I bought 3 pairs of sunglasses, then got a discount text 24hrs later. Here’s what went wrong.

99% of the time, I intentionally select the brands for my lifecycle journey breakdowns to understand what the best are doing or the common pitfalls to avoid. But this one found me.

I recently purchased sunglasses from a well-known D2C brand (truthfully, they’re the best sunglasses I’ve ever owned). This brand is awesome, but I experienced a small personalization error that I’ve seen several times across industries and brands that can really impact the bottom line, so I wanted to dive into this commonly overlooked use case.

Here’s what happened. Recently, I purchased two pairs of sunglasses because they were running an awesome sale (I even got a 3rd pair free). But exactly one day after completing my purchase and opting into SMS, I received a 20% off discount. 

This is what went through my mind: "I just purchased $150 of sunglasses, using a better discount at checkout, and haven't even received them yet. Why would I ever need this?"

Being the lifecycle marketer that I am, I knew something wasn’t working the way it should be, so I decided to investigate. What I found was an invaluable lesson when it comes to optimizing your post-purchase flows and SMS program.

What’s really interesting is that this brand has a post-purchase flow setup for both SMS and email. With email, they send multiple messages over the next few weeks, with a heavy focus on brand reinforcement, loyalty, and referrals. In fact, the first promotional product email didn’t arrive until June 2nd — more than a week after my initial purchase on May 21st. 

The SMS program is completely different, though. There was no brand story, no referral ask, and nothing that reflected what I actually purchased. The moment I signed up, the flow collapsed into a series of promotional blasts, driving towards more purchases.

Unlike email, where you can choose which messages to open, SMS is an extremely high-intercept channel because it appears on your phone, where most people read all of their texts. Given the hierarchy of the channels, the risk with SMS is actually much higher than email.

So when you send an SMS message to a user offering a 20% discount one day after the purchase, before the product has even arrived, you’re essentially training the user to disregard this marketing channel as anything that would ever be relevant to them.

There's also a real financial cost. Using an industry baseline of $0.015 per segment (a figure a friend of mine recently shared in a detailed SMS cost analysis), here’s how that math compounds over time with some hypothetical numbers.

If you run this same broken flow at scale, it gets very expensive very quickly. 

This disconnect between email and SMS isn’t unique. It’s something that many teams struggle with. Usually, it’s an underlying data challenge. Without actually hopping into their SMS platform (which is Attentive, from what I was able to gather from their UTM parameters), it’s impossible to know the specifics.

However, most likely, what’s happening is that this platform has little or no access to the underlying purchase data, or the data is not being incorporated in the flow logic.

Without purchase data flowing into your SMS provider, suppression logic doesn’t work because the trigger doesn't exist. Technically, the team could suppress by subscription date, but that’s not ideal because it’s still a bit broad and catches everyone who recently opted in, not just buyers.

What you actually need is the purchase event itself. Without it, every new customer who opts in at checkout gets the exact same experience as someone who signed up and never bought anything.

Outside of upsells, the most valuable use cases retail/D2C brands push for are usually: (1) reviews, (2) referrals, (3) social shares, or some form of the above. In this case, they’re already doing a combination of this in the email program.

To be clear, this is a great brand, and I am absolutely loving these sunglasses. Problems like this are very common in SMS programs, and it’s just another reminder why it’s important that lifecycle teams audit their programs. The easiest way to start is to do exactly what I did: make a purchase, opt into SMS, and see what happens. No amount of staring at a screen will give you the same insight as actually interacting with your own marketing channels the way the customer does. 

There’s a story I love about how the CEO of Uber did something exactly like this, going undercover as a driver for several months to get as close to the customer and the product as possible.

If you actually do find a problem like this, the next question is, how do you fix it? The answer almost always comes back to data. And truthfully, your data warehouse is the only place that is ever going to have a complete picture of your customer (i.e., all the data you need to actually orchestrate experiences).

Getting your data flowing into your SMS platform and using it in your automation logic is the only thing that’s going to solve these types of mistakes. Until that happens, your marketing channels will always be slightly out of sync with each other.