SMS marketing platform Postscript is expanding to offer brands a text-based sales channel.
First launched in 2019 and recently raising $65 million, the company has made a name for itself by working with Shopify brands to help launch personalized, text-based marketing campaigns. But co-founder and president Alex Beller said Postscript decided a year before him to test whether it could use its platform to drive sales. This requires both more people and a different kind of expertise than the company has traditionally offered.
“It’s been quite a process to figure all this out and get everything right,” says Beller. “What we ended up with is hiring a team and staffing it. I have.”
Postscript is beta testing this with about a dozen brands and is gradually adding more businesses each month. Beller said the company is fully booked with brands of interest to him through July. Postscript now works with more than 10,000 brands (up from 8,500 last summer) — Beller says this newest sales program adds more brands each month, but will soon offer all clients He said it won’t always be open (he has a timeline of full openness). The Phoenix office currently has 18 employees and his three managers, and plans to expand further as more brands sign up. However, Postscript does not plan to grow the team exponentially in the near future. Rather, Beller said some new technologies could help expand the company’s ambitions as this segment of the business grows.
“AI is building tools to make salespeople more efficient,” he said. “It means using AI to slice out data insights and collect conversations at just the right moment … but keeping the human touch in those highly experiential moments. [We see that] As a pathway to meaningful efficiency gains over time in terms of staffing. “
One of the program’s early beta testers was Dr. Squatch, a men’s body care brand. Dr. Squatch used the Postscript team to test his SMS sales, create new conversation flows, and personally answer customer questions. Previously, the company used his SMS, which has a marketing engine to send information about discount codes and new promotions, but whether customers will respond to more personalized interactions focused on conversions. The purpose was to see if
Beller himself worked on Dr. Squatch’s account to understand how the new sales flow worked compared to Postscript’s traditional marketing campaigns. “I’ve had a lot of people say, ‘I want my husband to smell better,'” he said. In the normal course of marketing, this may allow Dr. Squatch to offer discount codes for deodorant products or link to other materials explaining how the products work. However, Beller said: And I’ll create a custom bundle,” Dr. Squatch could advertise this custom bundle via his SMS.
Dr. Squatch says this new focus has resulted in increased sales from SMS listings compared to previous conversions.
Getting SMS sales right requires some training and trial and error, says Beller. Postscript now focuses on two things in training his sales team. “One is the brand. Not only the questions and answers and all the counter-arguments that this brand deals with, but also the unique lookalike sales prospects that occur with each brand,” Beller said. For example, if Postscript says he’s selling deodorants on behalf of Dr. Squatch, “That’s a completely different move than if I were trying to sell luxury rugs.” says.
According to Postscript, early data shows that sales programs lead to better, well, sales. According to Beller, new subscriber conversions increased by 30% in his first 30 days. “This makes a lot of sense for brands that are already spending this much to acquire subscribers to see a 30% lift in conversion rates.”
Cody Griffin, former vice president of marketing at Dr. Squatch, said testing SMS as a sales channel seemed like a natural extension of their existing strategy. Over a year ago, “our full lifecycle team turned him to SMS as a primary tool,” says Griffin. That is, “the popup captures his SMS before the email. First of all he was the SMS,” he explained. [SMS] Customers who have opted in. “
Earlier this year, Dr. Squatch had Postscript test 10% of their SMS lists with their new sales funnel. With that first batch, the company saw a nearly 30% increase in conversions, so Griffin decided to increase the number of customers. “We saw performance degradation during these periods,” says Griffin. “But we bounced back quickly.” That’s because the e-commerce sales team was growing quickly, and it took time for this new division to learn the nitty-gritty of the new strategy.
But once the sales team “felt comfortable with our brand, we were able to quickly pick up speed and accelerate quickly,” says Griffin. Currently, his 50% of Dr. Squatch’s customers use the sales platform, with more to come.
In some ways, this kind of expansion is a return to the basics of the sales team. Chris Toy, co-founder and CEO of MarketerHire, said: “We have call centers that are much bigger than this. It has been done before.”
However, he said only a few SMS platforms have made it into the sales channel. He pointed to his SMS cart recovery company LiveRecover, which he sold to Voyage SMS a year ago. Having an SMS-based sales team “fills the gap, but he’s the one,” says Toy. “It works – why not? [an SMS marketing company like] Do Klaviyo and Postscript do that?
Toy continued, “If you track all the AI, it’s really a step function.” So, he sees an opportunity for companies to adopt the idea of starting a more analogue version of this service and expanding it by adding new technology and software. “I’m honestly surprised people didn’t do it sooner,” said Toy.
This seems to match the Postscript view as well. We’re building a team of humans to text her messages to our client’s customers and guide them down the sales funnel, but we’re adding AI into the mix for easy scaling.
Beller added that adding more features to the SMS strategy could help keep it useful in the future. “All marketing channels have been declining in some way since the novelty era,” he said. “I think the record is that there has been some decline in the adoption of SMS as a very mainstream channel for e-comm over the last few years.” rice field. [that brands] Send targeted messages. Now say we are having a human conversation. “
Although this is a big new program for Postscript, Beller insisted that marketing remains the company’s main focus. “We really think of it as just a small piece of the pie,” he said.
