Don’t Miss This Post Valentine’s

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💌 Don’t Miss This Post Valentine’s 

Valentine’s campaigns are loud

Shipping deadline and reminders, “Still need a gift?” nudges. Then a quick follow-up sale once it’s over. By the end of it, the SMS channel has been pushed hard, and the natural instinct is to tidy things up.

Inactive subscribers get suppressed. Engagement reports get reviewed. Segments get cleaned.

All normal.

What rarely comes up in that process is a basic question: 

How do we look on the customer’s phone? 

It’s just a number sitting in the inbox. No saved name. No brand context unless the customer remembers it from the last message. Every campaign starts from slight unfamiliarity.

That’s a disadvantage you’re accepting without realizing it.

When someone saves the contact, the thread changes. Your brand name appears clearly. The conversation feels continuous instead of transactional. The next message doesn’t have to re-establish who you are.

It sounds small, but it changes how the channel behaves over time.

So instead of only trimming the list after a heavy promo window, it makes sense to add one more step. 

Send a message asking subscribers to save the contact if they want to keep hearing about drops, restocks, or early access. 

In the same message, mention that they can opt out if it’s no longer relevant to them.

Straightforward. No big production around it.

That one message quietly creates useful separation.

• Some people save the contact. That’s a clear signal.
• Some click through but don’t take the extra step. Interest is there, but it’s lighter.
• Some ignore it entirely.
• Some opt out, which improves engagement ratios immediately.

Now here’s where this gets more interesting.

Instead of just eyeballing campaign results in your ESP, you can actually turn this into a small analytics layer. 

Tools like Thesys let you upload your SMS campaign export or connect your database, ask natural-language questions, and instantly generate charts, tables, slides, or reports without building dashboards manually. 

It makes it easy to see patterns like save-rate by cohort, revenue per saver vs non-saver, or opt-out spikes after specific copy changes. You can claim $10 free credits here!

Back to the strategy. You now have behavior-based segments without building a complex flow.

• The group that saved the contact has made a small but meaningful decision. That’s the audience that can handle earlier access, slightly tighter launches, and more direct messaging
• The people who hovered but didn’t commit might respond better to value before urgency.

None of this feels dramatic when you send the message. It feels almost administrative. But over the next few months, it affects how often your texts are recognized, opened, and acted on.

Cleaning a list helps. Making sure your name actually lives in someone’s contacts gives you a different kind of advantage.

Together with Motion

Most Teams Are Missing This Paid Social Skill

Paid social is not broken. Teams are missing the skill that actually converts spend into results. Without a real creative system, more testing just creates noise and slows learning.

Motion’s Creative Strategy Bootcamp is a free, 8-week live program built for you to learn how to run a full creative sprint, from idea to insight, without guesswork.

This is hands-on training led by active Creative Strategists working on brands like Calm, Harry’s, and Happy Mammoth.

• You learn how to turn product features and customer insight into hooks that consistently convert.
• You work on real ads every week through live classes, office hours, and direct coaching.
• You graduate with a portfolio of ad wins and a Motion certificate you can display on LinkedIn.

The program runs live every Tuesday at 1 PM EST, with recordings shared within 24 hours.

Seats are intentionally limited to keep feedback high quality. It starts on starts March 17th.

Reserve your free spot now!

💬 Reddit Isn’t a Traffic Source Anymore. It’s a Search Engine.

In Q4 2025, 80 million people used Reddit search weekly. That’s up from 60 million a year ago. This isn’t accidental growth. It’s structural.

The Breakdown:

1) Search and AI Answers are now one system - Reddit merged traditional keyword search with Reddit Answers into a unified interface, letting users toggle between results and AI summaries seamlessly. 

Answers queries jumped from 1 million to 15 million year over year, driven by open-ended questions like what to buy, watch, or try. These multi-perspective queries naturally align with Reddit’s community-driven structure.

2) High-intent research is staying on-platform - Executives say users increasingly research purchases and comparisons directly inside Reddit instead of relying solely on Google. Search behavior is described as incremental and additive, often tied to high-intent decision moments.

Reddit is testing layouts with a prominent always-visible search bar and piloting dynamic agentic results that include media formats. The company wants users to finish searches inside communities, not just read AI summaries.

Reddit is no longer just a ranking factor inside Google. It’s becoming the destination where buying decisions are researched and finalized, and because Reddit content is now one of the most-cited sources in AI answers.

🚀Quick Hits

📦 Sending products? Tracking codes? Managing creator ROI? Modash does it all in one tab, so your team never scrambles again. Join brands like BioTech USA that scaled 70+ influencer campaigns effortlessly. Try Modash free for 14 days and streamline your workflow.

🧵 Threads now lets users influence their feed by posting “Dear Algo” requests, temporarily boosting chosen topics for three days, blending AI recommendations with manual control to increase personalization and user trust. 

📍 TikTok USDS launched a Local feed in the U.S., spotlighting nearby creators, events, and businesses based on location and recency, as privacy concerns swirl around expanded location data language in its updated policy.

🎭 Instagram is testing a Short Drama feature to ride TikTok’s booming mini-drama trend, where serialized cliffhanger episodes reportedly generated $1.3B in the U.S. in 2025, signaling serious monetization potential.

📦 Holiday 2025 returns surged 41% YoY, with average refund values up 42% and post-holiday refund dollars spiking 336%, far outpacing the 6.8% rise in online spending, signaling mounting consumer caution.

That’s a wrap for today! Tell us your thoughts about today's content as we line up more Shorts! And don’t hesitate to share this with someone who’d adore it. 🥰