S1 EP12: How to Grow Subscribers Through SMS Marketing

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to 30 minutes of growth, the all action, all growth marketing podcast. That's all within half an hour. It features three segments with three playbooks

Speaker B: you can use right away and I'm

Speaker A: your host Alex Garcia. So let's do this. We all know this, that growth is the number one priority for e commerce brands. And that's where YOTPO steps up supporting brands like Culture Kings and Steve Madden. Their platform offers data driven solutions like YoTPO SMSbump, the top SMS marketing app in the Shopify app store. Sounds good right? So hop over to Yakpo.com and get a free demo right now.

Speaker B: What's up guys? Welcome to another episode of 30 Minutes of Growth. We are actually re recording. We fucked up some audio a few weeks ago so we got to rerecord a great episode. But today I have Gabe from yahpo. Yeah, uh Gabe, if you want to give like a quick intro to yourself what you do and kind of what we're going to be just talking about today.

Speaker C: Cool. Yeah, glad uh, to be back here. The fuck up allowed us to spend some more time together. So good to see you again Alex.

Speaker B: You too man.

Speaker C: My name is Gabe, I work at uh, yapo. It's an e commerce marketing platform oriented mostly around customer retention. I've worked here for coming up on three years and specifically I manage a team in client success that works with our SMS marketing product. So today we're going to talk best practices, best strategies for deploying an effective sms, uh marketing program. Tons of topics to cover, tons of important questions to get to. So looking forward to having this conversation.

Speaker B: Awesome man. So I want to jump right into it. So when I see SMS I like the main practice I see is pop up and you know, collecting a phone number that way. What I want to know is what are some of the best brands that are using sms? I mean just crushing SMS acquisition. Are there any that really stand out?

Speaker C: I would say two that I point to often are Dossier. It's ah, a perfume company. I always bring them up with onboarding clients because they're really innovative. Uh they never get complacent, they're obsessed with the data. They check in on their subscribe rates, conversion rates, day over day actually. So working with them is very intense but very exciting. So I reference them because I appreciate they constantly change the copy and incentive on the pop up. Pop up shouldn't be set it and forget it. Right. You can have pop ups that are relevant to different seasonal key marketing dates. Black, uh, Friday, Cyber Monday isn't too far away, which is crazy to think about. But in the next month or so, you might even want to say, like one early access to Black Friday Cyber Monday promotion sign up for our text club. Right. So it shouldn't be one static incentive for the entire duration of your site's existence or your program's existence. Um, so Dossier does a good job of innovating. And then Culture Kings is one of my personal favorites. They, um, have a really nice custom built pop up and they've gamified the signup process in a really effective way. Um, I've never seen a list grow at the rate that Culture Kings does. They're constantly offering entry into giveaways for exclusive Jordans, really rare sports memorabilia. One time they had a sweepstakes for a Lamborghini, which is wild. They, uh, saw a ton of signups from that. So we're always encouraging brands to keep things engaging by adding an element of gamification to the signup process. So Culture Kings, the Gamify dossier, they never rest, they never settle with their pop up.

Speaker B: So is with the perfume, is it dossier? That's the name of the company dossier.

Speaker C: Yeah. D O, S, S, I, E R.

Speaker B: Are they constantly just like running a B test on say, coffee headlines or is it more so on the actual whether that's like giveaway, free shipping, et cetera? What, what are they testing that they're, you know, that. Is it everything? Yeah, if you could break that down, pretty much everything.

Speaker C: They test differences in behavior. Um, like right now, I'm pretty sure they have a pop up that minimizes into a floating button that follows you throughout the buyer journey. So if you're like most consumers, you get to a website before you know the brand, you're going to exit out

Speaker B: of the pop up.

Speaker C: Yeah, they saw they had a pretty high close rate, so they added this floating button element to make the pop up more dynamic. Um, so that would be one way they're testing behavioral settings. Um, they'll test creative, so they'll exchange graphics often, um, experiment with showcasing different products or different product bundles in their image. Uh, and then of course, they test the copy. And a part of that is changing the incentive. Right. And it doesn't need to be a dollars and cents incentive. You can incentivize joining the program with, um, like a promise of exclusive offers or early access to things or entry into giveaways like Culture Kings is good at doing.

Speaker B: How often do you think people should rotate different, uh, tests or that you've Seen as kind of best practices.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a good question. Um, if Dossier asked me this, I would probably tell them that they rotate too frequently. It's important that you're giving your new iteration enough time to perform. Right. And the data to settle for it to be statistically significant before you draw insights and make changes from there. So I would say two weeks at minimum. Probably you want to test a pop up for like a month. Because pop ups, they're not only about what copy graphic incentive you're offering, how many subscribers you're going to capture and conversion rate is contingent on site traffic. Right. Or intent. If you have a big promotion and people are coming to the website from email for example, then they're going to be inclined to leave their phone number because they want an incentive off of whatever you're offering, et cetera, et cetera. So there are a lot of confounding variables that end in the like net growth metric for subscriber growth. So yeah, I would say leave a month probably to understand how pop ups

Speaker B: really performing from culture king side. Are they doing that? Are they kind of rotating their giveaways on a monthly basis? Um, is because I, I remember the last time you, you and I spoke that you were saying their growth was like through the roof. That I mean you just said it that you've never seen a company's SMS list grow so fast. Is it just that they're rotating really like specific giveaways that. Because Culture kings, Right. For people that don't know culture kings it's like I would say streetwear. Right. It kind of fits there. So like their giveaways are just very on brand, very fitting to, to their audience. Is that kind of that with rotating and the testing?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's mostly that I don't know what their cadences for changing up the incentive but I would say that given their streetwear, their target demographic is prime for sms. Uh, marketing. Uh, most folks who are going to wear street wear prefer to do everything on their phones. Um, so that could have to do with uh, their conversion rates and their, their growth, subscriber growth and yeah like you said, they offer incentives and giveaways that would be relevant to their target demographic. They're very self aware brand. If um, you're offering really rare exclusive Nikes, right. For example, that's going to appeal to pretty much anybody visiting their website. So they're good at uh, understanding their brand and playing into that.

Speaker B: Uh, let's brainstorm for a second. Are there any ideas from an SMS Acquisition standpoint that like you, you just haven't seen executed yet. But they like keep you up at night because you're like, damn, if somebody did this, this would crush. Is there something that you've thought of?

Speaker C: We've tried this strategy a couple of times, but using your most avid SMS subscribers, your most engaged SMS subscribers to be force multipliers for your program would be interesting. Um, we haven't had a brand perfect it, but a refer a friend type of strategy, right where I text you Alex and say, hey, you're in our top 1% of SMS subscribers based on whatever metrics you want to define. Uh, we'd love if you share our program with 10 of your closest friends and if you do, we'll offer you $100 off gift card for the holidays or $100 off your next purchase. And then of course we wouldn't offer the incentive until you deliver on those 10 new subscribers. So that would probably be the most interesting growth strategy. It's just a bit difficult to pull off from a technical standpoint. But outside of that, I would love to see more brands use social media, even print media with QR codes, leverage their, you know, Twitch audience, YouTube audience, TikTok audience, what have you. Like, we offer a tool that's a social opt in tool where you can click a link and it opens your messaging app and all you do is submit a keyword to opt into a program. It's a super seamless mobile first way to subscribe. And we have some brands who have seen a lot, a lot of success with it, but for some reason it hasn't caught on the way that I would expect. But I take the subway here in New York. Um, one time I got out of the six at Astor Place and I saw a massive QR code advertising, I think a new Oat Milk. It'd be really cool if a Princess Polly who has super, uh, big following in the US and Australia did something like that in public transit or a larger brand maybe that has events at like arenas or something. If they plaster QR codes around the event venue, that would be a super successful way to solicit signups.

Speaker B: Almost like coinbase is like QR code during the super bowl. Have that linked up to just capturing SMS for. I think it was like the $15 in or $15 worth of Bitcoin or something along those lines when you sign up. Like along those lines, yeah, it gets

Speaker C: at this idea of taking an omnichannel approach to growing your list so you have what's happening on Site, right. That's your pop up checkout opt in floating button. But you also want to market your SMS program off site and that would be an email blasts. Right. Try to convert your email subscribers into SMS subscribers because it's more direct throughput and that would be in print and packaging inserts and using QR codes, social opt in links. Um, there's a million different ways to grow your list. And the best programs, uh, like I said earlier, dossier never gets complacent. The best programs aren't. They're not satisfied ever. Right. They want to keep growing. Some of them are seeing upwards of 50x ROI per subscriber. So it's worth investing in some packaging inserts or advertising your QR code everywhere if you know how valuable and how large the CLTV is for these subscribers.

Speaker B: I think that was something you and I talked about previously was like there was a podcast I listened to that you were in. Uh, before that you said, uh, SMSR is, is not an extension of email. Can you break down why you believe that? Like why is it. Because that, I mean when I initially thought of sms I'm like, it is an extension of email. And then you kind of broke it down and it made me think differently about it. So can you kind of give your two cents or your thoughts on, on why it's not an extension of email so people could see it as its own channel?

Speaker C: I guess I'll flip the question on you and ask you, if you're writing a professional email, how are you going to start? What's it going to look like? How are you going to finish it? It's a question for you.

Speaker B: If I'm used to doing sms, it's probably more direct, straightforward and more like I'm talking to a friend.

Speaker C: It's more casual. We use the word humanization all the time. If I'm going to write a formal work email, I'm going to say, hey Alex, paragraph break, outline my intention for reaching out to you and with my signature, have another signature with the Apple graphic next to it. It's very formal experience. Um, obviously brands aren't being that formal in their outreach, but the content they're sending on email is typically kitschier than what you would have on sms. SMS is a more human channel, it's more intimate, it's a more direct throughput. So if you're taking email marketing lingo and trying to adapt it to SMS and it's not going to perform super well, right? Like I'm not signing up for an SMS program, Because I want to get a duplicate of what I'm already receiving on email. I don't really care about that content. More often than not, where email does have an advantage that, uh, most brands have like a dedicated staff to create really engaging graphics on email and some use those graphics in their SMS marketing. But the content of the actual email is more marketing jargon. Whereas with sms you should be human, you should be direct, be quick, um, you should have a clear cta. You only have a short attention span when somebody is momentarily checking their phone. So you need to make sure that you're taking advantage of that window.

Speaker A: So this podcast is all about growth. That's why I'm hearing great things about how YoTPO is driving growth for brands. Their e commerce marketing platform is already helping names like Culture Kings and Steve Madden strengthen their customer relationships with with data driven solutions for sms, loyalty reviews and more. Yappo fully integrates with all the tools you already use, like Google and Meta. Even better, it's available on all major e commerce platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce and BigCommerce. If you're like me, you're going to want to find out more, so head over to yotpo.com today for a free demo.

Speaker B: What do you think that attention span is like? How, how quick do you have to be in delivering your message in via SMS in comparison to email?

Speaker C: I'm one who doesn't recommend exceeding. So basically every text is made up of multiple SMS. So for us, like you have 160 characters to work with per SMS. So a two SMS text would be 320 characters. I'm um, one who doesn't encourage exceeding that length. Just like I don't want to receive a long text from a friend unless they're really going through it. Um, I don't want to see a long text from a brand. So if you can keep it below two sms, that's preferred. Uh, but other brands, it really depends. Like we work with one health and beauty company that loves to lay out the specifics of the ingredients that are going into their products and their texts end up being visually about this big. I don't know if this is going to come through only on audio or video, but it's like a scroll, right? But they see massive ROI returns for those campaigns and because that's what their audience is looking for. But I would say typically we wouldn't recommend exceeding, you know, two SMS per text. We also prefer that you put, uh, most of the compelling information in an image, right Or a gif. Like if it's a product drop, you want to show off the product and then the text can just be something simple like hey, product dropping now shop before it sells out, something to that effect. But the point is like brevity is better. Less, uh, is definitely more.

Speaker B: In SMS marketing, is the first SMS more so the, let's say the body of it or like the, I guess you could say like the meat and potatoes. And the second SMS would be like a cta or like how do you, how would you, for a product drop, let's say, how would you structure those sms? Each one?

Speaker C: Yeah, typically I would say greeting and try to personalize it if you can. Right. So use a first name, short code or give a name to participants in your program.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Like Princess Polly, they say hey babe. So you could say something to the effect of that, um, just try to create more of an experience. So you personalize your salutation if you will, not to be like too nerdy with uh, the language. And then you make your offer. Right. Or you prove your reason for reaching out. Like we have a promotion starting now. You outline your incentive. 20% off all products and then you end with a strong cta. Shop before it's gone, something to that effect. So that's typically the skeleton of each SMS campaign. But again it varies. But that's what we recommend to our clients.

Speaker B: So you've gotten somebody on your list. What are some of the best practices to reduce Churn? I mean, don't want, you know, with you saying it is such a humanized channel, you don't want to like do too much and get people to unsubscribe from your list. So what are some of the best practices to, to reduce that?

Speaker C: Yeah, if, um, I'm thinking about it from the perspective of a single customer's journey, I would say they subscribe from a pop up where they fully understand why they're subscribing. Right. Take 10% off your first order and stick around to get exclusive offers down the line. They receive a welcome flow immediately. You don't want there to be radio silence between sign up and first campaign. A welcome flow that includes a contact card so they can add you to their contacts. It includes some personalized content, um, it includes a conversational element ideally. Right. So you say, welcome to the program, here's your 10% offer. And then maybe 30 minutes later you hit them with another text and say you sell, uh, shirts and shoes, right? And you say, hey, what do you want to hear about most shirts or Shoes, they respond with shirts. You put them in a shirts list and you hit them with content that's relevant to them, but with the welcome flow. You want them to add your contact, you want them to remember you next time you reach out. And then after that you want to hit them in a regular cadence. But of course you want to avoid inundating them. Right. So you'll have your flow outreach, which is automated. It's triggered by specific actions or a lack of actions. And then you'll have your campaign outreach. We typically recommend our brands to send four to six campaigns per month to all subscribers. And the idea is, of course, you want to maximize revenue driving opportunities. You want to be in touch frequently. Like, we know that each campaign is high positive roi.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: But also you want to condition your subscribers to hearing from you. So if somebody subscribes and then they don't hear from you for three months and you resurface, they're gonna say, you know, who the fuck are you?

Speaker B: Yeah, right.

Speaker C: I don't remember even signing up. Unsubscribe quickly. We see after long layoffs, really high unsubscribe rates relative to averages when you're in a consistent cadence. So yeah, I would say you wanna be in touch often so that somebody knows who you are and they feel your presence. But you don't wanna harass people with too many marketing texts. Um, you also don't wanna cheapen your brand. Right. So you don't wanna reach out every day offering a new promotion.

Speaker B: Do you see SMS as also a great place to deliver like your content? Whether you just dropped a YouTube video or a blog article or something along those lines. Do you see SMS that's like somewhere where you could share that, that content and use that as somewhere just to like, continue to develop a good relationship with the individual. If you don't have anything that you're going to promo. Right. Or like on my end, and I think you and I spoke about this is like, for my newsletter, I want to use sms. I want to build an SMS list. I think it would add more value to marketing examined. So like I want to use it not really to promote anything, but just to deliver content, you know, what does that look like for me? Is that me just linking out or is that me sending like a tip every day or every other day to somebody on my list?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it depends what the appetite of your subscriber base is. If they would be fine hearing from you that frequently, then I would say, why not? Right. We encourage a lot of our Brands to send non promotional content. A lot of brands are mission driven brands, like they're doing something to help the environment, right. Or they're producing their products in an eco friendly way. We always encourage them to link to the work that they're doing, to the healthy practices that they're employing because it creates brand loyalty and brand affinity from subscribers. So maybe one day they send a promotion and somebody thinks like I don't want to get these anymore. But then they remember, you know, I have an emotional relationship with this brand, I should stick around because I know the work they're doing is good, I know the content is good, the products are made in a good way. So yeah, I would recommend any brand to send non promotional content in conjunction with sending marketing content or promotional content. If I had unlimited budget with my own marketing program, I would send a ton of promotional content. Um, especially if I'm running like a really cool company with a strong mission, um, like with tons of good blog posts, content, videos. We have a lot of brands actually on Amazon Prime Day who use their SMS marketing program to advertise what they were doing on Amazon. Which seems a bit odd, right? If you're direct to consumer, you prefer to convert on your website because margins are better. But they understood the moment so they linked out to Amazon instead of to their website. So to answer your question, uh, sending non promotional content is something we see all the time. Um, you as somebody who's putting out content as opposed to products would 100% encourage that you get in the SMS

Speaker B: game because yeah, like the content is my product in that case, you know what I mean? Like it's, it's so, and I, and I definitely think there's like everybody only thinks of email when they think of newsletter delivering content. I would say, and I think there's such a, uh, you and I spoke about this but there's such a, a wide open lane to take advantage of being able to build out an SMS list and add value to X company by doing so. So I mean this, this flows perfectly. But the last question I want to ask you is so I'm starting, if I'm starting SMS tomorrow, like what are the recommended flows or the flows that you, you think no matter what, these are the ones you need to use.

Speaker C: Uh, from the jump generally I would say a welcome flow. Obviously again set the tone the right way. You would want a card abandonment flow. You should be using SMS to acquire customers. Once somebody does purchase and they're part of your program, you want a post purchase flow. Either you can pitch a cross sell, encourage them to follow you on social, encourage you to join a, uh, rewards program or a loyalty program so that you can work on retaining the customer. Um, and then also in the retention bucket, you want a customer win backflow. And then if you're a yapo client, you want flows that leverage other yapo tools. Right. So the value of our platform is that it's not just an SMS platform. You can use your loyalty data, your reviews data. We function kind of as a cdp, so we have different flows that draw on different, uh, loyalty reviews actions. And the point there isn't only to pitch Yappo, it's also to illustrate that your SMS program should work in concert with the rest of your tech stack. Like, it shouldn't only be an SMS program in a vacuum. It should speak to your other products and pull on other data so that you can ensure the most personalized outreach.

Speaker B: Have you seen like, a best practice when it comes to, like, the welcome flows? How many SMS should be within that flow? Is it, is it 5 over the course of 10 days, or is it more? Is it more comprehensive? What do you think there?

Speaker C: Yeah, I don't recommend five. I would say that I recommend simplicity across the board. Uh, other people on my team might recommend five, and I think that just speaks to different styles. But I would recommend two to three messages. The first is contact card and the original offer that you promised them. And then adding a delay, maybe a day long delay, and a condition that filters people out if they've already purchased since the beginning of the flow. If they haven't, you hit them with a reminder. Right? Like, hey, haven't, um, seen you since we spoke yesterday. Don't Forget you have 10% off your first order. Shop here and then bring them back to site. Then if you want to, you can add another reminder, but it's, it's kind of up to you.

Speaker B: Awesome. Well, Gabe, I appreciate your time, man. This has been phenomenal. In just 23 minutes, we've, you've dropped nothing but, but golden nuggets. So I appreciate your time, I appreciate you coming back on here because I know that's, uh, a, that's a pain in the ass with your, your travel schedule. So for anybody that's listening, where can they follow you or find more of your content and just learn more from you?

Speaker C: Yeah, uh, you can follow me on LinkedIn, connect with me, or you can shoot me an email, say hi, we'll set up a conversation. G.goldstein@yapo.com But I'm glad to be back. Hopefully I'll see you again soon. And hopefully the, uh, the audio is good.

Speaker B: Yeah, I've been monitoring it this whole time, so I think we're golden on the audio this time, man. But I appreciate your time. And, yeah, we'll have to do this again.

Speaker C: All right, man, talk to you soon.

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