The Real ROI of SMS: How to Measure What Actually Matters | Episode 1

Andrew Davis (00:00)
Welcome to the 98 % Podcast where data meets revenue. I'm your host, Andrew Davis, Senior Vice President of Marketing at TextUs. On this podcast, you'll hear from operators, product leaders, go-to-market pros, and more who have lived in data every single day and know how to keep things human. We'll talk to TextUs members, non-TextUs members, and some really brilliant minds in the go-to-market space.

Each episode will dig into the numbers, the experiments, and the plays that move the needle, not the vanity metrics that keep your business growing. Now, if you've ever been in sales or marketing long enough, you've probably heard that marketing just works. But have you ever stopped to ask why it works or how well it actually works? Today, we're kicking off our very first episode with a teammate of mine in a product powerhouse, Acacia Fante.

our Senior Product Marketing Manager here at TextUs. We're diving deep into something brand new, the TextUs Analytics Dashboard. We'll talk about how it gives a team more visual and more meaningful ways to understand performance, and more importantly, how you can use SMS data to actually drive smarter, more human conversations with your customers. So let's get into

Acacia, welcome to the 98 % Podcast. It feels right that we're starting this first ⁓ episode

with the person who's been so hands-on and kind of shaping how our customers actually see and use their data. Let's start with this. Before we even get into dashboards and metrics, what was the inspiration behind the new analytics experience and what problems were we really trying to solve for our users?

Acacia Fante (01:56)
Yeah, well thank you for the warm intro, Andrew. I'm happy to be here. I think there were a couple of problems, core problems that we are solving with our new analytics debuting in Texas. And the big one that's probably most centered in this conversation is that everyone wants data, but very few people know what to do with it or how to make sense of it. And so that visibility component of instead of just exporting a spreadsheet

and sending it off to a customer or passing it along to someone in your internal team, you can view and piece together what's actually happening in the data and make more strategic choices.

And then secondarily, we run regular quarterly business reviews with our customers all the time and we go over things like ROI and performance and we really wanted to eliminate any gatekeeping to that data and make this much more self-service so that anyone who's in our tool at any point in time can get the info they need from the analytics dashboard itself so that they're armed and equipped with the most up-to-date information

helps them to make the best decisions on how they're using text us and their overall SMS strategy.

Andrew Davis (03:15)
Love it, love it. Now, know, Text-Us isn't new to analytics. Obviously we've had analytics in the past. We have an analytics tab now, or have had an analytics tab in the platform ⁓ for a while now. What makes this so different than what exists in the platform today?

Acacia Fante (03:33)
I definitely think it's the visibility and the charting and being able to...

paint more of a picture around the data set itself ⁓ and just the breadth of the data too. So we'll dive into more of this as we go through this episode, but we really wanted to focus our analytics dashboard in the upcoming release here on the most important quick win metrics that a team can use to assess their SMS performance and make those decisions on how they can improve moving forward.

Andrew Davis (04:09)
That's awesome. mean, I'm a sucker for a good chart, right? Like I love good looking charts that are visually appealing, make you kind of feel like Tony Stark a little bit looking at dashboards and everything. so it's a, it's always fun as a marketing leader to be able to see performance visually versus just looking at a kind of a static number. mean, that's what Google Sheets and Excel is made for more than anything else. ⁓

Acacia Fante (04:13)
Yep.

Andrew Davis (04:36)
So a visually appealing dashboard is always a benefit when you're talking about a marketing platform and a performance-driven platform. ⁓ Most teams already know SMS drives results. They see higher response rates, faster engagement. ⁓ But one thing that I've heard a lot is, ⁓ in marketing specifically, is I know how it works. And I know it works. ⁓ I just don't know why.

Right? So why do you think understanding the why behind SMS success is critical for teams right now?

Acacia Fante (05:14)
It's a really good question. And in general, I'm just big on the why in everything. ⁓ It's probably what makes me a good marketer. And I think it's what attracts people to the field is really uncovering the answer to that. And I was reflecting on how you started this episode around, yeah, everyone knows that marketing works. Everyone knows that you need to invest in marketing to some degree. But I think the core of it is right aligned with your question about the why.

and you cannot make... ⁓

good investments and decisions unless you start to peel back those layers and unearth like what is actually happening in the performance, where there may be gaps or breakdowns in terms of what's not working so that you can make those micro adjustments. I think the best marketing strategy is one that's willing to flex, right? It's willing to be flexible and adjust over time based on data that's in front of you and presented

to you so that you get the clarity of information you need to make decisions that help you to improve your strategies, your performance moving forward. ⁓ Really marketing in general, lead generation, revenue, all of that activity can be really expensive. And so it's important for teams to know that what they're investing in, what they're spending time with is efficient and it's working for them. And certainly the people who are advocates for their favorite

tech stacks and tools, they want to be able to go to battle and say, no, we absolutely need to continue this. Maybe we want to expand or upgrade our use of SMS and here's why and be able to sort of support that argument internally and cross-functionally.

Andrew Davis (07:06)
Yeah, I think one of the most underrated skill sets that a marketing, a sales team, like a go-to-market team really can have ⁓ is the ability to pivot and pivot quickly based off of what the data is telling you. ⁓ listen, we've all been through the last two years of go-to-market changes with AI kind of coming in, changing search behaviors.

changing kind of everything that we thought we knew or were consistent with and familiar with ⁓ to where now everybody at some point is having to shift their marketing strategy. The good teams are the ones who figure it out quickly ⁓ and move quickly. ⁓ They don't sit through a lot of red tape or dive. ⁓

layers and layers and layers deep into, you know, vanity metrics like we kind of mentioned that may or may not be telling you the truth, basically, or may just be spelling out a narrative that, you know, you could assume from but aren't. But the ones that can say, hey, I think this is happening, these are my supporting data points because of it. And this is where it's ⁓ helping me improve or this is where the shift that we need to make. I think that's

Those are the teams that we're going to start to see really succeed over the next 12 to 18 months.

Acacia Fante (08:33)
Yeah, absolutely. Makes me think of that Friends episode with Pivot and you know, gotta have people on your side that you can just yell at and say, hey, we gotta adjust. We gotta make, you know, turn the corner here and make this work.

Andrew Davis (08:46)
Yeah, yeah, there's,

mean, there's, like the amount of times I sit in a meeting, you know, where I'm like, I don't care if we go left, right, up, down, you know, straight backwards, whatever it is, like somebody just pick something and back it with a little bit of data and let's go right. Like there's a million paths to, to success, I feel like. And ⁓ I think just the worst decision is to do the same old thing or not do anything at all.

Sometimes that's the right choice. Sometimes it's not. But more times than not, pivoting is a skill set that ⁓ once you do a couple of times, you really get used to and gets a lot better for us. ⁓ We talked about vanity metrics and stuff. What are the metrics, in your opinion, that really move the needle?

Acacia Fante (09:31)
Yeah, I mean, certainly deliverability is one of them. You want to know that your messages are passing through the regulations and protocols of carriers. You want to make sure it's getting to the right people at the right time. Deliverability is an important piece of the picture, but certainly not the whole picture. And I think that's kind of key to this conversation as well as there's not one metric that's going to tell you the whole story. And ⁓ some of them alone have more vanity than others.

together they paint a clearer picture. So deliverability is one, certainly opt out rates so you can understand how your delivered messages are performing ⁓ and who's engaging with them by the level of whether they're continuing to stay opted in to your communications or they're opting out and saying no more. Those can give you little touch points and clues along the way of how you can adjust ⁓

things like the frequency of your messaging and the ⁓ overall tone and language that indicates a higher quality around that deliverability piece. ⁓ And then certainly your response rates matter too, right? I know for certain, from my personal experience, I get a ton of messages throughout the day on my device from people I know and from providers I don't know.

Andrew Davis (11:00)
People you don't. People like

Acacia Fante (11:01)
Sometimes, exactly, and sometimes I just

Andrew Davis (11:01)
me.

Acacia Fante (11:04)
open that, because I get the ding, I get the notification, I look at it, and mentally I've responded or dealt with it, but something else comes up along the way and I have it. And so, you know, a good SMS strategy and performance is going to engage people in the right way so that they do not only open it, ⁓ which was probably more on that vanity side metric, but they're engaging with you and they're responding.

Andrew Davis (11:32)
Yeah, I agree. you know, listen, we've looked at a lot of data in our time at TextUs, right? And response rate is obviously, you know, the biggest driver of performance. ⁓ It's the biggest thing that, you know, people care about, ⁓ regardless of the vertical that you're in, whether it's sales, marketing, recruiting, ⁓ even workforce management cares, you know, if they're doing ⁓ shift scheduling or talking to

a specific segment of contacts or employees, right? So response rate's important. ⁓ I think one that you mentioned early on is something that we pay attention to specifically in the marketing space, which is deliverability, right? And making sure that you have ⁓ the right numbers and can get in front of the right people. And is your message going out, right? ⁓ Email, we've kind of been used to that for a while.

And it's one of those things where it's almost become forgotten in a little bit of a way, where deliverability can really make an impact. A couple percentage points here and there can make a big impact on SMS campaigns, ⁓ one-to-one conversations even, anything along those lines. ⁓ Is there a metric in your mind, the answer can be no, for what it's worth, that ⁓ people kind of obsess about but really shouldn't?

at end of the day.

Acacia Fante (13:01)
You know, I would say probably like a subscriber count is the first one that comes to mind. I think that can be a really flashy number depending on, you know, who's in your contact list and who you're outbound messaging. But it doesn't really tell you much of anything standing alone. ⁓ You know, I would much rather have information analytics wise on.

Andrew Davis (13:16)
Mm-hmm.

Acacia Fante (13:26)
you know the rate of our contact count and our subscriber count compared to people who are opting out over time or

campaign performance ⁓ reflected across a certain subscriber count within that campaign, right? And who's engaging in that campaign versus the one-on-one kind of messaging strategy. So, you know, it's great to know like how many people you've got kind of looped in or ⁓ on call to reach out to, but by itself, I just don't think it gives you much of a story to work from.

Andrew Davis (14:00)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I would agree with that. ⁓ You know, in my time leading marketing teams, email company, you know, we've been doing email since I got into marketing decades ago. And ⁓ I would never care about how many emails we sent, from a performance standpoint. Obviously, there's important things like thresholds and things along those lines that you care about. You don't want to get domains blacklisted or anything along those lines. But there's, there's

you know, number of cents, sent emails or sent messages type of thing, it can sometimes be a vanity metric, in my opinion, because it's like, it doesn't really indicate performance at the end of the day, right? If somebody came to me with a scorecard and was like, hey, here's how the campaign did, like, here's how many messages we sent, like, my first question is, I don't care how many people responded, you know, how many people, ⁓ how many people in the campaign versus your response rate or ⁓ open rate click through it like

Acacia Fante (14:50)
Yep.

Andrew Davis (14:58)
Performance indicators, right? Not how big was your send list, basically. So I do agree with you. I think that's a metric that some people may hone in on a little bit too much. It's like, how big is their campaign? It's like, well, know, 45 % is 45%. Whether it's 100 people or 10,000 people or anything along those lines, you know what I mean? It's a send list at the end of the day.

How do you help teams focus on the conversation aspect over just message counts, like we talked about, right? Like, is that an area that somebody should look at and say, hey, how many conversations am I creating versus how many natural responses am I getting, either in automations or one-to-one conversations? Or should they just focus more on those meaningful conversations that are ⁓ creating a healthy pipeline?

Acacia Fante (15:58)
Yeah, I think it depends on ultimately what your goal is, you know, from my perspective and personal experience around.

engagement and marketing in general, certainly the health and overall engagement of a conversation matters much more than the volume of conversations you're having, which is actually kind of funny because conversation is, in my mind, it's a two way street, right? So you do need some sort of response or engagement or nudge that that person is, you know, briefed in there, they're with you, even if it's not automatic, or they end up not going for a job, maybe that

that you're advertising if you're in the recruitment space. It's those types of indicators, like you said, Andrew, definitely show towards more of the performance-based messaging model ⁓ around conversation health than they would just around like the volume, even the frequency of overall messages that are sent out and the count there. And it's a starting place. It's nice to know kind of ⁓ who all can we reach? What kind of volume of

can we reach who's responsible, know, internally if someone's using an SMS platform like text us. It's nice to know kind of the volume of ⁓ messaging and contacts that people can handle or would want to. But again, it's just a starting point. And so, you know, in looking at the data around conversation health, you would want to take that a step further and look at, again, things like the opt out rates and the response rates and even your

Andrew Davis (17:22)
Mm-hmm.

Acacia Fante (17:37)
deliverability by message type. ⁓

how are messages performing at the campaign level versus one-on-one conversations that may vary by those metrics and may vary in deliverability and may vary in response rate and opt-out rate. And those are little clues you can parse out along the way and take with you to test out new tactics or new ways of approaching how you're using an SMS tool so that you have some benchmark or, you know, comparison point at least to work for.

from

and improve on over time.

Andrew Davis (18:13)
Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of the conversation ⁓ quality is really important to kind of hone in on, because not every conversation is going to go somewhere, not every conversation or every response is a positive one, right? ⁓ But the goal is engagements, right? And I tell people all the time, Texas is not a lead generator. If you're looking at SMS as a whole, just talking about Texas specifically,

obviously in this case, but SMS as a whole, ⁓ it's not a lead generator. Like it's a lead converter more than anything else. ⁓ It's not designed to increase your top of funnel. It's designed to move your top of funnel to the middle of the funnel or the bottom of the funnel and keep those conversations moving more than anything else. And those are done with ⁓ connections and quality conversations, right? And texting is a good way to kind of connect through.

and get through the noise of a delayed inbox or 200 messages in your inbox in a single day in an email, which is typical. So conversations, just tracking that and keeping an important eye on that is extremely important when it comes to SMS solutions

Acacia Fante (19:34)
The conversion I think is important to hone in on. mean, we all know that conversion matters, but I think sometimes we can forget how hard it is, even from some of the top of funnel ⁓ leads we might be working with. It's much easier to get contacts in a database or a CRM ⁓ or to have this huge volume of leads than it is to actually, as you said, move the needle and...

pull out some folks from that crowd who are really in search of something that you can provide.

that your product solves for, your team can help service. And so I do think in general, SMS is filling a lot of those gaps in the marketplace of marketing and selling. Email, historically, has been kind of king or queen, so to speak, and it's still a powerhouse and has its place. we're just seeing more and more that people are on their pursuit

Andrew Davis (20:30)
Mm-hmm.

Acacia Fante (20:37)
devices right and they're responding or noticing things outside of their inbox I don't know about you but sometimes I get a little inbox plagued and I don't even want to touch that thing right so yeah yeah I probably would so you know that's why we have SMS is just a different way to reach folks and a better one arguably

Andrew Davis (20:51)
You'd hate my inbox.

Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest, like my inbox is filled with sales emails, marketing emails, right? Like I sign up for a lot. I'm on a lot of targeted lists and understand that, you know, comes with the territory type of thing. But ⁓ if you text me and I'm expecting to hear from you, like I filled out a form, I opted in, I was part of a webinar, something along those lines. ⁓ I read it instantly. I mean, almost instantly, like my phone is literally sitting on my desk.

Acacia Fante (21:07)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Davis (21:30)
The noise that my inbox makes, it makes a little tennis ball racket sound or whatever. And like, it's just white noise to me now. I don't even hear it. But if I get that little notification on my phone or whatever, I go down and I look at it instantly. Always, always keeping an eye on it. ⁓ And obviously bias here, but I always support the people who do text. I always like to support that medium more than anything else. ⁓ We spent a lot of time on responses and conversations and everything like that. And I know that

We have a lot on the analytic side ⁓ that we want to get through. ⁓ Let's talk about the human side of texting and the human side of metrics. ⁓ I feel like everything that you've been talking about in terms of the quality of conversation and how texting is going to your personal devices more times than not, it's a very human-centric conversation back and forth.

That's one thing that I love about the conversation that we're having. We're in this data-driven world. SMS is that powerful personal channel that's still out there. How do you balance the numbers with nuance? How do you look at it and go, hey, I want to get this message out to hundreds, thousands of people that I have, but also want to be personable?

Acacia Fante (22:53)
Yeah, that's a really good question. You for better or worse, most of our lives are wrapped up in our phones. So it can feel very personal or on the flip side, interactions can feel very void of personalization or of feeling like someone is addressing you versus a mass or a crowd.

You know, it actually calls to mind one of my favorite, she's a researcher, an author, speaker, but many people are familiar with Brené Brown and she's a social science researcher and she says all the time that data is just storytelling. ⁓ And so that's the way I look at it is.

Data, of course, is often ⁓ quantitative. You can even kind of morph some qualitative data into a quantitative representation. But it doesn't matter unless there is a story you can uncover from that.

at the end of the day. ⁓ Otherwise, it's just numbers that don't have a lot of meaning behind them. And so people should think about metrics as an empowering force to the human side of any sort of interaction, specifically, certainly with sales. ⁓ It should really be seen as something that elevates your ability to engage with other people, make connections,

you know, measure what truly matters and stay memorable in a very crowded, loud ⁓ marketplace and digital ecosystem. And so I think certainly personalization is a key component here. There's lots of ways you can personalize and add tokens to your messages. You know, something as simple as just pulling someone's first name can go a long way. ⁓ If I get a text message and I see my names in there and someone's

Andrew Davis (24:45)
Mm-hmm.

Acacia Fante (24:50)
you know, advertising an open position, I'm much more likely to maybe look up that company on the side than I am if I just receive a message that feels like it went to a thousand people or more. ⁓ So I think there's little moves you can take. ⁓ Certainly you can, you know, you can speak to someone's other demographics, right? Like what kind of industry they're in, you can speak to your own brand in certain ways. And I think ultimately,

Andrew Davis (25:02)
Yeah.

Acacia Fante (25:20)
at the end of the day, you want your data again to tell that story and to pull people into the book, right? And make them feel like they're a part of the chapter.

Andrew Davis (25:30)
Yeah.

You know, we mentioned tokens and personalization and everything. It got me thinking about automation more than anything else. And kind of like a quicker question for you here. Do you think people over automate SMS sometimes, or do you feel like it kind of comes with the territory of just, when you're engaged with marketing, it's kind of the expectation.

Acacia Fante (25:54)
Yeah, it's an interesting question because I'm on both sides of it. You know, we're on the back end of a product and product marketing. I'm looking at those capabilities to automate, but ⁓ we all receive automations too, you know, on our email and on our phone. I think it's, ⁓ I think ultimately it's,

Andrew Davis (26:10)
Mm-hmm.

Acacia Fante (26:18)
Automation is still preferred. It's powerful. I would rather have it than not have it ⁓ as a user. But I think

people should just be mindful of the ways they're using it, right? And so automation in my mind is a lot more effective if you can take time off of your plate to get stuff out in the ether while still making it feel like you're talking to each person one at a time. And there's ways to do that. And there's ways that...

someone who's receiving that can perceive and feel some authenticity there around, this person, you know, most people know, like, I'm not the only one they're reaching out to, but just taking the time and having a signal that someone took the time to pull your name into a message. I think we're like, it's just a human part of us, right? Like that automatically creates a first impression and point of connection.

Andrew Davis (27:10)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I agree. And I think the automation aspect usually comes earlier on in the conversation more than anything else as well. And I think it's just part of the process more than anything else. I don't get offended if I have an automated message, because I know if I respond to that automated message, I'm going to get a human back. Obviously, there are AI components that are now starting to do that. ⁓

Again, that doesn't bother me. I'm getting to the destination that I want to get to, right? ⁓ As long as I'm not being lied to or anything along those lines, like I'm okay with the automated side of things. And, you know, we all, we all live busy lives. We're all expected to do more than, you know, than we did last year type of thing. And so productivity obviously comes into mind and automation is one of the first things that we think about when it comes to ⁓ achieving those.

productivity goals, right? And so it can be used obviously really effectively, but you don't want to lose touch of the human side as well. sometimes I love it when like, you know, I'm a text bomber, a cluster bomber in a way where I'll send them a question and then another question, another question. do it on Slack too all the time. Right. And I just don't put everything in one thought, one message. Like it just like, it like kind of comes in and I like when, when that happens back.

Acacia Fante (28:34)
I'm that way too.

Andrew Davis (28:42)
When people are back and they answer a question with a quick answer and then they provide context on it and stuff, it makes it really feel like it's an actual genuine conversation, a real conversation that they're putting thought into versus, I responded with pricing and now I get pricing. Time and a place for that, obviously. Time and a place for that type of automated workflow and stuff. But it's always a good feeling when you're like, I'm actually connecting with a person here and having that conversation.

Acacia Fante (29:10)
Yeah, it makes you want to keep the conversation going, which is what moves the needle. ⁓

Andrew Davis (29:14)
Yeah, I mean, it does,

right? Like just keeping things hot, keeping things top of mind and moving it. Like that's, you know, that's what the sales process is all about. That's what the buyer's journey is all about, right? It's striking while the iron is hot type of ⁓ type of situation. ⁓ Let's talk about the new analytics dashboard itself. Star of the show here, right? ⁓ So obviously we talked about what, you know, what inspired the design. Hey, we had metrics. We have tons of metrics at at TextUs. You know, we put out our engagement report every year.

state of texting reports. ⁓ I know we have benchmark reports and everything. ⁓ So visualizing the data is obviously what inspired it and making people be able to look at it and everything. Are you able to give us a sneak peek of this thing and show us what it might look like?

Acacia Fante (30:01)
Yeah, let's give that a try.

So what you're looking at right here is what our analytics dashboard.

is looking like in Texas. ⁓ This is very soon to be released so it's not live on all of our accounts yet but it's code complete and and we're almost ready to release this to the world. So if you go to your analytics tab here we really wanted to start with what we think are the most important quick win metrics and sometimes those two things are in conflict by the way sometimes quick wins are not very important but we wanted to

align those two and so that's where we centered around our QBR data and we wanted to start at the organizational health level. So this isn't necessarily a branch account view but the power here is that it gives you that highest level bird's eye view, ⁓ know, seeing the trees through the forest ⁓ point of view around how your SMS is performing.

And we've got two kind of core, I would call them dashboards in their own respect through the organizational health view. And the first is centered around usage. So this is all about how an organization is using messaging, their overall deliverability performance, ⁓ complete deliverability rate, which is what we see here, one-to-one conversational deliverability.

and your campaign deliverability. ⁓

performance as well. ⁓ And what's nice about this is we have some customization here where you can change the time period that you're looking at. So you'll notice I just changed this month to date. We're getting a different metric for the amount of messages we've sent this month and a different deliverability rate across the criteria here as well. So users can play around and they can compare different periods of time. ⁓

to get a good look at what's working and what's not and where there may be opportunities for improvement.

And then from, you know, deliverability, we move into messages sent writ large. So the count of messages and then sent by type. you can get kind of a here I've got it last three months. So this is more of a quarterly view. But to today's date and you can see the breakdown between conversational level and the campaign ⁓ performance level through your SMS segments.

So you can get kind of a clear picture here around if you're sending more campaigns or if you're sending more one-on-one conversations. And I think going back to something I said earlier in this conversation was really got to get clear on what your ultimate goal is. If you're trying to reach maximum amount of people just for something like brand awareness, ⁓ then

probably a campaign is a really great place to start and do that. If you're trying to engage folks who have perhaps responded to you or you have a unique, know, offering or opportunity for a subset of contacts, that's where the conversational messages data can come into play.

So that's kind of the overall breakdown around usage at the org level. And then we also have our effectiveness. So this is kind of where things start to get a little more interesting. ⁓ Where we can start to dig into metrics like opt out rate. So you can start to see number one, where your organization's opt out threshold is set to.

⁓ which is configurable in TextUs. We also have benchmark data around best practices there. So you can see where your threshold is for opt-out. And then you can also see your rates around. ⁓

opt out by the type of message that you're sending. So again, by conversational or by campaign. So you can start to see how those two are performing better or worse from each other. ⁓ And, you know, make tweaks along the way or hone in on one team's performance and kind of identify, you know, who their audience is and what they may try differently to better reach and engage folks through these conversations. And then you've got the more

holistic view of the opt-out rate as well so you can ⁓ look at you know the overall opt-out rate you can break it down by conversational campaign too this is just kind of another view of what's above here a different way of looking at it ⁓

And also on analytics too, we want it to be chart forward and chart center because that provides the level of visibility that a lot of other tools don't or that people are hungry for. But we also have table views. So you can just see this data in a table and you can also export this. You can export your data into CSVs or PNGs. So we're not writing off, you know, the Excel spreadsheet. You can still pull that and hand it

off to someone who wants to have a look. But this is more of like the live time. You log in to text us throughout the week and you're assessing how things are going, how SMS is performing in your organization. Yeah.

Andrew Davis (35:55)
Love the screenshot factor for what it's worth.

I always love when you can download a nice PNG and throw it into a nice PowerPoint or something and actually show visuals versus having to recreate it in your spreadsheet.

Acacia Fante (36:07)
Yes.

Yeah, or even having to like high screenshot stuff all the time. But, you know, sometimes you don't have the nice ⁓ even border. just a clean image that you can pop in somewhere is great. ⁓ And then, yeah, so overall deliverability rate. ⁓

Andrew Davis (36:18)
Yeah. Yep. ⁓

Acacia Fante (36:28)
We talked about that as well, and we get into response rates by type two. So you start by looking at deliverability, then you can kind of hone in on, okay, what's happening with our opt-outs, where our threshold is, how opt-outs are happening at the conversation and campaign level. And then you can compare that and make some evaluations next to the data around response rates ⁓ by message type as well. So that's just a very quick preview.

of what our analytics dashboard looks like today. This is a big area for us in our product that we're excited to continue developing because we know people really want this. They want the data that they know how to make use of, that they can see and understand and analyze and use to make better decisions and become advocates of the tools that are performing really well for them.

Andrew Davis (37:28)
I love it. And I know that customers have been asking for this data. And we've been covering this data with them in meetings, quarterly ⁓ business reviews and stuff. Now they have access to it virtually in real time, which is really exciting. And I know just the first step in a long, ⁓ exciting journey of us on our analytics roadmap for sure. know there's some.

pretty cool things coming in the future for it. Awesome. Well, let's wrap this up and make it practical. If somebody's listening right now and thinking, OK, I want to send a ton of messages, or I want to start sending SMS even, where do I even start? What's one or two metrics that they should look at tomorrow to start improving their performance?

Acacia Fante (37:59)
Yeah, we're excited.

deliverability.

for sure, would be the first place. Make sure that the work you're putting in is going somewhere. It would be a shame if your deliverability isn't performing where you want it to be. That's the first thing you would want to address, I think, before you look at any other metrics. And then you can start to kind of click down from there and look at some of the other stuff. But yeah, if I was to give a new hire a piece of advice, first time they're logging in to text us, let's say, or their SMS platform, and they're

they've been asked to present on some data, look at the deliverability rate, then you can cross compare it to some of the other analytics that are available to you as well.

Andrew Davis (39:05)
Yeah,

I love it. actually, I love the thing where you could tell the difference between the type of message sent, whether it was campaign or conversational. For me, that's an easy correlation on two charts in terms of looking at either opt-out rate, deliverability, or ⁓ even ⁓ engagement response rate ⁓ correlated to the number of messages sent in that same time period. And the type of message can really show.

What's making an impact there more than anything else? So it's awesome. Well, OK, so this was great. I appreciate you giving us an overview of the new ⁓ Analytics 2.0. Really excited for that. ⁓ I love that we just didn't talk about numbers too. We talked about what those numbers mean and how to stay human in communication and in this world of business that just seems to be changing constantly.

For everyone listening, if you want to actually see what we've been talking about, you can check out the new TextUs analytic dashboard coming to you shortly. It's rolling out in the next couple of weeks and will be available to customers inside their accounts to specific users. Thanks again, Acacia, for joining us. Any parting words for ⁓ our listeners?

Acacia Fante (40:22)
I'm happy to have been here. I'll definitely have to come back when we've released Analytics Pro down the line. That's going to be exciting. So thank you for having me. Parting words would just be know your goal and measure what matters.

Andrew Davis (40:36)
absolute measure what matters ⁓ is a great way to leave it off. If you like what you heard today, follow or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. We've got more conversations coming with go-to-market operators, data leaders, marketing pros, sales pros, you name it. ⁓ We'll get more guests on and ⁓ click that subscribe button, click that like button, and comment if you have questions, ideas, anything along those lines.

⁓ We'd love to hear from you, but until next time, I'm Andrew Davis. Keep tracking, testing, and texting smarter.

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