What are the best ways to boost engagement in bill pay text campaigns to increase payments?

A number of them involve personalization - engaging the customer with references to their account or using data to target the right way to connect with each account.

We teamed up with Solutions by Text to deliver 5 top tips - catch them in the report, or listen in as Scott Hamilton from Prodigal and Todd Jenkins from Solutions by Text review how you can maximize results with a few easy changes to the way you manage outreach.

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Todd Jenkins:

Thank you for joining me at the water cooler. My name is Todd Jenkins. I'm the Vice President of Business Development at Solutions by Text, and I tell you what, we got a lot of really cool things going on here with Prodigal. Some of the data that they've been able to extract based off of their fantastic AI partnered with our SMS- and MMS- compliant text solutions are incredible.

We're here to talk today about five ways to maximize the return on bill pay campaigns. That's why Scott's here. So I'm gonna kick them all over to you.

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Scott Hamilton:  

All right. Todd, good to see you again, by the way, hanging out at the cooler. I'm a little thirsty, but I don't know if I can...there's no cups. I can't see any cups on that. Anyway, it's great. We've had great times together, and we just finished, and I think we've just published jointly some some pretty cool stats that I think a lot of people have, I guess, intuitively believed and have been testing, but we, we partnered together to put some facts around what people just thought was definitely true, and it's actually pretty amazing.

So a couple of headlines that everybody can go and see in the published version of this. So a little bit of background, actually, first.

We took  - Prodigal and SBT partnered to merge all of the anonymized data, all of SBT's data and then a whole bunch of Prodigal data, in order to really understand the best practices that are out there across all of your - many of your clients, and what are they doing to get far better results than others that are not doing that those things.

So we have five, we can do a countdown of these various behaviors that everybody should be able to act on, actually today, most of them today. There's a whole new set of, to your point, Todd, sort of technologies to sort of take it even beyond this that maybe we'll sneak in at the end. But a couple, couple really interesting ones. I'll just quickly go through them. And this, not every one of these is for everybody, so you'll have to consult compliance and such and whatever is best for you. But the facts are the facts.

We found that when creditors use name and the amount owed, and they were allowed to do that, in the message response rates, click-through rates doubled from the same message to the same person without that data. So it's a doubling of click-through rates with that characteristic. The other one is it cuts spam rejections by 25% if, if you use short URLs. So it's it's branded short URLs within the message, cuts spam rates by 25%. That's a big deal. I'll just keep rattling through these. These are goodies, so hopefully everybody has their pen at the water cooler.

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Todd Jenkins:

I'm going to come back and touch on all these once you get through them as well.

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Scott Hamilton:  

Yeah, there. There's double clicks on all this. So the other one mentioning lower payments or payment plans or those types of words in the body boosts engagement and click through rates by 150%. It's big. So aligning the timing of the delivery with plus or minus a couple days around payday, triples payment rates.

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Todd Jenkins:

Wow.

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Scott Hamilton:  

It sounds - just to be, just because we're on the water cooler, we're not in a meeting, we're just hanging out. Like in reverse, it's actually very intuitive, like hitting somebody up when they're generally running pretty thin might they might have a harder time than if they just got paid. But anyway, it's 300% impact, is what we found.

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Todd Jenkins:

And for a quick question, are you finding that a lot of our clients' consumers, are providing their payment dates? Are they just speculating that it's either going to be twice a month or every two weeks?

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Scott Hamilton:  

It's a great question. Both. We definitely modeled it around the first and the 15th, but we also had some some other data that supported a little bit of a refinement around that. So it wasn't just a guess that people got paid on the first and the 15th. We inferred some learnings from some of the Prodigal data to help sort of triangulate and validate that.

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Todd Jenkins:

It's good to know because, yeah, just in my experience, that information is not readily shared. So modeling and off the first and 15th makes a lot of sense.

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Scott Hamilton:  

There is a little bit of a spike on simply weekly, people that get paid weekly, but the major spikes, as you would imagine, are around the first and the 15th, and then there's a slight lower, but still positive, uptick if you went the date before payday, or the day after or the day of, and it's to your point, it's a little tough to validate what the actual payday was, but that's why, if you go sort of plus or minus three days of the first and 15th, you'll get the lion's share of the gain. Great question.

The other one, the last one, is if you can start to customize the messaging to the consumer, ultimately, people are getting to consumer level hyper-personalization, but step one is even some degree of personas. So we found that income levels below X or above Y, or geography like New York is a tough one for obvious reasons. Others are folding in reasons for delinquency. So the more you can customize the message and not be - not look like a form letter, there's yet another step up in performance as well.

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Todd Jenkins:

Yeah, and that's where I feel like Solutions by Text comes and it does a fantastic job from a compliance side. There's a little bit of history here, so I'll just take 30 seconds to explain the importance of the pre-approved templates that we've arranged or come up with with our aggregators and carriers. You know that, as we like to say the carriers are the sheriffs. The carriers need to be able to have confidence that if a code is provisioned on behalf of you know your customer by SBT, that those templates are pre-approved.

So what we do is we provide those templates to clients when they become partners of ours. Furthermore, we highly encourage our clients to kind of get creative in those campaigns and propose to us some different you know, adding in the account number, adding in the name of the consumer. Of course, we want to make sure we're not doing anything poorly from a compliance side, which is why we're here to advise on, you know, not not exposing a third-party disclosure or anything like that, but super important to know you know your audience, and cater and customize those templates specific to verticals and those consumers.

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Scott Hamilton:  

And I know a lot of people just really appreciate that, that a lot of times the rules can be confusing, but to follow them is critical for a variety of reasons. But within those guardrails there's, there's some very cool things that people could be doing to get some, some pretty, pretty amazing results. So it feels like we're sort of at, you know, the second inning on a lot of this stuff. And hopefully with some of these learnings, we'll get to the third inning and and keep running from there.

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Todd Jenkins:

I'd also like to say just kind of looking back at the, you know, doubling your response rate was one of the key points, slash your spam rate by 25%, boost your engagement rates by one and a half percent. A lot of this - I spent a little time in an agency. I worked in an agency, and we get so busy once something is up and working. We were so guilty of not maximizing the efficiency of the technology.

What Prodigal does is is works directly with you, as well as SBT and helping you not just sit down after you've engaged with us and gone through the onboarding session, constantly looking at ways to tweak what are really very intuitive, simple things, but we just run out of time and don't do it. We don't, we didn't do it. So the fact that you have a partner that is working with you trying to find the best way to engage with your consumer, the better.

I mean, at the end of the day, we're all after just a very few things. Number one is consumer satisfaction. Number two is customer - your client satisfaction. Number three is curing accounts, making sure we're providing good payment options to those consumers. You know, that's that to me, that's really what it comes down to is just trying to define a payment strategy that works for those consumers. And this, this technology, really helps boost that.

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Scott Hamilton:  

It's really your comment earlier around getting a new capability up and running, and that is huge. And I joined your user conference back last fall, and the team was just beaming. Like the early results people were getting was energy - gave me a lot of energy.

With these types of statistics, you know, we're unlocking sort of that next layer of the onion, and you know, to double and triple performance off of something that was already working wonderfully is just so much more tailwind. There are a few firms out there that are getting sort of into the next layer of the onion, to getting a bit more sophisticated with the models, and bringing in other signals, be it voice signals or other types of data, to help even make these things smarter.

For example, your point around payday, you know, sort of guessing that it's the first and the 15th, but actually merging in actual data. Maybe a phone call didn't work yesterday, and therefore a text would work at it today, at the same time that you know, the phone was picked up, but no payment was made, those types of things. So these things are getting really, really fun, but even unpacking these five or six, five things are definitely actionable and usually impactful.

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Todd Jenkins:

I completely agree. It works. Data is data. Data doesn't lie. Texting consumers work. Prodigal's solution works, and we're thrilled to be a partner with, with, with Scott and his entire team.

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Scott Hamilton:  

Same. Feeling's mutual around the water cooler.

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Todd Jenkins:

Thank you very much. And thank you for your time today, and thank you for spending some time with me around the water cooler. Until next time, folks.

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Want a quick reminder of the 5 tips? Download the full report, or check out the blog version right here.