Now, this is where I do things a little bit differently from most people. I say: do you want to upgrade your discount code, we’ll give you an extra fifteen percent I’ll give you twenty percent I’ll give you twenty dollars whatever? It is something juicier because SMS is more powerful as part of our youtube series um how to create a million-dollar brand. I did say that I was going to get our consultants in simply because they know more than me in these domains. They have taught me a lot.
They implement a lot of things for my brands as well as well as they help our internal teams scale out those channels. So today i’ve got jason williamson here um he is an absolute sms gun, so we’re going to go through some crazy hacks. Today, some of his past experience and yeah – hopefully you know hopefully you’re going to get a lot of value from it as well. So welcome to the show man thanks for having me awesome, so i thought we’d start with a bit of a story. You told me one before we started rolling about sms marketing and how it can really turn a business around yeah.
So it’s really hard to give people kind of like these real world examples, and i really like to bring in, i guess, characters that people know so a good one is gary vaynerchuk. Everybody knows who gary is and when gary kind of like built the business wine library that you know he kind of um invested well built into with his parents, he’d build it up. So i think it was it’s like 64 million dollars annually by taking it online and gary decided to exit out that business. You know he wanted to exit out of his business start his own, so he went ahead and started vaynermedia. So after he kind of exited out, obviously his parents didn’t know we’re going new and eventually the business started to decline and it eventually halved.
So his dad was like hey gary. We need your help like. I need you to come back and kind of fix. The business, so he came back in and with um, i guess, with the skills of vaynermedia and stuff, like that, he implemented something that kind of you know, masterminded a couple things and came up with something that they called wine text and it’s basically sms marketing. So what they would do is they’d have a landing page and people come in and enter their like main details.
Right, like you know, phone number mailing address. You know, first name last name and also their credit card detail. So once they’re on this list, they’re also saved so like the the um, the credit card saved using like stripe or something and eventually he’d start sending out these sms blasts, and i think they did daily deals so every day they text out this list of daily Deals and people, just you know, buy with it using their credit card. That’S already subscribed. It turns out that that business model there that kind of that channel of marketing being sms, even though you know back in the day when they first died, it would have been even more fruitful than today because the same with email.
But what it said was that he said that he had an email list of 400 000 people and this 9 000 sms subscriber list outperformed that list consistently by more than nine times amazing. So it shows right there, the power of sms definitely – and it’s often overlooked as well, which i’m sure get into today for for multitude of reasons. So i’m just gon na list up some facts about yourself. So people know that they’re listening to the right person so you’re, a platinum partner at clavio, uh, you’re featured on optimunk you’ve worked with over 350 brands, you’re a postscript partner as well, which is our sms partner and you’ve done over 75 million dollars in retention marketing. How many years is that is that over i started officially when i was about 22, so i’m 28 now yeah tell me, tell me about how you got started.
Oh, how i got started is a wild story like i was it’s actually pretty cool um. I think it’s a good story and it is for a lot of people actually, because my story is the whole um. I want to avoid swearing, but now tony robbins says: if you want to certainly take the island, you’ve got to burn your boats, yeah exactly what i did so i used to be an electrician and my dad he’s a he’s on his own business in. Like sign. Writing so he did signs for, like coca-cola pepsi, all those types of people – and he was like trades trades – is the way to go so i got into.
I think i left school in, like year, 10 started becoming an electrician. I got to the point where i’d finished all my schooling done everything, but there was just something in me that i’d seen i used to work at places called vip electrical and i’d seen my boss. At that time he was paid, probably making. Maybe five hundred thousand dollars a year in in like profit for himself, which is awesome, and i was like dang – that’s what i want, but what i started to realize is he had financial freedom, but he had no time freedom every time something went wrong. He’D fly back from his bali hotel he’d have to come into the office.
He’D have to fix the problem, headed back out to your body, hotel, he’d, be in and out in the night two or three times a week. Sometimes i thought to myself. I thought i want to have the financial freedom, but i also want the time freedom because, like for some reason, actually there’s no there’s not some reason. When i was 19, i got hit by a car um. We were you know, just on the night out having a couple of drinks, i was meant to leave to brisbane with my dad, because dad owns his own business.
We were going to go up. There start the business and um. Had a couple of drinks had a bunch of friends with me, and we were ironically at the time going to a club called heaven, which is a funny place to be on the way to get hit by a car. But we saw this girl pass down. The middle of the road, so i’ve run over to help as i’ve gone over.
My jeans got caught on the fence taxi pulled out the sideway hit me straight in the face i got thrown back into the fence. I was unconscious. My friends come over and said i wasn’t breathing and then they like turned around and said jace like wake up wake up and say somebody call an ambulance so as i’ve turned it as they’ve turned around and got somebody call an ambulance. He like looks back at me and he goes you just stood up because i don’t know how, because you just stood up and you were like what just happened amazing. So i went over to the the wall and the ambulance like finally came over and it was like, we don’t know how you’re not dead like like you could have broken your neck.
We think you might have broken your back. Your nose is like this. It was like you should have died, we don’t know how you didn’t and then fast forward a couple days later. They says you know. Seven to ten days, you got ta, go see the ear, nose and throat specialist, because your nose was so swollen.
We couldn’t and i had a headache and i had i was dizzy. So i went in early probably like five days early and i told him the story and he and there was one particular detail that i wasn’t even going to mention. But as i was stood against the wall, my friend hugged me, and he goes that’s weird. You know started to bleed, but then it stopped and for some reason i mentioned this and he says. Ah, i never do this, but let me just let me just test you guys nothing’s going to be wrong.
It’S fine, but let me just test so it gets a needle. You know pulls out blood turns out. I had a blood clot right here, so if i’d have left it till the seven days he said again, i probably would have died because it would have stopped blood flow to the brain so like twice in his face so lucky, i’m so lucky, yes twice in The space of a week – so i guess i developed this – this sense of urgency and this sense of like time is not always going to be there that you know – and i got it tattooed on my arm as well like literally that tomorrow is never like promised. You know like live for today. Tomorrow will never come so that’s kind of what led me into where i was you know.
I i’ve decided that this isn’t something i want to do. I don’t want to be electrician and i got all the way through my schooling. I got to the point where i was literally a signature away and during that time of doing schooling during like kind of doing all this i’d been reading about russell brunson, right dot, com secrets and all that type of stuff. It turns out in sydney there’s a guy called mal emery, apparently the millionaire maker in australia i’d seen one of these webinars. I decided you know what burn your butts right and i took out a credit card.
I had like two grand on my credit card at the time, but i’ll i put the i think i put the tickets on that and then the rest of my money. I think in my savings i’d put on like the hotel and um. You know flights and i said to my boss: i’m sick, so boss. If you ever see this, i’m sorry um. I told him i said i’m sick.
I can’t make it and i flew over there. On friday, i met russell brunson. I said to him. I remember saying i said you don’t know me yet, but you one day you will and uh it turns out. I think there was a guy there he’s uh.
I can’t remember his name but he’s from melbourne. I ended up having a podcast with him too, and he goes. I remember you that day. I remember you saying that to him. He was his content creator at the time, and i met this guy.
This uh – i can’t remember his name now, but it’s steven essa. Do you remember when webinars were all the phase yeah like launching your six figure brand online with a webinar, it still is all messy, it still is, but back then it was fire like there was so many people doing it. He robs me in this really charismatic talk. I said i’ve got to do what he’s doing like i’ve got to do it. So i said up there i went outside.
I said i’ve got to do what you do and he goes. What can you do? He says i don’t know, i’m 20. And, he goes. What are you good at?
I said like how do you package your information? I said i’m 20, i don’t know anything nobody’s going to learn how to be half an electrician and he says what are you guys says? I’M good at talking and i’m going to write in he goes. Can you do emails as i can learn ever since then i just did email marketing. I literally dived in a good friend of mine, um murray, edwards, um assistant.
He was doing uh. He did this teeth, one in his advanced teeth, white in australia. He’S doing really. Well, i said to him i said murray: are you doing emails? He goes no.
So let me do it for free, so i jumped in for about six months, started learning play video. I started learning you know all that type of stuff and it’s pretty much history from there is literally to the point where i came. The kind of final straw was i’d, been working with murray for about six months. He goes. I need some help running the business.
It’S growing too big, and i only trust you because i’ll give you an option and, at the time i’d gone into a roof as an electrician. I was just still going into it. It was like two months from being fully qualified. I just needed a signature and, as i stood up, i tore my lateral meniscus in the roof, so i started to go on. You know like some sort of leave where i had to like repair myself.
I don’t want to call it anymore and um. He says to me: he goes look. You got two choices. You can go down the route that you’re going down and you know you don’t want to do it. He says or come work for me i’ll.
Give you three months but meantime when you’re, not working, you can focus on your business through all my stuff. In the back of my car, like literally black bean bags at the age of like i was like 21, i think i was going on 21., threw all my clothes in the back of the bin bag. Like threw him back in my car. Let’S drive from adelaide to sydney like to meet this guy that i’ve only known on the internet, it sounded creepy and – and that was it on the way up there, and this is where i feel like the universe rewards you when you take massive action, there’s a Guy called um joshua tate, who runs something called canvas, cultures and josh, was at an event in la who’s, some pixel mastery or something like that, and whilst i was driving up there he’d happen to mention, because i started working with him too.
He started to happen to mention i’ve got a good email, marketer and literally on the way up there. I got four new clients i feel like that was the universe rewarding me for taking massive action, and i literally literally went from like making i don’t know. I was making like 500 a week or something as a sparky, so when i went to like two and a half three grand a week, just right there in contracts, it’s amazing, i mean that’s a long story, but it’s such a it’s such a. Obviously, it’s not common for everyone to be hit by a car, but it is a common thing that people you know just wake up one day and they just fed up and they don’t. They don’t want to go into the rat race that they’re so used to growing up seeing um, and then you know just trying to find financial freedom so um, but that is an insane story.
Man um! It’S! It’S amazing. How much you know value has come out of the world as well from those choices that you’ve you’ve made. So i’d love to talk about some of that value as well in the fact that yeah you’ve got some crazy sms hacks.
I absolutely love hearing them every time. I want to hear a new hack or try to implement one. I always i always message you so maybe, let’s just jump into some of the the value um. What are some recent sms hacks that you’ve done um? What?
What should people be setting up with their sms stuff? Yeah sure so sms is a it’s such a lucrative channel and i think it’s going to become even more so because i know – and this doesn’t sound good because everyone gets scared. When you talk about compliance. But it’s really important to talk about first um, because it’s kind of like you know you go up and you try and take a go on a date. You kind of got to ask for a permission.
You know you got ta if you want to get a phone number, you can’t just go over grab a phone when she’s not looking, because that’s not gon na work. It’S not gon na she’s gon na get the text message and like really it’s not gon na work. So the first and foremost i wan na talk about compliance. Sms is great. I can sell you as many hacks, but if you’re not compliant, it doesn’t matter just to not to scare anybody, but victoria’s secret got sued for 5 million us dollars for being non-compliant.
So i know for a lot of businesses out there. That’S potentially bankrupting so, first and foremost, i’m going to touch base on that compliance is basically just getting explicit consent from the user to market to them via text message. So a lot of people think i’ve got this. This check box on my website. That says i can send to email and sms marketing and then they think.
Oh, that’s, okay, that’s all i need well, no, you need a privacy policy and in terms of services, so to know what you’re doing with their information. But you also need to state that this is going to be automated, but you also need to make sure that they tick that check box with, like you know, consciousness, they need to consciously tick that checks box if it’s already ticked by default. You’Re non-compliant because they’re not giving you explicit consent. So if anybody takes anything away from this, if you’re doing that, you’re not doing it right what you need to do – and this is where it gets tough. I know that shopify is coming out with a solution shortly, but right now in the current i got, i guess, the current economy, where we are right now we do what we do with.
You know the brands that i work with with you. We have a separate checkbox at the bottom that has all the the the proper consent language and that is by default, unchecked. So if anybody wants to subscribe to our sms, they have to press that button, which makes us 110 compliant now a couple ways around it. You might say to me: well, jason sounds like you know. I can’t really do it because i don’t have shopify plus and a lot of people think well, i’m out of the sms game.
Now, there’s a couple of ways that you can start to get out. I’Ll probably list my top three, the first one and my girlfriend always lasted me. She always kind of like dubs me, the um. She calls it can i upgrade your discount tm, so what i’ve started to do? Um, with a lot of brands that i work with, is i love email emails like where i started it’s.
What i do it gets me the best results, because i can scale it astronomically right now, it’s hard to implement everything because of the current. You know everything we’re still figuring out compliance and stuff tcpa changes, blah blah blah. The first thing i do is i collect an email subscriber. I use pop-ups, like you know, 25 off or 10. If anybody’s listening and pays attention 10 is for me often my most highest, converting because psychology behind it is people just understand 10 easier.
You know i can do the maths. If i got a hundred dollar item, i just save ten dollars. So i always ask: hey you save ten percent. Where should we send your discount, so they’ll then enter their email? I only asked for email because i’m you know don’t need anything more yet they’ll hit submit now.
This is where i do things a little bit differently to most people. I say: hey, do you want this kind of like the mcdonald’s? Do you want to get fries with that? I said: do you want to upgrade your discount code? They say yes, they say no.
If they say no they’ll go down the normal row of an email if they say yes, they get taken to another. It’S like a step on the the pop-up, and that simply says hey. If you give us, you know, if you join the sms club, we’ll give you an extra 15 i’ll, give you 20 i’ll, give you 20 whatever. It is something juicier, because sms is more powerful, a little fact about sms 5.8 billion devices in the world right.
So pretty much everybody has a phone 98 of the text. Messages are read by the end of the day, so more than likely you’re going to get them right, i mean 100 and what is it? 116 average emails a day an adult gets most of the demand opened. Open rates are sitting at around 16 on industry standard, so we know that the sms is super powerful and it’s like. I am more than happy to give a nice juicy offer to get that sms.
So when they say, like you know, when i tell them that you get twenty dollars off for 20, this upgraded offer i’ll then put a little button, and all i have to do is click it once i click it. It opens a pre-populated text message also, underneath has all the compliant language opens a pre-populated text message: they’ll, send it with a keyword which a lot of programs like postscript will be able to do this, for you all automatically, so super super easy and when they hit Send automatically it will return a message. They’Re now subscribed. They’Ve joined your list. You now have their phone number and instantly.
They get back a text message with all the details. If you choose to put the discount code in there and link back to your store, beautiful, so powerful, you mentioned postscript, what is the pop-up tool that you’re using to do that for us optimum yeah? Okay? Is there any others alternatives? So there is a bunch of alternatives.
I avoid a couple of um, the well-known ones, um there’s one particular one. I won’t mention the name, because i don’t want to get anyone in trouble. Of course there’s one that i don’t use it’s commonly known, but there was something that i heard for a long time that went around circulated that they’d had a dart leak, so i just choose not to use them. Um i’ll. Just say that it’s a common one.
That’s kind of cheap, so I wouldn’t I would avoid it. Pop-Ups to me are extremely important. So, if anybody’s paying attention to the pop-up, it should be I’ll give a free tip here. This is what I call my secret sauce. This is what nobody does, and I’ve been doing this for six years.
The reason is the story behind it is when I first got those clients right um. You know when I first kind of like moved to Sydney. I had one particular client. He was crushing like five six hundred thousand dollars per month, with no email at all. He says Jace I’ll pay, you are one.
I think it was five percent commission and my flows. All my automation was part of that and he got so far away. He was maybe like 10 15 pm. He was like yeah. Is it working as you know, it’s a lot of money, yeah and I was like he goes.
Look these pop-ups you’re doing are amazing, they’re capturing customers, but Jace most of these people are going to become customers anyway, I said: look I hear you probably right. I mean emails, guaranteed it, but you’re, probably right so I dived into this journey of figuring out using google analytics and creating these custom mobile reports because we can do exit intent on desktop. But we can’t do it on mobile because we can’t detect where the thumb’s going to go. So I thought well. The only way to do this is to use a custom.
Mobile reports are specific to the page that we’re on and analyze the drop-off time. What’s the average exit time of a customer or a visitor on that web page when they become the most unengaged, I put my pop-up five seconds before that so now, I’m not disrupting anybody, I’m not annoying anybody, I’m not taking. What were you know, revenue that could have been a full paying customer and entice them with a discount and training them to expect discounts? Now, I’m only getting the least engaged people, so I think it’s really important. You find a pop-up software that has that capability.
A lot of them don’t have the capability of really going granular on the page and optima offers that. So, that’s why I choose to use optimum, but if you want to use this another one that I’ve just got introduced is called a dork um, really really super nice software easy to split test, really easy to set up all the templates are beautiful. So, just you know from the jump you can go, and create a really really good-looking premium pop-up, I’m pretty sure they offer good. You know 30-day trials and stuff, but at the end of the day, I don’t think pop-ups if you’re doing the way that I do them and I’m more than happy. If anybody ever wants to reach out to me on Facebook, I don’t care I’ll tell you what it is, I’m not trying to hide anything um, but if you’re doing pop-ups right, you don’t need to find a cheaper alternative, because it’s so cost-effective I mean, I think, you’ve has seen if you look at your pop-ups revenue that you know that the fee is is worth it.
Yeah, we’ve been quite happy with optimum. The design capabilities as well are also important. Um, but yeah we’ve had no problems with it um. That is a very, very good hack, both with the pop-up timing and also um yeah. How does that all work um you mentioned you had two more, the other one that I really enjoy?
Is it just a very simple way of getting your already existing email list? You can, and it gets a little bit tacky, but if you just want to be simple, all you’re doing is putting a footer in your template at the bottom of your email. That just says join the SMS club and receive blah blah. It’s the same strategy. So once they get an email, they might go to the bottom say if you post a lot of content, i love to do content, especially when it comes to beauty brands.
I think to build that relationship you know is super important. I don’t want a relationship with my email list. That’s oh they’ve, emailed me. What do they want now? I know there’s one particular brand that I’m on right now and I know every single time they email me.
It’S a sale. So now it’s nice to get to the at first, it’s okay! After a while, then i go like leave me alone, like stop asking me to buy from you say, for example, how vaynermedia had 400 000 subs if he’d have been able to implement a strategy like that, i think it would have been harder back. Then he could have taken – i don’t know even 10 20 of that you know subscriber list on on um on their email turn them into sms subscribers and that’s been astronomically gross. So if you already have a subscriber base, if you already have all that data, those people and subscribers, you can really turn them into sms subscribers very very quickly and then the last one, i think, is really cool.
It kind of there’s kind of a combination here, i’ll actually i’ll actually talk about two of them. One of them is a qr code again same thing. You do need to put the consent, always kind of like have the opt-in language, but you can put a little qr code um, i think to say you can put it on your. I wouldn’t put on your packaging. I probably put on your welcome like in the little slip, but you can say things like um.
You know scan your phone here. They get a 20 discount code for a friend and i put it in my packaging. I put three of them as like. A little coupon i say give these to your friends and they can’t see what it is, but it’s a hidden discount code when they hit it. It says uh, you know, join it join the subscribe like join popito, subscriber club um and get 20 off with the keyword, uh friends with benefits, something like that right and then bang they join your sms club.
They join that it sends back the discount easy right. They’Re now part of your sms and it’s it’s a cute fun. Little way to do it so qr codes on, like your packaging, very cool who who creates that qr code? Is that script script yeah yeah? Is there any way that you can create the qr code independently from postscript, so you kind of own it and then link it to postscript?
There’S there’s plenty of apps on the internet. If you just search to make qr codes, yeah yeah yeah, i reckon we’ll we’ll be doing that. We’Ve been looking into it for audi packaging. I think it’s going to be pretty powerful for sure yeah, i think udi as well. I think i think of being an australian audience.
I think, like the the keyword friends with benefits, i think it’s pretty funny is pretty cheeky. Yeah um the the the behavioral change in people with qr codes, as well as something to capitalize on everyone’s scanning coming into shops and stuff. Like that, i remember people were saying: qr codes were just useless about two years ago, and now it’s just like, and people can’t live with everyday thing. Isn’T it it’s crazy, like literally enter a shop bang like so we’ve been trying to do it, yeah, which is good for us all right, third hack? What is it yeah?
So third slash? Fourth uh, this one is, is to do with your instagram, so you can actually do a very similar thing. You can actually do a link to yeah. It’S exactly the same thing right. It’S always a pre-populated mess uh text because you’ve got to somehow do it.
You can text, often australia doesn’t work as well, because the numbers are very american. Yeah people aren’t going to do it, but this one. You can literally just go to your instagram stories and you can create instagram stories. It’S really cool or if you want to save 20 off, and you can turn them into highlights that they swipe up and when they swipe up it, creates that pre-populated message so utilizing your instagram traffic with a highlight at the front. Just like saying, like you know, say, uh want to learn how to save 20 click next and it’s like save 20 by joining the sms club terms and services apply swipe up there, you have it and that’s a constant traffic at all times on your highlights.
So, whenever you’re funneling traffic in, if you’re using influencers, if you’re using instagram marketing people, are checking out your instagram they’re funneling through everybody starts looking at highlights and oh i do and i’m not even big on instagram, but i’m still curious, yeah and they’re right there. Another way to kind of organically grow that sms list, and it’s just it’s always forever there, it’s absolutely wild. That’S so good, so good, let’s, let’s touch a little bit more about the negatives of sms, just because it is something that people need to be mindful of how do we not look spammy when creating sms? So i just don’t i don’t sms too much yeah. I feel like frequency yeah, i feel like frequency is a big thing here, because at the end of the day, sms is super intimate right.
If you go to a club and try and get a girl’s number, it’s very hard, because it’s an intimate thing, it’s very close to them. It’S it’s almost! It’S super personal! That’S why it works really! Well, once you build that trust right and you build that trust to get the sms, but at first it’s super personally super intimate.
So i love to take the frequency to at the moment we’re trying. You know probably once every couple of weeks so almost bi-weekly it could be more, it could be less. You probably want to judge on i’d, say your click through rate, you kind of have a look, is it is it lowering? Is your unsubscribe going up and you can kind of find a happy medium, but i definitely would just first and foremost not to be spammy is just decrease. The frequency i think, um.
I love content. I love offering value, but i think that’s an example of of good content. That’S not an offer for an sms. I don’t think there is one and there probably is, but i feel like it’s a very expensive channel and you really would prefer an roi. I think a really good way of automatically reaching out to people probably is just shipping notifications.
I feel like just letting them know hey something’s on its way. Probably even this is one i just actually, i just actually introduced to ryan as well, and we want to try and do the same thing. Um reviews asking for reviews through text message and they can return like a selfie. That’S a really good way to reach out. That’S non-transactional a lot of the time.
I think it’s going to be automation based right, so it’s going to be based on behavior. That’S how you’re not going to be spamming. Is it’s going to be based on? What’S the behavior of the customer where they are in their journey right now, so that i’m not spammy, you know i’m not going to reach out to x, y and z, who just bought theirs like two days ago, haven’t received it yet and trying to sell them On something so behavior frequency and to me i feel, like automation, so being shipping notifications. Sometimes you could probably do all the confirmations um, but a really good one.
There is – and i learned this yesterday actually was that of kind of – let’s call it um gathering ugcs through reviews, and you can set up filter, behavioral, segmentations or behavioral automations like oh. This person, like, i think they can do delivered because shopify has the ability to know when it’s been delivered, so you can do um trigger when delivered, wait two days and then be like hey. What’S up notice that you got your order or you can wait three days just making sure that they went out for the weekend or something notice. We got your order, wanted to see how it went, love to see a selfie, something like that amazing um. This wasn’t in my list of questions to ask you, but i’m just genuinely curious in terms of there’s a lot of new sms providers.
That’S more conversational, so it’s i do think postscript has the opportunity to reply and whatnot, but there’s a lot of one. A lot of new software that’s coming out that either has automated replies based on certain keyword, words and stuff, like that, and it’s just really trying to get that roi up um. Are you familiar with many of those, and so i am but not in the e-commerce space yeah, because i feel like that’s that’s great. I feel like it’s. It’S a good direction.
I feel like postscript, could really look into that. I thought clavio could too, and i’ve seen a lot of these artificial intelligence, natural language processing, bots. That will, if this person says x, they’ll reply with why i think that’s a really really good route to go down, but i think it’s it’s also dangerous too, because we want to make sure that our customer feels like they’re being cared for. I mean in a world where we’re turning more into bots and everything’s becoming more automated. I think we’re going to start to miss that human touch and, in my experience i feel like emotion, is a huge thing for a customer being able to first and foremost understand it when a customer is frustrated or if a customer is happy because you’re going to Capitalize on a happy customer like in ugc, you can avoid a bad review if a customer’s in a bad mood exactly – and you can sense that.
So personally, i prefer to keep my communication on a if i’m communicating with the customer customers are hyper important. You know that feedback discussion everything i think if we start to use bots in e-commerce, it’s a massive missed opportunity to learn what went wrong, but there’s still a place for it. I don’t think posters introduce her yet, but i feel like they will surely for sure what are some other best practices, some just general list hygiene. Is that a thing in sms, or so just the text to opt out yeah making sure, because when they sign up they, if they read the message, they probably will most people that’s required. It is, but it’s not required once they’ve signed up.
You probably want to do it every couple of like blasts um like with your brand at the moment, we we trialed without it, and it was working really well. We didn’t put it in every single message, because once they opt in one of the first messages, tells them hey to opt out this and, as somebody explained to me from um, he was originally in twilio, but he works with postscript now uh. His name is watson. He’S kind of like the guy who you know, helps strategize and stuff and i’m always up on calls within like 6 7 a.m in the morning, because he’s in canada, i love it um and he says to me he says, like you got to think of it.
This way, if you always offer, if you always tell them text to opt out first and foremost, you’re kind of instructing them, and secondly, you just caught them in a day that are in a bad mood. They’Re gon na opt out exactly, but people know that if they just type stop, if they type like you know, there’s ways to get out of it. It’S important that you make it very, very well known and how they can opt out. But for me list hygiene in sms, because it’s so easy and everyone gets it. I think it’s going to do its own cleaning and that’s what we’ve experienced because they tend to do their own kind of like if they don’t want it, they’ll jump out and that’s nice and easy for sure how’s it going to change.
What does the future look? Look like for sms, oh kind of similar to that wine library yeah how they did their wine text there’s something going on in the shopify’s api postscript are doing it alternative are doing it. Post group called postscript pay and it’s that of once a customer’s purchased, their information gets saved as shopify, and once it’s saved in shopify, they can literally get. You can send an upsell. So, for example, um you know one of the top.
What are your top products, and then you say: okay! Well, this is our second best-selling product. Has this person got it? No okay, we’ll send this as an automation and they can simply text back with a hashtag buy and it will charge their credit card and ship to them without them going to a checkout. So literally, turning the conversation that you’re, having with the customer on sms into a potential payment platform yeah, i think that’s a massive in australia.
I think it’ll be a while till we get that, because you know australia is like very conservative in those types of developments, but it’s becoming a thing in america. I try to get your brand fast-tracked yeah we’re fast-tracked, but only from australia, yeah um but yeah. I think that’s a massive massive direction, but frictionless e-commerce is going to be big, even just with instagram shopping and stuff, like that, it’s just gon na be huge, huge sales channels. So yeah, i reckon that’s that’s it. Is there anything else where we’re missing that that the listeners should should know just start now just get into it?
Yeah get into it everyone’s so scared, and you know what everyone does. Everyone focuses so heavily on paid media, and i agree with it. I mean i’ve built my whole entire business on retention marketing, so i totally understand where the pain comes from from media buying, because we look at email, we look at sms. It doesn’t have the scalability potential that facebook instagram youtube all these types of page traffic channels. Google, why did i miss google uh all these types of paid media channels?
They they have this potential to scale up from a million dollars a month. Two million three million facebook email doesn’t have that, but what it does have is the ability to boost your profit margins, because you know, for example, if you send an email, you know how much profit is on that because you own that list. That’S your data! You no longer have to advertise to it sms the same thing, um being so much higher. I mean we’ve seen for like your brand we’ve seen some receipts like every time.
We send an sms it’s worth like 26 dollars. Every time we send it to you, and we’ve got some that they’re at like 30 40 50 clicks, which is absurd and if you’re not doing that, if you’re missing out on that you’re, just like literally taking money out of your pocket, you may as well burn That, because you’re just losing out on money, whenever you’re not doing sms, whenever you’re not doing email, whenever you’re not doing any type of retention marketing where you yourself, the business owner, owns the list, owns the data and and a good example is um. I’Ve had this happen multiple times from my career, but a really obvious one was uh. I had a friend of mine, he i’ll change his name to daniel just to because he was a very private person and he had a story at a pet store and he sold things for cats and he was, he was uh, crushing it probably doing like five Hundred six hundred thousand dollars a month just drop shipping, he was doing white labeling, so shipping times were better and the product was, you know, labeled his own brand, but at the end of the day, just once out of nowhere, we were doing. I think we started like twenty thousand dollars a month on his email, like campaigns slowly over time.
Two three years go down the track. We got up to 50 60k a month every single month and he was just making that every single month – and i think his profit margins was probably 70 on email so because he was just paying for the product and one day facebook uh yeah. Facebook just did his thing, whereas this decided banhammer and turns out. It was a verification. It was verifying his identity because i think somebody had like logged in from somewhere else and first was like like pulled that out, shut his account down.
He had to verify the identity show his passport show his birth certificates, all that stuff to prove who he is. And meanwhile three weeks goes down the track. He has no traffic and he should have diversified google very nice, but he didn’t, but unfortunately he had email. So that whole time where he was making zero revenue, we was making actually more because he wasn’t able to remarket, he wasn’t able to sell. So we were just pumped up the sales we saw.
You know we started sending where we send more content. We decided to send more sales and also he’s making 60 70 80k a month from his email, which, at that time, like really saved his butt yeah. You know he would have been without it yeah it’s really hard to clear stock without a good, healthy email list. As well, you can get in a whole lot of trouble there. So anyway, um.
Where can people find find out more about you? Where can they get in touch uh? I got multiple places, but i always say my facebook yeah. My facebook is always a good one. So i love to build one to one communicate like one-to-one real relationships with people.
It’S either that or probably my just my own agency website. It’S actually i’m thinking about doing a little e2 dot agency, slash davey, dash, sms, beautiful and everything we talked about in here. I’Ll put on there probably put a little guide that everyone can download for free and even though i’m near my marketer, i will not put it behind an email. Yes, you will i’ll just track them on a pixel phone check, the link in the bio, so good episode today. I think we will incorporate sms, probably in the maybe two or three episodes so we’re gon na first.
We need to sign off on the product that we’re we’re. Launching we’ve got to create content, we’ve got to launch the site and then, as soon as we’re driving traffic to the store, we want that sms set set up. Obviously, the main takeaway is make sure you’re compliant. It’S not that difficult. If you’re willing to do the research and check all the boxes, work with good providers like postscript they’re, the main thing so anyway, don’t forget to like and subscribe we’ll see you next week.
