How The World’s Biggest YouTube Star Built a Chocolate Brand on Postscript
If you’ve never heard of Jimmy Donaldson, known to his fans as MrBeast, then you’re clearly not one of the 127 million followers on his YouTube channel. Jimmy’s known for pulling off incredible stunts, like spending 50 hours in Antarctica, burying himself alive—and perhaps most notably—building a real-life Willy Wonka chocolate factory. Which is exactly what inspired the launch of his chocolate brand Feastables.
How SMS becomes the Golden Ticket
Postscript was recommended to Jess Cervellon, Head of Customer Experience for Feastables, and quickly adopted by the Feastables team. One suggestion the brand received was to implement a short code right away, so they requested 69420, mostly as a joke.
“Because [the short code] 69420 is such a funny thing, we wanted to drive traffic to that. We wanted to build that list really big.” says Cervellon. “When we launched our website we put ‘Text FEAST To 69420’ everywhere to draw the most SMS traffic.”
For an interactive and super engaged personality like MrBeast, this marketing channel was a no-brainer. They let subscribers know that signing up for texts would feel like a direct line to Jimmy himself, along with product help, support and randomness.
After launching in January 2022, Feastables acquired over 200,000 subscribers in their first year using Postscript.
How random texts became a cornerstone of their strategy
The fanbase for MrBeast was already strong, but Feastables was still starting from scratch when it came to their list of SMS subscribers.
Feastables wanted to make sure that, more than anything, they delivered on their promises to fans that signed up for their texts. They didn’t want to offer up “randomness” or exclusive content without being able to deliver on it.
The success of random texts to their base is one of the secret ingredients to their SMS engagement. It’s part of why fans love Jimmy so much to begin with—they never know what to expect.
Not only do fun campaigns delight their audience, but they bring in an incredible amount of responses. One campaign that simply asked: “Y’all got any beans?” received a staggering 15,000 replies.
Jess Cervellon
VP of Customer Experience
“When we launched, I did an analysis between the conversations on social media and the conversations on SMS. Within the first two weeks, we had 30,000 conversations on SMS which was very similar to our numbers on our already established social channels.”
Industry
Food & Beverage
Promoting every marketing channel—everywhere
Knowing what channels their customers like to engage in and adapting their strategy to be centered around that was crucial to growing SMS and every other marketing channel for the brand.
The Feastables audience are mobile users who are incredibly engaged on social media and invested in other online communities, like the Feastables discord channel. The plan was to create a truly omnichannel experience for customers and to promote where you can engage with MrBeast. The brand might send a tweet about signing up for their SMS program or send a text reminding folks to join their online community.
Developing a Chatbot to scale website conversations
Feastables had a really great problem to have when they launched SMS—adoption was easy and subscribers were engaged. Very engaged.
Right out of the gate, Jess had a team of 30 people responding to the onslaught of messages that would come through the channel. She quickly realized that automation would be crucial to their growing list. Enter the chatbot.
Within the first month of launching their on-site chatbot, they had over 150,000 conversations. Jess decided to create a similar chatbot experience with their SMS program too.
Continuing the brand experience with an SMS Chatbot
The Postscript team worked closely with Feastables and launched their first version of an SMS bot to field replies in February 2022.
The first day they turned it on, they started to see an 80-90% deflection away from the agents, just as they did with the on-site chatbot, meaning those SMS subscribers were engaging in randomness much more than any other issue (i.e. product questions, order inquiries, etc.).
“We went from thousands of tickets and not being able to get to all of them, to 15-20 per day and satisfaction levels across the bot and human touch to maintain in the high 96 percentile for CES and CSAT,” says Cervellon.
This continued to be a huge win for the brand. In November 2022, they had 12,000 conversations go to the SMS bot and from there, only 9% of those were handed to an agent.
Jess Cervellon
VP of Customer Experience
”Creating a one:one connection between your brand and your customers can be really hard to scale without SMS.”
Industry
Food & Beverage
How conversational commerce led to product innovation
As with every SMS program, driving revenue is a main goal, but it hasn’t been the biggest opportunity.
“I think this started as a wedge to self-service that has turned into a way to have conversational commerce,” says Cervellon.
The randomness banter has been a way to engage with customers and also get critical feedback, like suggestions on what chocolate flavors to roll out next. Customers consistently requested milk chocolate bars and now their two milk chocolate flavors are Feastable’s biggest SKUs—all because of simply asking subscribers what they want.
“The biggest thing is making new iterations, constantly looking through analytics, making new formulations of it. I think one of our biggest values like at Feastables is living and learning.”
Bringing fun into brick-and-click
And then Walmart came calling. Once Feastables made the decision to hit retail shelves, they still wanted to bring the Feastables experience to the brick and mortar customer.
“We thought about how we could bring these people back to our brand and not just be another guy on the shelf,” says Cervellon.
They decided to put their shortcode—69420—right on their packaging, asking buyers to text them to subscribe. For any customers that sent a text of their receipt, they’d be entered to win $10,000.
The second activation was to scan a QR code on their packaging to be able to join a Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament on their website.
Since Feastables bars have hit the shelves, these two strategies have helped them collect over 30,000 new subscribers.
Solution and results
Feastable’s commitment to engage with their subscribers at every turn of the customer journey has helped with list growth, retention rate and an incredible ROI for their SMS program. Their approach to treating SMS as a direct line to engage, delight and glean information from their customers has helped them create real 1:1 relationships between subscribers and the Feastables brand. (*Note: All results are accurate as of January 12, 2023.)
Jess Cervellon
VP of Customer Experience
“Having these random conversations has actually led us to product innovation, so it’s a direct driver into our revenue.”
Industry