How would you feel if you texted a friend asking for help and they either didn’t respond, took way too long to respond, or responded with basic information that you could have found yourself? I bet you’d be pretty frustrated. Unfortunately, this is how more than 50% of brands treat SMS today. It’s a huge problem and new research shows that 80.9% consumers would be more likely to purchase from a brand if they could text them back and forth! That is a huge stat because the reality is, when someone texts your brand, they are doing 1 of 3 things. They want more information about a recent order, they have a question about an item you sell, or they are trying to contact customer support. Regardless of what their motivation is, leaving them on read, replying with an auto-responder that tells them to check out your FAQs or having a human rep take 2 hours to reply is never a good look.
IMO, SMS is one of the most intimate interactions that you can possibly have with your prospects and customers. They are taking time out of their day to text you, and then you have the opportunity to actually talk with them 1:1 in a channel with no other distractions vying for their attention. A lot of the time, the text they just sent you with a question about one of your SKUs means they were moments away from converting on a new purchase, but needed more help. And because you didn’t respond quickly or you didn’t respond with the right information, you lost a sale.
As everyone who reads my newsletter knows, I’ve been a huge proponent of SMS marketing and conversational commerce for a long time. And now, with the help of AI, you can make these interactions better and faster than ever before. Just a few years ago, if a brand wanted to stand up SMS and be able to communicate with their contacts in a conversational way, i.e not just sending 1 to many marketing blasts, but having real conversations with their contacts, they’d need to have a small army of reps monitoring these interactions all day. Not only would these reps have to understand your brand, they’d need to be clear and compelling copywriters, who could get a message across quickly that would either help the prospect get what they needed or nudge them toward a sale. These folks would have to be 50% sales rep and 50% customer service rep in order to be effective and they’d need to always be online responding as messages came in.
Thankfully, AI has changed all of this where you can now have agents trained on the context of your business, all of your FAQs, all of your past support interactions, all of the copy on your site, all of your blogs, etc alongside pretty much everything that’s ever been written on the web. Your new AI agents are like having an always-on PHD level brand sales and support rep who can respond instantly, answer nuanced questions clearly, and hold real conversations 24/7 with no downtime and the best AI solutions allow you to have a ton of control, with quality checks, and a system that improves your AI's voice repeatedly so its as on brand as a founder texting their customers. I personally believe that AI agents for SMS have been one of the most obvious and valuable applications of the technology since it launched a few years ago.
I was chatting with my friends at Postscript, my favorite SMS platform and they showed me a new PDF they created called The Conversation Report. It’s a super detailed 22 page report with data from over 840 brands and 1000+ consumers on the survey + their own internal data on just how powerful SMS and texting back can be. I highly recommend that you download it but I also wanted to share a few of my favorite things I learned below.
First, I wanted to start with the 2 most compelling stats.
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How bad is it when a shopper asks a question but doesn’t get the answer they were looking for? Postscript’s consumer survey showed that 82.4% of shoppers have abandoned a purchase because they could not find an answer to a product or order question. That’s because if consumers can’t find what they are looking for, they don’t wait, they just leave. There are too many other things and too many other brands competing for their dollars and attention. The modern consumer will simply close the tab, abandon the cart, and move on.
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And like I said above, 80.9% of the consumers they surveyed also said that they would be more likely to purchase from a brand if they could text them back and forth and that makes a ton of sense. This is clearly where the world is headed. Everything about AI is chat based. It’s interactive. It’s engaging, it’s fast, and in many ways it’s fun. Consumers are being trained to expect conversational interfaces. They will expect conversational commerce to be the new norm going forward. If you aren’t offering this as a brand, I think you’re already falling behind.
Beyond that, if you had to guess, how many brands currently have AI responding instantly when a contact texts them? Do you think it’s over or under 50%? Remember, it’s 2026 now. OpenAI and Anthropic, the makers of Claude are the two fastest growing private companies in the world. Gemini, Grok, etc are also very well known entities with hundreds of millions of users each. Everyone and their brother has been talking about AI for the past 2+ years so if you are running a sophisticated business, you’d have to be sleeping under a rock to not be thinking about it for your company. But here’s the thing… only 26% of the brands Postscript surveyed said they were managing SMS conversations with AI. And what’s even more surprising is that for brands doing over $50M in revenue that participated in the survey, only 17% said yes.
17%! That was honestly shocking to me since the number of brands using AI for SMS went down as revenue went up. IMO, that makes no sense because the larger your brand is, the more incentive you should have to install an AI to automatically respond to all of your texts.
On the other side of the equation, more than 8 out of 10 consumers surveyed said they have replied to a brand via text, which means they’re expecting a reply back quickly but nearly half of consumers (49.4%) report receiving a delayed, generic, or no reply after texting a brand. Without question, the brands who provided that experience to their contacts are losing revenue from this channel.
When Postscript surveyed what these texts were about, brands said that 64% of all messages they received were a request for more product information, the number 1 use case of texts. The second highest category was questions about shipping and delivery (57%) and then returns or refunds was in third and discounts and promos was in fourth place at 41%.
Imagine you were in a store and you asked a sales rep a question about a product. Did you ask because you were interested in potentially buying this item or not? I’d bet that 9 times out of 10, shoppers who ask questions to attendants in store want more information because they are directly thinking about making a purchase decision. The exact same thing happens on digital channels including SMS. People want to know about the material or the ingredients or the sizing or the weight or what the return policy is before they decide to buy. Just like they would ask a question in store, they want that last piece of information to make them feel ready to move forward. And more than that, they want actual service, and to feel like they can speak to someone from the brand who is there to help. That conversational interaction is often the key to making them feel comfortable and excited to buy.
And like I said, 82.4% of shoppers have abandoned a purchase because they could not find an answer to a product or order question. Now what if your brand could answer that purchase blocking question instantly with AI? How would it increase revenue? Over 58% of brands think they’d see conversions increase by 5-20% and 21% of brands surveyed said they think they would see conversions increase by over 20%.
Now pause on that for a second. As you are reading this, I want you to ask yourself how much more money your company would make if it increased SMS conversions from the contacts that texted your brand by 5-20%? Is it 10s of thousands, hundreds of thousands or more? Either way, a fast, intelligent reply to a timely consumer question will increase a brand’s SMS conversion rate by a lot!
Also, I wanted to say that getting set up with conversational commerce and having an AI agent that can automatically respond to all of your texts is way easier than you might think. Postscript has a product called Shopper that’s already powering thousands of high growth companies and their customer conversations. They built an interactive demo of the tech that you can try here. They set it up to be an agent for Original Grain which makes really cool watches and other products using wood and other sustainable materials. You can text it to ask it questions, recommend different watches to you, send you links to check out the items and you can even ask for a discount if you’d like to buy one! It’s a great demo for how this would actually work for your brand.
Obviously, there are more ways to customize it and you can have your own Shopper agent do different things but it’s a great example of how it all works. Postscript says that customers who engage with Shopper are 1.5X more valuable on 30 day subscriber LTV and 22% more likely to stay subscribed after having a conversation with your agent. Shopper is having 100s of thousands of conversations with real live people like you and me every month so this isn't some niche tool. Brands like Original Grain see around $24K/month in revenue from Shopper and another customer, Hollow sees about $22K/month with a 25X ROI after the first 60 days from onboarding. Those numbers are hard to beat for something you can install and get up to running in less than a day.
The report also goes into just how valuable real time consumer insights from text can be. 94% of brands surveyed said they’d get value from these signals beyond all of the other benefits related to retention and new purchases. That’s because when contacts text you, they are sharing the most important thought on their mind. Imagine learning that a product description needed to get tweaked because a customer asked a question via text which revealed to you that the language on your landing page wasn’t clear. Or imagine realizing that your customer love using your product for a specific use case or activity so now that gets translated into new ad copy and angles that you can use. Or imagine stopping customer support tickets before they even occur because you answered those questions automatically with AI powered SMS.
With Shopper, brands like Original Grain have seen an overall decrease in their support tickets while SMS conversations went up by 174%. It should be pretty obvious to you but when customers have questions they can’t find on-site, whether it’s about styles or colors or material or shipping, all of these questions can be quickly resolved through a simple conversation. SMS surfaces these questions in real time, in your customers’ own words, then Shopper responds and gets them the information they need instantly so you can generate another sale. I won’t spoil all of the insights from their report but it's a really good and beautifully designed. If you want to download it and read the full thing, you can do that here. And if you want to experience Shopper in action with a live demo, I highly recommend that you check it out here.
Alright, that’s all for today. How have you been thinking about the future of conversational commerce and applying it to your brand? If you have any fun stories or insights, send me a note because I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you back here on Thursday!
Nik