Shift from push marketing to conversational marketing: The Drop Manifesto

I often hear from brands that SMS marketing is “intrusive”, “disruptive”, or even “not for us”.

The reality is that only bad SMS marketing is.

If done right, direct messaging with your audience can be the most powerful channel.

It feels great to get a text from someone you care about or an update from a service you like. Getting a text, a WhatsApp or Slack, is an invitation to start a conversation and feel connected.

But as email marketing performances are decreasing, and marketers are trying to fill the gap, most of them have started using SMS in the same way as e-mail marketing, trading pop-ups offering discounts for e-mail addresses to phone numbers.

Now we are starting to see the exact same promo SMS from different brands, sometimes in the same thread.

And Attentive, Emotive, Postscript, and SMS Bump empower this kind of usage.

It might help to get that first order in, but having your customers sign up to your SMS program for the wrong reasons doesn’t help build long term relationships.

This may have worked for email, because we tend to forget to opt-out from email newsletters, but no one will ever forget to opt-out from an SMS program.

Direct messaging as a marketing channel, like in real life, is a place when you need to build a relationship. You need to provide value at every step of your customer’s journey, so in return, you can expect instant attention, engagement, and loyalty. You need to leverage the opportunity to tell your story but also listen to your audience.

SMS marketing has been around for a while and is not going anywhere (quite the opposite). But as more brands start to using it, we felt that it was time to re-imagine the experience.

At Drop we built a platform that shares our vision of doing things differently. We believe in the power of conversations and leveraging the power of technology to amplify them.

We’re on a mission to help every brands shift from push marketing to conversational marketing and doing it at scale.

I’m Benny, and I’m the co-founder & CEO at Drop.
Thanks for reading☺