Name: Level Up Your Marketing: Unlock SMS Power with Mailchimp
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T19:01:17.745Z
Duration: 44 min
Description: Level Up Your Marketing: Unlock SMS Power with Mailchimp

Transcript for "Level Up Your Marketing: Unlock SMS Power with Mailchimp": Hello. Hello. Hi, everyone. Hi, Deandra. Good to see you. Hi. Hi, everyone. We're gonna give everyone just a few minutes to get going in here. I see Ray. Good to see you. If you could, if you're already in the chat, feel free to, you know, let us know where you're watching from, where you're joining from. We'd love to see all the people who are here and excited to to see everybody. We'll give it a just a few more minutes before we get going. California. Hi, Robin. Edmonton. Let's go. Memphis, North Carolina. That's my that's where I grew up, right outside of Charlotte. We love it. Jacksonville, Montreal, good to see you. New York. Oh, we have people from all over today. This is this is awesome. Shout out to the fellow Texan. I'm in the CW area right now in Arlington. I love it. Okay. Okay. I'll give everyone just a few more minutes here. I'm actually gonna go ahead and share my screen just so I can make sure I can do that. Let's just grab it. Yeah. This is the one. Just let me know if you can see it alright. Ginger, that'd be great. Yes. It looks okay? Does it look okay? Does it look full screen? Everything okay? Looks great. Great. Hey, Natalie from Michigan. Glad you could join us. Give me one more minute, and we'll just get going here. Wade, you're in Atlanta. Is that right? I am. I am in Atlanta. It's about 90 plus degrees and almost, like, a 100% humidity, and I am not enjoying it right now. But you know what? I'm hoping we get to some nice fall weather here soon. I'm not holding my breath, but we'll we'll we'll see what happens. It's terrible. Yeah. That sounds really humid. It's not awful. It's like 95 easily. 95%. It's terrible. But we're making it through. And you're you said you're out in in Texas. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. Although I'm from the DC area, but I'm visiting family. But yeah. Maggie, I'm in the Dallas area. Very nice. Yeah. Well, we'll go ahead and get started here. First off, again, hi, everyone. Thank you so much for being with us here today. I'm so excited to be here, and, obviously, Deandra is here with us as well. And I'm so excited to get the opportunity to talk through some exciting ways that Mailchimp can help grow your business and take it to the next level. So in this session, I will discuss some fundamentals of SMS marketing, including some specific use cases that will hopefully help you see the potential for your own business or your own marketing strategy. Then we'll go through some key stats that will hopefully give you the confidence that that Mailchimp can actually truly help your business and your marketing as well. So after my my quick preamble, we'll actually get into the good stuff here. So today, I'm joined by Deandra Shim, who's our senior customer success manager, but we're also joined by Brandon Johnson. He is a manager of retention and CRM with Ideal Image. He's going to give you some firsthand input and experience with, on his experience with Mailchimp, and we're so excited to have him here today. But first, just wanna do a quick introduction of myself, and Deandra. So, again, I'm Wade. I'm a principal product marketing manager here at Mailchimp. I've been with the company for almost eight years now. As I mentioned, I'm in Atlanta, and I'm solely focused on our SMS and our messaging product. And, again, I'm joined here by Deandra, and I'll let her, introduce herself. Yeah. Hi, everyone. My name is Deandra Shim, and I'm a senior customer success manager at Mailchimp. So my role is to work with our clients to make sure they're getting the most out of our partnership with us. I work with Brandon at Ideal Image, and we are very much looking forward to sharing about all of their success with SMS after Wei goes through his content. Awesome. Before we get started, I just wanna go over a few housekeeping items here. So first, we value your feedback. Right? At the end of the session, you'll be, we'll be sharing a quick survey. Please take a few minutes just to fill it out. Your input helps us improve these sessions and our products, so we really do truly appreciate it. And, again, we want to hear from you. Right? If you have any questions during the presentation, please submit them in the q and a box, on the right side of your screen. And we'll also have some time at the end of the call to do some q and a with our special guest, Brandon. Again, we have some team members that will also probably be actively monitoring the chat as well. So if you have some questions in there that, you ask and get they get prioritized, some members may also answer them in the chat, so just keep an eye on that as well. And, again, this just a quick heads up. This will be recorded, and we'll share this recording afterwards via email, typically, within twenty four to forty eight hours. So you can revisit the information or share it with a colleague who couldn't attend again. So let's just just to be aware of that and, again, be on the lookout for that. So let's get started here. So SMS and automations is is what we're gonna be talking about today more specifically. I think first off, the main question I think that's on a lot of people's minds these days is why SMS. Right? We know what SMS is. If you don't specifically know the definition, I have some definitions for you on the next slide. But I think the main question that we want to answer today, is why should I use SMS as part of my marketing strategy? So with that, let's get right into it. So if you're in The US, you're more more likely hear people call it a text. Right? It's a text message. Right? But SMS stands for short messaging service. So an SMS message can include text, emojis, links, and each message is capped at about a 160 characters. Right? Some elements like emojis or special characters may count as more as one character, but, overall, you should be capping that at 160 characters. But then we get to the fun stuff. So once you add, like, a GIF or a meme or a photo, of your your products or anything like that, that SMS becomes an MMS. Right? So MMS stands for multimedia messaging service. And a single MMS can be up to 1,600 characters long. Right? So each even though we we generally refer to these as collectively as a text, right, for the purpose of SMS marketing, it's important to understand what the difference between an SMS is and what an MMS is. So the next question that comes to mind is, why should I care about SMS marketing? Right? And I think that's there's a very simple answer to that question. But first, put in the chat, if you know exactly where your phone is right at this exact moment, and if it was, how long do you think it would take for you to check it? Right? How long do you think it would take? I wanna see some answers in there. Awesome. Alright. I think that just kinda covers it. Right? There's your answer. Right? Businesses need an effective way to directly engage with customers and prospects in order to drive conversions, to drive loyalty, and and that customer lifetime value. Right? SMS does that. Right? It allows you to connect with customers through the device that's almost always nearby, if not directly in their hands. Right? And Mailchimp SMS brings your email and your SMS campaigns into one unified platform all within SMS. So much so that we've seen our users see up to 97% higher click rate when they use Mailchimp SMS and email together. That's, that's one of the the many stats that I'll be sharing today, but we just wanna make sure that you see that 97% higher click rate when you use both email and SMS together. So we're gonna go through a few examples today. Now we know not everyone here, you know, might be selling a product or a service, but I think the principles and the fundamentals that we'll discuss here will still work for your business or your nonprofit or your service based business as well. So when you think about it, email marketing on its own can be effective. Right? But cross channel orchestration lets you take things to the next level with your subscribers. So sending email and SMS together is a great way to put your most time sensitive information in front of customers, and it allows them to interact with your messages and, by extension, your extension, your brand on a more personal level. In fact, according to research, we see that millennials many millennials and Gen z customers prefer text over, over any other way of of interacting with the customers and the customer or excuse me, the businesses that they care about. So it's a really, really important thing to take into account if you are thinking about ways to engage with your customer based on a different level. So a recent study found that more than 53% of consumers want the capability of texting back a business through two way messaging, and Mailchimp is moving the world away from generic one way blast communications to more personalized, responsive, to the interactive forms of communication with SMS. So the ability to react and respond means SMS can help you build a stronger and more meaningful relationship with your subscribers, with your customers, with your prospects. Right? So those are some of the basis about the platform, but I wanna put this into real world context, right, and share some of the way that businesses in different industries could and are using SMS. So in the next couple of slides, I'll be showing the actual messages sent by some Mailchimp customers that are using Mailchimp SMS. For their sake of their privacy, some of the parts of the messages have been grayed out and things like that. So it may look a little different than what the actual message is sent, but we still wanna give you a sense of what they're using it for. Right? So this right here, this is an example of an actual Mailchimp customer that uses, Mailchimp SMS as an independent book publisher. So if you sell products online, you know, you might relate relate to this in some extent. Right? So they sell their books online, and they use their SMS, marketing to let their customers know about events, about preorders, following up with customers to drive sales if they've shown interest in it, abandoned cart, all of these things here. So this is a good example of someone who who sells online and can, use SMS to their to their benefit. The next one here is an events and production company. So they use, SMS, for a variety of reasons. They create and host performance events, across venues across the world. So for them, SMS not only helps with, like, ticket sales. Right? But it it helps build their brand specifically since their experiences are always changing, and they want to be able to highlight those new events that are constantly changing and and and, of course, are related to people in certain areas. So they use SMS to really hit the right people at the right time in the right location on the device that they're typically using on a day to day basis. And then SMS is also perfect for nonprofits. We have a number of nonprofits that use Mailchimp right now, but you can benefit from SMS as well if you are a nonprofit. These organ this organization in this example is using SMS to raise awareness about their mission and to raise funds specifically. They use SMS as a tool to generate interest in new auction items to provide information about upcoming raffles and to drive don't donors directly to their website. So you get a sense that all these businesses are using SMS to reach their marketing objectives. So you probably are thinking about how I can maybe use SMS for my business. Again, don't hesitate to use that q and a, and we'll be sure to answer some questions as we go through this, directly in there, but also at the q and a at the end. The next thing that I wanna get into specifically is is is is how Mailchimp stands out in a in a world of SMS providers, how we can actually help you. So the next few slides are actually gonna be some examples of of some of the stats that we've seen for some of our customers in particular. But this first one here is very, very impressive. Right? So we know that Mailchimp users have seen up to 16 x ROI through the first three months after launching the first SMS campaign. That's an incredible increase over their ROI of just email alone. Right? And we couldn't be more proud of that. It's doing its job and making our customers happy and growing their revenue. Right? We love to see that aspect of our work. The next one here. I already told you this earlier. I mentioned this, but I'm gonna tell you again. Mailchimp users saw a 97% higher click rate when they use both email and SMS together. Right? So it just shows the power of what can happen when both channels are leveraged in the right way, within Mailchimp. Plus, the this one's very impressive to me, and I think it's something that we we we should very much kinda sit sit on for one second. But the average unsubscribe rate for SMS is less than fewer than one out of a thousand messages sent. It's among the lowest in the industry. We're very proud of it. But it's not just us. It's it's about delivery rate and those things, but it's also the content. Our users are sending content that's relevant, that is, meant for their customers, and their customers are enjoying it so they're not unsubscribing. Right? We know that this is a big aspect of what SMS is, is hitting the relevant message at the right time. Next one here is finally, again, this is I promise this will be the last one I have for you, but the average click rate for Mailchimp SMS is 12%. Right? So customers engage with that SMS content and doing so creates that connection with customers via that one to one medium. Right? You're able to use it and hit them right on the device that is very personable. Right? It's a powerful advantage that you can claim over your competitors who aren't using SMS. Right? So with that, I hope that these examples that we shared here and all of the many, many wonderful steps that have helped you that I've shown will help you understand kind of the opportunities and power of adding SMS to your marketing. So now we're gonna get into the good stuff here. I'm gonna bring back on Brandon, Johnson. Again, as I mentioned, he is a manager of retention and CRM at Ideal Image, but he specializes in building high impact email, SMS, and CRM programs that drive millions of personalized customer engagements. He's also a senior full stack engineer with deep experience developing scalable, data driven systems. And as a cloud and solutions architect, he designed and leads infrastructure that connects marketing strategy with modern reliable technology. I'm gonna hand it over to to Deandra and Brandon to take it away from here. But thanks so much for listening, and I'll be back here in just a little bit. Alright. Yeah. Looking forward to kicking things off here. Gonna go ahead and give it a minute for Brandon to join me on stage. Yep. And there he is. Hey, Brandon. Hi, everyone. Great. Well, yes. Thank you so much again for joining us to share about your experience using SMS and also using SMS at Mailchimp. We would love to start off with just hearing a little bit more about what you all do at Ideal Image and also some initial goals or challenges that led you all to explore SMS marketing. Sure. So hi, everyone. I'm Brandon Johnson. I oversee our CRM programs and marketing automation tech here at Ideal Image. So if you're not familiar with us, we are the number one aesthetics brand in MedSpa in North America. All of our more than a 150 clinics across the country are staffed by medical professionals and who've done over 20,000,000 treatments. So, we deliver science backed treatments such as laser hair removal, Botox dermal fillers, and skin boosters like, DiamondGlow dermabrasion facial. So that's kind of a a background to, our industry here. So to answer your question, Deandra, our biggest hurdle was really just cutting through the noise. Right? So email remains a steady revenue engine for us, but time sensitive messages like last minute appointment bookings or maybe a twenty four hour flash sale, those were getting buried in overcrowded email inboxes. So, marketing best practices remind us that, you know, you have to have permission to contact someone. And, really, that's not just enough. You you need to have a message that feels immediately relevant. We already have our guest permission to text them. What we lacked was the the really instant reach to make those offers matter in the moment, so SMS solved that gap. So if a text pops onto the lock screen. It's typically read within minutes, and, it really matches the conversational style our guests already use every day with us. So by adding the channel's SMS, we didn't replace email. We really supercharged it. Making some urgent offers hit the medium our audience prefers already. So Yeah. And I think what you said about that instant reach, that's just so true about SMS because, like, we saw earlier when Wade had asked whose phone is right next to them, if you've got a text message or buzzed, how long would it take you to take a look at that? And looking at the chat, like Robin, Nicole, Samantha, Natalie, Madeline, Kara, like, everyone's was almost under five seconds for someone to check that, and that is instant right there being able to grab someone's attention. So I think that is so true. And I've been thinking about SMS, so it being a great way to get someone's attention, cut through the noise. In terms of ROI, how would you describe the value SMS has brought to Ideal Image? Yeah. So when we added SMS on top of email, our total direct marketing engagement jumped about 50%. The lift really comes from the reach and immediacy. So, I know we talked about the industry estimate show SMS visibility in the 90 plus percent range, and we've definitely seen that. So, I mean, compare that to email open rates, which, you know, can be in in the mid low to mid thirties. So, I mean, SMS, the reach is so powerful. You know, even though a text costs more to send, right, so that that kind of factors into your ROI calculations, the speed and response that we get puts the ROI right alongside email, which is already one of the highest return digital channels. So SMS doesn't replace the inbox. It really amplifies it and and captures incremental revenue that we would otherwise miss. So the real magic for us is how the two channels work together. So, like, in our in our data, I guess, we subscribe to both email and and SMS converted at much higher rate than those on email alone just because each channel plays a different role. Right? Email educates and nurtures SMS kinda nudges at those decisive moments and can reinforce, like, repeat purchasing. So, I mean, in the industry benchmarks really showed, programs perform best when SMS is integrated with your broader customer life cycle marketing rather than just running in isolation. So it's that orchestration between channels is really where the the big returns for us showed up. Yeah. And I love how you called out the two of them work in tandem. They both have unique ways to reach your audience because I think many people do have email marketing that they're using already, and SMS is a powerful tool to come alongside that and not replace everything that you've done and have a lot of hard work that's been poured into, but it's to really help amplify that. So that's great to hear. Alright. My next question for you, Brandon, is around advice that you would give to other businesses. I think especially those who are in health, beauty, or services, if they're considering SMS, they haven't quite made the decision to do it yet, but what advice would you give them? The short answer is SMS is extremely powerful and it's still underutilized by a lot of brands. If you're not already building an SMS program and growing your text opt in list, you're really leaving engagement and revenue on the table. But there's there's some caveats here. So text is not as forgiving as email. Text is more intrusive. It's more regulated. Every send costs more money. So know what you're getting into first and do your homework. Long long answer if you get into the weeds a little bit here. So, I like to remember Spider Man's rule. Right? With great power comes great responsibility. So text messages, you know, they buzz in in your pocket. Right? It's it's far more intimate than email. So the borrower for trust is much higher. So you need to earn that trust with confirmed opt ins, clear expectations about, you know, what you're gonna be sending. Make sure you respect when people opt out, and set a sustainable cadence. Right? So many brands will cap, text that one once or twice a week or maybe even less frequently. Maybe even once a month is the right cadence for your brand. Make sure you enforce local quiet hours and, you know, just follow regulations, because, you know, it's not only the law, but, you know, carriers are going to expect it. And that's respecting those rules keeps your deliverability high, and protects your brand reputation as well. Second, make your list growth a deliberate initiative and strategy in your business. So add SMS sign ups to your website forms if you have, like, appointment booking flows, checkout flows. You can offer something tangible if they sign up. So, like, a a percent off of product, a small add on service, early access to a new product or service you have. Publish your text to join keywords everywhere, you know, on signage, receipts. We do an aftercare sheets, email footers. Again, you know, there's synergy between email and text here. You can get people opt in to text from your emails, post it on social media, do you host an event or have consultations? Have staff to invite yes to text your join keyword on the spot for a small perk or discount. So, the easier and more valuable that first opt in is, the faster your list is going to grow. Third, let me think. So, yeah, lead with context. Before you start sending things, take take the time to map out where each customer is in your customer journey. So, for example, some life cycle stages in your customer's journey might be new prospect, first consult booked, first treatment, look at maintenance, or collapsed customer stages. So tailor the message and offers to be appropriate. Segment by their interest, past then geography or even real time signals by weather. There's a lot you can do with text. So and then use, like, calendar moments, not just the holidays, the small ones like National Self Care Day or back to school or, you know, first day of summer. So we've found that when timing and message lineup engagement rises and churn drops. Fourth, use use the medium of text to your advantage, especially MMS. MMS is so powerful, especially in the, like, health, beauty, and aesthetics industry. It lets us send before and after images, short animated GIF of, you know, transformations, quick care checklists, even, like, infographics explaining our treatment. So it's really like visual proof, can answer questions faster and and can shorten the path to conversion for your customers. So Yeah. Well, Brandon, that's been so much really great content. I wanna do a quick recap because I know you actually have a little bit more to share on this topic as well. But quickly to go through the four points, I think the first one you mentioned is being responsible. So making sure you're aware of quiet hours, staying in line with those. The second point you mentioned is deliberate list growth. So making sure that you are actively gaining new SMS subscribers, looking for them to add on, whether that's through a promo code or discount or something small that they can receive. You talked about the context before the content. So depending on where they are in their stage with you, whether they're a new prospect or lapsed customer, we'll wanna make sure we're getting the right kind of content to them, so we need that context. And then lastly, visuals and how important it is to make sure those also work in tandem with the text that's actually being sent across. So before Brandon keeps going, he actually has a few more things to share. I'm curious in the chat out of those four things, which is one that as you think about your SMS program, you really wanna make sure you focus on or go ahead and make sure you add into your SMS plan. So feel free to throw it in there between responsibility, list growth, context, or visuals. And then we'll keep going in about twenty seconds or so. Alright. Yeah. We're seeing few responses come in. I think being able to have a QR code is one thing that we called out and making sure we're being responsible with sending text messages. I personally think visuals are so important because we do see a lot of text messages come through, but being able to see, like, visual transformation, especially when it comes to ideal image and what you all do, I think that's such a key part there, and people love responding to imagery. So that is a great point that I wanna take away. But, yeah, Brandon, I know you have a few more tips. So anything else you like to share around this topic? Yeah. There's a lot. I'll I'll try to keep it short, but, yeah, some more advice here. So make your text worth the interruption to someone's life. So, like, be creative. Don't be spammy. A lot of brands just blast playing, like, 20% off messages with literally no context, no personality, no reason to even care. Like, send something you would want to receive with tight copy, clear benefit messaging, maybe a line or two of friendly brand voice and flavor, small visual, or a quick tie to the offer. A little flavor is gonna go a long way in separating your message from the generic discount data dump a lot of brands do and really give you a competitive edge. Next point. So this has been really powerful for us, is treat SMS as a conversation, not a bullhorn. Keep in mind texting, it's it's a two way platform, especially on Mailchimp. Right? So you can invite replies in your text by including in your messaging copy like questions, reply here, and we'll text you back. You'll be surprised how many people will do that. So we've seen response rates roughly double when we ask for engagement. So try asking your customers to even respond with specific keywords and then trigger a journey or automation based on that keyword. There's a lot of powerful things you can do. And, because Mailchimp routes replies into a shared inbox, we have trained staff and even automations, hooked up to it to to answer quickly. So every exchange becomes a data point you can feed back into your own systems and marketing programs to improve targeting, and recommendations. So, and then kind of on that note, just in all marketing programs. Right? You need to test and iterate, beyond the standard coupon, run a b test on send time, short versus long copy, emojis versus no emojis, even MMS versus plain text only SMS, those sorts of things. And you can even get creative. I've linked linked to quizzes on your website, short polls, educational flows. We've even, you know, connected an AI through texting, give a really, simple interactive experience to our customers. They even handle some personalization at scale. So there's a lot we can do. And the last point, very, very important, keep your list healthy. Remove invalid numbers, suppress product non responders, monitor opt out spikes because that is an early fatigue signal in your audience that you might be sending too frequently. Feed all of your SMS engagement data back into your marketing programs, with alongside email, paid media. If you have, like, any store or for us in clinic outreach systems, each channel can reinforce the other. So really done well, SMS becomes a reliable, really high signal line to your customers that supports, the rest of your marketing mix. So that's that's a mouthful. But Yeah. Thank you so much, Brandon. I think just to recap quickly those last four points. So being creative with what you're doing, not just simply blasting out 20% off, but what's the story behind that, Making it conversation, testing and iterating, and then also making sure your list is healthy. I think the one thing that really stands out to me from that list is making it conversational. I think that's such a great aspect about SMS that you can utilize for your marketing. So so glad that you called that out, and thanks for sharing all that with us. Yeah. So I'm gonna zoom out a little bit and wanna ask you a question about how you all decided to move everything over to Mailchimp. So I know previously, you all were already running SMS and email on a different platform, but how did you come to the decision to come over to us? Yeah. So as an enterprise user, our legacy tool was powerful but complex. So marketers needed a developer just to build, and segment an email or a text, and the the text replies were not easily accessible for non developers. So Mailchimp, it gives us an easy way to to just build texts and even MMSs right in the editor. And, of course, it supports native two way texting out of the box. So our team sees guest questions instantly. And then, you know, on the back end, Mailchimp's API, is really powerful because it it lets us keep, like, the messy data work behind the curtains while our marketers stay in the Mailchimp UI, which is just super easy to use. So it's like that balance of ease and flexibility, with with the powerful AI was was the deal maker for us. Yeah. And I think that's been my experience using the platform as well is that it can be very simple in the moments it needs to be, but there's definitely that room for complexity and customization as you continue with your use case of it. And curious to hear what's changed the most in how your campaigns are run now that you both have SMS and email all inside of Mailchimp. Yeah. So yeah. So this this is exciting. So, I know this discussion's about SMS, but, right, for no marketing program should live on text alone. Really a true omnichannel strategy and how Mailchimp has facilitated that for us has been really powerful. So, like, email, text, direct mail, paid media, even, like, call center outreach, they don't work in isolation. They they work because they support and complement each other. So pulling SMS and email together in Mailchimp forced us to think bigger. We now plan, like, a single customer life cycle map instead of siloed channel calendars. So, you know, those the heavier lifting with educational nurturing, like, before and after stories, treatment science, while SMS carries the urgent stuff like a a flash sale ending tonight or or a special offer a customer just qualified for, things like that. So seeing both channels side by side makes it obvious where each is the strongest, and we can choreograph each them accordingly. And then, of course, in Mailchimp to Journeys, you have the ability to get really powerful and, you know, you can use webhooks and API calls to other services. So you can even do cool things like bring in, like, direct mail integration right into your journeys in Mailchimp. So a lot that you can do. So that's what we've done. Right? So we've integrated Mailchimp with, with, like, our direct mail pieces, paid media, coordinate offers that appear in organic search and landing pages, even push call test to, our clinic staff, where, I mean, a high value guest hits like a a key life cycle stage, for example. So the platforms kinda become the one stop shop, the hub that informs everything else. Wow. That is great to hear. And, again, just hearing how SMS has really added to your overall marketing plan has been great to just see how it's helped to amplify those different aspects. So I have two more questions for you before we go to our q and a. So, again, I just wanna remind those in the audience, if you do have questions to ask Brandon, our marketing expert here, please feel free to put those in the q and a. Kara, we saw yours, and we're gonna definitely get to that one after we wrap up. So two more questions. One, Brandon, is how has seen reporting for both channels in one place helped with optimization? And can you speak to that value of having a single source of truth? Yeah. It's it's huge. So because email and SMS metrics sit side by side, we can immediately see how the channels play off of each other. So if we have, like, a a Tuesday text list list Friday bookings by, 30%, and then we can, you know, we we can repeat that pattern on on purpose if we align it with a an email journey, for example. And then we can tag every send with a a a g a four UTM parameter. So attribution is not guesswork for us. So we can line up downstream revenue with, and calculate the incremental return, with our texts versus email. So it's it's really key to see that level of granularity and that the level of clarity in reporting, it just allowed us to to shift our budgets and strategy weekly instead of having to wait for this quarter end report. So Yeah. That's so great to hear because I think being able to make those decisions quickly and with confidence is so important in an ever changing marketing world we're operating in. So I'm glad that you all feel supported there and you're able to make those decisions quickly because it is all unified in that one spot. Okay. My last question before we head over to q and a. So in your experience, how easy is it to set up email and SMS campaigns inside of Mailchimp compared with other platforms you've used before? It's very easy, and that's honestly one of the big reasons we chose Mailchimp. Today, a marketer can just log in, build a segment in sixty seconds. They just drop that segment into a campaign. I mean, you can do this with email and text. And, you know, you have, like, a journey where you schedule the whole sequence of events. So, like, there's no engineering ticket. There's no switching between platforms. So being able to do it all in one place is just makes our life easier. So, like, when technology fades into the background, really the principle of iterate quickly and test relentlessly really becomes a reality and we've seen that. So Great. Well, thank you so much, Brandon, for sharing all of that with us and talking about your experience. I really appreciated it, and I think I learned a lot myself. Hopefully, those in the audience, you have a lot of takeaways as well. We are going to shift over to asking Brandon some questions, and we have about seven minutes left. So we'll see how many we can get to. But, Brandon, the first one is from Cara, and she is wondering if you can give some examples of the difference between the content you would provide in an email versus SMS. Great question. So email is really a more long form medium. Right? So you can take the time to really start educating your audience on on different things. Like, for us, we might have almost like a newsletter style email where we we have, you know, thousands of words of content describing, you know, how laser hair removal works, for example, or, you know, how Botox works. And you can get really granular with the data, and you can show different infographics like multiple images, multiple blocks of copy. So really make it something that people can spend a few minutes with reading through. Email, it lets you do things. You can have multiple CTAs. For example, if you have different pages on your website, like, maybe you're an ecom shop, you want to you want to link to different products directly from the email. Email is I mean, it's it's still a little bit more powerful in terms of the content that you can leverage. Right? But texting, it really has that reach and immediacy that makes it a really powerful tool if you use it strategically. So, again, use text for short form content. I know, like, a a typical text might be, like, a 160 characters. Right? I think you can get up to, like, three zero six characters with with two credits if you wanna get a little bit longer on an SMS. One really cool thing with using MMS, is it you're not as limited with your character account and you can incorporate emojis without limiting your character account. So, MMS is almost, like, become a different channel for us than just plain text SMS. We used to just send plain text SMS for years before we moved to MMS. And the engagement we've seen just from MMS is almost just made us use exclusively MMS. But, yeah, I mean, email and text, two completely different channels, but they're both very powerful. Just you gotta find how to use them strategically in your business, how to align the strength of those channels with the the needs of your specific, subscriber base and your customers. So does that answer the question? Yeah. I think it does. Kara, just let us know that it was really helpful, so thank you for that. I think we have one more here, and it's a question from Kai. So is it possible to send videos in MMS messages? I think based on my knowledge, we you wouldn't necessarily be able to have it embedded in. I think you could send a link to it. But, Brandon, curious to hear from your perspective in terms of utilizing a GIF or just a static image or maybe linking to a video. Like, how did you all decide what to use, when to use it, and for gap? We use we use animated GIFs all the time in our MMSs. Yeah. So they're not technically videos. They're technically a a GIF file. But, yeah, you can embed those in your MMSs. Those are extremely powerful. We'll have, like, before and after animated GIFs in our in our MMSs and our customers love those. I would highly recommend those. Like, take the time, work with your design team, get something really exciting and embed those into your text. That's been a really great driver of engagement for us. But, you can absolutely link to videos as well, like, you know, just include a link in the in the text, and it will go to a video and that will load on the website. So, again, just make sure your website is mobile friendly to to load that video. Yeah. There's endless possibilities. Yeah. And on that note, with using SMS and Mailchimp, we do have a branded link shortener you could use. So to make sure that that link for the video is one that the customers or the contacts can trust, you're able to go ahead and put your branding in there. Alright. Well, we just have a few minutes left. I don't think I see any more questions for you at this time, though I know there's probably some bubbling up. But we can officially close this part out because I do know we have our survey coming up. So once again, I just want to thank you so much, Brandon, for joining us today and sharing all of your insights. I think you could write a whole book about this, so we really hope to have you back again to share more with us soon. I look forward to it. Thanks, Sandra. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thank you so much, Brandon. That was amazing. And, again, thank you, Deandra, for for facilitating. Truly an amazing conversation, and even I was blown away by some of the the stuff that you were talking about, Brandon. Thank you so much. One final thing here, just so that everyone's aware, before you leave, we wanna make sure that you see a few things. One, obviously, if you have any questions or you wanna learn more, you can book a demo with the link that's pinned in the chat, or you can reach out directly to one of our, representatives. Her name is Ayesha. So you can see here there's her email, ayesha_shank@intuit.com. They will get right back to you with any questions. And, again, please feel free to, do the survey as well. That helps us out big time. It's a couple of questions. It won't take too long. But, overall, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. We truly appreciate it. We know you're busy. And, again, we hope to see you in the next one. And, again, have a good day. We'll see you next time.