SMS Strategy and Community with Melanie Balke

Introduction and Goals

0:00If your text program was a paid service, what would it look like? And how can you provide that value to people at no cost? So really the goal is how can you build community? How can you strengthen brand relationship? How can you deliver value that people would be willing to pay for at no cost? And then of course, how can you make sure that it's built specifically for this channel? So it's not just something where you're repurposing an email that you were sending out, but it's a distinct strategy specifically for tech. I don't think every SMS you always send needs to have a CTA or a link. I think you can absolutely spend some money to deliver value so that when you do send a link or a CTA, people actually feel inclined to take action because you've built so much goodwill. Thank you, Nick, and thank you for dealing with me while I'm here at the mastermind. I'm super excited. I get to speak after two absolute legends. So, I couldn't be more stoked. I have a

0:57lot for you guys today. We're chatting about SMS. I could probably take an hour and a half to talk through the slides that I have. they're a lot more text heavy than I normally would make them, but I did that so you guys could digest it. And I'm going to do this and the time slot. So strap your seat belt in because we're we're gonna get going. Let me share my screen real quick. Perfect. Awesome. Okay. So we're

Why SMS Marketing Matters

1:20talking about SMS text to convert. Unlocking the power of SMS marketing for e-commerce. I'll give you a quick intro on why you should or shouldn't listen to me, what the basics are around SMS, and then we're going to go into some strategies. So, I will actually set a timer for myself. You know what? So, I don't I don't keep you guys too long. we're going to go into some specific strategies and then we'll open up for some Q&A at the end. So, who am I? My name is Melanie Balky. I would say I have by chance become a certified retention marketing nerd. So, I started my career in consulting, then went in-house for an ecom brand. Saw how much money email and SMS actually makes for brands and fell in love with it. Started an agency by accident and we've been at it for a while now. Other fun stuff about me, I'm German. I have a lot of good dad jokes and I'm a surfer. So, if retention marketing doesn't interest you, come and talk to me about any of

2:18the other stuff. And let's get right into it. Why SMS? Why should you listen

Basics and Strategies of SMS Marketing

2:23to me today? Why is this even relevant? Well, a couple of things. How many if if you were here in person, I'd make you guys raise your hand and I'd go, "How many people here have a phone?" And then I'd say, "How many people here take their phone to bed?" And how many people here check their phone first thing in the morning? And you guys will probably all raise your hands because we all have a problem. 33% more people have access to mobile phones than to toilets in this world today. SMS is super engaged. So studies estimate about 98% of SMS are opened and they're opened within three minutes usually. Now you can imagine with email we see open rates of 60% and they're probably inflated and we're like wow that's awesome. so a lot more people open them, a lot more people open them quicker and people are a lot more engaged with them. Part of the reason is that only 25% of your competitors are using SMS right now. That means there is

3:19a lot less competition there. On top of that, SMS is a really great channel for two-way conversation. That means you can actually get responses from your customer much more easily, which increases their emotional connection with you, I would say. And then, of course, it's very high ROI. So, SMS as a channel itself is is very lucrative. But I would say there's more. I would say right now I used to say we were in the wild wild west of SMS like like imagine when email just started out and only a couple of businesses were using it. I think we're actually past that. I think we still have the benefits of the wild wild west which is like we don't have a promotions tab for SMS yet.

4:01That will come the same way it has come for email. It will come. But I think now why you need to use SMS even more is because email is getting more difficult. We just talked about deliverability a ton. Deliverability is not going to get easier. Competition for email has gotten a lot harder. It's increased a ton. I know Jimmy actually did a great study with Sunlight and I can tell you guys anecdotally from us. We worked with one brand specifically where I I looked at the data and we sent double the amount of emails in 2024 compared to 2023 during Black Friday, Cyber Monday for the same brand to make the same amount of revenue. And that's for a growing brand. So it's not like they were actually, you know, losing money everywhere else and declining like that was just a growing brand. And part of it's just that ads have become more difficult and people are using SMS to supplement. So that means email is more crowded, but SMS isn't yet. And that's what I think the biggest opportunity is

4:59for brands out there. So I want you if you're if you're here and you are still skeptical about SMS and you forget anything else I said during this entire talk, I want you to really take this home like I got to do SMS. My feelings about it don't matter. I got to do SMS. I will have a huge advantage if I do SMS. My feelings about it don't matter. because the biggest thing we get is people say, "Oh, but I hate receiving SMS and blah blah blah blah." And I'm like, "Do you like money or you do not like money?" It's really two two things.

5:29If you like money, I highly recommend you do SMS. And we in fact see that about 20% of email and SMS revenue should be coming from SMS right now. So if you take one thing away, my feelings don't matter. If I like money, I should be doing SMS. Now I will tell you guys

Building Community and Brand Relationship

5:47there are a couple of basics that people get really wrong. Why other people hate SMS and why you if you hate SMS probably hate SMS. One you have to think about SMS in the context of your entire life cycle. SMS is a supplement to email. It's not a separate channel. They don't live separate from each other. They should live in unison. That means think about your life cycle of your customer, where email marketing fits in and how SMS can be supplemental and integrate with email. So if you have like a back in stock email flow, SMS should be supplemental to that. It shouldn't be like the same thing at the same time.

6:26You should really think about, okay, we're first going to send them a text. If they respond, then we don't send them an email. they don't respond, then maybe resend them an email a couple days or hours later. So, really, you want to think about it in unison with your your email channel. The second thing, and I think this is the thing that most people tell me when they're like, "Oh, I hate SMS. I got unsolicited unsolicited text messages." I'm like, "Yeah, I mean, obviously that's the most legal thing you can do." In email, people get away with it. It's kind of a gray zone. Most people have like notification bankruptcy in email anyway. They're so used to getting spam, they don't even care. It's like whatever. But in texts, I can tell you that people do care. And why do they care? Because they're not getting a lot of them and because they see them immediately. So, please, if you do do SMS, follow TCPH, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Make sure every SMS has

7:19clear optout instructions. Be transparent on who you are. And always, always, always obtain consent. Never send a text message if you do not have clear consent. And I will tell you a little horror story of Ease. Ease is a cannabis delivery brand. They're actually really well funded. They're huge. And they at one point thought that it was a good idea to go and send unsolicited text messages. Well, they went completely viral on Twitter as you can see here in the screenshot and also here in this other screenshot. And they have a huge class action lawsuit going against them. So it doesn't matter who you are. You can be a massive brand.

7:54Please do not do this. It is literally the reason people are afraid to use text and it is it it will get you in trouble. It's not like email where people will, you know, they're like, "Oh, whatever." Like, people get very mad about this. So, the reason I'm mentioning this is because I think most people don't want to do text because they don't know how to do text, right? And so I'm going to give you a bunch of strategies of how I believe you can do text messaging in a way that brands are actually going to love your texts and want to receive them. My first one is this question. So would you want your brand's text to go viral on Twitter? And in fact not the way the ones of ease did, but in a way that your customers go, "Wow, that was incredible. I love their text program."

8:41Do you want to receive an award maybe even for community building with your text messages? Do you want to be growing so fast that it might even become a separate service? Because you can. And so I want to show you two distinct examples. On the left, you have ease, which they're going to get sued. They are there's a class action lawsuit. That's how they went viral. And on the right, you have we're not really strangers. We're Not Really Strangers is my favorite example. They're a card game and it's built to build intimacy.

9:08And so I remember one day I was working and I got my phone dinged and I got a text and I looked at it and it said, "Hey bestie, just wanted you to know I'm proud of you." And I was like, "Who is this number?" And I had such a positive feeling about that text. And I looked and then it was, "We're not really strangers." Now, you can imagine what an incredible positive connotation I've now built with this brand. It was a positive surprise, which is one of the best emotional connections you can actually build with a customer. And so they've been doing this for a really long time, like sending texts that are very clear along their brand, match their product, and actually have no not a single CTA, not a single link in them. So you can see in the screenshot like, "Can we talk about the way I feel about you? I think you're amazing, and I hope you're being kind to yourself through everything you're working through. You got this."

9:57And so they went so viral, and they actually grew their text program so quickly that it turned into a separate paid service. So my question for people is always if your text program was a paid service, what would it look like? And how can you provide that value for to people at no cost? So really the goal is how can you build community? How can you strengthen brand relationship? And how can you deliver value that people would be willing to pay for at no cost? And then of course, how can you make sure that it's built specifically for this channel? So, it's not just something where you're repurposing an email that you were sending out, but it's a distinct strategy specifically for texts. And so, just so you guys know, we're not really strangers grew from March 2020 to December 2020 from 14,000 subscribers to 1.2 million. So, a whole separate paid service now. They got 7 million responses from 75 million texts they sent. That's basically 10% of people responded to their texts. You can

10:55imagine that's incredible. I want to give you another example. Judy Judy is an emergency preparedness kit and what they did was really cool is you could just text them your questions and someone would answer them in real time. Now back then this probably had to be customer support people. By now you can really automate a lot of this with artificial intelligence. And so I think this is another really cool example of how you can do that. In fact, if you go to Judy's website, it's a product that you can add to your cart and then you check out with all your information.

11:26It's $0. I love that because it gives them so much information about you. They get your address, your name, your phone number, your email, and it's still free though. But you also get their SMS alerts, by the way. So SMS alerts is like if there's ever a an emergency, then they will send you a text like what to do and where to go. And I think this is a really great example. You can see Aaron Ordorf, who I absolutely adore and love, tweeted about it as well during I think this was during COVID, so it was very on in the times, so to say.

11:56But yeah, I don't think every SMS you always send needs to have a CTA or a link. I think you can absolutely spend some money to deliver value that channel so that when you do send a link or a CTA, people actually feel inclined to take action because you've built so much goodwill. Now, let's say you you don't really know what to do. I'll give you a really simple strategy here is build value by teaching people how to use your product. So this drives product adoption. This drives product education.

12:23But this also, you know, helps people actually learn more. So in this case, Hydrant is sending stuff like, "Hey, try to drink a hydrant about an hour before bed and see how you feel when you wake up, right? That really helps you actually stay more hydrated." Now, this is a really great way to again build value, but also showcase the product. Another example is just like feeling tired. You're probably dehydrated. you know what to do and they add a link around learn more and then you can probably go and learn more about hydrant but they honestly could send that SMS without a link and I would be completely fine with it and then later you can drive a link a little bit later to get that engagement and the clicks which which is important v via SMS as well. So concerns around the strategy people might have is like does this make sense for my product? It doesn't make sense for every product, right? If you're an apparel brand, it might be harder to come up with ideas, but I do think

13:10almost any brand can actually successfully implement this. I want to talk about why this works. So, a couple of things. The principle of reciprocity. You're doing something for the customer so they feel more inclined to actually do something for you in return, which is purchase. You're building trust and you're interrupting a pattern. All the other brands are just sending them promotion, promotion, promotion, and you're the brand that sends them something of value. They're going to unsubscribe from everyone else. They're going to build a positive relationship with you, showcasing authority really, because you're giving them value, and they're eventually going to have a lot more goodwill to you, be be a lot more inclined to buy from you than from other brands. So, that was strategy number one. I know I'm breezing through this, but we'll get to questions later, and I hope you guys are ready for strategy two. Strategy two is really around

Conversational Commerce

13:57conversational commerce. So, one of the best things about SMS is it's not just a one-way conversation the way email is normally. It's actually a channel that's built distinctly for two-way conversation. The reason this works really well is you want to always behave in a channel in a way that's native to it. And text is natively made for two-way conversation. So, why shouldn't you have a two-way conversation as a brand? In fact, 82% of US consumers want more human interaction even though AI is advancing rapidly. So, and if you think about it, even AI, their newest model was not built on knowledge. It was built on actually making it more human. So, what I want you to do is think about what would conver conversation with your customers look like. In this example, I think you can even just make it cute, right? Make it fun. Add a human element by being funny, humor, appealing to emotions. Like in this case, it's like, "Hey Sam, thanks for trying Verb. I'm River and this is your personal verb

14:55line. Also, here's a cute dog just to brighten your day, right? Suddenly, your customer feels emotion. And we know that emotion is what creates bonds and what actually makes people ultimately buy. Another way that you can actually do conversational commerce is real-time customer support. I cannot tell you how excited I am when I can get customer support via text. If you have ever experienced customer support via text, you know that it's about a trillion times better than having to call someone. This, in my opinion, is one of the best customer support tricks that you can really use. And you can also use SMS and conversational commerce to learn more about your customers and develop better text messages after. So, I'll show you a couple of options like be human here. They're really kind of like texting like a girlfriend would text another girlfriend. And when someone texts back, they actually respond. So, having really live sales conversations.

15:46Postcript has a really great additional I would say offer where they actually help you do these livea sales conversations. And then the vitamin shop, you know, they're like sending a joke trying to make you laugh, giving their brand more personality. I mean, if anyone needs it, the vitamin shop definitely needs it. Pattern, you could actually text a chef. Like you could didn't have to purchase. You could just text them for help in the kitchen and then they would send you recipes, meal prep tips, troubleshooting, burn dishes, anything. So really like adding value to people's text. And then live support. We talked about this one. Hey, what's the best way to cook green beans? do you have any large any photos of the hat in the large hat box? And then here, perfect keto. I'm doing okay, but I don't really know when or if I'm in ketosis. Right. So really having that extra life support for customers is I I can tell you from personal experience, it feels like someone puts a warm blanket on top of you. It really,

16:42really, really makes customers, and there's a ton of data on this, highly favor your brand. Segmenting customers. So, I touched on this briefly, but you can use conversational commerce, and you don't even have to really have a person do this. Brands like Attentive do this really well where you can say, "Hey, like, what are you actually interested in?" And they respond with a number, and then they go through a distinct flow based off of that number. So that now, you know, let's say you're a supplement and someone is interested in powders, they're not interested in snacks and they're not interested in health and wellness or gym swag. Now you can really talk to them about powders in the rest of your automated flow to make that flow a lot more personalized. A lot more personalized means a lot happier customers and higher conversions. So why does this work? I already talked about it's native to the channel. It is unique. It's like not a generic message.

17:28So they're less likely to ignore you and they're more likely to have a positive connotation with you. It's also very convenient for the customer. We're actually going to talk about that in a little bit more. And it builds trust, right? They feel like they're talking to a real person. They're having a normal conversation. It's just not just like a brand with with no face who you do not want to be in this scenario. So, I think Old Navy is really funny. They were texting all this stuff and then someone replies and it goes, "Sorry, we don't recognize that word." That's a great way to, you know, kind of ruin a really good, I would say, channel. The concerns here I often have is like, do you even have the bandwidth to do this? Do you have the tools to do this? Is it profitable for you to do this? A lot of the brands that I showed you here, like for example, pattern does not actually have this program anymore. So my thought process is there. It would probably just

18:15wasn't very profitable for them. So if you do decide to do a strategy like this, it is very important that you actually test whether this strategy is possible and is generating a positive lift for your customers. Okay, SMS

Reducing Friction in SMS Marketing

18:29strategy three. We really are breezing through this. reducing friction. We all know that the thing that stops purchases is uncertainty and friction. So you should make it a no-brainer for your customers to opt into your SMS experience. You should do that by creating a really good offer and creating really good usability. The worst thing I see is when people say, "Hey, do you want to have 10% off for giving us your email?" And then you give them their email and they go, "Hey, actually, you also have to give us your SMS for 10% off." Immediately, your customers frustrated. If you want to get their SMS, give them a really good reason why you deserve their SMS. Is it an extra discount? Is it access to special SMS only promotions or insights?

19:12what is it? Why should they subscribe to your SMS? And I think a lot of brands just kind of like are whatever about this. They're like, "Yeah, whatever. We'll just ask them who was their SMS." Instead of really thinking about like, "Why would someone give me such a personal piece of information?" So, that's I think the first thing. The second thing here is what I really like is you can click and then it immediately sends you a text and you opt in very easily. So, I love that. That's a really great way to make the opt-in really easy on your customers. you could also do the text something to me and then you're basically subscribed like Aber and Carbine Fitch did or here like Sage. I never know how to pronounce it. Sage.

19:51Sage Natural Wellness did. I think that's another really great way to make subscribing as easy as possible. I just again like the less friction there is in this process, the more likely people are to subscribe. We already talked about this on the opting in side, but let's talk about the purchasing side. I think some things that c people really forget is if you have a replenishable product, why not text people to just replenish it in one click? Reduce friction and make it as easy as possible. Your conversion rates are going to improve significantly. Give better recommendations based on segmentation.

20:22So, we talked about that earlier. We just saw it in the previous example as well. Collect more data, send more targeted SMS, reduce the friction for customers to figure out what product they want and need and then to actually convert there. Then we also talked about the customer support piece which also fits into this, right? If someone can call your brand and has to wait in line for an hour versus they can just text you, you're actually reducing friction on the customer service experience side and that makes it a lot better for your customer, more likely for them to come back. As we know, a good customer service experience creates a really sticky customer relationship. I want to show you a couple examples here.

20:58Domino's, you can actually text an emoji and then order a pizza like that. I mean, you don't have to call. You don't even have to open your laptop and go online and pick stuff. Incredible. How much more likely would you be to order a pizza if there was less friction? I think a lot more likely than you probably think. We already talked about the segmentation piece, but just another example how you're reducing friction for customers to actually figure out what they want to figure out from you. And then this is just another example of segmentation. And then here, SMS replenishment. This is something I'm absolutely obsessed with, which is easily replenish the product you love via text. We remind you when it might be the time. You tell us if you're ready for more or not. Because one of the most annoying things about replenishing a product is getting more product when you're not ready. And then having to go online and having to email someone or having to go into your profile and

21:48changing something versus just saying yes or no via text. People are so much more likely to stay subscribed just because you've reduced friction for them in the decision-making process of whether they want more product or not. And then Chipotle did something cool. You could actually just text Chip Jobs to 97211 to apply, which now they're probably getting a lot more applications because they've just reduced the barrier to apply to jobs. So that was my Wow, I did really good on time. I have three minutes and 36 seconds left. I know. I really did breeze through this. That was

Q&A and Final Thoughts

22:21my That was my big presentation. I think we should hang out more. I think we can chat at the end where you guys can find me, right? Make sure we go into questions first. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, I think the first off tell you'll you'll put where they can find you, but Melanie Balky B- on LinkedIn, Melanie_balke on the Twitters, and she's active on both places. So, I actually think like my me to you, I think you should do more on LinkedIn. I think there's just more content that you have to share, especially the stuff today.

22:48so I want to push you to be more on LinkedIn. That's like a me to you moment right now. Okay. I love that. Thank you. And and I know you took some stuff out because obviously this this could have been an incredibly long presentation specifically, but there's been a lot of back and forth that I've had especially with the people on my team of like where do I prioritize email opt-in or SMS opt-in? Should I do at the same time?

23:09Should I make it a multi-step play? Because especially if we're trying to grow our lists, because you and I both know how powerful just sending that SMS is. Where should where does it land for you? Even if it's not right away, but is there like a testing sequence of should I have SMS next to email that you have any theories on? Yeah, I mean I I really like adding it as after email because I like giving people an extra reason to be subscribed to SMS. And so the way I like doing it is like email is one thing like subscribe to email. Here's what you're going to get and here's like my offer.

23:42And hey, if you want more, if you're interested in being closer to us and you want like like stuff I love to do is not just exclusive promotions, but like exclusive insights, the opportunity to help on product development, like I really want to give them extra perks to give me their text. And we usually have a separate strategy that is really just like, okay, this is our email strategy, this is our SMS strategy, this is how it's different, and this is where it interlaps with with email. And because of that, I like to do a a second step.

24:13if you don't have that, I I'd say it's worth testing. If you just have the same offer, I'd say it's worth testing doing email and SMS on the same one. but if you do have like a very distinct separate thing, then I think you can do two separate steps. Okay? Because we go back because we used to have big for SMS and we kind of prioritize SMS signups around major moments. So, like as your big gift or big sale or Black Friday starts coming up, I'm starting to build that SMS list. So, I think there should be a mental trigger to be like, hm, what's my sign up rate? Can I spike it a little bit? What's an incentive that I could do? So, one thing we do around Black Friday is like you can do a pop-up that's like SMS subscribers get access first. So, we actually do give SMS subscribers access first to the sale.

24:57And we will also send out a specific email to all our email subscribers that are not on SMS. And we'll say, "Hey, just so you know, if you subscribe to SMS as well, you get first dibs, like you get a day or two early access to our Black Friday sale." I like that. I love I wish we can send SMS as much as we could. Okay, two more for you, Logan. After running a response-based SMS campaign, how would I create the segments depending on what the subscriber replied with? So that's the platforms will do that for you like attentive and stuff. They actually just automatically do that for you. So that's and that's perfect because do you have like a sweet spot is like 10 reply one through 10 too much? Do you try to keep it on a solo keypad? What's your thoughts? Yeah, I think maybe like it.

25:37So it depends on the brand but less is better. So I'd say three to like tops five probably. Okay. Two quick ones. One says, "Any recommendations on finding someone that can help run these programs? It seems very involved." Yeah. I mean, one, you can work with an agency. There's a ton of great agencies out there. Two, you can hire a retention marketer, and usually they will do email and SMS at the same time. But yeah, honestly, doing SMS well does require some care, love, and attention. Yeah.

26:04And yeah, I don't know. I think I I No, I got you. I appreciate you not going like work with us. There is I I would look at if depending on what you need, I would pull a consultant to kind of an analyze it, give you a first like start here. Don't do an ongoing thing. Try to get like a project based thing done. look at marketer hire. It's pretty pretty easy to get a couple freelancers there, especially if you need one thing or two things versus an agency where you might not need it ongoing. Last one. As a growing food chain, would it be probable to hurt rather than help our brand awareness if we're trying to interact in a more personable way over SMS? So, I'll reframe the question. When is it not a good time to be like get on SMS or or communicate heavily on SMS? Do you have like a no-go zone? Okay. I will say there's one thing. If you have a customer base that's a little bit older,

26:53I usually tread a little bit more lightly with SMS because they get real angry for no reason at all. So, I think one, it depends on your customer base a little bit. And I would test it out, right? I would test out and see how people react, how engaged they are, how many people send you back angry text messages. So, test it out. But I don't think there's necessarily like ever if you're doing it right. I don't think there's a moment where you're like, "It can hurt my brand awareness." Unless you're doing it like ease, right? And you're like just texting people with no checks and balances, breaking laws, don't really have a good system. Like you guys need to know like even ease optin text program was like every Thursday they'd send you the same offer with just a really funny pun. So their copyriters crush, but like the same offer like I've got it six times in a row every week on Thursday. I'm not going to convert on that. So, I think

27:41the only time it can really hurt you and it doesn't matter where you're at in your life cycle is if you do it carelessly. Yeah, it's very well noted on this guys. Let's give it up to Mel Mel. She'll drop all where you can get a hold of her in the chat. Enjoy the event you're currently at. Thank you for being a part of us and sharing with us. We really really are thankful for you.

27:58Yeah. Thank you guys.