How Bare Performance Nutrition Made $1 Million with SMS in 4 Months

When Austin Clare became the Head of SMS and Email Marketing at BPN in 2022, they weren't doing much with text. So, he and the BPN marketing team put their heads together to level up BPN's SMS game.

Based on a recommendation from a friend in the ecommerce space, Clare decided to give Postscript a look. He was immediately drawn to the user-friendly interface and analytics dashboard. An added bonus: Clare was able to set a one-day click window and a 12-hour view window, allowing him to get a truer sense of the performance of each send.

According to Clare, no other SMS platform came close to Postscript in terms of functionality, tracking, and overall customer experience—particularly during onboarding. “[Other vendors] don’t create an experience based on value,” Clare said. “So, Postscript 100%. And I’ve gone to battle hundreds of times with friends about switching to Postscript.”

So, how does BPN continually drive SMS revenue without slinging discounts like they're going out of style? Clare says it's all about tailoring their text message content to their audience—and committing to a steady sending cadence of 2-3 messages per subscriber, per week. “We don't miss beats. We don't take time off. It's just every single week—two minimum, three max. That's worked really well,” he said.

He added that BPN's audience is uniquely poised to welcome the brand's messaging with open arms, largely due to the founder's (Nick Bare) focus on nurturing a loyal community over the last decade. BPN's subscribers want to hear from them, and they want to buy from them—and SMS is the perfect channel to facilitate both.

Case in point: BPN hit $1 million in total SMS revenue within their first 4 months on Postscript. And by investing a ton of effort into nurturing their list every month, they were able to beat their BFCM sales targets handily—even generating 6 figures of revenue with a single campaign.   

“The team was blown away,” Clare said. “It felt like all those years of effort to build up our community and everything that we had invested in growing and nurturing our SMS list came together in exactly the right way at exactly the right time.”

Rather than simply replicating what they do on email, BPN treats the SMS channel with special intention and care. “The way we view both email and SMS is that they are two platforms that are parallel to each other, but don’t pull from each other,” Clare said. For that reason, BPN took a best-of-breed approach in selecting their platforms for each channel, opting to use Klaviyo for email and Postscript for SMS.

They also draw a clear line between their strategies for each channel, reserving SMS exclusively for BPN’s most engaged customers and prospects. “I don't want the lukewarm or the cold [subscribers] on SMS,” Clare said. “The way we’ve viewed SMS this entire time is that it’s for the warm customers—the ones who want to engage with the BPN team and want to reap the benefits of the products."

In other words, BPN’s most valuable and loyal customers are on their SMS list—and he wants to keep it that way. “SMS has been the number-one defining thing that if you’re on the fence about leaving, if you’re subscribed to SMS, our hope is that you’re never leaving—because of the customer experience you receive,” Clare said.