Show HN: Convey – personalized SMS marketing and followups directly from Slack | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Convey – personalized SMS marketing and followups directly from Slack

5 pointsksj21144 comments

Hi HN!

We're Kunal and Parthi. We're super excited to launch Convey (https://conveyhq.com), our latest attempt to do everything directly from Slack ;)

Convey lets you do personalized SMS marketing and followups directly from Slack.

Customer communication is getting increasingly personal and businesses want to create an authentic relationship with their users. We're helping e-commerce brands, retail stores, and other online businesses engage with their customers through a format that feels personal - like a friend texting you. SMS is ubiquitous, more widely read than email and feels more intimate.

Here's what you can do with Convey:

️1. Send out personalized SMS campaigns to your customers. Trigger them via API based on user behavior on your site or in your app. Shopify and other marketing integrations in the works

2. Respond with a templated message that still sounds human. We use language models to understand user messages and queue up the best template response so you can edit if necessary and hit send

3. Collaborate with your team on responses in Slack - a very extensive Slack integration makes it possible to initiate and respond to messages while giving your entire team visibility

We're eager to hear your feedback!

Best of luck for your business, but here are my counterpoints:

I do not want businesses I interact with to be sending me texts or e-mails unless it's about an order I already placed or if something is wrong and requires my immediate attention. I have already more than enough things to worry about and spend my limited time & attention on to have to waste it on your marketing communications.

My local grocery store doesn't contact me to ask me if I would like a certain product. I go there when I decide that I need a product and buy it. My takeaway place doesn't contact me to ask me if I'm hungry - I contact them when I want a delivery. Similarly, the doctor doesn't contact you to ask if you're sick, and the fire brigade doesn't contact you to ask if your house is on fire.

Fair - SMS requires strict opt-in in the U.S., so its important that businesses don't text customers who don't opt-in.

I actually like my texting reminders.. for example I like when the pharmacy texts me that my prescription is ready, when Uber drivers text me that they have arrived, when Fedex says my package has been delivered, etc.

It is indeed different when businesses do play by the rules, and in that case I agree with you.

The problem I've noticed is that it is a slippery slope and often numbers given out for service notifications (such as the ones you describe) will "accidentally" start being used for marketing, of if there's no way to only enable service notifications while opting out of marketing.

We do have a law here in the UK about it as well but it is absolutely not enforced so a lot of businesses do it. I am not sure how well the law requiring opt-in is enforced in the US.

Also, we haven't put pricing on the website, but we have a 7 day no CC required free trial. The reason for this is that we want to talk to you and ensure we understand your use case!

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