look, I want to get SMS, but I don’t want to worry about it. Let’s get Arri on it.” Get Arri on it!
And anything else?
Arri Bagah: I’m a simple guy. You can find me-
Kurt Elster: I don’t know why that’s funny. I’ve talked to you several times and you really… You are a humble, kind man.
Arri Bagah: Yeah. You can find me at Conversmart.com or arri@conversmart.com if you have any questions. We can definitely chat. Honestly, like I can always talk about text marketing for hours and hours. I’ve done so much research and I’ve implemented so much. So, if you have any simple questions, feel free to ask me. But I do want to do one plug.
Kurt Elster: You have a podcast too. Plug that.
Arri Bagah: Not the podcast yet, though.
Kurt Elster: Oh, okay. You’ll have to plug two things now.
Arri Bagah: Yeah, so I recently started… We’ve been doing email marketing for the past couple of months, little over half a year now, and we’ve been giving brands these Klaviyo email marketing audits, so our email team has a lot of experience. Our email marketing manager has over 15 years of experience. So, if you want-
Kurt Elster: Hold on. The SMS guy is getting into email?
Arri Bagah: No. It’s been requested by so many brands that… Think about it, right? Like if you’re sending your text messages, why not just send also your email? It makes it a lot easier to coordinate both text and email and make sure that we’re not duplicating content, et cetera, so it was very highly requested by brands.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Arri Bagah: So, we decided to do it, and plus we want to really own the conversation between the brands and their customers, so just like a… just logically made sense to do it. So, if you want a free email marketing audit too, and I kid you not, I hate to be the person that brags, but this is gonna be the best audit you’ve ever seen on this planet.
Kurt Elster: You know, I always tell people, I’m like, “Look, your marketing, your positioning, your marketing is soggy. You need to make some bold claims here.” And Arri goes, “Look, I’m about to give you literally the best email audit you have ever seen or heard of.” All right, how do I get this? I want it
Arri Bagah: Yeah. Just go to Conversmart.com. If you request a free consultation, you can select if you want to chat about email, text, or both, and then we can definitely get that set up for you. And yeah, lastly I do have a podcast. I did have Kurt on that podcast. We had a great episode, so definitely check that out on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, whatever you listen to your podcasts.
Kurt Elster: What’s it called?
Arri Bagah: It’s called-
Kurt Elster: You’re burying the lede here.
Arri Bagah: The Personal Mastery Podcast.
Kurt Elster: Personal Mastery Podcast. I like that name. Oh, and I found it. Okay. I will link to that, as well. Okay, Arri, this has been fabulous. I appreciate your time. Thank you for doing this.
Arri Bagah: Thanks for having me.