Optimize The Four Stages of the Subscriber Lifecycle With These 2024 Product Updates

The key to driving real revenue growth from SMS is optimizing the full subscriber lifecycle, from acquiring new subscribers, to engaging them with personalized messaging, converting them into buyers, and finally, retaining those hard-won customers. 

We don’t want a subscriber or customer to drop out of your marketing funnel at any point along the way, which is why we’ve been hard at work developing powerful new features to help brands supercharge each phase of this lifecycle. 

But we’re also hard at work on yet another supercharged top secret feature set—Postscript AI. Register here for the live event on July 24—trust us—jaws will drop.

But in the meantime, let's revisit the four pillars that form an optimized subscriber journey.

You know it, you love it, but repetition is the father of learning, no? Here are the four key stages we focused on in our latest updates.

🤝Acquire: List growth fuels your entire SMS program 

💬Engage: Build relationships with personalized messaging 

🛍️Convert: Earn subscribers' trust to drive purchases

🤙Retain: Nurture buyers into loyal, repeat customers

We’ve recently rolled out some new features that can help you optimize every single part of the subscriber lifecycle. 

Here’s how to leverage our latest features and master each of these phases.

That’s right– we’re already on the next version of Onsite Opt-in with our latest acquisition feature. This feature allows you to re-engage visitors who don’t complete the opt-in process. 

The reality is every acquisition method has some dropoff. With Onsite Opt-in Reminder, you get a second chance at capturing leads that already provided you with their phone number.

When a visitor doesn’t complete the opt-in process, this feature allows you to send them a reply “Y” message to get them to finish subscribing. Combining our new innovative Onsite Opt-in technology with the legacy double opt-in sequence ensures that you’re making the most of every opportunity to acquire subscribers.

What does a world without cookies look like for marketers? A bit painful, which is why we've also rolled out Continuous Subscriber Identification Tracking. This feature cookies new subscribers when they sign up, along with existing subscribers, on each site visit. This ensures you can provide a seamless, correctly-targeted experience.

This tracking lets you maximize the frequency and accuracy of automation trigger events, for example, ensuring the right popup experience is presented for visitors. Already a subscriber? Then they won’t be bothered by a “Sign up for 20% CashBack on your first order” message.

It’s an improved visitor experience for maximizing high ROI trigger events for existing subscribers—and future ones. Not only will this feature help with acquisition, but it’s a key engagement method too. Automations that have better targeting, better personalization, and better timing improve engagement and build trust with subscribers.

All of this tracking ultimately helps brands make the sale too. The right experience lends itself to a smarter way to message visitors and get them to check out. This also allows you to maximize the frequency and accuracy of automation trigger events for current subscribers too which helps with conversion and retention, allow for everyone to have that VIP experience.

Big news for Shopify Plus brands who have upgraded to Checkout Extensibility—add Postscript’s checkout extension to checkout pages and collect SMS subscribers during and after checkout! Collect subscribers at other high opportunity points like the “Thank You” and “Order Confirmation” pages on your site where TCPA language is auto-applied.

This also offers a more personalized experience for existing customers, so you aren’t asking them to opt-in to SMS when they’re already on the list.

You’ll boost your acquisition rate by collecting SMS opt-ins even during Shop Pay express checkout. Shop Pay has as much as 50% better conversion compared to guest checkout. so you’ll see higher conversion and acquisition rates. Win-win.

This one’s for our marketers to make their lives way easier. Our Subscriber Attribute Splits within automation flows help brands get even more specific about the experience they’re serving. And this feature makes building out flows way easier.

You can now apply different messaging strategies cohesively within one single flow, eliminating the need to maintain multiple automations for each segment of subscribers you want to target. Within one flow, you’re able to tailor the messaging based on whether your abandon cart recipient is a VIP customer or has never purchased before, serving up tailored texts to them on different paths within one automation. This is a huge value add when it comes to building out more complex automations.

When we rolled this out, the feedback from our Customer Success team was immediate—our merchants love this. Do not sleep on targeting this segment. 

Identify and engage subscribers who have exhibited high-intent behaviors like viewing a product, initiating checkout, or adding to cart with our High Intent Subscriber Filters. Since these users have already shown purchase interest, tailored engagement can yield higher ROI.

When used in tandem with an “order created greater than or equal to 1” criterion, you can use these filters to offer unique incentives and retain these customers and funnel them back into the lifecycle.

This low hanging fruit is just ripe for the picking, and while we’re sorry for that fruit pun, we aren’t sorry about how these filters can truly move the needle on the path to conversion. 

We’ve made it easier to see how a split flow performs so you can adjust and make changes to your strategy in real-time.

With Branch Analytics, you’ll see the aggregate stats for each branch within any split in your flows, so that you can easily compare them and see which one is performing better. Take the winner and apply your finding to other flows to continue to optimize your sends. 

Use this feature to go with the highest converting result every time. 

Just picture it. A subscriber is on your website, looking at your bestselling sandal just before summer hits and then—while experiencing true despair over whether she should or shouldn’t purchase—a ping to her inbox. There—a low inventory alert. 

Can she survive the summer without these sandals? No. No, she cannot. She purchases. She is thrilled and grateful for the reminder. She will return again and again because of this show of kindness.

That’s only a slight dramatization of what a subscriber experiences with our Low Inventory automation trigger that lets you send a timely text out when you’ve hit a certain inventory threshold to anyone who has browsed or added that product to cart. Some brands use this low inventory trigger to notify customers via SMS ONLY as a perk for signing up to your SMS program.

A true win in engagement, conversion, and retention tactics. 

Low Inventory trigger is not yet available and will be rolled out to all brands in the coming weeks.

Let’s look at our same shopper as above. Maybe there’s no low inventory opportunity—but there will be a limited time price drop on a product where price seems to be an objection. 

With a Price Drop trigger event in automations, you’ll re-engage high intent subscribers who had previously browsed or added that item to their cart. This text will be triggered when a price is reduced on a selected product or product variant.

This personalized “sale” not only converts better than a sitewide sale, but is that added level of personalization to keep retention high too. 

Take it one step further and offer this price drop to an exclusive segment, like VIP customers, to really drive EPMs up. 

We've been busy serving up tons of revenue-driving features in the first half of 2024, but there's more. Our product team has been working behind-the-scenes on the next frontier of SMS innovation-- powered by AI. Be sure to sign up for our upcoming webinar to find out more.

Stay tuned for more product updates and feel free to reach out to our team if you'd like hands-on support in implementing any of our latest features.