Danielle Gallant – 00:00:03:
Welcome to Email After Hours by Sender Score, powered by Validity.
Guy Hanson – 00:00:09:
We’re your hosts. My name is Guy Hanson.
Danielle Gallant – 00:00:10:
And I’m Danielle Gallant. And this is Email After Hours.
Let’s start off with a stat that maybe I find a little bit personally depressing. But the average smartphone user checks their device 96 times a day. And while this might make me cringe personally because I see myself there, brands sending SMS messages have 96 opportunities to make a sale if they have the right strategy. SMS and email can naturally complement each other. And many email marketers are suddenly finding themselves tasked with their brand’s SMS strategy. While validity is known as an authority in the world of email, we’ve been seeing more and more of our clients adopt SMS marketing strategies and so we must adapt alongside senders to support them. With all this in mind, let’s dive into some of the opportunities and pitfalls of SMS marketing and how marketers can get it right.
Guy Hanson – 00:01:13:
And firstly, it is a real pleasure to welcome today’s guest, Karen Talavera. Thank you so much for joining us on email after ours. We’re so excited to have you here with us.
Karen Talavera – 00:01:23:
You’re so welcome. Thanks.
Guy Hanson – 00:01:25:
So you founded Synchronicity Marketing. You are well versed in the world of email and digital marketing in general. Tell us a little bit about a day in the life of Karen.
Karen Talavera – 00:01:37:
Thanks Guy. Synchronicity Marketing sweet spot is digital strategy. Our wheelhouse is definitely email marketing. So day in the life I might be doing everything from working on program strategy with a client to creating an optimization plan to get more bang for their buck, better results, better engagement with their email, putting together a test strategy. I do a lot of speaking and training at conferences, so I might be preparing a new talk or even doing a virtual training. So there’s lots of variety, which is why I’ve stayed with email for, I can’t believe it’s, 23 years now. So yes, I am sort of an elder statesperson in the industry, as are many of my esteemed colleagues. But I think the thing that keeps me going and keeps me interested is the constant evolution, whether it’s just in a single channel like email, whether it’s that we’ve given birth, the industry has given birth to all of these other channels, social, mobile. We’re going to be talking a lot about SMS today. There’s always something new to dive into and it never gets boring.
Guy Hanson – 00:02:45:
You know, I was going to ask you about sort of all those years you spent in email and I wasn’t going to mention like a specific sort of date or number of years because maybe that was going to be rude. But you know what? It’s almost like as long as I’ve been in it. And I just think about how much has changed since the turn of the millennia. What struck you, Karen, in terms of how this industry has evolved over the last couple of decades.
Karen Talavera – 00:03:08:
Well Guy, I don’t know about you but of course I started when I was 15. How has it evolved? Well, first we had the early adopters. Email came about and people were like well how do I send anything to anyone because I don’t even have a list. You had like the legacy direct mail mindset, direct response marketing mindset kind of feeding into this channel. So the data companies got on board and started building off permission files. Then of course marketers got smart and said hey, I’m just going to ask my customers and my audiences for the email addresses. So the data came pretty quickly but the technology sort of lagged. Just even bandwidth in the early days is an issue. I think email existed before WiFi was widespread, which is crazy to think about. But the tech evolution has continued, especially with platforms and value added services companies like Validity getting smarter, going from everything having to be manual, to creating built in marketing automation, to creating predictive modeling right, and kind of built in segmentation schemes to today’s world where now we have what do we have AI driven everything. So machine learning and technology that can take past data and past behavior and learn and recommend what to do next. So to me that’s super exciting because the job is getting a lot easier for those in the trenches or multi hat marketers where yes, maybe all they had to do was email ten or 15 years ago and now there is a whole lot more on their plate, especially SMS. Right?
Danielle Gallant – 00:04:46:
Well that’s a perfect segue. SMS is absolutely increasing in popularity and it comes with challenges that email doesn’t. Right, so cost, limited space, that creep factor compliance requirements and in my conversations cost is definitely a limitation with SMS, at least compared to email marketing. So can you share some of the major pitfalls or opportunities of SMS marketing?
Karen Talavera – 00:05:14:
Sure, one of them was top of mind when you opened with your stat that the average user checks their phone 96 times a day. I think it was 96 gives the SMS marketer 96 opportunities to market. It also gives them 96 opportunities to alienate and to aggravate people. So is the juice worth the squeeze to add SMS into the mix? Absolutely. The pitfall, I think two big ones are one overdoing it and assuming that there’s the same frequency tolerance with marketing through text message versus email or other more passive channels and I think I would say just rote repetition or duplication without any strategic thought to being complimentary versus supplementary. So no brand wants to be the friend that only calls when they need something. And I’ve been preaching this in email for decades. We want to add value. So if we’re thinking about which channel to use for which purpose and aligning our objectives appropriately and saying hey, well I could do a lot in something like email where there’s a ton of real estate. There’s a lot more message length. I don’t have the restrictions that I have, but what can I do in SMS that’s going to give me the biggest bang for the buck and that’s going to really be worthwhile that is unique to that channel?
Guy Hanson – 00:06:40:
Absolutely. And I was sort of thinking back on our status as email veterans and I think it’s easy to be a little bit biased and because you sort of worked your whole life in the email channel, you look at SMS and you think about it a little bit competitively, maybe. But the reality is that the two channels complement each other beautifully, don’t they? And any sort of tips or tactics in terms of how you get them working together really well.
Karen Talavera – 00:07:06:
Yeah, I think one of the great things about SMS versus email is a greater sense of urgency. So when we think about that, it is primarily, it’s funny because email started this way too, it was a personal messaging channel and now I’m not sure that a whole lot of people are sending personal emails as much as they are just sending a text. Right. Because we need to break through the clutter. So if we’re really trying to reach somebody, wherever this came from, I don’t know that behavioral economics or the psychology part, but we are more likely to respond to a message that is pushed and that is alerting us, which is going to be traditionally a phone call, a voicemail, a text message, whether that platform is traditional SMS, whether it’s WhatsApp? Whether somebody’s using Facebook Messenger, it doesn’t really matter. It’s, hey, I’ve got my alert set because I know somebody contacting me through this channel really needs to reach me. There’s something time sensitive, they need a response right away and I can’t get to it later. So if we’re a brand and we think that way, then logically we’re going to use SMS when we have tight deadlines on offers, when we’re sending informational alerts or reminders. So think about the earlier days of SMS where in the rise of mobile apps like Uber, like Lyft, like DoorDash or the food delivery, you had to be able to know when your driver was coming, when your delivery was coming, if your payment method failed, if the driver bailed on you. And that naturally bridged itself into marketing messaging. So my advice would be let’s not use SMS the way we use email. Let’s use it to complement and sometimes to supplement what we’re sending an email when we’re not sure that we’re going to have the attention and the eyes on email fast enough because there’s an expiring offer or there’s some other sense of urgency or timeliness where we really need to break through. Or let’s use it to be helpful. Right. If we can sense and respond to when somebody is or has just been in our mobile app, in our physical store, on our website and didn’t complete or struggled or looks like they struggled because we should be listening. For signals. Obviously not just listening with our ears, but we should be monitoring behavior, quick behavior, browse behavior, carding behavior, and sensing and responding to the lack of completion or partial completion of, say, a transaction. So yes, I think there’s opportunity for some of the traditional types of promotional marketing and exclusive offers and offer communication in SMS. Like there was an email, but see a lot of brands overlooking the let me help you get to where you want to go opportunity, what can I do? Can I send a short piece of content? And so I’ve seen Uber do a pretty good job as they’ve branched into multiple categories. Uber Eats, for example, sending a lot of in app notifications as well as provided there’s the permission SMS.
Danielle Gallant – 00:10:10:
And I was just going to ask if there are any examples of brands that are doing this well, right? Maybe brands that aren’t app reliant. Do you have any off the top of your head that you can think of apart from Uber?
Karen Talavera – 00:10:21:
Yes, too. And of course I’m a bit of an outlier because I’ll sign up for all kinds of email and marketing notifications just to build my own archive of what brands are doing. So kind of like an email hoarder and I have bought from these brands, apparel brands. So two of them, the first is a women’s brand in the US. Kind of like a common mall store. Johnny was legacy. Yeah, still doing cataloger, but a lot of business online. And then the shoe brand, TOMS. TOMS is heavy promotional strategy, lots of discounting, but also lots of new product intros. Johnny was not so much it’s much higher price point than TOMS brand of shoes. But I think both of them, the thread they have in common is seasonality to their marketing and promotions. Obviously, products change seasonally. There’s no seasonal introductions. There’s summer versus winter and all of that, but they’re not overloading with volume. And yet what they do communicate through SMS, there’s rationale behind it. There’s a reason again, there’s an offer deadline, something’s going to sell out, there’s a flash sale. Right. Both those brands, there are SKUs that sell out. They’re not Walmart, they’re not Target that has unlimited inventory and so forth. So, yeah, those are two that come up
Guy Hanson – 00:11:41:
And I think those are two great examples. Now I was speaking to a couple of our customers recently and we’re talking about almost the renaissance of SMS and both of them were saying, yeah, that’s absolutely right. And they know what an effective channel it is. If anything, their regret is that they weren’t more proactive about starting to build out their SMS lists at the same time that they were building out their email lists. And now they feel like they’re having to play catch up a little bit to sort of build up those SMS contacts that they’re having to incentivize their customers quite hard to provide those mobile numbers. And the question which I was leading towards is have you found any of those incentives that are particularly effective in terms of persuading consumers to provide their SMS details?
Karen Talavera – 00:12:30:
I’m still seeing that be tested. So I have a little bit of a gripe about the SMS list. So I’ll kind of put this out to both of you and to the listeners. Like who else has seen the double hit attempt to get the email address and the mobile number through a modal, through a pop up on a website? Now collecting email addresses that way has been going on for I don’t know, well over a decade. We know an interruptive effort like that works well. So of course, new visitor comes to a site, there’s, that collection attempt there’s, thank God, a lot of creativity that’s gone into that by now. We could control how we do that in terms of timing when the modal or lightbox fires and what the incentive is and we can test into that. But it’s been about a year and a half where all of a sudden I’m seeing this crush of the typical ask for the email address comes up to a site visitor and immediately thereafter oh, can we get your phone number too? And what I personally don’t like is when it’s all or nothing, if I have to opt into both or I’m not going to get like the welcome deal or the first purchase deal or whatever’s being promised to me, it could even be informational content then that could stop people in their tracks and be a deal killer. So in user experience testing this kind of stuff, I will go through part of the process. Email address, collection fine, get a second pop up for we want your phone number too. I’ll bail out of that but where it’s working well and this just happened with another footwear brand Asics. I’m still getting a confirmation and welcome, which is how it should be. Let’s give people that choice of control and not turn them away right out of the gate. So what I would recommend is testing and we could A/B split test this kind of thing, that approach against let’s just start by getting the email address. It is absolutely the most prevalent point of contact out there. More people have an email address than any other connection on any social network or anything else except maybe a mobile phone number. But let’s get the email address first and then come back with a different incentive. Let’s up the ante, right, and ask for the mobile number. Or let’s see who, if we have a brand with a mobile app, has already downloaded the app and maybe they haven’t or weren’t given the option to sign. Up for SMS, but they did say, yeah, send me inapp messages so we don’t have to again. Kind of toss everything on the platter right out of the gate.
Danielle Gallant – 00:15:07:
Agree 100%. In fact, I was doing a competitive assessment for one of my clients and that entails the opt in experience. Like you can opt into their email program just with your email, no problem. But for their loyalty program, it was that all or nothing. You have to give us both your email address and your phone number. And it felt so prohibitive, especially compared to who they were looking at as competitors. And in this case it was inbox competitors. And it’s a major influencing factor for whether subscribers are going to actually proceed with that and provide their mobile number to get these deals right. The idea of being in a loyalty program is exclusivity and a lot of subscribers are not willing to provide that phone number, but they are willing to provide that email address.
Karen Talavera – 00:15:57:
Right. There’s so many ways to get that. I get that brands are trying to play catch up and saying, oh yeah, SMS, we have to do SMS, but we have tighter restrictions, right? We absolutely have to have opt in self initiated 100% consent permission. Whereas those rules are so kind of fuzzy for email, especially in certain parts of the world. And there’s the cost factor. SMS is more expensive. So let’s not all panic out there and say, oh, I’ve got to go build my opt in SMS list. To the extent that I have my email list, it might never get there, it might never need to be there. And there’s so many ways to play the long game and get that data down the road and to test different incentives for opt into different channels. Test timing. If you could recognize a first time visitor to a site and fire a modal to collect an email address, well then can you recognize when they come back the second time or the third time? And maybe you don’t fire a different modal to collect a mobile phone number until further downstream. So not seeing enough strategic thought go into that testing?
Guy Hanson – 00:16:57:
No, absolutely. And I think you’re making a great point, which comes back to something you said a little bit earlier in the conversation when you touched on this idea of frequency tolerance. And if you don’t get that right, you are going to burn out whatever engagement you’re getting through the channel very, very quickly. And you talked about our recent research. One of my favorite facts from it was saying that 90% of consumers who responded to our questionnaire said, you know what? At least once in a while, at least occasionally, we actually get really mad at these senders who we’ve given them our number, and now they’re just peppering us with messages. And sometimes they’re coming in at these really inconvenient times. So I suppose the next question is any tips in terms of how do you mitigate that? How do you manage it properly to avoid that burnout, bearing in mind that they’re getting messages through other channels as well, including email. What’s the guidance there?
Karen Talavera – 00:17:51:
First and foremost, look at your overall contact strategy across all channels and then do some segmentation to understand a frequency distribution. I know that sounds like a big word, but what percentage of, say, your entire customer audience is receiving a marketing touch and how often? Because that will naturally segment itself out. So maybe there are 10% of your real loyalists, raving fans, right, who want everything you’ve got. Maybe in the ecommerce world, because we’re kind of leaning this conversation toward B2C ecom brands, maybe they’re getting ten touches a week across email, InApp, SMS, maybe even social, maybe they’re even getting 20. But then there’s going to be another percentage, another tier underneath that top 10%. Maybe it’s the next 20% and they’re getting ten touches a week or what have you, and really dig into the data and look at, well, how many are they responding to, as well as how many folks are actually opting out. So we always want to be keeping a mindful eye on the unsubscribe rate. And we’ve done this in email for decades and it’s usually been literally across the channel extraordinarily low. Unless a brand tries something, that’s a completely new departure. But I think we have to keep an even more mindful eye on it for SMS because there is that intrusive factor that doesn’t exist with email and burnout is real. So, I mean, I’m even wondering for those of us that are very integrated in the digital world, it’s our day to day reality. I know I have a couple of Google voice numbers and those can accept SMS messages. So now I have kind of my alias phone numbers that I’m using for marketing. I’m going to always give out my actual real mobile number.
Danielle Gallant – 00:19:40:
Thank you for that idea, Karen.
Guy Hanson – 00:19:42:
Tip of the week.
Karen Talavera – 00:19:43:
I’m going to blow it. I’m going to blow it for everyone. But it’s true. Will consumers catch on? Will they want to do that? Yes. Some people have more than one mobile number. They have a work phone, they have a personal phone. But the average consumer, if asked for a mobile number, is only going to have one and it’s going to be their primary. And their phone might already be blowing up just with personal text messages. So now they’re like, how do I triage and organize the marketing context? Because I really might still want them, but I’m overloaded already and I almost need like and it’s starting a foldering system. So I’m going to go back to answer the question. I think with SMS, less is more surprise and delight. So don’t be predictable. Show up more unexpected. Show up less often so that when you show up, you’re showing up with something that has so much juicy goodness or is such a surprise that the next time someone’s going to pay attention. And here’s another brand that comes to mind that does that. And they’ve been doing it in email for years. It’s a game. I think it’s now world renowned. I just saw a whole display at Target, at a Target store near me. Cards Against Humanity. Funniest party game ever. If you don’t know it, check it out. They send like two emails a year, two marketing emails. They’re hilarious. Their brand voice is fantastic and they pretty much send like a Black Friday offer. And maybe if they have a new product intro. Okay, so that might be obviously there’s a little bit of opportunity for them. They could even be once a month. But what if for SMS you were a once a month sender because you had something so rare and so extraordinary or so exclusive that you’re only going out once a month? This reminds me of the strategy behind the app, if anyone’s familiar known as Mischief, MSCHF for short. They’re an interesting one. They do these like crazy branded limited edition merchandise drops or gaming opportunities like enter a sweepstakes. But it could be this crazy weird pair of sneakers or whatever. But they have built the brand on Anticipation and on Mystery and I think we could use a little bit more of that in our direct to consumer marketing.
Danielle Gallant – 00:21:57:
Well, you said a phone number is really personal. Getting a text is personal, right? And people have one phone number usually where they’re going to receive those SMS messages. And we already touched on maybe different message types that can be leveraged or deployed through email versus SMS, right? So for email that might be a promotional message and for SMS it might be post-purchase. So do you think that offering different message types in different channels can really help combat that fatigue and build trust on a personal level with subscribers?
Karen Talavera – 00:22:35:
That’s a fantastic question and yeah, I think the answer is yes. I’ve been speaking a lot about better post purchase contact strategy because these days brands are sending both transactional well they’ve been doing this for a long time, but transactional and marketing messages are both part of that mix. So of course we need to send purchase receipt, shipping confirmation. But then what gets tacked on is oh, review request, post-purchase survey. That could even be multiple emails because maybe somebody is being asked about their shopping experience and then it takes a couple of weeks for their product to arrive and we want to ask them about their product use experience as well. Add to that the traditional come back and buy again kind of old school term bounce back email. So especially for it’s a first purchase reward because we know our best customers are previous customers layer on top of that loyalty program messaging, right? So we really need to orchestrate that whole series of touches, whether it is more transactional, whether it’s marketing or whether it’s straddling both worlds. And there might even be customer service messaging going on there. So if we think about orchestrating an intentionally sequenced series, then we can start to think about, oh, can I use more than one channel for some of these touches? Maybe some of these touches are best served through email, but maybe others I’m going to use SMS, I’m going to mix it up and maybe even for a third group. It’s so important to me that I’m going to do it in both, but I’m going to stagger the timing. Love that question.
Danielle Gallant – 00:24:12:
Another hurdle we touched on a couple like cost burnout, but another major hurdle toward SMS adoption is data privacy concerns. Right. Validity research shows that 70% of consumers worry texts received from brands post a data security threat. So any advice for brands to make the data collection and the resulting messaging process more transparent and more trustworthy?
Karen Talavera – 00:24:38:
Well, it’s 100% opt in now, which is good. So one thing is, yes, evolve your preferences centers. That’s low hanging fruit. That’s going to need to be done. Still working with brands whose preferences centers haven’t been updated since 7, 8,10 years ago, this is something not to get off on a tangent about preferences centers, but they should be thought of as living dynamic aspects of our business that need to be continually revisited. Because the choices, the channels, the interest categories that we were giving people access to or the ability to opt into in the past may have changed and we have forgotten to go back and match the preferences center to what we’re collecting on the front end. So there’s a back end, front end tension, I think that’s always there. Now, again, we have additional channels that we’re asking people to opt into, so we’ve got to make it easy for them to opt out. Now, in SMS you can pretty much universally just text the word stop or end and be instantly unsubscribed. But yet I think of the travel industry, big airlines and hotels. I’m a pretty loyal Delta Flyer. I can go in and I have robust choices for how I want to be contacted if my flight has been canceled or delayed, versus for promotions, versus about the loyalty program points, redemption, and so forth. So we’ve got to evolve those preferences centers. But certainly, yeah, make the front end as clear and transparent as possible so people know I can get out at any time. And if I don’t want to get all the way out and I have other choices, I have frequency controls. Great thing to put in a preferences center. Then I know where to go to adjust those.
Danielle Gallant – 00:26:20:
Interesting, right? That’s one place where email and SMS can overlap, right? Give preferences, provide these options, be transparent. Love that.
Guy Hanson – 00:26:29:
I agree. And I think it overlaps with my next question for Karen. Because sitting across the pond as I do, I often sort of look at all the important topics that we talk about through the lens of UK consumers. European consumers. And we talked about our research a little while back and I think one of the things that stood out to me is that while consumers in UK and Europe also like SMS as a channel, they are definitely more cautious about the way that they use it. And their concern about data privacy is significantly more amplified than we saw from our US respondents. And I found myself wondering, is that because we’re in an environment where the GDPR privacy laws have now existed for almost five years and that sort of consumers are more aware of privacy considerations? And you mentioned Karen absolutely, that perhaps those are also sort of amplified by the fact that you typically only do have a primary number and it is a more personal channel. So do we think that there is a relationship between trust in the channel and awareness through that sort of privacy filter in terms of how your data might be used?
Karen Talavera – 00:27:38:
I think there is greater awareness. It’s been building for a while. So at the average consumer level in the US, we’ve been very tolerant to receiving kind of anything and everything. Again, I’m old enough to remember the days of physical mailboxes being jammed full of catalog and direct mail that’s tapered off. But we’ve gotten really good at weeding out and triaging and figuring out what we’re going to pay attention to. Whereas in Europe, in the UK, Canada with more restricted privacy laws, I think that has developed a different consumer mindset. But the trust issue comes into play greatest with data protection and access. There are data breaches every day. The average consumer is becoming more aware that there’s massive amounts of purchase data, payment data, not just their marketing consent stored in places, and nothing is 100% secure. Right? So there’s only so much as advisors or the brands themselves can do to reassure people that their data is being protected. Because I think most people know nothing is ironclad, there’s no foolproof, even government data gets hacked. But I also think people are rightly a little bit suspect, or maybe discerning is the better word about who and how often they give their data to and for what purpose. Right? And to give them that choice of control of I can turn the spigot on a little wider when I want, or I can tighten it or I can turn it off is the name of the game. Not abusing that trust by over messaging, like we talked about with frequency, is really important. So transparency, yes. Great. Central hub for permissions, updated preferences centers, great. But we’ve got to be really cautious about burning out this channel. It happened in the early days of email when the term spam was coined. If you’re just blasting to anybody and everybody based on any point of contact info you can get, there are no rules to the game. We’ll burn this out before it gets any traction and frankly, we. Are living in a giant experiment. We don’t know how SMS marketing is going to net out. It’s evolving and I think we’ve got to be market smarter, not harder. Quality over quantity in our thinking for this.
Danielle Gallant – 00:30:05:
I love what you said about education too, because we’ve seen that with email, right? We’ve seen brands set out like recognize fraud or here’s how you can be more aware of what might be going on and any brand that is executing SMS campaigns needs to be aware of that ecosystem too. I got a text yesterday that a FedEx package had been delivered. I hadn’t ordered anything that was coming to me, right, but I absolutely have. So it’s important for brands to make sure that that’s clear. So agree completely. And at the top of the pod we were talking about how email marketers are now being tasked with SMS marketing too, or at least we’re seeing Senders, who once had an email marketing department, now become an omnichannel marketing department. Do we think SMS is the next phase of the email marketing profession? Do we think these are going to grow together?
Karen Talavera – 00:30:59:
I wouldn’t say I think SMS is the next phase, but I do think it’s sort of like the younger sibling that gets thrown into the, oh well, you’re already taking care of these two kids here. Here’s a third. Or yeah, you already have two dogs here, let’s just put a third. It’s not going to be that much more work, but there are opportunities with that which is, again, thinking through strategically what is really our digital contact strategy, what is our overall Omnichannel digital messaging strategy versus having the siloed approach of, well, we’ve already had email up and running and humming along for 15 years or whatever. Somebody’s watching email, somebody else is dealing with SMS and they’re not talking to each other. That’s what we don’t want. But again, it’s an experiment we do have and we touched on it. The issue of fraud scammers. They’re not going to go away, they’re going to find whatever channel is available for abuse. So. Thank you, Apple. I’m an iPhone user, so I can’t speak to the other phones for at least letting me see for SMS known senders and unknown senders and do a little bit of triage that way. Because to the example that you mentioned, yeah, there’s the oh, you ordered this or your payment failed. All these attempts to try to get personal credit card data and so forth. So as brands, yes, can we do some more education? Letting them know we will never text you, asking you to update your credit card number, we will never text you with this sort of thing or that sort of thing, we will not use SMS for that. We would send you an email or we would wait until you were logged in to let you know that that can go a long way as well.
Guy Hanson – 00:32:40:
I think that’s really great advice. Now, unfortunately. I mean, we could keep this conversation going all day and it’s just fascinating because you’ve shared so many brilliant tips and tactics with us, but we need to start wrapping things up. We have one more question for you, Karen, which is actually not directly related to today’s conversation, unless you want it to be, but love to put you on the spot and say, as you mentioned, we all sign up for all and Sundry programs to see what they’re doing. Also puts you in a great position to sort of pick out the ones that aren’t doing such a great job. So have you seen any particularly egregious examples of marketing lately, Email, SMS, which stand out and what made it as bad as it was?
Karen Talavera – 00:33:26:
Well, I’m not going to name names, but I will say the common thread is volume. So if there is a standout tactic or a standout habit that is turning people away, it is too much messaging too soon, which is a signal to me. I mean, that is a glaring red flag that a brand is not actually listening to the signals customers are giving or subscribers are giving and saying, we’re not going to try to tailor our frequency and our contact strategy to the known behaviors of our target audiences. We’re going to just do what we want. It’s going to be all about us. So there’s two sides to that coin as well. And I can already hear in my head one of my UK based colleagues saying, well, some of the brands that send a lot of messages, whether it’s SMS or email, do that because it works. So if you can, as a marketer justify your contact strategy because your data backs you up, you can say, hey, we’ve tested frequency. Yes, we’re a high volume sender, but we’ve tested that when we taper off from two promotional emails a day to two a week, we lose sales because we have kind of a rolling percentage of our customers who are always interested and always buying, and we need those more frequent touches to reach the entire spectrum of people. If you could say that, great. If you cannot say that, if you are not doing the measurement, if you are not paying attention to interval time between purchases and frequency of purchases by different customer deciles and all of the other juicy, good customer analytics, rfm type analysis that have been done for a long time that are kind of known knowledge. You’re not doing that, then you really have to question your rationale. So just too much and tone deaf messaging, that doesn’t take into consideration, hey, I haven’t bought from you in a year. Why are you still sending me two emails a day or sending me SMS promo message every other day? That’s the most egregious thing I’m seeing.
Guy Hanson – 00:35:37:
Just before we hand over to Danielle, you made me smile when you mentioned that UK colleague and I think I know who you mean. And Danielle, I feel like we should get him onto a future episode of Email After Hours so he can put his case forward as well. But we’ll save that for another episode.
Danielle Gallant – 00:35:53:
Absolutely. Karen, thank you so much for joining us and sharing all of these amazing insights for how we can best use our SMS marketing strategy. And Guy, do you want to give a little teaser for what we might be talking about next time?
Guy Hanson – 00:36:07:
I do indeed. We are going to be speaking with Michael Affronti, who is SVP and General Manager of Commerce Cloud, part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So watch this space. It’s going to be another fascinating conversation. Don’t miss it. Be sure to tune in next time and hit subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes. And don’t forget to visit eenderscore.com for loads more great resources to help you become a stronger sender.
Danielle – 00:36:36:
To all you sleepless senders out there. Thank you for joining us after hours and see you next time.
