COMPANY

Name: Voyage

Legal Name: Voyage SMS, Inc

Location: Los Angeles, California

Founded: 2018

Founder(s): Corey Epstein

Website: https://www.voyagetext.com/

Social Media Following: 119 Likes on Facebook, 28 Followers on LinkedIn 

INDUSTRY – Marketing Automation Software

Size: $5.10B in 2018 (Source: Mordor Intelligence)

Projections: $14.15B by 2024 (CAGR of 19.2%) (Source: Mordor Intelligence)

Introduction

Voyage SMS is a B2B SaaS company based in Los Angeles. They offer an automated text message marketing platform that enables e-commerce brands to more effectively leverage mobile marketing with SMS and MMS, providing significant ROAS and up to 10x revenues compared to email.

The Product 

Voyage is a mobile messaging solution that aims to be the MailChimp for SMS. Its proprietary text messaging platform helps e-commerce marketers maximize their revenue through text message-based mobile marketing. With Voyage, brands can build both short and long-term campaigns with automated messages for specific customer segments across their user journey. It offers custom solutions including but not limited to, initial opt-in list growth, automated drip campaigns, and weekend sales and promotions, which are aimed at helping clients achieve specific business goals. The platform also allows users to A/B test different copy for marketing messages to iteratively create the most impactful campaigns for their target audience. 

Voyage distinguishes itself from other bulk messaging platforms by bringing fresh functionalities to SMS that are more commonly seen in advanced email marketing automation platforms. The platform provides key performance metrics such as clicks, purchases, orders, revenue, etc. in real-time through its API integrations with commonly-used e-commerce tools, such as Shopify and ReCharge. Brands can use Voyage to segment their audience based on their buying behavior and engagement and create a customized communication experience to maximize conversions. They can also automate drip & one-time campaign messages to upsell products to existing customers, inform them about new product launches, offer discounts and promotions, or recover abandoned carts.

Voyage is also compatible with multichannel marketing and can be integrated with many other platforms (such as Klaviyo) so that marketers can use email for more visual content and text messaging for more time-sensitive communication. The combination of both email and SMS, therefore, allows for more effective engagement since text messaging delivers up to a 40%+ CTR, which is 5-10x better than email marketing.

Origin and Founding Team 

Corey Epstein, Founder and CEO of Voyage SMS, is a serial entrepreneur with interests across areas such as digital media, marketing, fashion, music, and brand building. In 2012, he founded DSTLD, a direct-to-consumer (D2C) fashion brand and spent over seven years overseeing the brand’s evolution with digital marketing and mobile communications. Between 2012 and 2017, the brand grew to achieve $3M in sales, which tripled soon following an equity crowdfunding round in early 2018 that enabled the company to scale up. During this period, Corey also witnessed the rise of text messaging as a marketing channel, and noticed that brands using it were seeing 4 times the engagement with SMS as compared to email.

Speaking about Voyage, Corey said, “While building DSTLD, we used several email marketing solutions and noticed a number of gaps in their functionality. They either did not have very detailed reporting features or could not be integrated with other channels. Simultaneously, the mobile consumer base for digital and e-commerce brands was growing steadily and e-mail no longer had the kind of impact that text messages did. So we set about building an automated platform that would allow businesses to leverage SMS in a similar manner as any email marketing software, but with more effective targeting and engagement capabilities. With Voyage, we focused considerably on the design and user experience to make the platform as simple as possible for businesses and allow them to derive maximum value from it.” 

Performance and Trends

Since it began operations in October 2018, Voyage has worked with several e-commerce startups and growth-stage businesses to improve their SMS marketing. It works with one-time purchase businesses as well as subscription-based businesses having revenues ranging from $5M to $150M.

Voyage’s clients include e-commerce brands with million-dollar-plus revenue such as Ruggable, a company manufacturing machine-washable rugs; Winc, a wine-in-a-box subscription brand; Dr. Squatch, a company offering all-natural, handmade soaps for men; and 12th Tribe, a women’s fashion e-commerce brand. 

In terms of the platform’s performance, Voyage recently helped a client generate $360K from a 4-day sale through SMS, representing 30% of the revenue their website generated during that period. An optimized message built on the Voyage dashboard and guided by insights from the dashboard gave a return of $6.55 per message, which is significantly higher than the average revenue per recipient of $0.08 from email campaigns, as per recent data from Klaviyo.