Artist Ryan Leslie’s SuperPhone was the winner of best B2C Startup in Music Ally’s 2016 Digital Music Awards, with campaign success stories such as selling 17k products and experiences to an onboarded base of some 34k fans – a 50% conversion rate. The SuperPhone team hasn’t stopped introducing new features since we last covered the platform, and its mobile app is now fully launched to accompany its desktop and mobile-web-friendly platform. SuperPhone’s quick pitch is around ‘scaling personalised communications’. The user, be they an artist, a tech startup or an entrepreneur, publishes their phone number to the world, and anyone can text or call it. We’ll stick with the artist / fan example. Once a fan has texted a SuperPhone, they’re usually prompted to enter some personal information – name, city, social media handles, birthday, etc – which then can be used by an artist in various ways. The ‘SuperPhonebook’ displays an artist’s contacts in several different ranking formats: by volume of contact, determined by messages sent from the fan / sent from the artist; by amount of spend, which is connected to the artist’s online point of sale and identifies fans who have made purchases; and by tags, which the artist and their team can set on an individual user level to identify a variety of user segments (other artists, agents, actors, investors). SuperPhone has several online guides for recommended use cases for different industries and goals, and examples for artists and celebrity stress emphasising and showcasing the authenticity of the artist being behind the SuperPhone (as opposed to having a faceless team managing everything). Encouraging fans to buy merch with promise of a phone call to the first buyer of the day, or blocking out a time period through which the artist goes on Facebook / Instagram Live and calls up fans and answers texts are both powerful ways to increase engagement, conversions, fan loyalty and fan evangelism. Other features, such as scheduling messages, sending mass personalised texts or voice recordings (perhaps around birthdays), and having automated / bot responses also assist in scaling communication without sacrificing personalisation and credibility. “Everything’s catching up with the convergence of media technology. I think there are certain fundamentals that will always be consistent though,” Leslie told sandbox. “That is no matter how progressive or disruptive the idea may be, the success of that idea is always going to be correlated to the speed at which it can be communicated to the people that the idea can help.” “SuperPhone always fits squarely in that zone of enabling people to communicate more efficiently, and now we’re building new health insights which serve as predictors to see how quickly you can accelerate success.”
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
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