Transcription
Hi everyone, it's Dan here from Flex, and today we're going to talk about how we scaled from 100 SMS a day to 10,000 SMS a day inside High Level. Let's dive in. [Music]
Okay, so if you're listening to me for the first time, I want to explain what our offer is to clients. We reach out to a client; it could be like a solar company or whoever. We say to them, "Have you got any old leads that we can turn into sales using AI and SMS?" We do this on a performance basis; we get paid unless you get paid. It's a very strong, sexy offer. Clients always come on board, and it's just a fantastic foot in the door for us to be able to sell other solutions to them. We call it getting our claws in, and that can do speed to lead out of our leads. We can do support bots, we can do document collection—there's just so much we can do when we get our claws in. It's very hard for businesses to leave us, and I really like what we're doing because the big behemoths, you know, the Salesforces and the HubSpots and all of those types of guys, they can't compete on this micro level and offer bespoke solutions for now anyway.
Right, so us marketers and people who have clients and have struggled for years are finally about to get paid. All right, this is a really exciting time for the smaller type marketers and the small businesses out there, so I'm very excited about what we're doing. But anyway, one of the clients that we reached out to turns out they do a lot of leads. They are an info product hybrid e-commerce type store, so they have an offer for about 99 bucks, and they drive a lot of traffic to this offer. They have affiliates, and they're doing hundreds of thousands of leads per month. They're quite big, right? So they came to us and said, "Can you start with our database?" They haven't SMSed their database like ever.
When you take their database over the last two or three years, it's millions of leads. What we found over weeks of trial and error is that it's very hard to ramp up to these types of volumes. If you try and go into High Level and send 50,000 SMS in one day, the account just goes down, and you're forever chasing your tail. There's an art to it, which is what we found. This video today is going to be about how we scaled from 100 SMS to 10,000 SMS a day in two weeks and exactly how we did it.
Okay, so without further ado, I'm going to pass you over to Graham. Please do enjoy the video, and I'll see you in a bit.
Hey guys, and welcome to this video on basically how to scale up to 10,000 SMS a day with as minimal issues as possible. We've done this recently; we've had to scale up to about 10,000 a day, and you know, we learned a lot from doing it. We hit a few stumbling blocks along the way, and this is basically how we overcame it and now are easily doing 10,000 a day with no issues at all. So hopefully, you can learn a little bit from what we've done.
So yeah, on the screen here, you can see what we're going to go through today: the best practice for warming up a number, how to protect your opt-out and error rates, multiple numbers and multiple A2P campaigns, multiple sub-accounts to protect volume, and to bump or not to bump. Some of these probably aren't 100% compliant; there's a bit of circumventing going on here. But ultimately, when you've got a huge client where you're making a decent amount of money from sending out 10,000 SMS a day, if you stop for three to four days, you know that's quite a lot of money left on the table, so you have to do what you can do.
I'm just going to go through the process that we've been through now. So firstly, let's talk about warming up a number. It is quite similar to warming up an email domain, really. You do want to start slow and then kind of ramp from there. You can't just go buy a brand new number, ask High to up your limit to 10,000, and then start sending 10,000 a day because you are probably going to get filtered by the carriers. They do not like that sudden surge of SMS coming from a new number. So yeah, High will have that limit in place where they do like 100 a day, then if you hit that, you go to 250 a day, hit that, 500 a day, etc.
Now, I think 100 a day is way too small; you can't really do much with that. So I do think that is a bit small. I would still be opening your brand new account. If you are on 100 a day, I still think you want to go to High Level and try and increase that to at least 3,000 to 5,000 a day to start with, just to get you going. That does two things: it allows you to have more SMS per day to use, and it also allows you to go into your settings, business profile, and turn off the compliance messages. You can't turn these off until you exit the ramp mode. If you get put up to a 3,000 SMS limit a day, that is going to automatically take you out of the ramp mode. Then you can take these two off and create your own SMS opt-out message.
If they don't let you do that, I'll pop a little video below to show you how you can use workflows to try and hit the 100-day limit to slowly increase you up those limits. Another thing you can do is customize this message, so you can go and change this to "delete." That hasn't changed for some reason, but I do try that. Mine isn't letting me do it, but I have seen other accounts where it does let you do it.
But this shouldn't be in our settings. Let's have a look. This can come off. I'll show you what it shows you when you try and take this off. It should come up here. Oh no, I've obviously gone over the limit, so I can't take these off. Obviously, up this limit account. Cool. So then you would just add... why is this not coming off? There we go. Oh, it's not taking off for some reason. I'll come back to that later.
So basically, to warm up your number, I'd be getting that limit raised to probably... you want to start at about 250 a day ideally. That's contacts going through, so you're probably going to get a few more messages than that with replies, but that's kind of where I would want to be starting. I'd be sending 200 maybe a day, 250. Yeah, 250 a day. Why is this not dragging down? Pop this over here one sec.
To do this, I'm going to go to automation. I've already set this up in the Royal training, so if you've got that, it should already be set up. You want to start GBT; you can put your 10,000 DBR list into this workflow, and there's two drip nodes. So to start with, it's 100 a day. You can up this to a maximum of 200 with a new number, but even if you start at 100, just dripping them through very slowly, that's where you want to go.
So yeah, let's say start with 100 a day. Leads that had... and they're going to drip one every two minutes. So to finish the 100, you're going to do 30 an hour, so it's probably going to be three in a bit hours, 3 hours 20 minutes to go through this 100. That's kind of where you want to be, dripping them slowly so it looks a bit more manual and normal. And that's what I'll be doing on the first day. So let's stick with 100 on the first day just to be safe.
Pop that through, check your error rates. Now, where you can check your error rates, you go to settings, phone numbers, messaging analytics, and you can just go and select the day. Now here it should show you the error rate. Now I'm just going to go into a live account just to show you what ours look like. This isn't a live account; just to show you what a live account would look like.
So I'm going to go into your phone numbers in your settings, go to messaging analytics, and then you can check per day or per week. So let's go. Let's look at what happened yesterday. So we're at a 4% error rate. The opt-out rate is not there yet, but you can check your error rates. So we sent 4,000 in this account yesterday; 184 were undelivered. You can click in there, and you can see the reasons why. You can start seeing the reasons why.
So let's go into this contact, load that up, and there we go. So it's an unreachable destination handset, so that is added to our error rate. But we're on 4%, so you can go through and check that. But we're on 4% there. They normally look at it on a rolling weekly basis, I believe, so you want to make sure it's under that 6% mark over the week. So we're at 5%, so that's fine at the moment, and that's kind of like our average on this account. We just started this guy back up now, so we've only been going for the last four days.
So that's how you check your error rates. You want to always make sure you're under six. If you get over 6%, you're going to get an email from High Level telling you to opt out; you're over 6%. I can't remember what it is, but if you start getting over like 8, 9, 10%, they're going to automatically temporarily ban your account. So it's very important to stagger and warm up your number.
Now, how you scale from here: so you put 100 through on the first day. I would be doubling it each day for the next three days. So the next day, you can let 200 through. Then the next day, I'll be letting 400 through, sorry. Okay, so let's just write this out: day one, day two, day three. Now, this is quite a conservative way. I think I was a bit more busy with it, but I don't want any of your accounts to go down, so I am just being a bit more conservative for you guys.
Day three, you're at 400. I'd want to be staying at the 400 mark for a couple of days like so. Then day six, I'd be doubling it again to 800, seeing how that fares. Double-check your error rates. Then I'd be scaling up pretty quick from here. I'd be going to 1,600. Now, if the error rate stays perfect over these two days, I'm going to go double it again, and then I'm going to go to 5,000.
Now, depending on how much you've got your SMS limits raised, you want to make sure that you've raised them enough so you don't go above this. So say you raise it to 5,000; you can't send 5,000 contacts through and expect all the messages to go through because obviously, they're all going to get the initial message, which is going to be 5,000, then that's your limit done. So if they reply, you're not going to be able to send it back, so bear that in mind.
Then day 14, we'll go to 6,000, and then each day we'll add a thousand on. Now, if you don't have a big list yet, there's no point going this hard straight away. If, say, you've got a list of 10,000, I would be using under a thousand for a lot longer just to warm it up even more. This is if you really want to get going with a huge list. So if you've got, say, a list of like 100 to 200,000 people, you want to start working your way through it. If there's no rush, start with here. If you're getting good numbers, there's no need to absolutely hammer the list.
It's just kind of like showing you how you can get up to 10,000 a day pretty quickly. So that's day 18; we're up to 10,000. So that's where I'd be kind of doing it, and that's how we did it on one of our accounts, and we didn't see any issues, which is perfect. On one of our accounts, we started just sending up, I think, 5,000 a day straight away, and obviously, we were getting hit with 3007 errors from too, which is basically the carriers filtering us out.
So that's kind of where I'll be going on warming up your number. If you've got lows and you want to get to 10,000 quickly, a bit slow in the start, but I think this really helps build that trust of the number before you start hitting a lot of leads very quickly.
Okay, so that's warming up the number. Now, the next up is how to protect your opt-out and error rates. Now, as you can see, we're on 5%, so it's not bothering me too much at the moment. In High Level's business profile, I've actually got "validate phone numbers when the first SMS is sent to a new contact," so that helps to weed out a few. So it is protecting my error rate a little bit. It costs 0.05 cents, I believe, per validation.
So that is... I'm just going to pop this down, so back to 100 for you guys. So it's protecting my error rate slightly, but if we go back to this live account, go to messaging analytics, and I click on undelivered, and I click on this guy at the top, this was a 303. Now, this should be taken out by High Level, really, but it's not; it's getting the error rate, which is very annoying. It's an unreachable destination handset.
So what you can do is you can put it through a list cleaner, the numbers, before you upload them into High Level, and that can help really protect your error rates and opt-out rates—mainly error rates. You can use things like DataSoap and Locate in the UK. I would put a post in the school to ask the American guys how to clean the American numbers. There'll be a cost to it, but it will protect your error rate, so you won't get the temporary ban.
So that's a good thing to do, and just to make sure it's under 6%. RS has always been under 6%, so I haven't bothered doing that yet with these American numbers. If I started getting flagged for a lot of these, a lot of these kinds of ones rather than the 307, I would start to do that for sure, but we haven't needed to yet.
But yeah, there's another workflow I've also added, which can help with this, especially if you're bumping. Because obviously, if it doesn't know that the phone number is dead, it's going to keep on sending the bumps to it. So I've set up this workflow. I've got too many validation errors, so the number is not valid. I've also got an SMS incapable, and I've also got just a generic validation error.
So you can see numbers; these are what you've got: not valid and incapable. And then what other filters you've got, and then that's nothing else. Yeah, so I've got all three in there. So this doesn't trigger for the 30007 filter, which is a bit annoying, but it does for everything else. So as you can see, if we go back to that contact, this has got a Twilio error 303. This one here, so you can see it's 33. What you'll be able to see down here is that it's been DND'd. I believe that's actually High Level's done that, so High Level's taken them out and DND'd them because it is a wrong number, basically.
So it hasn't even gone through to the error one because it hasn't needed to, basically. But that's a good fail-safe to have anyway. You don't want any more SMS being sent to this number. So yeah, High Level's validator has DND'd it, so that won't get any more messages from us, so it will protect the error rate that way.
But also, that workflow I just showed you is there as well to protect the error rate. Now, the opt-out rate, we do a different opt-out message. So if I just go into my notes again, our opt-out message is normally something like this: "PS, I hope you're okay with me texting you. If not, just reply back 'delete'." So we use that "delete" as the opt-out word.
In our workflows, we have... where would it be? I think it's in this one: apply delete. So we have a workflow set up like this. So if they reply "delete," they get enabled DND, so we don't send them in anymore. We add them to the DND opportunity status, add the tag DND, and then remove them from workflows so that doesn't trigger the opt-out.
So our opt-out is extremely low because people reply back "delete" rather than "stop." It is a bit circumventing the rules. "Delete" is not an opt-out word for High Level or Twilio, but it does the same thing. We're taking them out; we are adhering to best practice by taking them out if they want to be taken out. It's not like they're staying on our list; we are DND'ing them just like you would do if they sent "stop."
The only difference is it's not triggering the opt-out inside High Level, which can give you a temporary ban if you get too many. And you know how on these lists, I've seen people getting 5% or even 3%, and that's not a huge amount. The cut-off for High Level is 2%. If you start getting over 2%, they're going to start sending you a warning email. If you go to 3%, 4%, or 5%, they're going to temporarily ban you for the rest of the day.
So if you do have the "stop" option on, one, it looks very salesy because it looks like the stock kind of opt-out message, whereas ours is a little bit more of a conversational one. And yeah, if they reply "stop," it's going to add your opt-outs. And you know, 5% of people isn't a huge amount, but you will get temporarily banned if you hit that.
So that's another way you can protect your opt-out rates. Hopefully, that makes sense. Go back to see that workflow if you haven't got it already, and you can set that up. Cool.
So now, multiple numbers and multiple A2P numbers. Okay, so this is kind of... I got this kind of idea from a guy in our group called Mark, and he's doing it on a separate software, and I thought it was a really clever idea where you kind of switch out numbers sometimes to help with any kind of bans or anything like that.
So I'm just going to talk you through this at the moment. So what we found that happened to us personally was we were getting a lot of 307 errors being filtered by the carrier for multiple reasons. I think we hit it too hard at the start. Also, we're in kind of a shady area. We don't sell guns, but it can kind of link to guns, so sometimes the Android can filter like a keyword such as a firearm or something like that, and we can easily get filtered like that.
So we made some amendments to the prompt to make sure the keywords that trigger the filter aren't being said. As I said, it's not a restricted industry, but there can be a bit of crossover with some of the wording. So that's the first thing we did when we started getting a lot of these 307s.
But what you'll notice is, say we got a 20% error rate after three days, we got temporarily banned. Okay, we changed everything to the prompt to make sure we weren't being filtered or make sure those words weren't coming up. But what you'll find is that once you're being filtered by a carrier, any changes you make in your back end or anything like that isn't going to affect it.
So the next day, we got hit with another 20% straight out the gate after two hours, temporarily banned for the next 22 hours. Couldn't send any messages again, so it was very frustrating. We spoke to High Level; they had to speak to the carrier, Twilio, and the carriers to try and get the filter lifted. They sent us back some more best practices to try and change before we could get unfiltered. We did that, got unfiltered, but we assumed we were hitting the 307 again.
So that's when I thought maybe the number is doing something, so I started cycling through the numbers. I created a new number. So here's what I did: I created a new number, as you can see, that's V1. Then I created V2. Then what you have to do, you have to go to the regulatory bundle. Sorry, not that one. If you're in the US, you need to go to the trust center.
Now, you've already done your brand and your campaign; you've got your brand done in this one here, as you can see, verified. That's perfect. Then you go to campaigns. Now, normally, everyone's just going to have that one campaign that they're working off. When you start buying multiple numbers, and I would do this before you get banned, I created different campaigns.
So you can easily just do a standard campaign. You can change the campaign case; it has everything on there. If it's already been approved, you just go continue, continue, continue, submit. That's all you have to do; it's all done there for you. It's not any A2P, and then once you've done that, it's going to be sent to be verified. You wait for it to be verified, and then once that's done, it's all good.
So I will be doing three campaigns and three numbers. So say we got three campaigns here, I would be making a note with the campaign ID in here. This is if you're at risk of being filtered quite a lot, and if you're sending a lot of messages, it's good practice to do. Say you got those three, we're going to go back to numbers. Say you've bought three numbers as well. So we got V1, V2, and let's do V3.
So I'm going to just copy V1 and make sure you name them in the friendly name. You can do that when you go to edit configuration, and on the name of your number, you can just add a V1 at the end of it. But I'm going to copy that number, and I'm going to copy it next to one of the IDs. And to get that ID, you've got to wait for it to be verified, by the way. So you can't get this ID until it's verified, so you have to wait until that HP is verified, the A2P campaign, and then V3, this one here.
So once you've got that, you have to go and assign the campaign to each number. So we got CXF, SSK, KU. So on this one, you want to go and click there. You want to go select A2P campaign to connect, and of course, I've copied the wrong number. So go back to the trust center campaigns. So it's the messaging service ID that comes up, not the campaign ID, which is a bit annoying.
But so we'll go back to our notepad, we'll paste that in there, paste that in there. Oh, there we go, paste that in there. And then one last one, paste that in there. So now what I'm going to go and do is I'm going to go back to manage phone numbers, let it come up. I'm going to go down to V1 here, press link A2P campaign, and we're going to go and just find out which ID I want.
So I want one ending 1335. Ah, so it's perfect. So it's in order anyway, so it's in order, as you can see from here. 1335 is there, 883, 97C. Yeah, perfect. So these three are in order. So I would be selecting this one for that one. I'm not going to do it now because they're already attributed. You'd be selecting that one, submit, and there should be something pop up here being like, "Cool, that's all connected."
Then V2, I'll be doing the same. Second one, select. V3, same again, select. And then that should all be submitted. Then it should get a green tick; it should have HTP verified next to each one. Then you go and select the default number, V1, run that once it gets... if you start getting a 307 and you get temporarily banned straight away, the default number is V2.
So you just go there, set as default number. Then the next day, it'll start messaging from this number, and then there will be no issues with the 307. Now remember, when you change the number to a new number, it is going to be a brand new number, so you do want to make sure you're not sending out... so say you've gone through this ramp process on one number.
Yeah, say you're like day five, you start getting filtered. I would personally go back to maybe day two, start sending 200 through, make sure that's all right, and then 400, just to re-do this number basically. Okay, then you got three numbers. Then in the background, you can be speaking to High Level to remove the issue from V1 while you can still use another number when you're not being filtered.
So you don't have to wait four or five days for the filter to be raised and constantly... because at the start, we were getting constantly stopped, and our client was getting a little bit... not frustrated, but you know, it's never great when you've done four days and you're, "Oh, we've got compliance issues." Wait one sec; it takes five days to sort out where there's no sales being made.
So you do want a backup number just in case, just so you can still keep on going and still pushing through some sales. So that was happening quite a lot in this account. As you can see, I've got six numbers, so it was happening quite a lot. We're currently on V6. Then it was just annoying me so much I thought I'd set up a new sub-account, a second sub-account, which I can use if it goes down because I thought maybe this account is looking a bit shady or not good in the eyes of High Level and Twilio.
Because if you go into advanced settings, you can see in the restriction history. So you can see this is how many times we got restricted. So the opt-out rate was always fine; the opt-out rate was never an issue. It was the 3007. You can see we got a little opt-out warning for too many. It was just a warning, though; it wasn't a temporary restriction. You see we were getting quite high error rates on some of these.
So that's when I thought potentially this is not helping us. So I went across to... I got 50,000 there as well. So I created a second sub-account, which is this one. Okay, I then created an A2P for this one, and for whatever reason, we've obviously done all our best practices. We've really honed in on the prompt, worked with High Level and the carrier to get better compliance, so we're not saying the banned words and all that kind of stuff.
Then we created this account, and I haven't had one issue. I'm still on V1. I've never had a restriction on this account. Let's go to advanced settings. No, not even a warning. Let's just see this year. Have we got a warning? No, not even a warning. So got 20,000; High Level raised that for me.
So yeah, we are totally okay on this account. I've spoken to a few experts who have worked with carriers a lot and are working with High Level. They've noticed this as well: that you can have absolute murders on one sub-account, and you create a second sub-account, and it can be totally easy and you kind of see.
So I did the ramp that we did here on this account as well, exactly this, rather than on that previous sub-account that I created. I went really hard at the start; I did it slower on this sub-account, and that maybe had a massive helping because I warmed the number up properly. But this sub-account has been perfect.
So now what I do is I use this as the main sub-account for the client, and in this automation, like let's go to the one I've just created, this one now, instead of going through this account, I API into this account. So ignore this; this is just checking that they haven't bought and they haven't already been sent to V2. All I do now is add to the workflow, which is sent to the second account, send it over to the second account.
Then I just add the tag "sent to the second account" so I know, and I remove them from this workflow. And then in the second... sorry, there's one more workflow I need to show you. And then in this one, all this workflow is, it drips the leads 20 a minute and sends it to my NA server, which basically sends it to this sub-account with a tag, and that tag automatically starts a workflow like so.
And yeah, then this strips it, and this is what sends it all out and does all the printing stuff for the client. So that's how we do it. You can just start uploading leads to your new sub-account; that's fine. But I just had hundreds of thousands of leads in this sub-account already and in all these workflows, so I just simply added them, sent them, web-hooked them into the second sub-account, and just tagged them, sent to V2.
And yeah, then just removed them from the workflow, and it's worked really well for us. We're now... we were at 10,000; we had a little pause on this account because the client had to get some ducks in a row. We're back on now, and we're going to go get up to 10,000 soon. But that is one thing that has really helped this account, which is getting that second sub-account up to protect the volume.
Because basically, if a sub-account goes down for the day—and this is why we originally created it—the sub-account goes down for the day, we still want leads to be sent out that day because obviously, that's another day where you're going to have very low sales. If you get suspended quite early on in the day, you can just quickly go in, add in a node, which adds them to a webhook, sends them on to your other sub-account, and then just remove them from the workflow.
And that has really helped us anyway. And now we don't use the first sub-account; we only use the second sub-account to send now. And yeah, we're up to 10,000. We're up to 10,000 a day now. We're at about the 4,000 to 5,000, but it's going to slowly go up now back to where it was.
So finally, to bump or not to bump. The bump messages really killed us in the start because we were getting 307 quite a lot, and you can't take them out. You can't set up an automation to take them out or DND them. We were sending out five bumps quite aggressively as well. We've been extremely aggressive with this account, to be fair. We sent out five bumps in the space of three hours after the first message, and obviously, if they got a 307, all the bumps were getting filtered as well, which meant our error rates were skyrocketing.
So we actually just don't bump for this client anymore. We potentially could look to bumping again in the near future, but especially when you're sending 10,000 a day, if you send a bump, that's doubling the amount of cost that is involved. And we're seeing good numbers of sales, and we've tested the bumps, and for this offer, it wasn't looking like it was worth it, especially that many bumps anyway.
So it's a good thing to think about if you actually need to bump or not when you're doing this kind of volume. Test it out; see what it does to the sales. If it does increase sales, then great, I'd crack on and keep on bumping if it stacks up in your ROI. But if not, don't be scared to not bump either, I would say.
But yeah, I think that is independent up to you. The bump can certainly help get more attention and more replies, which we found. So I think we'll be testing that out again for this client very soon. We're a bit hesitant, though, because that was one of the reasons why we think our accounts went down at the start, purely because we were getting big error rates, and the bumps were compounding that.
And also, we were getting quite a lot of opt-outs because of the bumps—well, the quite aggressive bumps we did, to be fair. It was five in three hours, I believe, so that was a lot of deletes coming through, and Twilio didn't really like the delete when they were looking through our account when we were trying to get the filter removed for the 30007 as well.
So yeah, bear that in mind. But yeah, if you follow this, I think the biggest wins we found were properly warming up your number first, which seems obvious, but obviously, we didn't do it at the start. We were too excited with this massive client; we wanted to really hit the ground running.
I would say try and contain your excitement when you get a big client like this. Try and put in best practice, warm the number up like you would an email domain, and you should be fine. I'm sure that's what really helped us. The second account, and the second thing that really helped us was having a second account there ready to go.
So if our account did go down for whatever reason, you just quickly push all the leads that day over to the new second account and run it through there. I would be running a little bit of traffic in the second account first to warm that number up because say you're 18 days down the line, you're sending 10,000, then you get flagged. You're not going to be able to send out 10,000 from your new account easily.
So I would be getting your new account ready, putting a couple of hundred through a day through that one as well. And yeah, if you have any questions on this, do tag me in the school, and I can certainly help you out because I know there's quite a lot of information in this.
And this is, as I said, just our learnings from dealing with this huge client, and we went through a lot of teething pain to get to where we are right now. So yeah, do reach out to me if you have any issues or questions, and I'll be very happy to help.
But thanks again. Thanks a lot for watching, guys, and I appreciate it. I'll see you in the next one. Cheers, bye-bye.
All right, thank you, Graham. I really hope you've enjoyed this video today. As I said, this was a lot of trial and error for us. We messed up, and we made mistakes, and we had angry clients because they saw how many sales we were making them. They just wanted to go harder and harder and harder.
So there's a lot of learnings here. I've written a book on how we do this; it's called "The Instant AI Agency," and it's how a lot of people that have been running PPC services or lead gen or SMMA or drop shipping or whatever have been struggling for years.
And I can, you know, hand on heart say that this is a fantastic way to move to AI and get set up and running very, very quickly. That's why I call it "The Instant AI Agency." Grab my book below; it's really good stuff, and I'll speak to you soon. Take care. [Music]