“I had millions of people on my email list and was constantly emailing and optimizing, but could not consistently get better than 20 percent open rates. That means that 80 percent of my marketing leads were not getting my message. How could I better engage my customers during that funnel and sales cycle?”
That was Bogdan Constantin’s challenge as co-founder of digital direct-to-consumer suit and tuxedo rental company Menguin. He wanted to talk to customers directly, but email — which is the primary method of marketing communication for all consumer companies today — just wasn’t cutting it.
An experiment was in order: Bogdan decided to ask some of his leads for their cell phone numbers, and more than 80 percent shared them. Taking it one step further, Bogdan dedicated a whole day to texting potential customers.
“Just to test, I got through to 162 people that I individually texted — and I got a 70 percent response rate within two hours. It blew up my phone, but I kept talking to them.”
Four weeks later, almost half of the texted consumers converted into Menguin customers.
In 2017, Menguin was purchased by retail giant Generation Tux and Bogdan transitioned into CMO at the larger company. But he couldn’t get the idea of better conversational marketing out of his head.
“I kept looking for software, but nothing existed. Nobody was providing the ability to respond to customers’ behavioral cues and triggers in a human, conversational way.”
So, Bogdan did what an entrepreneur by nature does: he decided to build the solution himself.
Voxie is an SMS-based, conversational commerce marketing tool for acquisition, retention and repeat purchases.
Voxie integrates with other platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, Zapier and more to let marketers switch from an ad unit, social post, or QR code to a mobile conversation with one click.
The platform, says Bogdan, is the only tool to combine the scalability of mass marketing with the personalization of individual texting. He shares more on why that’s important, and how enterprises can build better relationships with their customers, below.
Tell us a little more about the challenges you experienced while trying to do what Voxie does while building Menguin.
I was a digitally-native, direct-to-consumer business, and the only way I could talk to my consumers was through email marketing with terrible open rates. I knew that if I could talk to every single one of my leads on the phone, if I could engage them in conversation, I could convince them that Menguin was better than anything else on the market.
Obviously what I began doing with personally texting my customers was not really scalable, but I wondered what would happen if I could get our CX people doing it — so I went out and bought them cheap cell phones and tried it. At the end of the first month of this experiment, we were doing 2.5 times what I was expecting us to do from the year before in the same amount of time. At the end of the second month, we doubled that. In fact, we didn’t have enough inventory to meet demand.
What did you discover about who your ideal customers are? What kind of customers can most benefit from Voxie?
We built it originally for e-commerce, but where we started seeing big response was from these giant brands — folks like Unilever, Mars, etc. The Fortune 500 brands experience this challenge even more acutely, where they have all these social media followers and contact lists, but all they have to sell to them is email marketing where open rates don’t break five percent. How do they build relationships with these folks?
Large brands want to build a relationship that they can monetize. So one thing we recently launched a feature called Reply2Buy, where Voxie integrates with a point-of-sale system and if the customer says a trigger word, we can immediately create an order without the customer ever having to leave the conversation.
We have also had B2B brands that asked how they can better engage with other businesses and, specifically, to the decision-makers at those businesses? We’ve now rolled out a B2B product which is basically a better lead qualifier. We can text leads specific qualifying questions that can then be parsed and segmented to help these companies dynamically market much more successfully.
Is it all working? Those were some pretty crazy engagement numbers you threw out before.
On average, one Voxie text on the consumer side equals one hundred emails in terms of revenue. We average a 50 percent response rate, an over-30 percent click-through rate, all with a one percent unsubscribe rate.
Those big-name brand clients like Danone and Mars have seen 70 percent response rates on campaigns we’ve powered nationally, all geared toward getting people to sign up for new products, back into stores to buy specific products, pushing recipes, or just building a community of people that are engaging with their brand in an omnichannel way.
There are so many places where consumers spend time nowadays. Are you planning to expand beyond text message?
Absolutely. Our roadmap includes launching additional mediums such as Instagram direct message, Tik Tok direct message and more. It’s all about the goal of reaching people with a brand at the right time, with the right medium, and the right message.
But I also want to highlight how unique we are even in the SMS space. There are a few folks who have raised a bunch of money that have these very inferior, automated robotic solutions. We’ve not been able to find anyone that can do what we do with behavioral triggers and immediate click-to-buy.
Why have you joined the Engage platform?
We believe we’ve got one of the most innovative products in the marketplace, and we can bring a lot of innovation to help these corporates build deeper connections with their customers. If you think about QSRs or airlines with millions of customers, how do they build that loyalty in a commoditized and competitive landscape? How do you get customers to return, to tell their friends? That’s what we can really help with.
I’m also committed to building a great company here in Atlanta, and to do that I think you have to become a staple in the community. We want to help the big brands that make their home here in the city so we can all win. In this kind of synergistic opportunity, we can also make ATL a more tech-oriented community.
Learn more about Voxie here. And check back next week to meet another Engage company from the 2020 Cohort!
