By Riley Kaminer
Are you one of the 79% of Americans that have their phones with them at least 22 hours per day? With that close relationship to our digital devices, it’s no wonder that text messages have somewhere around a 98% open rate – with the vast majority of those texts opened within 15 minutes of when they are sent. Compare this open rate to that of emails, which sits at just over 21% across all industries.
Boca Raton-based 3i Tech Works helps businesses take advantage of these high open rates for text messages through their platform TextExpress. Users can leverage TextExpress to connect with their customers at scale.
CEO and Chairman Joseph Riano told Refresh Miami that TextExpress can have an almost instantaneous effect on a company’s bottom line. One of their users runs 28 Goodwill stores in Palm Beach. “The CEO told me that if they send out a text at 9:30 in the morning, by 11 o’clock the parking lot is full,” said Riano. “A text that cost them a few hundred dollars can make them thousands of dollars.”
These text campaigns might include offers such as discounts, with the aim of enticing customers to stop by. Customers can opt-in when they’re at the store by exchanging their phone number with the store to receive a subscribers-only offer.
“An email tells you a story,” said Riano. “But a text drives you to action.”
Riano also relayed a story from a user who decided to temporarily pause their text campaigns while their warehouse was undergoing construction. “They said that customers were coming into the store and asking if they had been dropped from the text mailing list because they’re not getting information on sales.”
This anecdote is a powerful rejoinder to the concern that customers will be put off by receiving these texts. “What I always tell users is that your customers love you more than you think,” asserted Riano. “There’s a reason why they’re doing business with you.”
By this logic, the intimate nature of the text message makes customers feel appreciated by the companies. This has a tangible effect on the user’s bottom line, noted Riano: “It reduces the cost of acquisition and reduces attrition for the business.”
Another major product from 3i Tech Works is their Express Orders platform, which currently helps 65,000 restaurants across the US create new revenue streams while improving customer experience.
Perhaps the most novel aspect of the platform is that restaurants can get customer orders delivered for $1 (customers pay the lion’s share of delivery costs). That stands in stark contrast to the 30% delivery fee commanded by other platforms. Additionally, restaurants can take advantage of TextExpress to engage with their customers.
Founded in 2012, 3i Tech Works currently has 10 full-time employees, including 7 in South Florida (some of them are pictured above). The company reports that they have nearly doubled in revenue each year since 2018. They’ve amassed a million members (end users) along the way – a number they hope to grow to 10-20 million within the next few years. Now 3i Tech Works is looking to raise a million dollars in external capital, partially through a crowdfunding campaign.
“We are cashflow positive and don’t need the money to run the company, but we want the money to expand rapidly so that we can exit in the next two to three years at very high multiples,” Riano said.
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