2103 – Transforming Business Communication through Texting with Textdrip's Philip Portman

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

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1:05with us right now it's phil portman phil you are the ceo of text drip and you were found on the web at text drip.com plus your personal website phil portman.com and phil i want to mention as well you're a fellow podcaster your podcast is success is podcast uh so if you just search for success is, you probably just say success is podcast, it'll come up, but there's a little underscore in between success is and podcast. Phil, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me, Josh. Yeah, yeah. Well, give us an overview of your work and your impact, what you do. Yeah, absolutely. So Textrip is a business texting platform.

1:43Originally created it because we found that most platforms were email centric and email just has such a better deliverability, response time, response rate. It is without a doubt the most effective form of communication, but also the most preferred form of communication for adults under 50 years old. So we said, you know what, let's make texting the center component of the CRM and how it works. So someone goes on your website and rather than put on an email drip campaign, they're put on a text drip campaign. And the response has been fantastic. We've grown significantly over the last four years.

2:20And it's been growing at a high rate, specifically in the insurance, real estate, mortgage, and solar sales industries. So that's a little bit about me. And then the success is, was during COVID, I missed a lot of the face-to-face interactions that I was having with people. And so I created a podcast where I get a chance to meet and interview some fascinating, interesting people. So yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about that in a moment. So in that, the TechStrip, are these primarily, these are transactional, maybe transactional messaging. Do you mind maybe just sharing like what the use case is for TechStrip?

3:02What are solar companies and HVAC companies and, you know, restaurants and hair salons and so forth? What are they using TechStrip for? Yeah, great question. So primarily for a few different ways. One, somebody goes on your website and requests information. If you look at your inbox right now, your email inbox, I'd ask you how many unread emails do you have? If you're like me, it's thousands of unread emails, whereas text messaging, you typically don't have any or maybe just a handful of unread messages. People are checking their messages more often. So in certain situations, like you're buying a home or you're shopping for health insurance, you want somebody that you can talk to back and forth, but you also want to do it on your own time.

3:49And that's the beauty of texting. You can have a conversation with somebody that extends the entire day when you have time. So, hey, I'm between meetings. I sent in a text message with some information. It's also great for customer service for that reason as well. On the other end, customer service agents can handle multiple customers at the same time, and they're not trying to get them off the phone quickly because they're tying up a one-to-one interaction like a phone call does. So primarily through lead generation or taking the lead through the process of closing a sale with it, as well as customer services is primarily what most of our customers are using it for.

4:29Yeah. Hey, since we have you, you obviously know quite a bit about this. There were new rules passed. I think it was at the beginning of 2024 or was it, when was it? Yeah. So it started rolling out in 2019, 2020, we started seeing more regulations and something recent just happened as of December 1st, they stopped unregistered traffic. And so let me go back in time and explain what that means. Previously, business texting was supposed to be done through 800 numbers or short codes, not through what we call 10-digit long codes. It's the type of phone number that you have on your phone right now.

5:08Well, over time, people wanted to be able to text through local numbers. Once again, a real estate agent wants a local phone number. An insurance agent wants a local phone number, and they may operate in multiple states, so they want a local phone number for each state that they're operating in. Well, they didn't really have any processes for how that was supposed to be done. And we would have situations where legitimate messages were being blocked. And then you'd have the other side where you had overseas scammers sending you messages like COVID relief fund, click here and enter your social security number or get a free Walmart gift card, right?

5:46I don't know if you've got them. All of us still have a little PTSD from election season. Oh yeah. Elections. Absolutely. gosh and unfortunately you know if you're you know if you're independent or kind of in the middle like me man you get it from both sides they all want your time attention and money you're in a swing state like oh lord non-stop absolutely so the the there's regulations there's guidelines you have to have a website you have to you know state how you're messaging how often your messaging, all of that stuff, the terms on your website. It can be very complicated. The benefit with TechStrip is we help you with all of that.

6:26We help you create your website. We help you create your messaging. We spend a one-on-one time with you on a Zoom call, helping you get set up. So start to finish your operating in as little as three days. Most of our customers take about five to seven days for their campaign to get approved and all that process. So we help you with that. We also use AI to help you get up and running with some of the content that you need for your website. If you're starting literally from nothing, if you already have a website, then you're one step ahead, but if not, we'll help you get that set up as well. Yeah.

6:58Yeah. So yeah, you, you absolutely have to play by the rules. Do you mind maybe just sharing Philip about why this is a lot more serious today than it was maybe five years ago? Yeah, absolutely. So you can get big fines for doing business texting without being registered. So there's two types of messaging traffic out there. One's called P2P or person-to-person. The other one's A2P. P2P is you and I texting each other through our cell phones. That's person-to-person conversation. If you're using it for business, you need to be using A2P. On an easy note, your traffic would get blocked if you're using the P2P network for A2P.

7:36But the carriers do have the ability to issue fines if you're using the wrong traffic. And it can be something like$500 per message sent. Yeah, we're talking big money that can be incurred with using it. So we help you, one, get registered, but also not incur those fees. If you are sending text messages on a platform where you are not paying for each message that you're sending, you are on a P2P network. So not only could you potentially be incurring a lot of fines by doing that, I would guess a large part of your traffic is being blocked. I recently had a situation where I was inviting family to a family reunion this summer.

8:29And I sent my aunt a link where she could go on and RSVP for the family reunion. And she never got it. And so I kept sending her screenshots, you know, why aren't you getting it? So I actually had to use our Textrip platform to send her the link because the carriers were blocking my own message. Happens time and time again. At Textrip, we have the highest deliverability because not only do we only send registered traffic. But we also use AI to help you avoid keywords and phrases and things like that that are going to get blocked by the networks. We help make sure that your messages get delivered.

9:04And that's really important in this day and age because you may be sending a message like an email, for instance, free, right? If you use the word free in emails, it's often blocked. Same thing in text messaging. If you use words like free in there, they're going to get blocked. Well, we help you use alternatives to that word to make sure they don't get blocked. And there's other ones too. They call them shaft violations, where if it's like hate speech about weapons, marijuana, drugs of any sort, they automatically get blocked. And so we help you kind of navigate that to make sure that when you are running a message campaign, it's going to be the most effective campaign and get you the best response rate you can possibly get out of it.

9:44This is a stab in the dark, Phil. I don't know if you as can you maybe just talk about from the consumer side of things, if we want to experience or have a better texting kind of platform or be able to do this a little bit more successfully without getting overwhelmed. You know, obviously, you know, you get messages. Most of the time they say, hey, click stop to opt out. I do like I don't know if there's any tips you could offer. Or like, you know, let's say your wife was like, oh my gosh, Phil, I'm so exhausted getting all these different texts from all these different companies and brands. Some of them, I don't recall ever giving permission to do this.

10:25That's getting cleaned up through this process right now. Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah. As of December 1st, the last of the unregistered traffic stopped. So what you were seeing previously was a lot of unregistered traffic. So we're talking two days ago. Oh my gosh. As of when we're recording this. Yes. Yes. Yeah, as of what we're recording this. I know this is probably going to come out until, but December 1st, unregistered traffic stopped. Wow. So you're going to see that slow down. And the reason why you're going to see that slow down is now it's tied to that business. That marketing is tied to that business EIN.

11:00So that single business is tied to it. If they run a high opt-out rate, a high spam percentage, their platform is going to kick, they're going to get kicked off. They're not going to be able to use it. The carriers are going to block their traffic. And not only will it block their phone number in their campaign, it will literally block it based on their business EIN. So their entire business will be prevented from sending traffic out there. Right. So you're going to see in the past there was businesses that got around that by not registering. They would just they would pay more money to send messages by sending unregistered traffic.

11:38Well, now the last of the ability to do that has been stopped as of December 1st. So you should see significantly less as a result of that. If you respond back with the opt-out stop, they should stop sending you messages. And if enough people do that, their opt-out percentage will be high and they'll no longer be able to do business. so spamming that's what i thought too is that you should always hit stop especially if you think that this is a marketer who's you know maybe being a bit unprofessional um right so if everyone cumulatively hits stop then that will raise some red flags yeah and don't add anything else to the message when you're doing it yeah don't don't don't say screw off jump in a lake go flag kite as much as you want to sometimes.

12:30So we have something different in TechStrip where we actually understand the intent of an opt-out. And that's going to be important for next year because there's some policies changing that are saying that if your customers opt out in any fashion, you need to follow those rules. Well, we already have that built in. We trained our own AI model, specifically trained inside TechStrip that understands an opt-out. It understands stop effing texting me, right? It understands, take me off your list or whatever those phrases are, and it'll automatically opt out as a result of that. But most platforms are keyword specific, and the carriers are also keyword specific.

13:10The carriers look for words like stop, unsubscribe, and so on and so forth. So don't add anything else to it. If you want to opt out, use just that keyword. If they're a 10 DLC registered campaign, they'll have the opt-out phrase at the end of the message. Otherwise, the carrier ones that are kind of generic are stop and unsubscribe. But don't add anything else. Don't say stop texting me. Just say stop. Okay. So we've obviously been talking about texting and best practices and so forth. But Textrip.com, do you mind maybe sharing again how Textrip might compare to other text messaging platforms?

13:52And you've already been talking about some of the feature sets as we've just simply been talking about best practices. But, you know, included with that, maybe you could talk a little bit about how it works in terms of like the offer or the pricing, that sort of thing. Because this looks fairly accessible. Yeah, absolutely. So if you want to try out Textrip, first and foremost, if you say you listen to this podcast, all you got to do is message our customer service team and tell them you listen to this podcast, and we will give you 60 days and 3 ,000 credits completely free to try it out. That's how confident we are that you will absolutely love this platform, and it will change your entire sales process.

14:34But the major differentiator between us are two parts. One, we have the best deliverability in the industry. So we make sure that if you're sending out messages that they're getting to the phone. A lot of people advertise deliverability because they're sending your messages out and they're saying, look, we did our end. We sent it out. It's being delivered. We take it a step further and we request a delivery receipt from the carriers. So we're not just sending it out saying, okay, yeah, we delivered it. we've got a 98 % deliverability because we sent it out. No, we're waiting for that delivery receipt to come back to say, did that actually go through or not?

15:16And then if it didn't go through, why? And then on the back end, we're using analytics to determine why and then help make sure that that doesn't get blocked again in the future. So first and foremost, we are incredibly passionate about your deliverability. If we're offering a service, we want to be the absolute best at it. And we understand it inside and out. So not only do we have the best deliverability, We also have the best deliverability metrics, which you can see inside your platform. Everything from your spam ratings, what's getting delivered, what's getting blocked, and so on and so forth.

15:44The second thing that any company that I want to be a part of is going to have in place is phenomenal customer service. If you just Google TechStrip, you'll see five-star reviews all over anywhere you look out there. And that's because we have award-winning customer service. We respond to you in less than 20 seconds with a real human being. Not only that, but you're not watching a video. You're doing a Zoom presentation with a live person that's going through your account, showing you how it works, getting your campaign set up for your specific industry based on what we know that works. So when we get you set up, you have a campaign that you know works, you know how to work our platform and you have award-winning customer service at your fingertips the entire way.

16:35Beyond that, our messaging is 1.2 cents per message on the outbound. We don't charge anything for the inbound. Most of the time, our platform, there's three different tiers, but the one that most people choose is$34.99 a month. So it's incredibly affordable,$34.99 a month to get onto our platform with all of our different bells and whistles. We have a beautiful mobile app that works the way that a mobile app should. You can have 49 different phone numbers. So if you want to operate in multiple states, you can have multiple phone numbers that you operate through it. And like I said, for your guests listening to this, we do 60 days free trial to test it out.

17:16There's never any contracts. We're month to month because we know that when you get on it, you're going to absolutely love our platform. Yeah. Phil, how do they get that offer? Yeah. So when they go on, just message that they listen to this show. And we'll give them the offer. Nice. Very cool. Yeah. I mean, just FYI, like I'm looking at your SMS pricing comparison. Like if you're sending 5 ,000 messages at 0.012 cents a piece, it's 60 bucks. That's right. So, you know, just if you know you're sending volume, you can buy gift cards in advance. You can pre-purchase the pricing and then it drops it to less than one cent per message.

18:05Most platforms you're seeing out there are three to four times that they're three and a half to four cents per message. Unless you're purchasing large volume, we give that pricing to any customer the one point two cents. And then if you spend typically over$100 a month on messaging, you get a huge break and you can get as low as 0.98 cents per message, which is unheard of in the industry. Yeah. Awesome. Textdrip.com. Your website as well as philportman.com for folks that want to connect with you personally. And in your podcast app, if you're interested in, if you like this show, you probably like Success Is.

18:48And again, that podcast is just success is underscore podcast. Phil Portman, CEO of Textdrip, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Josh. And thank you for everyone for listening.

19:06Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

19:47I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

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