November is almost upon us, and BFCM will be here before we know it. Our latest live event focused  on the Postscript features merchants should absolutely leverage during this major selling season—and beyond.

Here’s everything we covered—including 11 fail-proof tactics to get the most out of SMS this Cyber Season.

Watch the full webinar recording below, or click the following timestamp links to jump to the part you’re interested in:

• Pre-BFCM Strategies [2:11]

  • Popup Scheduling [2:57]

  • Popup A/B Testing [3:58]

  • Custom Attribute Collection [6:01]

  • Message Planner [6:45]

  • Cart Abandonment Automations [7:12]

• BFCM Strategies [7:53]

  • Flow Builder Campaigns [9:20]

  • Templates [14:13]

  • Klaviyo Integration [14:55]

• Post-BFCM Strategies [16:04]

  • Holiday Gift Guide [16:44]

  • UGC Campaign [20:05]

  • Transactional Messaging [21:57]

• The Transition from ARMU to ARMR in Postscript [23:47]

Bre Fairley, Postscript Customer Education Specialist, kicked things off with a crash-course on pre-BFCM to-dos, starting with list growth.

Now’s the time for brands to really focus on gaining as many SMS subscribers as possible. After all, you can have the best, most well-thought out SMS strategy—but without a solid list of engaged subscribers, your messaging won’t make much of an impact.

Luckily, Postscript has several features to help you grow your subscriber list.

You may have already known about our popups, but for BFCM, specifically, our popup scheduling feature can come in super handy. It enables you to pre-set the exact dates and times you want to activate and deactivate a particular popup on your site. For example, if you’re launching a popup specific to Cyber Week—like one that says something like, “Sign up for SMS to be the first to know about our Black Friday deals”—you can make sure it launches at the exact moment you want it to.

Cyber Weekend presents a major opportunity to grow your list. You’ll have a lot more people on your website—which means more potential subscribers! Just make sure your popup offer is not less enticing than any sitewide promos you’re running.

Postscript also allows you to A/B test various aspects of your popups, including creative images, timing, message copy, and incentives. If you can, run a test prior to BFCM to help you get a better understanding of which popup experience captures the attention of your site visitors so you can effectively create content that resonates—and ultimately increases engagement and converts subscribers.

Once you set your parameters, you can monitor results on the popups page. The winner is determined by the conversion rate, and when you end a test, there will be a recommended winner. You also have the ability to select whichever popup you want as the winner based on your own criteria. Whichever one you choose, the winning popup will be automatically activated when you confirm to end the test.

Here’s an example from an activewear brand that tested two mobile popups—one specifying a 15% discount, and one advertising “exclusive offers” to those who signed up for SMS. We can see here that the popup with the 15% discount was the clear winner.

Using popups to collect phone numbers is great, but getting a phone number and some sort of unique subscriber preference (favorite color, flavor of ice cream, pet, etc.) is even better. Right off the bat, this engages your potential customers and shows them that you care about their individual interests. You’ll also be able to segment future sends based on these attributes, allowing you to deliver a more personalized and engaging experience later in the customer lifecycle—leading to higher conversions and more revenue.

These features are being built  right now, so be sure to sign up for our content newsletter to find out when they’re live. 

We believe SMS and email should work hand-in-hand, which is why we’re always working on improving our robust Klaviyo integration. One cool release that just came out in August is the message planner.

The message planner allows you to see all of your upcoming and previous SMS campaigns alongside your upcoming Klaviyo email sends—all on your Postscript Dashboard. We’re dedicated to making sure you have a comprehensive view of your current marketing automation cadence so that your messaging strategy is always aligned!

In 2021, there was a 69% cart abandonment rate across all devices on Black Friday alone. So before we get into the thick of Cyber Weekend, we highly recommend that you check in on your current cart abandonment automations to make sure they’re all set up and ready to go.

If you don’t already have one created, no worries—it only takes a few minutes to set up. Simply incentivize shoppers to come back with a holiday-specific discount code or free shipping offer—or remind them to check out before the item in their cart goes out of stock. This will be especially effective during the holiday season.

Alex Meyer, Postscript Product Manager, shared several ways brands can use Postscript to maximize revenue generation during BFCM.

Postscript’s Flow Builder is an amazing tool for planning and configuring both campaigns and automations. And it’s something brands should definitely leverage during BFCM.

That’s because it enables you to schedule multiple messages in the same campaign flow—and branch messages based on subscriber engagement, to boot.

This is huge, because last year, our team noticed that shops that sent a follow-up message after their first Black Friday campaign earned 40% more revenue than those that only sent one message. So, we highly encourage you to use a follow-up strategy for important campaigns like the ones you’ll be sending during Cyber Weekend.

Once you’ve crafted your initial campaign message, you can use Wait for Event branching. This to adjust the wait times around the follow-up messages you’d like to send—to those who ordered, those who didn’t, or both. Maybe your follow-up window is 8 hours—or maybe it’s only 2 hours depending on the urgency of your sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Either way, you can provide your customers a timely reminder so they don’t miss out on your sale.

We know SMS isn’t your only marketing channel, though we do want it to be the one driving the most revenue! To help you save time on creating campaigns for Cyber Weekend, we dropped a few pre-written templates into the product.

Remember, though, that your subscribers are probably getting texts from other brands—so it’s important to spice up the template copy to really make it yours. This is a great opportunity to show off your brand’s personality while already having the bones of the message created for you. 

Cyber Weekend is all about the discounts. So, when Postscript generates a unique coupon for a subscriber, we also send that information to Klaviyo, where the coupon is stored on the subscriber's Klaviyo profile. That way, you can use it in both your SMS and email messages. (And because coupons are unique to each subscriber, you can prevent them from sharing codes with other people who haven’t yet opted into your marketing communications.)

This integration also allows you to create targeted Postscript segments and filter out subscribers from your automations based on their Klaviyo activity. This means you can send an SMS campaign to subscribers who may have received a particular Klaviyo email but never clicked a link it in, enabling you to make your SMS campaigns more targeted—and therefore, even more effective.

The best part? The integration goes both ways. We send SMS click data back to Klaviyo—giving you the ability to use SMS behavior to better target your email campaigns.

As Ashley Hilton, Postscript Solutions Engineer, explained during the event, the calm after the BFCM storm isn’t the time to abandon your SMS efforts.

In fact, if you saw a lot of success in the SMS channel during BFCM, you should make sure you’re keeping those subscribers engaged and interested beyond those large sale days. Otherwise, you risk losing them.

December and January offer plenty more opportunities to not only generate additional SMS revenue, but also nurture your newly acquired subscribers to make sure they stick with you for the long haul—rather than bailing when their holiday shopping is done.

Here are a couple of campaign examples that you can use to keep your subscribers engaged even after those big sale days are over. 

The vast majority of holiday shoppers are still crossing recipients off their list in December. So, it’s important to stay in touch with your subscribers and their holiday gifting needs until those shipping deadlines hit.

One great way to tackle this is to create a holiday gift guide campaign! Sending out a holiday gift guide campaign in early December will allow you to engage your subscribers while also getting valuable information about them as well. Making this a conversational and personalized exchange lets your subscribers have a meaningful and resourceful relationship with you. Your holiday gift guide can tease new products or promote some best sellers—and with Flow Builder, you can even collect zero-party data from your subscribers.

For example, your first message might let subscribers know that they’ve still got time to shop for friends and family—and ask them to respond with who or what they’re shopping for.

From there, you could automate a follow-up message with a product recommendation based on their initial response. Or, you could ask yet another question—perhaps a budget-related one—to get even more granular with the product you eventually recommend.

For example, if a subscriber says they are shopping for skincare products under $50, you can serve up any products you carry that meet those criteria.

Authentic reviews are one of the most important factors influencing shoppers’ buying decisions, and the post-holiday period is a prime time to ask subscribers for their thoughts after purchase.

You can easily set up a user-generated content (UGC) campaign within Flow Builder. For example, you may target subscribers who have purchased in the last 30 days and incentivize them to respond with a review or photo in order to be entered into a drawing for a gift card.

You can then update each subscriber who responds with a specific tag (e.g., “UGC Holiday 2022”). This makes it easy to message this segment later and select your giveaway winner.

We have ready-to-use templates for both of these campaigns available in Postscript—along with templates for a stocking stuffer campaign, a VIP loyalty campaign, and a gift card campaign.

The closer we get to December 25, the more interested your subscribers will be in getting up-to-the-minute shipping updates on their orders. That’s where transactional messaging really shines.

Transactional messages (e.g., order received, order shipped, and order delivered) are also huge opportunities to deliver additional touchpoints beyond promotions and your standard automations.

With transactional messaging in Postscript, shops can allow customers to opt in to receive transactional messages only. These messages are solely order-related and cannot contain any promotional or marketing language. So, you’re left with two types of subscribers: marketing subscribers (who can receive both types of messages) and transactional-only subscribers (who only want transactional messages).

Transactional subscribers can convert into marketing subscribers via any of your existing opt-in channels—such as your website popup or a keyword you promote on social media. And, since they’re already getting transactional texts from you and building a relationship with your brand, many of them will likely end up converting.

If you’re interested in learning more about using transactional messaging for your brand, reach out to your CSM to get started.

One of the last things we talked about during our Thank You, Text event is the shift from ARMU to ARMR on the Postscript Dashboard.

As we’ve explained during previous events—as well as in numerous Postscript educational resources—we believe Subscriber Lifetime Value (LTV) is the most important SMS metric to track.

If you’re familiar with Subscriber LTV, then you’re also familiar with the four metrics that feed into Subscriber LTV: Acquisition Rate, Revenue per Message, Messages per Subscriber, and Unsubscribe Rate. Together, these metrics were previously known as ARMU.

Well, in line with our commitment to being customer-first, we are making a slight change to one of those feeder metrics. Going forward, instead of talking about D30 Unsubscribe Rate (the U in ARMU), we will measure D30 Retention Rate—now the second R in ARMR.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. People were confusing D30 Unsubscribe Rate (which measures the unsubscribe rate during a subscriber’s first 30 days on your list, specifically) with the classic overall unsubscribe rate, which is also presented in Postscript.

2. Retention Rate is a more positively framed metric, and it aligns with the rest of the ARMR metrics in that brands want to increase it in order to increase Subscriber LTV.

It’s still measuring the exact same thing—just flipped. In fact, D30 Retention Rate is literally the inverse of D30 Unsubscribe Rate.

It still focuses on those crucial first 30 days of the subscriber lifecycle, but instead of notating the percentage of subscribers who have left your list, it indicates the percentage of those who stay.

So the formula for D30 Retention Rate is simply 100% - D30 Unsubscribe Rate.

If your D30 Unsubscribe Rate is 25%, then your D30 Retention Rate is 75%. If your D30 Unsubscribe Rate is 20%, then your D30 Retention Rate is 80%.

As a reminder, you can always learn more about Subscriber LTV and ARMR (including benchmarks) here and here.

During the event, our hosts mentioned several additional resources to help you make this BFCM your best yet. Here are the biggest ones:

• The Ultimate BFCM Planner for SMS Marketers

• BFCM Quick Guide: 60-Minute Strategy + Checklist for Ecommerce Brands

• Cyber Week Campaign Examples

• Creative BFCM Promotions

• Holiday Gift Guide Tutorial

• BFCM Merchant Webinar Recap

• In-app BFCM Campaign Flow Templates

Still have questions about using Postscript to make SMS your number-one revenue channel for BFCM? Check out our help center or chat with our support team here.

Want to get up and running on Postscript before BFCM? Install now and send texts free for 30 days!