#243: Dos and Don’ts of Text Message Marketing with Bobby Angilella Co-Founder of Slick Text

Hey guys. Welcome to episode number 243. And we're going to dive deep into text message marketing. So get ready to meet my friends at Slicktext. Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works, from mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub, and I can't wait to chat. Hey guys, One of the most important opportunities that we have in marketing today is to build our lists. Whether it's email list or our Facebook messenger list or our text marketing list. Actually having a list that you own versus putting all of your eggs in the basket of social media and not knowing if the algorithm is going to allow your followers to see your content really is forward thinking about setting your business up for success. So today I wanted to answer some of your common questions about text marketing with my friend Bobby Angela from Slicktext. He's going to talk about how to grow your marketing list with text marketing, how to run giveaways, how to share content, really how to engage your followers. I think this stat is something like 99% of text messages are read within the first five minutes, whether they're opened or actually just viewed on your preview screen on your phone. It's a pretty significant stat. And when you think about how you're actually engaging your customer versus always just trying to sell your customer, there's some real opportunity with text marketing. So enjoy today's episode. I know your mind is going to run crazy with ideas on how to segment your list and how to reach out to your customers and how to drive more engagement in a list that you truly own. So enjoy this with my friends. Again at Slicktext, there is a download that goes along with this episode. So check it out in the show notes and as always, let me know what you think anytime on Instagram. Jalderson. Hey guys, welcome back to the show. This week we are going to get deep in strategy and what to do, so make sure you have your notebooks handy. I'm so excited today to be joined by Bobbi Angela, who is the VP and co founder of Slicktext, which many of you are probably already familiar with. So, Bobbi, welcome to the show.

Yeah. What's up guys? How are you?

We're really excited to have you. Let's start here. I Know that so many of our listeners are familiar with text marketing, but just in case someone isn't, do you want to kind of lay the groundwork for us?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, what is text message marketing? You know, text message marketing is the ability to grow a permission based subscriber list and send text messages to your subscribers, you know, maybe once a week or once every other week to drive traffic to your either retail location or E commerce site to spike sales. That's essentially it. That's the idea behind text marketing.

I've heard this random stat, you'll have to tell me if I'm close, but it was something crazy. Like 95% of texts are read within the first five minutes.

Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, there's two independent studies and you know, you're kind of really testing my brain and memory there on that one. But there's two independent studies that were made very famous in our industry. And the studies essentially said that when the text messages are sent, 99% of people read the message within 5 minutes and 95% within 5 seconds. And just to add to that, guys, the Pew Internet study for mobile phone users for 2017, I haven't checked 18 yet because they released them the year after, said that the number one function for owning a mobile phone, smartphone or not, was text messaging. And it's going to be that way for 20 plus years. Now they're releasing a new product called RCS Messaging Rich Communication Services which is going to beef up your current SMS services and it's going to allow you.

To do some crazy stuff that's crazy. First of all, I feel like a creeper that I'm on my phone that often and that I read text messages that fast because I find that to be quite accurate. But number two, that's really, really exciting, especially with the shift like you and I were talking about before we started to record that so many brick and mortar traditional stores are going, you know, not only e commerce but digital marketing. Like this is just so critical to growth today for sure. Talk to me about when using text marketing, the importance of building a list that you own versus just getting your name out there on social media.

Well, it kind of sounds like we're talking two different marketing channels almost. You know, I just want to. I've worked with thousands and thousands of businesses not only to implement text marketing, but I've been on some of the biggest marketing strategy calls in the world with brands like Selena Gomez, George Strait, American Cancer Society and you know, there's one thing that I'M seeing as a pattern with social media and that is as they continue to grow, they are putting more restrictions on how we communicate and market to our target audience on Facebook and Instagram and it's costing us more money and our followers aren't seeing our message like it used to be. And that really stinks. Right. So what do we do? You know, SMS marketing, text message marketing, like we're doing here with Slicktext, it's really different than social media marketing. Social media, you know, it's really, you should be about visually sufficing your audience and providing consumable content that they like to share and engage with. So it puts your brand in the back of their mind. So when they're looking for that cardigan or that article of clothing or whatever it is, they think, oh, hey, I'm going to go to Brand xyz because I remembered seeing that post. But the thing is there's so many restrictions, we can't really use it as an effective marketing tool like we used to. So step in. SMS marketing, the number one form of communication that's private, secure, encrypted, there's separate infrastructure in place, the cellular towers. That's the infrastructure that's not going away. So now how do we convert those people to sms? You know, you can use both of them and I usually suggest, you know, run a text to win contest on social media to convert those followers to sms because we know nobody's going to hold hostage your contacts. Right. So SMS is a little bit different in the sense that when you have somebody opt into a text message marketing list, there's no corporate company, Slicktext isn't going to say, okay, well great, you need to spend extra money just to get to those people. No, when you type up a text message and you hit send to your subscribers, it goes to everybody's phones within seconds. There's no non delivery, there's no issues. There's sometimes there's carrier outages which are rare, but your message is getting to them in seconds. And that is great because we don't have to worry about big old Facebook, you know, throttling our post and requiring us to spend additional money just to get our current likes in front of that post. You know, it's a big difference there.

Huge difference. We talk about this a lot inside of the boutique hub just in terms of strategy, how important it is to own your list like you do with sms, with marketing versus being at the mercy of the next algorithm change. Right, right. You mentioned one strategy to grow your list once you're started with text marketing, just running a text to win campaign. Can you talk about some other strategies that you find helpful for a lot of your customers when it comes to growing your list?

Right, so let's start with the basics, guys. There are really a couple different ways you can do this. Alright? You are trying to get somebody's cell phone so that you can send a text message to them that's private, that requires an exchange of something. If I'm going to give you my mobile number so that you can text me, I want to know that there's going to be an incentive or value worth receiving, right? So the basics, if you start a text marketing campaign, the most common thing is to exchange some kind of offer or free shipping or item for them to opt into your list, right? Actually, we should back up one step. The basic is to just simply put the mechanism out there for people to know about early access to new product and exclusive offers. That's the first and foremost basic. If you just put text marketing campaign together and put the mechanism out there, you know, the call to action that says text boutique2,888 triple one, you're going to get some subscribers, some people are going to be moved by that and see the value of just getting early access to your new product and maybe exclusive offers via text message because that's their preferred method of communication, right? So there's one way. Next we get a little bit more aggressive. We offer an incentive, right? So when we integrate Shopify, which, oh my gosh, if you have Shopify and you're using Slicktext and you're not integrated, I'm gonna slap your hand. So when we use Shopify, an easy strategy is once you're integrated on the checkout page, when they provide their mobile number, maybe give them free shipping on their next purchase, right? There's an incentive for them to exchange their mobile number so that you can send them exclusive offers via text, alright? Then we get really aggressive. In a perfect world, there's no limits, right? So for some of the bigger boutiques, you have a marketing department, you're a marketer, you want to get real aggressive with this and you can float this with the owner. What I would probably recommend is that you run a text to win contest where you have an incentive for joining the contest and then you're entered for a chance to win some kind of exclusive offer. So maybe it's, you know, join our mobile club and you'll receive free shipping on your next purchase, plus you'll be entered to win a $25 online gift card. Right. So that's a really aggressive approach, but you have to have that exchange of the value. There has to be a value proposition for somebody to take action and opt into your text list. So it could be early access to new product and alerts, it could be free shipping to opt in for, you know, exclusive offers, or it could be enter for your chance to win plus free shipping on your next purchase. Right. So no incentive. Small incentive, large incentive.

Perfect. Talk to me about when you're running those contests, those campaigns, are there any laws, Right. Or regulations that you feel like people should know about when it comes to opting in or using SMS in general?

Great question. So compliance is something we get questions on all the time. And this is really what we built our business on, is making sure that anybody who contacts us is educated first and foremost on how it works as far as compliance. We can't just take phone numbers and send them text messages. Right. In 2013, there was an update to the Telephone Consumer Protection act, which is law that essentially states that you have to have consent to send text messages to people. When they text a keyword to a number, they're actually providing that consent electronically because they're showing that they initiated the text message, they sent it to the number and they hit send, which confirms electronic consent. But there is a lot of compliance and that is something that, you know, honestly, I don't know if we want to talk about on this call, but as somebody does get signed up for Slicktext, we do provide one on one training which essentially educates them on compliance, like what's required on a Facebook post, what's required on a, you know, a flyer in your store, what's required on a television ad. There are requirements out there by not only the TCPA Teleconsumer Protection act, but also an organization called the Cellular Telecommunications Industry association, and that's usually abbreviated as SCTIA. And those are the carriers, Verizon, T Mobile, AT&T. They have rules on how you use their networks. Right. So our platform, just to let everybody know, it's CTI compliant, it's TCPA compliant. You really can't do anything not compliant unless you somehow do something that is not allowed, which we have an internal audit team that will catch you. So there is compliance. I feel like I'm not really answering the question.

Well, is there anything that, let's say a boutique owner wants to start texting, is there anything she needs to know about, like how often she contacts the list or if she scrapes phone numbers from some other place, but someone hasn't opted into the list. What should she be aware of to protect herself?

Okay, totally got it. So, you know, a couple additional things to be aware of is that you can't just scrape numbers from a website. You can't just upload numbers you have in a database because they did business with you. You can't buy or sell phone numbers for the purpose of recurring text marketing inside the usa. All right, so if you want to send recurring text marketing offers, it has to be all permission based. This means that people have to opt in to receive messages from you. And once they do, they usually get a confirmation text message back that says, you know, receive up to or five messages a month or something of that nature. Okay, now that number is decided by you. When you set up your campaign, you want to figure out, well, what is that ideal number? How many messages per month do I want to send these people? From my experience, if you're a brick and mortar, only maybe one to three messages per month maximum. Right. And some people will argue that if you're e commerce, it could be even less. All right, maybe one to two offers per month to drive traffic to your site. And you know, now, so when you set your frequency is what we call it, your number of messages per month, you want to look at your customer life cycle and set that number. Now let's say you set it at five. Would you want to send more than five? No. Because if you send more than what they have agreed to receive, they could say you violated their privacy. And somebody could essentially say, well, hey, you violated this over and over again for the past six months. I'm going to take you to court. Right? And it would be a black and white case because they would have a message on their phone saying five messages per month and proof of every message you sent beyond that per month that you violated their privacy. Right. So we do place a high emphasis on training compliance here at Sliptext. It's definitely something that we make sure our customers are trained on.

That's really good to know. I think one of the most common questions I get around this topic is that fear from boutique owners of being too intrusive, you know, with text marketing. So is there anything. I know you gave a couple of numbers of how often to send a month, and I've heard that range. I've even heard more of that, like more of one a week or even two a week, depending on the type of business. How do you suggest those using text marketing don't become too intrusive like what's a good rule of thumb or what type of content should be in those messages.

Right. So there's a couple things you want to look at. We're talking about two different things here, how not to be intrusive. So number one, don't send too many messages more than what they can handle. So if you're a retail store and you send maybe one around the 15th and one around the last day of the month, that's probably gonna be maxing it out for their life cycle. Maybe use the birthday feature and you send one birthday offer, you know, so that's one message a year, they won't mind that. But what you're gonna see is that if you send more messages than what the norm is for that industry, retail brick and mortar or retail e commerce, you will see a couple things happen. Number one, your response is gonna go down, which means less sales. Number two, you're gonna see your opt out rate spike. Alright? Now an average for opt out is about 10% or less. Okay. Inside your dashboard with most services like ours, you'll see an opt out rate and percentage which is one of the key indicators that you're sending too many and being intrusive. Okay. Don't ever send before 9am, don't send after 9am that is a rule of thumb that's outlined by the Mobile Marketing Association. That's a organization that sets the best practices for the industry. Alright? Now lastly, the last part of your question was, well, what makes up a good campaign? What would you put in there to be non intrusive or help to be non intrusive? So there's really four components that we always teach people how to compose. The most professional text marketing offer that's going to be different for retail brick and mortar and retail e commerce. Let's just get that out there. But typically it includes a business name. Whether it's your brand URL to your website, maybe your business name is in that URL or just your brand name. It has an exclusive offer number two. So number one is the brand name or sender. Number two is the exclusive offer or value. Number three is the call to action such as tap this link, use code, call, reply. And number four is an expiration or time frame. If you know these four components, you can put together an awesome text marketing campaign in 160 characters or less, guaranteed. In fact, I even have templates that you guys can download whether it be retail or e commerce. I think I might have sent those to you.

Yeah, you did. I will, I will Hook those up in the show notes so that you guys if you need some ideas, you can definitely grab those. One suggestion, we do a program at the boutique hub called Retail Bootcamp, which is a high end, kind of end to end training for all aspects of retail business. And when we cover text marketing, a lot of times we'll talk about the Gary Vee method. Right. I'm sure you've heard of Gary V. Follow him. You know, Gary Vee talks about jab, jab, jab, right hook, right.

Oh, geez.

And jab, jab, jab is soft sell, soft sell, soft sell. And the right hook is asking for the sale. So a lot of times in different type of content marketing, we like to mix in soft selling along with what's the offer and what's the hook. So I know some of our retailers that use text marketing are great at sending like a joke on Fridays or an empowering quote or something that isn't necessarily always asking for a purchase, but more so relating to that customer on a human level. Have you had some similar experiences with customers you've worked with?

I just want to clarify your question. We're talking about the hurdles of making a sale.

More so how to relate to customers not always sending just an offer or asking them to complete a sale, but more so sending them soft content. That's just building a relationship and using text as the medium to do so.

Sure, absolutely. So ways that you can build that relationship and what I would say engage your subscribers with would include sending things like pictures of new product and kind of posing questions. Right. So we just got this new product in. What do you think? What are your thoughts? You know, would you wear this? You know, tap below to post your favorite selfie emojis. Also personalizing the text message with their names. If you're collecting that data with our service, you know, so it's not always about the exclusive offer. It could be about simply placing your brand in the back of your mind and the way that you do that, like Gary Vee says, a soft jab. A soft jab, to me in text marketing is a message that simply reminds them that you're there and that you're cool, you're down to earth. And your organization or your company, your brand, your site is somebody that they want to associate and buy from. Right. So you give them a couple soft jabs maybe once or twice every couple of months. And what that does is that just kind of re engages them because we don't want to get dry. Right. If you're just hard Selling all the time. And it's just, hey, we got five VNICs in $5 a pop tap. This link expires tonight. That's good, right? That's good. Around Black Friday, maybe once or twice a month or less. But you gotta remember that these are real people, all right? At the end of the day, they don't want to receive messages from Macy's. Right? I use this example all the time. I don't want to receive a text message from Macy's because it's cold and disconnected. Right. We don't want to be Macy's. You guys can always throw a soft jab in there to re engage your subscriber to pique their interest, to remind them that, oh geez, I really like receiving these text messages from them. I want to see what they got next. All of a sudden, now we're peaking that interest. What does that do for you guys? That reduces your opt out rate and it increases your response when you are ready to execute a text marketing offer.

Mm, I love that you mentioned a couple of things that I found really interesting about sending back an emoji or responding or using a first name. Can you talk to me about some of those features that are integrated with Slicktext that maybe not everybody has access to or is familiar with?

Oh, totally. So it's tough. So yeah, how do we talk about Slicktext features in a short podcast?

You may or may not be partial.

I mean, yeah, so Slicktext, I like to say this Slicktext is like a 1970s TV remote. You got the power button, the channel button, the volume, and then you get the numbers, but then at the bottom you get that black panel and when you slide that black panel down, all of a sudden you have access to this crazy advanced functionality. Right? So we've built the platform to be very intuitive, but we hide the advanced stuff, but it's actually there for you. So just to kind of give you a sliver of some of the really cool stuff that you can do with our service that most others don't have. You know, if you wanted to include emojis in your text messages, we have support for that. If you wanted to send true picture messages, like legitimately true pictures, not a link to a picture. You know, because a lot of services, they say have picture messaging, but what happens is you upload your photo and you hit send and it puts a link inside the text message. You know, that's not picture messaging. We have real picture messaging. In fact, we are one of the first services to release mass picture messaging in The US on short codes. So when you attach a picture, you get 1600 characters in length. Not that you'd ever want to write a text message that long. Don't ever do that. So you can attach a rolling gif. Maybe you want to have an image rolling like four pictures of your product and you put a little short text message with it with a little emoji winky face at the end or pucker face or whatever you want to put in there. And it's just unconventional, right? It's very innovative because most services like this aren't offering those abilities. Now what about personalizing the messages, right? So you can add pictures, animated gifs, emojis. What if you guys used your customers or your subscribers first names in your outbound text message, right? What if you have a list of 10,000 people that have all opted in and provided their name, their first name, and you go to hit send on a message and it goes to all 10,000 people and it's the same message, Right? Well, that's kind of boring. We can't really get too intricate and personalized. But what if I could tell you that you could insert their first name and now all of a sudden when they get that message, it's not just, hey, we got a flash sale on Saturday, come join us. It's hey Bobby, hey Ashley. And you see and read and speak out your name. That's going to change the perception that your subscribers have towards your text marketing. Now it gets personal. Right? And that is where the industry is shifting to down to earth personalized text message marketing. So you can do a lot of cool stuff like that with our service.

Do you have some opportunity to segment your list as well, much like you would with your email service provider?

Yeah, totally. So segmenting is pretty simple. You know, it can get really advanced with slicktext, but the basics are real simple. When somebody opts in to your text list, we're collecting area code, city, state and zip code where the phone was registered, which is about 90, 95% accurate. So if you wanted to do some simple segmenting, you could segment based on that data. Get me everybody in this area code. Get me everybody in this zip code or this city or this state who's opted into my list. Right? So those are the basics. Now we get a little bit more advanced. Now we get into and and or statements. Get me anybody in this city who opted in between these dates or opted in from a Facebook signup form that I created. Right? That's a little bit more advanced. Then we get really Crazy. All right. For larger boutiques, you know, for those who have like a marketer, maybe a digital marketing agency managing their stuff, you're going to want a little bit more. Okay, not just segmenting by that basic info, but maybe we want to go ahead and segment people by gender, by birth date, by age. Right? These are things you can't do with a lot of services which allow you to hyper target your subscriber list. Or for example, what if during the opt in process you simply asked for their info, such as, you know, hey, what's your birthday? Join our birthday club. Now all of a sudden we have their birthday, their birth month, we know the age of them. What if you asked additional details like, hey, are you a size, you know, small, medium, large, xl? Are you, you know, what's your shoe size, what's your favorite color? We're building a database of information on these subscribers that will allow you to reduce your usage of messages, which sounds bad from my perspective, right? Because the more messages you use, obviously you're going to spend more money with us, but you want to get more granular than that, right? You want your marketing dollars to work smart. So segmenting is going to help you do that. And especially with Shopify, the integration that we have, I mean, we could be syncing last purchase date, total purchase amount for their life cycle. Think about that, guys. All right, let's just pause. The holiday season's coming up. Get me anybody. Let's pretend we're creating the segment. Get me anybody who hasn't made a purchase in the last two months and has spent $1,000 or more over their life cycle. Those could represent our best customers. Yeah, they could be your best customers. And we know that the click through is going to be higher and the spend, the average spend is going to be higher. So guess who I am going to segment and target first? The people have spent the most money, they haven't made a purchase in the last couple of months. Right. We know that they're primed to purchase and I'm going to deliver that right to their hand, you know, right into their phone. So these are some of the things you can do with segmenting. It's not just the basics. With sliptext you can do some crazy stuff. I mean, you could even import data. Let's say you build a subscriber list, but you're missing all the data. You could do what we call a data sync, add all that data to their profile and then segment people by that data you've added.

That is huge. There is Endless potential for that, for sure. Talk to me about, you must have excellent data when it comes to just like building a hard ROI or conversion rate for most retailers when it comes to using text marketing.

Yes, let's talk about opt in rate, right? That's the first number that we typically review in conversion of a text marketing campaign. This is how many people may be projected to opt into your text list. Right? So considering that you guys follow a strategy where you offer an incentive and the opportunity for every one of your customers to opt in, whether it be at the register or on your checkout page, if there's a mechanism there where they can opt in, then we typically see with an incentive that between a 10 and 30% opt in rate can be realized. Right? So think about it. If you have a thousand people come in the store over the next 30 days and you have roughly 300 people opt in, that's a textbook opt in rate. Okay? Shopify, we're seeing much higher opt in rate because the mechanism is just right there. You can do shipping alerts, you know, delivery alerts, order confirmed alerts, and then also receive exclusive offers just by them putting the number in there. So you know, that's the most qualified traffic. So obviously the opt in rate is going to be skewed and it's going to be much higher there. But you know, let's just pretend you have a banner on the website, you're stuffing outgoing orders with a little flyer, you know, maybe a checkout integration and maybe in store you have a flyer, an incentive and maybe a tablet set up to punch numbers in maybe with our loyalty program or just a sign up form widget on a tablet. If the employees get involved and they verbally engage people, I mean all these things can really affect this number. But an average, I would say Safely is around 20% with minimal effort are going to opt into your text list, either 20% of all your traffic incoming the store or on your site. Right. So the second conversion number that we usually talk about is the response rate. How many redemptions did we have? Right? So one conversion is your opt in rate based on growth, like how much is your list going to grow? And then the second one is, well, now that I have the list grown, when I send out these offers, how many people can I expect to redeem? And this is a really tough one. Okay. We try to really educate and train our customers, our paid customers, to put the best growth strategy in place and to execute their messages with the four components. We talked about those earlier. And if you have Those four components, it doesn't mean that you are going to see an awesome response. Although think about this for a second. If you had a list of 1000 people and you simply announced a sale for Saturday, that said, we're running a fill a bag sale this Saturday, you know, $20 per bag, stuff as much product in it as you want. If you simply just announce that but don't give them an exclusive offer, do you think out of those 1,000 people that there are going to be more people in your store as if you did not send that text message? Absolutely, absolutely. But here's the thing. We need to be able to measure that response, right? So because they're not going to say, hey, I got your text message. Well, some of them might. They might. So the way that you want to measure response is by either having them show you the text, if you're just doing a plain text message, or you want to track it in a couple different ways. Okay, so the average redemption rate, just to answer this question real quick, I would say between 8 and 15%. That is average for the text offers that you send. Okay. And then we get into measuring redemption, which is a whole nother ball game. Right. So that's our average we typically see with retail and E commerce.

That's really helpful to know.

And if you want me to go into how to measure redemption, I can touch on that too.

Yeah, touch on that as well.

All right, so let's talk about measuring redemption. We could say that this is our third metric that we can use to measure the success or health of our text marketing campaign. Alright. So number one, we have our opt in rate. Number two, we have our redemption rate. And number three, we have our response. Or actually we could say our redemption rate is number three. Or actually just how to measure it. I should say. Sorry. So we want to measure how to track our redemptions. And this is always the tough part for text marketing because we have folks that are really good at growing the list and we have folks that are really good at composing offers, but they suck at measuring roi. Oh, that's what we should say it is. So the third one is measuring roi. Sorry. So we have our growth metric opt in rate, we have our redemption rate and then we have measuring roi. Sorry, brain fart. So how do we measure roi? This is the tough part. All right, so traditionally in text marketing, when it first launched in the early 2000s, it was just text message. Show this text message and I'll give you an offer. Well, it doesn't really make sense if I can just go ahead and forward that message to a friend or take a screenshot and show you over and over again. Don't you think there's going to be a lot of abuse? Yeah.

Screenshots, right? Absolutely.

Yeah, totally. So how do we solve that? Right, so we've created a couple different ways that you can measure redemption, including, like, unique promo codes, which allows you to load in a list of unique codes that they can redeem. And we keep track of that. That allows you to track them in your POS system. Right. Now, most brick and mortars don't have the ability to do this, but most Econ platforms do. You can generate a list of promo codes for the same offer that are all unique, like 10,000 codes. Then you load them into slicktext. Slicktext creates a placeholder, and when you hit send, we pull one of those unused codes off your list and then we insert it in the text message per person. Right. The reason why I'm telling you that is because if those codes are generated in your merchant service, you know, Shopify or whatever you use for checkout, that allows you to do a quick lookup and get me anybody who uses promo code or used the string of promo codes and what their total cart purchase was. Right. So if a text message cost you, let's say you're spending $350 a month on our service and you just generated, I don't know, let's say you generated $2,500 in sales. So if we did 2,500 over 350, we could easily calculate a 714% return on investment. Right. So with a unique promo code or promo codes in general, that's one way that you guys can measure response for E commerce. But how do you do it for retail? Right. So for retail, it's even easier. We have a mobile coupon feature, a digital mobile coupon feature that allows you to track redemptions, how many times people have viewed the coupon, how many times they click the like button. We do have a voting system on there as well. It's kind of cool. There's also buttons for Facebook, Instagram, directions to your store, a button for your, you know, to call you, and we're tracking all those clicks, which is kind of cool. And yes, you can use our unique promo code on these digital coupons. So, you know, if you wanted to issue even your retail customers a unique code and this digital coupon, you could do that as well. And the point is that when they go through the redemption process on this coupon, let's say you did an offer for $10 off their next purchase of 50 or more. Okay, so this can get a little bit confusing, guys, so I'll try to go slow. Let's say that 20 people redeemed an offer for $10 off $50 or more. All right, so 20 people. So that means that the minimum gross revenue would have to be. We'll say 50 times 20. All right, so $1,000. And we know that the minimum ROI of those 20 people who got $10 off a purchase of at least 50 or more was 1,000. Okay. And if you're spending $350, I'm just using that number. I don't know what plan you're going to be on. It's all based on how many messages you send. But if you're spending $350 a month, same thing. We calculate that, we Simply divide those two numbers, move the decimal over, and that's a 285% ROI on that marketing channel from one text message.

Wow, significant. I hope everybody had an opportunity to run that math.

Yeah, let's do one more. I'm so sorry I have to do this to you.

You keep going. It's really good. It's really good.

I have to. Okay, this is for our Shopify listeners. Okay, this is going to be jaw dropping. All right. We do business with some very big E comm brands and small, medium size as well. And what we are finding is that these E comm brands, when they integrate Shopify, they're using our abandoned cart feature. And we're seeing between. I haven't seen anything less than 25% recovery rate. We're seeing between 25 and 32% recovery rate. If that's not mind blowing now, what does that equate to? I have a customer and I can mention their name. Well, actually, I'm not going to. I have a customer that sells earbuds. We'll just say very famous earbuds. And when you abandon their cart, they send you a text message personalized with your first name and everything. And a cart link that you click on that takes you back to your cart to finish your purchase. With this abandoned cart feature, they have seen an 18,000% return on investment month over month from our service. 18,000 guys. So whether you're a Shopify store that's doing a thousand purchases or a thousand orders a month, you probably have about 30% abandoned carts. If we could get back 25% of those abandoned carts, I mean, think about the revenue that that means to you. If I Told you it cost you $350 for 10,000 messages and we got you back, I don't know, 5,000 or $10,000 in abandoned revenue within the first couple hours. Like, you'd be all over that. So anyway, it was about the metric. The metric is that we're seeing between 25 and 32% returned abandoned cart value back to those Shopify users. And the one customer, obviously, they're getting a pretty high roi, and we're seeing that very similar to everybody else across the platform.

It's pretty unbelievable if you think about it. And I think about a lot of our boutiques. Customers who, you know, they're women, a lot of them are juggling multiple things. We all know women like to multitask, right? So you're scrolling online and you're looking at this top that you want to purchase, and then you have a baby crying or, you know, you're at work and you're actually not supposed to be shopping, which, you know, we all do that as well. And you lose your scroll, you lose where you were at. So it's so easy to abandon a cart today. So to have that right there in your text where it's not going to go anywhere, you can come back to it later, completely makes sense. That's really, really eye opening.

Yeah. Honestly, I feel like you just described me.

Oh, baby's crying and then getting distracted at work.

What? Yeah, you know, sometimes I work from home. Yeah, I got two toddlers.

Oh, I totally get it. How old are your toddlers?

We got. Jasmine is two years old. Old. And then Braxton, he is three and a half. He's going to be four. Oh, my gosh. He's going to be four on the 17th of December. So next month. Awesome.

So you heard cats in your spare time. That's perfect.

Yeah, I heard cats. That's one way to put it. Yes.

I once had three kids under the age of five, so I totally can sympathize with that.

No way.

Yes. Yes. You know how they tell you this is such a side note, and typically I would say that if it was a woman on the show. But they're like, you know how you can't get pregnant while you're nursing? No, you totally can get pregnant while you're nursing and you'll just boom, boom, boom, have lots of them all at once. But you know what? It's awesome because they're friends. They're such close friends now. So I'm sure that's going to be the same for your littles. Too.

Yeah. How old are yours now?

They're five, eight, and nine.

Oh, my gosh. I cannot imagine that age.

It's an awesome age. Now they finally listen, you know, somewhat. So. It's getting so much better.

Oh, that's good. That is good. Kids that obey.

Well, I can't say that it's all the time, but, you know I'm great at bribing, right?

Oh, yeah. Halloween candy. That's all I can say.

Perfect. So this is a perfect time. I want to ask you before we wrap up our time together today. I always love hearing the backstory of a business, right. And how it came to be and kind of the founder's journey to where you are right now. So I know your co founder. So tell me about the backstory of Slicktext and how you got where you are right now.

Yeah, yeah. So it's kind of a entrepreneurial idea, Right? And what does that mean? That's an odd term because you hear entrepreneur, but never intrapreneur. So basically, there was a need inside of an existing business that we were working at, right? They said we need a text marketing service. We need the ability to send text messages, but, you know, and we don't have anything to do it right now. So Matt, my business partner, and Ryan, who was one of the other co founders, they were tasked with the responsibility to find a service that they could use at their current employer. And what they found was that there was no easy and affordable and intuitive way to do this. Everybody in the industry at that time, this was like 2011, 2010, actually. When they were tasked with this, they researched, and everything was like, mad expensive. It was ridiculous, and it was very hard to use. It was very clunky. It wasn't robust. I mean, it was really in the infancy stage of text marketing. So they stopped and they're like. They looked at each other and they're like, geez, we could probably build something better than these guys and probably better priced, with more innovation to it. So that's what they did. They started developing that platform, and I got involved a couple months after the idea, and we all just started working nights and in between our jobs and just cranking out as much as we could on the product and building it for about a year. And we ended up launching in late 2011. And, you know, we took the market by storm. When we launched, we ended up winning about five or six different awards. We won a $500,000 grant from the state of New York that we were not allowed to use, that went to the Incubator. Yeah. So you want to start a business in western New York, just go to Fredonia and ask for that grant. So you're welcome. So you know, we got an American flag from President Obama, we got this signed letter from Senator Kathy Young, all these different awards. We got the technology Innovator award of the year for the design of our platform and just reinventing how the service would work for small to medium to large size businesses. And we made it more affordable, easier to use and innovative with features that nobody else had and still does not have to this day with what we release. That's our story.

Very, very cool.

Yeah. And we're still owner operated, all USA based.

Very, very cool. So I always ask this question at the end of the show and you know, it kind of ties into. You shared a lot of strategy today. Right. And you talked about where the future of SMS is going and E commerce in general. And also your personal story, right, of you as a dad and you as a co founder. I always ask this question at the end though. If you fast forward, you know, 30 years into the future and your kiddos have their own kiddos, right. And you're sitting on the front porch and you're talking about the life that you led and the business that you created and just, you know, all the things that people say about you. Right. What are the things that you want those kiddos to remember the most about what you created and how you lived?

Yeah. Oh boy. That comes down to, you know, personal philosophy and that is that we're not here to serve ourselves. Right. We're here to serve others. And the reason why we created Slicktext and why we push it so hard is because we believe there's a better solution out there and we want to solve the problem that everybody was having, you know, and it really comes down to the more people you help succeed, the more successful you're going to be. You know, don't just make it about the money. It's not about the money. Be passionate about providing the service or the product. Make it just an outstanding bend over backwards for your customers. Make it a great experience and solve their problems. Don't just make it about the money. We're here to serve others, not ourselves.

I love that. So well said. People over profits.

Perfect for sure.

Bobbi, it was so awesome to meet you. Thank you so much for sharing your precious time with us today on the show. I know there was a ton of value that was shared. So again we'll drop those handouts that you shared with me into the show notes so everyone can use those cheat sheets. And again, thanks for your time. It's awesome to meet you.

Pumped. Looking forward to the next one.

I hope you guys love this episode and walked away with so many ideas on how to grow your own list. Whether it's with text marketing or email marketing, Facebook messenger bots, the opportunities are endless when you really dig into the content and the contacts that you actually own in your marketing channels. Hey, I wanted to mention one other quick thing this week. I know so many of you are right in the middle of market season, whether you've been to Dallas or Atlanta or you're headed to Las Vegas and I want to invite you if you're going to be attending WWD Magic, the Win show, the Off Price Show Project, Women's or any of the shows happening during Las Vegas Market Week that you come over and say hello. We've got so many opportunities to meet up with you while we're in Vegas, including a private educational breakfast at the Wynn show on Wednesday, a number of talks and educational seminars that we're actually doing with Magic on Thursday and Friday, and our exclusive Boutique Hub member cocktail party happening Thursday evening with our friends at wwe. Whether you guys want to learn the latest in marketing tips or business resources or trend reporting, we've got a little bit of everything coming. But more than anything, we just want to meet you. We love to get to see you in person to hear about your business and to hear how the Hub can continue to help your business grow in 2020. So come say hello to myself personally or any of our team at the Boutique Hub. You guys, we cannot wait to get to meet you. We'll see you soon in Vegas. Look for the details in this week's show Notes. Hey guys, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope that you loved it. Don't forget to hit subscribe and leave a rating and review down below for a chance to be one of our featured listeners each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and how to access complete show notes and bonus downloads from our guests, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.