All about
Tone is a “done for you” SMS Marketing tool that scales 1-1 communications with your customers.
Started by Ecommerce merchants who were running a retail/online bike shop, they started giving people their personal phone numbers to keep in touch and noticed a significant increase in conversion rates. This gave them the idea that there could be a scalable SMS platform that allowed for 1-1 communications with brands that actually helped to increase sales. And thus, Tone was born.
Tone isn’t just automated texts that go out to customers without any regard to what they need or have to say. It provides templated if/then campaigns that real people are deciding when to send, ensuring your customers are getting the personalized service they need to make their purchasing decisions. It is a customer service/sales force/automation center all in one that will respond to your customers within 3 minutes 24/7, 7 days a week
Plus, as the merchant, you have the ability to review the conversations and make sure that Tone agents are using the right language and processes to represent your brand. Most brands peek in there the first month and then stop as they find themselves satisfied with the result.
For some accounts, they come into your Slack channel for any issues that need to be escalated to an in-house agent. They also can do the same thing via email, sending you the whole conversation so that you can see what the agent has said and what the problem is, and then you can follow up to close out the ticket.
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
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Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
Because Tone is the SMS platform and the customer service team that will respond to and engage with customers, answering their questions and converting them, or keeping your existing customers satisfied, they are a streamlined solution for the age old question of “Yes I agree that conversational text can be good for my business, but where am I going to find that kind of bandwidth?”
Tone knows that conversations with your customers and prospective customers are what will drive revenue and beat other tools' conversion rates. And they have proof that their tool does outperform “self-serve” SMS platforms.
They have a guaranteed 5X ROI from their platform, and they often see 10x, 20x, or 30x ROI on their tool, especially for some of their higher average order value customers.
Tone states that they will “unlock 24% more revenue for your Ecommerce store through lightning-fast text message conversations”. That comes in the form of reducing cart abandonment, increasing conversions and improving the overall customer experience.
And, with a 5X ROI guarantee and a team of agents managing your SMS, you can probably throw in improvements to operational efficiency as well.
You can be up and running nearly instantly (about 15 minutes), starting with abandoned checkout recovery.
For larger merchants, you may have an onboarding call with your account manager where they will make sure that their team is matching your brands’ voice and doing a great job closing sales for you.
Since we’re talking about a slightly higher touch tool, and it does cost a few pennies to send text messages, this will be better for higher average order value (AOV) merchants, as well as brands that sell products that are a little bit complicated or confusing and might have some questions for the brand that are preventing them from converting.
This is not for starting stores or founders. It’s for brands with a dedicated customer service manager, or at least a few customer support agents that are running the rest of the channels - email, chat, phone, etc.
Tone is best for Ecommerce teams that don’t have a robust marketing team and a robust customer service team. If you’ve got the bandwidth for both SMS marketing and SMS customer service, then sure, do it yourself, use a “self-serve” tool and plug your agents in. But if your core competency is not in customer service, and you just want this problem solved (and probably done better than your 1-way SMS strategy of the past), then plug in Tone.