Name: How to Unlock Global Growth with Email + SMS
Uploaded: 2025-11-20T17:16:17.174Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 28 s
Description: How to Unlock Global Growth with Email + SMS

Transcript for "How to Unlock Global Growth with Email + SMS": Awesome. Alright. Hello and welcome to our webinar on how to truly unlock and measure global growth for your business. I'm Ayesha Shank, your moderator, and I'm really glad everybody is here with us today. Like many of you, I've spent years working with marketers navigating the very real, often complex changes of scaling an ecommerce operation, especially this time of year when every second in every marketing, dollar really counts. A lot of modern marketing really comes down to having the right tech stack and efficiency, acquiring, retaining, and growing your customer base. So when I lead marketing efforts with growing businesses, the question that always comes up is around efficiency efficiency and measurement. Basically, am I leaving money on the table because of my data is fragmented and systems aren't talking to each other? How do I actually prove the ROI of the channel like SMS, especially across different countries? And can I really justify the cost of separate complex tools? We're all here working hard, but if you don't have a unified intelligent platform to pull your audience data together, it's incredibly tough to scale ahead of the competition. That's exactly why we're here today. We're gonna share practical ways to solve real mid market challenges, things like overcoming fragmented data, removing the complexities of running into, international campaigns, and delivering personalization at scale. So those pain points turn into predictable growth opportunities for all of us. By the end of the session, you'll have a clear picture of how Mailchimp's unified data strategy and our latest SMS innovations make it easier to unify your data so we get clear non fragmented revenue attributions across channels, scale globally with ease using multi country and multi audience SMS from a single account, and also increase efficiency and customer lifetime value through precise targeting and cross channel marketing. Now, of course, I'm not doing this alone. I'm joined by two wonderful people who are constantly thinking and, thinking the same thing and how to solve these exact problems. Wade, our product marketing expert who drove the vision for these new features, and Lindsay Nance from Marketwake who specializes in email and SMS strategy and helps brands stay top of mind in your customers' inboxes and on their phones. Wade, as the principal product marketing manager for Mailchimp SMS, you hear directly from digital sales businesses about their biggest hurdles, especially around global, global expansion. Could you could you kick us off a little bit by telling us about yourself? Sorry. I had to unmute my mic. Yes. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. I'm Wade. I lead our product marketing, for Mailchimp SMS, and I'm really focused on one thing, and my team is as well, is is making cross channel marketing simple and accessible for everyone. I spend a lot of my time talking to customers who are juggling multiple platforms, multiple channels, struggling to get an idea of their revenue attribution. My job is to translate those pain points into those powerful features that solve those problems by working with our product teams to ensure that we're actually delivering what our customers need. The core vision really though is simple. I think it's pretty necessary though. We want to eliminate two big killers when it comes to global scales, complexity and data fragmentation. We want businesses to be able to market internationally across channels without needing additional tools, additional compliance teams, etc. Etcetera. So it's one brain and all your channels. Right? We created a single system or a unified platform where your email, your SMS, your purchase data, data are all in one platform. And that kind of allows you to to to make better choices, make better strategy, decisions, and stop blasting messages to everyone and start using your channels more strategically. It's also the logistical headaches that come with growing your business more worldwide. We handle compliance opt ins, that's a big thing, credits and how you what you need to do to send it, and you manage it all in one platform and and for all of it globally. So that's that's our core philosophy when we come to to bringing SMS into Mailchimp and kind of growing globally for sure. Thanks, Lynn. Lindsay, you are bringing years of hands on experience to this conversation with us. So especially through your work at Market Lake, could you introduce yourself and share a little bit about yourself? Yeah. Definitely. Thanks so much for having me again today. Like you said, my name is Lindsey Nance. And I'm an account manager and email marketing specialist at MarketWake. I have around five, six years of experience working with marketing and email execution, and we are also one of Mailchimp's strategic partners. And so at MarketWig, what we do is help help build build businesses, within their paid media, SEO, market or marketing, anything really just related to marketing in general in all industries, and we're really there to be your partner across wherever you're helping trying to grow within your, your marketing goals. And really excited to be here and talk more about email and SMS. Yeah. We're super excited to kick things off. So super thanks, Lindsay. And super helpful too and really sets the context for the stage, and setting it perfectly. So, Wade, I wanna build on that a little bit. What would you say is the core vision behind really unifying email and SMS inside of Mailchimp to drive that global growth? Yeah. It was what I mentioned earlier. It's around that ability to create that single system to better manage email, SMS all in one place. You're actually able to basically just strategically do more work that is effective and not just truly just sending things out into ether and hoping they work. I think that's the key philosophy for it, is allowing for businesses to come in, do everything that they need to do to manage their audience, manage their marketing, understand their marketing is a big part of it as well so that they're actually seeing effective results with all of the work that they're doing to promote their business for sure. So alright. Well, with that in mind, a couple of days ago, all three of us actually got together to prerecord some part of this conversation. So we're gonna go ahead and play that for you now, and then we'll come back live for a live q and a towards the end. I'm gonna start with you, Lindsay. A lot of digital sales leaders are trying to hit big revenue targets while working with limited time and resources. So from your experience, what are some of the biggest time sucks or efficiency killers in your marketing stack before you all moved over to Mailchimp? Yeah. That's a really good question. I think one of the biggest time sucks is definitely working between different platforms and having to constantly import data, export data, make sure your contacts are matching up, make sure that the information you have is translating from one platform to another. That can also lead to really fragmented reporting. And so having to double check-in each platform, making sure that the tools are communicating together definitely takes a lot of time. But I think really just QA ing also to make sure that everyone you have is matching up in both platforms and that there aren't any discrepancies there. Mhmm. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate you calling that out because some something that we hear a lot from customers is that specific thing all the time. So with that in mind, I want to shift over to Wade for a second. Wade, building off of what Lindsay just shared, when you think about the mid market customer, what are the two or three product philosophies that guided your team when you were working to remove that friction? In other words, what did you all prioritize to make things easier and less complex for them? I love this question so much because it's it's kind of at the heart of of what I do, but also what our team here at Mailchimp does specifically in working with the product teams. Right? So I I think what we did was start by recognizing that the biggest hurdle for our users is, as as Lindsay mentioned, that shared time wasted, like or that sheer that sheer time suck. Right? And it's also that, but also the managing of fragmented solutions or platforms. Right? So you're juggling logins for your forms. You're juggling logins for your emails, or you're juggling logins for your SMS. Right? So we focused on on three core philosophies to help solve that inefficiency and brought to light some new and exciting benefits for our customers. Right? So the first one, the first philosophy I would say is is that unified audience management. Right? So our fundamental principle was to ensure that all your customer data so, you know, purchase history, their opt ins for their email and SMS. Right? All of that is captured and accessible in one place. You should be building your customer segments once. Right? And those segments should instantly work across your email, your SMS, and any other channels. Right? So you're maximizing the efficiency, but also eliminating that data duplication across different platforms. The second philosophy was around workflow application. So every feature was designed to reduce the steps to launch. Right? We made it a mandate to create a signing up form, to building an email, to to scheduling SMS for following up within that kind of cohesive platform experience. Right? So it frees up crucial hours of of marketers to actually do what else they need to do to understand what works for their business, but also do more in that time. And the third one there is just speed to revenue. So we committed to delivering measurable r ROI almost instantly, and that meant providing, like, best in practice automations, abandoned cart sequences, prebuilt templates, those types of things so you can launch quickly and and really hopefully see the value as soon as possible. So those were the three things that really kinda drove our our product strategy for sure. Got it. Yeah. And that ties directly into what we've been seeing with customers heading into the peak season. So I wanna stay with you just for one more question. Right now, a lot of businesses are struggling because because their data is scattered across different tools, and it slows them down when things are getting really busy. So from your perspective, what's the most important part of SMS integrations or advanced analytics that help create real data unification? And why is getting that right so crucial for digital sales teams, especially at this point of the year? That's a great question, and it is so, so important. Well, obviously, with peak season coming around the corner literally in the, I think, what, like, a week or so, like, it's gonna be so quickly here. And then, obviously, New Year's. Right? It's just a big important time for ecommerce businesses in general. So I think the most critical feature, right, is that deep real time integration, right, that feeds the behavioral data into our data foundation or into your data foundation. Right? It creates that necessary but super important single source of customer truth. So thinking about it even more kinda deeper, specifically like this the Shopify integration, it it ensures that your data is high value. You got got product needs. You got cart contents. Right? You got customized time value. These things are are available for segmentation, for automation, and allow you to do so much with them. And why is it essential? Right? It's that unification of your data and of your platforms that eliminates that time lag that I mentioned earlier and that Lindsay mentioned. So in peak season, your delays will kill conversions. Right? So having that complete real time customer view, you can bypass generic messaging, trigger highly personalized or cross channel campaigns too. And I think you can even do this right now. We just launched this in the last week or so is actually, yeah, a unique discount code for SMS and a follow-up. Right? And and it's that ability to actually say being relevant in what you're showing them and actually being specific about what it is and, obviously, driving that speed to the point of sale. So very, very important for this time of year. Absolutely. Thanks, Wade. Yeah. The breakdown really makes it clear on why unification matters on the technical side. So now I wanna shift gears a little bit and look at what it actually feels like for a customer in the real world. So, Lindsay, coming back to you for this. Before bringing clients onto Mailchimp's unified platform, you saw firsthand what it's like when teams are juggling too many tools. So can you talk us through a quick, like, before and after for one of your clients? Maybe a moment where they realized their old setup was holding them back and how things changed once everything was in one place. Yeah. Definitely. I really love what Wade said about having that single source of truth. That's something that we're constantly trying to find a better way to what is our single source of truth? When you're having multiple platforms, sometimes you'll have data on one platform saying one thing, another saying the other. But I think having everything, your email and your SMS and Mailchimp has been one really helpful because you're able to have that especially in this time of year, like you were saying, it's a lot quicker when everything is in one platform, and I'm not having to export this list of SMS customers open this email, and I wanna or sorry. Open this text, and then I also wanna send them an email. I have to export it, import it into email or sorry, import it into Mailchimp. It's having everything in that one platform where it's a lot quicker. I can build a segment beforehand. Anyone that engages with this text, I wanna then send him an email. So I can have it set up more automated rather than having to, like I said, export, import, and it just takes a lot more time. So with having everything in the one platform, you're able to just have that one source of truth like we were saying and, build based off of behavior that we're seeing with SMS and email in that one spot. I just keep going back to source of truth. It's so good having all of that behavior in one place. And so being able to see that, and especially with those SMS clients and email clients that are doing ecomm, you can whenever you're seeing certain engagement, you can then build something quickly within Mailchimp that goes off of that as well. I have a quick question, Lindsay. It's so interesting because I feel like and Ayesha, you could probably attest to this too. People, customers, clients, businesses, I think they think and and and know that single source of truth, all those things are super important. Right? But sometimes getting to that point is so hard because because your data's everywhere. Everyone's data's everywhere. You know, how has how have some customers or clients in your eyes, Lindsay, like, taken to that? I think have you had to to show them the value of it, or do they kind of ultimately just get it and want to work towards that, but it takes time? What's what's that been like just in your sense? Are you saying, like, bringing some people into one platform? Yeah. Yeah. Like, has has that been an easy sell, I guess, is my question. Yeah. I think there can be some friction with clients with wanting to change. I think a big thing is when they've been using the same platform for a long time, it can be a bit hard to get someone onto a new platform. And so what's really been helpful is showing them we're able to build these specific automations or these specific campaigns in this one platform, and we should make this move because then we're gonna be quicker with getting text out, quicker with getting emails out rather than having to go back and forth. I think that's definitely a big thing. Clients love to move quickly. And so showing them we can do that is, I think, the biggest the biggest way to get them on one platform. I love that. Change is hard, especially when you were kind of baked into our ways of doing things. But that's so that's so crucial, and I'm glad that you're seeing that kind of value or at least being able to show that. So that's great. I love that. Thank you for jumping in on that. Yeah. No. That's super helpful. And I agree. Like Wade says, change is hard and moving sometimes is never fun. Right? Or it's moving your house or moving over a platform. Sometimes it's not as fun, but once we do kind of get there and see the utilization of it, you know, it gives more of a clear picture for everybody. So I do wanna stay with you, Lindsay, for one more question. You have extensive experience in your email marketing, so I wanna place a shine on that. Email is the bedrock for client conversions, and your agency success relies on smart strategic execution. So can you walk us through, like, a client journey you've worked on, maybe a campaign where the strategy was a little bit more complex and break down how Marketwake approached it? Yeah. Definitely. So we actually have an ecommerce client that we've been working with the past six months or so. They came to us with a huge email list and saw that their engagement over time had been dropping. So they're seeing their click through rates dropping, their open rates, click rates, overall conversions from emails were really slowing down. So what we did was took a look at the campaign or took a look at the account, and the first thing we saw was that they were sending far too frequently to everyone in their list. There was absolutely no segmentation, no different audiences built out. So no matter what part of the journey someone was in, they were receiving the same email. So you have people that have purchased 15 times from our company and are purchasing regularly, receiving the exact same cadence as people that have never purchased before and maybe just added one or two times to their cart. And so what we did was after conducting a full audit of the account is decide which workflows we were gonna optimize and then which segments needed to be built out based on the different user behavior that we could track. And so one of the first things we did was stop sending to every single person in your account. Let's send specific email campaigns to people that are engaging more, are regular purchasers, and then let's have a different kind of cadence for those that haven't purchased before. So with those frequent buyers, you wanna be pushing them along in the journey and still building that customer relationship. And then with those that need the extra nudge, maybe you're sending them more testimonials or sending them just other information to encourage them to make that first purchase. So really just changing the way that you're speaking to each person has been really, really helpful there. Also updating workflows. I think one of the big things we saw is when you're seeing open rates and click rates really decrease and those unsubscribers grow, you're probably sending way too often to people that don't want to be seeing your emails all the time. And so really just making sure that you're sending to people that want to get your emails at the right time. And then if someone isn't engaging, have some sort of sunset list or an engage list to where if they're not engaging as much, maybe let's only email them once a month. They don't wanna see an email every two every two or three days. That's another big thing that we did with them as well. And because of these changes, we've able we've been able to see a 30% increase in open rates rates over the past six months as well as a 220% click rate increase. And so changing those CTAs and making things more intentional at where they're at in the buying journey, we've seen huge success there as far as just making sure that whatever you're sending out resonates with that type of buyer that you're sending to and not just spring and praying and sending everyone the exact same message. And I love that. And it really shows how, like, intentional strategy translates to results. So I do wanna dig just a little bit deeper on that. So looking back on that specific project with that client, what was kind of the biggest learning that came out of it either for you or for the client that you can kind of share with us? Yeah. Definitely. I think just to put it in one phrase, relevance always outperforms volume. I think some people think that you need to be sending all of the time, stay top of mind, but someone may get annoyed if they're getting if you're in their inbox all the time. Yes. They signed up for emails or, yes, they signed up to receive some sort of notifications from you, but not everyone wants to receive all the time. So building lists of people that are frequently opening, are frequently purchasing, are frequently engaging and having them receive a certain message, maybe they do wanna have more volume and wanna see your name in their inbox more, and it's good to still send to them. But those folks that are only opening, say, every four emails, maybe put them in a different list, and they're receiving only promotional things or one specific email less frequently than those that are engaging more. So definitely focusing on relevant content rather than just sending as much as you can. No. Absolutely. I say that to all my folks all the time too. We don't wanna throw out everything and seeing what sticks. We kinda really wanna, like, listen to our audience and our folks when we're sending email. So wait on that. I wanna pull you back in here for a second. From the product side, is there anything you'd add when you have a journey like that, or are there any specific features or tools inside of Mailchimp that you think would really elevate those more complex strategies? As Lindsay was talking, I was trying to think about that. And and and, frankly, it's I'm having a hard time thinking of anything because what we try to tell businesses to do and and users to do is to do exactly that. Really, like, digging deep and then segment and getting closer or getting closer to understanding what's happening and how your people are behaving and what the you know, not necessarily to your point, Ayesha, throwing, you know, everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. So, honestly, it feels like there's just from from a product perspective, there's not too much more they can do apart from, you know, continuing to dig in, which, again, I think they are doing on the analytics and reporting to understand what is actually working. Is that the right is that the right message to send to that group? Or is you know, should I do this? Or can I AB test within the same group? Right? Like, how can I can I do that even a little bit more? So there's things there that really do stick out, and I I think that's that's super interesting from a from a use case perspective. And and, honestly, I'm very, very happy at those results, Lindsay. It's pretty amazing. No. Honestly, do more of that, frankly. Alright. Let's shift it back and talk about performance a little bit, Wade. So because this is, of course, something that every team cares about. So we've seen the data, and customers using email and SMS together in Mailchimp are seeing around a 97% higher click rate. So from the product side, what do you think really drives that? Is it smarter segmentation, stronger cross channel journeys, or something else maybe behind the scenes that's tying it all together? I mean, that that 97 holds nothing to Lindsay's click through. I feel like so I we should ask her. I'm just kidding. But for me, the the the high engagement with SMS and email together, I think, is the important context here is SMS and email together is, like, how you actually sequence the channels together. Right? So you use SMS as a strategic follow-up to email. You you can use it as stand alone. Right? But I think it's definitely has more impact to your marketing and to your, you know, business goals, whether it be, you know, revenue growth, CLV, all these things. Using it as a strategic follow-up is the best way. Right? So you're using kind of the the the automations flow or the flow builder in Mailchimp, right, which allows you to pull in that data, those triggers, right, based on customer intent. Right? You know, customer interacts with your email. They demonstrate intent or they don't. Right? And then, you know, they they fail to convert. They stall out. Our platform is smart enough to recognize that at that moment, it should trigger x, y, and z or an SMS or a high urgency SMS at that point. So, right, it ensures that you are deploying powerful immediate messages via SMS when the customer is actually most motivated. Right? But they need that final nudge to really get them over the edge. And I think, you know, when you use the channels to this way or use them strategically, it reinforces that, like, intent that they are showing you. Right? You're eliminating the wasteful messages and not throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, but basing it off of how they are interacting with your business, with your brand, with your website, right, and actually drive higher conversion rates. So I think there's a lot of there lot there, but I think those are the main things that I would kinda focus on. Absolutely. Yeah. And I wanna bring this down to, like, the tactical level for a second as well. So, Lindsay, kind of based on what you see with clients every day, what's the most common tactical mistake marketers are making with SMS? Something you see pea people either overdue, underdo, or potentially even misuse? The mistakes that a lot of marketers make when using SMS is treating it like email. SMS is its own channel, and you don't need to be communicating with your customers the way that you would over email. I think when people are signing up for SMS, they're knowing they're gonna get that text on their phone, and I think more like, we should be using that as high urgency things. So, like, if you have a sale that's going on, something that's time sensitive that needs to be a text, knowing that people are opening all these messages, you wanna make sure that they're saying subscribed and the information you're sending them is relevant. If you're sending me a text every other day, honestly, even more than once a week, I'm gonna be like, why are you texting me all the time? Like, I don't need to be hearing from you every single day. If I wanted to know every brand update, I'm gonna follow you on Instagram, or I'm gonna follow you somewhere else, or subscribe to your newsletter. If you're gonna be texting me, it better be something important. And so I think just making sure that the strategy you're using for SMS is those, like, high intent, urgent, things like that where you'd want someone to see it on their phone and not just any sort of information to share with them. Wayne, interested to hear what your take is on that too. It's so important. Like, that is, I think, something that a lot of businesses struggle with. I think, you know, ecommerce in general is you get the idea of what ecommerce SMS and how to use it in conjunction with email. Right? I think we kind of understand that. We've done it. We everybody signed up for an SMS alerts or an SMS marketing program to get that free discount. Right? At their 10% discount on something for the first you know, signing up for a list, you get that discount. And I think that's so important. But, like, what I think people and and to your point, Lindsay, is, like, relevance is so important. Right? You you it's not only, like, you basically tell them what to expect when you're gonna text them. Right? When you sign when somebody signs up, you say, I'm gonna be we're gonna use this for discounts, for, you know, new launches. Right? You just set the expectation upfront, and then you have to just all you have to do is kinda live by that and continue to go through that with your SMS strategy. Right? And so I think kind of relevance is so important. But, also, I think just to dig a little bit deeper, when you sign up for SMS, like, when somebody signs up for SMS for you or for your business, they are expecting that. Right? So that's like that is something that, you know, you don't wanna take advantage of. You don't wanna take for granted either of of when somebody signs up and gives you their personal phone number, they wanna hear from you, but you just have to be respectful of their time and of, you know, of their notifications and their their alerts on their phone. And I think that's just so important that people forget that this is this is consent to text me. And I think that's a big thing. And if you do it right and if you do it well, by literally just being relevant to what that person's doing with your business or not doing with your business or, you know, wants to hear from your business is so important. I think it's just a a crucial aspect of any kind of best semester strategy for any ecommerce business. Absolutely. And I think also that strategy aspect, like I tell a lot of my folks too, is it it gets away from overmarketing. Right? Using it specific on how we need to for text alerts that are critical rather than get to within that overmarketing aspect. Flip side, Lindsay, when you look at how Market Weight coaches clients, what are the simple high impact behaviors you all push for that actually drive revenue, especially with those advanced use cases like abandoned cart flows and personalized SMS triggers? Yeah. Definitely. I think the overall just messaging there is making sure that you're sending the right message to the right person at the right time. And so wanting to make sure that when you are sending out those abandoned carts, making sure that you're doing that quickly. Don't wait a couple days and send them a text. Send them a text an hour after they leave their cart. So it's still top of mind, and then they're still thinking about it, and we'll go back and make that purchase. I think also just making sure that you're quick with when someone does sign up for text messages, make sure you're sending them a welcome flow right away. They don't wanna just be sitting around wondering, oh, I just signed up. When am I gonna get my text? But letting them know right away what they can expect to see from you so that they're aware of how often they're gonna be receiving messages from you and when they should be keeping an eye out for that. I think another thing too that we really encourage is that testing. And so when you are sending out SMS for the first time, test a couple different options as far as messaging. What are people clicking on the most? What is your audience engaging with the most? That way you can then further optimize for other campaigns with that baseline kind of like this is what my peep the my audience is looking to engage with. So definitely testing a lot. But, yeah, I think the biggest things are really just frequency. Make sure you're not sending to people too often, but only in those really specific moments where urgency does matter, letting them know when they can hear from you, and then also just really testing and seeing what messaging resonates the most with your audience. And then dependent on that, making iterations and continuing to send text messages and just make have learn sorry, learnings from there. Alright. Wait. Let's talk about quick wins for a second because that's usually where teams wanna start. So for a digital sales team that wants to show fast ROI, what's the one workflow automation you would recommend for them to use for the first time, whether it's something prebuilt that really takes advantage of the new SMS and email features and delivers results results quickly or potentially something that they can build out themselves? It's such a good question. And and even just to and it's it's very similar to what Lindsay was saying. I think from, like, the clearest path to near instant, like, ROI is activating the abandoned cart recovery workflow or flow. Right? So it's but not just for SMS, but specifically, like, a two step cross channel sequence. So the journey starts with kind of a standard automated email, right, a short time after they abandon their cart. And then I you automatically set it up to follow-up with a personalized SMS, but only to the contacts who did not complete the purchase from that email. Right? So you're you're hitting people at two separate times in the when they in in two separate channels when they should actually expect it and are expecting it. Right? And I think just being able to hit them twice after they've already left your left your your website or your store is so important. It's very simple. Right? But I think it's so important. And the other thing here I just want to also, like, tell us to hit at is when Lindsay was talking about, you know, the welcome subscriber one too, I think what's so important is and something that Mailchimp takes a lot of pride in is, you know, ensuring that when people sign up for your SMS, you are hitting them with something immediately. Right? And I think that's super important on top of the abandoned cart automation is to just double down on on just they have signed up for you. You have captured that compliant sign up, which is so, so important. And, again, Mailchimp enables you to capture those compliantly so that you're not worrying about any compliance issues or any kind of consent issues. When somebody signs up via form, you are compliant with with all of the regulations out there for sending an SMS marketing. So it's super important there, but you do just have to hit them with a message to say, hey. Welcome. And and, honestly, what I think is so important too, especially if you're just getting started, is is to hit them with a with a a a quick little, like, thank you by giving them a discount or something like that. Right? So just hitting them with something that's just, like, immediate. They already signed up. They said, yes. I want you. I consent for you to send me SMS. Hit them with a thank you. And I think that's so, so important going forward. It's super easy, but so important. Something that you just mentioned, Wade, that jog my memory too is another reason as to why it's so important having your SMS and email providers within that same platform. It's, for example, with the abandoned cart, say you send someone an abandoned cart email, they don't end up making the purchase, but you're able to see that they opened it in platform. You can then trigger a text to go out the next day with that five dollar off. Or another thing to help push them over the edge to make that purchase and having it all in that one platform allows that to be a quick process, and you're not having to check, okay. Who opened the email today? Let me export and import and then reset this up. You can have that all set up already. That's that's so true. And I think this just is a complete kind of, like, illustration of the importance of having it in one. Right? I think just literally being able to automatically check if somebody opened an email and then immediately send them a text, it's so simple, but it's so powerful. Truly. Absolutely. And as a consumer myself, if I sign up for text message, I am expecting whether it's a text message, a welcome, a coupon code. I always say you can get me with a coupon code pretty quickly. So definitely things like that. But now I kinda wanna look a little bit ahead. So, hopefully, we get some sneak peeks, Wade. I wanna shift in to see what's coming next. So from your perspective, what's the one upcoming capability or road map item that you think will really change how ecommerce teams grow over the next year? And if you can share even whether it's around analytics, AI, or something else entirely. I've I've kinda shared some of this already, and I think we're enabling more here. And I think it's this one capability that I think will continue to kind of fundamentally change customer growth for ecommerce businesses is our expansion of our ecommerce segmentation and behavioral triggers. Right? So we are accelerating our focus on bringing those types of features into the experience, right, centered around the better data activation. So key capabilities like and I mentioned this earlier is the unique or dynamic discount codes for ecommerce integrations. Right now, you can do that with Shopify, but we're bringing that to other other ecommerce providers in the near future here as well. So it's the ability to, like, sync and deploy single use promotional codes directly through SMS campaigns and automations and email for that matter. And it's like it that removes a massive barrier for digital sales teams who rely on traceable and secure off offers, right, or or coupon codes in that sense. And then it's also CLV based segmentation. Right? So using the unified data to enable segmentation based on customer lifetime value. Right? This will allow ecommerce businesses to stop treating all customers the same, right, and actually enables true high value targeting for retention and upsell journeys. Right? So it's this combination of unique offers and smart value based segmentation that will hopefully fundamentally shift how customers and users approach that retention and revenue generation over the next six to twelve months. So I'm excited about what's to come for sure. Alright. Well, we've covered a lot today. Global growth, unified data, tactical wins, future strategy. But I wanna close us out with something super actionable. So, Wade, if you had to narrow it down, Wade, what are the top three things or customers should be doing right now to see immediate success with the new SMS enhancements and the things that move the needle pretty fast? Of course. I I think you should prioritize three actions. One, as I mentioned earlier, is the capturing compliant consent immediately. Right? So you're you're deploying sign up forms or pop up forms across your site to start building your SMS audience today. Right? You cannot compliant without you cannot market without compliant permission. So super important. Super easy too, but super important. And it's the activating the cross channel flows or journeys. Right? So it's the abandoned cart one like I mentioned. You can go straight to the highest ROI, turn on the prebuilt email and SMS automation, and you can begin recovering those lost sales almost immediately. And then three, it it's it's targeting those high value segments. Right? You use your unified audience data to identify and prioritize your highest value customers and and use SMS for those most urgent, most impactful communications with them. Right? This preserves your your your reputation and your brand with those customers and maximizes the per the conversion of that. So those are the three things I'd say that I'd be taking away. Cool. And, Lindsay, based on the success you've seen with SMS and email together, what are the three biggest lessons businesses can take right now? And if we are starting out fresh tomorrow, let's say, what would be the first thing you do to build out that com combination of SMS and email strategy? Yeah. Definitely. I think one thing is important to keep in mind is that if someone is signing up to receive your email or SMS, they want to hear from you. They're not just they may have given you their information because you had a discount going on or they wanted to enter some giveaway. But if they've been unsubscribed yet, they probably still wanna hear something from you and there's something relevant you can be sending to them. And so just making sure that you do have those series like we talked about, at least having a welcome and abandoned cart set up, super important to have so that you have some sort of messaging going out to these folks and then also engaging them when they've shown those high intent behaviors. I think something else too is that it's really important to have forms on your site in multiple locations, especially this time of year, you're gonna see the most sign ups and also the most unsubscribes. People know that the holidays are coming up, Black Friday is coming up. They know companies are gonna have deals that they're sending out, so they wanna get notified about that. But it's also the time of year where people are wanting to clean their life up and get ready for the new year. So if they're not interested anymore and they unsubscribe, don't be super stressed out about it. Maybe you just aren't super relevant to them anymore, but there are opportunities to still continue to grow that list. And so having pop up forms on your most high intent pages are really important to have, especially to help grow that SMS and email list. So if you're not doing that, definitely would. And then something else that we really love using is the Mailchimp's preferences section, so allowing people to go and select what they want to be seeing from you. So maybe you have an option where they can select that they wanna hear about the newsletter. Maybe they just want product updates, or maybe they just wanna know when you have discounts. So allowing the user to also select what kind of journey they have. I think something we've also learned is that people oftentimes also like to select what they're interested in seeing. So just because someone signed up for your email or your text, maybe they don't wanna see every single thing that you're sending out. So using the Mailchimp's preferences section and creating options for people to select what they wanna see from you. Maybe it's they just want discounts or they just want product updates, or maybe they wanna see everything. But giving them the option to select what they want can also help keep people subscribed longer if they're only getting that information that they're wanting from you. And I think just if I were to start right now, what I would do is just pause, don't freak out, and just go ahead and audit everything that you have going right now. If you are already using email and SMS, look at all the workflows that you're running and see what's the what's the most successful, which open rates do you have that are getting the most open rates, what CTA buttons are you using that you have the most clicks from, and really just seeing what's working and what's not, and then deciding one by one where you wanna start and kind of refresh. So like, we've been saying that welcome series and abandoned cart is definitely where I would start in terms of refreshing things. But like I said, just going ahead and auditing everything you have, what's working, what's not, and then creating a plan to help revise and optimize those campaigns you have going forward. One thing just to add to that, it's it it's just baby steps too. Right? You don't have to, like, immediately start and be like, I'm gonna be sending, you know, four campaigns a week on SMS alone, or I have every automation set up. Obviously, you can do that if you're capable and feel like you want to. But, like, if you're new to SMS as a channel and and how it works with email and and the strategy behind it, you can take your time and really get in there and do it right and figure out what works and what doesn't work. But I think it's just it's it's all about baby steps and just getting in there. It's it's it's Lindsay had some great feedback in there or some great direction, so love that. Mhmm. Absolutely. You haven't started, just start. And if you're already doing it, just keep going, basically. Keep going. Exactly. Awesome. Well, thank you, Lindsay. Thank you, Wade. There was a lot of great information within that. So that wraps us up for the recorded portion. So we're gonna go ahead and switch back over to the live q and a now. Awesome. Well, that was some great information. Everybody, we are back live. In just a moment, we'll start answering your questions from Goldcast. There was a lot of actionable items and information and discussion that we really covered. So I want to make sure that we are leaving here today ready to use it. So if you haven't already, go ahead and drop your questions in the Q and A tab and we'll get through as many as we can today. And just a quick reminder as well, when you do submit a q and a, your name will be visible for everybody participating today. So you are just providing that consent ahead of time. Alright. Let's go ahead and jump into the first question. So, Lee, I think this is gonna be a good one for you. So what emerging technologies or tactics will shape SMS marketing over the next one to two years? That's a great question. And I think if you look ahead, eighteen months, right, I think the technology that's kind of underlying SMS, you know, won't necessarily change, but I think what what will happen from a marketing perspective is it's this this kind of hyper personalization and kind of prescriptive analytics aspects of it too. So, You're moving past I think as marketers, we're moving past simple segmentation of our customers and our audience. I think the next iteration or the next frontier is channel optimization. You're not just batching and blasting to certain segments. Right? I think, you know, platforms, Mailchimp, you know, will be able to kinda learn and understand what the best hour is to send an SMS to me or to anyone else, right, versus, like, the best time to send an email to Lindsey or or anything like that. Right? The system will just suggest a time. It will actually, you know, execute that message at the kind of individualized optimal moment. Right? So I think that's also enhances the the idea of SMS and and and what you want to because it is so high impact and and getting someone at the right time. So if you're able to even get even more kind of precise on that, it's gonna be amazing. I think the next thing here is is something that we do now on in Mailchimp and we'll be continuing to add to, but it's that conversational like opportunity, like two way SMS. So right now, you know, SMS in general is is kind of one way alerts or, you know, very specific to this one person about this thing that they've done on a site. But I think, like, if you're able to to have those conversations, and you can do this in Mailchimp right now via SMS, is as if a customer replies back with questions, you can respond to them or you can, you know, give them, you know, discounts, whatever it is you need to. It's that customer service side of the thing. It makes it more kind of immediate. Right? It makes it more personalized. Even more, it feels like there's something else that you're you know, they're talking to a real person versus, say, you know, an AI chatbot or, you know, just a faceless brand at that point. So just kind of, like, continue to evolve SMS from, like, a marketing channel solely to a a sales and support channel as well. Right? So just elevating the actual experience with SMS and what you can do with it. The other thing here is more visual and rich media, with SMS. But actually, it's called RCS. People have seen this, I'm sure, out in the world with the latest iOS updates, but also on Android, it's very popular and in other countries. It's not fully adopted everywhere, but a lot of carriers and a lot of iOS and and and, phone software are actually allowing you to do this now. But what that means is you can you know, we're shifting towards RCS messaging, which will allow marketers the opportunity to embed more dynamic content, images, carousels, richer branding. Right? So you can all of that directly in the the native text message thread or the native text message, app on the phone. So, like, you're bridging that gap between a simple text message or a simple MMS, you know, photo with, like, a mini branded app experience with RCS. So, again, that's where I think the this this the the technology is for for SMS is going. I think it really offers some opportunity for businesses as well. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for that. And then also to build on that and to answer kind of put another question in there with a lot of new technology and a lot of shift that comes through, you know, there comes a lot of power with texting directly on people's phones. So our can Mailchimp set quiet hours prevent sending messages to subscribers, let's say, late at night whether they're in an automation or we're doing a one to one communication? Yeah. Absolutely. That's kinda a very big part of of how Mailchimp actually kind of helps out our customers to, you know, stay compliant. You know, there are quiet hour kind of, requirements, across, you know, every market. Right? And Mailchimp allows you to set those based on on where you're at, but also will will default to them on as well. So what that means is, you know, if you're if you've got a, if you've got a, an automation that is set or a campaign, a bulk campaign for that matter, that's set to go out right near the edge of a quiet hour or when quiet hours begin, it will pause that and then automatically send it for you in the next time the quiet hours are over. So we take that, away out of your hands. You don't have to worry about that. It's kind of automatically done in the system and, again, helps you stay compliant but also helps you not, annoy your customers with text at all all hours of the night. What's the line? Well, Lindsay, when I hop over to you real quick, from your experience working with customers or what you've seen yourself, are there some common mistakes that people may be doing that's leading to high unsubscribe rates? And if so, how are some ways that they can prevent that? Yeah. Definitely. I think when you're seeing a lot of high unsubscribe rates, a lot of it comes down to messaging way too frequently. And so, for example, say someone just purchased from your website. You wanna put a list together that's maybe people that have purchased in the last seven, fourteen days and exclude them from receiving that further information, like, go see this sale or make this purchase. I think sometimes people can get annoyed. They're like, I just purchased from you. Why are you texting me to make another purchase? So I think that can definitely be a reason why people are unsubscribing. Also what's really important to do is make a list, just based on engagement. So you'll have people that are more frequent engagers and maybe some people that just engage every couple of months with either an email or a text. And so I think building those lists, say you have a list of folks that have engaged in the past thirty days. So they've opened an email or text or clicked, having a list of those people. And then I think also having one of, like, people that have engaged within the past sixty days and ninety days, That way you're able to send different messaging based on their engagement patterns. I think some people do love to engage more with email and SMS and they are gonna fall in that frequent engage list and they wanna hear from you all the time. And then some people just wanna hear whenever you have a big promo or say there's some sort of update coming out, they only wanna hear at those times. So definitely just keeping an eye on people's behavior that you're seeing and then building lists based off of that and excluding when it may not be the best time to email or text some people. But really just making sure things are personalized and you're sending people messages only when it'd be most relevant to them or if they're wanting to be hearing from you. And kind of playing on that revel, that aspect of really segmenting and using the data that we already have. One question that came through is beyond using a contact's name, what are some best ways to personalize SMS messaging to make them feel less transactional, more engaging? Yeah. I think definitely even when you're seeing an action, like, someone abandoned their cart instead of just, hey. We see you left your cart. Go check out. Adding some personal messaging around that. So if you know something like, I'm trying to think of an example, if their birthday is coming up. I love a good birthday text. And so if you have that information around their birthday, maybe sending a workflow up that lets them know, like, hey. We know your birthday is coming up. Would love to give you this coupon here or anything that makes them feel special in that way. Or even just people love having things that are sent to them that that brings them value. So say that, you know, someone left their cart abandoned or they just visited your website instead of just being like, hey. We know that you just left the site or we know you did this. Adding some more personalization there, but anything to just help them feel a little more special instead of making it seem super transactional. Or if, you know, for example, another good one is that you have different product categories. Instead of just sending them a general, hey. We saw you left this in your cart, sending them something with that's within that category specific. So maybe, like, a testimonial about a specific product in that category rather than just overall, we saw you left this in your cart, but being specific around that and making it more personalized, sending a personalized testimonial that falls within that product category rather than just overall evergreen testimonial, but really just using the data that you have about their actions to make it a more personalized experience for them. That last one there is such a good one too. I think, like, it's it it goes back to the, you know, don't take our word for it. Right? Take our, you know, previous customers' word for it and what they got out of our experience with us or with their products that we have. That's a a very kinda simple ecommerce related thing that I think reviews play a lot into it. But if you can incorporate that into your content in any way, whether it's on your website, but also in your text messages or in your emails as you're, you know, trying to get someone to convert is such a good option. And I think that's a great call out, Lindsay. I love that. Awesome. Wade, for the compliance aspect, I know SMS compliance is a little bit different than with email. So how are we balancing the compliance aspect when we're trying to grow our list within Mailchimp, and what do we kind of do to help support them on that front? Well, there's a number of things here. Like I mentioned, some of the the quiet hours work. Right? I think the the most important thing is is just capturing and, kinda maintaining, the approvals or the opt ins, right, for SMS. So ensuring that, you know, the people who subscribe to your list, they, you know, they're giving you consent. There's things like double opt in as well that we work that we offer as well for SMS, which allow, you know, you just to really confirm and then capture that information into, into the contact profiles of the individual and the audience. So, you know, it's it's It allows you, one, again, that sounds like a lot, like you have to make sure I got the consent to everybody that comes in, but similar to our email platform and our email consent, it's captured in the user profile or the contact profile and it's maintained that way. You're able to see all of that in one place as well. Again, I think what it comes down to is also just we give tips and tricks and stuff as you're building your content as well. It's really about hitting the right notes with your customers through the the content, but also, again, just ensuring that you have, that consent. And doing it through Mailchimp sign up forms or pop up forms or anything like that, you're you're guaranteed to do that and guaranteed to capture that. So again, just something else you don't need to worry about as you're building your SMS audience. And I think too, a great option here too is just to, you know, if you have an existing s excuse me, an existing email list, right, if you have a or a list or an audience that had you just have their emails, I think the best way to get and grow your list and then do it compliantly is send them, like, a landing page with, with a a an SMS sign up form on it that just is clear, like, hey. You're already engaged with me on this channel via email. I think you'd really benefit for doing, you know, signing up via SMS, and here's what to expect with what we're gonna send you. And just doing that is just a way to already get an audience that is so ingrained in your brand or so engaged with your brand, I should say. Just sign up through a different channel and just grow your list that way. So it's this already baked in thing. And, again, we capture that consent right in the contact profile, so it's really, really straightforward. And, again, takes that off your head or takes that off your mind and off your plate too. So just a few things there, but I think that's really crucial. It's just, you know, we make it so kind of simple and easy that you don't have to worry about those compliance things, and we kinda handle that for you with the just the platform itself. Absolutely. Yeah. And what I see as well to kind of add to that when we work with our customers is not only help them grow within their business location, but also globally. Right. We handle that compliance aspect globally as well. So especially for e commerce brands that might have outside of The US or outside of The EU, we'll help kind of cover all bases, which is always really good for us. So, kind of going on that list growth and the sign up forms way that you kind of went on. Lindsey, question for you on what are some strategies that we can use on our sign up forms to really encourage subscribers to opt in? Definitely. I think one thing that I always see a lot of sign ups with is if you do have something, like I said, to give them. So say you have a piece of information on your site that is helpful to share with them, letting them know if you sign up for this, like, we'll give you this in return as well. That we've seen a lot of people sign up that way. And then I love what Wade said too about segment your email list already and then let them know, hey. We're doing SMS as well. I would definitely start with maybe building a list of who's engaged the most in the past thirty days. Send them an email. Let them know, hey. We're doing text now. You can sign up here on this form. Definitely would do that. And then letting them know, like, what it's been saying, what they can be seeing from you, I think or even having something, like, if you sign up, you get 10% off your first order. Any sort of incentive, people love to know they're gonna get a discount code or $5 off, or, just letting them know what they can be expecting can definitely help them encourage them to sign up as well. So almost giving them a reason of why should I sign up for SMS using not sign. up? Yeah. If. I'm gonna be getting 10% off, why am I not signing up your SMS? Yeah. Definitely. really honestly, creating FOMO is is is is not. a bad thing in this instance. I love that. Absolutely. Awesome. So one, question I have for you. Let's see if we can pull out a question for us. So, how do we avoid I know when we kind of went through our chat, we were talking about messaging fatigue and really concentrating on how much we are texting our folks since it's very personalized. So how do we avoid message fatigue while still hitting the revenue goals that we need for ecommerce? Yeah. I know we touched on it, briefly too, but I think really just I keep saying segmenting and building lists. I think definitely, like I've said, one of the biggest mistakes is just sending to everyone. And so really keeping track of who's engaging, who's not, when did they sign up. Let's make sure we're not sending the same people multiple emails at a time or text. So cross checking your workflows even too, making sure that if they signed up for a welcome flow, we also don't wanna be hitting them with three other workflows that they're in as well. Let's make sure they're not getting if we're sending two emails a week, we don't want them to have four workflow emails coming in as well as our two regular sends. Just making sure that they're in their own journey. They're not getting the exact same emails every single person. I think that's definitely a really good thing to keep in mind. Excellent. I think that's also the power of combining email and SMS because you are able to see, hey. I've already sent them two emails this week. Maybe not send them another text message. Right? So. it's definitely not power of combining for sure. Awesome. So, Wade, when it comes to some statistics and aspects from there, are there certain benchmarks for healthy SMS click through rates and conversion rates that folks should be keeping a lookout for? That's, that's the million dollar question. Right? And I think the answer is is is, in general, SMS are significantly higher than email, but they, you know, can vary dramatically based on the intent of the message. Right? And I think, again, going to what Lindsay said about who you're segmenting and when you're sending it to, and if you're very, very kind of, critical about that and making sure you're sending to the right people right the right message, which, again, Mailchimp can help you with, that kind of impacts the the potential kind of, click rates or even the conversion rates for that matter. But when you think about it, like healthy benchmarks, we see, I think for transactional or alerts, alert based things, it's twenty-thirty 5% is a healthy click through. I think from a promotional or marketing standpoint, anywhere we love to see high and we've seen different customers have very high click through rates as for rates of their promotional, but like 15% is really, really strong in this. I think conversion rates are even two-five percent. When you think about it, if you're thinking about volume and stuff, that may not seem like a lot, but when you're doing it on a regular basis and really getting your brand in front of people, those higher conversion rates are pretty good. Then when you think about abandoned cart, that's a different one. Those people are potentially expecting to receive something like that. They showed so much interest in your in your your product and your business that they put something in the cart to abandon it. So they're locked in in some respects. Right? We expect those kind of click through rates to be in the 25 to 40%. Right? And then conversion rate on those should be 10 to 20. Right? Because, again, it's just the types of intent or what the people are doing or how they're engaging with your brand and what the the actual message is that will actually do it. So I think, you know, when you're unifying to your point earlier about unification of email and SMS together is like when you're unifying email and SMS together, you should aim for your abandoned cart SMS to be your most powerful revenue driver. You should start with email. Right? You should absolutely send an email as part of the like I mentioned in the video or in the recording, you should start with email. But if somebody doesn't open it or doesn't engage with it, send them the SMS, and that SMS should do you know, seal the deal. So really trying to like that That ten-twenty percent of conversion rate for SMS is very attainable when you segment it, when you do timely follow-up logic in your flows, those types of things. A few potential insights there as it relates to benchmarks and what you should think about as you're sending SMS, for your for your ecommerce business for sure. Alright. Well, we're heading towards the end, of our live q and a. So I just wanna hit it off with one question for both of you guys. And for anybody who's watching, if you're either brand new to SMS or you've already done it, what are some words of advice that you guys would, you know, let people know whether they're starting or they're currently kind of engaging in it? Yeah. I can go ahead go ahead and start there. I know Wade was just mention mentioning industry benchmarks, and I know a lot of times we'll deal with clients where they come in and they're like, we're not hitting these benchmarks at all. Like, feeling kind of discouraged, and I think the biggest thing is that just starting where you're at now, starting to implement those best practices one at a time, and then just going against your yourself and where your goals are, where your results are now. It can be kind of scary to be like, oh, I need to get up to this percentage of open rates, and I'm only at 10%. But just tracking month over month your own progress and seeing that and then taking your learnings to then go from there, I think is really good to keep in mind and that you'll reach those big goals one day, but starting where you're at now and then just working through best practices and seeing where you can go month over month with, what you have. I think that's a great point, and that was kinda similar to what I was gonna say is is is, you know, you shouldn't necessarily expect, immediate, like, this is with any marketing channel. Right? Like, you like, immediate kind of results ROI. I mean, I will say Mailchimp users who are using SMS and email together are seeing some pretty incredible, like, stats. Like, 97% higher click rate when you combine email and SMS together, so like that abandoned cart one. And then I think we've seen some for ecommerce customers specifically, 16 x ROI in the first three months after sending their first SMS campaign. But, I mean, like, to to Lindsay's point, that's three months in. Right? So you have to build it up. You have to continue to grow it and get, you know, get it in front of your audience and make sure that they kind of see it and understand it. So, I think it is just kinda don't be discouraged. You know, take some time. It's a new channel if you haven't done it before. I think a great opportunity for you to, to to just to get started, frankly. Awesome. Unfortunately, that was the last question that we have time to answer today. So if you didn't get a chance to ask yours, and you wanna go deeper or anything that we want we covered today, definitely feel free to reach out. We're always happy to talk you through any specific use cases or specifically what you may be doing now. Huge thank you, of course, to Wade and Lindsay. You both were fantastic today. And thank you to everybody who joined us. I did want to, make sure that you guys understand that we do have tailored guidance and the best next steps is to connect with our digital sales team for maybe a quick demo, or we can go over through a quick conversation to see what you guys are currently doing. The way that you can walk through Mailchimp exactly, and we can help with fragmented data scaling and getting more out of your current SMS and email together. So thanks again for spending part of your day with us, and I hope you guys have a great rest of the afternoon.