Improving SMS Deliverability with TrueDialog: The Story of Brazilian Professionals

We’re happy to have Mary Lawyer here today with Brazilian Professionals. Mary was a early adapter and a beta tester of True Delivery. And I want to start off just by giving a little bit of background with regards to letting Mary describe who she is, what Brazilian Professional is, and what her position is inside of Brazilian Professionals. Mary? Yes. Thank you, John. So I work for a company called Brazilian professionals. We’re a hair care company and I’ve been with them for the last 14 years. My customer base is roughly nine to 10,000 hairstylists who really these days never really want to chat over the phone. And it’s very hard to have time with them when I go visit them in the hair salons to try to sell them our products. And so texting has been the way that I’ve been able to really make my business happen. I’m the number one sales producer in the company now. And I really believe that a huge part of that has been the way I’ve been able to use TrueDialogue and now TrueDelivery to really make sure I am able to reach my customers on a quicker, a more regular basis. Thanks. And I just kind of want to just take two seconds here because Mary actually came to us and was one of the people that instigated the whole development of TrueDelivery, which basically was precipitated by the 10 DLC registration process, which the carriers have implemented, it’s been in place for a little over two years now. And as that product has matured, the carriers basically are forcing people to register so they can know who their customer is. Anyone here who uses text has probably received unsolicited text as well as phone calls. And this is one of the steps that they’ve taken as far as forcing people to register. So if there is a problem with a line, they know who to go to talk to. And as it’s matured, they’ve also tightened controls. And since 10DLC is a lot less expensive way and more adaptable way for people to send bulk messages, they can’t go through the screening and onboarding and review process like they do with short codes. So they rely on technology. and the technology that they use, we’re very familiar with it. It’s kind of like a spam detector that the email companies use to determine a spam assassin is what email companies use to kind of block unsolicited messages in their inbox. The carriers are doing the same thing and these things use machine learning and AI. So once those carriers started tightening up their controls, we had companies like Mary and a couple of other clients saying, Hey, my messages are not always, always going through. Can you help us understand why we would comb through and we would find that blocked by carrier and most of the blocking happens on content. So we went through and rethought the problem and said, I had a pretty smart kid that is pretty high up in machine learning and AI. We got him out of Harvard and we gave him the problem to solve and said, how can we use new technologies to solve this problem? And it came up with a true delivery and And I think our testing with beta clients and now that we’re rolling out to more clients has shown that we’ve reduced false positives by 85%. So we are extremely excited about how this thing performs. Mary, since we started talking about problem, can you tell us a little bit about the problems that you were facing and with regards to using text and it getting blocked? Yeah, I mean, I would typically create a message that I was gonna send to 300 stylists to invite them to an event I was doing. And lo and behold, even though when I tested the message, it would go to me and I thought, okay, surely it’s gonna be received by everyone. Later, I would find like 70 % of the messages were blocked. And of course then I would call… true dialogue to be like, why is it being blocked? I’m obviously not a spammer. These are people that I’ve texted many times. There’s back and forth text messages. And then of course, stylists would get frustrated because they said they weren’t receiving texts and they wondered what happened to me because they hadn’t heard from me in a long time. So this was obviously causing frustration and then even not knowing what words were triggering it. It was very much a guessing game. It was very, very frustrating. So once you started using True Delivery, can you talk a little bit about the results that you started seeing and the benefits that you realized? Yeah, there were instant aha moments that I was having where I would type a message that I would have normally sent in the past. And then when I clicked deliverability, it would say 80 % predicted to not be delivered because it was going to trigger a spam filter. So then instantly I was able to change up the message. and test it again. And through process of elimination, I’ve been able to tweak my messages. It’s helped me simplify them. And it kind of, it’s almost a game now where I get really excited when it says, you know, only 8 % predicted to be blocked. I’m like, oh my God, okay. And then I see the results when more stylists respond, you know, and I’m getting more sales because of it. And so it’s obviously less frustrating and more advantageous when my sales are increasing. And so overall it’s made my life easier. Well, one of the things, and I’d love to get your opinion on it, that our clients have given us feedback on is that not only does it tell you your likelihood to be blocked, but it does it by carrier. And I find it just fascinating when we were testing, first we were just testing the overall algorithms, seeing how well it did. And then we said, well, let’s check it by carrier. and we split it out by carrier and then it got really interesting in that we were able to see how different carriers were filtering different things. Did you have any similar aha moments when you were? Oh yeah. mean, usually T-Mobile and AT &T were a little less, just like they didn’t spam as much or they didn’t block it as much. Verizon definitely was the number one that I was always looking for. And it was weird, the words like. Brazilian, I mean, my company is Brazilian professionals. And if I said, hey, it’s Mary from Brazilian, it didn’t seem to like the word Brazilian. Verizon didn’t like that word. Or if I was inviting my hairstylist to a hair cutting class, it didn’t like the word cutting. I mean, just bizarre things, you know? And then I learned sometimes a combination of, I put a comma here or a period here. Like it would definitely change things up the way Verizon would perceive that message. So. It’s been great to be able to fine tune it and get the message through basically. It’s great to hear you say that. And again, we appreciate you and your input in helping us not only come up with the idea for this product, but to be a good user of it. And I think one of the other things that we have been focused on, and I think that you and our other clients will see over time, is that because they don’t like the period here today or they don’t like the word Brazilian here today, tomorrow that can change. it is, you know, we are going over hundreds of millions of messages in real time, looking at what is and what is not getting delivered and delivering the model that our customers are using to identify messages. You know, one of the other things that, you know, I, as CEO of this company, my background has been in messaging for gosh, 30 plus years, started off doing sticky labels for direct mail and doing data processing for people who were putting catalogs and direct mail pieces in the mail and doing all of the database work for those. And then when email came along, built, I built a business with some other guys and was one of the pioneers of that. And it was interesting because at the 10 years into that life cycle, started being companies that came out that said, hey, when spam filtering started happening, what is your delivery rate going to be? And the difficult part of that is that in order to understand what the delivery rates were going to be with your messages for those technologies was you actually had to send messages to a seed list that they had. And it would go through and say, did it get through or did it not get through? And they had all the different mailboxes lined up. The way that we’ve aligned this using machine learning and AI is that before Mary even sends a message, because prior to true delivery, if she sent a message out to 10,000 stylists, we would be billed by the carriers and Mary would be billed by the carriers. And as she said, the carriers still bill you. They don’t care if they block 70 % of the messages. So this gives a nice tidy way for us and Mary and our clients to be able to test messages without wasting money. you know, kind of after the fact learning that, all of these are going to get. Now, I think one of the interesting things that we’ve talked about that I found that you do is that, you know, this tool is obviously very new. This technology, I don’t know anyone else that’s doing this, but, you know, there’s still a chance that stuff gets blocked and things do. I’m just curious for your business, how do you handle that? And how has that improved in that, you know, if you do see that, let’s say out of 10,000 people, 50 don’t get pieces delivered, how do you handle those? Well, yeah, typically after I send a campaign, then I can look and see in that campaign which ones didn’t get delivered. And you guys give a kind of drop down so I can compare the ones that got sent, the ones that were undeliverable. And then in the past, it would be more than half the list. So it was virtually impossible to go through every single person and resend a one-to-one message. But now using true delivery, it’s whittled down to 10, maybe 20 people. So now I can very easily go through that list and just email them or text them individually and make sure they get the message. It’s way, way easier. That’s fantastic. So right now, our internal testing has shown that we’ve reduced false positives and the error codes that say carrier blocked message. which again is mainly content related by 85%. Have you seen similar results in your efforts? I mean, it sounds like the numbers are pretty in alignment with our overall numbers. that- Yeah, I would definitely say it’s around the same. It’s shocking. I’ve had people who maybe they thought I wasn’t their rep anymore because they haven’t received my text. And now all of a sudden they’re responding. They’re like, oh, hey, yeah, I’ve been needing some stuff. Let me get this or that. So I’m noticing that a lot. It’s very, very cool. Fantastic. Well, I think one of the other things that in addition to offering meet new tools like True Delivery is I think one of the things that we really focus on is our client support. And this is kind of a last minute addition to our webinar today, but Mary felt very adamant about mentioning this and that she’d used several providers preceding TrueDialogue. And I take great pride in the fact that one of the things that she mentioned was our service delivery. Can you tell a little bit about your experience with that? Not just with TrueDialogue, but the overall TrueDialogue service delivery? Yeah, mean, for those watching, you may have tried other texting apps or companies like TrueDialogue. I’ve used Avachado, even another company called Simple Texting. Some of the features on the app might be great, but the big deal that I kept running into was if something wasn’t going right, if messages weren’t going through, or if I was being blocked, if I just had any questions about the service and the app itself, it was really hard to get someone on the phone or even virtually. It was always a chat box after hours and let me get back to you and it could be the next day and. These are questions that I would need answered right away. And so that is something I’ve continually been impressed with by TrueDialogue where I can just make a quick phone call and you guys are there. And if there is an issue, you respond pretty quick. And so I always feel like you feel my pain. You know, me being able to have connection with my clients is number one priority. And if I’m not getting that, you’ll do your best to help me get there as soon as possible. that’s been, I can’t say it enough. Like everyone needs to know because it’s not available with other companies usually. Well, thank you for the kind words. And again, that kind of came up in our preparation meeting for this. And I appreciate you mentioning that Mary. And I think we’ve kind of gone over the basics of true delivery. I see a couple of questions have come in. First question is, What was the implementation like and how quickly were you able to get up and using this tool? It was really quick. One day, Dave in customer service just told me, hey, this is now on your account. This is how you can use it. So basically, I would go in to create a campaign and I would just type out my message in the check delivery box. And then I would just click check delivery. And instantly, it would tell me, you know, T-Mobile, Verizon, AT &T for each carrier, what percent of messages would be blocked. So then in that same box, I was able to then tweak the message, click check delivery again. And granted in the beginning, it took me a little bit longer to create a message because I was tweaking the message, testing it. And so now it might take me maybe two, maybe three times of tweaking the message to see that now the percentage of blocking is down to like 9%. And so it was pretty quick, pretty quick. The next one, seems like they kind of were typing it in and they said you answered some of it, but they were just curious, what words were you noticing being blocked? Yeah, I mean, it was, it’s quite comical. know, one of the haircuts that we teach in our classes is called the kitty cut. And so it didn’t like the word kitty, didn’t like the word cut. And I noticed like if I was, giving the address to where a class was going to be. It could be a hotel. It didn’t like the hotel name or the address. So I just learned to simplify my messages. And so now it’s a lot shorter of a message. And then I will basically ask the stylist, hey, are you interested in coming? And if they say yes, I’ll send them a picture of where it’s going to be. And so that has helped me streamline that. But it’s pretty hilarious, the words. I could say, good morning and it wouldn’t be blocked. But if I said, Hey Julie, and just the word, Hey would have it be blocked. It’s so crazy. Yeah. It’s very interesting. had a, we had another client that was in the retail flower that they did online and retail flowers. And you know, in the state of California and other places, cannabis is legal. However, Texting is conducted over federally regulated communications platform in the FCC. And the carriers have said, we don’t want any cannabis to be marketed over telephony and using text. And doesn’t mean that they still don’t get on and try. And we see probably 15 to 20 applications a day from cannabis related companies trying to get on and use our applications to market cannabis. And we turn them away. But because of so many cannabis marketers knowing that they shouldn’t be marketing, they still do it. One of the words that they use to get around, because they’ve noticed that cannabis, bud, those type of words get blocked. Same with loan, mortgage for financial stuff. What they noticed though is that the word flower, and this was right before Mother’s Day, and the word flower was getting blocked. And we had to call. and basically get white listed on their numbers to say that, why are you blocking a flower company, the word flower? And they’re like, oh, that must have been our AI picked up the word flower because so many cannabis companies that switched from using this to that and change using the word flower or leaf in order to promote cannabis. And it was causing false positives for a flower marketer, know, two days or three days before Mother’s Day. So it’s amazing. the words like Brazilian, what causes that to cause to get blocked? But yeah, I mean, I was aware of words like free, if you say sale or promotion, like those are given those I’m aware like, okay, they’re probably going to be blocked, but these other words. Yeah, it’s funny. So, you know, I think, you know, you, how long, I guess one of the customers said, how long have you been on the TrueLionLog application? Gosh, I think it’s been four or five years now, time flies. Yeah, and they’re like, you mentioned customer services or anything else that’s kind of kept you with us, with the company for so long? I mean, just the ease of use of the platform. I love that you guys are always updating and especially that you’re open to hearing feedback of, you know, Dave, whenever I call him to say, hey, this would really improve the site. Is there any way you guys can change this or that? And he’ll, I know that he’s gonna give it to you guys to say, hey, this has been something we’ve been getting requests for. I really appreciate that, responsiveness. And of course, some things may happen sooner than others, but that’s something else that I appreciate is that you’re willing to listen to what we need to be fixed or to be changed. Well, thank you for everyone for attending and Mary, we’re very grateful for your time today and appreciate. you giving your time and also being a great TrueDialogue customer. And if you’ve got questions, you want to learn more about TrueDelivery, you can speak with your client services representative. Dave Carravine and his team all know about it very well. For those of you who are on integration, we are going to be finalizing, adding TrueDelivery into our integrations. That should be somewhere in the last Q4. Now that we’ve gotten most of the initial design and implementation components of true delivery outlined and our product teams are going to be incorporating that into our integration. Stay tuned for updates for Salesforce HubSpot and Dynamics and Salesforce Marketing Cloud that being added to those integrations and beyond that. Thank you everyone again for your time today. I really appreciate it. Mary, thank you so much again. You’re welcome. Thank you. Alrighty. Have a great day.