This time of year, phones are blowing up. And it’s not just exes and high school friends filling up the inbox—it’s also brands hoping to hook you on their holiday deals.
Adam Turner, co-founder and CEO of SMS marketing company Postscript, told us that in the last two weeks of November, Postscript will oversee in total “about a billion messages” sent from the more than 18,000 brands it works with.
As we approach Black Friday-Cyber Monday and head into gifting season, what can brands do to stand out and make sure they don’t get lost in the clutter? Turner shared some tips.
Got a text
In the last three years or so, Turner said he’s noticed that brands have started moving Black Friday send times even earlier, and those of us who have received ongoing sales messages all month can attest. That might not be a bad thing.
“It’s good for everyone,” he said. “Consumers aren’t inundated with [messages] and they don’t need to make a bunch of different decisions on Black Friday itself. They get to see the different sales over the course of the month.”
One of Postscript’s clients, supplement company Bare Performance Nutrition, sent a Black Friday-Cyber Monday promotional text out in mid-November that led to a million dollars in revenue, Turner said. Bare Performance Nutrition didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“It was a million-dollar text message,” he said, adding that part of what has helped its best vendors perform is by offering bundled and tiered discounts that encourage customers to buy more to increase their discount and increase average order value.
Beyond bundling discounts and spreading out messages, Turner said trying to reach customers at odd hours in the morning and evening could also work in brands’ favor since the highest volume of brand texts on Black Friday tend to go out around 11am PST. Adding pictures to texts can also help catch customers’ eyes more, he said: MMS outperformed SMS by 186% leading up to Thanksgiving last year, according to Postscript data.
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“The name of the game is attention and the way to get attention is to differentiate, whether that’s the time that you’re sending, the type of message that you’re doing, or the type of sale that you’re doing,” he said.
For marketers worried about overwhelming customers, Turner noted that the percentage of unsubscribe requests around Black Friday compared to the total volume of sent text messages is actually lower than at other times of the year.
In fact, interest in SMS may be at its peak, which is why he recommends not turning off website pop-ups encouraging customers to sign up for text messages, even if there’s no additional discount being offered simultaneously. Last year between November 13 and 20, he said brands that turned off pop-ups missed out on “almost three times the amount of subscriber opt-in” they would have normally seen.
“It turns out that consumers will sign up with no additional discount on their pop-up just to learn more about the other sales that are going on from that store,” he said.
Once the glow of Black Friday-Cyber Monday wears off in early December, Turner recommends that brands keep on pressing send. When brands send 13 or more messages in November and keep a similar cadence in December, he said, they may see similar sales results, since not everyone does their holiday shopping on Black Friday-Cyber Monday. Right now, he estimates that only about 20% of brands are doing that.
“The merchants that are going full out in December…up until the last shipping date, those are the merchants that are actually capturing the most value over time,” he said, adding that “whatever cadence you’re doing in November, do it in December as well, and don’t take your foot off the gas.”
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