John Wall: This is something that you have to be pretty careful about, because it’s even more risky than spamming. You know, people get very angry if they’re getting texts that they don’t want and so you have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to make this work. But there’s a couple things you can do to give yourself the best odds. And you know, if this does work, this is a fantastic channel. Deliverability is usually in the high 90% as opposed to email, which can be down in the 10% rate when you have a sign up form on your website, if you can add email and give them the option to include their mobile number, do that, but if you can get those numbers ahead of time, that will at least give you some data to go forward with.
John Wall: In the future, you can start individually texting customers and prospects, if appropriate, and if they are open to doing it. The problem is, of course, that it just doesn’t scale really well. You’re gonna have to figure out who’s responsible for texting. Usually starts out being a founder, but once you get beyond just a few people, it can get really messy quick, so you need to at least figure out who’s responsible for the accounts that get text messages and make sure you’ve got coverage. 24/7, for those eventually you get to a point where there are services that you can use, where you can bulk text on behalf of your organization. For some of our promotions, we just start with “Hey Everybody,” because that way readers will realize that, “oh, this is a bulk message.” This is not an individual message to me, because to the recipient, it’s not going to be clear to them. Whether this is just “Oh, the founders asking me a question”, versus “Oh, this is going out to everybody.” But the real value of those systems is that they manage the replies. You know, as they come in, you’ve got a queue, and even some of the better systems allow you to, if you get five or six or you could even get tens, or hundreds, if you’ve got 1000s of followers. But specific questions, you can answer bulk answer. It’s like, okay, everybody that’s asked about, when is this product available? You can say December 14, and it will automatically answer all those people. You don’t have to do individual texts to everyone.
John Wall: Texting offers is great with text messages. You know, as far as anything else goes, keep in mind it’s a lot more important to be considering time zones. You know, if you’ve got a global list, you may want to segment that by parts of the world, because you don’t want to be texting people at two in the morning. Don’t presume that everybody’s got their notification schedule silenced. Set up the way they want to schedule it. Do the work to make sure that you’ve got everything hitting between 9am and 4pm business hours, unless you know you have an evening related product, or if you’re pushing live events, or “Hey, join us for this concert,” or whatever. You shift time frames accordingly, but do the work to make sure you’re not making people angry and scaring them off your list.
