SMS Marketing: Advanced SMS Personalization in a Post iOS 14 & 15 World with Ryan from Attentive

Hey guys, today I'm here with Ryan. We're going to be talking about advanced personalization and SMS. Ryan, how are you? I'm wonderful, man. I'm doing great. Oh, fantastic to see you. Likewise. I think we hung out a few weeks ago and went to an Angels game, but we'll save that, I guess, for later. So good to see you virtually now. Really pumped for you to share your screen today. I guess really quickly, you run partnerships at Attentive, is that correct? Yeah, so I run our growth partnerships team at Attentive. So I work across our agency partners, our VC partners, our PE partners, and then, of course, some of our bigger strategic partnerships. So Attentive was recently selected, like the Disney Accelerator. So I've been involved in that, which has been a ton of fun. But bottom line is just trying to help our friends and our partners use SMS and make sure they're really creating the future of commerce and conversation with SMS. I love it, dude. Well, I know you have a sick presentation for us today. If you don't mind, go ahead and screen share, and I'm going to let you run the show. So I'll be on mute. Let me know if you need anything, and I'm excited to learn from you. Awesome. Sounds good, Chase. Let me just go. Awesome. Cool. Are we ready to dive in, Chase? Let's do it. Beautiful. So yeah, so we're talking about advanced SMS personalization in a post-iOS 14, 15 world. Obviously, with how much the world is changing right now, first-party and zero-party data is hugely important. And with SMS in particular, being personalized and targeted with how you're interacting with consumers and everything. We're on your phone. You're in the most personal channel there is. The average consumer spends 65 minutes a day in their messages app. And so that's the place they're living with friends. That's the place they're engaging with companies. And as such, it's really important to be personalized in this channel. So we'll talk about advanced segmentation, personalization, and then a little bit about our conversational SMS and zero-party data. So first, as we think about personalization. So personalization is so key because we got to start creating segments around how people are engaging with messages. So some ideas off the bat for people are past text message engagement. So who's engaging with your brand? Who's engaging with your messages? And then what have they bought? So we can go in and actually say, okay, we want to engage all the people who have bought swimsuits. It's summertime. Let's target them with something like a swimsuit. Maybe it's for cross-selling hats to people who've bought swimsuits. Then location. People act differently based on weather or based on what's going on in their local economy based on where they are in the country. And then shopping behaviors and the last, VIPs. So one thing that's always really cool to do as you're building out your segments and personalization is who are those VIPs? Who are those people that are spending $100, $300, $500 on your brand? Those are the people that you want to change the messaging around. Really treat them like they are a VIP because they are. They're your most important customers. So engage them like that. Then we think about all the different things that we can do around personalization. So we pull in all the Shopify data into the platform. And what we can do is actually say like, hey, what's lifetime spend? What are the historical purchases they have? Opt-in statuses. And then start seeing what are their attributes or the categories of products they're looking at? And then just use these collections to be super, super targeted. Because what's really cool is we know that the incidence of purchase is significantly higher if you've purchased before. And your ability to cross-sell when you use that is also extremely strong. So the more personalized you can be, A, your consumers aren't going to be opting out of your lists. That's valuable. You want to keep those people on your lists. But maybe just as importantly, if not more importantly, the ROI is going to be a lot higher. And ROI is everything, particularly with how much prices have gone up on Facebook, Google, Instagram ads. And then combining that with just really good SMS targeting can really help you from an LTV to CAC perspective for your companies. So how do we do this? How do you create personalization? I think about it kind of in three steps. It's like you crawl, then you walk, then you run. When you think about crawling, it's like these are the very simple things. Setting up dynamic coupon codes, that seems simple, but SMS 10 is great. But being dynamic, that's personalization. That's giving someone their own code when they sign up for something. Creating those dynamic coupons and bringing them into your campaigns and sending them into your automations, that's important. And then this seems really simple, but transactional messaging, that inherently is personalization. You're sending them the exact product that they bought. You're telling them when it was shipped, when it's delivered. That's very powerful because it creates just an additional touchpoint. You can even have some fun with those messages. Use them to be like, hey, listen to these songs while your product is on the way. Find that cool, personalized touchpoint. Just connect with your consumer. Because by not connecting with your consumer, you're just losing a really valuable opportunity. The email is great. It's like, hey, your product is on the way. But what if you could show a little brand ethos? What if you could show a little extra about who you are? Because as you know, and you talk about this a lot, I think, every touchpoint you have with your consumer is an important one. Every one's a time for an impression. And so make those as best as possible. Then when we think about walking. If you started in single A, this is double A, to use that baseball analogy. This is starting to create segments. We can go in and say, okay, what products were out of stock? Let's take that, make that a segment, and then send them those messages when those products are back in stock. To take that VIP segment, that's starting to be that double A baseball move. You're starting to throw that fastball in the outside corner and then follow it up with a slider. You just play baseball. I like that analogy a little bit. And then also maybe using some gender, state, tags to let your customers know about new products. Again, taking that first party data and then more of that zero party data that we talked about that actually think about running. On the right, this is in a really advanced automation, but this is coming in and saying, okay, we know what our top products are. So as a company, I know what my top 10 products are that are going to sell. I know what drives the most revenue. I also know of those top five to 10 products or product collections, what my consumers are most likely to buy after they bought that. Or when you're trying to upsell them on the cart page, what products are likely to upsell in their cart. And so let's take those, put them into post-purchase automations to then drive more specific LTV capture. I just bought shirt, shoes. What goes well with shoes? Well, socks. Let me cross sell some socks with a targeted post-purchase message to each of those consumers. Maybe I send people specific offers for, you know, a high value product that was left in the cart. Or like if I left a couch in the cart, like that's probably more important than leaving like, you know, a bedside table or a lamp. Like that's a lot higher purchase value. So maybe you want to send them a little something extra to complete their purchase. Then last, like even things like free samples, like people love free things, sending a free sample, like after a product, you're like, Hey, get your free sample here. And then using that opportunity, then cross sell them something else, huge benefit. And the one I love, and the one that I think that people can do more is like when someone makes a purchase, like give them how to wear something. What are care tips for something? You know, what are directions? If it's a more complex product, if it's like a, you know, a cooking product, like how do I cook this? How do I make this? Like just opportunities to not only reduce return rates, that's huge because we know a ton of product return and how much does it cost to get things, you know, sent back for each of our companies. It's a lot. But also just a lens like, Hey, I'm being taken care of after I've made a purchase is not when the relationship between brand and consumer ends. It's actually when it's really starting to begin. So here's a few use cases because I think these are fun. So again, this is like a view to product use case. So using like targeted messaging and verse for personalization. So someone who looked at summer sale, we saw you hiring our summer collection. Like let's send that a brand browser banner messages. Then use that short window 50, 15 to 60 minutes personalized with that brand voice, use a B testing and link back. Like be personalized. Don't just say, Hey, we saw you looking at this. What were they looking at? Why were they looking at that? And then take that and be personalized around that. Another idea again, like after someone made a purchase. And this is again, the one I love that post-purchase flow. I think it's so important. These are times to start promoting loyalty or rewards. These are times to talk about new arrivals and you don't have to do anything. You set these up and maybe you tweak them, you know, here and there you tweak them every, every season you tweak them. When you have, you know, products that are moving around that maybe this product has now become your bestseller or this collection has become your bestseller. And that's your opportunity to like, just build deeper consumer relationships, be personalized, be engaging. And then last, you know, abandon cart out of stocks are hugely impactful for brands, obviously. Like, and we don't want to then retarget something to a consumer when it's out of stock. Cause like, what good does that do us if they've added something to their cart, but it's out of stock. So what we can do is say, Hey, this is out of stock. Bummer. Let's cross sell them a different product. Let's raise a product that might be a better fit for them. Since we don't have that product in stock because that consumer said, I want to purchase your product. I want to engage with your product. So let's sell them something different. Let's solve the problem for them. Not just hope they figure it out on their own. And these are again, sending them 15 to 60 minutes after user abandons is the right time to do it. And particularly like if you've had something that they've used out of stock, maybe use some type of offer because they're like, they were excited about a certain product. They weren't excited about product two as much, but maybe with an offer, it makes them, it makes them more excited and gets them to that purchase. And again, like, particularly if this is one of the first times a consumer is interacting with your brand, like we've got to get them to that first purchase because after you make that first purchase, you're much more likely to then make a purchase down the line. Awesome. So I'll pause there for a second. I guess like Chase, like segmentation, personalization, how do you think about it? Oh yeah, this is, this is huge. I'm not as much of an SMS person, but there are definitely a lot of parallels with email. You know, I think one of the use cases you showed like, you know, a browse abandonment for email, right. Really effective for moving someone from viewing a product to hopefully adding the cart to starting checkout and ultimately making the purchase. And I love like the post-purchase, right. The customer thank you, the confirmation, the upsells, the cross sells, any kind of product education. So a lot of the stuff that you're talking about in SMS is a lot of the same things I preach on email. So I love it. I actually have a couple of questions. If you have more slides, we'll go into those after, if you don't, we'll end after, after these, but a couple of questions that I get that are pretty popular that I don't really have an answer to. How much of, you know, revenue should be coming from SMS for a brand, right? So when people ask that for email, our benchmark is hopefully at least 20% or more revenue coming from email. Is that comparable for SMS or what does that look like? Yeah. I mean, it's in the bulk, you know, I think on average, like our merchants will drive about 18 and a half percent of total online revenue via SMS. So with our growth tools and with our personalization, our segmentation platform, like our goal is to get them to that 18 and a half percent of our revenue and really make it top three revenue channel within three months. And so everything we do and everything we think about from a personalization automation point is to get them to that number. So, but as the war evolves and as people become more and more comfortable with SMS, like from a channel, it's just, you know, people want to interact with consumers. People want to interact with companies over SMS. Like we did the survey. It was like 90% of people want to actually do and sign up for SMS programs. Like that's a big number. And if we were, we did that same survey like two or three years ago, it was like 70%. So like consumers are changing. Like the COVID has like totally changed the way that consumers want to interact with their companies and like the instantaneousness, like the immediate gratification that consumers love, like that's SMS. You're able to get, you know, immediate reads if you're a company, like 90% of messages are read within like the first 10 minutes. Like people read these messages, they read them immediately. And then like with conversational and two steps, like you can start getting zero party data. You can start really interacting with the channel, which is cool. I love that. One other question I have, and then we could continue if you have more or we could wrap it up if we're good there, is how do you think about like the cadence of campaigns on SMS? Like with email, you know, we could get away sending three, four, maybe five email campaigns a week, give or take. How do you think about cadence? Is one a week good? Is three a week good? Like how do you think about them and how does that change maybe depending on list size or type of brand? Yeah. So in terms of cadence, like there is no one size fits all approach. There are best practices. Like generally you want to have enough messages where consumer knows you're on your list. Like if all of a sudden you get a you signed up, but you want to create like, you want to know, have the consumer know that you're engaging this channel. So generally like, you know, one to two a week is a good, at least place to start. And then you kind of scale it up and scale it down. You maybe segment more. And again, personalization, send the messages that are relevant to the consumer. Not just like, Hey, we're having another 20% off sale. It's like, great. But like, you could, you can do that over email and you can do it over text too. And you know, they're going to read it, but like make sure you're engaging with them on things that are relevant to them. And, you know, as you start out, you're going to probably in your first early days, like sending it to the entire list. Those are going to be like your best consumers, right? Cause you're your early adopters of your brand. But then as you grow your list, you know, 20,000, 50,000, a hundred thousand, 500,000, like it takes a while to get there, but that's when you're going to start segmenting more. That's where you're going to say, we want to send it, you know, as we started out with like the people who have clicked in the last two weeks, or we want to send it just to people who have looked at swimsuits in the last month or this product collection. So you'd always start like kind of keep starting a cadence and making sure the consumer knows you're going to engage with them through this channel. You know, we always say like, Hey, you include the contact card and the welcome series, like make sure you start like creating that personalized touch point from day one. And then down the line, you start, you know, using that and the consumers are attuned to be like this brand interaction, you know, text, this is how I interact with this company. I love that. Well, dude, if you have more presentation, I'm, you know, at the edge of my seat, want to learn from you more, you know, if not, we could wrap it there. So this has been great so far. Yeah. Why don't we go into like conversational a little bit? I love conversational stuff. And like, I think this is when you think about SMS as a channel, like this is where things are totally changing and the place where I think we're seeing just like a ton of adoption across the ecosystem. So like first in terms of, you know, two-way conversations. So, well, you know, this is your opportunity to start driving like personalized recommendations. So we can come in and say like, Hey, are you interested in Nike, Adidas, Puma or other, like let's recommend this specific product that's like relevant to them as a consumer to drive like purchase incidents. Then when you think about like, you know, two steps, like, are you interested in skincare? Are you interested in like, you know, makeup? What type of products are interested? This is like zero party data. This is the way for you to understand your consumers on a deeper level, see what they're interested in. And when you make these responses, like these become segments, these become ways that you can then engage those consumers and create very unique experiences for them and then send them the products that are right for them. So the more you can start engaging your consumers and like, they understand this is a channel that I'm talking to, I'm engaging in Congress, I'm engaging in conversation. Like this is a great approach to it. And we've seen this, like, and have used this with our customers, which is awesome. And I've seen some awesome results, which is really cool. So like, you know, this is one example we have on our site where, you know, we actually did a mystery sale and you respond based on a mystery sale keyword and like drove a ton of revenue over a two day period. So like you see here, like drove about 26% of total revenue in two days, but just like this type of messaging from an ROI perspective, like really, really strong. So a cool example. And then this one I thought was, you know, fun, kind of gamify things, subscriber engagement to with our two way journeys, like actually did like a scavenger hunt to capture subscribers and like re-engage subscribers during the holidays. And just really, really strong conversion rates with these texts. Cause like they went through a campaign, they created a personalized interaction with the brand, which was really fun. So that's it. I have some stuff on like, you know, our Shopify guide, which I think is really, really cool that I can share with you. And we can talk through that, but like, there's a lot of really cool things. And like the world is going conversational, the world is going like two way. And like, we want to have the personalization and segmentation tools to power that all. Love it, man. This was sick. Drop me a link so that way everyone watching or listening can get access to this guide. It looks like you guys have, and thank you so much for being here. Definitely learned a lot. And I think this is super timely and insightful for everyone else. What's the best place for people to learn more about Attentive, learn more about you, ask any questions about your presentation. Where can people find you? Yeah. So I'm on LinkedIn, Ryan Briggs on LinkedIn. I'm not a huge Twitter guy, Instagram's private, but I'm always available. Hit me up on LinkedIn, shoot me an email, rbriggsattentivemobile.com. You know, can love to talk SMS, love to engage with people. You know, I know our social team on like Attentive on Twitter is really like engaging, you know, on Instagram, on LinkedIn. So like, we're here, we love talking to people, talking SMS and trying to like, think about like the future of commerce and conversation. Amazing, man. I'll drop your links below. I appreciate you. Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. Thanks, Chase. All right. Cheers, man.