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Bonus: 26% of Brands Reply in Real Time: The Conversational SMS Playbook That Wins More Orders
00:41:47
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- [00:00]
A
There's no reason not to be leaning into what's possible with sms. There's this huge gap between what brands think is happening and what consumers are seeing. 25% ish of people who give up their phone number end up converting in the first 30 days. If you're trying to really maximize the opportunity, it's impossible not to think about the other 75% of people who gave you their number, double opted in and didn't buy anything in the first 30 days. The fact that people aren't using this direct channel to develop those relationships with their customers, which is like theoretically the whole entire reason we even have direct to consumer brands in the first place, it just like blows my mind. You already paid Meta for the traffic. Why not try to ask the question to drive the conversion?
- [00:54]
B
Welcome to the DTC podcast. I'm back with postscript's Michael Manheimer. We co authored a report with postscript recently. You can find it, I believe, on our website. It's called the Conversational Report. A Consumer and Brand Survey on texting back. What a simple idea. Texting back what? What is going on in the world of sms and why are more brands not texting people back?
- [01:15]
A
Yeah, it's a good question. It's sometimes in business it's like the simple things or the things that we forget. Texting is a two way channel by nature. It's not. This isn't a no reply at email address here. Like, you know, people can text back and when you engage in the channel, you're kind of setting that expectation. But a shockingly large number of folks just do not engage with the channel that way. And I think that, you know, they're not only letting their customers down, but they're also missing out on amazing consumer insights and also lots of incremental revenue.
- [01:47]
B
Yeah. So we surveyed this was. This is a cool report because we sweet looked at it from both the brand side and the shopper side. You guys handled a bit of the shopper side. We surveyed over $840 million plus D2C brands. What was maybe one of the more alarming, like stats from your perspective?
- [02:04]
A
The stat that jumped out to me from the results was less than 40% of brands thought that not answering questions resulted in people abandoning their purchasing decision. So like, among all of the things that could happen, they were like, yeah, answering questions is not that big of a deal. Like, you know, that maybe that's not driving abandonment, but like 85% of consumers said, oh yeah, I've abandoned a purchasing decision because I couldn't find the information that I needed dozens of times. And so there's this huge gap between what brands think is happening and what consumers really are seeing. And that gap is where tons and tons of lost sales are happening. And I think that there's tons of reasons for it, which I'm sure that we'll get into. But I think anywhere you see this gap between consumer expectations and what brands assume the answer is, you know, in that gap there's just tons of, of missed revenue.
- [03:04]
B
It's kind of interesting because SMS is like, we've talked about it before on the last time you hear, it's like the most intimate communication channel, you know, whether you're, you know, when you're texting someone, you're in a conversation, there's so much anticipation around those three dots coming up or whether it's been read. But it's like as soon as it goes to the commercial side of things, it's like that all of those expectations are kind of abandoned in a way. I think was only 26% of brands resp to replies in real time, which is again, like you say, a huge opportunity.
- [03:34]
A
It's because most people think of responding to their customers in terms, in support terms, in reactive terms. It's like a, a cost of doing business, but there's no revenue there and it's overhead. And so yeah, bad customer interaction on the support side could make your brand look bad. But a good customer interaction on the support side, you know, it doesn't usually drive incremental revenue or additional purchases or anything. And that's usually the surface area where people communicate with their customers. And I think they're just bringing that mentality to it. But if you think about what's happening when most people are texting is they go to your site, they get hit with the pop up to give up their email and SMS for an introductory offer they haven't bought yet. And so the questions that they're asking are not reactive support decisions. They're asking, they're purchasing questions. And so if you think about them, if you reframe it and say this is a sales opportunity rather than a support opportunity, I think brands would totally address the channel completely differently. But they're just bringing all that support baggage to this part of the conversation. And that I think causes them to misdiagnose what's really happening. When someone who like landed on your site yesterday and gave up their SMS number when they text in, what are they really asking? They're not saying, hey, where's my order? They're saying why should I buy this thing versus the 10 other things I'm comparing your product to on the side that you can't see. And that's your chance, that's your chance. But most brands are missing it.
- [05:05]
B
Why, why do you think most brands, it's, it's funny. We, in our, in our business, we're, we've sort of, everyone on the executive team has read Unreasonable Hospitality. We talk a lot about what, what we can do as a brand to make, whether you're our advertiser or a reader, to make it as seamless like over and above kind of experience as possible. What we're talking about isn't unre at all. This is just reasonable, you know, communication. So what, what do you think? Why do you think brands have, have trouble with, with real time communication on sms?
- [05:35]
A
Again, I think that they don't have a people to handle these conversations. So what typically happens is when they do care enough to respond, they will simply set up like a forwarding from their SMS provider to you know, Gorgeous or Zendesk or Rich Panel or, or whatever, a customer service tool that they're using. Those replies then go in as tickets to their support team who's probably already overloaded and who is not measured on driving incremental sales or handling sales conversations. They're measured on like ticket resolution. And so the one thing that I will empathize with brands about is like if you don't have anybody to text back, if you have a list of size, you can generate a lot of responses if you're not careful, right? Some people are like, hey, you know, they'll ask a question simply at the end of the text and they might get a few thousand responses. And if you get a few thousand responses and you just send them in as tickets to your support team without giving them a heads up, they're mad. They're like what are these? These are just clogging up my day to day job. I didn't ask for this. They probably just go, you know, bulk resolve them. If they don't go to the support team and they just land in postscript or whatever SMS tool of choice and you know, you get the flashing red notification, you're the retention marketer, the CMO and you're seeing thousands of replies. You're like oh my God, what did I just do? I don't have time to respond to maintain thousands of text conversations at once. And so I think the fact that we used to need humans to resolve these conversations or manage them appropriately made it so it was kind of like too high of a bar. Like most brands would just be like, I'd rather like stick my head in the ground and have blinders on that. There's these conversations that could be happening because I just don't have the resources to support them. I think that came up in, in some of the reports. Yeah, they said the biggest barrier to real time replies is staffing. 60% said staffing was the big issue. So that makes total sense. Actually, you know, it's like D2C companies are not, you know, they don't have thousands of people on staff here now. AI obviously totally changes that paradigm and I think makes the bar for responding well and in less than a minute, like, you know, table stakes. If you're using a top tier software platform and that takes that whole entire objection off the table, then now there's really no reason for you not to be responding to these things and driving incremental revenue as a result.
- [07:59]
B
Talk to me about just how it works. Talk to me on post. Is it, is it just simply chatgpt answering basic questions, you know, with a sales bent? Like how has postscript built this to alleviate these concerns?
- [08:11]
A
Essentially, yeah. So I'm, I'm proud to say that what we, what we have is not just a, an LLM wrapper that answers basic questions. We've actually been on this journey for a long time. Many years ago we had this insight. SMS is a high converting channel. There was like 25% ish of people who give up their phone number end up converting in the first 30 days to a purchase. And that's why people continue to invest in sms. It's high ROI and it's high converting. It breaks the noise. That's all good, but if you're trying to really maximize the opportunity, it's impossible not to think about the other 75% of people who gave you their number double opted in and didn't buy anything in the first 30 days. And so a few years ago we set out to figure out what that was and we built this thing called the E Commerce Sales center in Phoenix, Arizona. We hired like 20 sales representatives to start texting back just to understand what was happening. And you can imagine what we found was very similar to what would happen if you walked into a retail store that you've never been in before. You're looking around and someone comes up to you and goes like, can I help you shop today? Like, what are you looking for? The range of questions that would happen in that environment, those are happening digitally too, right? Like, people are shopping, they're shopping digitally. So they're like, you know, where's the stuff that's my size? Is there anything on sale? Is this product useful for this thing versus this thing? What would work best for me? All the stuff that you're trying to answer with your pdp, right? It's just one page. So you can't do everything on the pdp. There's naturally questions that come up. People are asking those. So we developed it as a service and we learned an unbelievable amount from texting back. We had literally hundreds of thousands of conversations, drove hundreds of millions of dollars in incremental revenue that way. So when AI started becoming commercially viable, we took all those learnings and we built them into our software product. Yes. Does it use LLM logic? Of course it does. But we've built a huge range of probabilistic models in addition to all of the sales playbooks that we developed over the last few years with the E Commerce Sales Center. And that culminates in a postscript product that's called the Brand center, where you can fine tune your product portfolio. You can ingest all the MetaField data from Shopify, you can upload any voice and tone documents, we can read PDFs, we read all the PDPs. It basically gets us to develop like, basically an LLM for your brand that understands not only what your products do, but also how your brand wants to show up. Once the Brand center is fully developed, then we have a product called Shopper, which is our conversational sales agent that responds. And so anytime someone texts in, Shopper responds immediately. We do that in less than a minute. The conversations that we have are meant to be helpful. They're meant to educate consumers, but they're also meant to sell. And so selling and reactive support are completely different things, which is why sometimes if you turn on what people like, you know, have gone onto, these other chatbots, for example, they don't send links back, they're not trying to drive to a purchase, they're not trying to help someone make a decision, they're not navigating through the site. And so they don't drive any incremental revenue. And what do they. When they don't drive incremental revenue, they just turn out to be toys. Right. At best. And so we really focused on how can we use conversational AI using everything that we've learned, plus what the LLMs are capable of, to drive incremental revenue for our brands. That's what Shopper Plus Brand center does for postscript customers.
- [11:50]
B
Back to the report. 65.7 people expected a response within one hour. That's an interesting one to me. 50. Only 15.5 expected a reply in under one minute. Which, which is kind of crazy if I'm getting a text like it. Like we say, it's the most immediate kind of communication channel you have. So Again, if only 15, 16% of people are expecting a reply in under one minute, what an opportunity you have to wow someone or to surprise them or delight them. If you're responding more or less in
- [12:15]
A
real time, the bar is on the floor. And so for, for, for most brands, like, you can show up in a way that will, will blow people's minds. Like, one of the things we learned from the ESC when we were texting back manually. Dr. Squatch was one of the brands on Postscript that was using that service in the early days and they were exploring and like, they would develop these really interesting sort of like parasocial relationships with some of their customers once they figured out, like, oh, you'll text back. This is really interesting. There was one guy who was an avid Dr. Squatch fan. He bought, you know, I think he was a subscriber and he bought all their drops. This guy was probably buying, spending 80 bucks on soap every single month. Like, he was just a constant. Very clean, very clean guy. But he started having these conversations with, with the folks in the other end. He would send a daily picture of his dog to the esc, like being like, hey guys, here's a picture of. I forget the dog's name. It's escaping me now. But there was a picture of the dog in the esc because this guy was just like, it's me on the walk with the dog. Check him out. Like, and it's like that person. You know, I'm not saying that everyone should be trying to solicit pictures of their customers dogs, but when you think about the bar that you jump over and the relationship that you create with somebody when you're living in their most intimate, most responsive app, right? Their messaging app, that's where their family relationships and their friend relationships live. If you earn the right to be there and you respond regularly and you develop that type of relationship with the customer, the LTV on that particular person is like insane off the charts. Right? And that's worth it. Like if you're in direct to consumer. Theoretically, the reason why we do direct to consumer instead of the old business models is because you can use the direct relationship with the customer as a weapon to Win in your category. So the fact that people aren't using this direct channel to develop those relationships with their customers, which is like theoretically the whole entire reason we even have direct to consumer brands in the first place, it just like blows my mind. And so we're trying to make it dead simple for people to use it because the, the revenue plus the insights that you get are just like unbelievable. You can't get them anywhere else. They do not exist on any other channel. So there's a huge opportunity.
- [14:36]
B
Yeah, we communicate. You communicate different on text with your friends and family than you would communicate everywhere. You, you have higher expectations. What, what I'm wondering is, does it communication strategy a little bit like when you're operating from this two way model or the third moment model, which, which we can get into a little bit, does it change the way you send that first text? Like because most texts get sent out in this like broadcast sort of methodology where people, some people might expect to be able to respond to that, but a lot of people will just be like, okay, this is a broadcast text from sms. Are there approaches that brands can take where that first text is more personable and invites a response?
- [15:13]
A
Essentially a hundred percent. It's so funny. I talk to people all the time and I'm, you know, I'm, I'm in this all day long. So I'm, I'm, I'm like, oh yeah, here's all the cool strategies you could do. And they're like, pause. I don't even believe you that people want to text my brand. So let's start from that. And I'm like, well of course they don't, they don't think they can. Have you ever asked them a question? And they're like, no, like why would I do that? But like literally if you just change. Let's say your welcome series, right, it says, hey, thanks for joining the VIP club. Get your 20% off code here. Shop your favorite styles link, right? If you simply just after the link say, are there any questions I can help you with? Question mark? That's it. If you just do that, you will get hundreds and hundreds of responses just by doing that. And when you think about like what's happening in the consumer world right now with AI, every single person is being trained to expect that when they type a message into a text box, they're going to get an instant and very good response back. Everyone is learning that is the behavior of a text box on the Internet and it's completely changing. So yeah, only, you know, I agree with the stat was 7% or only 24% are responding under two minutes. That's like meeting consumer expectations. I think consumer expectations by like this time next year are going to be like why did I have to wait 60 seconds for a response here? Right now it's an opportunity. But I think a year from now brands who don't invest in this are going to look like archaic from a consumer expectation point of view. And so yeah, there's an arbitrage here. You can be one of the ones that stands out massively for 2026, maybe a little bit of 2027. But do I expect as AI becomes a normal part of consumer life that these opportunities are just going to become baseline table stick expectations 100% they will. And so I am encouraging people to lean in now because if you don't, if you're like, yeah, that's a 2027 thing, you're going to be late to what consumers are expecting to happen when they text you and they're going to be texting you. They really, really are. We're seeing messages to shopper going up double digit percentages every single month. So the it's not, oh, we're growing messages on the platform 20% a year, they're growing 30% a month. They're going to millions and millions and millions of messages already. So like this is happening and you can either, you know, you know, be caught flat footed or you can use this opportunity to be a leader in two way messaging for consumers. And I will tell you, they'll know the difference.
- [18:01]
B
I think you message mentioned this but 82.4% have abandoned a purchase because they couldn't find an answer to a product or question that makes sense. And then 81% say they'd be more likely to buy if they could text back and forth in a real conversation. Like that's really all you need to know. What do you see on the brand side in terms of like incremental revenue that's generated by these kind of conversations?
- [18:24]
A
Yeah. So the shopper stats are very, very compelling. One is because when people are texting back, they buy more and they unsubscribe left the unsubscribe less the subscriber LTV lift. So the lifetime value of people who are texting with Your brand is 1.5x greater than those who do not. So like just fundamentally getting someone who you have their number to text you and you text them back, that relationship will increase their lifetime value to 1 1/2 x of someone who did not People who engage with conversations are 22% more likely to engage with the rest of your marketing. And the median shopper ROI right now because obviously the messages cost money when you text back and forth, just like they cost money when you're doing promotional texts. But the median ROI on shopper conversations is over 20x right now. And so it is extremely high performing. It is like putting money in the bank for the future because these people go from becoming like I kind of like this brand to becoming fans, maybe mega fans, maybe VIPs in the future and they're buying more stuff over time. And so the economics, like obviously it feels good to text back somebody and get a good little conversation going, but this isn't just about the qualitative side of it, although that's really important. There's an economic reason to do this as well, which is you will drive more incremental revenue. The stat that we show when people are like should I or should I not do this is if you add conversational strategies into your existing flows, you'll get somewhere between 5 and 15% better performance. And we're talking about like flows like welcome series where you might be driving. If you're a nine figure brand, you might be driving 10 million, $15 million a year in welcome series revenue from SMS. Yes, we're talking about a 5, 10, 15% increase in that revenue if you just simply start having two way conversations with people who are confused about what they're seeing on the site. Your PDP can be so good. The best PDP ever seen. There is no way it can answer every single person's question clearly. And I have like the anecdotes I see about like just stuff you wouldn't expect that shopper can handle. They're happening all day long. There's just no way you could put every single objection onto a PDP and make it the perfect thing. And that's where shopper can kind of back cleanup and handle all those objections and drive those incremental sales. Because people are getting answers to questions that they're not sure about.
- [21:07]
B
And it's the way, the way you described it as the like the, the minimum bar of thinking of it like a sales associative. Like hey, is there anything I help you with like asking that question? Like it must I think about back to my retail days as a sales associate, like the amount of times I'd ask that and they wouldn't. There'd be sale sale placards all over the store of this big sale we're having and they'd have, they would have. No, they would not have registered that at all. For whatever reason, they're in their own head about whatever. So it's hard to underestimate, you know, what, what these shoppers have going on to the point where they might not realize things that are immediately obvious to you.
- [21:40]
A
Totally. And I think like, you don't know, you don't know what you don't know until you start getting text back. I'll give, I'll give you a good example of something that we saw that has always just stuck out to me is Jones Road Beauty is one of our customers. Cody and crew are world class operators. Cody really cares about his PDP's being really good. In fact, I was just talking to him the other day and he let me know that he's logged over 80 hours on cloud code trying to build the perfect landing pages. So his pdps are good. But when we turned on Shopper for Jones Road and someone was texting in about Miracle Bomb, the question that this woman asked you was like, hey, I'm pretty sure I know my shade, but I've never used this product before. Here's my question. I live in a warm climate year round and I garden every single day. I tend to get sweaty when I'm gardening. Will Miracle Bomb stand up to the sweat from when I'm gardening? And for how long? If your PDP has to handle every single edge case question, it's not possible. But shoppers like, hey, here's how you should think about sweat and moisture associated with Miracle Bomb. Because it knows everything there is to know about that particular sku. And it's like going back and forth with this woman about it's not even about the product. She wants to know how the product performs in her geography with her hobby. And that's like the type of thing that, because sometimes people get very precious about what's on their pdp, they're like, no, it's the perfect thing. And when you really start to see the types of questions that come in, I think you're instantly struck with like, oh, there are so many angles, personal angles to why someone would or wouldn't buy our product. And if we don't address those angles in real time with Shopper or with some conversational AI, like there's no easy way to navigate the site and get an instant answer to that question. And so if you're not addressing it with kind of conversational strategy, you're leaving it up to chance. And not every single person is going to Spend the time going through your FAQs or using your search capabilities on the site, or, you know, waiting for the email, perfect email sequence to come through where it's like, oh, that's my question. They're impulsive. They clicked a meta ad, they landed on the site, they had a question, they didn't see the answer, they bounced. And we can recover that with text if you simply ask what stopped them from buying. And like, that's really how simple it is to get that started. And then are you doing a good job on the back end? And there's lots of nuances there, but that's for, you know, the software companies like postscript to figure out. But I just think it's a huge missed opportunity. And once people like start just adding a question mark onto a simple flow and they see what comes back, then it's like, oh, the wheels are turning. Now I see what's possible.
- [24:32]
B
And you mentioned Insights, like we're, I'm constantly on this podcast talking about like the Andromeda update and you know, how important sort of Persona based marketing is at this point and angle based marketing to the point when like, so if you, if you start getting, you realize over the course of a month, you put out a new product, you get, you know, 100 people texting in to be like, is this going to help I sweat a lot when I garden or whatever, then you might spin out a PDP that's like, this is the ultimate mascara for gardeners or whatever. Right? Like the amount of data, like you don't get that from your sales associates when they have these conversations, like on the floor. But this is all recorded on your platform. So I imagine the Insights piece of this is, is like the other gift that keeps on giving.
- [25:12]
A
Yeah, I actually think that like people come for the incremental revenue and they stay for the insights. There's a product called Ask Shopper which goes along with our Shopper technology where literally you can query your conversational data for insights anytime you want. And like, I'll give you a good example of how sometimes people use this is like, let's say you do a new offer on your pop up and so instead of doing the normal 20% off welcome series, you're doing a buy one, get one. It's like stackable offer and technically it's better. But then you find out through the conversations that people are really confused about it. Not only can you Ask Shopper, like can you tell me the sentiment of folks who subscribed in the last week as it relates to the promotional offer that we change. It'll go through and it'll find all the examples so you can get an understanding. Are people confused by it? Do they like it? All right. Is the value being communicated appropriately? But you can also say, oh, give me the people who had a bad experience because they were confused by this particular thing. Wrap them up into a segment and create a segment in postscript for me. I'm going to send them a message that says, like, hey, sorry, I know you found that this thing was confusing. I'm the founder of Brand xyz Mike. I want to give you a special thing just to make sure that your experience is good. It's not just about the insights that you get and what you can learn from it. You can also take action on these things to develop even a better relationship. And so, yes, the incremental revenue and picking up those lost sales is critically important. But the stuff that you learn that can either help you in your offer testing or help you in your creative testing, or help you understand the Personas that you're going to be trying to attach to in your meta campaigns, for example, it's endless. And like, that's really the stuff where most brands don't even have a conduit of great customer feedback that they can rely on on a weekly basis. I mean, you've seen people who are like, their hack to this is like querying meta ad comments or going into Reddit and someone trying to read it. You can, let's say you have a list of 50,000 people on your SMS list. If you start trying to develop a conversational approach with them, you will have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of real customer prospect and customer conversations happening for your brand instantly, overnight. And you'll drive more sales and you will learn an insane amount about what's going on. You'll learn about stuff that's broken on your site too. Someone's like, well, I clicked on this page and it went to a 404. And then I didn't know what to do from there, so I bounced. You'll learn stuff like that. You'll learn about the person who's wondering about the gardening aspect. You'll learn about people who are like, will this fit me? What's the return policy? There are people who are like, hey, I really like this product, but I want to know it's sustainable. Can you tell me about how it's sourced? Literally, the concerns that consumers have are endless. We work in direct to consumer, so these are discretionary impulse purchases. So we Gotta be on it. We gotta answer these questions when they're there. And you already paid Meta for the traffic. Like why not try to ask the question to drive the conversion? It's really, you know, we've been pounding the table on this for years at this point and now with AI it's so much easier. And at this point I'm like, I just really, I don't understand why people aren't activating this capability because it really is a fountain of knowledge and incremental revenue at the same time. With most merchants not having to lift a finger, they just turn it on and it happens. And so I'm just so bullish that like this is going to be the battleground where you're going to win or lose sales with consumers obviously in the future as we move to agentic commerce. But even now, you know, like they're not just, you know, the person who's looking for Miracle Bomb, she's not only considering Miracle Bomb if she's looking for a new foundation, right? She's considering what she saw at Sephora, she's considering the other ads that she saw. She's considering Miracle Bomb. Like this is your chance to turn that person into a Jones Road Beauty user. And I can tell you Cody is going to take advantage of that. He's going to convert that person and the brands that are in the consideration set with him who are not doing this sort of thing are going to lose that sale to Jones Road Beauty. And you like, you kind of have a choice if you're a brand, which side of that do you want to be on?
- [29:39]
B
And you're going to maybe lose that first sale and then you're more likely to lose the ongoing sales when they live in that person's SMS with the rest of their family and friends, right? If they're having ongoing conversations the next time they want to buy or whatever.
- [29:53]
A
There's not infinite demand for every single category. Right? Like so yeah, I'm not saying that direction a consumer e comm is zero sum but there's a certain amount of people who are shopping for your particular category at any given time. And if you have a brand who's converting more of those people to first time buyers of their product over yours over time, that means the value and the dominance in that particular category is going to accrue more to those people. They're going to become the dominant brands. And so I think a lot of brands try to act like, well, like what, what does this really matter? Is this really a big deal? Should I really care about dipping my toe into this. And it's like, well, if in, in beauty, for example, If Cody's converting 5 or 10% more people to first time buyers than the other brands B, C, D and E that he's competing with in those meta auctions for those new buyers, if he's converting 5 or 10% more than everyone else over time, he's com compounding that. And that's how you get category leadership. And so if you're not addressing that opportunity, you really are losing something. This isn't just a nice to have, like you are getting beat by other people who are giving consumers an easier path to purchase something in your particular category. This is not a vitamin, this is really a painkiller. If you're not investing here and someone else is like, eventually all the value is going to accrue towards them.
- [31:21]
B
Can you sketch it? I think we've talked about this a little bit. I think we've talked a lot about like the bare minimum you can do with converse how much value doing the bare minimum has, but at scale, like nestled in like an entire SMS setup. What does like a good playbook look like right now? Just sketch that out for me a little bit.
- [31:39]
A
Yeah, I think the, the first step would be if you think about like mapping all of your flows, you would say, where does it make sense for me to ask a question here? And I think that there's tons and tons of missed opportunity. You could start with just like welcome series. Abandoned cart is an obvious place, right? Someone abandoned their cart. You try to get them back with an offer and then you say like, what stopped you from purchasing today? That sort of thing will generate tons of conversations. That's like the basics, the intermediate and the advanced stuff would be like, I always tell people this and they're always like, how did I forget that? What's the best text that you could ever get? It's not the 20% off. It's not that we're dropping a new thing. The text that consumers love to get are the ones that say, hey, the thing that you bought is out front of your door right now. It's getting dropped off in five minutes. That's everyone's favorite sms. So when you're taking them at that moment of like pure happiness, the thing that I bought is at my door. Following that up with a question about, you know, maybe 24 hours later, what did you like about it? I hope it fit right. Hey, I'm the founder, I'm very passionate about my products. I'm always Trying to get feedback and learn asking that next question. And then if people respond, like giving them a special, hey, thank you so much for giving us feedback. Here's a special code we're going to generate for you. Next time you want to buy, take another 10% off the next thing. We appreciate you. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That sort of stuff can not only drive next sales, but it also creates brand fandom. Right? Like these people are like, oh, I feel connected to this brand now. And so I think instead of just thinking about my flows, where can I jam a question mark into my flows? I really encourage people to think about what are the moments, like what state is your consumer going to be in at these different moments? You know, there's the moment of them abandoning their cart, they're probably frustrated they clicked on an ad and they didn't get what they wanted. And there's a question you should ask there. But there's also positive moments. I just got my thing, I just bought my second time. Now I'm turning into a subscriber and I, you know, I'm making this up. But like, let's say you're, you know, AG1 and they know that, you know, you need to get to 10 orders in your subscription to cultivate a habit. Maybe you should be like congratulating people at that particular moment and what question is the highest order question that you could be asking them then? I think, think the idea that these are two way engagements. Commerce is a relationship with the customer and really thinking about it from what does the consumer want to hear from me next at these particular times is where you start to get into the stuff that's really, really interesting and way beyond the basics of just like asking people why they didn't buy or asking them if you can help them answer their questions. You could get to all of that by just simply mapping what a great in person experience is. Right? We've talked about, you walk into a store, someone says, can, can I help you with anything today? Most of the time you say, no, I'm good. And then you just go do your thing. Sometimes you're like, I'm looking for X thing, where is it? And they just point you in the right direction. Those are the basics. But if you think about what is the last amazing consultative interaction you had where you were like, you know what, I have tons of questions actually, I don't know where to start. What's going to be great? Like for example, I had a question recently where I went to like a nursery and I had a Picture of where I wanted to put some potted plants. I didn't know what would live best, what's the right shade environment, what plants are going to be best for. So I just went to somebody and I asked them, you know, like, hey, here's a picture of what I got. I'm looking to add some greenery to this back patio. It's half shade, half nod. It gets really hot in Arizona where I'm at, like what should we think? And this person led me through this amazing like, okay, cool, I'm going to walk you over. Here's how to think about this. I would choose from these five things based on these five things. What do you like about this? What do you like about that? Made a great recommendation. And it's like when you think back to those sorts of engagements, mapping those into your digital flow, your digital SMS strategy, that's where you're going to really find magic. And so, so I think getting obsessed with moments of not just reacting to objections or not only finding incremental revenue, but also finding ways to take an 8 out of 10 experience to a 10 out of 10 experience or take somebody from a one time purchaser to a subscriber, capitalizing on their happiness or excitement or whatever it might be, those are really where you start to get some of the magic moments happening. Let's say someone gets, you know, your true classic, someone gets the item. You ask them, hey, how did it work? And they're like this is my favorite T shirt I've ever owned. Instead of just being like cool, two thumbs up, that's great. What about saying awesome through my integration? You obviously wouldn't text this, but maybe you have it integrated with the Kendo and that's where you do reviews. Ask for the review right there. Hey, can you say a couple things about why you like this shirt and we could generate a five star review for you right here. They'll do it, they'll text back, they'll, you can just pipe that straight into your reviews platform and radically increase the number of reviews that you have. People who are saying like, hey, send me a picture of like, you know, oh, this shirt makes me look better than I've ever looked. Send us a pic. You can get UGC from this channel if you really just open your mind to what's happening on the consumer side. And what if a consumer could engage with me wherever they want. You can create magic moments that'll radically increase. LTV will create a whole new source for VIPs that you've never had. Before and will drive meaningful incremental revenue for your brand. But like marketers just don't think of this because they're not used to channels being two way and when they are, they see it as a problem. And so AIs flipped it on its head and now I think everyone should be like expanding their mind to what's really possible here.
- [37:30]
B
It's just SMS has always been this like, you know, darling, you know, incremental revenue channel. But it's amazing that it's been able to do that without this like maturation of the channel. Like this is like the channel kind of coming full service. You know, you're like, brands don't expect to have to respond or to be able to respond, but that is unlike any other experience they have with their sms. They always expect a response, you know, from every other SMS experience they have. So it's really just like a come first, full circle maturation moment of the, of the channel.
- [38:00]
A
Yeah, people just don't. And the consumers, you know, don't really realize that they can text back a lot of the times too. So if you start trying to engage with them and train that behavior, you'll see a complete behavior shift on their end. But the reason that they're not used to it is because of what the current state is. Most brands, brands who are listening to this right now are probably thinking in their head, yeah, like if someone texts me back, I send them a form message that says this is a not monitored channel. And if email us at info at brand here or stop to stop if you want to opt out. That's crazy. That is crazy to do and you don't have to do it anymore. You don't have to staff a person to not have that experience. You can use conversational AI to develop a strategy here and so there's no more excuses. And I think that in the past there's like plausible deniability for brands. Like, you know, if you created a thousand responses it would be hard to manage, but now you can just flip it on instantly and develop insights and revenue. Like there's no reason not to be leaning into what's possible with sms. We already know it's a great revenue driver. Right. That's why people are all using it. You know, shopping happens on the phone, the text goes to the phone, there's a direct connection. It's amazing. And if you just simply start to think about what could happen if I develop a texting relationship with my consumers, I think there's a lot to learn and a lot of revenue most brands are leaving on the table.
- [39:26]
B
Well, if you need any more convincing, you can go to directtoconsumer Co, the conversational report. We're gonna put the link in the show notes of this and this will give the full 360 degree reasoning from both the brands and the consumers about what an incredible opportunity this is. If you're already convinced, you can go right to postscript IO. Mike, always great to have you on the D2C podcast. Great chat today.
- [39:49]
A
Yeah, I love being here. I love talking SMS anytime we can. And if you're a brand who's on the fence, happy to talk to you as well. I think a lot of people want the proof, right? So I'm going to give a couple shout outs real quick to brands who are leading in this. If you want to see what happens when you text a brand and what what this experience we're talking about here, here's a few brands that you can subscribe to their text and start texting them and see what happens. True classic high adoption of conversational AI. Hollow Socks, a great conversational brand. The Woobles using conversational AI. Go ahead and text them back. Original grain. Go ahead and text them back and see what happens. The list goes on and on and on. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of postscript customers are using Shopper for conversational AI. And so don't take it from me, go shop those brands, start asking them questions and see what happens. Jones Road Beauty, another great one. So you can see it in real time. It's an amazing experience. I think once you see what's possible, you'll be like, why? Why are we turning our two way channel into a one way channel? This doesn't make any sense. And so, so I encourage you to test it out live. And if you want to talk more, postscript IO is a great place to go. Or you can find me on LinkedIn X wherever and happy to chat SMS, especially conversational SMS anytime.
- [41:10]
B
And it'll be actually you. Oh yeah, you don't have a mic AI yet?
- [41:13]
A
No, I mean I do have a mic AI, but I will handle the conversations with the human mic for sure.
- [41:20]
B
Nice. Love to hear that. All right, thanks brother. This is awesome.
- [41:23]
A
Thanks so much.
- [41:31]
B
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at directtoconsumeralloneword Co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.