Tool Review: Blueprint

Hey all - let's jump straight in: 

Blueprint was started by Harvey and Rory - ex-D2C operators themselves, Blueprint is “the conversational commerce CRM supercharging eCommerce retention”. At its core, Blueprint is an SMS platform which helps you build intimate relationships with your customers - which in turn, helps you drive up LTV & retention.

Perfect for: D2Cs who value strong customer relationships and rely on a high repeat purchase Customer base includes: Rise Brewing, Ghia, Daring Foods, Misfits Health, Days Brewing

Pricing starts at: $127/mo. 

The hero feature is the one-to-one SMS communication channel. When you start sending SMS’ to customers - some will respond, and that’s where the fun begins. With the right rail of the platform, you can identify a customer’s total LTV and see who’s a superfan. From there, just start engaging. Send texts like “Hey! Thanks for being a great customer! Let me send you a free sample of our next product”. 

The next feature to highlight is the group texting feature. Because you’ll be all synced up via Shopify and ReCharge (soon Bold & Smartrr), you can create customer cohorts such as “customers who have spent more than $250” or “customers who have purchased product xyz in the past 8 months”. You can then text those dynamic groups whatever you want, including “1 click checkout links”

“1 click checkout links” are one of the key pillars of Blueprint. As an admin, you can create custom baskets - and send them as direct checkout links via SMS. So your customers can skip the entire funnel and convert without any friction.  

Now - let’s touch upon a neat feature: Automated messages. Once you’re integrated to your store, you can start sending abandoned cart messages, order confirmations, order fulfilment messages & post-order check-ins. Use dynamic fields to make your texts personalized, and easily select when you want those texts to go out. This is the fundamental feature that ensures your customers get the best possible customer experience. Again - to use the ReCharge example: Use this “automated messages” feature to easily send “upcoming subscription” prompts to “skip, cancel, modify” that a customer can respond to with intuitive words like “skip”.  

It’s worth highlighting that the overall UI is extremely clean and user-friendly, so you’ll be in full control over your texting strategy. You can even set “global settings” such as “whatever happens - do no text a customer twice in the same day”. 

Finally you have cross-sell and up-sell functionality. This is especially useful for the businesses with >20 SKUs and a strong order base. Essentially, these are like automated text messages - but even more specific. This feature helps you analyze your customer buying behavior, and create advanced rules to text customers with the right up-sell or cross-sell offer at the right time. For example, you can identify that customers who purchase the “chocolate milk” on a one-off basis typically re-order it after 38 days and create a rule to text those customers a few days prior to the 38th day with a bundle offer of “chocolate milk + banana milk for 50% off”. 

To make sure all your texting efforts are paying off, access their 2 clean dashboards which highlight your LTV growth in one, and your SMS performance metrics in another. 

Before we wrap - I want to call out that Blueprint can send text messages in various countries including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Germany. This list gets bigger by the month. This is a strong “pro” for Blueprint because many tools are only suited for North America. 

If you did consider other SMS tools like Klaviyo SMS, Attentive & Postscript - I’d summarize the key difference with Blueprint by pointing out that they focus on individual customer chats and growing LTV. The others are more geared to send automated mass messages, while Blueprint’s key focus is to get you to build individual customer relationships. 

That’s all folks. I recommend Blueprint - I’ve only heard great things from it. Also - they’ve launched this cool new retention benchmarketing tool for brands to figure out their own LTV vs. the competition, check it out. 

-Tim