How Postscript Helped Us 3x Email Revenue
The headline is accurate but it needs context: Postscript didn't 3x our email revenue. It 3x'd our revenue from owned channels by adding a second high-performing channel alongside email. SMS and email running together, coordinated properly, generates more than either running alone — and the multiplier effect is bigger than most people expect.
Why we almost didn't add SMS
Honest answer: we thought our audience wasn't ready for it. We sell to people who we assumed preferred email. The list felt personal. We didn't want to push into text messages and come across as aggressive.
What we didn't account for: our audience opted in to SMS at a 38% rate when we asked. Thirty-eight percent. The people who didn't want texts just didn't opt in. The people who did want them really wanted them — and they converted accordingly. The assumption that our audience wasn't 'an SMS audience' was wrong, and it cost us revenue we could have been generating for months before we finally tested it.
How Postscript is actually set up
Postscript connects to Shopify and syncs customer data automatically. Building the subscriber list happens through a combination of on-site popups (we use a two-step flow — email first, phone second), checkout opt-in, and keyword opt-in campaigns we've promoted in email. The compliance flow — double opt-in, clear disclosure, TCPA alignment — is handled by Postscript natively. You're not doing legal compliance work yourself.
The automation library covers the essential flows: abandoned cart, shipping notifications, welcome series, browse abandonment. Each connects to Shopify data the same way our email flows do in Klaviyo. When we added SMS abandoned cart to complement our email abandoned cart sequence, recovery rate on that audience segment increased noticeably in the first 30 days.
What the coordination with email looks like
This is the part that makes the '3x' number make sense. We don't run email and SMS as parallel, independent channels. We run them as a coordinated sequence.
Product launch: email goes first. Tells the story, shows the product, builds anticipation. SMS goes the morning of launch day: short, direct, with a link. The people who need context got it via email. The SMS assumes they saw it and reminds them today is the day.
Flash sale: SMS leads. It's time-sensitive, and SMS gets read immediately. If they don't click, email follows two hours later with more detail. Between the two sends, we capture people at different moments in their day.
This sequencing means neither channel is overused. Email subscribers get emails. SMS subscribers get texts. The people on both lists get coordinated touches, not duplicative spam. Unsubscribe rates on both channels went down after we systematized the coordination.
The revenue math
Before Postscript: email was our main owned-channel revenue driver. After adding and optimizing SMS over six months: SMS contributes roughly 15–20% of owned-channel revenue on top of what email generates. The email number didn't go down — we didn't cannibalize one channel to feed another. We added a net-new revenue stream from an audience that was already ours.
That's the real answer to '3x.' It wasn't that SMS replaced email. It's that owning two channels outperforms owning one by more than the math of 1+1 suggests, because of how they reinforce each other when coordinated properly.
