Why SMS Might be the Next Great Marketing Channel for Your Business

Hey guys, Matt Paulson here. I want to talk about SMS text messaging as a marketing tool in today's video. I believe there's great opportunity with SMS and I think you should consider adding it to your business as a marketing tool in 2019. So some background information about how SMS kind of at marketbeats we have built a fantastic business of building an audience on a specific communication medium. So whether that's email, we've done it with email, we've done it with web push notifications, we tried to do it with Facebook group, we tried it with Facebook messenger bot. But the idea is, no matter what it is that you create a consistent stream of valuable content and then invite people to receive that content regularly. So once you have your audience's attention, you can then leverage that attention to sell products and services that your company sells or you can promote products of your advertisers. You know, we've done this very well with email. We have 810,000 email subscribers as of the day. In recording this, we've done it with web Push, we've got 300,000 Web Push subscribers. We tried to do it with Facebook messenger, didn't work out because our audience is primarily older men and that audience largely isn't on Facebook or just doesn't spend a lot of time on Facebook. So at the beginning of 2019 we kind of decided that we are looking for our next kind of medium of communications to build an audience on. We're doing a little bit of experimenting with Amazon Alexa, we've got an Alexa channel. But I think the main focus for us is going to be SMS because it is the technology that our audience already uses. They're used to getting SMS text from companies like ours. It's a known quantity and I think it's going to work to grow our business. In the past I haven't seriously tried SMS because I just didn't know how to attract SMS subscribers. We buy a lot of email signups through co registration advertising networks, but you can't buy SMS signups through those same networks. They don't sell those. Also, if you add an SMS field to an email opt in, your opt in rates are going to decline dramatically. Typically, every additional field you add to an opt in form, you lose about 30% of the you lose about 30% of your opt in rate. So we don't want to torpedo our profitable email funnels. We just haven't done that either. But I do think we have found a couple of good ways to get SMS subscribers. So I think for the first Time. SMS is going to be a real opportunity for MarketBeat. So I plan, at least initially primarily growing our SMS list by just asking our existing email and web push subscribers to sign up for SMS alerts. And the way we're going to do this is we're going to put an SMS opt in inside our co registration funnel. So after somebody signs up for marketbeats newsletter, they may or may not see an ad that says, hey, why don't you sign up for SMS notifications too? Or if we're going to send people to a free report, we might put an interstitial page in between the email and the report that says, hey, we'll give you a report. But before we do that, would you also like the SMS alerts? So we're going to do that and we're also just going to email people and say, hey, we have this new service where you can get SMS alerts for your stocks. Why don't you go to this page and sign up? So really our strategy is to populate our SMS list with our existing web push and email subscribers, at least initially. We may experience experiment with some other stuff down the line. Our goal for this year for SMS is to get 100,000 SMS subscribers by the end of 2019. And I have no idea if we're going to make that goal, but that is what we're going to target. I'm a big believer you should target big goals and I don't think it's unreasonable. But it's not guaranteed we'll hit it either. I've done a lot of research about SMS in the last few weeks and I'm certainly not an expert on it. But I am quickly discovering that SMS is just a very different animal than email and web push. And it is for a few different reasons. First, there are some very specific regulations that apply to SMS messaging that don't apply to email. So I'm kind of learning a new regulatory environment SMS is. It's really governed by the Telephone Consumer Protection act, the TCPA as well as can spam and then there's like an industry group as well. When you're getting people to opt into sms, there are some specific disclaimers you need to provide that you don't. With email, for example, you have to tell people how often you're going to message them. You have to tell them that standard text message rates will apply. You have to tell them how to unsubscribe. You can also only send messages certain times of day because who wants to receive an SMS text message? At four in the morning. You also have to include specific wording in your welcome message and you have to track consent to prove that somebody signed up for your mailing list. That way if anyone ever accuses you of spamming them, you can say, well, no, you signed up on this page at this time. Here was your IP address, this is the phone number you entered. So you know, you have to be able to prove somebody signed up. I've also kind of discovered that SMS is really kind of a technical challenge as well to set up at MarketBeat, we're kind of a unique company. We always build out our own management systems and then we work with relay services like Twilio for SMS or OneSignal for web push or SendGrid for email that do the actual delivery of our messages. So we kind of maintain in our own internal database the subscriber list and all the management stuff and the messaging scheduling. And then we use one of these other services to do the actual message delivery. And this is a little bit unique for SMS because you can send out SMS's through an email gateway. So like my phone number@vetext.com is how you would email Verizon phone number, that's called an email gateway and you can do that for free. But the deliverability is kind of so. So like you couldn't send 100,000 messages to 100,000 Verizon numbers through an email gateway and expect them to show up. Alternatively, you can use a service like Twilio that is kind of a professional SMS delivery service, have much better API, much better handling of cancellations on subscriptions, but they cost 0.75 cents for each message that goes out. And that might not seem like a big number, but if you're going to try to send a message to 100,000 people, that's $750 for every message that you send out. So obviously that gets expensive pretty quickly. With sms you also have to be able to handle incoming messages. So that way if somebody replies to one of your texts and says stop or unsubscribe or help in a text, you have to be able to accommodate that. You have to do both with the incoming API from Twilio and then you also have to do it through the email gateway. So I send a text message from SMSarketbeat.com and, and you reply to that email, it's actually an email with the word stop. I have to be able to handle that and then process your unsubscribe. I do think we've worked well through Most of these issues, but it was definitely a learning experience to get where we need to be. And honestly we need to test everything and make sure everything's working the way it's supposed to. But before we really launch this, I'm hoping we're going to be there. Now that we've talked through some of the different issues, I really want to talk about the opportunity that SMS provides. SMS is a very personal communication method because pretty much everybody opens every text message they get. This means that you can't send as often as you would with an email or web push or a Facebook messenger bot. But the engagement rates are incredibly high. You probably really only want to send one or two text messages a week because any more than that, you're going to start to annoy people and they're going to unsubscribe, complain about you on the Internet. So it's really critical to, since you can't message very much, it's really critical to get your messaging right the first time. You know, in our test we're seeing click through rates as high as 10% for the people we text. So we send out 100,000 messages, that's 10,000 clicks from a single message, which is huge. You know, if we believe that a click is worth a dollar to us on sms, which we do because that's what we think advertisers are willing to pay. We send out a message to 100,000 people, hopefully by the end of the year we get 10,000 clicks, we make $10,000. I don't care who you are, that's real money. I think it could be kind of the next big revenue stream for MarketBeat. So the way I kind of forecast it is we send, have a list of 100,000 people, we send out eight text messages a month, 10% click through rate, that's about 80,000 clicks a month or $80,000 in potential revenue. So this theoretically could be a million dollar revenue stre market beat if the numbers pan out. And you know, I don't think we're going to make a million dollars off it this year or a million dollars next year, but maybe two years from now, you know, a million dollar revenue stream from SMS is entirely possible. Now certainly I'm not an expert at SMS marketing. I'm probably three or four weeks into developing our SMS program, but I do think it's real opportunity for consumer oriented businesses. Lots of retail stores use SMS and ask people to opt in to text messages at checkout and they know what they're doing. My wife is Constantly getting texts from stores like Joann and Kohl's and Macy's to try to get her into those stores and buy something or give her coupons or whatever it is. I don't know if they work on her, but they work on somebody because they keep doing it. Retailers can only ask you so many questions at checkout and if they're asking you to sign up for a text message before they ask you to sign up for a credit card, that tells you they're making more money off text messages than credit cards. Certainly what your SMS program will look like will vary depending on what type of business you have. Like if you're a retailer you're going to be sending coupons, if you are, and you'll be taking opt ins at checkout. If you're a website, you know, you'll probably have like a short code that you can send messages to. People can send messages to you just to subscribe or unsubscribe. Especially like if you're a speaker. I've seen this a few times. Professional speakers will have a short code that you can text and, and then they'll reply with whatever their offer is by text and then they'll continue to send you text. So it's going to be different depending on who you are and what your business is. But if you sell to like kind of a mass market of consumers or even kind of a niche audience, you know there's an opportunity here with sms. I don't think it's as big of an opportunity with B2B because you don't want to annoy people and it just doesn't work with B2B. This is the type of thing that operates at scale. But if you have a consumer business, I really think you should think about how you might be able to integrate SMS marketing into your business in2019. We're certainly going to do it at MarketBeat maybe a few months from now. I'll provide an update with how it's going, but I wanted to share you kind of what our latest project is and hopefully you guys can learn something from that.