#197 – How Text Message Marketing Can Help Your Amazon or E-Commerce Business

As Amazon’s ecosystem continues to become more crowded, the way e-commerce sellers advertise and market their products has becoming increasingly important.

E-commerce is booming and the sophistication of the marketing methods is rapidly evolving. That’s why it’s funny that one of the fastest growing methods of marketing is a form of communication favored by teenagers.  

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton welcomes Arri Bagah, a text messaging marketing expert.

It was evident early on that Arri might end up in technology. While still in school, Arri was playing video games for money online. Later after teaching himself to code, he transitioned into Facebook marketing, and got his start optimizing online stores for friends. After Facebook started to impose more control over their proprietary marketing platform, Arri pivoted again to text message marketing.  

He says that he loves the freedom it gives him. When you add in the 99% open rates and the 20% click through rate; what’s not to like?

 In episode 197 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Arri discuss:

• 02:50 – Playing Video Games for Money
• 04:15 – Starting with Facebook Marketing
• 05:25 – An Early Text-Based Marketing Agency
• 07:20 – What’s a Typical Text Message Marketing Open Rate?   
• 09:15 – Owning Your Own Audience
• 10:25 – Text Marketing Rules
• 13:35 – Arri’s Success Stories 
• 18:25 – Creating Facebook Marketing Flows  
• 20:55 – Putting QR Codes to Work  
• 24:20 – Establishing Urgency
• 25:45 – Text is a Two-Way Conversation
• 28:20 – The Biggest Misconceptions About Text Message Marketing
• 31:20 – Getting Started with Text Marketing 
• 33:45 – How to Contact Arri   

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about a form of marketing that most Amazon sellers don’t even consider, but it has a 99% open rate and a 20% click through rate. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon world. And we’ve got somebody on the line today that is going to talk about something we’ve never talked about over 200 episodes. We’ve got Arri, Arri calling him from LA. Arri. How’s it going?

Arri Bagah: Doing well. How are you?

Bradley Sutton: I’m doing just delightful. Thanks. Now, one thing we do on this show, when we first start, before we get into the meat and potatoes, I always liked just learning about the individual’s journey to get where they are now. So, you said you’re in LA right now. Were you born and raised here in California? Or where were you born and raised?

Arri Bagah: I was born in Togo in West Africa, actually. Nowhere near LA.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Cool. That’s a little bit farther away from LA. Now, when you were like eight, nine, 10 years old, were you still there?

Arri Bagah: Yeah, didn’t it moved to LA until I was like 12.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So, right before you moved to LA, like, what was your, like, when you’re growing up there, eight, nine, 10 years old. What was your ambition? As far as career wise? Like, Hey, I want to be this when I grow up.

Arri Bagah: Yeah. I think I wanted to be like a fighter jet pilot growing up.

Bradley Sutton: Top gun.

Arri Bagah: Yeah. Fighter jet pilot. Always love those, looking at those when I was a kid. So that was kind of like what I wanted to do.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Okay. I like it. Sometimes I get people on here and they gave me the most boring of answers. And I’m sorry, guys, if you’re listening back to this episode, I’m calling you out by like, Oh yeah, I want it to be an accountant or I want it to be in this. I’m like, Oh my goodness. What eight year old strives to be an accountant? Eight year old should want to be fighter pilots. That’s what I’m talking about. Okay, cool. So, then you moved to Chicago. Now when you graduated high school, did you enter university at all?

Arri Bagah: Yeah, I went to college in Indiana. Um, and I was the going for pharmacy actually. And I didn’t really like it. So I ended up dropping out. I graduated at like, well, I graduate high school at 16 or right before I turned 17. So that was not my [inaudible] could really do that. I could feel it do. So, I was playing video games professionally on Twitch. This was like in 2013 and I wanted to be like a professional video gamer. And obviously my parents were like, no, you can’t do that. Kids don’t make money playing video games. And now today, kids are just making so much money playing video games. Then I went to college again. I tried to go to college for the second time. I went to Roosevelt University in Chicago, but I also didn’t really like it. I was going for computer science and I’m like, man, maybe college is not for me. So I started to learn coding, met a friend who was doing consulting at a time. My good friend, Victor Khan. And, so he sent me like, uh Envato and Treehouse. And now like, I’m just going to learn coding on my own. Maybe that would be a much faster way to actually doing what I wanted to do. I then started to do small website projects with my friend in Chicago. We even did like a small agency to help businesses build sites and it’d be transitioned into marketing because we realized in order to get brands to pay us every month, we had to do some sort of recurring marketing and do marketing every month. So we started to transition into marketing and that’s when I first got into Facebook marketing. And after learning Facebook ad for awhile, I work with one of my friends e-commerce store, helping him optimize his store. And we took the store from literally zero to like a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue for his e-commerce store in like five months. So, that was like a lot of learning and like driving traffic, optimizing storage, et cetera. So I started to work on my personal brand around like Facebook and helping e-commerce businesses, either optimize their store, leverage Facebook ads. And while doing that, it was just a great learning experience. And around that time too, Facebook messenger marketing was starting to get a little bit more popular. So, I got into messenger marketing early specifically for e-commerce because once you get the taste of e-commerce, you can’t really go back. People kind of knew me as like this guy was doing like messenger marketing for only e-commerce and Facebook was also making a lot of changes to the messenger marketing space. So, I started to transition into text marketing because I knew I wanted a channel like email where there’s no control over your audience. No one can tell you like, Hey, you need to send at this time where you can send to these people or approve what you’re going to send. So texts was that channel and right around there, there was like software companies that were coming out and then making text more available for e-commerce brand and more integrated. So, I was probably one of the first ones to have an agency that is specifically doing text marketing. Even today, there’s barely any agencies that are doing text marketing for e-commerce businesses, converse smart. My current agency we’ve been helping direct to consumer e-commerce brands, leverage texts, marketing, and we recently introduced emails, email marketing as well, and just allowing brands to reach their customers directly, build meaningful relationships and generate millions of dollars in revenue, through mobile messaging. So, we really focus on mobile text marketing and mobile email. That’s our specialty, and we’re not looking to be like some full service agency offering like 20 different services and just suck up all of those services. We really want to specialize. So, that’s what we do. We are a conversational marketing agency and we want to help bridge that gap between the brand and the customer by crafting awesome messages that get their customers to convert.

Bradley Sutton: I mean, people I think are used to like email marketing and they say, Oh, you don’t want my open rates only 5%, 10%, 15% or something. And my CTR, click through rate, is less than 5%, 2%, 1%, even less. But how does that compare with text marketing?

Arri Bagah: Yeah. So with text marketing, open rates are very high. Obviously you cannot measure an open rate through text, but with everyone in the text marketing space and by everyone, I mean the platforms and consultants and marketers based on just the data that we see, we’ve concluded that you get 99% open rates on text. But what can be measured is that 80% of those texts are open within 90 seconds of being received. So that’s a lot of reach that you get compared to something like email, where you’re seeing 20% open rate, if you’re actually really, really good. But we’re not saying to stop using email. Email is still a very effective channel, but texts is meant to supplement that email traffic because of texts, you reach more people more quickly and people are more likely to see the message that you want to send.

Bradley Sutton: Now. Yeah. I agree that no matter what everybody’s still should do email marketing, but then maybe some people might be wondering like, okay, well, do I still do Many chat and SMS or text marketing? Or do you feel it should be in addition to email, they should pick one or the other or still they should even do both as far as the messenger and text.

Arri Bagah: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think you should do text and email because doing texts, email and messenger, obviously you do have customers on messenger, but messenger and texts are very similar where it’s still on the customer’s phone. But I would argue that it’s much easier to reach that customer on texts than messenger because text is just pre installed on their app, on their phone when they get it. And more people are more likely to open their text messages and open the messenger app. Although open rates on messenger are still pretty high. I still recommend using texts over messenger because with texts, you own the audience, Facebook own your audience. They can’t tell you like that. You have to pay a certain amount of to message your audience. They can’t tell you, Hey, you can’t send this because they have to approve it. So, there’s a lot of restrictions with using messenger at this time. So, typically I recommend texts for mobile marketing.

Bradley Sutton: Let’s talk about that a little bit. Because I know people got kind of messed up with the strategies they’re using with Many chat because of limitations on, I forgot exactly what it was, but like you can’t message them after so many days of inactivity and this and that, but what are the general rules of text marketing? Obviously you can’t just like spam people, with no consequences, but in general, what do people who utilize text marketing needs to understand in this country and in the USA, I’m sure it’s different than in other countries, but what do they need to know? What could get them in trouble here in the States?

Arri Bagah: Yeah. One of the important things that I recommend is to be aware of compliance. So, obviously text is a regulated channel, meaning that you can’t just spam, random phone numbers. You definitely get in trouble. And the FCC has enacted the TCPA, the telephone consumer protection act, to protect consumers who have cell phones from getting spammed by any individual or telemarketers, et cetera. So I always recommend every marketer to either talk to a lawyer or figure out what the different rules are for texts marketing. But the main thing is that you can’t just download a text list and just start spamming people. People need to actually give you consent to text them. So, if you have like a form where people can opt in and then check a box, Hey, you can text me stuff like that. So you need to make sure that those people are aware that you’re going to be texting them. So that’s the first thing. And also like it’s courtesy, right? You’re not just like abusing people’s privacy, Texts like a very primary channel for people. So, you don’t want to be that person that’s just texting people and then they’re like mad about it and they’re not coming back to your website to make a purchase. So compliance is a big thing. So make sure that people are opting in and they actually want to receive your text messages. And once you’ve got that right, the next is what you actually sent. Obviously don’t spam people. I know that’s one of the reasons why messenger Facebook, we’re seeing like people were just spamming and spamming, but with texts you could get like in legal trouble for spamming, you could get sued by consumers up to $500 for it’s protects messages. And if you get a class action you’re basically done. So you definitely don’t want to be spamming. So there’s a lot of different things, but mainly like if you have an audience, make sure they’re opting in and yeah, send them relevant content, segment your audiences, and just do the right thing. I know people typically know what they should be doing and they know what they shouldn’t be doing. And that was mark is like, it’s always the people who know what they should be doing, but they decided to do what’s not right, because they want to squeeze as much out of the list as possible. And then that ends up ruining channels for other marketers. So yeah, just don’t spam and make sure that people are opting in compliantly.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now, just to get people excited or to understand the potential here, what kind of facts and figures can you give us, like on an actual company? I mean, you don’t have to say the name of the company or anything, but you can just say, Hey, there was a company and they were doing a thousand dollars a week on this project or this product. And they started implementing a text marketing. And then over the next– within six months we were able to 3X, their sales, I mean, are just some example kind of like that real life examples that people understand the potential here.

Arri Bagah: Sure. Yeah, we have a lot of those. So we have clients that are doing over a million a month in text marketing alone. Especially right now when some products are out of stock and people want to know when the product is back. So we have brands like that who are sending those back and stack notification. That’s working really well. And with text having so much reach, we’re talking 99% open rates and 10, 20, sometimes 30% click through rates. You can really reach most of your audience. So you don’t really need a big list to see results. And we have a brand that we’re doing about a hundred K through texts, and then they came to us and we took them to like 500, 600,000 per month in revenue. So yeah, there’s a lot of different case studies that we have on our website. But I would say like the main thing is that for a channel like text, typically we see around the 25X return on investment on the channel. So, for every dollar you spend on texts, you can get up to 25, or more back. So there’s a lot of great opportunity on this channel for any e-commerce version to average it.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So in actuality, obviously a lot of our listeners are Amazon based, but do you have Amazon sellers who use your service?

Arri Bagah: Mainly e-commerce, like direct to consumer, shop five, Magento e-commerce whatever the platform is. That’s the typical clients that we work with. But we do have some brands that want to build up an audience that they can text Amazon links to. So that’s something that you can do. Because I know sometimes Amazon brands like to build up an email list that they can then leverage to drive traffic too. So, you can consider a text marketing list as an option and probably even work better just because of the open-ended click through rates. So that’s something that Amazon brands can leverage if you’re going to building an audience route. And also I know some Amazon brands that can send postcards to their audiences. You can get them to opt in through text to those postcards so you can reach them directly.

Bradley Sutton: All right, let’s take a quick break and let’s get into my BTS that can stand for whatever you want. Bradley’s 30 seconds or possibly bountiful tactic systems, behind the scenes, whatever you want it to stand for. But this is my tip for the week. During Q4 and who knows how long into Q1 it’s going to go, many sellers for newer items or even existing items have maximum quantity limitations that they can send into Amazon. Now, the way to find out what your maximum quantity limitation is inside of Amazon takes kind of forever to get to. But those of you who have Helium 10, just go into your Profits tool and into your Inventory Forecasting, and right there, there’s a column where you can see instantly how many units you have available to send into Amazon so that you can plan your inventory out.

Bradley Sutton: Let me give you, I mean, I’m just coming up with this at the top of my head, like a random scenario here, and then maybe you can finish it off here. So, I would imagine like a couple of different ways that people can get the phone number. Because obviously Amazon does not give out the phone number of customers anymore and you’re not necessarily supposed to contact them outside of the Amazon ecosystem. So two ways that I could think this would work, number one , is before they even get to Amazon, kind of like the way that people use many chat is, Hey, we’re going to throw up a Facebook ad and to try and get people into our funnel, through it through many chat, and then we’ll eventually direct them to Amazon. But at the very least now we’ve got there, we’ve got them in our many chat audience. So I would imagine that it could be possible to do something similar. Like, Hey, I’m going to put a Facebook ad to, Hey, get 50% off of this item or get 75%. You just have to opt in to the text. So there may be the call to action will be in the Facebook ad. And then, you know, let’s just take this, let’s start with this one and I’ll give the other scenario that I came up with in my mind. So, is that possible? And then how would that work? What would the click do on the Facebook ad? Does the Facebook ad just say, Hey, text this number to do it. And then you got to hope that they do it, or does it actually, can it click into a text conversation from the Facebook ad directly?

Arri Bagah: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think what you could do is click into a Facebook lead form. So, instead of like sending them to the landing page with the Facebook lead form, they can– it auto-populates their phone number. And most people have the most current phone number on Facebook because Facebook is making everybody have this whole two factor authentication things. So you got to have the most updated numbers. Otherwise you get locked out of your account. So people most of the time have the most up to date for a number. So if you use a Facebook lead form, you can collect their phone number directly through that. And then from there, you can send it to a platform like many chat, if you want to use it for text, or post group attentive, some of those apps that you want to use for e-commerce. So, the other option is to send them a landing page or on the landing page, you can get their phone number. And on that landing page, you can have, you can split test, right? You can have one that has a lot of copy that goes more in detail. And if they’re exiting the page, you can have the exit intent pop up to collect that phone number. Or you can just have a direct option page. Typically I recommend having more content on a landing page that way you can filter more people and have a more targeted audience. And so those are some of the two apps.

Bradley Sutton: It works out great for Helium 10 because we have landing page software included in our package for our sellers where in the past, it’s mainly just to like, maybe deliver coupons or try and get their email address. And they don’t have the contact information, or things like that. But then I could see that integrating perfectly with getting their phone number instead of just their email address. And then we’ll have their– we can have them in our, in our text audience, I guess. Interesting. Okay. How about this then scenario? The other option I was thinking of is kind of like what you were talking about something on the box which is kind of, I’m not sure I’d have to check into what the latest app from Amazon is. I might not want to put something on the outside box at Amazon could see, but insert cards where you could say, Hey, texts number to get our warranty, or to qualify for your lifetime warranty or something. So then, that could be either a QR code that generates something automatically, or is the better way to do it is just having them say text 3333 to this number, or how would you suggest doing that in insert card?

Arri Bagah: Yeah. QR codes are also really great. That’s something that I forgot to mention, but if they can scan a QR code and go directly into a text conversation, that would be even better because they don’t have to type in the number and the whole keyword thing. And I think people are getting more used to QR code with like restaurants. Now they don’t give you the menu. You got to set scan the whole QR code. I’m not sure if you have experienced that yet at a restaurant now.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. I mean, I think everybody– Nobody knew about that before. Very, very rare, except, Oh yeah, we’re a trendy restaurant. You can get the menu on the QR code, but like literally everywhere I go now, that’s all it is. It’s all QR code.

Arri Bagah: Yeah, exactly. So people are getting more used to it now. So maybe QR codes will work much better. And I think it makes the experience a lot better cause they don’t have to type anything in, so yeah. QR code, like insert packets inside of the package itself. So you don’t put on top of the package and Amazon not find out, but that could have be a strategy that works too.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Now, how– you gave us some numbers like, Hey, sometimes it’s 25X, so like what are people doing to be able to get those kinds of numbers? Like, what is the offer? Like what is the strategy here? I mean, we’ve just been talking about how to get them into the flows and how to acquire the numbers and stuff, but what’s the actual strategy of how people are generating money from this type of advertising?

Arri Bagah: Sure. I think, yeah, the reason why it’s important to cover out to get people in, because if you don’t have anyone on your list, it’s very hard to generate revenue. So, I think the most important part is actually getting that those subscribers onto your list. But once you have people on your list, what you want to do is make sure that the audience is targeted, right. People who are interested in your product and what you want to do is engage with them. Maybe two times, two to three times per week, depending on your audience. Some audiences might be able to handle less than that. Maybe just once a week, but typically twice a week is fine. Recently we did a survey, or 2020 state of DTC text marketing report. And we found out that over 75% of consumers have signed up for text messages through online stores in the past year. And they’re receiving around three plus messages per week, which has been like really interested to uncover. So people are very used to text marketing already. So, people are not really going to get annoyed, receiving text marketing, a text campaign from your business. So, that’s the first thing. So knowing that what we want to do is craft messages that would get our customers to click to where we want to send them. So what we don’t want to do is like, obviously someone can not make a purchase directly from texts yet. So, our main goal is to get them to click. So, what we want to do is send content around the product benefits, and this comes from like, knowing your audience very well, right? If you have a product that’s been selling already, you know what works, so that type of copy, and then just kind of getting them to a click with a strong call to action and with texts, because it’s kind of like an instant channel. You want to also put some urgency on that. So like, Hey, get this products limited offer our offer expires tonight, midnight tonight, et cetera, because people are going to open it very quickly. And with some urgency, you’re going to get more people clicking. For e-commerce sites, if you’re integrated, what you can do is more like automated stuff. So with a welcome series of when someone opts in, you can send them a series of messages to try to get them to convert. So it could be like a five-part welcome series that sends in the span of two weeks that welcomes them to your brand. And it gives them more information about the product that they’re interested in. And then you have your abandoned cart message to get those people who are leaving stuff in their cart to come back. It works really, really well. You’re looking at 20, 25% click through rates on those messages, which is really good. The last thing I would say was, is to also respond to customers because I know some marketers like to do text marketing people reply back, and then they just don’t respond. Texts is a two-way communication channel. That’s how in nature people use it. If you’re communicating with friends, family, coworkers, it’s usually a two way conversation. So if you have people replying to your campaigns, respond to them. Most of the time they want to make a purchase. And they probably just have a question right before pulling that trigger. So, make sure to respond to questions about orders, et cetera. It just makes the experience a lot better. And at the end of the day, we just want to be heard. So if you take time to respond, they’re probably going to come back and make another first.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, man, I think that’s important too, because just me personally, I just hate like talking on the phone and I’m all about like chat, customer support and things like that. But then like, for example, not Comcast, but Cox, I have Cox cable out here, which is just bad. But, for whatever reason I love, the only way I liked talking to their customers for it is through Twitter DM. Like I found they’ve got a Twitter support channel. And then that’s how I do my customer support. But so basically if you’re marketing on a certain text number, somebody can reply to it and it actually goes somewhere so that you can have a two-way conversation. Or how does that work?

Arri Bagah: Yeah, let’s say you’re using Many chat, for example, for text, if people are replying back, you as in a go, there’s like always a chat tab where your responses are coming back. Like I think every platform has it. So yeah, when people are responding back, you’re going to see in the chat tab and you’re going to be able to like text people back and forth. And I’m the same way to have customer support. I hate calling. I would go in like a hotel and then like the idea of just calling and ordering food. I just like hate it so much. So yeah, I’m always like a chat person. So like everything I try to do over like chat or texts.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. I’m exactly the same way. I just hate talking on the phone. I want to just, even with the hotel, like, I don’t want to call the front desk. I love the Hilton, like little app. I can just like chat with the front desk.

Arri Bagah: Exactly. I’m the same way.

Bradley Sutton: This is interesting. This is interesting. Go ahead. You’re the same way. Okay. That’s good. All right. Now what else should people know? Obviously I have zero experience in this. I’m just coming up with the other top of my head, like kind of questions that I have and that maybe others have, but what are people, what are some misconceptions maybe you can talk about, or some things that people don’t realize, like the biggest things that people don’t realize about marketing via SMS?

Arri Bagah: Yeah. I think the biggest misconception is more like a personal. I’ve talked to a lot of marketers. And the biggest thing is that people are afraid that they might be invading people’s privacy, or people might be annoyed. But what you have to realize is that the average person is already predisposed to text marketing through two factor authentication, delivery notification, presidential campaigns. If you look at all the presidential campaign, every one of them had like text this keyword to this number. Like most people are already predisposed to it. So text is not really something that’s going to surprise the customer. So, don’t be afraid to try at least try it, you don’t have to, you might feel that it might be annoying, but once you do it and you see the results coming, it’s definitely going to change your mind. But we’ve had many markers just like, think that would be annoying to text to three times per week. But when you do it, it works, you want to do even more. So yeah, like I think people are just, maybe they’ve had a bad experience with it in the past, but texts today’s completely different. There is a lot of regulation to stop people who were spamming and it’s very easy for consumers to unsubscribe today. All they have to do is reply stop. So that’s not even an issue. So from talking to many markers, I think that’s the biggest thing that I’ve heard. Either like someone who’s like very excited to do it, or someone was like, Oh, I would never like, let it brand text me. That’s just like invasion of privacy or whatever. But the data shows otherwise the consumer is spending time and the channel like texts and businesses have to reach those customers where they are, which is on their smartphone. So text is only going to be used more and more often as over the coming years, since that’s where the consumer is. And the consumer want to text with businesses, just like the texts were friends, family, coworkers. So, ultimately you’re just going to have to use it since that’s where the consumer is.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So then is there like a platform that you have, or do you just utilize other platforms or how has this actually run? I’m assuming a lot of our listeners would probably want to contact you and see you about getting started, but what would the process be like me, we’ve got some case study products here at Helium 10 that we did a YouTube series on, like one is a coffin shelf and one is an egg tray. So like, if I were to say, Hey, Arri, I want to start, I’m going to put– I’m going to use Helium 10 and maybe put like– make a landing page or something. Or maybe I’m going to put an insert in later. And I’m going to get people into this funnel, or at least I want to capture these text messages. And now I’ve got 500 phone numbers and now what do I do with this, Arri? So what’s the next step there.

Arri Bagah: A platform that you could use for Amazon seller , I think many chats can be a great platform because you have that flexibility to use both messenger and SMS on the same platform. And I think it definitely is easy to get that customer’s phone number directly from Facebook or a landing page and have it in Many chat and send them campaigns directly through there. But if you’re an e-commerce brand doing direct to consumer through Shopify, postscript, Yappo SMS are two great apps. And if you’re like a much bigger brand, attentive is a brand that we also work with. So those are some of the platforms that I recommend. And at the end of the day, we are a marketing agency. We are helping businesses implement. So, whatever platform you’re on, doesn’t really matter. We’ve used pretty much every platform that’s out there, and know what really works. So yeah, as far as platforms, those are some of the ones that I would recommend.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Cool. Now, one thing that we do on this show, we have what’s called a TST, or a TST, 30-second tip. You’ve been giving us a lot of different strategies about how to utilize SMS marketing. What is something that you can say in like 30 seconds or less that’s highly actionable, valuable to our listeners in regards to text messaging.

Arri Bagah: One tip I could offer during the holiday season is if you’re emailing your subscribers for the holiday season, tell them to subscribe to your text list to get early access to your, their black Friday cyber Monday or Christmas, or whatever, how this is an offer you have, they can opt in through texts. That’s a great way to get those customers onto your text list initially. The reason why you want to do that is that with texts, you get much higher open rates and click through rates. So with the holiday season, people are sending two to three X more emails. So if a channel like X and just probably going to be the only person in their inbox, and you’re going to reach them directly. So that can be a great strategy. We use it on the last year’s black Friday, cyber Monday worked really, really well for some of our brands. So that can be one strategy that I think could work for the listeners.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Now, if people want to find you on the interwebs and get more information on how this works and possibly see about getting some help from you on a campaign, how can people find you?

Arri Bagah: This is my favorite question on any podcast. You can find us at conversmart.com, conversmart.com. You can request a free consultation. Like I said, we do text marketing as a service, as well as email marketing as a service. So if you want to get a free consultation or a free audit, if you want us to take a look at what you’re doing right now and offer different ways that you can improve, definitely reach out to us there. My email is, [email protected]. If you have any questions, we’re more than happy to help out.

Bradley Sutton: Can people have like a text number so that they can see your stuff in action? Isn’t there an opt in maybe a via text too?

Arri Bagah: Oh yeah. We do have– it’s more like client. I haven’t been doing more much personal branding, so I don’t have like– I don’t– like the numbers that we use are just for like clients that are selling products and they have their own numbers. So, it’d be like opting in to them. But if you go on a website, you can see some of the projects that we worked on and you can go on a website and be able to opt in and you actually get like some of the texts that we’re sending out.

Bradley Sutton: Oh, okay. Cool. All right. Well Arri, thank you so much for coming on here. This is something that I think, I would say 95%, if not more of Amazon sellers maybe have not considered, most of them have heard of email marketing most have heard of many chat, but text marketing might be a new concept. So I thank you for coming on and educating us on this. And we’ll talk to you again in the future.

Arri Bagah: Thanks for having me.