In today’s rapidly changing digital landscape, the way businesses communicate with their customers is important. With the rise of telecom carrier restrictions and the challenges faced by highly regulated industries, it’s essential to adapt and diversify communication channels. As the CEO of Alpine IQ, a leader in the realm of customer engagement and communication, I’ve witnessed firsthand the shifts in the industry and the need for businesses to evolve. In this blog post, I’ll share insights into the current state of communication, the challenges we face, and the innovation solutions Alpine IQ offers to ensure your message reaches its intended audience. For further insights on this topic, I encourage you to check out my recent post on Linkedin.
The Need for Diverse Communication Channels
Over half of your average revenue comes from loyal customers, and they also contribute to increased average order values (AOVs). However, within the last week, access to highly-regulated industry customers has been put at greater risk by telecom carriers.
For over three years, Alpine IQ has been hard at work to help you extend the average 5-7 minutes you have with a customer in store and turn them into a lifetime of repeat visits, transactions, and engaging communications. We’ve analyzed over $22 billion dollars worth of highly regulated transactions and identified the most lucrative strategies to engage and bring back customers over and over again.
Over the past three years, our leadership has emphasized that text messaging would face more severe carrier filtration compared to other channels that perform better. When we first got into this business we were told that texting had a 99% open rate, however, nobody could prove that fact given phones aren’t setup to communicate a text open.
We found this to be a distracting and self-serving sales tactic perpetuated by our competitors. The only way to understand who reads your messages is to drive them to a landing page where you can track engagement. Alpine IQ implemented Walled Garden, our technology to track and protect regulated messages. We deployed Walled Garden in 2021 after an escalation occurred with Twilio across the industry.
Since then, we have become the largest texting provider in the highly regulated space bar none. We service almost every major e-commerce and point-of-sale (POS) platform for their order notifications as well as the largest brands and management service organization (MSO) accounts across multiple countries.
Having executed more than 650,000 campaigns on our platform and after analyzing the product conversion data linked to these campaigns, as well as the e-commerce and point-of-sale (POS) momentum they generated, email is the HIGHEST performing channel. We’ve also built over 300+ native apps, owned and loved by our customers, push notifications are still a strong competitor to email and have the added benefit of mobile shopping, refer a friend programs, and loyalty. Therefore, we have always recommended diversifying risk to email or push notifications since 2021.
Today, I am happy to say that our recommendations have been highly adopted and that clients sent 72% of their messages as emails last month.
Why am I telling you all of this?
We are at an important crossroads with highly regulated markets. The industry as a whole has seen the price of a text message quadruple or more since 2021 due to carriers increasing their sending fees. Plus, carriers have been intensifying their efforts to block unregistered highly regulated related traffic on their networks.This is an attempt to stop the spammers and scams we all have probably experienced over the years.
Unfortunately, since highly regulated companies are not federally legal, you cannot register your organization and send promotional text messages. If you do, you will likely negatively impact your registration after a couple of sends, be banned globally across all major vendors on your employer identification number (EIN number)/ website, and not be able to re-register.
Alpine IQ is a huge advocate for carrier change and has always tried to protect the voice of operators, especially when their customers double opt-in to get communications from their favorite businesses in highly regulated markets and there are few spammers as a result. It should be allowed and we honestly can’t believe this level of industry suppression even exists in 2023.
Unfortunately, carriers appear indifferent, and there hasn’t been any favorable progress for the industry since 2021. Last week, carriers decided to implement another escalation in their war on highly regulated markets and unregistered traffic. Companies globally, regardless of vendor, have started to see filtration go up based on a list of factors.
This is not affecting any agnostic/ non-regulated traffic from our client base. I personally want to emphasize the importance of utilizing our alternative messaging channels to connect with both customers and staff.
If you haven’t experienced increased filtration on text messaging, we are urging you again to consider diversification in case you are affected now or in the coming months into our other communication channels. Email, Voice drop, or push notifications should be utilized based on use case.
New product alert
Speaking of, to help our customers continue to diversify their messaging channels, Alpine IQ is excited to announce a brand new groundbreaking channel called Voice Drop. All of the messages come as a phone call or voicemail left by either a personally recorded memo directly in the dashboard, uploading a static audio file, or by typing in a message and letting groundbreaking AI generated synthetic voices communicate your message for you. We can generate tens of thousands of AI audio files personalized to each individual using macros. Voice Drop can be distributed to opted-in phone numbers. This includes already opted in text member subscribers, ensuring our customers don’t lose their member base while diversifying their text message risk. Not only that but you can generate messages in other languages and even accents. These messages ring from an inviting caller ID that references the store they are receiving the message from.
This channel launches Tuesday morning and will be available to all customer plans within the marketing product suite. Messages left automatically get transcribed on modern devices and even read to subscribers if they are driving or using airpod devices. You can also automatically inject discounts into customer wallets within our loyalty product suite when they get a message
Example:
Pricing update March, 2023
In March, we created a buzz in the industry by significantly reducing all pricing in the following ways:
- AIQ is the only vendor that no longer charges “per store” fees.
- We also do not charge you for new loyalty members as you obtain them via member tiers
Instead, we simply charge you for the products and services you utilize from our increasingly expanding suite of tools. Simple, easy, huge cost savings. Over 40% of our clients have already transitioned to new pricing since March. If you would like to make the change now, please reach out to us at sales@alpineiq.com and we will get you taken care of immediately. All we want to do is ensure you have the tools for success, especially in the current market.
To help you get even higher ROI and incentivise more channel transitions, we have made some recent changes to the way credits can be utilized across our suite of products and I feel humbled to be able to offer these to you on a go forward basis:
- Native App Push notifications are now: FREE
- Browser App Push notifications are now: FREE
- Two years ago we introduced email for the first time and it has gotten extremely advanced ever since, being the only provider that can offer dynamic product shopping, auto filling abandoned cart recapture campaigns, and sophisticated automation within highly regulated markets. In order to continue ground breaking product innovation for you, we are increasing the cost of email credits. However, we are only increasing our email credit rate by $0.009 (0.09 credits), making it extremely low and well below the cost of our competitors. I promise we have some amazing things coming to cover this increase and you will not be let down.
10DLC Registered Traffic
Please note that 10DLC registered traffic is unaffected. This includes loyalty wallet PIN codes, two-factor authentication (2fa codes), order notifications for e-commerce, and point-of-sale related transactional customer updates. You can also view our Alpine IQ Deep Dive for everything you need to know about text message filtration. We handle a majority of e-commerce order notifications across major vendors like Dutchie, Leafly, and more. These will all continue to operate normally. Visit our integrations page to learn more.
We are committed to being the most transparent and technically savvy vendor within your partner ecosystem. Should texting undergo any changes or experience positive developments in the future, I’ll ensure our team contacts and updates you. Please be mindful of vendors who fully rely on texting as a source of their revenue because texting filtration means the complete extinction of their business. We far too often see customers being deceived into false narratives only to return a few months later after being misled. It’s crucial that you diversify your channels to email or push as soon as possible. We will continue to offer texting as we always have but delivery will continue to be a major challenge.
Don’t hesitate to reach out for further strategy insight from our team at sales@alpineiq.com. We are here to help you with your business.
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