John Stuckey: There's a whole dark art to it, to be very honest. It's not email, it's different. It's a new channel. Send the first one up front. To build your brand in somebody's phone, you can get 40 and 50% conversion, but you need to be sending it right place, right time.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to ADD to cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Every week, Nathan Bush from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course, keep your customers adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to Add to cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and director at E Commerce talent agency E Suite. Don't call today's guest. Seriously, don't call him. He hates phone calls. John Stuckey is the founder of Mobile Digital, a company focused on helping businesses utilize the power of text to communicate with customers. John and the team create personalized MMs which have open rates, get this of over 98% and click through rates of up to 60%. They're huge numbers boasting customers including Country Road, Pet Circle and Harris Farm. I asked John to come on and give us a bit of a 101 on text messaging and and how businesses, especially e commerce businesses, can get the most out of it to communicate with their customers. In today's episode, we dive into the elements that make a great text campaign. John also shares where text campaigns can go wrong and how to get started with your marketing team. John has also given ADD to Cart listeners a very special offer which entitles them to 5000 free SMS and 500 free free MMS with a three month trial of their product called Sniper. So thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Signet, here's our conversation with John Stuckey from Mobile Digital.
Nathan Bush: John Stuckey, welcome to ADD to cart.
John Stuckey: Thanks Nathan. Great to be here.
Nathan Bush: Great to have you. So we're going to dive into the
Nathan Bush: world of text and SMS and MMS today and for a lot of people this is going to be new in terms of they haven't had SMS or text as part of their strategy before. You've been in the game for a long time.
Nathan Bush: How are you feeling about the world
Nathan Bush: of SMS and text right now?
John Stuckey: I'm feeling very good, feeling very good about the opportunity in that space. I'd certainly say Covid has kicked it along down the road very quickly. It certainly it was big previously for transactional you know, people used it for appointment reminders, delivery, advice and perhaps two factor authentication and like. So that SMS component of it was very strong. What we're seeing now is using it for informational and using it for marketing. So that's good. And that's, that's the space we've been in for the last six years. So it's, it's refreshing to see the opportunity really lifting and the numbers that it's delivering to our clients.
Nathan Bush: So we're going to get into the numbers.
Nathan Bush: But before we do that, can I
Nathan Bush: get a little bit of an overview on what mobile digital does and how you're different from all the other SMS and text providers out there?
John Stuckey: Wow, that's a long. It's kind of a long because you have to break it into the transactional and the text message marketing space. Right. So the transactional, as I said, is the stuff that everybody knows and people have been using for years. Appointment, reminder, delivery advice and two factor authentication. And more recently there's been a bit more of a trend to SMS triggers generating abandoned cart and those types of things still in the transactional space and linked to some of the CRM providers are providing that as part of their solution. We're in another space which is the text message marketing space. So that relates to campaigns, unique advice, loyalty, those types of things. We focus very much on the visual and the personal in what we do. So we give people a SaaS platform that they can work through to produce their own text message marketing, increase their engagement work. It's kind of like mailchimp, you know, version two type of thing for the text space. So you're giving people that in house capability to have text relationships two ways with their clients without having to go to an outsourced player to do it. That's probably the way we separate ourselves and we developed some patented technology to enable people to actually use visuals and personalize the visuals. We still have that pattern, nobody else is doing that. So we can give our customers the ability to put 22 unique data tags on an MMS image and that personalization is key in building trust, creating relationship and then taking that to a call to action or perhaps a conversational response.
Nathan Bush: It's interesting when you say visual and personal because we've recently had a few political examples of people blowing up because they've been getting texts from political parties that are just spam essentially. Right. Can you give us an example of a client of yours that's really used the medium in a personal way?
John Stuckey: Yeah, sure, absolutely. What's A good one. A good one is probably country road. Country road are a big client. Country road have a tremendous brand feel for want of a better expression. You know, if you see a country road vision, you know it's a country road vision. They send out their loyalty rewards and they send them out as an MMS like a multimedia visual message. So it could be two or three or four country road images on a gif and they personalize those. So they say you're hi, Anna Marie, you know your particular offer is available to you and as you know, personalization is key in this, in any space at the moment, particularly because it kind of counters what doesn't count to your discussion. But it addresses the issue of spam in this space because there is a lot of spam and there are some rules that you can follow that you can advise people to follow so as they don't get sucked in by spam. But gray route SMS is a problem in the industry and what we tend to advise our clients to try and build their brand in their user's phone before they start pushing messages to them. So they have to build that trust relationship. And there's Long answer, sorry, but there are three kinds of messages that you probably look at. One is a SMS that comes as an alpha and you can't reply to it. Warning number one, if you can't reply, don't click on anything. That's probably. But that's Alphas are okay for transactional messages. You know something's arriving where it doesn't require any two way. Then there's SMS messages that come from a dedicated number and it's a number that has been built trustwise with you. So they may have initially started an MMS relationship with you. And there's not a person in the world who could afford to spam mms. And there's no plans that let you spam MMS where there are plans that let you spam sms. Because an SMS guys, they really like, they basically buy a whole lot of mobiles, they stick them in a rack and then they use residential or domestic tariffs which don't isolate sms. And then they. So they can shift and they're using the multiple SMS tariffs. Gotcha. Not quite throughput because it's the limitation of single phone. Yeah. So MMS is a great way to do that. So if you've built your brand in the phone, then a numeric number is probably trusted and you can trust the call to action link. Okay. And then there's the MMS message which again like numeric SMS is two way and if it's two way it's usually going to be, it's going to be a trusted message. That's what I got. I just say on an alpha, don't click on an alpha link, whatever you do. And you know, they're pretty clever too because there are stories where they actually the spammers try and make the message, they'll put spelling errors in their message and they'll do lots of things in the message to try and just catch the gullible because they don't want to have to deal with the abusive, they want to deal with the gullible idiot who said oh yeah, I'll try that anyway. So that's the best way to do it is to build a trust relationship with your mobile user. And going forward, if mobile is going to take on this primary and I think text message will become the primary or the ultimate relationship between customer and client, it's not going to happen instantly but it's certainly growing rapidly. You've got to start looking at, well I'm starting this relationship and based on the fact of how long people hold their numbers, which in Australia is over 17 years, people were very reluctant to change our mobile number. So you're starting a relationship with someone that's probably going to last 17 years. So good thing to build it in a trust based relationship up early, not just send something cheap and hope to get the immediate. You've got to think of it as a long term product and a long term way you're going to interact with your clients.
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Nathan Bush: trust and owning the customer in your phone, what are some of the tips that you have for for doing that?
John Stuckey: One would be personalization. You know, the more trust you you can create with someone so the first thing would be using their name.
Nathan Bush: Are you Talking about people literally saving your brand into their contact list on the phone.
John Stuckey: Absolutely. You can send with an mms, you can't do it with an sms, but with an mms, you can send a contact card and then you can have that contact card in their phone. So anytime they get an SMS or an MMS from that number in the future, it comes up as a contact. Like, I have Nathan Bush in my phone.
Nathan Bush: That's unfortunate for you.
John Stuckey: I've got mate way worse than you, mate. Yeah, no, that's probably. That's a really good way of doing it. And some of our clients do that. Certainly Country Road send out their messages with a V card on them. Not everybody downloads it, but over time you want to try and keep that something that you want to continue to build on. Also in the content of your message, if you use their name, that's really, you know, the person's name. And also if you can link it to a prior product purchase or something that they've done before. We talk about context, that if you can make your message contextual as well as timely and as well as valuable, if you can make that message. There's a whole dark art to it, to be very honest. It's not email. It's different. It's a new channel and, yeah, different strokes for different folks. But it's, you know, when it works, it's ridiculously outstanding.
Nathan Bush: And I could imagine that you get a lot of comparisons when you're speaking to new clients around result expectations in comparison to email. How do the two compare from what you've seen?
John Stuckey: Look, a bad email gets a bad response. A bad text message gets a bad response. A good email gets a good response. A good text message program gets a phenomenally outstandingly brilliant response. It's just, I've seen 40% redemption, not like open rates. We've seen 40% of the people actually take up the offer and use it. We saw with like, as an example, we did one with Harris Farm. Harris Farm had a list of clients who had registered for their online service but never purchased. And they'd send them emails, but they never answered or did anything with their email. So they said they'd try an mms. They said they sent an MMS and they honestly, genuinely, this was all audited. They got 19.8% of the people they sent to took up their offer, which gave. It was good and bad because it killed their website, because nobody expected. We ended up having to. We introduced a new feature into the product now that allows you to send in groups of 10 minutes. Because with text the response is very instant. If you've got a great call to action and it's very easy, then you're really trying to get people to do things in that 8 to 12 seconds. And if you've got a good click through call to action, then you can get it immediately. And so that's one of the things that we learned painfully, but we learned it. And so now we put that that's a part of the product features.
Nathan Bush: Now there's some crazy stats, isn't there? And you'll know the stats around the percentage of people who see a text message within 10 seconds.
John Stuckey: Yeah, within 90 seconds. They would say the stat ranges between 90 and 95% dependent on which statistician you're quoting. The number that everybody agrees on is that 98% of everything sent is seen. And then you start going into the 90% and 95%, like Mobile Squared in the UK back 95%, a couple of the US companies back 90. But yeah, but people are going to see and act on your message very quickly.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that makes sense from the clients.
Nathan Bush: You've already given us some great examples from a creative perspective. What have been the creative executions that have stood out for you? You said that a great MMS produces phenomenal, outstanding, brilliant results. What creatives have you seen, really launch.
John Stuckey: Oh, okay, well, let's go back to the Harris Farm one. Harris Farm, a pretty good example. Harris Farm. I don't know if you know the stores, they're coming to Queensland. I think they've got two in Queensland now. But they very much boutique, big delis, for want of a better expression, really high quality cheeses, meats, wines, unique products, not just sort of high brand, high volume products. So they basically had a box filling with their products with a gift card in it and it was a good offer. I think it was $40 off, $120 or something. But it was just, it didn't say buy these products. It said in a way it actually said go through the process of shopping another one to try and explain the same thing. Pet Circle is a very good client and great people to work with. Pet Circle were quite cynical about whether it would impact in the initials. So they did about seven tests. Their worst one only got 4% redemption. And that was a picture of product and the discount was a percentage discount. Then they did one which was simple as a really cute dog on a nice background and the dog's bowl was filling up as a gift and they had a $15 offer. Now in their initial tests, they got 17% redemption versus the 4% reduction. So then they went to about 70,000. And I think on average across that, they got about 16% redemption across that. But it was the nature of the vision and the offer. We learned again that a percentage is not as powerful as an amount. So in that 8 to 12 seconds of. In that 8 to 12 seconds of. Am I going to act on this? It was. I know how much it is and I know how much I'm going to get rather than having to calculate 30%. And strangely, the 30% was actually a bigger offer.
Nathan Bush: So you're better off to do something like $20 off your next purchase rather than 10% off.
John Stuckey: Correct. Because people can get that in that. Microsoft talks about that. Microsoft Canada, six seconds. We think it's eight to 12 for a call to action. And on a. So, yeah, look, they're two really good examples, I think, of how you're actually talking about the doing rather than pushing a product.
Nathan Bush: And do the best results usually come from price messages?
John Stuckey: I don't think I could say that. I could say that personalization is really big. And timing the normal things that, you know, context, timing, authentic, all those types of things are important. The right offer is going to go. The most powerful one we ever saw was a 50% discount that one of the wine firms was using. And they had. They sent 6,000 and they did. This was the amazing power of it. They sent 6,000 and within 30 minutes they had 1,000 people. So they sent 6,000 and they had 1,000 people replying, wow. Well, it was good and bad again, because they hadn't set up to reply. So they didn't say, please reply. These people were like, I'll have two cases, I'm on holidays, just reserve them for me. Or no, thanks very much, Tom, but I'm full at the moment, but hook me up next time. And so there was this whole conversational commerce component where I hope your viewers don't mind this, but we definitely see with this product there is a get shit done response that people want to just get something like, wow, that's a great deal. I want it done and I want it done in as little as I could possibly can do it. And if I can text back. So people talk about conversational commerce, we're actually seeing it with our clients, the people who are responding. And so now we have someone watches because the system's two way. We have someone watch every campaign, someone internally in each organization watch every campaign. And if they're not ready for that, we can divert it to Zendesk or we convert it to their email or something like that. But there is definitely a response component to this product which is, I mean fantastic. You're actually getting a two way response from an interested customer that you probably want to deal with as quickly as you possibly can to get that person and to develop that personal one to one relationship with them.
Nathan Bush: Do you have anyone who's, who's got that conversational text set up with their customer service team so they can do it in quick time?
John Stuckey: Yes, we do.
Nathan Bush: Cool.
John Stuckey: They probably don't want to talk about it, but yes they do.
Nathan Bush: And in terms of integrations into customer data and customer service, who do you integrate in with?
John Stuckey: Okay, we integrate. The first one we did was Amassys because Amasses have. And we did that probably four years ago. And we did that because Amasses have always been very much focused on the personal, on the, you know, the individual and also focused on what they call their ac, the automation center. We're currently working through with one of our customers with Salesforce to develop a Salesforce one. We've done a Tealium and a Shopify one and now we're working with big CDP out of the US named Blueshift. But I certainly am a big believer now that the world has gone to this single point of truth. And for us, Text is not a spam product, it's a targeted product. And so you're wasting money if you're not well targeted. The better your data, the better the relationship, the better the campaign. And that's why in this space the CDPs are very interesting in what they're trying to do. And in the US some of the success there is closely linked to what the CDPs are doing. So yeah, so we've got a number of. And we tend to do. If, if someone came to us now and didn't, we didn't have an integration, then we do the integration free of charge for them because we think that the more integrations we have, the better and make it easier because you don't want people pulling out CSV files and duplicating. You want to be as integrated as mailchimp and mail systems were 15 years ago.
Nathan Bush: Yep. And do you find that most of your customers, when they're going out to launch their first campaigns, how does the amount of people with mobile numbers connected to their customers compared to those that have email addresses, I'm assuming it'd be much lower.
John Stuckey: It is much lower. It is much lower. It isn't because it hasn't been a priority. And you know, in the online in particular, the email has been the bread and butter product because it's, you know, you could look at an email and the stats were always between 30, no matter. You spend a dollar and you're going to get between 32 and 40 something dollars. You know, email is cheap, free, integrated, you know, you're going to get those kind of, those kind of comments. And so there hasn't been a great focus on collecting mobile numbers. I suppose the positive side is in Australia it's a bit Wild Westy in terms of the use of mobile numbers and that can be a risk, I think. But at the moment it's an opportunity. In the UK for example, they're very constrained in what they can do thanks to gdpr. And in the US it's the California privacy regulations. Here we don't have that. We have the Spam act which has gaps about as wide as you can possibly imagine. So I would say 90% of people, 95% of people in this country tend to use delivery mobile numbers and those types of things and are reliant on a requirement in the Spam act which relates to inferred consent. So inferred consent has three tiers, if you like. Would the person who received this expect, because I've done business with them in the past, expect that I may reach out to them? That's one. The second one is I clearly enunciate who I am and I'm not selling love, sex, blah blah, blah. And the third one is a very clear and active opt out.
Nathan Bush: Do you foresee that those laws will tighten up in the near future?
John Stuckey: Oh, absolutely, they have to because spam is becoming, as it becomes bigger, spam will become an issue. And those laws were primarily aimed at spam. So ultimately people will be required to seek specific opt in because at the moment text messaging is lumped in with email. It's not even differentiated as a category. So yeah, I expect that that will happen. I talk to my customers now and say I would get in as fast as you can and optimize every asset you have and at least engage that client base. Because there was a period of adjustment allowed in California in the California regulation and the GDPR regulation that enabled people to send out a message to say, do you confirm? Rather than having to start from zero with their thing and then you have to go out. Now there are ways of raising your lists quickly the same way people raise their emails. QR codes have absolutely resurged. If this is the right word in terms of the ability to just hold up a QR code. It generates an, it generates an sms. The SMS comes to our system, our system and then sends them a reward and offers them another reward if they give us more information and set up effectively a profile.
Nathan Bush: Gotcha. So if you're a physical retailer or you're a cafe or something along those lines, QR code on a post that's saying send a text, user's QR code to send a text and we'll give you free muffin, 10% off, whatever it is.
John Stuckey: Yeah, you'd be def. Dumb and stupid not to be doing that. Okay.
Nathan Bush: Even if you're not using SMS or MMS now, it's not building up that
John Stuckey: list to build that list because you know we went to a huge customer turns over, let's turns over 2point something billion retail and they have less than 200,000 mobile numbers.
Nathan Bush: So you mentioned before, which I thought was really interesting around the idea of needing to segment for customers not only for personalization but for effectiveness. Because as compared to email, email is relatively easy if not close to free to send regardless of the size of your database. Whereas SMS and mms, you pay per message, is that right?
John Stuckey: That's correct.
Nathan Bush: So you need to make sure that each is specifically targeted because there's probably a lot more at stake if you're promoting a dud message to a dud audience.
John Stuckey: Yes, I think you've answered your own question.
Nathan Bush: And what's. So can you give us an idea of the cost between SMS and MMS to send?
John Stuckey: Look, if you're just doing a couple of SMSs and you're paying more than five cents, somebody's ripping you off. If you're doing high volume SMS, you can get around two and a half cents, something like that, two and a half to three cents. But that's, you know, a million and something a month. Perhaps they were the real pricing. Mms started at 50 cents because there wasn't really a product and they were offering the wholesale. The wholesale product was the same retail product. So that's been changed. And there's Telstra Wholesale is just launching a wholesale product for mms. Optus is just. And these were complete non believers. Optus are actually introducing a wholesale tariff for mms. It's quite complicated. But there was another tariff, there was another channel that everybody expected would take over from sms and that was called rcs and that was a Google product that if Apple got on board it was going to be a very high function product. But in Markets where Apple isn't. I think the telcos have had to come to the reality that Apple's not going to move to this RCS platform and therefore, if you want ubiquity of delivery, which is what you need, you know sms, there's a great Seinfeld clip that talks about SMS and you know, when did you know, did they advertise sms? We all use sms. I never heard of it. I never thought ad. We use it because it's simple and it guarantees delivery. Whereas I have. I can't guarantee that you're on WhatsApp, I can't guarantee that you're on Facebook, but I can guarantee that you have a mobile number and I can deliver, point to point an SMS or an mms. So that's what's great in the business space is I can guarantee to deliver my message to 100% of the population and that 98% are going to see it. That's, that's the big. And it's easy. They don't have to, you know, they don't have to do anything massively complex. So a marketer could be up and marketing with SMS or MMS the same day that they choose to do it.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Which is probably why people feel like they can respond to it straight away because it is that simple, natural way of interacting. From a technical perspective, can you shed light on the difference between sms?
Nathan Bush: Like from my point of view, SMS is text.
Nathan Bush: I think it's 140 characters. I'm probably wrong there, but MMs, I'm like, oh, you can put pictures in MMs.
Nathan Bush: Am I oversimplifying it a little bit?
John Stuckey: Firstly, it's 160 characters. Sorry.
Nathan Bush: Damn it.
John Stuckey: It's all right, man. I don't know much about what you do. Yeah, it's 160 characters. But you can also send doubles, which because of limitations it's not exactly double, it's 306 characters. So you can send an image and that gives you a lot of ability to do spacing and send your message out. Whereas sometimes 160 characters tends to be bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.
Nathan Bush: So once you put a long hyperlink in there.
John Stuckey: Yeah, not very respectful. So yeah, so a longer message can be, can be an advantage. And then you go to an MMS and an MMS has four. So yeah, so it's basically, it's 300 kilobits but you can compress it and you can do. So rather than characters, you're talking kilobits and then so an MMS message is a, is a subject heading, it's a vision which is usually a GIF or a video or a png. And you can personalize that with us. That's our unique, you can personalize that image and then at the bottom you can have a thousand character text message underneath it with as many active links in your want it. And then you can also, as we spoke of earlier, you can also put a vcard in that. So an MMS is a very powerful device and I say to people, even if you're only going to send one mms, send the first one up front to build your brand in somebody's phone and then you can alternate with SMSs. I say to people, you wouldn't want to be sending an MMS every month. You might want to send one every quarter to put your brand in front of people and then you might to send an SMS every month to remind them or to put an offer in front of them with a call to action or something like that. But the enemy of text is overuse and you know, I think anyone who ever got spammed by Domino's might agree with that because of the results. People can get greedy as people have got with email, which unfortunately has made a great product, not as good as it could be. And now we tend to look at email as a very passive product. Whereas this one hits you because this one hits you in the face or hits you in the phone. You have to be very respectful of how you use it because it's a very personal medium.
Nathan Bush: How often is too often.
John Stuckey: I would say sms, it all depends, like data out of the states. There's a lot of charts that I can give you. There are some people who are happy to get a great deal once a week via sms. I would think myself once every two weeks would be pushing it for me I would think one sms. Except if it's a reminder. We've had a lot of success sending an mms maybe on with a two week window and say look, this offers available for two weeks and then two days before the offer finishes, sending an SMS even, no matter how great the vision was, no matter how great the offer was, they might have been running for a bus when they got it, but at the same. And so you remind them of it and then there is a big difference with MMS and SMS in terms of memory. You know, I've been into people and shown them an MMS and they went oh yeah, yeah I got that. And you know that was a couple of months ago and I went, no, that was a year and a half ago. Because they do remember brand and message and good message where you don't remember the SMS you got yesterday. Yeah, so as I said, SMS in a marketing sense tends to be transactional or informational. And MMS, because of the ability to run visuals and multimedias and those types of things, it's much more branding and messaging opportunity. And so going back to your original point, it's because it costs more. You have to be very clever about who you send it to and you're segmenting, otherwise you're wasting money. You can get 40 and 50% conversion, but you need to be sending it right place, right time, right offer.
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Nathan Bush: And does MMS work exactly the same on every type of phone?
John Stuckey: It does now, yeah.
Nathan Bush: Okay, so you got consistency.
John Stuckey: You do have consistency. There is one strange inconsistency is that some Android phones put the message above the picture and some put it below the message. But there is a relationship between the telcos and the mobile that MMS is a product and it is a product delivered with the phones. I mean it was a bow wow doggy when it was first introduced. It was way expensive and most phones didn't come native with it and therefore you had to do a lot of work. So I got a very bad reputation. And so everybody stopped selling mms in about 2011. If you look at the graphs, it fell off a cliff because Facebook and WhatsApp came along and only a fool would be sending a 50 cent photo to their mum when they put on WhatsApp for free. The reason that MMS has come back is because people are looking for something probably stronger than email to deliver their message. And so this product is, you know, it's instant, it's all, you know, to an always on audience. It's two way, it's visual, it's personal, I mean it's, it's Don Draper's, you know, best product ever. And that's the fact of it. That's why we know that long term it will be the ultimate product. Because you know, because it is instant and it's everything that you need it to be. Yeah, when you area on fire they don't send you an email.
Nathan Bush: You just don't want to be in Hawaii when you get those text messages that go wrong.
John Stuckey: Yes, true.
Nathan Bush: You've already mentioned, you mentioned some common mistakes that you see because text is so powerful. You've mentioned things like not having customers set up in your phone, lack of personalization, sending too often. Do you see any other common mistakes that people make when starting to utilize the power of text?
John Stuckey: Look, that's a good question. There are legal things that people fall over and we have a systems assurance system that we put in to stop people getting into trouble. So we when somebody, because yes they do make mistakes and there are a number of legal requirements and particularly with visuals and messaging, if you know it's probably been around the organization a few times before they finally get to the right level of what they want to send out and they might miss put a spelling error in or legally they might forgot to even mention who they are. And one of the requirements of the Spam act is you have to mention the name of the company that clearly enunciate who you are. They might also forget to check the link that they're using. So the big, you know, an SMS or an MMS is effectively a tremendous call to action. And if your call to action is not working or your links too long, that can cause distrust and those types of things. So making sure that you're ready for it, those types of things. So we go through I think a 20 point check for every client. I mean you do have the ability to turn it off, but only one client has turned it off. And so that gives us 45 minutes to review every. Which is good because originally we were doing, before we had the platform, we were doing it for people and that was like producing a magazine. It was horrific because we were doing the design and you know, they'd send us and we'd go is this good and this bad? There was toing and froing like the poor graphic designer in a magazine. So that was when we went to the board and said look, we need to give people the capability to use this tool themselves. And so that's what they have with Sniper. They have the ability to do all that themselves. But then we, when they push send we take on the responsibility. So the alarm goes internally. Everybody, everybody in the team's phone goes off, someone will pick it up and someone will then go through and check it. And we've saved them so much, saved our clients money and, you know, legal issues just by picking up. Having an independent set of eyes look at it.
Nathan Bush: Is there any training or upskilling you need for your marketing team before embarking on text?
John Stuckey: Look, the first thing you need is you need management commitment to it because you are actually putting your hand in your pocket. It's an roi. It's not like email. Everybody thinks email is free. Even though, you know, you do spend a fair amount of hours putting an email together. That's not usually considered because it's all set up. But yeah, you need management commitment to take the risk. Because with email, if your email goes wrong, you know, so what if you've spent, you know, $35,000 on a campaign, you would hope that it's going to work. So you need to have that. There's a higher risk involved, risk reward in that ROI story. I mean, we did one with Country Road recently where they spent that amount of money and they got, I think, over 21 times the lift against a comparative email segment. So I hope Paul doesn't. Paul Conti at Country Road doesn't mind me saying this, but Paul said that he hadn't. He'd never seen, no matter what they did in SEO or Facebook or anything, they'd never seen anything that delivered the same response. But he'd had to go to his boss at some stage and say, I'm going to spend $35,000 to get something. Not really sure what that's going to be. So that's the chance. So you need management commitment to it and then you need the CRM person to have the time to do it. Because I see them as the most overworked people in the industry. You look at a CRM person and you say, well, that person is probably responsible for 18 to 23% of the online revenue for my company. Even if it's not working perfectly, it is working. So I think that's a challenge is you need to actually allocate enough time and effort for those people to actually genuinely get involved in text messaging. And look, I think that will happen. Some of the data out of the U.S. there's a company in the U.S. attentive who published a survey across 2000 commercial users of text message marketing. And that survey said that of their online revenues now that they were attributing over 18% to text message marketing. So that's a Good number. And that will assist. I think Australian market is in understanding that this is not a flyby, you know, this is not just a waste, this is a new channel because that's very close to the old email number and I think it'll probably go past that.
Nathan Bush: And you've mentioned some big retailers that you work with. Country Road, Pet Circle, Harris Farms. Is there a size that a retailer especially in E commerce now needs to be at before they can consider text messaging or does it work for any size business?
John Stuckey: It works for any size business. It works for any size business. My favorite business. And you'll have to forgive me because I talk about this one all the time. It's the lowest revenue earner we have, but I love it. The guy wrecks cars. His name? Yeah, Auto pest. And if you've ever been super broke, you have to put your name on a list at Wrecker to get a panel or something for a car that you know. And look, I remember I had a Datsun 120Y and it had three different panels on it that I'd got from Wreckers. Anyway, that was when I was super poor. But anyway, so he wrecks cars, but they used to have a register and you'd put the name of the car in and then if they got the car in. So what he does is he takes your name, they put it into their database and if that car comes in, they send an MMS with a picture of the car that they're wrecking to the people on their list. Now they used to have to phone those people. So he may send between 15 and 20 different campaigns based around 15 to 20 different cars he gets in a week, but he does it in 30 minutes.
Nathan Bush: Smart.
John Stuckey: And he has 100% take up. So that is a replacement to the outbound call and the same team of people he had in the Philippines doing it. He doesn't have the team anymore. He has one person using the product to produce that. So I think they're the big changes because you know, 90% of the world would prefer to deal with someone by text. That's standard pretty much numbers now because I think it's that whole selfishness of my own time. And if you text me, I can deal with this issue in my time. Like I'm dealing with a couple of not for profits at the moment. I'm like, if you ring me again, I probably will never talk to you again. But if you texted me and gave me an easy donation position, then I'll do it. Yeah, I'll tell you what you interrupting my day surf life saving Australia to try and get money off me because I bought a ticket at the shops. You just. You're not reading me.
Nathan Bush: Oh, and we even use in recruitment, we use text a lot just to scope out when people are available for a call. So instead of surprising people for a call, go, hey, when you're available.
John Stuckey: Exactly. I do that with my friends. Now have you got time now have you got time for a quick chat or something like that? Because if we can't deal with it with the text, with my fat thumbs, then yeah. Do you definitely. We've got, you know, open market ran a very good ad which was, you know, Tom doesn't want to stop playing with his little girl. He doesn't want to have to go through his records right now. He doesn't want to have to do this. You know, text shows respect to your clients that they can then deal with you in their time, not your time.
Nathan Bush: Yep.
John Stuckey: And that's a big plus in the personalization space.
Nathan Bush: That's a great point.
Nathan Bush: Now, I know you've done a few
Nathan Bush: missions over to the UK and the US Obviously before COVID hit. What are you seeing in terms of their environment around text messaging? Are they ahead of the game?
John Stuckey: The US in particular? Yeah, the US is that firm I mentioned before, Attentive A T E N T I V E if anyone wants to have a look. Attentive published a couple of numbers recently that just blew me away that, you know, in 2016 they had 4% of the population using text message marketing. Last year it's 50%. That's 50% of companies rather than 4% of companies. That's a big number. The set 71. So we all talk about the email number being 32 to 40. Right. They're claiming $71 per dollar spent on text message marketing. And what was the other number they had? Oh, yeah, and that 18% of their. 18% of their online was coming from that. And there are some big companies if your listeners want to look up. These guys been doing it for years, but it's absolutely taken off. And the mix of MMS and SMS is about 18% is MMS. There's a company called Tatango, a guy by the name of Derek Johnson worth following. Derek runs a site. He's like, he's one of those tremendous people in an industry who all boats rise on the tide and he doesn't really mind sharing. And so he's put out a site with 10,000 examples of MMs and SMS.
Nathan Bush: Oh, wow. We'll put a link in the show notes.
John Stuckey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's just great because it gives your clients ideas about what to use and how to use them and your listeners how to use them and those types of things. So Derek does that Attentive's done something like that as well. But yeah, it's very big over there. Very over there. 18%. And as the US goes 10 DLC, it's previously, sorry, 10 digit long code numbering, it means you can address 100% of the US population using 10 DLC whereas previously there was a ceiling based on short codes. And so because there was multiple carriers and they didn't necessarily agree, you had to buy a short code number and then pay rental on the ship which was not cheap and then you had to pay rental to every. So your cost of, of getting into MMS and SMS marketing was very expensive where that's now very affordable and it gives the opportunity for everybody to place uk. We were in the UK for a month and we got two clients so there's an appetite for it. We have full MMS and SMS access to the full uk. The challenge over there at the moment is really just being there. And so I think if we went somewhere first we'd go to the us, not the uk just because of the size of the market and the appetite for it.
Nathan Bush: And from a product development perspective, what's on your radar at mobile digital?
John Stuckey: Well, we're in trial at the moment with something that is super exciting. We learned, I mentioned earlier the example of the wine firm who, okay, that taught us that there was this again, I've got to find a better expression than get shit done. But we learned if you promote on mobile then you really want to be able to close on mobile and that way you don't want someone off to some cumbersome e commerce website or something like that. You want to give people the opportunity to GSD as fast as they can. So we've developed a product called Rapid Shop where basically in a link in the active link in the bottom of it, so we send a picture of the product and then there's an active link in the text component of the message that actually generates the order for that product. And the first time you use it you have to put in your payment details. But every other time after that, like Shop pay, like Shopify pay it remembers. So it came from, you know, you go into a cart and then you don't buy and then they pursue you like some crazy ex partner for months they're coming at you and Then you go, oh, hang it. I'll buy those shoes. And then they go, log in, please. It's maddening. It's maddening. Whereas this product, you can basically. And we're testing it with a wine firm at the moment, a really good guy who was one of our first customers years ago, who now runs a company, runs a wine company, and they're going to use it for their dealers to be able to just push an order. It generates the order and honestly, it's called Rapid Shop. It is less than 10 seconds on the second and 15 seconds on the first.
Nathan Bush: I can imagine that'd be really important for wine drops. All I've got in my head at the moment is sneaker, sneaker drops. How perfect would it be for that?
John Stuckey: All those types of things, like a product where you can actually put a visual of the product. Also for clearance, I've got 30 of these clearance items. Send them to a list of 30 people and. Or send them to a list of 50 and make them fight over it. Because. And we met someone who. Well, who started Net, a porter, Natalie Massonet. We met her in New York and we pitched this to her and she was like, it's brilliant because that's what people want. I want to get stuff done on my phone. And there are examples in the us. Another company that's big in the messaging space is a company called Airship. They bought a company called Reply By. Now, Reply by is exactly that you registered to be able to place orders via text. And they were selling. Reply by was selling tickets to stadiums at universities. So, you know, we have seat 4B and 4A available. Are you interested? And they text that out and the person just has to reply, yes, they reply from their number and so therefore it goes on their record and they're built.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
John Stuckey: So text purchasing is really big. And because you've got so many authentications in the phone, you know, like your phone's like your wallet now. So if you lose your wallet, you're in grief. If you lose your phone, you're in grief. And if you lose your phone, if your phone's logged on. Yeah, you've got. You've got problems. Yep. And so this product, you actually send them, it generate. You send them the picture. If they want to buy the product, they just go. We've managed to get. We own Click to Buy. So Click to Buy link. So it's pretty plain language. And then it's got a series of compressed characters. Like, the algorithm is very long, but it actually comes. The URL has been compressed down to five characters and then basically they click on that, that generates their order, it says all their order details and all they have to go is buy and it's done.
Nathan Bush: Beauty. That's very exciting. We can't wait to see it hit the market. Now, John, if listeners are listening to this and going, oh, I'd love to dip the toe in the water of text or MMS or sms, what's the best way to get in touch with you or the team?
John Stuckey: Just go to Infomobile Dot Digital. That will do it, I think. You asked me if we prepared to do something. I put an offer out there if you want to celebrate it and we'll give them so many thousand SMS's and so many MMSs to try if they're interested in doing that. I think that's a great way to start because you don't want to start people, you want people to dip their toe in and get the results and then be emotionally committed to it. And you know, we're not huge so we can't handle that many but you know, it's. I think that's how I'd do it if I was interested in it.
Nathan Bush: Beauty. That's great. Thank you, John. We'll publish that offer in the email and in the show notes as well so people can know where to go for that. I know we've only scratched the surface of all things text and a fountain of knowledge when it comes to it and it's I got boring.
Nathan Bush: No, you're not boring.
Nathan Bush: We could have gone a lot deeper in a lot of those topics.
Nathan Bush: So I appreciate your time and thanks for sharing.
John Stuckey: No problem.
Nathan Bush: We only scratched the surface of what John knows about text messaging.
Nathan Bush: Trust me, I've sat around and talked to him a lot about text, but
Nathan Bush: I hope that if it's a channel that is new to you or you have given much thought about, this episode gives you a great starting point on the power of text as a marketing and communication channel. Here are my top three practical takeaways from today's episode with John. Number one, build up mobile numbers in your database right now, even if you're not going to use them. As we heard from John, most retailers have a lot of email addresses but not as many movies numbers. And we know that customers hold mobile phone numbers for 17 years, so that's a hugely valuable asset to have. John's tip around using QR codes in physical venues to incentivise customers to register their mobile number with you is a really great one. Number two, if you're paying more than 5 cents per SMS, you are getting ripped off. And if you are sensing sending a high volume amount of SMS, say 1 million or more per month, you should be expecting to pay 2.5 to 3 cents per message. It's a great benchmark to use. Number three John shared that a percentage is not as powerful as an amount when it comes to text marketing and I thought that was a great practical tip. When you think about text messaging, it's immediate and you need to understand the offer straight away. We don't want to make customers do mental maths, so $10 in the hand might be more powerful than 10% offer value, even if 10% usually works out to be a larger discount. Make it easy now if you want to jump straight into text messaging, John and the team at Mobile Digital have given Add to Cart listeners a very special deal. To give it a go, they're offering listeners 5,000 free SMS and 500 free MMS to any company that signs up for a three month trial of Sniper, their personalized messaging service. Signing up for three months costs $147 and after that is $49 per month on a pay as you go basis. Not a bad way to dip a toe in the water. All the details are in our email newsletter or you can reach out directly to John and mention the offer. To finish up. I have three resources for you. Firstly, if you're a first time listener of Add to Cart and you want to stay up to date with new episodes, head over to add to cart.com and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll let you know every time a new episode drops as well as giving you my three takeaways from each episode and a link to the transcript scripts so you can know that this is an episode that you want to dive straight into. Secondly, if you want a weekly roundup of the best e commerce case studies, tools and research, sign up to the High Five Friday newsletter which is delivered to inboxes at 8am every Friday morning. I read all the e commerce news and send you the bits that I think you can take action from. Sign up at 12 high. And the last thing if you are looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, head over to esweettalent.com we are a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands. Check it out. Sign up to the email and get in touch with me if you want to discuss your next move. Until next time, thanks for listening and keep those customers adding to car.
