How Snow Made SMS One of Their Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Channels

Links:

• Website: Snow
• Josh's Twitter
• Josh's Instagram
• SplitBase x Snow - CRO + Landing Pages Case Study

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Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Welcome to The Minds of Ecommerce podcast, where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat. In a 15 to 20 minutes episode, founders and executives take us through a deep dive of a strategy so you get to learn and grow your online sales. In the last episode, you heard from Rick Kijoshi, who is the co founder of Satva Mattresses. It was a really great conversation on how to grow a DTC brand in a very crowded industry, which, in his case, mattresses. And today on episode number 20, I'm really excited because you'll be hearing from Josh Snow, who's the founder and CEO of Snow, a hundred million dollar plus oral care brand. And I'm sure you've seen their ads at some point. So I'm your host, Raphael Paulandegal, and I'm the founder of Splitbase, a conversion optimization and landing page agency for D, two C brands and Quick Disclaimer.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Snow is a client of Splitbase. This is minds of ecommerce. All right, Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh Snow:
Hey, what's going on? Thanks for having me.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Yeah, thank you so much for being here. I've been looking forward to this interview for a while. As you know, Josh, this podcast is all about going deep, dissecting one key growth strategy so our listeners can get the most value right away. And obviously, you've grown Snow to pretty crazy levels, and other companies, too, I should note. So just before we actually dive into the strategy you want to talk about, which is SMS and email marketing, just to give people context, about how long ago did you launch Snow?

Josh Snow:
Snow was launched about five, six years ago now. Cool.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
So five, six years ago. And in that period, you've had some pretty amazing growth. So, again, for a little bit more context, what are some of the cool, impressive milestones that you can give the audience just so they understand how big the company is at and what you've achieved so far?

Josh Snow:
We bootstrapped the first $100 million in direct to consumer sales. We have millions of followers all around the world. We've whitened over 1.5 million smiles, mostly through our teeth whitening systems, which we've sold over 1 million units.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Amazing.

Josh Snow:
So those are kind of the highlights we're in. All Best Buys. All bed. Bath beyond. Walgreens. Target. So the retail side of our business has been something that we've been investing more and more into. And then, of course, Amazon and all the.com retails.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Amazing.

Josh Snow:
This year, we've had over 12 million people, 12 million unique shoppers on the website. So a lot of visibility and also very heavy in terms of online advertising spend. We're seen by 15 million unique Americans per week through Facebook and Instagram, which is mostly driven by our paid media. Organic does help, but it's mostly paid media. So it's a lot. It's a lot to manage for, really, a small team, but a mighty team. There are about 40 of us today.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Amazing.

Josh Snow:
It's been a fun journey and a lot of people have teeth, so I feel like we're just getting started.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Totally. So obviously, in five years, growing to that scale, you've likely done a lot and a lot of things, right? Obviously, I'm sure you've tried a lot of things that didn't work as well and that's totally part of the game. But today I really want to focus on one of the things that you've done really well and you continue to do well, and that is SMS and email marketing. Obviously now with all changes to ad platforms and how that is reflected to ecommerce businesses owning your customers and being able to really kill it when it comes to SMS and email is more important than ever before. So tell us a bit more about that. What makes SMS and email marketing such an incredible channel for you guys?

Josh Snow:
Yeah, it's important because we are so heavy on the paid media spend, we're paying for those clicks and whether it's Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, generally it comes down to paying for that potential customer to visit our website. But the truth is, even if you have a 5% conversion rate or 10% conversion rate, 90% to 95% of the people that you paid to visit your shop are leaving empty handed, and you're not getting anything. They're not getting anything in return. And hopefully they'll come back to retargeting, and maybe they'll remember you or keep the tab open. But it's kind of difficult to build a brand in that environment. And so email and SMS are super important because there are elements of your brand and of your business that allow you to convert a higher percentage of the people that you're paying to visit your website. And even if you're not paying for them, it allows you to fill a very large hole in your bucket, in the leaky bucket analogy. And so the more holes you fill in your bucket, the more you can turn on the faucet in terms of advertising, marketing, more sales.

Josh Snow:
And so I feel like that is an area. Plus it gives you an advantage, it gives you a competitive advantage and a market advantage in many ways because you're able to have one to one conversations with your customers. You're able to serve them, I believe, in a better, more modern way, which is meeting the customer where they want you to meet them at. So texting, right? We have an entire team that's managing our customers who text back, and it could be customer texting back to a promotion, but has an issue with their product or is looking for something they couldn't find on the website. And so that communication channel. From an SMS perspective, when we think about brand equity, brand longevity, customer lifetime value, that touch point is the modern form that is very, very comfortable, especially when we think of our Gen Z millennial audience. But really beyond that, if you can live chat phone call, we have our phone number right on our website and give us a call. You can email, you can, IG message us.

Josh Snow:
But SMS is an area that when someone's looking for there's urgency there. It's an opportunity for you to, I believe, give a better experience and better care for the customer. But it also is an incredible sales generation, a sales generating asset. And I say asset because every subscriber you have that's active in your subscriber list is a chip being added to your enterprise value, the valuation of your know, when someone comes in to value your business, they're going to say, okay, how much are you making on your shopify? Well, how big is your SMS list? Because that's a separate asset. If you have a Facebook group for your customers, that's a separate asset, a sales producing asset. And so you're actually going to make more money in the short term. And you're going to be adding a pillar of enterprise value, which means that your business is going to be worth more, you're going to make more money, and you're going to give a better experience, which means the customer is more likely to come back, they're more likely to get their concerns out before they refund. And maybe it's something that wasn't made clear to them that we could have done a better job on.

Josh Snow:
So that touch point gets missed by a lot of businesses, but it's extremely powerful and SMS is in our business about four times more effective from a sales metric. So our SMS list is younger. We started building our SMS list less than two years ago. Email has been since day one and SMS has not only caught up, it's surpassed the revenue produced versus the larger email list that we have. It's just because you're right, everyone opens their text messages right now. It's not so cluttered that people are opening them. So you get email, you're getting the spam or people are seeing it.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Let's talk about how you guys are so successful at SMS because I think if we look at brands that are producing a couple of million dollars, most of them are now doing SMS. But I don't think that most brands are as successful as you guys when it comes to doing SMS. Right. So what would you say sets you guys apart from other brands? How are you guys so successful with SMS marketing compared to a bunch of other brands?

Josh Snow:
Well, I think we have our perspective on it and I think that our perspective on it is relatively successful and in many ways more successful. It certainly produces incredible results for us. I think that we've made a lot of efforts to make sure that our customer is aware of the relationship that we're building with SMS. We can't answer all your questions, but we can answer order questions, frequently asked questions and things like that. And then we're going to be here to promote ourselves when we have sales and answer questions. And so, being clear with that, I think that our acquisition program, which means that when people land on Trisno.com triggers a pop up to ask them for an email and then their cell phone number. We used to give lower value gifts and lower value offers up front. We decided that, well, wait a second, we've got really good products.

Josh Snow:
What if we put some of our best sellers inside of that free gift, preload their cart once they put their information in? So the way it works is to get the first gift, you have to put your email in. To get the second gift for free, you have to put your SMS in. The second gift has more value to it because the SMS phone number is more valuable to us and we get less of conversion rate there and that gets preloaded into their cart. So now what that helps us do is it helps us have a fair competition with Amazon where we prime, where we also sell. Now all of a sudden you go to Amazon, you're not going to get those two free gifts that you have on Trisnow.com. So it anchors us and allows us to capture more of that margin. And it's exciting and it's fun and it's a product that people actually want. They were about to buy it that is respectful of the exchange of information versus just sign up for offers one day, give us your cell phone number.

Josh Snow:
The conversion rate is just not the same.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Yeah, and I think what's great with that is that it also doesn't devalue your brand.

Josh Snow:
Right?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
I think there's a lot of brands that fall into the trap of like, hey, we're just going to do discounts over discounts over discounts over discounts. You kind of fail at the opportunity of getting customers to learn about your other products and just get a bit more familiar with your brand also without diminishing the value of the brand. So I think what you guys are doing is genius. So for people that are listening and want to do something similar, what tool are you using for that? Is it kind of custom built or you're using tools that allow you to do that?

Josh Snow:
We have a great partner in Postscript. They came in early on as we were venturing into SMS years ago and came to our office and we presented some perhaps jarring ideas around acquisition and particularly around using paid media to drive our SMS growth, right? And so anyway, early on we've kind of been a voice in kind of echoing perhaps some of the other businesses concerns in terms of them adding features to the app. And so I will say that they've been also really good partners from a legal compliance standpoint as well in kind of really keeping the guardrails there and strong versus other vendors in my opinion, perhaps more loose or whatever. But my experience has been phenomenal with Post amazing and everything's plugged in. There are multiple vendors, right, and other people doing similar things, but they all plug into shopify and so you can attribute the revenue really nicely. And SMS is also nice because we use our automated campaigns like abandoned cart browse, abandonment. So someone leaves those free gifts in their cart, they disappear 24 hours later, they might get a message that says, hey, are you sure you don't want those free gifts that are left in your cart while supplies last? And so that gives us an opportunity to reengage the customer. And we have phenomenal feedback.

Josh Snow:
Most people are scared to send messages to their customers because they go, I wouldn't like a brand to text me. Well, you're one of 370,000,000 people in America. Not everybody thinks that way. Some people wouldn't mind having a few texts here and there. And they can always text stop to end the conversation and reengage when they want to. So they're in full control of that conversation at all times. And we found, I would say, overwhelmingly positive feedback of having SMS as a channel of communication for our customers.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
I was going to ask about that because I think a lot of brands are generally using it just like a one way newsletter and like, here's our promotion. But if I understand properly, if people respond, they will actually talk to an agent on your side.

Josh Snow:
Yes, we do our best in busy times to manage as fast as we can because the expectation on a response via SMS is almost instantaneous versus people know when they respond through an email, they'll check it later in the evening to see if the company got back to them with a text. It's like, did they read it? Are they responding? Are they typing? There's a lot more suspense around that conversation. So we're a lot more cautious and respectful in that way and moving more and more toward keeping that channel open for ongoing communication one to one. But in addition to being a promotional channel, so don't get me wrong, we have a lot of promotion in that mix. Black Friday sales, Cyber Week, Door Busters, all of that. That's being now we segment, right? We have some subscribers that would rather get a text once a week. So we'll give those options to be able to segment that's a little bit more advanced. I think the base of it is we have used our customer support team to draw in that channel, to be able to type back and respond really smart and just be able to have those conversations.

Josh Snow:
And it's fun and it's quick and you get responses super quickly and you're able to solve a customer's concern faster sometimes than email.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Yeah, and I think some people forget that to convert people, it's not all about just what's on your website right away or what text you're sending, but the faster they can speak with someone on your team and get their questions answered, the higher their chances are of buying, right? So it's all part of one cycle and when we treat people as human beings, instead of looking at them as numbers from a channel to channel, I think that's kind of where you start unlocking a bit more firepower. So in your marketing it's full circle. So Josh, when it comes to actually executing on those SMS campaigns, if someone who know they're running a brand, they're sending a couple SMS here and there, a bit like their email newsletter, but they really want to have that as a killer marketing strategy for them in the coming quarter. What are some of the top pieces of advice you would give them so they can get some success under their belt when it comes to SMS?

Josh Snow:
So one, if you're not doing email and SMS, they work in hand in hand. And so our email and SMS team work very closely with each other. But I would say if you're not doing it, you got to do both. If you're just doing SMS and not email, you got to do them both to send more often. Believe it or not, a lot of brands are sending once a week, once a month, once every two weeks you should be sending maybe not every day. If you have just a few SKUs, maybe it doesn't make sense to send an email every single day, but have you ran a birthday sale? Why not? Have you run a semi annual sale? Why not make something special, make it exciting, give great value to the customer so there are opportunities. And if you subscribe to Snow's email newsletter for free, you'll see pretty quickly how that campaign calendar rolls out. So new Year, new you, new smile, all this Valentine's Day and so there's constantly every two weeks there's a reason to celebrate.

Josh Snow:
And if you're creating new products or you're bringing new products to market, that gives you an opportunity to bundle and do different things, right? Door busters. And so I would say increase your frequency, double it, triple it, watch your unsubscription rate. If it gets crazy, then you're doing too much. But really figure out what that balance is from your list versus being afraid to send it. Or maybe you don't have the resources. In terms of the designer send templated emails, that's okay too preload a few of them. The third thing I'd recommend is what is the mousetrap in terms of the front end offer? Is it actually worthwhile for someone to put their information in? They're guarded about sharing their information. So instead of giving them 2% off, if they give you the cell phone number, is there something that they actually could benefit from? Get real value from that.

Josh Snow:
It seems a little scary to put that up front, but if you're able to load it into their cart. Now they want to stay on your website and complete the purchase. The conversion rate should hopefully go up. The customer is happy because they got something of value for free, and if it works, they're going to come back and buy more of it because they feel like that was great. They built that trust. They were able to build that trust. So that front end offer, I think, is super important to test and play with and test and see inside of the dashboard. Wow.

Josh Snow:
9% conversion rate now. Now 12% conversion rate test that because the more you mature that channel, the more it's going to be of value to you. So it's definitely worth investing in that now and thinking about it, because you're going to get more out of your dollar, especially when you're paying for traffic. You're going to get more out of your dollar. You're going to know definitively within six months that SMS subscriber is going to be worth $17 to you. Or twelve blocks. You know you've got something else to pick up some of the work.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Awesome, Josh. That was the perfect conclusion. Lots of value right there. Thank you so much for sharing. So if people want to learn more about you, snow, and I know you also teach some e commerce goodness as well, where can they go? Where can they follow you?

Josh Snow:
I would say the best place because I have them all in my Instagram bio. My personal instagram is Josh Snow on instagram? And you'll be able to see everything from there at Snow, at Frost, at powerhouse Brands. Like you mentioned all that's in my bio.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
Awesome. Josh, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Josh Snow:
Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle:
All right, so that's it for today's episode. In the next episode, you'll hear from Jason Wong from Doe Eyelashes, where he'll be talking about how to build a highly effective referral and loyalty program for your D two C brand super in depth and super actionable episode. I can't wait for you to hear it. Now to make sure you don't miss any of the new episodes, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and if you've liked what you've heard, make sure to leave a review in the itunes Store. That would really mean the world to me. Now, if you are working on a DTC brand that does over a million dollars in online sales and increasing conversions is a priority, make sure to go to Splitbase.com to learn more about how we might be able to help you with landing pages and on site optimization to improve the effectiveness of your marketing. Now, if you have any guest requests, questions or comments, tweet me at rpaulindaigle and I'll be happy to hear from you. Thanks again for listening.

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