293: Arri Bagah On How To Do SMS Marketing The Right Way

293: Arri Bagah On How To Do SMS Marketing The Right Way


Today I’m thrilled to have Arri Bagah on the show. Arri and I both spoke at the Many Chat Conversations conference this past year.

He is the founder of Conversmart which is a company that helps direct to consumer brands generate 6 figures in revenue per month using SMS marketing.

In this episode, Arri and I go in depth on the best ways to implement SMS with an ecommerce store.

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What You’ll Learn

  • Arri’s background story and how he got started with SMS marketing
  • The types of SMS messages that convert
  • The best way to acquire new SMS subscribers
  • Rules when sending SMS broadcasts
  • The rules of thumb for engagement and what strategies are working right now

Other Resources And Books

Sponsors

Klaviyo.com – Klaviyo is the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store. Created specifically for ecommerce, it is the best email marketing provider that I’ve used to date. Click here and try Klaviyo for FREE.
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Privy.com – Privy is my tool of choice when it comes to gathering email subscribers for my ecommerce store. They offer easy to use email capture, exit intent, and website targeting tools that turn more visitors into email subscribers and buyers. With both free and paid versions, Privy fits into any budget. Click here and get 15% OFF towards your account.
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EmergeCounsel.com – EmergeCounsel is the service I use for trademarks and to get advice on any issue related to intellectual property protection. Click here and get $100 OFF by mentioning the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast.
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SellersSummit.com – The ultimate ecommerce learning conference! Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high level BS, the Sellers Summit is a curriculum based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an ecommerce business. Click here and get your ticket now before it sells out.Sellers Summit

Transcript

Steve: You’re listening to the my wife could a job podcast the place where I bring unsuccessful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies. They use to grow their businesses. Now today. I have my friend are iboga on the show. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about SMS marketing and in short we should all be doing it.

But before we begin I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Code Black Friday is right around the corner and for my e-commerce store email marketing is a heavy part of my holiday sales strategy. And in fact last year, it was close to 50% of My overall sales. And of course as you all know klaviyo is the email marketing tool that I use for Bumblebee Linens now Klaviyo is the growth marketing platform chosen by over 20,000 Brands generating more than three point seven billion dollars in Revenue in just the last year and with the holiday season right around the corner klaviyo has created the ultimate planning guide for crushing those holiday Revenue targets for marketing creative to segmentation strategy. These are proven tactics for more personalized marketing, especially in time for the holiday season. To get ahold of this guide, visit Klaviyo.com/mywife. Once again, Klaviyo.com/mywife. Now on to the show.

I also want to give a shout-out to Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve. Now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the my wife quit her job podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have our Arri Bagah on the show. Now, Arri is someone who I was introduced to by Ezra Firestone and we both spoke at the many chat conversations conference this past year. Now, Arri is the founder of Converse smart, which is a company that helps direct to Consumer Brands generate six figures in Revenue per month using SMS marketing and they were actually named the top performing agency of the Year by many chat. Now SMS marketing is still in its infancy. I’m actually not doing it yet for my store. But I sure as heck want to give it a try. So in this interview Arri is going to teach us how it is done. And with that welcome to the show Arri, how you doing today man?

Arri: Doing well. Thank you so much for having me.

Steve: So Arri, Give us the quick background story and tell us how you got started with SMS marketing because I thought for some reason you were doing chat marketing a long time ago

Arri: sure so, We still consider SMS marketing to be kind of a part of that conversational marketing ecosystem. So we started out Giving messenger marketing for e-commerce and like you mentioned we want the top-performing e-commerce agency of the year for Messenger marketing and for the brands that we work with we were always looking for the next channel for them to be able to leverage to reach their customers directly. So text just made sense, right? Especially after Facebook made quite a few changes to the Facebook Messenger platform. Text just made sense as a channel where Brands can communicate with their customers and that’s how, That’s why we decided to get into it.

And also to just like so many perks of like using text compared to other traditional channels like email that brands are attracted to and even today like all the things that brand are doing over a communication Channel like email can be done through text as well. So just kind of like made sense for text to be that next channel that Brands can leverage.

Steve: So first of all, so for the listeners out there, SMS is just like text messaging on Your phone but when I was thinking about this in the first time, I was a little hesitant to get started with it because I actually hate it when people text me offers and I get a lot of spam I get maybe one or two texts spams every other day I should so say, maybe like one per day and I can’t imagine getting these messages in my SMS inbox. Can you first talk about how to address this issue?

Arri: Sure. Did you actually like opt-in?

Steve: I did not they were spam I never opted in.

Arri: Yeah, so see that’s that’s the problem with text rate where a lot of people Had bad experiences with that channel where you would go through checkout you put in your phone number didn’t you know except to receive these marketing messages and boom they start texting you or you just fill out a form they get your phone number and then they export that phone number and start texting you that’s a bad way of using text messaging and companies do get in trouble in terms of compliance for using strategies like that. So we look at text completely differently than how most people you know, have looked at it and the reason why there’s such compliance like the CTI and TCPA laws on text messaging is because you know, these are some of the things that people were doing like, you know, 10 15 years ago all these telemarketers would like just by phone numbers and just like text a bunch of random people.

So that’s why all these regulations were introduced to kind of cut down on how much spam people were receiving and people have gone into you know legal trouble for Doing like Miss using text messaging right? So the new way or how we look at text messaging is that we kind of want to provide a good experience. And also let customers know ahead of time that they’re going to be receiving the text. So one of the ways that you can do that is actually if you’re for example at checkout, if you’re collecting your phone number, you can have the option to check a box to receive offers through text. So the customer actually knows that you’re going to text him and instead of just like shit up getting like a cold text message.

And also you can have a pop-up that gets users to subscribe through text. So they know they’re going to you’re going to be texting them. For example, if they’re opting in for like an offer when they put in that phone number they’re going to be expecting you to text them.

Steve: before we move on to the kind of guts of the implementation. Is there anyone policing this because I still get these Rogue texts and I can’t seem to block them and that’s kind of what I’ve been concerned about like you might be doing it the right way and all your clients might be doing it the right way, but is there anyone policing this platform?

Arri: Yes. So all the text messages that are going through like short codes or being monitored by these telecom companies. So if you reply stop to unsubscribe the keywords tab should automatically unsubscribe you but if it does not let’s say that company keeps texting you. You can reply report and Report less susceptible to come companies know that this company is sending unwanted messages and when they get to the point where there are ascending just they’re getting a lot of people responding report then they get shut down by the Telecom company. So that’s the first thing. The second thing, could be you actually like wanting to sue them and you can actually get like 500 dollars for unwanted text message that you receive because you have tried to unsubscribe and they keep texting you and that. That’s the second option where you could actually like sue them for keeping on texting you.

Steve: but it’s like playing whack-a-mole, I’ll block these numbers but then it’s always a new one. Like does that policing work or has it worked?

Arri: Yeah actually works and they’re all these telecom companies are always aware. Like for example, like one of these brands that were talking to they were getting like some people after texting for a while responding report. I think they have like 20 people so they get like alerted by, you know, an account manager from these telecom companies. They will kind of like let the platform that they use seeing Knew how much how many people are responding report 20s, like on a low end and it doesn’t really affect the brand but they do keep it keep track of how many people are, you know reporting you and if you get like super high reports then they do shut you down.

Steve: Okay. Okay. So I’ve had a bunch of people talk about Facebook Messenger on the podcast already and you know in March they’re changing the rules pretty dramatically. And if you wouldn’t mind just kind of summarizing the changes and I wanted to just kind of compare the two after you kind of summarize the changes that are coming up for Facebook.

Arri: Sure. So Facebook has been trying to make these promotional changes for the past probably like six months like year and they keep pushing it back every gets like a month closer. It’s like hey, we’re going to push..

Steve: It supposed to be January, right?

Arri: Yeah. Yeah, and then they just keep pushing it and I think to me it just doesn’t make sense because I think messenger could be be a channel for Brands to be able to leverage and research customers, especially after you’ve acquired someone as a subscriber you should be able to you know, text him but basically is going to be a pay to play a game where for each subscriber that you want to message outside of 24-hour window. You’re not going to be able to text him unless you do it through like an ad that is ran through ads manager. So Facebook just wants to control what people are sending. Well as you know, how much people are spending. In order to send these text messages and yeah, that’s a strange that coming and they’re also introducing like a one-time message API.

Which basically says that okay customers can actually sign up to receive a one-time notification from your brain that can be promotional or not. I don’t know if that’s going to make change anything because you only get like to send the customer one message.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

Arri: Yeah. Yeah, but basically yeah, he’s just going to have to reach those customers you’re going to have To leverage as manager in order to be able to communicate to those are some of the changes.

Steve: So let me ask you this. I guess for my story, we will just use my store’s context. So right now I’m gathering email subscribers, Facebook Messenger subscribers, and push. And I’m fixing everybody right now I’m still trying to grab email first because it is a medium that I control right? No one can ever take away email from me in terms of prioritization then because you’ve used Facebook Messenger as well as SMS. What are you prioritizing? Are you Addressing SMS? Are you down playing Facebook Messenger these days because of these new rules?

Arri: Yeah to us. Like Facebook Messenger was always a top of funnel play where we leverage it to engage with users with cold audiences. So one of the things actually that we did for tough to needles for example as leveraging Facebook Messenger to engage with users who have never heard of the brand so they would go through like an experience like a quiz where we would at the end recommend a product. So that’s kind of like how we’ve always used it and then, you know will leverage the ad manager for broadcasting and so a lot of the changes that Facebook has made hasn’t really affected us because we always went the paid route.

Steve: Okay.

Arri: And we look at SMS as more of like a bottom of the funnel / middle of the funnel where you can you know, collect subscribers that are already on site. That means they’re interested in get their contact information and be able to nurture them or send them a notification based on actions that they take on your website.

Steve: Okay.

Arri: it’s very, you know, a similar approach to email and the difference here is that, well, at least how we look at it right now is that on your mobile website, we like to leverage SMS. And on desktop, You can leverage your email. The reason why we want to do SMS on mobile is that the customer is already on their mobile devices probably way easier to reach them and send them that you know coupon or whatever it is that you’re offering while they’re on our cell phones so they don’t have to login to the Gmail and check. And yeah emails so very valuable channel. So we still like to leverage email on desktop traffic. So Messengers more top of funnel for us and SMS is more like bottom of the funnel.

Steve: Okay. So what are some of the best implementations that you’ve seen for SMS? Like what are some acceptable SMS messages that customers don’t mind getting?

Arri: sure. So first of all, like customers want to receive text messages and you’ve done the survey and about 79% are open to receiving Text messages special Millennial in that demographic where you know, they open text messages within 90 seconds of receiving them. So text has been primarily a channel that across all demographic, you know, 18 to 55 heavy use and the interesting thing is that you know, we have this brand that is serving the demographic of 45 plus and text has been performing really well for them. And that is because they’re kind of also like predisposed just because if you look at some of the Presidential campaigns I have ran, you know, 2008-2012 even 2016 with Trump they’ve all used text messages.

So these demographics have already used text messages in some way to interact with either political campaigns mainly / political campaigns, right? and text is that channel and I think that’s the reason why it’s working for that demographic but one of the ways that we like to use text is first getting you know. Users to opt in, so they know you’re going to text him and after they do opt in and because you’re expecting you to text them, you’re not going to see those high on subscribe rate or customers being, you know, getting

Steve: sure

Arri: because they’re receiving text messages, but in terms of content, you know just content that your audience might be interested in. You know, we like to send a mix of content as well as offers, but we mostly focus on content and we also like Leverage creative

Steve: Can you give us an idea of what, like Blog posts content or?

Arri: Yeah by content text is like a very, you know, – warm content that people get you know, we’re talking like a hundred and sixty characters, you know or so.

Steve: It’s like messenger.

Arri: Yeah, so or 200 or so. so one of the things that you can send is, you know value propositions in short bites that people can just like that would really resonate with the customer. So we like to do different benefits. So our products does this, so you can get this result so different types of content like that that we like to send and we also send creative like GIFs and images to kind of illustrate the product in a way that would engage the user for a longer period, period of time and we found that to really really work and it just kind of enhances the experience of sending text messages the opposed to just receiving a text you’re now getting the text as well as a creative that shows you the products or different ways that you can Use a product and makes the experience a whole lot better for the customer.

Steve: these sound like full-on promotional messages is that is that accurate?

Arri: Not necessarily, so

Steve: meaning like they’re designed to sell a product.

Arri: Yeah. It’s it’s very bottom of the funnel and you know, usually like when someone is on your site and they opt-in they are interested in purchasing. They just need maybe a couple nurturing messages to be able to you know, get them to make that purchase.

Steve: I see

Arri: and also we like timely messages like abandoned carts messages that work really really well. So they’ve opted in they’ve added to card. They did not purchase text could be that you know medium for you to use to reach that customer directly and get them to come back and complete their purchase. So it’s all about figuring out where the customer is in a journey and then, you know sending them the right message at the right time. That’s kind of like how we look at text messaging right now.

Steve: What are some ways to get them to opt-in is? It just like a coupon that you give out and then you text it to them or what are some popular ways to get them to even opt in for text messaging?

Arri: sure. Usually, you know brands most brands are doing like exit intent or you know, first load discount code, whether it’s five percent ten percent whatever incentive it is that you think can resonate with your audience. That’s what I recommend. It’s different for everybody, but it needs sort of offer that would resonate with your audience. You can leverage on a pop-up. In get them to opt in

Steve: and then after that like as part of that pop up or whatever you tell them that by opting in your giving us permission to text you going forward.

Arri: Yes own pop-up. There is some sort of legal language that says that and also the first message that they receive is going to be that legal language that says that they’ve opted in recurring messages and they can reply stop to subscribe. So the first message has to let them know that they can reply stop it Anytime. To unsubscribe and then you can send them like a follow-up message to be complied. The customer has to respond. Well, there are two ways. So there are two different experiences that get users to opt in right now. So there’s one called the to tap where the customer will tap up, tap the pop-up the button on the pop-up to subscribe. It will open up their messaging app. They click Send.

So the when it automatically opens up their messaging app on their mobile device would Auto fill like a text that says send this text message to receive, you know, 5% or 10% off and then they would click Send and they get opted in and what that does it’s a confirmation the customer themselves sent that message to get opted in.

Steve: I see that’s smooth. They don’t have to enter any numbers or anything.

Arri: Nope. Yeah, they don’t have to enter the phone number and that gets rid of all the wrong phone numbers that someone might enter and that’s it’s a really good experience. That’s what we use probably like a hundred percent of the time.

Steve: What about on desktop though?

Arri: Yeah, the second way which I’m getting to is having to type in the phone number this could be on desktop where they type it in and you have to get them to respond first. So if somebody puts in a wrong number, you don’t want to just like keep texting that phone number you want to make sure that customer has responded. Like hey reply yes to get the coupon or whatever the offer is so they respond to confirm their subscription and that’s how you get subscribe. And these are some of the ways we do it. Obviously, this is not legal advice, but can kind of look at the different ways to get to be compliant in the users to opt in but those are some of the two experiences that users can opt in right now.

Steve: Okay, so we talked about some opt-ins with the pop-up slide ins and that sort of thing. The problem is, is that when you run a store there’s different information that you want to gather right? So like I have an email pop-up, for example that usually leads to trying to get someone to get a messenger subscriber. What would you recommend going for first? an email? SMS? Facebook Messenger? Like there’s, you can’t ask for all three right or you can I guess over time.

Arri: Yeah, you probably see pretty low opt-in rates if you ask for all three. Yeah, but yeah, I think you know messenger is kind of like out of the picture when it comes to web site using messaging on the website messenger. We just strictly used to running Facebook ads and connecting the add to a messenger experience.

Steve: Okay.

Arri: so that leaves us with email and SMS for your website. on Mobile Traffic you like to use SMS just because whatever you’re offering to the customer. It’s easier to just text them directly because they’re already browsing on their cell phone which you know about, you know, 63% us e-commerce traffic comes from a mobile device and for a lot of the brands that we talked to it’s usually like 80% plus that they’re getting through their mobile device. So we like to leverage SMS on mobile and for desktop can use leverage email I just because it might be easier to communicate that way when the customer is not on their cell phone.

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So if I were to collect an SMS on a mobile phone like so when I when I grabbed an email, for example, I have this really long nurture sequence where depending on what actions they take either give them a coupon or like it branches on what type of content that I give them. Can you replicate that same experience with SMS? And is there a really easy way to get an email once you have their SMS number?

Arri: Sure. So if you are leveraging SMS on your mobile traffic? You can definitely put people through a nurturing sequence. Obviously the content is going to be a lot shorter, but we do, if you like a welcome series on SMS that would be set in the span of like two weeks or so and it has worked very well and it you can model after the welcome series that you have over email. You know, all the other pre-purchase and post-purchase flows that you have on email. You can also kind of model over text obviously within a conversational context. That has worked really well and I think when you have a phone number right now, they are different ways to kind of collect that phone number, you know get customers to respond, but we haven’t really found the perfect way to automate the process of collecting emails through text and I don’t see the need for it just because you’re most of the time getting a 98 and 99 percent open rates over Text.

That’s as high as you can get and because you’re already reaching that customer directly. Why do you need to get their email? Check text a channel that you own so there is no there shouldn’t be like any reason to fear losing that list because it’s a list that you own. It’s not like Facebook Messenger where the list is on Facebook. So that’s kind of like how we look at it where but one thing we do though is leverage your email list to move those subscribers through to text because you’ll be able to reach those customers directly when they are on text as opposed to email where they might open it maybe 20% of the time. So that’s one thing that we do that has worked well.

Steve: I never done SMS before but whenever I do a messenger broadcast, I usually lose maybe one to two percent of subscribers. Can you give us a feel of how many people unsubscribe when you send out like an SMS blast to one of your clients?

Arri: Sure, so it really depends and I’m going to give you an example and I think the type of Content that you send or how you write your content really makes a difference. So for example for a brand that we were working with before we started to take over text messaging for them. They’ve been doing for year seeing okay results and they’re getting around seven to eight percent on subscribe rate, which I heard.

Steve: that’s high. Yeah

Arri: Yeah, and I was like, whoa, like what’s really going on here? When we took over we kind of, you know implemented more instead of focusing all the time on sales and promotions that We’re running we focus more on nurturing the customer and also leveraging more creative that gets the users attention and were able to bring that down to one and a half percent.

Steve: So on the same order as Facebook Messenger, basically

Arri: yeah. So yeah, depending on how aggressive you are with sales might go up but we like to keep at around one and a half percent or less.

Steve: Can you give me an idea of what a nurture type of text message means exactly or an example?

Arri: Sure. So when it comes to nurturing, so it’s all about the different ways that you can connect with your customer. So I think it’s really different. So how we do it is through you know, this product is made with these different benefits so you can get this results and that’s what we’ve seen work. That’s a formula that we’ve seen work most of the time and we don’t attach like an offer to it and then we also add creative that illustrates the product and also we do like a lot of you know user-generated content. So we’ll get like pictures of other customers using the products and we’ll turn them into like a GIF that we also send. So yeah, I think that’s kind of like our formula right now and it’s not silly like hey go by right now, but here are the different ways that the product can you know help you get the results that you’re looking for and that’s kind of like how we’re doing it.

Steve: Do you have like or are you allowed to reveal your clients just kind of use as an example?

Arri: Sure. Yeah, let me give you an example here. So for example for this brand called for Patriots, so they sell like they’re one of the largest survival food companies in the US and one of the things that we do is kind of show why their customers should be buying products because it keeps them always ready for anything that come in their way and they sell like different products like flashlight and we show them like different ways that they could use the product so different things like that just showcasing the value of the product through short text message bites as well as creative and one of the campaign’s that we recently ran actually built a waitlist through like a giveaway built a list of 4920 to phone numbers, which is really small. We were in the campaign over the span of five days and that generated $89,401.

And we weren’t to focus on you know, like hey, you should go just buy this now. We show them value of the products and with a call to action and then we also leverage a scarcity and that’s how we’re able to get that type of results for this client. So, yeah.

Steve: it sounds like just regular tactics that you would use with an email sequence. Just I guess condensed down to sms.

Arri: Yeah, there’s actually so that’s what I’m saying. Like you can leverage all the pre-purchase or post purchase flow that you have over email right now within the conversational context and do the same over text and it can work with you all.

Steve: interesting. So are there any rules to doing this like, you know Facebook owns their messenger platform. So they impose all these rules. Is SMS essentially like email like in terms of rules wise what you can send and in terms of spam and that sort of thing?

Arri: Are they any rules to email marketing? I’m trying to..

Steve: Hey, there are I mean technically you have to have an unsubscribe Link in there and I guess the ISPs kind of enforce it also like if you get marked as spam too many times your email just never makes into their inbox does SMS have something similar in place?

Arri: Yeah. I think I might have mentioned that in the beginning were telecom companies. If you reply, you know, stop you should get on subscribed in the first message also has to have the word stop. And then also if you get people reporting the messages multiple times, like big amount of people that are replying report and the telecom companies might shut you down. It’s also like best practices to also be in the broadcasting messages always add like reply stuff to unsubscribe that way users know like hey if they want to unsubscribe they can just reply that and this system that you should be smart enough to automatically unsubscribe.

Steve: Right

Arri: so that you don’t have to you’re not texting that same customer by mistake. So I think those are some of the..

Steve: but outside of that there’s no rules really as long as people don’t Mark you as spam your free. There’s no pay to play. It’s not like Facebook. There’s no one like there’s no overall governing body. That’s policing all this stuff. Right?

Arri: Well, there is the so the FCC Federal Communications Commission. So they are the company that so they have the telephone communication Protection act. Which protects what which basically overseas like companies that are all the telecom companies. And also there is the CTIA which is just like they put together put out like best practices for how companies can kind of implement what the TCPA Act talks about and that kind of the TCPA is set to kind of limit all the spam and telemarketers people doing like voicemail stuff. So there the FCC is the governing body that kind of looks over all the messaging stuff when it comes to text messaging.

Steve: I guess what I’m trying to ask is is there a chance that this will eventually become pay to play like if I gather like a hundred thousand subscribers, for example, can someone eventually say hey you’re gonna have to pay to text these people.

Arri: Well, it is paid in play right now like it’s so the cool thing with texts that right now if you want to text, let’s say a thousand people depending one like which platform you’re using. It might cost you, you know, $30 or 60. It really depends because whoever you using to send that text is going to charge you per text that you sent. So that is the cost that you paying to taste text those customers and what I like about it is that you know up front how much is going to cost you to like reach a thousand people over text whereas in messenger, you know, you really don’t know how many people are you going to reach don’t know when they’re going to get that message.

And you don’t even know if they are going to get that message. So I think that’s the difference right now. Where Text, It’s already paid to play, you know, you usually paying, you know, like one cent or more or less depending on the platform to reach each customer.

Steve: I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2020 Seller Summit are on sale over at sellersummit.com. Now what is seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that is specifically targeting e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online and unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS. Mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the Seller Summit will be small and intimate every year we cut off ticket sales at just a couple hundred people. So tickets will sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or 1 million dollars per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now, the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From May 6 to May 8. And right now, we are almost sold out of Mastermind tickets already and I will be raising the ticket price regularly starting the day after Cyber Monday for more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s SELLERSUMMIT.COM or just Google it. Now back to the show

I guess what I was trying to get, there’s no like one gigantic governing body that sets the prices like like Facebook for example in SMS land, right? Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about like the best tools to manage this for e-commerce. Is there like a tool like klaviyo for SMS where you can do the abandoned cart win back campaigns and all that stuff automatically and keep track of all your sales. So, you know all of what all of your customers have purchased?

Arri: sure. So right now one of our partners I think put together a really great Stand alone SMS platform for or e-commerce Brands. It is called PostScript. And actually if you go to post script that I owe for / Converse smart, you get a thousand three credits and you can send a thousand text messages for free and that’s a great way for you to text this channel to test the channel and see How it would work that’s one I recommend for Shopify brands. And if you’re not shopped on Shopify attentive is also a good option. So for example, if your Magento, big commerce, woo Commerce you can leverage attentive. So those are some of the to that would our e-commerce focused if you want to do all of the pressures, welcome series of bank card set up your pop-ups and all that good stuff.

Steve: because I know Klaviyo just introduced SMS also have you have you used klaviyo at all or tried their new SMS features?

Arri: Yeah, so they are getting into the SMS space and I do get the fact that it will be easier. If you could just like manage your email and your SMS marketing within one channel, but within one platform the problem is that it doesn’t have all the features that I think any an e-commerce marketer could leverage really maximize the channel. So that’s kind of like the problem that I see with it right now because if you look at PostScript, for example, it’s like a whole another klaviyo itself for SMS. whereas right now, you can just, you know within your flow like a text message and the functionality is very limited from to consent or like doing like Integrations also.

Like if you’re to like integrate with like a cart hook or like other checkouts that you might use or any other apps really that you want to integrate to use to leverage text message. Like adjust to know those are some of the limitation and I think when they first launched are going to launch like long codes, which is like a 10-digit phone number. I’m not sure if they have the short codes yet, but there are limitations to using long codes in terms of the durability. That’s another problem that I see

Steve: Can you define. What a long code is versus a short code?

Arri: Yeah a long code is a 10-digit phone number and a short code is a 6-digit.

Steve: Oh, I see. Okay why anyone would ever want to do do like the short codes can be letters to write or no?

Arri: No, it’s just a phone number.

Steve: just phone number, I see. I would imagine you would eventually run out of those right real quick. If it’s just six numbers?

Arri: No, so I mean like the number that you’re text is coming from not like how many numbers you actually get. So the five digit phone number that the customer is going to receive your text from on their cell phone. So if I, as a business if I text you right now you’re going to get that text from a number. So that number could be a five-digit number called a short code or it could be a 10-digit phone number like a regular Us phone number.

Steve: I see so you’re saying a 10-digit may not get delivered?

Arri: So, ten-digit numbers have really bad deliverability because they’re not built for Mass messaging. They’re not built for business and short codes are actually built to be used as a mass messaging phone number. So if you’re sending like to a hundred thousand people, for example, you have a much higher chance of reaching all of them by leveraging a short code as opposed to a long code.

Steve: interesting. So I didn’t realize that certain text message you sent may never make it to the phone. Is that is that what you’re saying?

Arri: Yes, that’s also another thing that you have to worry about when it comes to different platforms because some platforms have really bad deliverability where you might leverage it to text to Customers and platform is not going to report it to you that those customer did not receive the text. But that’s another thing that you have to worry about. They might say that the numbers bounced but really they just have like bad deliverability

Steve: interesting, so are their metrics that tell you whether someone opened and clicked kind of like email also for text?

Arri: so you can’t track open rates on text messaging but you can track click through eight if you’re using like like a or if the platform is providing like a URL tracker and track the click-through rates as well as the conversion rate. So if they click that link and come to your website, you’ll be able to track the conversion rate as well as how much revenue

Steve: so you’re recommending a standalone tool right now to manage all the so this post group Tool. So for abandoned carts, for example, do you have to upload your I guess your product portfolio so they know which product images to show in that sort of thing and these messages?

Arri: so it’s automatically synced Into Shopify. So once you install it all that information, synced a PostScript and also you get a lot of segmentation power, which is another thing like all the products specific segmentation, segmentation based on you know, how many people have interactive or use your text messages before. There’s just like a whole lot that you can do when it comes to segmentation alone. So all that is available when you connect the app to your Shopify store.

Steve: I see, what about the many chat? It’s getting to this point now when as an e-commerce store, I got a log into four things. log into my email log into messenger. If I do SMS message, I got to log into PostScript and then I also got a log into my push notifications thing. How do you manage all this for your clients?

Arri: Sure, I think you know there needs to be a some point platform where you can do all of this things so you don’t have to jump through multiple different platforms. But yeah looking at many chat they are moving towards, you know, being able to you know, do messenger and email and text my only problem with it is that it’s not e-commerce focused, you know, you can’t, you know connect to your Ecommerce store and get all the data and all the segmentation that you’re looking to do as an e-commerce brand and also you can’t track recording unless you using UTM tribe the tracking codes of course, but there needs to be an e-commerce Focus tool that can do all three whether it’s like hey, you know, the customer has opted in I have their information over email and text, you know, maybe I should text them and if they don’t click maybe then I should email them.

So yeah many chat don’t have that right now and also because it doesn’t know what’s going on on your shopify store then I don’t think it’s like, that’s my only issue with it. But I think they are moving in the right direction.

Steve: Okay. Arri, this is really eye opening for someone who’s interested in doing this and has it done yet. To kind of summarize, So on desktop, you’re still going for an email and on mobile you’re going for SMS first and it sounds like that once you have their SMS number on mobile. It is generally very hard to move them and get an email address as well. But you’re saying that Because the conversion rates are so high email is not necessary once you have SMS.

Arri: Yes, and also to correct myself. It looks like klaviyo also launched the pop up and you can also leverage a popup on Klaviyo. But how I kind of look at it is that let’s say you are you know Shopify announce that they’re going to have their own email tool right? And you know, if you’re an e-commerce marketer what they launch is going to be, you know, something simple and not as sophisticated as Klaviyo from Announcement that they, from this announcement, so you always going to go to like Klaviyo because you know, you’re going to get you know, the most advanced tools from like the campaign opt ins, the flows that list segmentation customer profile as well as metrics.

So that’s kind of like the difference that I look at when it comes like, you know, Klaviyo having their own SMS tool and a tool like Postscript where the difference in the campaigns tool, the segmentation the list as well as tracking they just like a whole another level and you just can get more value out of a standalone platform right now, then, you know using something like Klaviyo. Although, Yeah, I’m not opposed to it. But that’s kind of like how I’m looking at the platforms right now. If you know Klaviyo decides to like create something that’s like another PostScript like a whole other platform for text and you know, that might be the right choice for brands.

Steve: Yeah, so just for the listeners if you guys are listening as later on this is the beginning of 2020 and this is just the current environment.

Arri: Yep.

Steve: So Arri, if anyone out there wants your services or wants to find you online, Where can they find you?

Arri: Yeah, you can find me at conversesmart.com And yeah, if you’re interested in working with us, we can. One thing that we do is you know, we just ask you a couple questions about your business and we can kind of estimate how much revenue you can generate with SMS. So we just need a couple of data points from your website visitors, conversion rate, average order value, and we can based on customer data. We can come and calculate that.

Steve: All right, cool. All right. Arri, I really appreciate you coming on. Take care man.

Arri: All right. Thank you.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now as I mentioned earlier SMS is next on my list mainly because Facebook Messenger is now charging to send broadcast and I want to own my own subscriber list. For more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode293.

And once again, I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce Merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence a post purchase flow or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

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