Emotive

The two main ones are:

1. Conversational SMS, not just broadcasts
2. You are actually hiring a team - a customer success manager and shopping experience managers - to do the conversational flows for you.
   

Because you have people working for you, you can rest assured that you are always in compliance.

There is a unique problem with SMS where sometimes you have people opted-in to SMS but you don’t know their email or if they’ve purchased from you, etc. Emotive uses the phone number from orders as a comparison to the phone numbers in their platform, and then can make the connection as to who each SMS subscriber is. This doesn’t mean you know 100% of your audience, but as customers purchase, you have a clearer understanding of how they are engaging with you on SMS.

Emotive is extremely good at squeezing the juice out of your opted-in SMS customers. At the end of the day 2 way conversations are better than 1 way, but the technology is not quite there to let an “AI” take it away completely, so by having this blended model they really do maximize your conversion rate over a 1-way SMS communication tool.

There is a little bit of a setup time, where you need to work with your Emotive customer success manager to setup your account, get your dedicated 10-digit long-code, setup your on-site pop-up flow to capture as many phone numbers as possible, and then build out your experiences. This should take a couple hours of your time.

Usually by the end of your setup call, you have all the basics setup and one conversation live. I would expect you to be fully setup within a few days/weeks depending on your internal time frames.

Once you’ve launched, whoever is in charge of your customer service will manage the Emotive team and spend as much/little time as they feel necessary to optimize the campaigns. 

While you can absolutely start with SMS first, Emotive is the perfect next step after seeing great results from live chat. If you’ve got live chat flows and real-time live chat conversations, and you are seeing the ROI from live chat, then adding Emotive on top will absolutely blow up your conversion rate. Why? Because SMS is capturing the people who didn’t engage in a live chat, so you’re using the same concept as your live chat, but extending it to SMS.

Emotive is best for brands with over 10,000 website visitors, where they will offer a 5x ROI guarantee on their product/service. If you’ve already got an SMS list, you will be quicker to ROI with Emotive, but you don’t have to have a pre-existing list to get started.

Now using Emotive comes at a very small incremental cost, a few texts may cost $0.06-$0.10, plus the cost of the platform itself, so if you have very slim margins, or a really low average order value, like under $10, a tool like this may not be the most ideal for you.