Rethinking SMS Marketing for Ecommerce: AI, RCS & LTV

25% of people who give you their phone number and buy something in the first 30 days. That's why people keep putting money into the SMS ATM. People are like, "Oh, I don't want to annoy people." And like, "Well, if you annoy people, we would show up as unsub, right, right?" You can send about eight messages per person, per month, and without seeing an uptick in that, whatsoever. We are in the very early innings of thinking about frequency. I really want to test it. Maybe not as aggressive, but I am super curious to test a more elaborate aggressive onboarding experience. Well, we'll jump into it. So, for those listening, we're obviously here with Mike Mannheimer. Mike, your CMO at Post-Criptor also CMO and Chief Customer Officer? Yeah, I'm technically, I just go by Chief Customer Officer now. Got it. I started at Post-Cript five years ago as the CMO eventually made sense to take over the customer facing teams. I'm a marketer. We sell to marketers and service marketing teams. And so there's some crossover there. And so about two years ago, I took over the customer side, which would be customer success. The professional services onboarding and added that to my existing responsibilities on, you know, marketing and business development. And so all of that reports up to me. And so if you are a Post-Cript customer, thank you very much. You probably have worked with my team. If you are not a Post-Cript customer, you have probably heard from my team, the other part of my team. And so, yeah, that's my role at Post-Cript. So technically, CCO now. Before we get any further into the episode, I want to thank our sponsors as always, Motion, Pression, Rich Panel, Aftersell and House. Motion just dropped their 2026 Creative Benchmarks report and it's been getting shared everywhere. Slack channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, sharing it in our private group chats. And it's great because everybody's been asking the same four questions forever. What is normal? How many ads should we actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate? And which formats really win? The report analyzes over 575,000 creatives from 6000 advertisers and over a billion dollars in ad spend to answer these exact questions. And the report has some really interesting findings like the fact that only four to eight percentive ads actually become liners and over half of ads actually lose. And for motion customers, this report is especially helpful. You can upload it into your motion dashboard with their run-with AI chat and compare it directly against your vertical benchmarks. Hit the link in the show notes. I promise you won't regret it. And as always, go to motionapp.com and tell the marketing operator sent you. I wanted to start with actually Cody and I are contractually obligated to discuss incrementality on every episode. So we're going to start with incrementality and hold out that's in SMS. Because I was thinking about this a little bit more. This is, I hear this said all the time, people regret not sending more emails. This is one of those things. It is advice. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that aren't technically sending enough emails. But everybody on D to C Twitter has learned this lesson. It's just one of those things where it's like it's said and it sounds like it's advice, but everybody immediately agrees. So it's just kind of like a good take to throw out there once in a while. What I want to talk about is how that relates to SMS because I feel like we are in the very early innings of thinking about frequency and therefore the incrementality of SMS. So I was just curious for you to talk through what's post-cruple POV on like just SMS volume or their best practices. I know you guys kind of pioneered the subscriber LTV metric. So how are you thinking about driving additional value with more messages? Yeah, it's a it's a big question because there's a lot of strategy implications in it. So I'll start from the like just general dogma of like send more messages and like why we agree with that. It's different between email and SMS obviously because every SMS is an unfortunately just a fact of life. It's a toll road where you know the next email you send cost money or doesn't cost money but the next text that you send does cost money and so you have to think about them a little bit differently. But the reason that people always say like to send more emails like why not just hit the blast button every time you need to is because I think the right way to think about this is it's like impressions right? Like you have a captive audience of people you can serve basically an unlimited amount of impressions. If you you know have the budget SMS budget to fund it around email you can just literally keep on taking send and the only thing you need to look at is really the engaging metrics plus the unsubscribes your manufacturing infinite impressions to an audience that has already demonstrated some intent. And so the reason that that guidance works is while there's diminishing returns over some period of time. Every time you send an email or SMS you're going to get new conversions that didn't happen before. And so you know like Connor you and I've joked about this before everything in e-commerce the mid-wit meme right and it's like if you send more texts or send more emails or deliver more impressions to an audience that is already indicated they're kind of interested in your brand you're very likely to generate new customers from that. People who've never purchased before are going to purchase and so on a very very simple level that works and it works in SMS as well. I would say if we get a little bit more sophisticated from there and say what does subscribe real TV look like subscribe real TV is a proprietary sort of benchmark that post-cript developed that helps us balance a few key metrics. We have a acquisition rate which is you know how many people are subscribing to the list how many messages per subscriber are you sending in a given month what type of earnings or revenue per message are you getting and then you're unsubscrib rate. And the sweet spot that we generally find is you can generate very high returns with essentially zero impact on your baseline unsubscrib rate by sending somewhere between like eight and ten texts per subscriber in a given month. That's like that's usually a little bit more than people think but we always say like what do you worry about people are always like oh I don't want to annoy people and like well if you annoy people it would show up as unsub rate right how many people are unsubscribing we actually look how many people are unsubscribing in that first 30 day period as the actual good signal. You can send about eight messages per person and per month without seeing an uptick in that whatsoever. And so instead of going off the gut you know we like to look at what the people are actually doing in texting they vote with their feet they'll unsub from your list if they don't want to be there and usually you can get away with you know eight messages without making a budget. So ever there are plenty of brands who are sending significantly more than that. So if you just heard me say eight messages per subscriber and you you know clutched your pearls you're like oh my gosh that's way too crazy. There's plenty of brands that you everyone on his listening to this nose and loves who are sending like two you know multi you know 100 million dollar brands are sending two messages per subscriber. There are plenty of brands that everyone wishes they were like who send like 20 in the first 30 or 45 days. Grooons is a good example of that. And so really we tell every brand your baseline needs to be tested and we're going to look at what the relationship between revenue and unsub rate is on the messages per subscriber to be able to you know settle in somewhere. On a proper incrementality basis we've done some of these tests with the brands we did one with Cody I think last year maybe on we set up a couple cohorts 50% of SMS subscribers got their normal cadence 25% didn't get any messages whatsoever and another 25% got double which was in this case we were trying to move from one text per week to two and the results is that more sending produced a higher ROI in 90% percent certainty at the group that was getting twice as many texts was yielding JR be a significant lift in revenue so against the holdout there was significantly more revenue coming from the 2x campaign treatment so we saw which surprised me yeah I was going to ask before you but you mentioned it at you know what your guys for recommendations are is usually above what most brands would expect I was I was surprised and pleasantly surprised and obviously you know appreciate that you guys I would ask to or to grade your own homework but the results were obviously like really good and you know was like clear incremental impact like let's send more messages because it counter to your point and like to your point about cost it's it's one thing on email but there's a very high cost on the stuff but the return is the return is at least for our test the return is there I'm curious because this was more of a campaign strategy I really want to test it um we'll say I want to do a groons type thing now maybe not as aggressive but I am super curious to test like a more a more elaborate aggressive onboarding experience yeah groons does a groons is 23 messages in the first 30 days I was reviewing we talked about this a couple months ago um so yeah just just to lay out sort of the spectrum it's like you have you have really high frequency from from some really great brands yeah we should ask Connor why they're doing so few yeah they um you know their strategy makes total sense for them it's like it's all about subscriptions so Connor's point of view is I want to do everything I can to convince somebody to be able to convert on that subscription as much as possible when I really don't want as I don't want to be spending fees on people who got on my list didn't unsubscribe but I've been there for one or two years and I never actually actually gonna end up subscribing, because that's just, that's waste. And so I think there's another part of this conversation, though, that's really interesting as SMS becomes way more mature, where people used to have very, very small SMS lists. You know, when Post-Chip got started seven years ago, the whole name of the game was like, oh, how do I get my first 100 compliant phone numbers collected? Well, I mean, you guys are part of this group, and so is Connor at Grooons. We're seeing regularly people have lists that are hundreds of thousands of people big. We're seeing millions of people on lists now. The Dr. Squatch team just celebrated over a million SMS subscribers on Post-Script. When you have that many people, and you have an aggressive strategy, the SMS bill gets big. I'll be the first to admit that. As the first two submits the SMS bill, we know that like you have all your SaaS apps down here, and then you have like your performance marketing spend up your energy and the SMS bills in the middle, and it kind of jumps off the page. 'Cause you're like, wait, this isn't like either of these things really. And so one of the things that we have been talking a lot about, and I think you're gonna see this a lot more, is more advanced strategies to not back away from the channel, but to say, how can we use, let's say, you're spending 10K or 50K or 100K a month on SMS, the scrutiny on making that as effective and performant as possible. And as incremental as possible, it's gonna go way, way up, way, way up. It's gonna scale with the bill. And I think it's really important for everybody, whether you're a Post-Grip customer or not, to make sure that you're partnering with somebody who's willing to, like Cody said, grade their own homework that way, because it was one thing to just let it fly when your SMS bill was 2K a month. There are plenty of people listening to this podcast now who are like, my SMS bill's 50K a month. So I need, I gotta make sure it really, it really goes. And that's partly why a lot of folks like to partner with specialists on the channel. You want all the attention on the biggest spend buckets and SMS is becoming a big spend bucket because it performs really, really well. And I think, we can get into this a little bit, but I think it's completely slept on by most of the people who are spending the really, really big budgets on Meta and Google and AppLev and Incru, people who are spending the performance-workening budgets are under connected to the teams that are deploying the SMS and email budgets. 'Cause if you really think about what happens when you buy a click, the first thing that happens really is the pop up. And so everyone thinks about SMS and email as like retention channels, but so many people that are on your list have never bought before and maybe clicked at Meta Add yesterday. So you earned that click yesterday, they didn't convert what now. They're on your SMS list. And so I think that people should be thinking about the SMS program a lot more like they think of performance-workening than they think about it as just another yet-pretention channel, partly because of the way it's build and also partly because it's basically the welcome mat for your e-commerce experience, no matter where the traffic's being driven from. Totally, get a note, 20. The two points here, one is, I think the 23 SMS example from Groons is pre-purchase, that's an acquisition tactic. We think of that as a retention marketer would own that channel, but that is you acquiring a subscriber for the first time. The other thing that you kind of hit on, people maybe they're over-indexing their time on paid, upper funnel channels. McCoy came on last year from Portland, another good to see him out there. And he said, I think about this all the time, he was like, yeah, look, everybody's talking about paid, everybody's talking about incrementality. He's like, two years from now, everybody's gonna be talking about retention because we're all just trying to find that, where can we generate that marginal value? And there's lots of places to find it now, but as you exhaust those opportunities, you just get further and further and down, down to the point where you say, oh, yeah, now I need to be thinking really precisely about how many SMSes should I send in my welcome here, so I can maximize value of every little customer and touch point and impression that I'm serving. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I was thinking when you were saying, what do you see you have to prove out that 50K is working for you, but it's also, should we be spending 100? Is that actually the most efficient place to be spending 100 or maybe at 75? And likely it's the case for a lot of brands. Yeah, I think there's this idea that SMS is part of the acquisition funnel is actually like really under articulated in the space. Like people really just do not talk. I know we're gonna talk about conversational because it wouldn't be a post-cript podcast appearance if we didn't talk about conversational. We're obsessed with it. But like the reason we're obsessed with it is because the average eight, nine figure brand who's collecting emails and SMSes on their pop up, which most people are, they're collecting thousands a day, thousands a day. And so the idea that like every single person who clicks on a meta ad and lands on your site is going to land on a PDP experience that's going to convert 100% of the people who did that and handle all their objections perfectly is not possible. There's no PDP on the planet that can do that. Cody Cody's tried. He's pushing Claw to build the perfect PDP that converts 100% of the traffic, right? So until he gets there, there's a ton of people who are ending up on these lists that we consider like retention lists who actually have an objection to first purchase that is, you know, that's constricting the funnel. When we look at 20,000 brands across the post-cript, almost 25,000 brands now on Shopify, what we see is the reason SMS is a super high converting channel is demonstrated in the metrics. 25% of people who give you their phone number in a double-off-think compliant way by something in the first 30 days, that's awesome. Great conversion rate on the channel, that's why people keep putting money into the SMS ATM. It's great. But it begs the question, like there's 75% of the other people give you their phone number, which is like a place that most people don't really want businesses. So they did it and they confirmed it. And they are in there not unsubscribing and they're just getting messaging like what's in that? And yes, eventually, you know, as we exhaust the funnel perfectly, we'll eventually only be talking about our attention. But there's still 75% of the people who end up on your own marketing channel list who have not converted to first purchase yet. And most people are like, oh darn, like, let's go re, let's go re get them to click on a meta ad now. And it's like, there's so much stuff that we can be doing in that initial experience and thinking about the acquisition side of these channels. That's just like really under articulated and the other thing is like, I talked to so many of your performance markers all the time and I'm like, oh, like what's the pop up experience? Like they don't even know. So it's like this experience is completely disjointed, even though at least half of what you're doing in your SMS program is completely related to acquisition performance. And people aren't just don't really think about it that way. And I think it's partly organizational and also just partly because like the tying everything together is always challenging, but it's like a completely under articulated opportunity, I think, in D to C. Multi-touch attribution tools are great but there's one big downfall. And it's that most brands are using them to make next month's budget decisions with last month's data. Your attribution tool cannot tell you what happens if you shift 50k from meta to CTV or whether your best channel has already hit saturation. MTA and platform reporting will only tell you what happened. Precients MMM tells you what will happen. You can see we are next dollar will perform best. Catch where channels are maxing out and hitting their saturation curves and move money before you waste it. Models update daily for online and weekly for retail so you're always working with current data. And it also maps out how your channels work together. This is one of my favorite things about pressure. It tells you things like how meta drives Amazon sales, how CTV lists branded search. We use it at Hexclad, other brands like Safa and Cotary are also using it and it ultimately is like a GPS for our performance marketing. And you'll get your first insights within a week. If you're interested, go to Prussianai.com/operators, P-R-E-S-C-I-E-N-T-A-I.com/operators to see how pressure can give you your next best move. That we haven't really action this within Ridge yet, but I think it's really, there's like an organizational thing that I think will change over time where I feel pop-ups, feel more and more to me like an e-com, they should roll up into like some sort of chief, or not some, you know, PM, or like a digital product director, something like that. And then even the flows, like a welcome series such a different purpose than a campaign, where I'm like, oh yeah, the flow is like an extension of that initial touch point that we're talking about. Like that is the acquisition engine. That's the the mouse trap that you're building is add, delanders, a pop-up to like, you know, whatever, that whole thing. And then campaigns feel like a true like retention point where it's like how are we coming to these people at day 15 or 30 or 45 and giving them some fresh message about a new launch or like using first party data to craft that message, just feels a little bit different than like the productization of the e-com experience. - I have it, so I have it, I think part of it is culture, like you have to have the culture, or even if they're not under the same teams, like you're all working on the same goals together. but I also have it under one person. So I have like growth acquisition, you know, whatever acquisition. It's really all under growth for us. But if you would call it, you know, your normal growth, meaty buying creative strategy, uh, e-com and retention all under one person because it's got to ladder up. And so what I found when we had it separate was it was just like, oh, yeah, they're working on this thing and they need this landing page. And it's like, not gonna, everyone's heard the story where it's like, you know, pop up changes or whatever. And it looks great, but then it tanks your conversion rate. So I'm like, also anal about it. I'm like, all right, great. You want to, you want to test the, when we load our pop up, great. Let's do it on a full site experience. So we also know how that impacts conversion rate. And then vice, vice versa. We're looking at some ad metrics and we're looking at reach and one of the things that we noticed that I think this is only happening because how we have the orgs to spread up set up as my senior director of growth, who it's all under is like, oh, or, or since we made that change with our ads and added view optimization, our SMS growth is now below forecast. And that's actually impacting it there. And so these just have such a play together. So completely echo what Mike's saying. Yeah, and we're seeing that org structure change a lot. Like when we're, you know, obviously we get to see a lot of these in our engagements with our customers and a lot more people are moving to that sort of, like maybe they have distinct teams, but they're getting some centralized reporting structure to an executive leader who is looking at the whole thing. And I think that's really smart because you know, all these, you know, we always joking inside of post group that like one of the biggest lies in marketing is that like the customer journey is like a line that you can plot on like it's like linear. It's like, it's not, it looks like a big scribble, right? Like people are engaging with everything all the time. And so you got to have someone who can see all the touch points because it's not like this. You only move forward. You don't move back. You know, it's, it's, it's just not a realistic way to think of the way that the customers interacting with your brand, but that's technically the way the assembly line of all the siloed organizational structure kind of forces are thinking and it's just not, you know, aligned to the way that people actually shop and buy right now. So I think or structure matching like the true customer journey makes a lot more sense. And, you know, having one, at least one person who can see the whole thing and is responsible for not just, you know, the first order effects, but the second and third order effects that happen in other parts of the funnel, I think is really smart. 1,000%. All right, cool. Let's jump into conversational commerce and then I want to come back because I do want to talk RCS before we wrap up here. But conversational commerce, I think we've got a good segue here. I would love like just a small, this is me, this is me getting a little refresher on, on post scripts, approach to conversational because you guys have been extremely experimental for a couple years now, like way ahead of the game in terms of embracing AI. So maybe just talk about like the quick development of like how you guys have been treating it internally. And then like what is the product? How does it look today? Yeah, totally. So quick little history lesson. That stat that I was mentioning before, we're like somewhere between, you know, 20 to 25, maybe 27, somewhere in there. That's the amount of people who are subscribing to your list and buying something in the first, you know, 30 days. We got obsessed with this idea about what are the other people doing because we know that the SNS channels are super intimate channel, like really text from a brand like that that's kind of nuts. And so people were staying subscribed for a year, but not buying anything. We're like that's weird behavior, like what's going on. And so before we had Claude and before we had a chat GPT, we got obsessed with this idea. And so what we did is we built this thing called the e-commerce sales center in Phoenix, Arizona. We hired like 50 people and we started texting on behalf of brands like by hand. The goal originally was simply to like learn why what's happened. We learned an insane amount. We product ties to that and we found that we could start driving incremental revenue for brands via handling these objections. And at a very simple level, it makes perfect sense, right? If you walked into the Jones Road store, someone would say, "Hey, how can I help you? Do you want to go to, can I help you get shade matched?" Right? And you start handling objections, helping people shop that sort of thing. We rely on our PDPs to do that in e-commerce. And they do as good as they can, but it's different than the human asking questions and helping you do what you need to do. And so that's what the e-commerce sales center did. And that product was called SNS sales. We learned an insane amount on that. And then as the AI tooling got more sophisticated, we poured it over those hard-won learnings into our AI product. We have a conversational AI product that's called shopper. It's called shopper because it helps people shop simple. And it's powered by brand center, which is our policy and voice guidelines that help make sure that what we're saying actually sounds like the brand and is aligned to everything from your offer strategy, your merchandising strategy, your real reading, all your Metafield data and Shopify. We're learning everything we possibly can about your brand and we're selling on your behalf using AI. That's been scaling for the last year or so. In any given time on PostScript, we're having somewhere between 750,000 to a million concurrent conversations with AI with people who are shopping on PostScript customers sites. It's really, really exciting stuff. And we're super bullish on it because we really believe that most consumers are being trained right now to expect that anywhere on the internet where they see a text box that they should be able to get like an instant really strong conversational answer back. Chatchy, Patis, training them, clouds training them, the AI tools, Gemini's training them all over the place, all over the Google services. I think the expectations are changing at what consumers can do when they text something in or they type something in and they want it to be that amazing chat experience that we all know and love and dominates our world now. And so from our point of view, conversational is going to be the core, the core capability that people are going to judge SMS, RCS and other messaging channels like WhatsApp, etc. So that's really the history lesson and we are super, super excited about it. Yeah. Cody, have you guys experimented with shop or at all? Yeah, so we were probably one of the, I don't know, but we were one of the probably the last brands to transition. We were heavy on SMS sales and it performed really well for us. For us, our biggest shade matching. And so the team did a really good job with that and just answering other objections and stuff. So I'm all in on conversational commerce and just being able to give people really good experiences, that mimic a little bit closer to what they would have in store. So it performed really well for us, but I have been very impressed by shopper where we have a Facebook group and there's constantly people who are older customers constantly asking like, "Hey, is this a real person?" And I was like, "Hey, I always get these texts from Jesse." And so it's very good. It's very impressive. I'll like test it around. So yeah, definitely a big fan and it's done really well and you have to see it kind of evolve over the years. But obviously, it's significantly cheaper than SMS sales. So I like that as well. It's a lot more that, you know, the AI makes it possible for us to do it at that human level or better and also to lower the cost basis, which is the promise of the AI productivity boom that we're hopefully all benefiting from. So we're super excited about it. Jones Road has been a great customer of it. And we have this thing inside Postgrib, it's called like the shopper sales bell. Like every time it makes a sale, it posts a slack, the conversation. And the Jones Road conversations are some of my favorite because like the objections that we're handling are just like so interesting. It's like stuff you wouldn't even think like, "What are my favorite stories about it from the Jones Road?" Examples is, you know, Cody's over here hacking on like the best PDP possible. He's building the best AI landing pages, convert the most possible people. And like the objections that we get through the conversational aspect are like when you see him, you're like, "There's no way you could design a landing page to specifically handle." Like we had someone recently who was, she was like, "Hey, I'm ready to buy Miracle Bomb. I'm convinced I saw like the ads on, you know, on Meta or whatever." And like, I've shaved myself and I feel pretty confident about the shade. Her reason for not purchasing is she was like, "I garden for five hours a day. I'm retired. I garden five hours a day. I'm in the sun. Of course, I, you know, have a big brimmed hat to shield my face." But like it's hot where I'm at. And I'm out in the sun. I sweat a lot. Like I get it says like it's sweat, you know, resistant to whatever. But like she literally was like, "I will not buy this product unless somebody tells me it'll hold up to my like five hour a day gardening regimen." And like we ended up buying her whatever, but like she was literally not going to buy unless we can answer like that core specific question. And it's like think about the long tail of like value props that need to be on a PDP to hand. It's insane. It's not possible. Or like shopper will have people who will like, we'll be like, "Okay, I'm ready to try this brand. I got my miracle ball mull set up. I went to go check out and it was $75. I only have $68 budgeted. Can you do anything about it?" They literally will not purchase if it doesn't get to that number. And like shopper can also handle that because it knows like, "Hey, if someone's really like within this range, we can offer something to get them over the hump." And so like stuff like that when you see the types of things that are actually preventing from buying, it's like mind expanding for most brands and you're like, oh yeah, like training a person or a team of people to handle every little thing perfectly is functionally impossible. And so, shopper obviously handles all that stuff automatically and drives incremental sales that wouldn't happen otherwise but the learnings are insane. And when you see it, it's like you can't unsee it. We have this thing called Ask Shopper where you can query the conversations inside of Postgrip and see the trends. And when you start to see what's preventing people from actually purchasing your stuff, like people come for the incremental revenue and for the conversational commerce aspect, I think they stay for the insights. Because everyone's doing the post-purchase stuff, they're reading the Facebook comments and they're trying to mine all these things to get customer insights. When you have app scale conversations happening from your text deck, because there are thousands of conversations at this point, there's no more direct way to engage with people who are thinking about buying your product than that. Like we think shopper might have the most interesting stream of consumer insight data that exists in e-com right now and we're just starting to tap into it. RichPanel CEO just predicted his own SaaS product will lose 90% of its revenue and he's the one building what will kill it. They are betting that AI agents will replace traditional support tools entirely. No dashboards, no seats, no workflows. So what did they ship? An autonomous AI agent that handles customer support from end to end. Reading, order data, issuing refunds, updating shipments, without a human ever touching it. Here's why this matters. It means you can run a faster, leaner support team at a fraction of the cost while resolving tickets instantly 24/7. RichPanel is cannibalizing their own business to build the future of CX and support for brands. Because if they don't, someone else will. Go check out what they're building at richpanel.com and learn how you can automate your entire support operation today. A few things that Mike actually texted me that one. I think it was like $300 order. It was like right when we switched. So Mike was like pumped about it. But it's funny because you were like, yeah. And it's like, so he was super pumped about it. But it's also like, because I think it was like such a cool insight. But it's also like, hey, that's a way to prove incremental. The customer is literally saying this was an incremental purchase. Which is kind of funny. Also, Mike, I've tweeted a lot about asking vendors for APIs. So I'm going to publicly ask you here, do you guys have an API? So I can get these insights into my cloud. Yeah, we're working on, actually, I sent your tweet. I sent your tweet around to the product team because we have this agent inside of PostScript that you can use to get these insights. But we are working on making those insights available via API and MCP so that you know, cloud or your LLM of choice can get smarter about your customer. So we're going to try to make that data go everywhere. We think it's probably the most interesting data that's coming out of E-Com right now. And it's totally untapped channel, right? Because the thing that everyone's, we've been talking about, well, how long have we been talking about conversational conversation? E-Com has been like 15 years of people being like, maybe it's apps, maybe it's native shopping experience like it's been going forever. The interesting thing about it, for how much people have been talking about it, and for how long, and it's dominated the key notes, like the shop talks and whatever for the last decade. I'll be hyperbolic about it because obviously this isn't exactly true. But like zero people texted their customers right now, like zero. Like it's basically nothing. And so this stream of insights that come from texting back almost doesn't exist for most brands. And so I think a lot of people are listening to this like, oh yeah, that'd be cool or whatever. If someone asks me like, what's the thing that I should do to start experimenting with this or seeing this effect? Simply ask your customers a question. The number of people who do this, like I'm saying, you have your normal welcome series or your normal automation that fires. It says, hey, we saved your car. Like, you know, here's the link, you know, normal car abandonment message or something like that. After the link, just like add a question, it's like, is there anything else I can help you with today? Do you have any questions I can answer? Just question mark. Just do that. You will get so many replies. Like that's kind of like the first aha moment for most people. I've talked to like brands that are like doing $500 million a year in sales and they're like, do people actually want to text me back? I'm like, one, 100% yes. But two, if you don't believe me, just ask. They'll ask and they'll get like 5,000 replies in the first week. And so that, I mean, like that's like the starting point. Do that and you'll be like, oh my gosh, there's something in here. It's like, you know, the iceberg, you know, there's, it's such a deep opportunity, but like most people haven't even started. So I wanted, it's a great example because I wanted to ask about the way brands are integrating the, or how are they balancing like their automated flows and beginning conversations? Like we just ran a test at Ridge that we're very happy with. Where we have our standard flow, we have a, you know, it's six messages or so. And now the last message, we, and we split test this flow actually. We have our standard six message flow. And then the other one ends with what you're saying, where we just begin asking a question. And it's exactly what you said. It's like, okay, we kind of want, I mean, theoretically, and I could hear the argument that we're just kind of like slowly easing our way in here that, uh, that over time will like further embrace conversations happening earlier. But right now it's like, look, we'll probably clear out the 25% of people with our standard flow as we always have been. And when we're talking about, uh, you know, um, acquiring that like marginal customer, if it requires conversation, let's just kind of clean that up at the end. And it can become sort of an amorphous conversation where you can talk about whatever they want. Um, so that's what we're doing. So that's like a welcome series example. What you just described was an abandoned cart or something, which I think is another great example. I'm curious like any other anecdotes or interesting use cases of how brands are balancing it. And do you see some people just go in straight conversation right from the beginning? Some people go straight conversation right from the beginning. If they know that they have a really long consideration period, because I totally agree with you. Like if someone clicks an ad for a ridg wallet, and it's like coming up on Father's Day, and like they're probably going to convert by that, you know, it's like, that's like the perfect setup. You don't need to have a conversation with somebody who's in that part of the funnel. They're good, they're probably going to buy and check out. And the cut consideration period is probably not that long. And so for that point of view, I think your strategy of like cleaning up, like once you identify there's something that is preventing them from buying. Now let's ask, makes total sense. You can imagine if you sell a, um, if you sell like a thousand dollar piece of furniture, and you know that from the time that you've clicked someone's clicked on a meta ad, you're giving their email on their SMS, that the consideration period that you're on the clock started, and it's like, you know, 90 days or something, that what you want to do to maybe go conversation first is try to compress that time down, because the 90 day consideration period or whatever your consideration period is, like what, what does that really mean? It means that the person is trying to shop for a category of things. They're deciding a bunch of little micro decisions and comparing you against your competitors for some determined amount of time. You would, if that was a real life thing, you would desperately want your best, most educated salesperson to talk to that person while they're in that consideration period. And so for people who have long consideration periods, high ticket items, or people who are trying to convert one time per extroist to subscribers where they're getting that huge incremental value bump, those are folks who I think are going heavier on conversations, because they know that essentially what they're trying to do is like, you know, either do an upsell sort of conversation, or they're trying to handle some competitive objections about, like, why should I buy this sofa over some other sofa that I'm looking out online? And so I think you're, the product category, the consideration period, all of that kind of matters. But I think that there's tons of opportunities to drive conversations. Even like, you know, people talk about windbacks all the time, as you are seeing people on your list who haven't bought, but they've been on there and engaging with texts for like a year. Like, those are also great people to ask questions too. A really underutilized thing is people who, the best text ever that people want is the consumers who get the text that says, the item you purchased at your front door, right? It gets delivered. They use it. What about asking them a follow-up question about how the product usage is going and let that conversation happen? There's like, if you start thinking about like, where are all the touch points where you're either helping them make a decision, or you're trying to get feedback, and where are they at in their cycle of using your product, any place, any of those places would be amazing opportunities to be able to get a conversational data in. The other reason to do it, which you haven't even talked about, is like, it pays to have conversations. Like, under the subscriber, LTV, metrics is free measure, how many, how much of value is coming to a subscriber, people who have a conversation, a conversation with a brand, versus people who don't, have a one and a half times higher lifetime value as a subscriber on your list. So, it's crazy. They buy more in the future. The likelihood that they're going to go from a one-time purchaser to a two-time purchaser or go from being just a, someone who's kicking the tires on your brand to being, you know, in your VIP or brand-bloialist category, because of their purchase and their browsing behavior, goes up by one and a half times, if you engage on the conversation. And it makes sense, right? Like the bar to have someone text back to your brand is like insanely high. Like some people are probably listening to this going like, "I would never do that." But so you could think about if people do it, think about what that connection is with like your brand, the name, recall, figure out how effective the halo effect is, the brands, the CTV, all the other, or the meta ads, the CTV, all the other stuff that they're seeing from your brand, how they engage with that. Getting that conversation to happen drives a level of engagement with that consumer that is like unlike any other type of engagement in in our e-com touch points. And so it drives meaningful initial conversion, it drives strong your LTV. And we think people are going to start demanding experiences like that in mass. So the best time to have started conversational was five years ago when we started SNS sales. And like the size second best time is to start asking people questions today. Marketing operators, I want to challenge how you think about post-purchase. If you zoom out, post-purchase isn't a tactic, it's a system. It's your cart, your checkout logic, your one-click upsells, how you increase AOV, revenue procession, traffic procession, it's your confirmation pages, all of that system together. The entire flow determines how much incremental revenue that you can make for order. That's why rocked aftersell isn't just an upsell tool. It's a design system for the full post-purchase experience. Rocked aftersell gives you one unified system, a smart cart and check out offers one-click post-purchase upsells, and thank you page monetization with rock banks. And here's where it becomes very strategic. Beyond the 30% revenue per visitor lift, rocked aftersell opens a monetization layer that most operators haven't fully priced into their unit economics with rock network products. Run the math on your own volume at 50k orders a month that's 15 to 25k in pure profit with rock banks. At 100k, it's 30 to 50k. I'm not great at math, but I love those numbers. Straight to the bottom line as well. Every month, from a page, your customers are already landing on, won't affect conversion rate. It's just free money you can pocket at the end of the month. No inventory, no operational lift, no contracts to lock you in, and this is not just for Shopify native brands anymore. Whatever platform you're on, rocked aftersell supports it. Operators, listeners can activate rock thanks and get the full aftersell suite for a year or grab an extended 60 day trial to test post-purchase performance. Go to aftersell.com/operators, build this system once and let it compound. I want to talk about first-party data. This is something that I'm like super interested in. Because obviously, you mentioned it earlier that we think this stream of data is one of the most interesting streams and completely untapped by most brands. I don't know where that data is going to live or how I'm going to use it in the future. So I'm curious what your eyes' perspective is on that. Yeah. So the types of information, I'll go back to the gardening example from Cody's buyer. If we take a big step back, all the marketers who are listening to this know that the thing we've been chasing this whole time is like one-to-one experiences, right message, right time. Everything's perfectly orchestrated and the audience is not a segment. It's audience of one and we're delivering a pinpoint-perfect message to them. We haven't had the tools to do that as marketers in the past. AI is getting us a lot closer to that. That's changed the way we think about what customer data even is. Historically customer data would be like, what device are they on? What links did they click? What pages did they browse and how personalized can you be about that, right? But it's a completely different thing to say, like through this conversation, we found out that this person lives in Florida during the winter months and lives in Minnesota during the summer months and when she's in Florida, she gardens five hours a day. That's an actual piece of customer data that we could like design and interaction around for that individual person. That would get as close as we've ever been to that like really like one-to-one pinpoint experience. And so the conversation data is great because it helps people make decisions and it drives future purchases and whatnot. But the other bit is that we can mine that data to enhance your subscriber profile, your CDP, your CRM, wherever you're housing, all that subscriber data to have things that we would actually consider to be real customer data. I will always laugh about this at PostGrip because it's like CRM or CDP, the customer data, customer relationship management. None of the data that exists today would actually allow you to have a real relationship with anybody. It's all like internet bread crumbs. It's not like, it's not like, oh, my daughter just had her first birthday and she's really into princesses right now and like, what can I do with that to do like an amazing wow experience from marketing for any of you? So the, where does that data live? It lives in conversations. And so now that conversational started to become a little bit more mainstream, we actually have a source to be able to pull out those zero-party data attributes that are going to make a lot of sense. So one thing we're experimenting with at PostGrip, which we're really excited about is there's pieces of data that are static, like I purchased this thing one year ago and it was this skew. And then there's pieces of data that are ephemeral, which is like, my daughter is one right now and in a year she's going to be two and then, you know, you're from there she's going to be three and she's in these different phases of her life. That data, the fact that I have a daughter is a static piece of information. My daughter's age and preferences like that you might get from conversations are ephemeral. And so we're starting to experiment with this concept of like their static data and then there's like memory type data, which is it changes over time. Maybe it's seasonal, maybe it's age-related, maybe it's preference-related, whatever. The point is, is we have a place to be able to get that data, which is inside of the conversational data set. And then two, we're putting that into PostGrip to be able to operationalize it. Not just in your text, but hopefully that data will exist all over the place because that data, I've been talking about how the data is really interesting to us as a merchant. We get customer insights we've never had before from these conversations, which is true, but the data is incredibly unique as it relates to the subscribers themselves. And if you want to learn things about this again, this is just think about your real life relationships. If you want to learn things about people, you have to have conversations with them. That enhances their relationship. That's where the insights are. That can really lead to one-to-one experiences. And so the fact that we have that information at our fingertips now as marketers is incredibly interesting. And we're just like the very, very tip of the spear on how do we operationalize that stuff. But we think that's the missing component to be able to actually deliver one-to-one experiences at scale. And that's what we're focused on right now. I love it. I feel there's a good like dating metaphor to be had here. You know, you got to ask questions. You got to listen. You got to remember the important stuff. Post-cripts just allowing us to do that at scale with all of our customers. Yes. And I think that the other insight, this is again, why if someone's listening to this thing, I don't know, or just simply ask a question. Because the aha moment that comes out of it will be like, when you look at the replies, you'll be like, "Why are people telling me this?" We're like a brand that sells belts online. And they started asking questions and people were like, "Hey, like, you know, wives would be shopping for their husbands." And we'd be like, "My husband's on a health journey. He's lost 40 pounds this year. Here's his like, his, he's works out this many days and he takes this medication." And like, here's a picture of his before and his after. Here's what he looks like in your belt that he bought last year. And we need a new belt for this year. And we're like, "First off, does your husband know you're telling us all this stuff?" Yeah. Like, to like, think about everything we just learned about that consumer that like, historically, there's no way to get it that. Like, now we basically know like everything about this. The wife purchased for the purchases for the husband. The husband is, you know, having this, this life journey that eventually is going to cause him to, you know, need belts of exercise. Like the, in then that just expands the amount of marketing these cases that you can do in the future. And it's, and I think if you're a brand, you don't even know that people will give you that type of information until you start trying to solicit the conversations. When you solicit the conversations, the, they'll roll in and to the stuff that you'll see that people are trying to tell you is insane. And so, obviously, we're going to make it easy to operationalize that stuff, but if you don't believe it, just ask the question. You'll see what people tell you. It's absolutely wild. What people will share with you as a brand about the way they use it, where you fit into their life, who they're thinking about buying it for and why they're, they're thinking about your brand. It's completely mind expanding. And so, I recommend if you don't do anything after listening to this, like just, just add a question mark to any flow you want, see what happens. The love it. Yeah, simple advice. Okay, awesome. Obviously, that will be sort of an evolving topic, conversational conversation is going to be, I think, more and more explored as far as a marketing goes generally. I do want to maybe wrap on this one, but to like punch in on a little bit more tactical of a thing. Brands are beginning to roll out RCS. Maybe you could just talk about what that means and like what you guys are seeing, the interesting use cases and what's this additional functionality going to do for brands? Yeah, technically, the way to think about RCS is it's a new channel. So like SMS is a channel, RCS is its own channel. So like when you send an RCS message in post-grip, like if the person can't receive an RCS message, there's a SMS fallback. So there are distinct things. RCS is a different messaging protocol. It is available for everyone on everyone's device in the United States. So like we're ready to do RCS and we have dozens and dozens of brands that are on RCS right now. Essentially, it raises the floor on what you can message somebody. So before SMS would be just text only, MMS, you can add a picture and you're pretty much limited to that. RCS will allow you to do carousel scrolling. It'll allow you to have video. We just rolled out iOS calendar functionality. So if you're like doing a drop, like imagine you're like, hey, we're going to launch a new product in a week instead of just telling people like watch this space, you can actually have an action button in there where they can add it to their calendar and save it. So you get these action buttons, these CTAs that integrate natively with the phone. And it's just expanding the amount of use cases that happen on the messaging channels. Right now, we're seeing outsized performance on RCS over SMS and MMS. So the reason to do it, it's driving incremental performance, which is amazing. It's also creating like richer brand experiences. And so those are like the two reasons why I think people are super excited about it. It's completely reinventing what's possible on the channel. We're not using it yet. I heard you guys are. We just switched. I think we went live this week. We have a holdout running. I haven't seen ours. I think I got a text test right from us. So I think I'm in the control group, unfortunately. But I will say I got one from different. I think it was party full and it was maybe a month or two ago. It was beautiful. It feels, I actually questioned whether I was in an app or not. I forgot it was a text. It feels like you're in an app. It's a really nice experience that I'm not surprised as performing better. Because in this environment where you're texting one to one and it's trust is essential, it feels really premium. And I could see it feeling much more secure for customers. So I'm excited to see ours. Did you guys change any of the flow? I know. So if you have your standard flow, you're sending links in the SMS side. And then on RCS side, it will just look better. It'll be a more immersive experience. You get some cards. Did you guys add some of the carousel stuff? Are you relying on that? Or are you just going to measure the incremental impact of this new RCS experience? I haven't been close to it. You'll report back. I mean, looking slack. Yeah, I don't know. My guess is we're probably going a little bit more one to one and then we'll test to get a cleaner read, but I'm not sure. Yeah, because what I was just going to say there quickly is, there's only a handful of brands that I get RCS messages from. And it just looks better. It can be the same messages. And I do think just being an early adopter here, Mike, to your point, I hadn't really thought about it that way. But just being more distinct than the other brands is going to have value for some amount of time. Yeah, there's the standout in the inbox, ARB that you can get right now, which is great. We're really, eventually, obviously, that'll diminish as more people get on the channel. But yeah, the use cases are just insane, not to make everything about conversational, but we're really excited about shopper being able to use the carousels to make recommendations. Right now people would go to Ridge and be like, I'm buying for a guy who likes the outdoors. What do you recommend, shopper? We'll come up with some links. Imagine now we can say, cool, here's a carousel of three items that we think are best sellers for that type of person. And it also has web view. So they can expand and get the native web experience in the browser that's native to the messaging app. So it's all happening right there. It is a completely rich web experience from the messaging thread. And I think that the outside's performances because consumers are like, they're trained to use all that functionality. I message has had all sorts of cool built-in functionalities for many, many years. And so I think like, there's no training necessary consumers are just pushing the limits of what can be done. The ability to do the action buttons, which can literally be like any CTA you want. You could like program in there. It's just, it's really, really cool. It is, I think, going to be the dominant channel that people use to message. I think what you'll see is a big shift, especially in the eight and nine figure brand space, where maybe a year from now, 100% of them will be using RCS with SMS as a fallback as opposed to sending SMS campaigns. The only threat to that would be if performance doesn't hold up because it is a little more expensive. The carriers always find a way to get their cut of it. And so if the performance doesn't hold up, that could be a threat to the channel. But right now we're seeing very meaningful lift from standing out in the inbox. And I think as consumers start to see and get used to these experiences, they're going to demand richer and richer stuff from the messaging channels that they engage with. We talk about incrementality a lot, but how do you actually operationalize it to make your business better? That is one thing that I've been really leaning in with my team recently. And how does it play to tremendous role? We use it for all of our experiments, all of our geolift testing, but we now use it for our MMM as well. I've been a design partner. I've been one of the early design partners on how to see MMM, see stands for causal. So it's one of the only MMMs. If not the only MMM that I've seen that's actually using your causal experiments to build the model. And so that allows me to just trust the data so much more. So it's not a black box, but actually informs our roadmap and has been so crucial for allowing us to operationalize around incrementality. The house team is world class. I can't speak highly enough about them. They've also built a really amazing community with some of the best D to see growth operators out there. If a few exciting events coming up soon that they call the house growth lab, one is an LA and May 19th and the other is in New York on May 21st. I highly recommend checking it out if you're in the area. If you want to check it out, learn a little bit more about CMM. I'm going to house.io/operators to start making better data driven decisions today. All right, sweet. So I want to wrap on maybe we just hit some real tactical advice. We've had plenty of it so far this episode. I've got a couple notes here. But for those listening, we could leave them with some actionable next step. So Mike, if you're a brand doing five to 10 million dollars a year, they're listening to this episode and they're like, there's so much going on with SMS. I'm not paying attention to it. I'm not taking as much advantage of all of this as I could. What would you be recommending? Like what would be the first thing they should be changing about how they handle SMS? Yeah, I think the first thing that you should be looking at if you're a five to 10 million dollar brand and you're thinking about SMS as a growth channel for you and you're trying to max it out. Very, very basic list growth. Focus on list growth first. Post-group test onsite opt-in, which is the fastest way to grow your list. There are other methods out there, but that's the best one. Focus on driving as much subscribers as you possibly can through your pop-up. Like ultimately, that's the very, very top of the funnel for your own marketing programs. That will pay dividends down the line. Fix your pop-up acquisition rate first. If you do nothing else, that's the most important thing. The next thing I would do is whatever your cadence is for message sending, start trying to send one more message a week, maybe one every two weeks. Just start trying to bump up the amount you're messaging and see what happens to your unsubrate. Do that until you see the unsubrate, start to tick up. That's your new baseline. You're leaving money on the table if you aren't seeing how that's affecting your overall revenue from the channel. Then three, we've talked about conversational commerce a bunch. I would start asking some questions and seeing what you can learn. Not even just to drive incremental revenue, but just to figure out how you should better be handling objections in all of your flows. The customer insights that you get about why people aren't purchasing is going to tell you so, so, so much. You want to get that data into the brain of your team as fast as you possibly can and asking questions of your customers is the best way to go get that. Maybe I'll add a fourth. If you are like, I want to do all that, but my team's lean and I don't have time to do that. And you're not on post-grip, switch to post-grip. We are going to be the most hands-on provider that you can find. We'll make sure that you're always doing the latest and greatest stuff and maxing out the returns that you're getting for your SMS bill. We know that the SMS bill is a big growing line item for everyone who's listening to this. We will get more dollars out of that spend than any other provider on the market. That's why I 25,000 Shopify brands choose post-gripped. And so if you if you want the type of performance hit us up. We are happy to get you rolling and help SMS be a highly performant channel for your brand. Yeah, I love it. You stole all the good ones, frankly. I'm going to I'll plus one the list growth. And this is what we always joke about the like mid curve meme and like the far left and the far right size strategy is just like grow your list faster. And like I've said for a long time and this has changed. But for a long time, if I like the best SMS providers, the one that could help you grow the list the fastest is just simply if you have more if you have more numbers, you text more people. I think with conversational commerce with RCS with all the functionality, like that's changing over time. Like the actual features are a little bit more of a differentiating factor, but list growth plus one and everybody could probably do them a little bit better. Cody, anything you'd leave listeners with? Everything Mike said, I don't want to like fund it in, but I totally agree with everything he said. It has proven very incredible for us, where big fans the shopper we are. I think we've been under uh, optimizing our Pop-ups in the past and so we're doing it now pretty aggressively trying to get a lot of fun stuff in there So yeah, I think having your your site team do it just do that aggressively and make sure that's going in the right direction Is a big one love it. All right guys. We'll super fun episode Mike. Thanks for coming on of course anytime Post script Obviously post scripts are B to B company B to B marketing is incredibly boring and stupid usually and we Set up to do something that we think is unique and fun and we filmed a scripted series and This is the trailer to that scripted series because it's ready to be released and We would love to show it to you guys first Wonderful All right, you're ready for this Putting that attentive money to good use Instead of AirPods we did this Okay, ready Hey, Bri did we run new ads? No didn't email go out No, Marty what's the good news? Cheers to that It's a SESPARILLA please Sean We need to become Scarcely works So good and that'll be on that'll be on HBO on Sundays this was yes HBO on Sundays X stream near you Yes, it's coming out in just a bit here We are super excited about it. That is so funny. How the idea come about Well, if we're first off one of the things that drives are thinking around like how to be market our products And what not is that the bar for B to B marketing is on the floor and so we're always trying to do something remotely interesting so that's that's one bit But the idea for this show was more as we've been everyone's talking about AI Some people are talking about AI because they Some some people are talking about AI because I had a sick crossover Because they know about it some people are talking about it because other people are talking about it Some people are talking about it because they hate it and we've been encountering all these different Sort of perspectives about it and we were started kind of playing around the idea that like you know Ecom is its own unique thing all of you who work in ecom notes like you know small teams doing big numbers every day matters every hour matters There's so many things that are interconnected Meanwhile you have people working on these problems where maybe the founders like we have to do everything with AI And then you have people on the team who are like I don't even know what AI is and other people are trying to like run Claude bots on the side So we're like okay, there's something really like funny in there Around like what's hype and what's not? How these things should actually be deployed? How does AI like layer on to like the craziness that is running in ecom brand Because as everyone who's listening to this and you guys well know Every day is just a wild day in ecom land and so We were like instead of just doing like you know another white paper which of course post-posed script does white papers too We were like let's Do something more interesting and we got out to LA with the small crew and filmed a scripted short I think it's gonna be six or seven episodes and They're already in the tank their films. We're editing them and hopefully Hopefully we get a couple a couple laughs out of it. We're excited about it Defend housing. I think this super fun. I'm gonna push back You said b2b marketing is extremely boring b2b marketing seems so it seems like it's become so much more fun at the very least over the last like couple years And you've heard me say this Post-crop crushes the events the cabs you guys are you you're producing TV shows I mean it just doesn't sound like your typical like marketing collateral that you're handing out a conferences Yeah, it's getting better It's getting more fun. I think that there's plenty of like aspirational brands and b2b that are showing a different way like when I think about I think about like a ramp for example the crushing it Growing massively putting up all the numbers and also doing really really cool interesting brand stuff and so That traditionally is not the way b2b marketers approach their jobs So there's definitely some folks out there showing what's possible and You know at post script we always say like you know, we want to try to Say where are the people's ag and let's do some weird stuff because if it's not interesting then it's probably not good and You know now our family TV show so we'll see what happens, but we're excited about it. There'll be some Uh some cameos there um and I think that the the community will we'll enjoy those I'm most I'm most curious by the Sean Frank part because he's fun big time So it looks like he has a star role in this and he was just in a Common thread collective ad as well. So he's he's on mainstream. Oh, yeah, he's he's definitely crossed over He's the talent now and We he'll make a cameo. Um, there'll be a few other folks in the mix too. It'll be a lot of fun um If people watch it will do a skeptic season two, you know, I will pick it up We'll pick it up for another season, but um, we'll see how the first one goes. We're really pumped about it it was a lot of fun to make um and hopefully it resonates with the community.