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- [00:00]
Mike Manheimer
25% of people who give you their phone number buy something in the first 30 days. That's why people keep putting money into the SMS atm. People are always like, oh, I don't want to annoy people. I'm like, well, if you annoyed people, it would show up as unsub rate. Right? You can send about eight messages per person per month without seeing an uptick in that whatsoever.
- [00:17]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
We are in the very early innings of thinking about frequency.
- [00:20]
Cody
I really want to test it. Maybe not as aggressive, but I am super curious to test a more elaborate, aggressive onboarding experience.
- [00:28]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Well, we'll jump into it. So for those listening, we're obviously here with Mike Manheimer. Mike, you're CMO at postscript or also CMO and Chief Customer Officer.
- [00:37]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, I'm technically, I just go by Chief Customer Officer now.
- [00:41]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Got it.
- [00:42]
Mike Manheimer
I started at postscript five years ago as the cmo. Eventually it made sense to take over the customer facing teams. I'm a marketer, we sell to marketers and service marketing teams. And so there's some, some crossover there. And so about two years ago I took over the customer side, which would be customer success, professional services, onboarding, and added that to my existing responsibilities on, you know, marketing and business development. And so all of that reports up to me. And so if you are a PostGrip customer, thank you very much. You probably have worked with my team. If you are not a postgroup customer, you have probably heard from my team, the other part of my team. And so yeah, that's, that's my role at Host Script. So technically, ccna, before we get any
- [01:30]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
further into the episode, I want to thank our sponsors, as always. Motion Prescient Rich panel. After Sell in House, Motion just dropped their 2026 creative benchmarks report. And it's been getting shared everywhere. Slack channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, sharing it in our private group chats. And it's great because everybody's been asking the same four questions forever. What is normal? How many ads should we actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate? And which formats really win? The report analyzes over 575,000 creatives from 6,000 advertisers and over a billion dollars in ad spend to answer these exact questions. And the report has some really interesting findings, like the fact that only 4 to 8% of ads actually become winners and over half of ads actually lose. And for Motion customers, this report is especially helpful. You can upload it into your Motion dashboard with their Runneth AI chat and compare it directly against your vertical benchmarks. Hit the link in the show notes. I promise you won't regret it. And as always, go to motionapp.com until the marketing operator sent you. I wanted to start with. Actually Cody and I are contr. Contractually obligated to discuss incrementality on every episode.
- [02:38]
Cody
So.
- [02:39]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
So we're going to start with incrementality and hold out testing in sms. Because I was thinking about this a little bit more. This is, this is. You know, I hear this said all the time. People regret not sending more emails.
- [02:50]
Mike Manheimer
Uh huh.
- [02:51]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
This is, this is one of those things. Like it is advice. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that aren't technically sending enough emails, but like everybody on D2C Twitter has learned this lesson. It's just like, it's one of those things where it's like it said and it sounds like good advice but everybody immediately agrees. So it's just kind of like a good take to throw out there every once in a while. What I want to talk about is how that relates to sms because I feel like we are in the very early innings of thinking about frequency and therefore the incrementality of sms. So I was just curious for you to talk through what's postscript's POV on? Like just SMS volume. Are there best practices? I know you guys kind of pioneered the subscriber LTV metric. So how are you thinking about driving additional value with more messages?
- [03:33]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, it's a, it's a big question because there's a lot of strategy implications in it. So I'll start from the like, just general dogma of like send more messages and like why we agree with that. It's different between email and SMS obviously because every SMS is unfortunately, it's a fact of life. It's a toll road where you know, the next email you send costs money or doesn't cost money, but the next text that you send does cost money. And so you have to think about them a little bit differently. But the reason that people always say like send more emails, like why not just hit the blast button every time you need to, uh, is, is because I think the right way to think about this is it's like impressions, right? Like you have a captive audience of people. You can serve basically an unlimited amount of, of impressions. If you, you know, have the budget, SMS budget to fund it or on email you can just literally keep on clicking send and the only thing you need to look at is really the engagement metrics plus the, the unsubscribes you're manufacturing infinite impressions to an audience that has already demonstrated some intent. And so the reason that that guidance works is while there's diminishing returns over some period of time, every time you send an email or sms, you're going to get new conversions that didn't happen before. And so, you know, like Connor, you and I've joked about this before. Everything in E Comm is the midway meme, right? And it's like if you send more texts or send more emails or deliver more impressions to an audience that has already indicated they're kind of interested in your brand, you're very likely generate new customers from that people who've never purchased before are going to purchase. And so on a very, very simple level, that works, and it works in SMS as well. I would say if we get a little bit more sophisticated from there and say, what does subscribe Rail TV look like? Subscribe Rail TV is a proprietary sort of benchmark that PostScript developed that helps us balance a few key metrics. We have a acquisition rate, which is, you know, how many people are subscribing to the list, how many messages per subscriber are you sending in a given month? What type of earnings or revenue per message are you getting? And then your unsubscribe rate. And the sweet spot that we generally find is you can generate very high returns with essentially zero impact on your baseline unsubscribe rate by sending somewhere between like 8 and 10 texts per subscriber in a given month. That's like, that's usually a little bit more than people think. But we always say like, well, what are you worried about? People are always like, oh, I don't want to annoy people. I'm like, well, if you annoyed people, it would show up as unsub rate. Right? How many people are unsubscribing? We actually look how many people are unsubscribing in that first 30 day period as the actual good signal. You can send about eight messages per person per month without seeing an uptick in that whatsoever. And so instead of going off the gut, um, you know, we like to look at what the people are actually doing in texting. They, they vote with their feet. They'll unsub from your list if they don't want to be there. And usually you can get away with, you know, eight messages without making a budget whatsoever. There are plenty of brands who are sending significantly more than that. So if you just heard me say 8 messages per subscriber and you, you know, clutched your pearls you're like, oh my gosh, that's way too crazy. Um, there's plenty of brands that you, everyone on who's listening to this knows and loves who are sending like two, you know, multi, you know, $100 million brands are sending two messages per subscriber. There are plenty of brands that everyone wishes they were like, who send like 20 in the first 30 or 45 days. Grooms is a, is a good example of that. And so really we tell every brand your baseline needs to be tested. And we're going to look at what the relationship between revenue and unsub rate is on the messages per subscriber to be able to, you know, settle in somewhere on a proper incrementality basis. We've done some of these tests with brands. We did one with Cody I think last year, maybe on. We set up a couple cohorts. 50% of SMS subscribers got their normal cadence, 25% didn't get any messages whatsoever. And another 25% got double, which was in this case we were trying to move from one text per week to two. And the result is that more sending produced a higher ROI and 98% certainty that the group that was getting twice as many texts was yielding JRB a significant lift in revenue. So against the holdout, there was significantly more revenue coming from the 2x campaign treatment. So we saw.
- [08:32]
Cody
Which surprised me. Yeah, sorry to cut you off.
- [08:35]
Mike Manheimer
No, go ahead.
- [08:35]
Cody
I was, I was, I was going to ask before you, but you, you mentioned it at, you know, what your guys recommendations are, is usually above what most brands would expect. I was, I was surprised and pleasantly surprised and obviously, you know, appreciate that you guys allowed us to grade your own homework. But the results were obviously like really good and you know, was like clear incremental impact. Like let's send more messages because Connor, to your point and Mike, to your point about cost, it's one thing on email but there's a very high cost on this stuff. But the return is, the return is at least for our test, the return is there. I'm curious because this was more of a campaign strategy. I really want to test it. We'll say I want to do a Gruins type thing now. Maybe not as aggressive but I am super curious to test like a more, a more elaborate aggressive onboarding experience.
- [09:19]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Yeah, Groons does. Groons does 23 messages in the first 30 days. I was reviewing. We talked about this a couple months ago. So yeah, just, just to, to lay out sort of the spectrum. It's like you have, you have really high frequency from, from some really great brands.
- [09:33]
Cody
Yeah, we should ask Connor why they're doing so few.
- [09:37]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, they, you know, their strategy makes total sense for them. It's like it's all about subscriptions. So Connor's point of view is I want to do everything I can to somebody to be able to convert on that subscription as much as possible. What I really don't want is I don't want to be spending fees on people who got on my list, didn't unsubscribe, but have been there for one or two years and are never actually going to end up subscribing because that's just, that's waste. And so I think there's another part of this conversation though, that's really interesting as SMS becomes way more mature, where people used to have very, very small SMS lists. You know, when postscript got started seven years ago, the whole name of the game was like, oh, how do I get my first hundred compliant phone numbers collected? Well, I mean, you guys are part of this group and so is Connor. At Gruins, we're seeing regularly people have lists that are hundreds of thousands of people. Big, we're seeing millions of people on lists now. The Dr. Squatch team just celebrated over a million SMS subscribers on postscript. When you have that many people and you have an aggressive strategy, the SMS bill gets bigger. I'll be the first to admit that as the person who submits the SMS bill, we know that you have all your SaaS apps down here and then you have your performance marketing spend up here and your P and L and the SMS bill is in the middle and it kind of jumps off the page because you're like, wait, this isn't like either of these things really. And so one of the things that we have been talking a lot about, and I think you're going to see this a lot more, is more advanced strategies to not back away from the channel. But to say, how can we use, let's say you're spending 10k or 50k or 100k a month on, on SMS. The scrutiny on making that as effective and performant as possible and as incremental as possible is going to go way, way up, way, way up. It's going to scale with the bill. And I think it's really important for everybody, Whether you're a PostScript customer or not, to make sure that you're partnering with somebody who's willing to, like Cody said, grade their own homework that way. Because it was one thing to just let it Fly when your sms bill was 2k a month. There are plenty of people listening to this podcast now who are like, my SMS bill's 50k a month, so I need, I gotta make sure it really goes. And that's partly why, you know, a lot of folks like to, you know, partner with, you know, specialists on the channel. You know, you want all the attention on the biggest spend buckets. And SMS is becoming a big spend bucket because it performs really, really well. And you know, I think, well, we can get into this a little bit, but I think it's completely slept on by most of the people who are spending the really, really big budgets on meta and Google and Apple, Evan and crew. The people who are spending the performance marketing budgets are under, under connected to the teams that are deploying the SMS and email budgets. Because if you really think about what happens when you buy a click, the first thing that happens really is the pop up. And so everyone thinks about SMS and email as like retention channels. But so many people that are on your list have never bought before and maybe clicked a meta ad yesterday. So you earned that click yesterday. They didn't convert what, now they're on your SMS list. And so I think that, you know, people should be thinking about the SMS program a lot more like they think of performance marketing than they think about it as just another yet retention channel, partly because of the way it's billed and also partly because it's basically the welcome mat for your e comm experience no matter where the traffic's being driven from.
- [13:17]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Totally. Yeah. No, it's funny, two points here. One is like, I think the 23 SMS example from Groons is pre purchase, right? It's like that's an acquisition tactic. We think of that as like a retention marketer would own that channel, but that is you acquiring a subscriber for the first time. The other thing that you kind of hit on people, maybe they're, they're over indexing their time on, you know, paid upper funnel channels. McCoy came on last year from Portland Leather Goods, the CMO there, and, and he said, I think about this all the time. He was like, yeah, look, everybody's talking about paid, everybody's talking about incrementality. He's like, two years from now everybody's going to be talking about retention because we're all just trying to find that, like where can we generate that marginal value? And there's lots of places to find it now. But as you exhaust those opportunities, you just get further and further down, down to the point where you say, oh yeah, now I need to be thinking really precisely about how many SMS should I send in my welcomes here so I can maximize value of like every little customer and touch point and impression that I'm serving.
- [14:18]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, I was thinking when you were saying like obviously you have to prove out that 50k is working for you, but it's also, should we be spending a hundred? Is that actually the most efficient place to be spending a hundred? Or maybe a 75? And likely it's the case for a lot of brands.
- [14:32]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, I think there's this, this idea that SMS is part of the acquisition funnel is actually like really under articulated in the space. Like people really just do not talk. I know we're gonna talk about conversational because it wouldn't be a postscript podcast appearance if we didn't talk about conversational. We're obsessed with it but like the reason we're obsessed with it is because you know, the average like you know, figure brand who's collecting emails and SMSs on their POP up, which most people are, they're collecting, you know, thousands a day. Thousands a day. And so the idea that like every single person who clicks on a meta ad and lands on your site is going to land on a PDP experience that's going to convert 100% of the people who did that and handle all their objections perfectly is, is it's not possible. There's no PDP on the planet that can do that. Cody's tried, he's pushing Claude to build the perfect PDP that converts 100% of the traffic. Right. And until he gets there, there's a ton of people who are ending up on these lists that we consider like retention lists who actually have an objection to first purchase. That is, you know, that that's constricting the funnel. When we, when we look at 20,000 brands across postscript, almost 25,000 brands now on Shopify, what we see is the reason SMS is a super high converting channel is demonstrated in the metrics. 25% of people who give you their phone number in a double opt in compliant way buy something in the first 30 days. That's awesome. Great conversion rate on the channel. That's why people keep putting money into the SMS ATM. It's great, but it begs the question, like there's 75% of the other people give you their phone number, which is like a place that most people don't really want businesses. So they did it and they confirmed it and they are in there not unsubscribing and they're just getting messaging. Like what's in that? And when. Yes, eventually, you know, as we exhaust the funnel perfectly, we'll eventually only be talking about our attention. But there's still 75% of the people who end up on your owned marketing channel list who have not converted to first purchase yet. And most people are like, oh darn like let's go re. Let's go re. Get them to click on a meta ad now. And it's like there's so much stuff that we could be doing in that initial experience and thinking about the acquisition side of these channels that's just like really under articulated. And the other thing is like I talk to so many of your performance marketers all the time and I'm like oh, like what's the pop up experience? Like they don't even know. So. So it's like this experience is completely disjointed even though at least half of what you're doing in your SMS program is completely related to acquisition performance. And no, people just don't really think about it that way. And I think it's partly organizational and also just partly because like the tying everything together is always, always challenging. But it's like a completely under, under articulated opportunity. I think in D2C
- [17:47]
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- [18:57]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
We haven't really actioned this within Ridge yet, but I, I think it's really. There's like an organizational thing that I think will change over time where I feel pop ups feel more and more to me like an E Comm they like they should roll up into like some sort of chief or not some, you know, PM or like a digital product director, something like that. And then even the flows, like a welcome series serves such a different purpose than a campaign where I'm like, oh yeah, the flow is like an extension of that initial touch point that we're talking about. Like that is the acquisition engine. That's the, the mousetrap that you're building is add to lander to pop up to like, you know, whatever that whole thing. And then campaigns feel like a true like retention point where it's like, how are we coming to these people at day 15 or 30 or 45 and giving them some fresh message about a new launch or, or like using first party data to craft that message just feels a little bit different than like the productization of the E Comm experience.
- [19:49]
Cody
I have it. So I have a. I think part of it is culture. Like you have to have the culture where even if they're not under the same teams, like you're all working on the same goals together. But I also have it under one person. So I have like growth acquisition, you know, whatever acquisition. It's really all under growth for us. But if you would call it, you know, your normal growth, media buying, creative strategy, E Comm and retention all under one person because it's got a ladder up. And so what I found when we had it separate was it was just like, oh yeah, they're working on this thing and they need this landing page. And it's like not coming. Everyone's heard the story where it's like, you know, pop up changes or whatever and it looks great but then it tanks your conversion rate. So I'm like also anal about it. I'm like, all right, great. You want to, you want to test the. When we load our pop up. Great, let's do it on a full site experience. So we also know how that impacts conversion rate and then vice versa. We're looking at some ad metrics and we're looking at reach. And one of the things that we noticed and I think this is only happening because how we have the org chart set up. As my senior director of growth who it's all under is like oh our. Since we made that change with our ads and added view Optimization. Our SMS growth is now below forecast, and that's actually impacting it there. And so these just have such a play together. So completely echo what Mike's saying.
- [21:01]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, and we're seeing that org structure change a lot. Like when we're, you know, obviously we get to see a lot of these in our engagements with our customers, and a lot more people are moving to that sort of. Like, maybe they have distinct teams, but they're getting some centralized reporting structure to an executive leader who is looking at the whole thing. And I think that's really smart because, you know, all these, you know, I. We always joke inside of Postscript that, like, one of the biggest lies in marketing is that, like, the customer journey is like a line that you can plot on, like, it's like linear. It's like, it's not. It looks like a big scribble. Right. Like, people are engaging with everything all the time. And so you gotta have someone who can see all the touch points because it's not like this. You only move forward, you don't move back. You know, it's. It. That's just not a realistic way to think of the way that the customer is interacting with your brand. But that's technically the way the assembly line of all of the siloed organizational structure kind of forces our thinking. And it's just not, you know, aligned to the way that people actually shop and buy right now. So I think org structure matching, like the true customer journey makes a lot more sense and, you know, having one, at least one person who can see the whole thing and is responsible for not just, you know, the first order effects, but the second and third order effects that happen to other parts of the funnel. I think is really smart.
- [22:23]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
1,000%. All right, cool. Let's jump into conversational commerce and then I want to come back because I do want to talk RCS before we wrap up here, but conversational commerce, I think we've got a good segue here. I would love, like, just a small. This is me. This is me getting a little refresher on postscript's approach to conversational. Because you guys have been extremely experimental for a couple years now, like, way ahead of the game in terms of embracing AI. So maybe just talk about, like the. The quick development of, like, how you guys have been treating it internally. And then like, what is the. What is the product? How does it look today?
- [22:56]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, totally. So quick little history lesson. That stat that I was mentioning before were like, somewhere between, you know, 20 to 25, maybe 27 somewhere in there, that's the amount of people who are subscribing to your list and buying something in the first, you know, 30 days. We got obsessed with this idea about what the, what are the other people doing? Because we know that the SMS channel is a super intimate channel. Like you're getting texts from a brand, like that's kind of nuts. And so people were staying subscribed for a year but not buying anything. We're like, that's weird behavior, like what's going on? And so before we had Claude and before we had ChatGPT, we got obsessed with this idea. And so what we did is we built this thing called the E Commerce Sales center in Phoenix, Arizona. We hired like 50 people and we started texting on behalf of brands like by hand. The goal originally was simply to like learn why, what, what's happened. We learned an insane amount. We productized that and we found that we could start driving incremental revenue for brands via handling these objections. And at a very simple level makes perfect sense, right? If you walked into the Jones Road store, someone would say, hey, like, how can I help you? Like, do you want to go to, can I help you get shade matched? Right? And you start handling objections, helping people shop, that sort of thing. We rely on our PDPs to do that in E commerce and they do as good as they can, but it's different than a human asking you questions and helping you do what you need to do. And so that's what the E Commerce Sales center did. And that product was called SMS Sales. We learned an insane amount on that. And then as the AI tooling got more sophisticated, we poured it over those hard won learnings into our AI product. We have a conversational AI product that's called Shopper. It's called Shopper because it helps people shop. Simple. And it's powered by Brand center, which is our policy and voice guidelines that help make sure that what we're saying actually sounds like the brand and is aligned to everything from your offer strategy, your merchandising strategy, your, you know, all your rereading, all your Metafield data and Shopify. We're learning everything we possibly can about your brand and we're selling on your behalf using AI that's been scaling for like the last year or so. And at any given time on Postscript, we're having, you know, somewhere between, you know, 750,000 to a million concurrent conversations with AI, with people who are shopping on Postscript customers sites. It's really, really exciting stuff. And we're super bullish on it because we really believe that most consumers are being trained right now to expect that anywhere on the Internet where they see a text box that they should be able to get like an instant, really strong conversational answer back. ChatGPT is training them, Claude's training them the AI tools, Gemini is training them all over the place, all over the Google services. I think, you know, the expectations are changing on what consumers can do when they text something in or they type something in and they want it to be that amazing, like chat experience that we all know and love and dominates our, our world now. And so from our point of view, conversational is going to be the core, the core like capability that people are going to judge SMS, RCS and other messaging channels like WhatsApp, et cetera. So that's, that's really the, the history lesson and we, we are super, super excited about it. Yeah.
- [26:37]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Cody, have you guys experimented with Shopper at all?
- [26:41]
Cody
Yeah, so we were probably one of the, I don't know, but we were one of the, probably the last brands to transition. We were heavy on SMS sales and it performed really well for us. For us, you know, our biggest thing is shade matching. And so, you know, the team did a really good job with that and just answering other objections and stuff. So it, like, I'm all in on conversational commerce and just being able to give people like really good experiences that, you know, mimic a little bit closer to what they would have in store. So it performed really well for us. But I have been very impressed by, by, by, by Shopper, where we have like a Facebook group and you know, there's constantly people, older customer, constantly asking like, hey, is this a real person or is it a, like, hey. I always get these texts from Jesse and so it's, it's very good. It's very impressive. I'll like test it around. So, yeah, I'm definitely a big fan and it's done really well and to see it kind of evolve over the years, but obviously it's significantly cheaper than SMS sales. So I like that as well.
- [27:33]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, it's a lot more AI, makes it possible for us to do it at that human level or better and also to lower the cost basis, which is the promise of the AI productivity boom that we're hopefully all benefiting from. So we're super excited about it. Jones Road's been a great customer of it and we have this thing inside postscript. It's called like the Shopper sales Bell. Like every time it makes a Sale it posts to Slack the conversation. And the Jones Road conversations are some of my favorite because like, the objections that we're handling are just like so interesting. It's like stuff you wouldn't even think. Like, one of my favorite stories about it from the Jones Road examples is, you know, Cody's over here hacking on like the best PDP possible. He's building the best AI landing pages, convert the most possible people. And like, the objections that we get through the conversational aspect are like, when you see them, you're like, there's no way you could design a landing page to specifically handle. Like, we had someone recently who was, she was like, hey, I'm ready to buy Miracle Bomb. I'm convinced. I saw like the ads on, you know, on Meta or whatever and like, I've, I've shade matched myself and I feel pretty confident about the shade. Her reason for not purchasing is she was like, I garden for five hours a day. I'm retired. I garden five hours a day. I'm in the sun. Of course. I, you know, have a big brimmed hat to shield my face. But like, it's hot where I'm at and I'm out in the. I sweat a lot. Like, I get it says like, it's sweat, you know, resistant or whatever. But like, she literally was like, I will not buy this product unless somebody tells me it'll hold up to my like 5 hour a day gardening regimen. And like we had. She ended up buying or whatever, but like, she was literally not going to buy unless we could answer like that core specific question. And it's like, think about the long tail of like, value props that need to be on a PDP to handle. It's insane. It's not possible. Or like, Shopper will have people who will like, will be like, okay, I'm ready to try this brand. I got my Miracle Bomb all set up. I went to go check out and it was $75. I only have $68 budgeted. Can you do anything about it? They literally will not purchase if it, if, if it doesn't get to that, that number. And like, Shopper can also handle that because it knows like, hey, if someone's really like within this range, we can offer something to get them over the hump. And so like, stuff like that. When you see the types of things that are actually preventing people from buying, it's like mind expanding for most brands and you're like, oh yeah, like training a person or a team of people to handle every little thing perfectly. Is functionally impossible. And so Shopper obviously handles all that stuff automatically and drives incremental sales. That wouldn't happen otherwise, but the learnings are insane. And when you see it, it's like you can't unsee it. We have this thing called Ask Shopper where you can query the conversations inside of postscript and see the trends. And when you start to see what's preventing people from actually purchasing your stuff, you'll like. People come for the incremental revenue and for the conversational commerce aspect, I think they stay for the insights because everyone's doing like the post purchase stuff. They're reading the Facebook comments and they're trying to mine all these things to get customer insights. When you have at scale conversations happening from your text thread, because there are thousands of conversations at this point, there's no more direct way to engage with people who are thinking about buying your product than that. Like, we think Shopper might have the most interesting stream of consumer insight data that exists in E Comm right now. And we're just starting to tap into it.
- [31:14]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
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- [31:59]
Cody
Few things that Mike actually texted me that one, I think it was like a 300 order. It was like right when we switched. So Mike was like pumped about it. But it's funny because the guard you were like, yeah. And it's like so he was super pumped about it. But it's also like, because I think it was like such a cool insight. But it's also like, hey, that's a way to prove incremental. The customer is literally saying this was, this was an incremental purchase. Which is kind of funny. Also, Mike, I've tweeted a lot about, you know, asking vendors for APIs. So I'm going to publicly ask you here, do you guys have an API? So I get these insights into my cloud?
- [32:30]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, we're working. Actually, I sent your tweet. I sent your tweet around to the product team because, like, we have this, you know, this agent inside of postscript that you can use to get these insights. But we are working on making those insights available via API and MCP so that, you know, Claude or your LLM of choice can get smarter about your, your customer, you know. So we're going to try to make that, that data go everywhere. We think it's probably the most interesting data that's, that's coming out of E Comm right now and a totally untapped channel. Right? Like the. Because the thing everyone's. We've been talking about. How long have we been talking about conversational commerce and E commerce, E Comm. It's been like 15 years of people being like, maybe it's apps, maybe it's native shopping experiences. Like, you know, it's been going forever. The interesting thing about it, for how much people have been talking about it and for how long, and it's dominated the keynotes at like the shop talks and whatever for the last decade. I'll be hyperbolic about it because obviously this isn't exactly true, but like zero people text to their customers right now. Like, zero. Like, it's like it's basically nothing. And so this stream of insights that come from texting back, like, almost doesn't exist for most brands. And so like, I think a lot of people who are listening to this, like, oh, yeah, that'd be cool or whatever. If someone asked me, like, what's the thing that I should do to start experimenting with this or seeing this effect? Simply ask your customers a question. The number of people who do this. Like, I'm saying you have your normal welcome series or your normal, like automation that fires. It says, you know, hey, we saved your cart. Here's the link. You know, normal cart abandonment message or something like that. After the link, just like add a question. It's like, is there anything else I can help you with today? Do you have any questions I can answer? Just a question mark. Just do that. You will get so many replies like, like, that's like kind of like the first aha moment for most people I've talked to, like brands that are like doing $500 million a year in sales and they're like, do people actually want to text me back? I'm like, 1, 100%, yes. But two if you don't believe me, just ask. They'll ask and they'll get like 5,000 replies in the first week. And so that, I mean, like, that's, that's like the starting point. Do that and you'll be like, oh, my gosh, there's, there's something in here. It's like, you know, the iceberg. You know, there's, there's, it's such a deep opportunity. But like, most people haven't even started.
- [35:03]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
So I wanted, it's a great example because I wanted to ask about the way brands are integrating the. Or, how are they balancing, like, their automated flows and beginning conversations? Like, we just ran a test at Ridge that we're very happy with. We have our standard flow. We have a, you know, it's six messages or so, and now the last message, we, and we split test this flow. Actually, we have our standard six message flow. And then the other one ends with what you're saying where we just begin asking a question. And it's exactly what you said. It's like, okay, we kind of want, I mean, theoretically, and I could hear the argument that we're just kind of like slowly easing our way in here, that, that over time we'll like, further embrace conversations happening earlier. But right now it's like, look, we'll probably clear out the 25% of people with our standard flow, as we always have been. And when we're talking about, you know, acquiring that, like, marginal customer, if it requires conversation, let's just kind of clean that up at the end and it can become sort of an amorphous conversation where you can talk about whatever they want. So that's how we're doing it. So that's like a welcome series example. What you just described was an abandoned cart or something, which I think is another great example. I'm curious, like, any other anecdotes or interesting use cases of how brands are balancing it? And do you see some people just going straight conversation right from the beginning?
- [36:16]
Mike Manheimer
Some people go straight conversation right from the beginning if they know that they have a really long consideration period. Because I totally agree with you. Like, if someone clicks an ad for a Ridge wallet and it's like coming up on Father's Day and like, they're probably going to convert and buy that, you know, like, that's like the perfect setup. You don't need to have a conversation with somebody who's in that part of the funnel. They're good. They're probably going to buy and check out. And the consideration period is probably not that long. And so for that point of view, I think your strategy of like cleaning up, like once you identify there's something that is preventing them from buying. Now let's ask makes total sense. You can imagine if you sell a, if you sell like a thousand dollar piece of furniture and you know that from the time that you've clicked, someone's clicked on a meta ad, given their email and their sms, that the consideration period that you're on the clock started and it's like you know, 90 days or something that what you want to do to maybe go conversation first is try to compress that time down. Because the 90 day consideration period or whatever your consideration period is like what, what does that really mean? It means that the person is trying to shop for a category of things. They're deciding a bunch of little micro decisions and comparing you against your competitors for some determined amount of time. You would, if that was a real life thing, you would desperately want your best, most educated salesperson to talk to that person while they're in that consideration period. And so for people who have long consideration periods, high ticket items, or people who are trying to convert one time purchasers to subscribers where they're getting that huge incremental value bump, those are folks who I think are going heavier on conversations because they know that essentially what they're trying to do is like, you know, either do an upsell sort of conversation or they're trying to handle some competitive objections about like why should I buy this sofa over some other sofa that I'm looking at online. And so I think you're the product category, the consideration period, all of that kind of matters. But I think that there's tons of opportunities to drive conversations even like, you know, people talk about win backs all the time as you are seeing people on your list who haven't bought but they've been on there and engaging with text for like a year. Like those are also great people to ask questions to a really underutilized things people who the best text ever that people want is the consumers who get the text that says the item you purchased at your front door, right? It gets delivered, they use it. What about asking them a follow up question about how the product usage is going and let that conversation happen. There's like, if you start thinking about like where are all the touch points where you're either helping them make a decision or you're trying to get feedback and where are they at in their cycle of using your product? Any place, any of those places would be Amazing opportunities to be able to get conversational data in. The other reason to do it, which we haven't even talked about is like it pays to have conversations like oh, under the subscriber LTV metrics which we measure how many, how much value is coming to a subscriber, people who have a conversational a conversation with a brand versus people who don't have a one and a half times higher lifetime value as a subscriber on your list.
- [39:46]
Cody
So that's crazy.
- [39:48]
Mike Manheimer
They buy more in the future. The likelihood that they're going to go from a one time purchaser to a two time purchaser or go from being just a someone who's kicking the tires on your brand to being, you know, in your VIP or brand loyalist category because of their purchase and their browsing behavior goes up by one and a half times if you engage on the conversation. And it makes sense, right? Like the bar to have someone text back to your brand is like insanely high. Like some people are probably listening to this going like I would never do that. But so you can think about, if people do it, think about what that connection is with like your brand, the name recall. Think about how effective the halo effect is. Like the brands, the CTV all the other or the meta ads, the CTV all the other stuff that they're seeing from your brand, how they engage with that, getting that conversation to happen drives a level of engagement with that consumer that is unlike any other type of engagement in our E commerce touch points. And so it drives meaningful initial conversion, it drives stronger ltv. And we think people are going to start demanding experiences like that in mass. So the best time to have started conversational was you know, five years ago when we, you know, started SMS sales. And like the second best time is to like start asking people questions today.
- [41:11]
Cody
Marketing operators, I want to challenge how you think about post purchase.
- [41:14]
Sponsor Representative (House IO)
Zoom out. Post purchase isn't a tactic, it's a system. It's your cart, your checkout logic, your one click upsells how you increase AOV revenue per session, profit per session. It's your confirmation page. It's all of that system together. The entire flow determines how much incremental revenue that you can make per order. That's why ROKT After Sell isn't just an upsell tool, it's a design system for the full post purchase experience. ROKT After Sale gives you one unified system, a smart cart and checkout offers one click Post purchase upsells and thank you page monetization with rock banks. And here's where it becomes very strategic. Beyond the 30% revenue per visitor lift, Rock after sale opens a monetization layer that most operators haven't fully priced into their unit economics. With Rock network products run the math on your own volume at 50k orders a month that's 15 to 25k in pure profit. With rock banks at 100k it's 30 to 50k. I'm not great at math but I love those numbers straight to the bottom line as well. Every month from a page your customer is already landing on won't affect conversion rate. Just free money you can pocket at the end of the month. No inventory, no operational lift, no contracts to lock you in. And this is not just for Shopify native brands anymore. Whatever platform you're on, ROKT after sales supports it. Operators listeners can activate ROKT thanks and get the full after sales suite for a year or grab an extended 60 day trial. To test post purchase performance go to aftercell.com operators build the system once and let it compound.
- [42:32]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
I want to talk about first party data. This is something that I'm like super interested in because obviously you, you mentioned it earlier that we think the stream of data is one of the most interesting streams like and, and completely untapped by most brands. And I don't know where that data is going to live or how I'm going to use it in the future. So I'm curious what your guys perspective is on that.
- [42:55]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, so the types of information I'll, I'll go back to the, the gardening example from, from Cody's buyer. Like so if we take a big step back, all the marketers who are listening to this know that like the thing we've been chasing this whole time is like one to one experiences. Right message, right time, you know, everything's perfectly orchestrated and the audience is not a segment, it's audience of one and we're delivering a pinpoint perfect message to them. We haven't had the tools to do that as marketers in the past. AI is getting us a lot closer to that and that's changed the way we think about what like customer data even is like historically customer data would be like what device are they on, you know, what links did they click, what pages did they browse and how personalized can you be about that. Right. But like it's a completely different thing to say. Like through this conversation we found out that this person lives in Florida during the winter months and lives in Minnesota during the summer months and when she's in Florida she gardens five hours A day. Like, that's an actual piece of customer data that we could like design an interaction around for that individual person that would get as close as we've ever been to that, like really, like one to one pinpoint experience. And so the conversation data is great because it helps people make decisions and it drives future purchases and whatnot. But the other bit is that we can mine that data to enhance, you know, your subscriber profile, your cdp, your CRM, wherever you're housing, all that subscriber data to have things that we would actually consider to be real customer data. It's I, we always thought this at postscript because like, you know, it's like CRM or cdp, like customer data, customer relationship management. Like none of the data that exists today, like, would actually allow you to have like a real relationship with anybody. Right? It's all like, you know, Internet breadcrumbs. It's not like, it's not like, oh, you know, my daughter just had her first birthday and she's really into princesses right now. And like, what can I do with that? To do like an amazing wow experience from a marketing point of view. So where does that data live? It lives in conversations. And so now that conversational starting to become a little bit more mainstream, we actually have a source to be able to pull out those zero party data attributes that are going to make a lot of sense. And one thing we're experimenting with at PostScript, which we're really excited about, is there's pieces of data that are static. Like I purchased this thing one year ago and it was this sku. And then there's pieces of data that are ephemeral, which is like, my daughter is one right now, and in a year she's gonna be two, and then, you know, a year from there she's gonna be three. And she's in these different like, phases of her, her life. That data. The fact that I have a daughter is a static piece of information. My daughter's age and preferences like, that you might get from conversations are ephemeral. And so we're starting to experiment with this concept of like there's static data and then there's like memory type data, which is, it changes over time. Maybe it's seasonal, maybe it's age related, maybe it's preference related. Whatever. The point is, is we have a place to be able to get that data which is inside of the conversational data set. And then two, we're putting that into postscript to be able to operationalize it not just in your Text. But hopefully that data will exist all over the place. Because that data, I've been talking about how the data is really interesting to us as merchants. Right. We get customer insights we've never had before from these conversations, which is true. But the data is incredibly unique as it relates to the subscribers themselves. And if you want to learn things about this is again, this is just think about your real life relationships. If you want to learn things about people, you have to have conversations with them. That enhances the relationship. That's where the insights are that can really lead to one to one experiences. And so the fact that we have that information at our fingertips now as marketers is incredibly interesting. And we're just at like the very, very tip of the spear on how do we operationalize that stuff. But we think that's the missing component to be able to actually deliver one to one experiences at scale. And that's what we're focused on right now.
- [47:12]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
I love it. I feel there's a good like dating metaphor to be had here. You know, you gotta ask questions, you gotta listen, you gotta remember the important stuff. Postscript's just allowing us to do that at scale with all of our customers.
- [47:25]
Mike Manheimer
Yes. And I think that the other insight, this is again, why if, if someone's listening to this and they're like, I don't know where to start, like, just simply ask a question. Because the aha moment that comes out of it will be like, when you look at the replies, you'll be like, why are people telling me this? Like, we had like a, a, a brand that would, that sells belts online. And they started asking questions and people were like, hey, like, you know, wives would be shopping for their husbands and would be like, my husband's on a health journey. He's lost 40 pounds this year. Here's his, like his, he's works out this many days and he takes this medication and like here's a picture of his before and his after. Here's what he looks like in your belt that he bought last year. And we need a new belt for this year. And we're like, first off, does your husband know you're telling us all this stuff? Yeah, like two, like think about everything we just learned about that consumer that like historically there's no way to get at that. Like now we basically know like everything about this. The wife purchased for purchases for the husband. The husband is, you know, having this, this life journey that eventually is going to cause him to, you know, need belts of excise, like the, and then that just expands the amount of marketing use cases that you can do in the future. And it's. And I think if you're a brand, you don't even know that people will give you that type of information until you start trying to solicit the conversations. When you solicit the conversations, they'll roll in. And two, the stuff that you'll see that people are trying to tell you is insane. And so obviously we're going to make it easy to operationalize that stuff, but if you don't believe it, just ask the question. You'll see what people tell you. It's absolutely wild what people will share with you as a brand about the way they use it, where you fit into their life, who they're thinking about buying it for and why they're thinking about your. It's completely mind expanding. And so I recommend if you don't do anything after listening to this, like just, just add a question mark to any flow you want, see what happens.
- [49:28]
Cody
Love it.
- [49:29]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Yeah. Simple advice. Okay. Awesome. Obviously that will be sort of an evolving topic. Conversational commerce is going to be, I think, more and more explored as far as marketing goes generally. I do want to, maybe we wrap on this one, but to like punch in on a little bit more tact a thing. Brands are beginning to roll out rcs. Maybe you could just talk about what that means and like what you guys are seeing, the interesting use cases and what's this additional functionality going to do for. For brands?
- [50:01]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, technically the way to think about RCS is it's a new channel. So like SMS is a channel. RCS is its own channel. So like when you send an RCS message in postscript, like if the person can't receive an RCS message, there's an SMS fallback. So they're distinct things. RCS is a different messaging protocol. It is available for everyone on everyone's device in the United States. So like we're ready to do RCS and we have dozens and dozens of brands that are on RCS right now. Essentially it raises the floor on what you can message somebody. So before SMS would be just text only mms, you could add a picture and you're pretty much limited to that. RCS will allow you to do carousel scrolling, it'll allow you to have video. We just rolled out iOS calendar functionality. So if you're like doing a drop, like imagine you're like, hey, we're going to launch a new product in a week. Instead of just telling people like, watch this space, you can actually have an action button in there where they can add it to their calendar and save it. So you get these action buttons, these CTAs that integrate natively with the phone and it's just expanding the amount of use cases that happen on the messaging channels. Right now we're seeing outsized performance on RCS over SMS and mms. So the reason to do it, it's driving incremental performance, which is amazing. It's also creating richer brand experiences. And so those are the two reasons why I think people are super excited about it. It's completely reinventing what's possible on the channel.
- [51:40]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
We are not using it yet. I heard you guys are.
- [51:42]
Cody
We just switched. I think we went live this week. We have a holdout running. I think we went live this week. I haven't seen ours. I think I got a text yesterday from us so I think I'm in the control group unfortunately. But I will say I got one from different. I think it was partyful and it was maybe a month or two ago. It was, it was beautiful. It like feels. I actually questioned whether I was in an app or not. Like I, I forgot it was a text. Like it feels like you're in an app. It's a really nice experience that I'm not surprised it's performing better because in this environment where you're texting one to one and it's trust is essential. Like it feels really premium and I could see it feeling much more like secure for, for customers. So I'm, I'm excited to see ours.
- [52:21]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Did you guys, did you guys change like any of the flow? I know, like, so if you have your standard flow, you're sending links in the SMS side and then on RCS side it will just look better. It'll be a more immersive experience. You get some cards. Like did you guys add some of the carousel stuff and are you relying on that or are you just going to measure sort of the incremental impact of this new RCS experience?
- [52:44]
Cody
I haven't been close to it. So you'll report back. Let me look in Slack. Yeah, I don't know. I. My guess is we're probably going a little bit more one to one and then we'll test to get like a cleaner read, but I'm not sure.
- [52:56]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Yeah, because what I was just gonna say there quickly is I. There's only a handful of brands I get RCS messages from and it just looks better. It can be the same messages and like I do think just being an early adopter here, Mike, to Your point? I hadn't really thought about it that way but just like just being more distinct than the other brands is gonna have value for some amount of time.
- [53:15]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, there's like the, the standout in the inbox arb that you can get right now which is great. What we're really eventually obviously that'll diminish as, as more people get on the channel. But yeah, the use cases are just like insane. Like not to make everything about conversational but we're really excited about like Shopper being able to use the carousels to make recommendations. Like right now people would go to like Ridge and be like I'm buying for a guy who likes the outdoors. Like what do you recommend Shopper? And like you know, we'll come up with some links. Imagine now we can say like cool. Here's a carousel of three items that we think are bestsellers for that type of person. And it also has web view so like they can expand and get like the native web experience in the browser that's native to the messaging app. So it's like it's all happening right there. Like it is a completely rich web like experience from the messaging thread. And I think that the outsized performance is because consumers are like they're trained to use all that functionality. IMessage has had all sorts of cool built in functionalities for many, many years. And so I think like you know, there's no training necessary. Consumers are just pushing the limits of what can be done. The ability to do the action buttons which can literally be like any CTA you want, you could like program in there. It's just, it's really, really cool. It is I think going to be the dominant channel that people use to message. I think what you'll see is a big shift especially in the eight and nine figure brand space where you know, maybe a year from now 100% of them will be using RCS with SMS as a fallback as opposed to sending SMS campaigns. The only threat to that would be if performance doesn't hold up because it is a little more expensive. The carriers always, you know, find a way to get their, their cut of it. And so if the performance doesn't hold up, that could be a threat to the channel. But right now we're seeing very meaningful lift from standing out in the inbox. And I think as consumers start to see and get used to these experiences they're going to demand richer and richer stuff from the messaging channels that they, that they engage with.
- [55:25]
Sponsor Representative (House IO)
We talk about incrementality, a lot. But how do you actually operationalize it to make your business better? That is one thing that I've been really leaning in with my team recently and House has played a tremendous role. We use it for all of our experiments, all of our geolift testing, but we now use it for our MMM as well. I've been a design partner, I've been one of the early design partners on House's cmm. C stands for causal. So it's one of the only MMMs,
- [55:46]
Cody
if not the only MMM that I've
- [55:48]
Sponsor Representative (House IO)
seen that's actually using your causal experiments to build the model. And so that allows me to trust the data so much more. So it's not a black box, but actually informs our roadmap and has been so crucial for allowing us to operationalize around incrementality. The House team is world class. I can't speak highly enough about them. They've also built a really amazing community with some of the best DTC growth operators out there. They have a few exciting events coming up soon that they call the Houzz Growth Lab. One is in LA on May 19th and the other is in New York on May 21st. I highly recommend checking it out if
- [56:17]
Cody
you're in the area.
- [56:18]
Sponsor Representative (House IO)
If you want to check it out, learn a little bit more about cmm. Go to House IO operators to start making better data driven decisions today.
- [56:26]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
All right, sweet. So I want to wrap on. Maybe we just hit some real tactical advice. We've had plenty of it so far this episode. I've got a couple of notes here, but for, for those listening, we could, we could leave them with, with some actionable next steps. So, Mike, if you're a brand doing five to $10 million a year, they're listening to this episode and they're like, there's so much going on with sms, I'm not paying attention to it. I'm not taking as much advantage of all of this as I could. What would you be recommending? Like, what would be the first thing they should be changing about how they handle sms?
- [56:55]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, I think the first thing that you should be looking at, if you're a 5 to 10 million dollar brand and you're thinking about SMS as a growth channel for you and you're trying to max it out. Very, very basic. List growth. Focus on list growth first, postscript has on site opt in, which is the fastest way to grow your list. There are other methods out there, but that's, that's the best one. Focus on driving as much subscribers as you possibly can through Your pop up like ultimately that's the very, very top of the funnel for your own marketing programs like that will pay dividends down the line. Fix your pop up acquisition rate first. If you do nothing else, that's the most important thing. The next thing I would do is whatever your cadence is for message sending. Start trying to send one more message a week. You know, maybe one every two weeks. Like just start trying to bump up the amount you're messaging and see what happens to your unsub rate. Do that until you see the unsub rate start to tick up. That's your new baseline. You're leaving money on the table if you aren't seeing how that's affecting your overall revenue from the channel. And then you know three, we've talked about conversational commerce a bunch. Like I would start asking some questions and seeing what you can learn not even just to drive incremental revenue, but just to figure out how you should better be handling objections in all of your flows. Like the customer insights that you get about why people aren't purchasing is going to tell you so, so so much you want to get that data into the brain of your team as fast as you possibly can. And asking questions of your of your customers is the best way to go. Get that. Maybe I'll add a fourth if you are like I want to do all that but my team's lean and I don't have time to do that. And you're not on postscript. Switch to postscript. We are going to be the most hands on provider that you can find and we' sure that you're always doing the latest and greatest stuff and maxing out the returns that you're getting for your SMS bill. We know that the SMS bill is a big growing line item for everyone who's listening to this. We will get more dollars out of that spend than any other provider on the market. That's why 25,000 Shopify brands choose Postscript. And so if you if you want the type of performance hit us up. We are happy to get you rolling and help SMS be a highly performant channel for your brand.
- [59:09]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
I love it. You stole all the good ones. Frankly I'm gonna I'll plus one the list growth. And this is what we always joke about. The like mid curve meme and like the far left and the far right side strategy is just like grow your list faster. And like I've said for a long time and this has changed but for a long time I felt like the best SMS provider is the One that could help you grow the list the fastest. It's just simply if you have more. If you have more numbers, you can text more people. I think with conversational commerce, with rcs, with all the functionality, like that's changing over time, like the actual features are a little bit more of a differentiating factor, but list growth plus one, everybody could probably be doing a little bit better. Cody, anything you'd leave listeners with?
- [59:49]
Cody
Everything Mike said. I don't want to phone it in, but I totally agree with everything he said. It has proven very incremental for us. We're big fans of Shopper. I think we've been under optimizing our. Our, our pop ups in the past, and so we're doing it now pretty aggressively, trying to get a lot of, you know, fun stuff in there. So, yeah, I think having your, your site team do it, just do that aggressively and make sure that's going in the right direction is a big one.
- [60:13]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Love it. All right, guys, well, super fun episode. Mike, thanks for coming on.
- [60:17]
Mike Manheimer
Of course. Anytime. Postscript, Obviously, Postscript's a B2B company. B2B marketing is incredibly boring and stupid usually. And we set out to do something that we think is unique and fun. And we filmed a scripted series, and this is the trailer to that scripted series because it's ready to be released and we would love to show it to you guys first.
- [60:52]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Wonderful.
- [60:53]
Mike Manheimer
All right, you ready for this?
- [60:55]
Cody
You're putting that attentive money to good use
- [60:59]
Mike Manheimer
instead of AirPods. We did this. Okay, ready? Avery, did we run new ads? No.
- [61:11]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Did an email go out?
- [61:13]
Mike Manheimer
Nope. Marty, what's the good news? Cheers to that.
- [61:19]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
It's a sarsaparilla.
- [61:21]
Cody
Please. Sean, we need a Mecom Miracle
- [61:30]
Mike Manheimer
Scarcity works. Namaste.
- [61:42]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
So good. And that'll be on. That'll be on HBO on Sundays this week?
- [61:47]
Mike Manheimer
Yes, HBO on Sundays. X stream near you. Yes. It's coming out in just a bit here. We are super excited about it.
- [61:59]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
That is so funny. How'd the idea come about?
- [62:03]
Mike Manheimer
Well, first off, one of the things that drives our thinking around, like how do we market our products and whatnot, is that the bar for B2B marketing is on the floor. And so we're always trying to do something remotely interesting. So that's. That's one bit. But the idea for this show was more as we've been. Everyone's talking about AI. Some people are talking about AI because they. Oh, I hadn't heard. Yeah, you hadn't heard about it.
- [62:31]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Some.
- [62:31]
Mike Manheimer
Some people are talking about AI. Because guy had a sick crossover about. Because they know about it. Some people are talking about it because other people are talking about it. Some people are talking about it because they hate it. And we've been encountering all these different sort of perspectives about it. And we were started kind of playing around with the idea that, like, you know, E Comm is its own unique thing. All of you who work in E Comm know it's like, you know, small teams doing big numbers. Every day matters, every hour matters. There's so many things that are interconnected. Meanwhile, you have people working on these problems where maybe the founders, like, we have to do everything with AI, and then you have people on the team who are like, I don't even know what AI is. And other people are trying to, like, run cloud bots on the side. So we're like, okay, there's something really, like, funny in there around, like, what's hype and what's not, how these things should actually be deployed? How does AI like, layer on to, like, the craziness that is running an E Comm brand? Because as everyone who's listening to this, and you guys, well know, every day is just a wild day in E Comm land. And so we were like, instead of just doing, like, you know, another white paper, which, of course postscript does white papers too, we were like, let's do something more interesting. And we got out to LA with a small crew and filmed a scripted short. I think it's going to be six or seven episodes and they're already in the tank. They're filmed, we're editing them, and hopefully, hopefully we get a couple. A couple laughs out of it. We're excited about it.
- [64:12]
Host/Interviewer (possibly Sean Frank)
Fantastic. I think this is super fun. I'm going to push back. You said B2B marketing is extremely boring. B2B marketing seems so. It seems like it's become so much more fun, at the very least, over the last couple years. And you've heard me say this Postscript crushes the events, the cabs you guys are. You're producing TV shows. I mean, it just doesn't sound like your typical, like, marketing collateral that you're handing out at conferences.
- [64:36]
Mike Manheimer
Yeah, it's getting better. It's getting more fun. I think that there's plenty of, like, aspirational brands in B2B that are showing a different way. Like, when I think about. I think about, like, a ramp, for example, crushing it, growing massively, putting up all the numbers, and also doing really, really cool, interesting brand stuff. And that traditionally is not the way B2B marketers approach their jobs. So there's definitely some folks out there showing what's possible. And at Postscript, we always say we want to try to zig where other people zag and let's do some weird stuff because if it's not interesting, then it's probably not good. And now we're filming a TV show, so we'll see what happens. But we're excited about it. There'll be some. Some cameos there and I think that the community will enjoy those.
- [65:31]
Cody
I'm most curious by the Sean Frank part because he's gone big time. So it looks like he has a starring role in this and he was just in a common thread collective ad as well. So he's gone mainstream.
- [65:43]
Mike Manheimer
Oh, yeah, he's definitely crossed over. He's the talent now and we. He'll make a cameo. There'll be a few other folks in the mix too. It'll be a lot of fun if people watch it. We'll do a skeptic. Season two. You know what, we'll pick it up. We'll pick it up for another season, but we'll see how the first one goes. We're really pumped about it. It was a lot of fun to make and hopefully it resonates with the community.