This week, I met with Ryan, the founder of Original Grain, at my office. He just moved to NYC, so we thought, why not bring this Twitter relationship into real life? As I asked him what has been working for him lately, one of the things that he mentioned was Shopper, Postscript’s new product.
Then, I hit up our Sharma Brands x Postscript Slack channel and demanded to learn more. I was so fascinated by the few screenshots I saw that I told them I wanted to do a deep dive on their new product launch. I asked Mike, the CMO, a bunch of questions and summarized my learnings in a 100-second read below. So… why does this product matter so much?
Well, in the world of DTC, there are only three lists your brand can fully own that matter:
- Your customer list, with home addresses, is for you to do direct mail marketing.
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Your email subscribers (from customers and prospects) can run various email campaigns.
- And your SMS list to run your SMS strategy as a brand.
These three lists represent the most powerful and reliable ways to reach consumers without paid ads. Yes, there is organic content, but with organic, there is no real guarantee. You can post something on social media and get 100K views or 1000, no matter how many followers you have.
That’s because content going viral in 2025 is no longer simply driven by how many followers your account has. Instead, it’s driven by how relevant your content is to the end consumer. The algorithm and what people call the “For You-fication” of social media feeds have changed this in pretty significant ways for brands. You can thank TikTok for that.
So now a ton of people on social consume endless amounts of content from creators and brands they don’t even follow just because the algorithm thinks it’s relevant to them which means organic as a channel (although still valuable) becomes less reliable for predictable/repeatable results.
But with direct mail, email, and SMS, you at least know that your message or offer is going to get delivered (minus anything that gets marked as spam) but you aren’t sure what the open rates or conversion rates will be.
I still think many brands underestimate these 3 owned channels, given how expensive CACs on paid search and paid social have become. I think the biggest opportunity of the 3 right now is probably SMS.
Depending on which studies you read, the average SMS campaign outperforms the average email campaign in terms of open rates, click rates, and conversion rates. According to Klaviyo, the industry average email open rate for e-commerce is around 37.93%. For SMS, it can be above 50%.
I think having a great SMS program is table stakes for 2025. Every brand I know does email, but not every brand I know does SMS. I feel like this is pretty obvious but when there’s a discrepancy in the market like this it becomes your opportunity to execute and do SMS better than your competition, especially since many brands don’t even do SMS at all.
I like Postscript because they are trusted by over 18,000 brands, and a ton of clients that we work with at Sharma Brands use and love them. But there’s one big thing I have always thought was missing. Not just from SMS, but from marketing campaigns more broadly. And that’s the concept of true interactivity and 1:1 personal engagement.
If you think about it, most marketing still feels like shouting into the void. You’ve got email blasts, Instagram ads, and other campaigns that go out to prospects through a one to many approach hoping that someone bites.
Yes, you can customize the messaging based on cohorts, but most brands simply send the exact same message to all of their prospects at once. And if someone replies to your marketing email or DMs you on Instagram from an ad they saw, there is typically no always on, quick, intelligent or engaging response.
Imagine if your brand could actually talk back to your customers and prospects through one of these channels. What if you could respond (at scale) to answer questions, recommend a product, or learn why a prospect isn’t buying. Well, that’s the promise of Shopper, which is why it’s interesting to me. They announced it last week at their event on the 16th, and you can watch the recap here.
It allows you to message your list in your brand’s voice, answer their questions in real time, and guide them through the buying journey just like a great in-store associate would.
Here are five reasons why I like the new product release:
1. Personalized Conversations Convert Better:
Think about how much more likely someone is to buy when they talk to a real associate in-store. Someone who is there to make recommendations, answer questions, and mitigate any concerns. When I’m shopping at various stores in NYC, this is exactly what I like about the experience. Having that person there to talk to me about the products, my preferences, and my goals always makes me feel more confident in making the purchase decision and swiping my card.
Imagine replicating that digitally with every prospect joining your SMS list. That’s what Shopper does. It helps brands start those conversations with their existing customers or people who haven’t converted yet and gives you a second, third, or even fourth chance to close the sale through automated follow ups and natural conversations.
You can think of Shopper as an AI sales rep and AI customer service rep who’s only job is to engage in less than a minute and reply to any question that is asked.
2. Shopper Makes Your SMS List More Valuable:
Postscript shared with me that SMS subscribers already generate up to 8x more revenue than email subscribers. This sounds like a lot, but I’ll take their word for it. But the bigger thing to me is that with Shopper, subscribers who engage in conversations become more valuable and are more likely to stay subscribed.
The early results I’ve seen are promising.
Postscript said that brands currently using the tool have seen:
- Subscribers who engage with Shopper are 1.5x more valuable than the average subscriber, based on L30 SLTV.
- Brands are seeing an 85% decrease in SMS related support tickets and a 68% increase in conversations held through SMS.
- Subscribers who interact with Shopper are also 22% more likely to stay subscribed, meaning less net churn.
- And the average response time is under 1 minute, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week (subject to applicable quiet hours restrictions).
I think these stats alone make it pretty compelling to try.
3. Learn More & Sell More:
The other cool thing I like about Shopper is that it doesn’t just help you sell, it helps you learn. You get direct feedback on what customers are looking for, what’s confusing about your product pages, website, descriptions, value props, etc and what objections they have.
This is the kind of insight that normally takes a bunch of surveys, tons of CS tickets, or countless hours studying heatmaps on your site to figure out what’s actually going on. Now, it’s just a text, sent in simple, natural language from your prospect or customer that you can reply to (or have Shopper AI reply to) in order to resolve the issues or questions immediately.
4. It’s Valuable to Any Brand:
Whether you’re running a 5-person team or a multi-national brand, you can use Shopper to scale 1:1 conversations without having a massive team.
Personally, I’m particularly excited about how this tech can help the smaller companies in DTC. I know it will be valuable to the largest brands but I talk to so many startups who have between 3-20 employees where this would make a huge difference for them.
Imagine you are a startup and only have enough revenue/cash to support a team of 5 people. You’ve got one paid ads expert, one creative expert, one person on organic social and influencer partnerships, one founder to set strategy, negotiate with suppliers and vendors, etc and do everything else, and one web design lead to manage your Shopify store, landing pages, and PDPs.
You don’t have the money to roll out an always on sales and customer service team who can resolve tickets and answer questions at every hour of the day. But with Shopper that now becomes a possibility. It’s built directly into Postscript, meaning if you are already using them, setup is simple, and your existing flows/automations fit right in. Getting this level of support from employees would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary per year to compete.
5. Brands You Know Are Already Winning with Shopper Today:
Although it’s very early in the rollout, Brands like Original Grain which I mentioned above are already seeing strong results with Shopper. Ryan, the founder, said:
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They saw $24,000 in new monthly revenue attributed to Shopper.
- A 61% decrease in SMS related support tickets
- A 174% increase in total SMS conversations held
- 900 new monthly engaged subscribers
I know other brands like Hollow, Truff, Snibbs, and others are also testing this tool. We are also testing it with some Sharma Brands clients right now as well and I will report back once I have more data to share.
What’s the best way to test Shopper?
I think the answer is simple. You can sign up here and just start a conversation with your list to see if it works. Let your customers ask questions. See how Shopper responds and see what the conversion rates actually are.
Obviously there is no guarantee but I think using this tool could result in more revenue, better retention, and more loyalty from your SMS list.
You can give it a try here. And by the way, Shopper is free for brands to use until June 30, 2025. For customers and prospects, it’s part of Postscript’s tariff relief efforts so you should take advantage of this now.
Alright, that’s all for this week.
What do you think about the future of SMS and the concept of interactive and truly personal 1:1 marketing?
Let me know if you have any questions, and I can answer them in a future email or on a segment of Limited Supply.
Thanks again for reading.
I hope that you have a great rest of the week.
Nik
