Email vs SMS Marketing: What to Send Where (Strategy, Examples & ROI)

One of the things I really love that I'm seeing a lot of is sort of like mini surveys and mini quizzes and things, because not only does that enable you to get things like email and phone number, but it also enables you to understand more about your customer. Make sure that the message is relevant. Okay, so just in that example that I gave around my friends, you know, make sure you kind of try to know who you're saying hello to, how you get some sstarted, right, because you might be thinking, well, it's great, I have emails from people. I have everyone's email address, but I don't actually have their phone number. Let's get focused on today's session and today we have an absolute legend with us. We have Ali Wood from MailChimp. Now MailChimp are a brand that are like in beauty mode history and I won't go into that, but Ali, on a very personal basis, has been such a big supporter of the marketing meter over the years and just like a real good person just to check in with every so often. Before we get started, I just want to say a big, big thank you to all of our sponsors, because without our sponsors, we're going to have to bring these sessions to you. So a big thank you to Wistier, to MailChimp, to Cambridge Marketing College, Frontifying Plannable, they're all wicked brands who do so much and of course we're going to be speaking to Ali today from one of them. So with all that said, I'm bringing Ali on stage and I'm saying hello, it's over to you. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks Joe, thanks for having me. Hi everyone. It's really nice to be able to spend some time with you this afternoon. So nice to meet everyone. My name's Ali Wood and head of Partnerships for the UK and Ireland Intuit MailChimp. I've been in and around the EECOM space for over 15 years. I've had my fair share of technology conversations and I'm really excited today to talk to you about email and SMS. So without further ado, for those of you that don't know Intuit MailChimp, we are a email marketing tool. We've been around for over two decades, so we've been in the space for a very, very long time and we've really gone through a transitional journey recently. Being a traditional sort of besting class tool for SMEs to send bulk emails, to send simple emails, simple email campaigns, right the way through now to being this fully powerful email marketing platform that has AI built in, automations, segmentations and soon to be connected with QuickBooks and financial data too. So since we were acquired by Intuit a few years ago, who are a massive US tech giant, we've got lots of new things coming on board and today the MailChimp is a very, very different product. So I'm really excited to be part of that journey and I think one of the things that is really interesting as well is the evolution that email is now having with the likes of SMS and social media, so we'll dive into a little bit of that today. If you've got any questions as I go, please drop them in the chat because we'll have plenty of time afterwards for us to dive in and get some answers to what's top of mind for you. Okay, so really we can't talk about SMS without talking about email. These two are really linked together. We all want to get the right story to the right person at the right time, which is ultimately going to make them purchase something from us, or do an action that we want them to do. So by bringing SMS and email marketing together, it really enables you to bring a cohesive journey to your customer. The way that we look at these things is you're getting the right message at the right time and in the right kind of format as well because as you'll see as I go through these slides, there's certain messages that work really well for SMS, there's some messages that work really well with email. So by bringing those two things together, you can really start to build a journey that the customer starts to engage with and your message will fall to your person in a much, in the right way. If you just want to give them a nudge through an SMS and get them to do something or get them to be aware of something, you can then link that back to your email marketing strategy. And we've had customers that have had some really great success with this over the years. I mean SMS is a tool itself. So this is a direct link into your customer's mindset, right? If you think about email, you have to go and load up your email. Your emails have got to download. When you get a ping from your SMS, that message is right there for the consumer to see. So the SMS part of this is really surpassing sort of like the, you know, the immediacy that you really want to get from an SMS message. And what we see is it's really good for things like impact messages, flow ups around like journey flows. And we're seeing about a 12% average click-through rate on our SMS right now that customers like the ROI from an SMS campaign on their first one was 16.5x. So we are absolutely driving real engagement from audiences through SMS messaging. And, you know, the stats are quite crazy really. 97% higher click rate when you're using email and SMS together. And I'll talk a little bit more about how you can connect those two as I carry on. So to create a successful digital content journey, as I've mentioned, we want to coordinate both SMS and email. And this is really kind of like building like a multi-channel campaign. And there's core parts of the processes that you want to be looking at. So let's say, for example, that you have a seasonal offer, what you can do is when you're using email, your email marketing is telling a story, right? It's helping to build brand. It's it's where you're telling longer, there's longer content for you to be sending out to the recipients of that. So what you can do is use your SMS strategy to prompt people that you're going to be doing that. So you might want to nudge your SMS through SMS, nudge their loyal customers to say, hey, look, this is coming down the line. Watch out from the email that we're going to be sending you tomorrow. And that could be, you know, a new product launch, an event, some sort of social media campaign. But it's a good way to ensure that, you know, that email that you're putting a lot of effort into is going to get seen by the person that you want to see it. We all know that we do get huge amounts of emails in our inboxes. So from an SMS perspective, it's a way to kind of cut through the noise and make sure that you've got that, you know, where the consumers got that awareness. And so as I just mentioned, what we're trying to do is get these channels working together. Now, this is a good example of where we, where we've looked at how you can use your email with your SMS. So when you're thinking about email, this is where you want to be putting that, the full details. So if we take that example, I just spoke to in your email, if you've got a special something that you're launching or offer, the email is where you're going to be putting a huge amount of that information, links to T's and C's, imagery, all of your descriptive wording. But what you work then can do with SMS is you can nudge the and send reminders that it's coming, coming down the road. Also, you can use your email to look at non-responders. So maybe you sent an email, you didn't get a response and you want someone to get in touch with you. You can then sort of do more of like tactical, tactical, so I can't go where's that tactical nudges through your SMS campaign to say, hey, did you see the email we send? Or here's a promotional offer that's linked to the email that I just sent you. One of the things that we look at as well when we're thinking about this is that the data that you can start building up with this cohesive strategy. If, for example, you are sending a segment of your user base, an email about a specific product that you've launched, and then you follow up with SMS with a specific offer linked to that. You can then start building up a picture of the people that are much more driven to purchase or to buy through you based on a discount. So they're sort of like you can then create all these people of price sensitive. I'm going to start putting that into my segmentation analysis to start seeing, okay, well, maybe this subset of people here are much more prone to offers and maybe that's how I need to start engaging with them going forward. So these two channels, like they, it just, it can go back and forth, which is what I really love about it. I actually had a really interesting example myself through a, it was a company that sells home furnishings. I'd bought a lamp and then through SMS, I got a message that said, hey, hope you love your lamp. We thought these things might also go with it. And then it was a link to, you know, two or three new items. That was really nice. I clicked on the links, had a look. And then I received an email after that saying, you know, what did you think of what we sent you, his, you know, his 10%. So it was actually a real emotion play of what we are educating our customers to do on a regular basis. And I think they did a really good job this particular company because they know what products are like a best suited with the, with the lamp that I bought. They're already starting to build up a picture of what I like. They knew I was interested because I clicked on the links. So they're starting to build a nice picture about me in the background and then using that in their email marketing strategy as well. So when marketers are, you know, streamlining SMS and email campaigns, you're basically taking big strides in order to achieve, like, and accelerate your growth. It's a very much a dynamic duo that works really well together. You know, we all know how much time we each spend on our phone, but I think on the average person, it's three hours and 50 minutes. So if you can send a message to someone, it's going to pop up on their screen. The likelihood of them seeing it is extremely high. And we've seen that through getting sort of like 90% open rate on SMS messages. So that is huge and very high compared to email. But what the SMS doesn't do is then enable you to continue to build the story with your customer. So that's where the email piece sits in very nicely with it. And what we're seeing is it's different in different industries around how you can kind of automate your triggers. But there's a lot of like natural triggers that you can automate through an SMS strategy, which will save you a lot of time and money. So for example, if you're in a non-profit, you could automate donation requests that are linked to a particular event. So say for example, cruises on the TV and you're fundraising for animals, you know, cruises on the TV. You might want to set that there's a text going outside and hey, please donate to our doctoratee, for example. But what we're seeing in kind of like food and beverage is things that get automated like order confirmation, delivery updates, texting for reviews. So there's something really kind of quick and easy, especially if someone's ordered their food on their phone, they're much more likely to be on their phone and looking at when's the food going to be delivered. Oh, yeah, let me give you a quick review there. Ecom, again, very much like like the example that I just gave with the furniture store, but you've also got like flash flash sales, limited time offers. And just the general sort of like thanks for signing up. I think one of the things that you need to be thinking about is actually how you get SMS started, right? Because you might be thinking, well, it's great. I have emails from people. So one of the things that you can do is look to some of the email marketing strategies to start collecting that information. So maybe you might want to put a pop up on your website. You know, if you're interested to hear more, do you want to sign up to our SMS alerts? One of the things I really love that I'm seeing a lot of is sort of like mini surveys and mini quizzes and things because not only does that enable you to get things like email and phone number, but it also enables you to understand more about your customer. Now I talk into my friend saying, I'm doing this presentation today and she had an example of where she had received SMS marketing. And this is where it hadn't gone so well. So she had bought something from her son, for her son, who is 13. And so it was her phone number on the order and then she received a message. And I think the initial start of the message was like, hey guys or something really kind of like very much driven towards a 13 year old and not her. And so which point she was like, I'm not reading that. Now if you're clever about these things, you can try and build up a picture of what my friend was doing. Are you by, is this purchase for you? If they'd have been using the data that they've collected, they would have seen that it was a boy's item and she's the mom. So you've got a difference in gender there. So we can think about how we can start to build up this picture and then make sure that you're sending the right messages at the right time because I think it would have fallen a bit better if it had had an introduction that was much more aligned to where she was as a consumer. And I think also like don't take things around, you know, just because someone giving you their phone number is a very, it's a personal, it's much more personal than email. And so what you want to be thinking about is these three words. Make sure that it's a fresh message. Don't keep saying the same thing day in, day out, that will really wind people up and turn them off from engaging with you. Okay. So just in that example that I gave around my friends, you know, make sure you kind of try and know who you're saying hello to try and be valuable as well. So I thought that it was my example. I thought it was really relevant that maybe there would be something that I wanted to put with my lamp. So I could see that it was a valuable message for me to receive and then just start using what that what happens with the data that you start seeing, making sure that you're feeding that into a feedback loop of is my strategy working and how can I use what I'm learning in SMS into email and vice-pert. And moving on around sort of like leveraging data. So you need to be thinking about segmentation just like you do in email for SMS. Okay. So to maximize, you need to segmentize and timeize. I've made up those words today because I needed a bit of rhyme to go into this. But really thinking about like just moving beyond sort of like the basic demographic. So moving away from sort of like age or location to looking at the purchase behavior and thinking of creative ways that you can start building up that database like in pop-up forms, for example. And what's really nice when you can you know you can start putting your the segmentation that you're looking at on email, but then start testing and learning as you go, you know, what works on email might work for a subset of people, but that same subset might be different on SMS, you know. So having a think about A/B testing, seeing different messages, different lengths of messages, and then feeding that, giving that all into that big feedback loop so that you can see the responsiveness that you're getting. Because ultimately what you want to do is reduce that your cost of acquisition. And so you want to be making sure that you're spending the right amount of money right in the right place at the right time. So you know if you're really not getting any response on a particular segment when you're sending us particular message at one time, then maybe try and change the time and start analysing, analysing what you're doing there. I've just seen in the chat someone said if customers are opt out, can they unsubscribe? Yes, you have to give, I'll touch on that, but you have to give the option for people to subscribe out of SMS, just in exactly the same way that they have to subscribe in. I've touched on this a bit, yeah, so optimizing for your performance, look at things differently and then look at them collectively. So one of the things that you want to be thinking about is are you measuring your, are you measuring and then refining what you're doing? So in your head, for example, you might think let's go back to the original example I gave. I want to send this email. I want to get more eyes on that email because it's a really big announcement. So I'm going to nudge people through SMS. Now you need to be checking that actually that SMS nudged an increase in open rate on that email. So can you see the correlation between the two and then how are you going to move that forward? Also you might want to be thinking around sort of like which channels drives the biggest intent. So you know, is SMS driving your most amount of sales or is it still coming from the email? What if you send both messages, similar messages through both emails and these are more like marketing messages that I'm talking about now rather than like your transactional thanks for your order, your order is being delivered tomorrow, like those sorts of things. And I think that channel follow up is really important as well when you're thinking about budget and how much money you're spending. You know, yes, you put your plan in place but then you need to be coming back and doing that review of whether ultimately your message is driving new sign apps, new purchases, new donors, whatever that whatever success looks like to you. And one of the other, we touched on it previously but I think you know, looking at sort of like that price sensitivity stuff as well. So using your email marketing campaign to drive out that new message of it's a new season, these are new things going on or we've got this big event. If you're then not getting a huge amount of in click-throughs from that and then you send an SMS, did that work, did that SMS then drive the outcomes that you were looking for and then you can start to correlate saying, oh great, well we sort of we start with you know telling people about stuff through our email marketing strategy and then we use SMS as a follow up to get the actual click-through that we want. And I think there's really sort of like there are different, depending on your own business and even maybe even down to like who is in your database, they will read different messages in different ways. So one person might just need a hook to do something someone might need a lot more information to feel comfortable and also I think this is where when you're looking at email and SMS, if you've got a new set of contacts, they might not necessarily be trustworthy, they might not trust your brand yet, they might not know exactly what you'll do, if you're selling stuff, maybe they haven't bought anything from you yet. So there might be a few additional barriers as to why they're not engaging with you or purchasing something. So this is where I would always really recommend that you need to be building on your email marketing strategy to start educating them more on hey we do free returns or you know this is more about our brand, this is why we're here and then use and then once they become more more familiar with your brand you know if they're like VIPs you can start, you've trust would have been built and then so SMS can be a real sort of like leave it there for you to you know drive more share of wallet. So I've just put a couple of like here, because I'm quite conscious that I'm talking a lot about SMS, automations, campaigns, just in case anybody here doesn't really isn't really at that part of their journey yet. You know you want to, if you're building a campaign, it's basically a flow in which you want to take a user through and so you can see here we've got you know a new campaign they subscribe to our email, they're a VIP member member. So you can work SMS into that so you know maybe they have a new mother says thanks for your order then you might send them an SMS that says hey we've shipped your order, here's your tracking number four if they're already kind of like in your VIP space maybe you might want to send them on one time discount code if you if there's a new product again go back to the example of I said with the furniture store they I was already a customer I'd already bought something we think you might like these product recommendations and then once you sync both the email and your SMS campaign you can then use automation to trigger what the SMS or email follow ups do so and this is something that's really quite nice because actually you've only really got to work out once on the flow that you want to take that that consumer through and then you can set it up to automate based on what they do and then you can start seeing patterns within you know whether whether they did go down the flow that you wanted them to or whether they've got stuck at a particular point and then start looking at a new strategy to take them elsewhere. Here's just a use case that we have from one of our non-profit and so they do a lot of raffles or ticket selling in order to raise funds so you can see here there's just some examples of how they've advertised buying tickets very simple SMS strategy you can see here to the person who asked about opting out you know you can you have to put this note here that says stop tech stop to opt out and then people will not receive the text messages anymore and then you know you've got things like you can get you can do more there's a I'm touching on this a little bit but RCS is coming which is more of a picture-led type SMS you can also do like multimedia messaging as well so you can start to put imagery into your text messages as well that would have been something that would have been quite nice for my example instead of seeing a link I would have seen a picture of something and that would have gone with the lamp and that these are this is our customer that's using sort of like events multimedia though for us in the UK isn't something that we're focusing on because we're focusing on RCS and so I'll touch on that in a couple of slides time but this is just to show you that there's developments in SMS and it's becoming much more interactive and I did see in the chat as well someone mentioned SMS and what's up so I'll also touch on that too but that is something that's coming as well so there's evolution in SMS for sure and just quickly some like automation examples which I was speaking speaking on as well just to put this into kind of perspective you know the customer buys the product are they a repeat customer yes or no so yeah if they're not then I'm going to send them a link to sign up to my loyalty program if they are I'm going to send them a reward SMS so you can really think about this in exactly the same way as an email journey and you can also kind of like copy these over to email too it's once you sort of start testing and learning you can start to see what really starts to work cut abandonment is also a really good one you've got your welcome series so all of these different like welcome series cut abandonment series reminders for appointments they can all be they can all be created under separate workflows and the customer just automatically goes into them and then you can start looking at the data on in the back end and you can also look at how you think about SMS with your social media strategy as well so um one of the again this is kind of like driving things driving consumers kind of like back and forth so do you want to create exclusive social media content for example to your VRP customers maybe that's something that would be very interesting for them so you could SMS them the link and get them to get the social media content there but I think one of the things that we always start saying with this is start small and then start seeing what's working for you and again very much like I mentioned before like if you start looking at like the sequencing that you're doing which sequencing way is working well and also make sure that you um think about the time of which you send these messages and actually how long are they and so you know with SMS there's you know finite amount of characters who might have to be creative when we come down to kind of like RCS messaging which you you'll be able to send more um so let's just recap the benefits so we're going to you're going to consolidate your marketing efforts into one but get two two data sources really in two ways of engaging with your customers and then by putting both SMS and email together you can start merging and unifying like the profiles of people as well so you can start putting those two things together um and then what you can start doing is crafting your journeys based on that and you should be getting maximum ROI if you start doing this because you're going to be getting really quick learnings from the SMS strategy you're going to know who's doing clicks and and who's not and then start seeing where the best return on investment is for you and ultimately you're going to be creating a much more of a personalized experience you know if you've signed if someone signed up to email and then your SMS strategy and you know them as a regular customer you can really start to build up a relationship and you might be able to get them to respond you can definitely do that with with WhatsApp that's coming through but one thing I do want to call out is obviously the regulations so with all of these things ddpr is something that comes into play um and you do need to be thinking about that so the main consent headlines really is you need to get explicit consent that that person wants to receive email and SMS you need to make sure that they can unsubscribe and also there's some with SMS there's some timing issue not issues timing rules so it's best to only really send an SMS within the working day um and you can't really send them between the hours 8pm and 9am so that's something to consider and also if you've got a global audience or you know even a European audience and we've got timezone differences make sure that if we've got anything on automation that that's not going to impact someone in in Europe who might be an hour ahead for example one thing that you also might need to think about depending on where you are is whether you need to get your list scrubbed against a do not call list and just to make everyone aware of that but if you you know if you're going out and doing some sort of like campaign to drive a phone number sign up and they've consented then you should be okay so just to recap some of the best practices that i've spoken about today so we've just covered sort of like compliance and permission and also time and frequency so make sure that you are avoiding hours outside of business and also that you're not sending too many messages per month you need to think start learning how many times your customers want to hear from you know um and i'm sure receiving more than like one text message a day would not be helpful content and formatting so you need to keep your messages concise and don't forget about your course to action and then you know use your you the way to automate um and merging your tags for personalization and then incorporating that into the strategy that you want to put ahead for SMS i'm nearly there i'm nearly at the end i think this might be my last slide say the best to last so the evolution of SMS is rcs which is rich communication services really glad i put that on there because i couldn't remember what it was earlier but ultimately like this is like sms on steroids basically so you can see that it can be much more branded you can become a verified sender so that's going to improve your engagement rate as well they're going to know that who the message is from it will be trusted and verified and you can see there that you've got more imagery it's rich content like links are embedded and you can put like action buttons now which is say like you know like in this example it says book now so you click there and you'd be taken into the booking page which is really nice we're reducing the friction there and it feels a lot more like an app experience you can even put things like maps or payment triggers within an rcs message as well so this is we've launched it in beta at the moment so if it's something that you are interested in drop me through a message on LinkedIn um and i can get you included in conversations there it's really really exciting i know whatsapps mean questions on the chat so that is also something that's coming i'd say probably for h2 for us it's a similar strategy but not i think for whatsapp you need to be thinking about um the audience that you're engaging with um especially when it kind of comes to age there's a lot of data around you know um gen z versus even millennial like whether they received text messages or whatsapp and who your main audience is and also sort of like um the use cases as well um with whatsapp you can have more of an engaged kind of like conversation whereas kind of like sms messaging is a bit more one way it's kind of like action driven so i can go into that i'll be back when we have whatsapp live i'm sure i will pester drode to come and um give you an overview on that as well but yeah that is all i wanted to cover today on email an sms happy to answer any questions you're a wonderful alleyward thank you so much it's uh it's it's fascinating because like i i've saying this to you before we went live today that i don't think it's a topic that a lot of us have focused on or even really thought about an awful lot and so if you to give us that whistle stop tour right there was so so appreciated and the chat has been fabulous today as well so also a big thank you to everyone for dropping in like we were being kind definitely was always very good bunch i think you've got you've got some all the same members of the Mark tomato community right here uh this today folks i can i can actually see that there's already uh there's 11 open questions right now uh and we have things to start to the Q&A right now so um we should probably get to those alley um and i've got some as well and then hit me my sms uh counterpart will i will this alright i'll be kind and and it is a good point that if we can't answer then uh alle's linked in this in the top right corner there as well so uh please do drop alle uh hello and thank you and the question if you have one as well um so let's take the first ones i'm gonna i'm gonna throw like an emotional question at your first alley because like i'm i'm interested like we we spoke a bit about this when before we scheduled stay a session so we've got Lizzy in the Q&A who says is there any date around how sms makes people feel so Lizzy says i know we shouldn't base our marketing on our own bias but personally i'm i'm not that keen on receiving marketing sms so i wonder how it puts people off and so like this was i think you put it really well throughout the duration of the thing that is sort of like you got to be mindful in the same ways we got to be with any marketing channel but is there anything particularly unique to sms when it comes to that sort of emotional reaction to things i think yeah i think it is hard to take the emotion out of it isn't it because we all have preferences in the way and i won't tell you how many emails are unopened in my inbox as a consumer but we do have stats around you just need to look at i think it was like 98% open rate of of an sms so you know that's staggering and i can definitely get some more case studies kind of like over to you guys so you can see what people are doing it's a very competitive world out there and if you're not in someone's if someone's not seeing your name they're seeing your competitors name so i think you know if you've got a if you've got a good message to send and something that you believe is relevant to that person then i think you have the authority to be in their inbox if they said yeah text me because the whole point around you know us giving being able to give consent is that they are happy for you to be there so i think that's kind of probably how i would take up my own sort of you know personal preferences out of it and see what your customers are saying see what your audience are saying you know we'd love to start sms would you be interested maybe i want to start if you feel a bit nervous about it and then see what they say and maybe start small love that i think that's that's really really sensible thank you you know that is here's one of those you know i mean i've experienced it myself too many times possibly because my character where i want to say things quietly and and then just nothing happens and so as you say as long as you've gone about it the right way with the right permissions etc etc then it's something you still do mindfully and respectfully that same thing goes for any channel so yeah i love that and thank you speaking to you that and let's take the next one from the legend that is bagel so bagel is just like fabulous a wonderful human being and so you spoke about rcs already but i wondered because there's a question that's come in on it perhaps we can speak to it for a little bit longer so bagels ask curious from a UK perspective and for context bagel there's a lot of work over in taiwan and and and china as well so there's probably a bit of cultural relevance here most brands still relying on sms today or are you seeing rcs get real traction yet so i'd be interested in like knowing how much we have to pay attention to rcs like is it coming now is it around the corner and sort of speak into that just a little bit more yeah so i mean i think yes so people are using sms and i think like we're going to because we're only in a beta at the moment so i don't have a huge amount of data but the obviously all of the people that are in our beta are the people that have been sending sms and now i'm seeing the value of it i'm wondering okay what's next how can i make how can i make this better and i think that i think again it's going to be down to the type of business that you are in because you know with your business will you get more clicks if you can show a beautiful chair or a lovely picture of a hotel or a new room that's been redecorated in your Airbnb or whatever your you know whatever your vertical is if you have if imagery helps you sell then i would be thinking at unlooking at rcs that could be very helpful for me and you know but if you're using sms you know really to do sort of like you know more of the transactional stuff like here's an offer or if your offer's a generic like it's 20% of everything then you you know you could probably say that maybe you don't need a picture but if it's 20% of this particular product for this particular time because it's our best seller then you feel that that imagery would help then that's really where i would start thinking about it and as we build out again more information um more like data around from our beta i can share that with you i think that's probably an interesting conversation for when we launch whatsapp as well because my question here would be okay rcs versus whatsapp where's where you know what's the difference is there and where is it a bright fit for me i don't know the answers to that just yet because we haven't got whatsapp there but when we do we'll know more no i love that i think you can get a lot from the intuitive sense of what like you know how it would feel as a consumer because at the end of the day we will get these messages as well and so to know yeah that beautiful chair that you're speaking about is actually quite enticing you know it probably would benefit from an image and it's just again it's interesting to to hear about the progression of the tactic which is which is really cool so i mean there's been a lot of questions coming in around whatsapp and stuff like that i mean i appreciate isn't the focus of the conversation necessarily but i mean given folks are asking is there is a specific question here which it says is there any stats about the most affecting messaging platform i.e sms whatsapp messenger etc but probably broaden that out and just sort of say in a similar sense that conversation that we just had about rcs like is there anything we should be thinking about with the whatsapp sort of stuff coming on the horizon i mean from from the conversations that i've had internally and i'm not hugely close to this at this point but it is to two things that were called out to me was your the audience and the use case so who is your audience what are your audience or whatsapp or are they going to be able to receive a text message you know i weirdly i think with this that text messages have had a research i felt like there was a time in no text and now i'm getting all of these text messages which is very strange to 2016 now at this point not here but you know it's ultimately it is about sort of like your marketing strategy really isn't it and it's about you know how am i going to get my message to the person that i want to give that message to and i would i don't we can look and see if we can find some stats around what's best but again i think i would fall back on what do you know what do you know about your audience this is where we come we do a lot of education with our customers around actually like do you know enough about your audience in your database because that is kind of a ground stakes really like do you know their age do you know you know do you know they're profiling do you what else do you know about them and then how can you make this like an educated assumption as to what the best way is going to be and then that's also why you've got the a b testing as well so that you can make an assumption test it and see if you're right um once we launch what's that we will have more concrete like icp's as to an example of where because we'll have all of the solutions and where those solutions go so i can make sure that we share those with you thank you Ali let's take the next one from from Ashling because part of your answer there kind of covered off what we were speaking about a little bit so you covered it off in the presentation as well um but Ashling says any suggestion outside outside of the website on how to collect more emails or SMSes so Ashling says in their case that pop-ups aren't working well have you have you seen any best practice for sort of gathering information i mean when you say pop-ups aren't working well i'd love to dive into that a bit more because mostly it is driven three pop-ups on the website right but there are ways in which you can use pop-ups to be more effective so you know is your pop-up just saying hey gives you a email or drawing our database like usually there needs to be a bit of give and get and that's why like i really like i like um doing i like the quizzes because i feel like i'm getting something i'm helping you know if someone's willing to give you their personal information they're kind of willing to for you they want you to want to know what they want i want to be recommended things that are good for me i don't want to be recommended something that i bought yesterday which has happened numerous times before as well um so and like one of the examples that i've had on like pop-up forms is if you have like a clearance tab or if there's certain times of the year where things are cheaper like if you're in travel for example in January sales like you know January sales in general you kind of know that people are price sensitive so you can sort of what's the message that you want to give to them in order for them to give you their contact details um i don't know if maybe you know you could create a landing page and use your email marketing strategy to try and get more phone numbers from people's you know what's but what's the value do you want to create a loyalty program that you know we're the only text if text you if we're in your if you're in our loyalty program and we promise to give you xy and zed you know if you're in our loyalty program we're going to give you this newsletter and you're going to get this you're like what are you going to give people in order for them to feel comfortable to swap their data totally and i fully agree and there's the exchange of give and get there's also the clarity point i think is is really important so the line which i was fell fell fell off at the beginning of my career was you know the latest inbox latest updates straight into your inbox and it's just like this generic line so it doesn't necessarily say like here's what you're going to get in exchange for your information which ultimately we feel precious about yeah totally yeah i mean like i i love i love the marketing meter but you know like i wouldn't if someone i just said give us your email address i'm not sure many people would want that and so there's a few examples that come to mind uh straight off the bat there's people like how he drive from marketing examples as a really lovely sign up form where he says get one email per week with three tips and so there's a very clear value exchange straight back and you know the same here could play for SMS i think Dave Harland has like get a one email per week with a funny thing and something else there's a very clear value exchange but then the thing he uses really well as well is social proof so 20,000 marketers get the email or something like that and so there's these lovely little missouts or that's it that's knowledge that's it maybe maybe we need to run a pop up clinic or something similar to the landing page i think also don't assume like but we we love to assume as humans and you know like one of the things that was really successful over like the festive period was just a quick pop up you buy in this for yourself for someone else you know and you and we had customers that also did that as an email marketing strategy after did you love it who was it for was it a gift for him or for her and so you start building up and then you're not going to be in the example that i mentioned with my friend where she's naked or whatever the introduction to that text message was so true and like i think pool is some bit up quite nicely in the chat here that says we collect consent for emails slash SMS etc on exhibition booths at conferences the customer visit our engage and often want more content i can almost feel the vibe in in some other chat and some of the questions which is almost like that a little bit of hesitancy and stuff like that and i guess it's just a really nice point from pool here which is like you know if you get the message right with the right people etc it is well of course it is you know because it's it's helping the last example i'll give before moving on to the next question is like you know this isn't trying to flex but like one of the things i'm proud of is like giving blood and like i'll get texts about uh there's an appointment near you at whatever point and it's like it is just a welcome reminder and so like i think in the same way as the question here was about like getting more people to sign up i think that we can apply the same logic so this whole conversation is clear straight from the earth and people are really happy to have these communications combine it with that 98% open rate and you're onto something quite powerful i think also the only other thing that i would add on it as well is like sms isn't going to build your community sms going to build lovers of your brand and understand why your brand exists and what your mission is and what you're trying to achieve your email marketing strategy is going to do that so you know you need to get are they engaged at that level before then you ask them nice sms love that that's very solid and a really useful way of thinking about it as well thank you you know we always prime our speakers whenever we come in sort of saying you know don't do the hard sell thing etc etc that being said there's a question here that's come in from a net eight minutes ago and and that is not a plant and that is just a lovely member of the community who has asked how can you effectively use sms when your systems are outdated and automation isn't possible and the reason why you know i can't be out there's a fairly obvious answer with Ali from Mailchimp here but could you could you give any advice to him i mean i would i would think about looking at more of a sophisticated tool to communicate with your with your base you know if you if you if you've managed to build up a big enough like pool of people that you can that you want to communicate with that's that's the hard parts you know um i would i think my only recommendation is speak to speak to a company like Mailchimp and understand what is possible and you know what that would mean for your business and because you're not really going to be able to you can't really do it without one of those tools you know this is what these we're here to help you so you can concentrate on your business you know your business is what's my what's my what's my company objective what do i want to bring to the world how do people engage with me you know whatever that is like our job is to just give you the tools to be able to do that and there's some really cool nifty things that can help take time off your hands and get that stuff moving in the background and once you do that i think you'll never look back love that thank you Ali and as as mentioned before then i'm properly setting you up here i hope in a nice way Ali that your LinkedIn profile is in the corner at the screen. Let's take the next question because you mentioned timings and i think this is a really great question from Lex as well so Lex says do you have any suggestions on timings that you mentioned to be careful about what time we send SMS i've got a good idea on social media best practice but how do these SMS strategies differ for the best times to send so your advice in the presentation was about a message during during the working day and being careful of time zones is there anything extra good. So i mean legally you can send a message any time outside as long as it's not after 8pm and before 9am again i think this is going to need to come down it's going to need to be your strategy isn't it so i would make an assumption that if you get good engagement on social media at a particular time then maybe SMS might follow suit or maybe it's a bit after that but i think this is going to be everybody's going to be different in this and i think this is probably like doing some maybe testing and finding out and even just trying different segments as well so if you're segmenting your base for email maybe trying different time zones you know i would guess people commuting you know that's a good time to maybe send a message but i don't have any kind of concrete evidence yet but if who was who asked the question this was lex lex the legend lex you want to drop me for a message and tell me more about your business i'll see if we've got any other customers in your vertical and what they're doing and what kind of success is there getting and i'll happily share those if i don't have anything off the top of my head because it's it's all very arbitrary to your your particular audience really totally no i think it's a really great point and you know i can remember in back in the day when i used to work in the e-commerce agency you know we used to have very different tactics for the end of the morning when people didn't buy quite as much versus 5 pm when people did so i think it's amazing and i would like and and that the the the number of messages that you're sending as well in a particular time there is one drinks company that just constantly kept texting me and i was like oh my goodness so and i think that's tested then totally love that thank you you actually answered one of the questions just with that last bit there so you nailed that as well let's speak about the interface a little bit as we we come to the close so we've got the very very amazing very lovely Simon Hague in the question saying thinking automation can non-red SMS be flagged in a sequence to rescind or send via email and i guess to broaden out the question is this is much about the interface in the automations and stuff like that in terms of when we come to practically do these things but how are they presented in the platform you know and and how that sort of works in terms of building those flows yeah that's a really really good question i believe it would go into a flow of non-opened like an email okay cool non-flagged red but i will triple check my answer with my SMS expert on that and then what and then understand what you can do so again send me a message please send me a message i can follow up on that directly because it's a great question and my understanding is that it can work similar to email but let me let me verify perfect alley wood you have been a legend there are open questions not so there are some open questions but i think what we'll do is the nice thing is you've you've been great in support in TMM so this isn't the last interaction by any way and so i feel like hopefully through the newsletter and our social medias etc we can carry on telling this story as well so it's very much appreciated not until and thank you at all of course to everyone for being absolutely incredible as ever in the chat in the q&a pop in the new amazing questions and just being wonderful as ever it's absolutely brilliant to see you every week and it's just uh really really appreciated with all that said i felt like i spoke over you there alley which uh felt uh pretty bad but i just want to say thank you very much for taking the time alien and thank you to everyone in the chat for being incredible um we'll be back next week with Danny from a sauna speaking productivity uh so very very different kind of chat uh but in the meantime please do say a big thank you to alley on linkedin and uh we'll see you next week thank you very much for being bye take care