Marketing

Company Name: Paradox Founder Name(s): Aaron Matos LinkedIn: Paradox Company Page Industry: Talent Acquisition Technology Stage/Funding: Series C, $200 Million USD Location: Scottsdale, Arizona This is a post in a series of interviews with startup founders who have worked with Twilio Ventures. Twilio Ventures invests in companies building tomorrow’s solutions for developers and customer engagement applications. We had the pleasure of working with Aaron Matos on their startup, Paradox. Describe Paradox’s startup journey in 160 characters or less (the original length of a text message) Paradox is a leading conversational AI innovator, helping 700+ global clients get recruiting and HR work done faster through frictionless experiences people love. What does Paradox mean and/or how did it originate? We’ve always believed that recruiting is a people game – and if you get the people thing right, you can build teams that change the world. The problem, however, is that recruiting at most organizations is plagued by software, systems, and processes that slow things down and create bad experiences for candidates, recruiters, and managers. The net result: Inefficiencies that hurt hiring productivity and make companies less competitive for the best candidates on the market. We’re obsessed with the idea that conversational AI – or what we sometimes call “assistive intelligence” – can transform that paradigm by fundamentally transforming how we think about the core systems that drive enterprise hiring (ATS, CRM, the career site, etc.). We see a future where enterprise software feels invisible and conversational experiences become the new UI – automating repetitive tasks to help people spend more time with people, not software. That’s ultimately the mission that influenced our name — the paradoxical idea that we can create software that helps us spend less time... with software. What have you enjoyed most about building Paradox? For us, it’s all about building an amazing team that’s driven by helping our clients drive real results. One of our values is that we measure client success in hugs. For some, that’s a weird thing to say, but we take it to heart. We don’t celebrate until we see a client achieve the business impact they set out to achieve when they partnered with Paradox. When a client goes live and they first start to see the impact of their transformation, that’s what we live for. When they see candidates chat with their assistant, thank them for being helpful, schedule an interview in seconds (and in some cases get hired that same day) – their eyes light up, and you can really see them grasp how this could change the way they hire forever. What is one decision you made building Paradox that you would make differently today? I don’t worry too much about what we could have done differently. I worry about what we can do today that will make us better tomorrow. Some of that comes from learning from previous mistakes, but we try to think more practically with a growth mindset. We take responsibility for our successes and failures, and our curiosity and perseverance drive us every day. I could second guess a lot of things we’ve done, but I’m not sure it’s worth wondering what I would’ve done differently in that exact moment. It’s easy to play revisionist history, but I’m more focused on what we can learn from the decisions we did make and how we can use that to become better professionals and people. What should potential customers know that is unique about Paradox? We’re a product and a client-focused company first – one that’s driven by how we can build things that help our clients solve real business challenges. We’re not about flash or buzzwords, or promoting our own success. We’re obsessed with truly transforming the industry and organizations we serve. We do believe we bring a new lens and frame to enterprise recruiting and HR technology that’s helping our clients completely re-think what’s possible, and that frame centers around some key pillars: Transform the experience: We believe it’s possible to deliver true consumer-like software experiences in hiring, onboarding, and employee engagement – experiences that differentiate against legacy systems by fully embracing a mobile-first, conversational-led philosophy every step of the way. Hire faster with less work: Paradox helps eliminate bottlenecks and friction in the process, automating work people might’ve otherwise needed to do – giving time back to recruiters and getting candidates through the process faster. By returning time to hiring teams and managers, we’re helping clients reallocate headcount to focus on higher-value work. Convert more to spend less: Most organizations spend a ton of money to attract candidates — only to send them through traditional enterprise ATS systems that weren’t built around experience or conversion. By removing friction and building the experience around conversational experiences, we can help increase candidate conversion to reduce ad spend and create immediate value. How are you building on Twilio? E.g., how do you use Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Verify, etc. to communicate with your customers? We built on Twilio from the earliest prototype because of its scalable model and ease of use. We’ve always been a messaging-first platform, using SMS as the primary channel for communicating about a job. As our platform has expanded globally, Twilio was an obvious partner to use for SMS, and as our platform demanded more services such as Verify and video, audio and other services, Twilio has always been the first choice for us. Our business is built on the reliability and scalability of Twilio, so we were honored to have Twilio join us as an investor in our Series C fundraise as well. Why did you select Twilio Ventures as an investor? As we did our Series C, we wanted to continue our strategy of getting “smart money” around the table. Along with a fantastic coalition of financial investors, we were honored to have Workday Ventures and Twilio Ventures join as investors. Given our success building with Twilio and how core it is to our business, being closer with Twilio made all the sense in the world. How has Paradox benefited from partnering with Twilio? As a Twilio Ventures company, we have been able to get access to executives, understand future initiatives, and participate in the strategic direction of Twilio that’s important to us. We fully believe that great partnerships start with the shared goal of doing right by the client and serving their needs first. Twilio has shared in that philosophy and our partnership allows us to do more to further that mission together. Thank you for reading. If you would like to read more Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight interviews and learn how others build, prototype, and demo on Twilio, please check out the series of articles here. For questions about Twilio Startup Labs or to learn how to get involved, please contact Frank Y. Owusu at fyawowusu@twilio.com. To find out more about how Twilio supports Startups, check out Grow with Twilio.

Company Name: Termii Inc Founder Name(s): Gbolade Emmanuel LinkedIn: Termii Company Page Industry: CPaaS, Communications Platform as a Service Stage/Funding: Termii has raised $3.65m funding to fuel customer engagement innovation in Africa. Location: San Jose, Lagos & Abidjan This is a post in a series of interviews with startup founders who have worked with Twilio Startup Labs, a program for developers at early-stage startups to learn how to build, prototype, and demo on Twilio. We had the pleasure of working with Gbolade Emmanuel on their startup, Termii. Describe your company (Startup) journey in 160 characters or less (the original length of a text message) Termii: Nigerian startup founded in 2017, offers messaging and communication solutions for businesses in Africa. Why did you start your company? Termii was founded to address the need for effective communication solutions in Africa and facilitate business growth in the region. How are you building on Twilio? E.g., how do you use email, SMS, WhatsApp, Verify, etc. to communicate with your customers? Termii has leveraged Twilio's API to send SMS messages to customers in the US, whether for marketing campaigns, notifications, or tokens. This would enable businesses using Termii to reach customers via text messages. What has the benefit or commercial impact been for your business since using Twilio? By leveraging Twilio SMS services, Termii has recorded Improved Customer Engagement which has translated into increased sales and brand awareness. Another benefit has been the Global Reach that Twilio offers that has enabled businesses like Termii to expand their reach across the shores of Africa and serve a wider customer base By building on Twilio, what has the impact been for your customers? By building on Twilio, Termii has empowered our customers with reliable and scalable messaging solutions, enhancing their communication and customer engagement, ultimately driving business success. Have you enjoyed Twilio Startup Labs? And if so, why? Termii has enjoyed Twilio Startup Labs as it has given us access to Twilio's Communication Platform which is valuable for startups like ours looking to build messaging, voice, and video capabilities into our applications. Do you have a recording of your DEMO and how you are using Twilio that you would like to share below? What is the best piece of advice you would give to founders who are looking to build on Twilio? Founders should focus on creating a clear and efficient messaging strategy using Twilio, tailor it to their target audience, and continually adapt to evolving customer preferences and technology trends for long-term success. What excites you most about being a founder? Being a founder at Termii is exciting because it provides the opportunity to create something significant, contribute to the betterment of society, and be a part of a dynamic and ever-evolving journey. It's a challenging and rewarding experience that I am passionate about. Thank you for reading. If you would like to read more Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight interviews and learn how others build, prototype, and demo on Twilio, please check out the series of articles here. For questions about Twilio Startup Labs or to learn how to get involved, please contact Frank Y. Owusu at fyawowusu@twilio.com. To find out more about how Twilio supports Startups, check out Grow with Twilio.

Company Name: Postscript.io Founder Name(s): Adam Turner, Colin Turner, and Alex Beller LinkedIn: Postcript.io Company Page Industry: Talent Acquisition Technology Stage/Funding: Series C, $65 million USD Location: Fully Remote This is a post in a series of interviews with startup founders who have worked with Twilio Ventures. Twilio Ventures invests in companies building tomorrow’s solutions for developers and customer engagement applications. We had the pleasure of working with Adam Turner, Colin Turner, and Alex Beller on their startup, Postcript.io. Describe Postscript’s startup journey in 160 characters or less (the original length of a text message) Postscript serves 12,000+ Shopify Merchants by making SMS their #1 revenue channel. 230+ folks, fully remote, delivering best in class service and strategy. What does Postscript mean and/or how did it originate? We chose the name Postscript for a few reasons: A “PS” at the end of a note or letter is friendly, relatable & casual. A Postscript is something you might add in a letter to a friend. We wanted our communications platform to have that warm, friendly feel, which our branding matches if you go to our site. We’re in marketing automation, so we thought that the “scripting” part was nice Abbreviating with “PS” is fun What have you enjoyed most about building Postscript? I’ve never learned so much so quickly. That pace of growth has been unrelenting, which has pushed the team to our limits in the best ways possible. We wouldn’t have it any other way! Most importantly, though, we’ve been able to make a tremendous impact for our customers. We’ve driven billions of dollars of e-commerce transactions that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. We’ve brought hundreds of millions of customers in deeper connection with brands that they love, how cool is that?! What is one decision you made building Postscript that you would make differently today? I would have hired more people earlier. There are benefits that compound with early employees, especially ones that are able to persevere through all the growth – this layer acts as a structural foundation for future hiring by becoming culture carriers, knowledge centres, recruiters, onboarding buddies, interviewing resources etc. Our second stage of hiring was much larger than our first, which created a relative imbalance because our foundation was smaller than it could have been. This caused more pain than it needed to, and if we had hired folks earlier we could have avoided some of that pain. What should potential customers know that is unique about Postscript? Our suite of products (SMS Marketing, SMS Sales, Fondue CashBack) will make you the most money out of any provider, hands down. Our products and expertise for list growth, segmentation, targeting, and personalization result in merchants collecting and monetizing subscribers at the highest possible rate; We also believe in the power of using SMS for 1:1 conversations. From being able to manually respond, flexibly automate responses or have a team of expert sales associates reply back, Postscript is making SMS more human; We have a strong compliance first approach to the channel and proactively adding features and tools as both legal and industry requirements change; We are all-in on SMS and deliver strategies and product innovations to help make SMS the #1 revenue channel for ecommerce merchants; By working closely with Twilio as a partner, and as our exclusive global customer engagement platform, we are able to work closely with the carriers to help shape the future of industry requirements balancing the needs of consumers with the complexities of support SHAFT adjacent verticals like alcohol. How are you building on Twilio? E.g. How do you use Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Verify etc. to communicate with your customers? We use Twilio's APIs for programmable SMS and conversation management to power our e-commerce SMS marketing platform for over 12,000 Shopify merchants. Twilio is Postscript’s exclusive global customer engagement platform. Why did you select Twilio Ventures as an investor? Twilio has been with us since I began developing the product on Day 1. It’s been incredibly rewarding to grow into a success story of theirs from developer to strategic partner. Twilio has seen our growth and vision for what the channel can be for merchants, and it feels great to be so aligned with a commercial partner in finding success for our customers. How has Postscript benefited from partnering with Twilio? Our close partnership with Twilio has helped Postscript unlock much higher throughput for our customers which is super important during peak sending times like BFCM. There are a lot of other benefits to us in being able to work closely with Twilio on larger topics like how the carriers view alcohol and help advocate on behalf of merchants. We are also able to resolve issues with deliverability a lot faster because of our extremely close relationship with Twilio. Screenshots Thank you for reading. If you would like to read more Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight interviews and learn how others build, prototype, and demo on Twilio, please check out the series of articles here. For questions about Twilio Startup Labs or to learn how to get involved, please contact Frank Y. Owusu at fyawowusu@twilio.com. To find out more about how Twilio supports Startups, check out Grow with Twilio.

When you think of “scary communication,” you’re probably thinking of fraud and phishing. But what if there were something more macabre on the other end of the line? That’s what horror movies have been exploring for decades, and you might be surprised by how many scary films are based on calls and other forms of communication. Spooky season is upon us, so get in the Halloween spirit with these communication-based horror and thriller flicks that are sure to make your spine tingle. 1. “Scream” (1996) “Do you like scary movies?” If you do, you probably recognize this iconic line delivered by Ghostface, the murderer persona in the “Scream” film saga. In the opening scene, Ghostface terrorizes a high school student (Drew Barrymore) with a taunting phone call where they demand that she answer questions about horror movies correctly to save her boyfriend, who is restrained on her patio. The rest, as they say, is horror canon history. 2. “The Call” (2013) In this thriller, a 9-1-1 operator receives a phone call from a girl who has been kidnapped by a serial killer. With the girl locked in the trunk of the kidnapper’s car, every moment matters. The operator, played by Halle Berry, is determined to save her and coaches her on how to draw attention to the car and signal her location to the police. In real life, Twilio enables first responders to get to the scene faster and with better information through a partnership with First Due. Read their story. 3. “When a Stranger Calls” (1979, 2006) Sometimes a phone call can be a lifeline. Other times, it can kick off a string of terrifying events. In “When a stranger calls,” teenage babysitter Jill picks up the phone and hears a mysterious voice asking if she has checked on the children lately. She dismisses the call as a joke, but things take a frightening turn when the phone rings again, and again, and again. When she contacts police and traces the call, she learns they’re coming from inside the house. If only they had technology like AI-powered Voice Intelligence, they could have analyzed data about the mysterious caller—saving Jill from a lengthy ordeal that was reprised in a sequel. 4. “Ring” (1998, also titled “Ringu”) A reporter investigates a disturbing video with an even more disturbing urban legend: anyone who watches it dies seven days later. The reporter watches the video, which contains seemingly random images and a screeching sound. She then sees an apparition and gets a phone call with the same screeching sounds, signaling her impending death—as if we needed any more reason to dread answering a phone call from an unknown phone number. You may be more familiar with the 2002 American remake, “The Ring,” which is arguably equally chilling. 5. “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” (2022) Craig experiences the dark side of modern connectivity when he starts receiving text messages from the other side. After his friend and mentor Mr. Harrigan dies, Craig continues to call and leave messages when he needs help. What he thought would be a shout into the void returns a supernatural response when Mr. Harrigan sends text messages back. We find this very impressive, because while Twilio can deliver text messages in 180+ countries, we can’t process SMS from the other side (yet!). 6. “The Net” (1995) A reclusive systems analyst whose life revolves around digital interactions realizes something is very wrong when two friends die suddenly. What she doesn’t is know that a floppy disk she received put a bullseye on her back. After being targeted with an attempted hit and having her identity erased, she desperately chats online with a fellow hacker who helps her determine the disk is connected to cybercriminals who will do anything to get it back. 7. “Chain Letter” (2010) How many emails are unread in your inbox? What if one of them could change your life—or end it? “Chain Letter” shows exactly how much is at stake in your inbox when high schoolers receive an email chain letter with instructions to forward it to five recipients—or else die. When some circulate the email and others ignore it, they realize how serious the threats are. At Twilio SendGrid, we also take email very seriously and try our best to keep recipients’ inboxes free of spam and unwanted evil chain letters. 8. “Cry Wolf” (2005) In “Cry Wolf,” things get tense when a prep school student gets an instant message from a “killer” he and his friends created. Wolf is the fictional serial killer they imagined and then introduced to their entire school body in an anonymous email. But when a person matching Wolf’s description shows up and attacks the students one by one, they aren’t sure who is telling the truth or what’s real anymore. 9. “Pulse” (2001, original title “Kairo”) After the death of their friend Taguchi, a group of coworkers discovers a computer disk containing a haunting image in his house. The friends begin to receive calls where a distorted voice pleads “help me,” then they find the same haunting image from the computer disk on their phones. Things get spooky as they investigate the contents of the image and the forbidden rooms that appear in the homes of the dead. You may also know the 2005 American remake of the same name. 10. “Host” (2020) A group of friends holds a weekly video call to stay in touch during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Haley hires a medium to attend one of the video calls and lead the group in a seance. But not all the friends take the seance seriously—until strange things start to happen. Unexplainable noises and apparitions make it clear that they’ve invited an unfriendly presence into their call. 11. “The Black Phone” (2021) A serial child abductor and murderer called “The Grabber” has been terrorizing a Denver suburb. They abduct Finney, who awakens in a soundproofed basement that has a black rotary phone on the wall. The phone is disconnected, but Finney hears it ring. When he answers the call, Finney finds that previous inhabitants of the basement are on the other side of the line. 12. “Dial M for Murder” (1954) Tony, a retired tennis player, discovers that his wealthy wife Margot is having an affair. He plots to blackmail an old acquaintance into murdering Margot to inherit her fortune, fearing that a divorce would leave him with nothing. The murder plot hinges on a well-timed phone call, but it doesn’t go as Tony expected. 13. “One Missed Call” (2008) Imagine checking a voicemail from your friend only to discover that it’s actually a message from yourself… from the future. The victims in “One Missed Call” receive ominous voice messages only to realize the timestamp of the message is actually the moment when they will die. Maybe things would’ve gone differently if they forwarded their voicemails to email so they could screen the messages and trace them back to the sender. Create spooky phone calls of your own with Twilio Ready to get in on the spooky season fun? If you know how to code (at least a little), you can make a spooky phone call app with this tutorial using Twilio Voice and Amazon Polly. If you don’t know how to code, you can build an app with Studio following the steps in this tutorial. When you sign up for a new account, you can start using Twilio for free (with $15 in credits). We can’t promise to keep you safe from haunted messages or calls from beyond, but if you need to streamline your business' communication channels and engage customers, Twilio has your back. Twilio is the industry-leading platform that powers your customer engagement. With communication solutions for every stage of the customer journey and AI features that help you make the most of customer data, Twilio makes communicating a little less scary.

How successfully are your marketing efforts reaching customers? One of the best ways to gauge this is through your customer acquisition costs (CAC), which can tell you a lot about how your marketing efforts perform with your target demographic. While retaining existing customers is also a great way to sustain company progress throughout the year, gaining new customers is necessary for meaningful growth. Without new customers, any company will stagnate. However, growing your customer base is not only challenging but also expensive. Here, we'll learn about CAC and how to use this metric to develop low-cost solutions to bring on new customers without straining your budget. What is customer acquisition cost? Customer acquisition cost refers to the expenses associated with acquiring a new customer. This includes everything from your marketing personnel's salaries to your budget for various advertising categories, such as social media marketing, Google Ads, and billboards. Did you recently hire someone in your marketing department or spend $3,000 to purchase a brand-new laptop for your social media manager? You must include these when calculating CAC.    How do you calculate CAC? While many expenses fall under the customer acquisition costs heading, calculating your overall cost is necessary to understand how they affect your business. To see how much you pay to acquire each customer, add the costs of your marketing efforts, then divide that number by the total number of customers acquired. CAC = total marketing cost / total number of customers acquired For example, say that between salaries, office space, ad spend, equipment, and overall office costs, you spend $250,000 per year on marketing. In that year, your company acquired 2,500 new customers. In that case, your cost to acquire each customer is $100. If each customer spends well over $100 on your products or services, your CAC is good. However, if each customer spends under $100, your CAC metric might indicate a problem for you to address.  Top 9 tips to reduce CAC The following nine tips will help you reduce CAC, improve the customer experience for new and existing customers, and make your company more resilient to changing demands. 1. Personalize your marketing efforts  One of the biggest marketing mistakes that businesses can make is to be too general. Even if you have a niche product, it's unlikely that customers will fall into only one demographic. Generic marketing campaigns that lack personalization will struggle to attract (and retain) customers. In fact, 75% of Gen Z customers will leave a brand that doesn't personalize their experience. To successfully personalize your marketing and customer experiences, you need high-quality first-party data—data that comes directly from customer interaction with your business. Without it, it's difficult to segment your audience effectively and understand how your customers found you.  Getting quality data through a customer data platform can help ensure more personalized and strategic marketing. 2. Focus on your existing customers  It sounds counterintuitive, but focusing on your existing customers lowers CAC overall. Taking steps to improve customer retention can reduce your overall marketing costs, which lowers your customer acquisition costs. Here are two ways to tackle common customer challenges to improve your existing customers' experience: Safeguard their data privacy: Reassure customers that you prioritize their privacy to increase their confidence and trust in your business. Reward loyalty: Consider the fact that 75% of consumers would switch brands if they discovered one with a superior loyalty program. If you don’t have a loyalty program in place, this is an excellent reminder that customers reward brands that reward their loyalty.   3. Build a stronger community  Cultivating a robust customer community can offer meaningful benefits to businesses looking to lower CAC. Creating a sense of belonging and encouraging engagement within a company's customer base provides ongoing opportunities for organic advocacy.  Satisfied customers who feel connected to the community are more likely to share positive experiences of the brand, recommend products or services, and offer personal testimonials. These organic endorsements carry much more credibility than any marketing campaign and can lead to increased referrals, reducing your overall customer acquisition costs. Additionally, having a responsive and engaged customer community can provide valuable insights into consumer preferences and pain points. This real-time feedback allows businesses to fine-tune and further personalize marketing efforts. As a result, conversion rates improve, lowering your cost per acquisition. 4. Retarget customers  Sometimes, customers just need another nudge to complete a desired action. For example, they browse your site but don’t make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter. Retargeting ads can help you give these would-be customers the push they need to convert. These ads tend to be cheaper than prospecting ads—those targeting brand-new customers—and can yield higher comparable conversion rates. That’s because retargeting focuses on a narrower audience and warmer leads, which can help you use your resources more efficiently. This precision leads to a reduction in CAC, making your marketing budget more cost-effective. However, this strategy only works if a high number of people visit your website and a lower number takes the desired action. Better user experience metrics can help you get a more accurate read on these numbers and give you better data to use in retargeted ads. 5. Create value with great content  Content marketing is an incredibly valuable resource that can boost your company profile and deepen relationships with customers. Depending on your audience, you can publish blog posts on your website or focus your efforts on social media. Whichever platform you use, publishing dynamic and interesting content regularly helps build your brand’s social profile, attracting and engaging potential customers. When you generate interesting content consistently, you establish your brand as an authoritative resource within your industry, building trust and credibility with existing and future customers. This increased visibility also drives organic traffic to your website or social media accounts, which can reduce your need for paid ads and lower your overall marketing spend.  6. Try A/B testing  If you spend more money than expected without the results desired, your current message isn’t likely resonating with the intended audience. In this situation, A/B testing can offer valuable insights into your audience's preferences. A/B testing is a process where you make minor changes to messaging, layout, calls to action, and other elements systematically to determine which version performs better. Harnessing a platform like Twilio Flex that offers access to zero-party data—data that customers share with your organization—allows you to be even more specific in creating customer cohorts, which can shape the results more accurately.    Choosing this data-driven approach allows you to optimize your marketing efforts by focusing on what works, enabling you to allocate your budget more efficiently. 7. Experiment with different types of advertising It’s easy for marketers to stick with the familiar instead of branching out and trying new things. Unfortunately, this can lead to rising ad costs based on market conditions while results stagnate. Plus, seeing ads from the same companies in the same locations can lead to ad fatigue, which further decreases the return on investment (ROI) from your current ad spend. Instead, to boost marketing ROI, focus on experimenting with different types of advertising. For example, if you’ve traditionally opted for Facebook and Instagram ads, try TikTok. If you’ve only used social media, branch out by exploring emerging avenues, like native advertising, partnership deals, or newsletter and podcast sponsorship. Each platform offers unique advantages and reaches different segments of your target audience. By diversifying your advertising portfolio, you not only reduce the risk of ad fatigue but also increase your chances of finding the most cost-effective channels for customer acquisition. Just be sure to monitor and analyze the performance of these new channels continuously to ensure your strategies work as expected. This flexibility in advertising strategy can be instrumental in lowering CAC and achieving better results in the long run. 8. Start an affiliate marketing program  How many customers do you bring into your business through referrals? If the number is low, it may be time to explore an affiliate marketing program. This type of marketing uses affiliates to raise brand awareness in exchange for a commission on sales. Sometimes, affiliate marketing involves influencers and other paid social media figures, but not in every situation. While companies get to dictate ad cost, affiliate marketing allows them to specifically allocate spend to acquire a new customer. This creates a more predictable outcome while increasing positive awareness of your brand, both of which can help lower CAC. 9. Offer a more seamless experience Think about your customer experience from your customers' point of view. Does your current system require customers to jump through hoops to place an order or speak to a customer service agent? This friction can negatively impact your customer experience, affecting sales and increasing customer acquisition costs. Focusing on omnichannel engagement can make it easier for customers to navigate your content, reach a human faster, or place an order when they’re in a hurry. Investing in more user-friendly interfaces, responsive web design, and a more frictionless contact center experience isn’t just a long-term growth strategy—it can also make a meaningful difference in customer acquisition and retention.   Lower customer acquisition costs with Twilio Flex The tips we offered above are crucial to helping you lower your customer acquisition costs, but marketing is just the first step. Your contact center needs to be ready to support your new customers once they arrive. We can help. Twilio Flex is a flexible, comprehensive solution that helps businesses streamline customer engagement, enabling customers to connect with your business more efficiently. By optimizing customer interactions with tools like live chat, you can improve retention while lowering CAC in the long run. Discover how Flex can help you start your journey to more cost-effective customer acquisition.

Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single news outlet or check your inbox without seeing an article about AI and how it’s changing the world (for better or worse). Regardless of the stance, there’s no denying this fast-moving technology is changing every aspect of life from business to personal. At Twilio, we typically lean toward early adoption of the latest in innovation. In our adoption, we’re forced to ask questions about the safety of AI for our customers. How can we better interface with the latest technology and improve the experience for our customers and in turn, their customers? Is it possible for us to do so safely, protecting your data while also pushing that innovation forward?  In this blog, we’ll shed some clarity to the questions above as we outline seven different ways to use AI to improve, safeguard, personalize (and more) your marketing campaigns as this technology continues to evolve.  1. Enhance marketing automation  AI's potential for automation is a game-changer, especially in marketing. It allows for smarter customer communication, loyalty-building, and personalization. By using real-time data to improve the customer experience, AI-powered automation provides the tools needed to continually refine those experiences. Here are three ways to use AI for marketing automation.  Facilitate chatbot communications  One of the key benefits of AI marketing automation is its ability to facilitate seamless interactions between marketers and customers using existing customer data to provide useful, intelligent feedback. And a great way to facilitate these interactions? Chatbots. Chances are, if you’ve dealt with one recently, it probably harnessed some level of AI. These bots engage in real-time, offering personalized recommendations and resolving queries efficiently. An example of this is Dialpad. By creating create a unified customer view using real-time data, their AI chatbot increased sign-up completions by 25%. Implement smarter loyalty programs  AI can also empower customers by making brand loyalty a natural part of their customer journey. Traditionally, loyalty programs require customers to actively participate by accumulating points or coupons. By leveraging customer data, AI algorithms can identify loyal customers and automatically reward them with personalized offers or exclusive benefits. This automation simplifies the loyalty process, making it effortless for customers to stay engaged with a brand, and fostering stronger customer retention. Tailor recommendations  AI can provide customized product suggestions based on individual preferences, saving customers time and effort in making choices. As an example, AI chatbot MAIA on luxury resale site Hardly Ever Worn It allows users to type in what they want (such as “I want to look like Romy, from ‘Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,’” or “I need something to wear on a yacht in Croatia in August”) and it’ll pull all product on the site that Romy might wear or what you’d consider wearing on a yacht in Europe. Automation like this saves the potential customer time and energy they might otherwise spend browsing through pages of products online or dealing with unorganized racks or an overzealous sales associate in person. By leveraging AI, you can automate various marketing tasks, making your operations more efficient and customer-centric. 2. Hyper-personalize customer experiences Personalization has proven to be a key driver in customer satisfaction and loyalty, with the average consumer expecting a certain level of personalization to continue doing business with your brand. With AI algorithms, companies can use existing customer data to generate more meaningful insights and predict preferences and behaviors. Here are a couple of ways AI can create more meaningful personalization for your business. Use real-time data for better product recommendations We already discussed MAIA, the AI-powered chatbot that can automatically pull products from across the Hardly Ever Worn It site with one question from a potential customer. AI-powered recommendation engines like this one, or in “Recommended for you" sections on platforms like Netflix or Spotify, are reliant on current and comprehensive customer data. By using real-time internal data such as product supply, popularity, and price, as well as external data like customer browsing history and previous purchases, AI can identify patterns. This enables it to make product or service suggestions that are most relevant to the individual user's preferences and needs.  Use real-time customer interactions to create dynamic content generation AI can also dynamically customize content to suit individual customer segments. Having a robust dataset is crucial for this to work effectively. By analyzing data like customer behavior, preferences, and demographics, AI can generate tailored content variations for these different segments. For instance, if a customer frequently reads about sustainable fashion or filters their search for eco-friendly products, the website can instantly adapt to highlight its sustainability initiatives and showcase environmentally-friendly options. This personalized approach isn't confined to website interactions. It can extend into your email marketing efforts. For example, if a customer has read several articles about sustainability and made an eco-friendly purchase, you could follow up with an email campaign that includes personalized subject lines, curated content, and product recommendations related to sustainability. This approach generally results in higher email open, click-through, and conversion rates. By leveraging AI in these ways, you can make your customer experience more personalized, driving higher satisfaction and long-term loyalty. 3. Segment better, faster, and stronger Customer segmentation is key for effective messaging and improving marketing ROI. Automating this with AI offers the benefits of quick, accurate data analysis for precise segmentation and optimized ad campaigns. Here's how AI can boost your marketing efforts: Build meaningful customer personas Use technology like Twilio Engage to gather essential data for your AI algorithms. It's efficient at consolidating information like transactions and social media activity. Once you have this data, your AI can categorize it into initial segments based on behavioral patterns. For example, a gym could create customer categories like "weight-loss programs," "strength trainers," and "early birds," tailoring marketing strategies accordingly. Reach those personas with hyper-targeted ads Once you've identified customer personas, AI can help you create targeted ads on platforms like Google and social media. Optimize your campaigns based on real-time data and customer responses. Continuous A/B testing and persona updates are crucial for increasing engagement and conversions over time. AI-powered segmentation is key to precise targeting and can significantly improve your advertising strategy. Keep an eye out for our "Target and Optimize Ads" section below for more insights. 4. Settle the (lead) score Traditionally, marketing teams score leads based on activities like content downloads or demo requests. These activities are assigned a value, and when a lead accumulates enough points, it's passed to sales. AI enhances this system by tracking all user interactions with your brand and comparing this data to your best customers. This enables quicker, more accurate lead scoring, helping your sales team engage prospects in a more timely manner. AI-based lead scoring also guides your marketing strategies. By identifying high-intent customers, you can create targeted campaigns to secure their business and loyalty. 5. AI copywriting AI can also help marketers create copy in a fraction of the time. Instead of starting with an intimidatingly blank document, marketers can use AI to create outlines, rough drafts, and polished final drafts of:  Ads Emails SMS messages Blog posts Landing pages Social media posts Product descriptions Webpages The quality of AI-generated copy relies on the prompts you provide, so be specific about what you need, including tone and content. It's important to review AI-generated material for accuracy and brand consistency. While the first draft may not be perfect, AI can provide a strong starting point, especially for those who find writing from scratch daunting. This tool can make you a more productive writer. 6. Understand tone, intent, and emotions in messaging AI can use natural language processing (NLP) to gauge the tone of messages about your brand. Sentiment analysis can provide insights into how your brand is perceived, eliminating the need for manual scans of various media channels. Here's how it can be useful: Measure customer sentiment AI analyzes customer reviews and social posts to gauge their feelings about your products. This can help you identify upselling opportunities or areas needing attention, making manual reviews unnecessary. This can help your brand:  Identify and address user complaints quickly to improve customer satisfaction Understand how customers feel after a big announcement or product release Learn where your business delights customers Determine key areas of growth for your business Track market sentiment Your business can also use AI to analyze how media outlets, forums, and blogs talk about your business. Any negative media coverage can help your business identify areas of opportunity and take immediate action before these issues affect your brand’s reputation. Of course, any positive coverage can help your business learn what works and help you refine your messaging to emphasize these strengths.  Together, tracking positive and negative market sentiment can: Help with brand monitoring Direct your business’ PR strategy Analyze where your business succeeds Identify areas where your company can grow 7. Target and optimize ads With increasing customer acquisition costs and the end of third-party cookies, AI can help optimize ad performance and target audiences more effectively. Leverage look-alike audiences Do you know what your ideal buyer looks like? Look-alike audiences let you target users similar to your top customers. AI can analyze your customer data to identify key accounts, helping you target the right audiences at the right time to boost conversion rates. Experiment with audience exclusion Targeting the right users is only half of advertising. Ensuring you don’t target the wrong users is the other half. With AI, your business can identify audiences you don’t want to serve your ads to, whether current customers, users who have already converted, users from a specific location, or unqualified leads. AI can also help build and maintain exclusion audiences that you can sync directly to your downstream ad platforms. Excluding these users from your ads can optimize your ad budget and ensure that your business only spends money serving your ads to qualified prospects.  Unlock better ROI with retargeting With cookies going away in 2024, advertisers need new ways to recognize audience behavioral patterns and to use this data to serve ads to high-intent users at the right time. AI helps sift through your first-party data to identify customers who have shown interest but haven't converted. Be it an abandoned cart or an uncompleted signup, AI allows you to retarget these users effectively, encouraging them to engage further with your brand. Superpower your marketing strategy with AI There are two ways to view AI. You can fear and avoid it, wondering about its power but never trying to understand it. Or you can work to see the value it provides your business and educate yourself on how it can assist your company to work smarter, not harder. Embrace its potential to make your business more efficient. Onboarding is key: align your customer data well, as AI's effectiveness relies on good data.

Company Name: Regal.io Founder Name(s): Alex Levin & Rebecca Greene LinkedIn: Regal.io Company Page Industry: Enterprise SaaS, AI-enabled telephone & sales automation Stage/Funding: Regal.io has raised $42.1 million through Seed and Series A funding rounds Location: New York, NY This is a post in a series of interviews with startup founders who have worked with Twilio Startup Labs, a program for developers at early-stage startups to learn how to build, prototype & demo on Twilio. We had the pleasure of working with Alex Levin & Rebecca Greene on their startup, Regal.io. Describe your company (Startup) journey in 160 characters or less (the original length of a text message) Regal.io is a phone & SMS outreach platform enabling $200M+/month revenue driven. Regal’s AI-enabled tools enable high-answering and high-converting funnels. Why did you start your company? Before founding Regal.io, we were executives at Angi (NASDAQ: ANGI) Handy (acquired by ANGI in 2018). While at Angi, our team successfully drove top-of-funnel growth, but even after rolling out website optimization and email/SMS re-marketing, only about four of 100 customers would convert. We found that if we called the 96% “abandoned” customers and got them on the phone, they loved the attention, and converted at double the rate. This was the genesis of Regal.io. Knowing that legacy outbound contact center software only enables a "call more" or "call faster" strategy — which results in poor answer rates, low on-call conversion, and a terrible customer experience — we set about to develop a better approach. Regal uses real-time customer behaviors to personalize outreach, increase conversion, and boost revenue. Regal’s outbound phone and SMS sales solution empowers B2C brands to add a human touch at critical moments in their online experience, such as when customers “abandon” the sign-up or checkout flow. The solution helps win over customers, exceed expectations and drive more revenue. High-growth brands including Angi, Career Karma, Fidelity Life, RefiJet, Ro, SoFi, and The Farmer’s Dog use Regal to increase sales and improve customer retention. How are you building on Twilio? E.g., how do you use email, SMS, WhatsApp, Verify, etc. to communicate with your customers? We leverage Twilio’s APIs for programmable voice and conferences to power calls, transfers and voicemail drops. And we leverage Twilio’s programmable SMS and conversations service to power triggered SMS and agent-customer conversations. We’ve also built our routing rules which determine which customers speak with which agents, using Twilio’s task router as the backbone. What has the benefit or commercial impact been for your business since using Twilio? Twilio’s APIs and components allowed us to get to market faster. It’s so easy to build on top of, and we could launch much faster than if we built everything in house. It also enabled us to learn from Twilio’s experience and design paradigms while allowing us to focus our engineering resources on our key differentiators (rather than problems that had already been solved). By building on Twilio, what has the impact been for your customers? Our iteration times are faster, and customers benefit from that. When a customer requests a feature like barge or pay with IVR, we’re already 50% of the way toward delivering the feature, even if it wasn’t on our roadmap. Are there any future Twilio Products that you plan to integrate into your startup, and if so, why? We are starting to experiment with Twilio’s Answering Machine Detection service as we build out more sophisticated dialers to automatically detect when a voice mail vs. human answers a call - in order to save agents time and avoid them listening to dial tones and voicemails. Do you have a recording of your DEMO and how you are using Twilio that you would like to share below? What is the best piece of advice you would give to founders who are looking to build on Twilio? Don’t spend too much time thinking about whether to build something yourself or use a Twilio solution; the answer is if Twilio makes it easier and faster to build, just go with that - even if it’s not exactly how you would have thought about the solution. It will allow you to focus your engineering time on your differentiation and validating the core hypotheses of your business. Otherwise, building voice and SMS products is very time-consuming, technical, and hard to test and debug - don’t underestimate how challenging it is and how much Twilio abstracts away the hard parts. What excites you most about being a founder? We have always believed that when you make customers successful, they will make you successful. We built the company on our value of ‘Customers are Royalty,’ and it’s a major part of our success. Since the company’s founding in 2020, Regal has driven over $2 billion in revenue for its customers. The platform has powered more than 50 million customer conversations, helping more than 150 brands drive an average 25%+ lift in revenue. We’re incredibly proud of the company we have built! We remain excited about fulfilling our mission of treating our customers like Royalty. Thank you for reading, if you have any questions about Twilio Startup Labs or how you can get involved, please contact Frank Y. Owusu on fyawowusu@twilio.com.

Company Name: Posh AI Co-Founder Name(s): LinkedIn: Posh AI Company Page Industry: Fintech Stage/Funding: Series A $32 Million USD Location: Boston, USA This is a post in a series of interviews with startup founders who have worked with Twilio Startup Labs, a program for developers at early-stage startups to learn how to build, prototype & demo on Twilio. We had the pleasure of working with Karan Kashyap & Matt McEachern on their startup, Posh AI. Describe your company (Startup) journey in 160 characters or less (the original length of a text message) Founded in 15 at MIT. Pivoted to AI in '18. Grew to 100+ staff, 60 clients, $32M raised. Posh is modernizing banking with conversational virtual assistants. Why did you start your company? We originally started Posh as sophomores in 2015. We positioned Posh as a consulting company to work on cool, real-world software & AI challenges while we wrapped up our degrees. Once we graduated, we pivoted towards current-day Posh in 2018, after we noticed the perfect balance of promise and skepticism in conversational automation. Language is hard-wired into all of us - it’s a stretch to even call it a human invention. Popular culture and Sci-Fi hinted that language [and conversation] would become a dominant form of HCI. It’s exciting to play a part in making this a reality. We are also passionate about applying our tech to improve the negative stigma that shrouds the customer service industry, especially in banking. How are you building on Twilio? E.g., how do you use email, SMS, WhatsApp, Verify, etc. to communicate with your customers? We primarily use Programmable Voice. Our conversational virtual assistants are deployed on the telephone. Callers are greeted by an audible welcome message, and they’re free to simply ask for what they need. Programmable Voice is the technical bridge between the user’s phone input and our backend. We also leverage SMS as means of sending textual follow-up questions whilst users are interacting with the assistant over the phone. For example, an SMS with branch location information is much more helpful than listing that information over the phone. We leverage Media Streams for Voice Authentication. What has the benefit or commercial impact been for your business since using Twilio? We’ve used Twilio since the beginning of our business. It allowed us to rapidly build an MVP product that our market found valuable. And we’ve iterated, polished, and scaled upon it since. By building on Twilio, what has the impact been for your customers? Clunky touch-tone menus at 1-800 numbers are very quickly becoming a thing of the past. Customers’ standards for good product experiences, especially in customer service, have never been higher. We’re in a new era of intelligent virtual assistants. And Twilio’s API suite is the platform upon which delightful, voice-driven, “ask me anything” - style automation can be built. Are there any future Twilio Products that you plan to integrate into your startup, and if so, why? We’re excited to go deeper into Media Streams so that we can have more control over the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Voice Activity Detection (VAD) systems. What is the best piece of advice you would give to founders who are looking to build on Twilio? Twilio’s APIs are highly approachable. Speed is the name of the game. MVPs aim to capture a large bulk of value in as little time as possible. Twilio’s API’s can help you build that rapid MVP> But once you have Product-Market-Fit (PMF), Twilio’s APIs don’t stop there. They allow for a massive amount of intricacy and control, so that you can really polish your product UX, post-MVP. Twilio Support & Staff are also very helpful to understand edge-cases. What excites you most about being a founder? I (Matt McEachern) thrive on the uncertainty. So much of my Posh journey has been characterized by putting relentless effort behind uncertain bets. It’s exhilarating [for the whole team] when those bets pay off. Founder Biographies: Karan Kashyap Karan is Posh’s Chief Executive Officer and co-founder. His education at MIT included undergraduate and graduate degrees focused on artificial intelligence, where he was named a Siebel Scholar for his research work. He soon began AI and software consulting with enterprises across multiple industries, building a business foundation and establishing a pathway to the beginning of Posh. Posh has over 57 clients with over 100 products deployed across the banking and credit union space, with an ever-growing client base and employee roster. Outside of work, Karan has joyfully traveled across 20+ countries, plays various sports, including soccer, golf, and squash, and enjoys cooking. He lives in Cambridge, MA Matt McEachern As Posh’s Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Matt has always been passionate about problem solving with conversational AI. His skillset was forged at MIT which is where he first met co-founder and CEO, Karan Kashyap during their freshman year. As co-founder and CTO, he has revolutionized AI with customer service in the banking sector working to ensure the functionality and implementation of AI tech for Posh. Additionally, he is passionate about making Posh a great place to work, especially for self-starters. Matt’s hobbies and interests include pickup sports, theoretical physics, and investing. Thank you for reading, if you have any questions about Twilio Startup Labs or how you can get involved, please contact Frank Y. Owusu on fyawowusu@twilio.com.

Company Name: Vibehut.io Founder Name(s): Chris Dolinski LinkedIn: Chris Dolinski LinkedIn Industry: Software, Video Stage / Funding: 1M USD Location: Toronto HQ, Global Team, Delaware C Corp This is a post in a series of interviews with startup founders who have worked with Twilio Startup Labs, a program for developers at early-stage startups to learn how to build, prototype, and demo on Twilio. We had the pleasure of working with Chris Dolinski on their startup Vibehut.io. Describe your startup journey in 160 characters or less (the original length of a text message) Vibehut took the building block of a video call and evolved it into a platform for professionals, companies, and communities. Its branded video rooms are used to host calls, share resources, sell products, create content and monetize. Having a Vibehut room is the virtual equivalent to having an office on main street. People know where to find you, can see that you’re available and can stop by when they have an appointment or would like to talk. Why did you start your company? I started Vibehut because I had sold my previous company (Co-founded the Canadian version of Carvana, Clutch.ca) and was building projects around the opportunities I came across. I was messaging a number of global thought leaders online and quickly realized we were sharing ideas but the value of conversation wasn’t at the same level it was in real life. Vibehut was born as a platform that connects great people through video calls. “In real life” is the best. The dinners and events create an environment for talking about ideas, trying new experiences, and collaborating. Technology has drastically changed our world recently, and tooling needs to keep up. Most of us take it for granted, but high speed internet, programmatic video calls, and an online reputation means that remote work is the default and talent is burgeoning globally. COVID-19, although terrible, put boosters on the acceptance of the virtual world, and socializing has evolved. Deals now move fast, and it’s hard to be in Zurich, Toronto, and Hong Kong at the same time. Video calls lack many of the benefits of in-person, but they win in efficiency and speed. Vibehut stepped up to provide discoverability and a way to be a part of the web’s active community. How are you building on Twilio? E.g., How do you use email, SMS, WhatsApp, Verify, etc. to communicate with your customers? Vibehut is building on Twilio extensively and picked the APIs needed as a Michelin star chef picks their ingredients: SMS for notifications; Video for 1:1 and group calls; Composition to download in TikTok, YouTube, formats Spotify; Storage for downloading and displaying the recorded video. From these primitives, Vibehut has extended to offer our customers: PWA and browser accessible video calls; branded video call rooms with a unique persistent URL; global discoverability; room and user call counts and analytics; scheduled and monetized events; auto-organizing community calls; user profiles, linked to their other socials; direct messages, group messages with conversational AI support; AI agents and aggregated resources to provide asynchronous support to rooms. What has the benefit or commercial impact been for your business since using Twilio? Twilio has played an enormous role enabling Vibehut’s commercial impact and offering. Vibehut has hosted calls from people in 141 countries in the last 30 days. It has been the platform of choice for the virtual world. It’s possible and common to speak to someone in Africa, North America, South America, Asia, and Europe on the same day. Notably, Vibehut’s design makes it a preferred choice for instant sales calls and scheduled calls for virtual legal office hours, IETLS English speaking practice, founder community discussions, and podcast recording. Although I’m the founder, I’ve had 2913 calls in the last 2 years. I see it as building up conversational equity. An asset that I can point to saying, I’m happy to listen, talk, collaborate and provide feedback if asked. By building on Twilio, what has the impact been for your customers? Building on Twilio has been a boon for our customers. Twilio offers a robust API providing a reliable service for video conversations, notifications, and content creation. It has supportive documentation and excellent reporting to identify and track outages. These fundamental building blocks provide the confidence we need to pick Twilio as a service provider. See the article here that Byvi published about our IELTS video room and the impact it is providing for people practising to learn English. Are there any future Twilio Products that you plan to integrate into your startup, and if so, why? We are in the process of implementing Mux, previously Twilio Live (suggested Mux). We continue to explore the composition API and have spoken directly with the team about our customer needs there. Our dream is to have a Twilio video call, and on completion it automatically generates viral clips with captions. We already provide YouTube, TikTok, Spotify and ChatGPT call transcripts for our recorded videos. Have you enjoyed Twilio Startup Labs? And if so why? Twilio Startup Labs has been great to be a part of. I would like to thank both Brandon Leen from Twilio Ventures and Frank Yaw-Owusu from Twilio Startups for their time. Do you have a recording of your DEMO and how you are using Twilio that you would like to share? What is the best piece of advice you would give to founders who are looking to build on Twilio? The best piece of advice I would give to founders looking to build on Twilio is to get started and involve others. Whether you’re building as part of a team or an individual, it always helps to have a handle on how things work. When you see a new tool or API offered by Twilio, explore it, make a small app with the API yourself. The building blocks needed to build a billion dollar company are already available from the thousands of enterprise APIs available. They are waiting for you to piece them together, brand them and market your products and services. What excites you most about being a founder? What excites me most about being a founder is that I get to visualize what could exist, decide what we want to work on, and then bring it into existence. People have always been tool builders, it’s the best time in human history to build something of magnitude. Screenshots Thank you for reading, if you have any questions about Twilio Startup Labs or how you can get involved, please contact Frank Y. Owusu on fyawowusu@twilio.com.

At Twilio, we recognize that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the way we work, live, and interact with the world around us. We believe its use will give us the ability to improve our products and services and create new opportunities for our customers. We also believe the true value of AI is unlocked when companies like yours are able to safely and compliantly harness all of the data across their business—including the signals from each interaction with every individual customer—and use this deep understanding at scale, consistently improving the next interaction that every customer has with your brand in real time. This data-driven flywheel—iteratively understanding and growing deeper relationships with customers—is precisely what Twilio makes possible. That’s why we’re incredibly excited about the value that Twilio’s CustomerAI technology will unlock for the brands and enterprises we serve. That said, we recognize that AI does not come without risk and are committed to helping our customers use AI in an ethical, legal, and responsible way. Our legacy of trust, squarely at the center On June 6, 2023 we announced CustomerAI, which couples the power of large language models (LLMs) with rich customer data that flows through Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform. Ultimately, CustomerAI accelerates how companies unlock the potential of their customers across the entire customer journey, including marketing, sales and support, onboarding, authentication, and more—enabling companies to create a flywheel unlike anything they’ve had before. Twilio Segment enables companies to personalize interactions with golden profiles assembled from events and behaviors. But now with CustomerAI, we can better interpret communications—identifying traits and important details, and updating the customer profile. The flywheel effect means that our customers better understand every interaction, enriching the golden profile and, in turn, better personalizing every touchpoint. CustomerAI starts with its foundations in trust and the commitment that all of your data is yours. While privacy concerns have come to the forefront with AI, Twilio has always taken data privacy seriously. We maintain a commitment to building privacy and security by design into our product development lifecycle to support our customers’ compliant and responsible use of their data with our products and services. For example, we have created a Privacy Pattern for our Flex, Console, and SendGrid products that empowers developers to build privacy directly into their applications. We offer Segment Privacy Portal, a data inventory feature that allows customers to automatically identify and classify data (e.g. high, medium, low risk). You can set rules to manage risk exposure and proactively block data to comply with your company’s privacy policy. In addition, Twilio encrypts data both in transit and at rest utilizing industry standard encryption algorithms. It offers controls for customers to manage their customer data and to delete personal data relating to their users as needed. As we continue to deliver powerful AI solutions across the Twilio platform, we’re committed to the same level of rigor and trust, especially when it comes to protecting customer data privacy. Our commitment to privacy: CustomerAI trust principles and privacy ladder We view the use of AI and the protection of privacy as a shared responsibility between our customers and Twilio. To support this, we have adopted a set of CustomerAI trust principles to guide the responsible development, use, and deployment of predictive and generative AI across all of Twilio’s products and features. CustomerAI Trust Principles Transparent We provide transparency about our use of AI and give our customers the ability to control their data. We help our customers make informed choices about whether to use different types of AI models by being fully transparent about the AI vendors and type of models we are using, and how customer data is used by those models. One of the ways we provide transparency to customers is through our AI Nutrition Facts Labels (more on this below). These labels are assigned to each AI-driven product and feature that we launch, bringing all of the key details front and center in a simple and easily understandable format. Responsible We select responsible AI vendors and strive to use—and help our customers use—AI in a way that respects privacy, keeps data secure, and minimizes the risk of bias or other harms. Twilio performs a privacy and security assessment prior to working with any AI vendor to ensure they meet our privacy and security standards and requires specific contractual commitments. These include a specific commitment not to use customer data to train their models. Accountable We monitor the functioning of AI to address harms and fitness for purpose in partnership with our AI vendors and customers. Twilio exercises auditing, logging, and monitoring to ensure our AI is operating as intended. Additionally, we offer a number of guardrails to ensure fitness for purpose, ranging from human-in-the-loop to monitoring for toxicity and other harms. CustomerAI Privacy Ladder In addition to Twilio’s CustomerAI trust principles, we have introduced our CustomerAI privacy ladder. For each AI-driven product or feature that you may opt to use, this ladder (and its levels) show the type of data used by the model, and whether the model is exclusively for your use or the use of multiple customers. While some customers may only prefer to use isolated models, we know that others may be open to sharing data and benefitting from models that use broader, more representative data sets. Level 1: Models with your data for your use, without PII Level 1 is the lowest privacy risk option and identifies models that use your data for your exclusive use without any personally identifiable information (PII)—that is, information that, when used alone or with other relevant data, can identify an individual. Level 2: Models with your data for your use, with PII Level 2 offers more value and requires more caution than the first level as it identifies models that use your data for your exclusive use, including PII. Level 3: Models with your data for multi-customer use, without PII Level 3 offers the highest level of value and need for caution as it identifies models that use your data and other customers’ data for multiple customer use but does not include any PII. This may include PII data that has been anonymized prior to being used by the model. We view Twilio’s CustomerAI trust principles and the privacy ladder framework outlined above as critical to ensuring that, as a customer of Twilio, you’re equipped to make well-informed decisions about which CustomerAI products and features you and your organization are prepared to adopt. Introducing Twilio’s AI Nutrition Facts Labels Finally, in addition to Twilio’s overarching CustomerAI trust principles and privacy ladder framework, we’re excited to introduce Twilio’s AI Nutrition Facts Labels—a clear, consistent, and transparent way to understand exactly “what’s in the box” when assessing all of Twilio’s CustomerAI products and features across the platform. Our AI Nutrition Facts Labels provide key information about an AI model’s privacy level and design elements in an easily understandable format, mimicking the food nutrition labels you’re likely already familiar with today. Below, you’ll find an example of the AI Nutrition Facts Label for Twilio’s Generative Journeys and Generative Content (both in Engage) as well as Voice Intelligence—all of which were announced today at SIGNAL. You’ll see how each label highlights critical details like: Ladder level Model type Base models and owners A detailed breakdown for how data is used by each model Additional links to supporting, public-facing resources. All of the products and features that are powered by Twilio CustomerAI will feature this label within the product UI/UX, but we haven’t stopped there. We want you to have the ability to create and share AI Nutrition Facts Labels in ways that instill trust and a commitment to the privacy of your customers. To help make this possible, we’ve launched nutrition-facts.ai, a new AI Nutrition Facts Label generator, powered by Twilio, allowing our customers, partners, and the industry as a whole to easily and thoughtfully create their own AI Nutrition Facts Labels. Bringing trust and privacy to life through CustomerAI At Twilio, we’re incredibly excited about the value and efficiency AI will bring to our customers while, at the same time, remaining aware of the associated risks and complexity. As we continue to deliver on our mission of building the world’s most trusted customer engagement platform, we’re committed to being transparent, responsible, and accountable in how we use AI in our products and features. We’re also committed to adapting our AI efforts responsibly as best practices and regulation continue to evolve. Amy Holcroft is Twilio’s Chief Privacy Officer. She brings over 20 years of experience in privacy and manages Twilio’s international team of privacy lawyers, risk, and compliance professionals responsible for Twilio’s global privacy program. Kathryn Murphy is Twilio’s Senior Vice President of Product and Design at Twilio, focused on Segment, Engage, and CustomerAI. She brings over 20 years of experience in product management, design and engineering with deep domain expertise across retail, commerce, payments, customer data platforms, and multi-channel marketing.

Conversational marketing is a customer-centric marketing approach in which businesses interact with customers one-on-one in real time. Businesses that adopt a traditional marketing approach might broadcast a general message to a large audience hoping to attract a few interested leads. In contrast, conversational marketing uses direct and personalized conversations to make each customer feel heard and valued. Here, we’ll look at the importance of conversational marketing and its benefits. Then, we’ll explore conversational marketing examples, such as SMS and chatbots. Finally, we’ll provide some guidelines for how to effectively integrate conversational marketing into your overall strategy. Let’s dive in. Why is conversational marketing important? The customer experience you provide will directly impact your business’ success. So if you want to foster genuine connections with your customers, a conversational marketing strategy is essential. There are three primary reasons why. First, modern consumers have high expectations for the speed and quality of service that businesses provide. They expect instantaneous, accurate, and always-available support. Additionally, they want to feel valued and understood. Conversational marketing meets consumer expectations for personalized and immediate communication by providing real-time personalized responses. Second, relationships—not transactions—lie at the heart of any successful business, and conversational marketing facilitates a meaningful, two-way dialogue with customers. This open communication strengthens customer relationships through meaningful engagement, allowing businesses to build trust and rapport that fosters customer loyalty over time. Finally, traditional marketing methods often cast a wide net hoping to win over some customers, which can waste time and resources. Conversely, conversational marketing targets individual customers with tailored messaging, a tactic that drives business growth by increasing conversion rates. By engaging customers individually and in real time, businesses can address questions promptly, accelerating the customer journey from interest to purchase. In short, conversational marketing is more than necessary. It’s critical. Let’s continue by exploring some examples and benefits. Conversational marketing examples Unlike traditional marketing, conversational marketing has many forms and is personalized to the target audience. Businesses use these methods to improve customer engagement and retention. Let’s take a look at some popular conversational marketing examples. 1. Chatbots Chatbots can engage customers in multiple ways, including basic customer support, lead generation, customer satisfaction surveys, and product availability and recommendations. Additionally, chatbots can personalize recommendations to users, help mitigate long wait times, provide support outside of business hours, and reduce costs for businesses. 2. Live chat Live chat allows customers to connect with customer support agents directly on a business’ website for issues that arise and need more tailored support than a chatbot. Agents can message customers directly to provide support and send direct links and instructions. 3. Messaging apps Messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, are organic and paid channels to engage prospective customers. A prospective customer can send your brand a message via Facebook Messenger while viewing your Facebook page. On Instagram, customers can message you directly, or you can add a click-to-message link in your Instagram bio. This link will take prospective customers directly to WhatsApp, where they can message you to learn more about your business. Many brands also run paid click-to-message ads on Facebook and Instagram to connect with customers via WhatsApp. A prospective customer can reach you directly by clicking a link from that advertisement. Learn more about setting up click-to-message ads for WhatsApp. 4. Text messages Text messages are part of many businesses’ conversational marketing strategies. One example is sending a personalized text message with tracking information for a recent order shipment. Some brands also choose to run click-to-text ad campaigns or use click-to-text links in email marketing efforts. When a customer clicks on one of these links, their texting app opens and shows a pre-populated message to the brand’s phone number. Learn more about engaging customers with click-to-text. Benefits of conversational marketing Conversational marketing is advantageous for business operations and customer experiences alike. Here are three of the top benefits: 1. Enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty Tailored communications to the individual help businesses form more personal connections, which leads to customers feeling valued. This increases customer satisfaction and deeper brand loyalty. 2. Improved customer insights for better decision-making Communicating directly with customers helps businesses gain access to a wealth of first-party data. By mining this data for insights, businesses can understand customer behavior, preferences, and pain points better. This leads to better data-driven decision-making. 3. Efficient and effective customer service Conversational marketing can significantly improve the quality of businesses’ customer service by providing immediate, real-time responses. This results in quicker resolution of customer issues and reduced wait times. What does conversational marketing look like when applied to SMS marketing or chatbots? Let’s shift our focus to consider these two angles. Conversational SMS marketing SMS holds several advantages that make it ideal for a conversational marketing strategy. These key advantages include: Reach: SMS is highly accessible to reach a broad audience since most consumers own a mobile device. Immediacy: SMS messages are typically read within minutes of receipt, ensuring that your message gets to your audience promptly. Engagement: SMS is more personal and direct, leading to higher engagement rates compared to other marketing channels. In fact, the average open rate for SMS marketing messages is 82%. Now, let’s consider an example: Annie is a customer who purchased a product from your online store. Within seconds of completing her purchase, she receives a personalized SMS message to thank her for her purchase and provide an estimated delivery date. Over the next few days, Annie receives personalized updates about her order status. Additionally, when Annie reaches out with an inquiry, she receives a timely and helpful response. From these interactions, Annie feels valued and connected to your business. Her enhanced customer experience will increase her loyalty and the likelihood of future purchases. Chatbots and conversational marketing As indicated earlier, chatbots also play a key role in conversational marketing, offering availability, personalization, and human-like interactions. Unlike human support agents, your chatbots don't require rest or have limited working hours. This means your business can leverage chatbots to facilitate 24/7 customer interaction. Your business can engage with customers in real time, anytime, promptly addressing customer inquiries and consistently meeting customer needs. AI and automation also enable modern chatbots to deliver personalized and timely responses. Chatbots can analyze customer data to understand their behavior and preferences, then tailor the responses accordingly. This can potentially lead to an AI-powered chatbot being more successful at delivering effective customer personalization than a human agent. However, businesses must balance using chatbots with human-led interactions. Even with advancements in generative AI to provide human-like interactions, addressing a complex issue or providing a more empathetic response require a human touch. Therefore, creating a balance between automated and human-led interactions is crucial. Effective conversational marketing strategies often use chatbots for initial interactions and common queries, then transition to human assistance when the interaction requires more nuanced understanding or decision-making. Now that we’ve considered how to think about conversational marketing in the context of SMS or chatbots, let’s transition to some helpful best practices. Conversational marketing best practices As you get started, consider the following best practices for conversational marketing: 1. Align your conversational marketing with overall business goals Every business has goals for its marketing strategy: build brand awareness, boost sales, improve customer satisfaction, and so on. When you adopt a conversational marketing approach, ensure that your efforts directly contribute to achieving your overall business goals. Otherwise, you may only pursue conversational marketing in the short term because of its novelty. Aligning conversational marketing and your overall business goals ensures your business will take a focused approach. Additionally, you can measure the success of your initiatives by analyzing the direct impact on your business goals. 2. Segment your audiences for personalized communication As we’ve noted, one of the significant advantages of conversational marketing is engagement with your customers through personalized, one-to-one interactions. However, effectively leveraging this requires you to segment your audiences appropriately. You might segment your audience based on factors such as demographics, buying behavior, or preferences—any of which will have a significant bearing on how you personalize your communication. Then, after segmenting your audiences, you can tailor your messages to resonate with each segment. The result will be more engaging and fruitful customer interactions. 3. Ensure a seamless transition between marketing channels Increasingly, customers expect an omnichannel experience in interactions with businesses. For businesses, this means being available, reaching out across multiple channels—social media, email, voice, chat, SMS, and more—and providing a consistent experience across these channels. To properly leverage conversational marketing, your business must maintain the momentum of a customer conversation, even if the customer switches from SMS to a chatbot to a video call with a human support agent. By providing a seamless transition between channels, you communicate to the customer that you hear, understand, and value them, building deep customer trust. Build an effective conversational marketing strategy with Twilio Now that you know conversational marketing builds real-time, personalized, and engaging interactions with customers in contrast to traditional marketing strategies, it’s time to build one for your business. Twilio has the tools to help you implement conversational marketing using SMS and chatbots, vehicles that extend businesses’ reach while meeting the customers’ expectations for immediacy and availability. When you’re ready to take your first step, take a look at Twilio MessagingX, a centralized messaging platform that enables you to engage your customers on their channels of choice. By using Twilio’s Programmable Messaging API and Conversations API, you can quickly get to market with globally scalable conversational messaging. To get started, sign up for a free account today.

The last few years have been hard on marketing teams and advertisers. Rising customer acquisition costs paired with the gradual depreciation of third-party cookies have made finding and converting qualified leads harder and more expensive than ever before. Twilio’s Demand Generation (DG) team wasn’t immune to these trends. In fact, they noticed a few additional hurdles holding their team back from optimizing ad spend and campaign performance, including: Limited in-platform ad targeting capabilities: Twilio runs ad campaigns across many channels, but not all ad platforms have the specific targeting capabilities Twilio needs. Our DG team wanted a reliable way to ensure our ads reached the right audiences, not wasting impressions on low-quality leads. Slow manual processes: Twilio’s DG team spent a lot of time manually uploading audience lists to various ad platforms. From building custom audiences to reformatting them for each ad platform and manually uploading lists, this process was a huge time drain for the team. Poor quality conversions: In-platform audiences often led to poor quality conversions. Our DG team wanted a way to ensure their budget only went to qualified leads interested in Twilio products and services. Lack of accurate conversion tracking: An in-platform conversion doesn't necessarily translate to a qualified lead, pushing the DG team to look for a new way to safely and compliantly share customer relationship management (CRM) data directly with third-party ad platforms. To tackle these challenges, the DG team turned to Twilio Segment for help. Look-alike audiences Different ad platforms have different targeting capabilities, with some better than others. As a B2B company targeting specific personas and job titles, advertising to the right audience on channels like Facebook and Instagram can be a challenge for Twilio. To help focus our campaigns on the right individuals, our DG team often leverages look-alike audiences or a group of users with similar characteristics to existing Twilio customers. Before Segment, look-alike audience creation was a flawed manual process. Unqualified leads would inevitably infiltrate these lists and convert, which would lead to wasted ad dollars and a high volume of unworkable leads. Now, with Segment on our side, our DG team can build much more qualified audiences modeled off of sales accepted leads or opportunities to target better audiences (workable leads) on the platform. Audience retargeting Retargeting is always a great way to re-engage qualified, motivated audiences and ensure your business stays top of mind as they progress along their customer journey. But this seemingly simple strategy proved to be a logistical challenge for the DG team. To build these retargeting audiences across more than seven ad platforms and Twilio’s martech stack, they had to install pixels on the Twilio domain for Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bing/Microsoft, Reddit, Capterra, and more. This led to numerous unintended consequences, such as: Slowing website performance and speed Creating more work on the operations side Leading to potentially redundant retargeting pools across the channels Not to mention, the list-building process could take the DG team up to two weeks to build. Looking for a more efficient way to build and maintain retargeting audiences, the DG team turned to Segment. “Segment now acts as an air traffic controller for our retargeting data,” says Brandon Borden, Twilio’s former Principle Demand Generation Manager. “Now, when we want to build a retargeting list, we're confident that it’s backed by strong first-party data. We can seamlessly build lists and push them to any of our ad platforms—from one place.” Segment seamlessly enrolls users into these lists who complete any high-intent actions, like landing on a specific Twilio.com page, filling out a demo request, or downloading a piece of content, so the DG team no longer has to maintain them manually. This new list-building automation has also been particularly helpful for cross-sell and upsell purposes. Since using Segment and incorporating these stronger retargeting pools, Brandon says the team has reduced cost per acquisition by 10%. “We've also unlocked the chance to build automated, multichannel campaigns across paid, web, and email with retargeting lists powered by Segment. This provides us the opportunity to drive more impact to the bottom line by influencing product adoption, acceleration, and more,” he continues. Audience exclusions Next, our DG team wanted to reduce inefficient budget spend. They knew their campaigns inadvertently targeted unqualified leads and wasted ad dollars on users who’d never convert. Or as Twilio’s former Group Manager of Demand Generation Anneke Cavness puts it, “The more we can exclude users we don’t want to hit, the more efficiently we can spend our budget on the users we want to get in front of.” So who didn’t make it? Our DG team wanted to exclude unworkable marketing qualified leads (MQLs) or leads rejected due to bad contact data, fraudulent/spam sign-ups, or previously unsubscribed from Twilio. Depending on the campaign, they also would exclude users who converted, like someone who completed an account sign-up or who is a Twilio customer. That way, they could invest in driving new business, not targeting existing users. With Segment, the DG team can now feed insights directly back into ad platforms to filter out these poor-performing audiences. “We’re filtering them out to ensure our ad campaigns are being as efficient as possible with our spend. This has also helped us improve our lead quality from paid since we’re no longer hitting those unqualified audiences,” explains Alexis Cattermole, Twilio’s Director of Demand Generation. The DG team has also used these improvements for Twilio SendGrid. “We’re operating a semi-complex operation from a DG perspective because we acquire customers for multiple products. With Segment, we can sync those audiences across our different website domains and databases. We can filter out the poor-quality audiences we find on the SendGrid side from our Twilio campaigns, which would be impossible without a solution like Segment,” Alexis adds. The best part? The impact of these exclusions will only increase over time. “When you apply those audience exclusions to all of our Google and Facebook campaigns, it has a material impact. Over time, these audiences will continue to get larger, so we anticipate the impact of these Segment exclusions to only increase over time,” says Anneke. Conversion tracking Since Apple implemented the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework with the iOS 14.5 update, which allowed users to opt out of being tracked across applications and websites, many advertisers have struggled to understand their mobile campaign performance. Unfortunately, Twilio is one of those advertisers. “Many of our ad platforms have seen diminishing performance in the last few years. Apple’s iOS update really killed the performance of our Facebook campaigns and channels that are reliant on look-alike audiences,” shares Alexis. “Essentially, the platforms are losing visibility into conversions, meaning we no longer have a clear understanding of who is engaging with our ads and turning into meaningful customers for us,” she continues. That’s where Segment helped change the game. “What Segment has allowed us to do is essentially backfill bottom-funnel conversion data into our advertising platforms and build look-alikes using our own first-party data. That’s helped us improve some of the performance gap that we were seeing from some of those channels reliant on look-alike audiences last year,” she adds. Now, the DG team uses Segment to track ad conversions and share that data from our CRM directly to Facebook. That helps the DG team train the ad platform’s algorithm to go after quality conversions rather than all conversions. Measuring impact: how Segment helped drive $250,000 in influenced pipeline in just 2 months Before using Segment, the DG team saw a significant number of their campaign-generated leads disqualified due to fraud, spam, bad contact data, or unqualified contacts. But almost immediately after implementing Segment, the Twilio DG team saw significant improvements in campaign performance and lead quality. In fact, within 30 days of implementing Segment, the DG team’s percentage of workable leads increased from 73.3% to 76.4%, a percentage increase of 4.2%. More importantly, the number of unworkable leads decreased considerably by 20.5%. Both trends continue upward when looking 90 days out as well. Campaign results pre- and post-Segment implementation Another big win for the DG team was a major uptick in the influenced pipeline from these new, higher-quality leads. While cost per MQL remained the same (as expected), the DG team was excited to see the pipeline associated with generated opportunities increased by $250,000 in two months. While these quantitative improvements prove the power of Segment, Anneke says the best part of using the customer data platform (CDP) is how it has improved the efficiency of her team’s work. “For us, Segment is a quality and efficiency play,” she says. “We can quickly build an audience in Segment and push it to multiple different platforms in a few clicks, all the while knowing that these audiences will automatically refresh in real time. By targeting more qualified audiences leveraging our CRM data, we can more efficiently spend our marketing dollars on the right people,” she continues. And the DG team says they’re only scratching the surface of what Segment can do. They plan to use the platform to build personalized customer journeys across all Twilio properties, including custom webpages, bespoke email campaigns, personalized ads, and more. The DG team is excited to see what else they can achieve with Segment. Optimize your advertising strategy with Twilio Segment Advertisers have faced significant challenges in the last few years, like Apple’s ATT framework and the quickly approaching deprecation of third-party cookies, which have made acquiring new customers harder and costlier. Pair this with economic uncertainty and a time when marketers must “do more with less,” and you have a hard battle to win. Luckily, having clean, organized data and the best tools available, like Twilio Segment, can help your marketing team drive results even in the face of uncertainty. Whether looking to acquire new customers or upsell existing ones, delivering a message that’s audience-, time-, channel-, and behavior-specific has never been easier, thanks to Segment. Ready to see the leading CDP in action? Learn how Twilio Segment can help your business use first-party data to reduce customer acquisition cost and drive return on ad spend.