191 - In this episode, we chat with Jesse Clemmens, co-founder of HiTide, a platform revolutionizing SMS list growth for Shopify brands. Delve into cutting-edge strategies for data collection, effective retention techniques for sustainable growth, and more!
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191 - In this episode, we chat with Jesse Clemmens, co-founder of HiTide, a platform revolutionizing SMS list growth for Shopify brands. Delve into cutting-edge strategies for data collection, effective retention techniques for sustainable growth, and more!
Watch the full episode here!
You’ll Learn
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
Request Free Email Marketing Audit!
Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review and we will send you a Flowium gift.
Welcome to email Einstein, a podcast by Floium. It's time to start honoring your inner marketing Einstein. Tune in for the data-driven tips that'll make you a marketing genius. Here you'll find email marketing formulas and tips straight from the brilliant mad scientists at Floium. It's time for your emails to start earning more money. It's time to unleash your Einstein.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone and welcome back to email Einstein. The podcast by Floium. We are your host, vera Sadlak.
Speaker 3:I'm Andrey Bocz.
Speaker 2:And we are pumped to have you guys back with us because today we have a very special guest with us today to discuss all things SMS list growth. So today we have a special guest joining us Jesse Clemens, co-founder and CEO of Hi-Tite. Hi-tite is the app that is revolutionizing the game for e-commerce brands with their innovative approach to SMS list growth through social DM automations, and we are definitely going to go in details and we're going to discuss this amazing tech and details. But before we go there, say hi, jesse, we're so happy to have you on this podcast today.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the chance to join and talk SMS.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we just had a quick chat before I start heading to record. But Jesse is calling us from New York and I'm also in New York and we have what? Three inches of snow in the city, which never sleeps, stops when it snows.
Speaker 4:Yes, and I have my warm cup of coffee. I'm bundled up inside, looking at the snow globe outside and ready to talk SMS, as one does on a snow day. Oh, that's perfect.
Speaker 2:I'm so jealous of you guys. Oh sorry, andrea, I just wanted to add a few things about this snow topic. I'm so jealous of you experiencing this right now. I actually got myself tickets to Finland in hope of seeing snow this year for the first time, so hopefully I'm going to be able to see this snow this year, but if not, I'm just going to watch Andrea's Insta stories.
Speaker 4:Nice thanks, Amazing. I hope you have a fantastic Finland trip. Are you going cross country skiing by any chance?
Speaker 2:No, I'm just going for a weekend to see the snow and going back because everything gets so close here there you go, there you go.
Speaker 4:I'm jealous.
Speaker 3:Yeah, nice, nice. Before we start the full globe interview, we have a quick Q&A questions to know you better. Are you good with that? Yeah, let's do it, sure. So let's do it Facebook or Instagram.
Speaker 4:Oh, all right. So we're doing rapid fire. Choose one. I'm going to go with Instagram, the best platform for. Sms growth, of course.
Speaker 3:Desktop shopping or mobile shopping.
Speaker 4:You know I'm the guy that the attribution people hate. I browse on mobile and then I go and purchase on desktop.
Speaker 3:Wow, Okay, so this is question, not this or that. Favorite app subscription.
Speaker 4:Oh, my favorite app subscription. I'm currently addicted to whoop, which is my wearable, not for fitness so much, but for sleep. I love it for sleep tracking. So that's my current and, funny enough, if the whoop team is listening, my renewal is up in a couple of days. Here my yearly subscription renewal and I'm hoping to renew, so that's my current fave, nice.
Speaker 3:If you could learn any new skill, what would it be?
Speaker 4:That's a good one. I would love to be amazing at playing the drums, which I am not amazing at and have always admired.
Speaker 3:Cool. What's something on your bucket list? What do you have? Something that you can share?
Speaker 4:Oh, on my bucket list for life in general.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 4:This is kind of an easy one. It's hopefully going to be quite achievable. It's not about vacations or crazy professional accomplishments, but I am hoping to start a family at some point soon. So that's my bucket list is to become a dad.
Speaker 2:That's so cool.
Speaker 3:Great one. I never heard that on bucket list, but it's cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good one. Mine is more hard to. Mine is harder to achieve. I talked about it many times on the podcast, but I really, really, really want to hug a penguin and I still haven't found a way of like doing that.
Speaker 4:So if you have any connections in the industry. Well, I don't know the penguin population looks like in Finland, so I can't promise you, but we'll take a look. Did you ever read the book, mr Poppers Penguins as a Kid, or see the movie?
Speaker 2:No, I haven't. I grew up in Ukraine and we read like different kind of books. But I'm going to put this one on my bucket list, Jesse.
Speaker 4:I'm going to send you a link, not to divert too much. But the 10 second is it's about a guy that wants to own penguins in the city, and so he freezes his apartment and brings all the penguins into the apartment.
Speaker 3:I think you saw this is a famous comedian. Who's his name? What is the actor team?
Speaker 4:Oh, I don't know. I only know it as a children's movie.
Speaker 2:I would, I would remember if I saw something as legendary as this.
Speaker 3:I think they're similar movie. Maybe it's based on the story, but like more modern on and the famous comedian I forgot his name he plays, who plays down downer and dumber. And there's movie about also Jim Carrey yeah, Jim Carrey.
Speaker 4:Jim.
Speaker 3:Carrey. Yeah, in New York City he sees his apartment.
Speaker 4:That must be the that must be the movie version.
Speaker 2:Okay cool. I'm going to Google it after the after the call Okay cool.
Speaker 4:Andre what's?
Speaker 3:your bucket list Mine.
Speaker 4:We got to know. The people want to know.
Speaker 3:Always like to share it's. I want to build the airship. It's not spaceship airship, it's a sustainable building based, built from garbage, and they typically build them in Arizona. It's a guy I forgot his name, but he has even documentary on Netflix how he built, how he reused like bottles, tires and built those sustainable houses in in ground. So I want to build one in in my life.
Speaker 2:Your bucket list items are so admirable, you guys.
Speaker 4:I was going to say when, when you get that built, I'll bring the kids, and Vera brings the penguins and we'll have a little party.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I just Google it. So the movie calls Mr Pop Poppers Penguins. That's it, that's it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cool, cool, cool. I'm gonna Google it.
Speaker 3:It's a very funny movie.
Speaker 2:Guess what I'm watching tonight.
Speaker 1:Awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, we do have some more serious questions, Jesse. I promise this episode it's not gonna be only about the penguins and stuff, but tell us more about what you do. What is high tide and how does it connect to Instagram, Because I'm still very in awe of what you guys are doing and tell us more about it.
Speaker 3:And how did you come up with this name, High Tide?
Speaker 4:Yeah, oh, that's another great question. So let me briefly start with kind of the discovery of learning about this method and why we wanted to build this platform, and then I'll get into the specifics of how it works. On a top level, I had spent my career before getting to the Shopify space about a year and a half ago. I had spent my career in social and specifically on social ads. I spent almost 10 years between Google and Facebook and a couple other programmatic ads platforms, and as I got into the Shopify space and learned more about how brands are marketing their products, I realized that there was a major gap that existed between brands' social followings and their owned channels email and SMS where many of the Shopify brands that we all work with work so hard to build these non-owned followings on social and then, often separately, are working to build these owned channels that they have true control over. I thought that problem was really interesting and I kind of filed it away in my head and, separately, was working on a now kind of now defunct project that was helping creators to monetize their Instagram messages.
Speaker 4:When we first started building this concept, meta had opened up their Instagram Messenger API for the first time. My co-founders and I thought it would be cool to build a power inbox for influencers and creators. That sorted through incoming comments and DMs. And, long story short, we found out that what some of these creators specifically those who are selling stuff on Shopify actually wanted was a more dependable way to reach their following. And through a series of experiments, we realized that automation of messages was a fantastic way to build owned channels. That would allow anyone that wanted to sell stuff to their audience the ability to convert Instagram following into an owned channel. And as we learned more about SMS, we realized that SMS opt-ins, by nature of both regulatory and kind of consumer habits, are just tough to get. It's expensive to acquire a phone number. We put two and two together and launched this brand new platform called Hi-Tide about a year ago that helps brands acquire phone numbers, and we do that on top of the Messenger marketing API, which I can talk a little bit more about in a bit.
Speaker 2:That's very interesting, Jesse, and just curious can you do same thing with emails or a similar thing with emails?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so we started with SMS and we're laser focused on SMS because it's the biggest gap in the market today. It's hard and it's expensive to acquire phone numbers and there's just hasn't been a ton of innovation outside of website pop-ups for capturing SMS. The core function of what we do is helping brands to start automated short sequences via Instagram DMs that capture data. So if you remove the SMS part of our platform, what we really aspire to do is be this zero-party data collection platform where SMS opt-ins are just one kind of channel that we can move people into and email is another. We don't have a full set of email functionality built out in the platform today, but it's high on our list for stuff to do in the future and if you imagine a DM based conversation between a brand and a consumer, you might get people the option to what they want to subscribe to or connect people with whichever channel they prefer.
Speaker 3:So the shorter answer is not yet, but we hope to soon, jesse, so could you please walk us through the process from A to Z in terms of how do you convert Instagram followers into SMS subscribers?
Speaker 4:Yeah for sure. Okay, so a brand on boards onto the Hightight platform and they connect us with three important platforms that they use. The first is their SMS platform, like attentive or PostScript or Clavio. The second is their Instagram account. They connect their Instagram account via this messaging API that Facebook provides. That makes it safe and, in fact, encouraged to run these types of automations. And then the third is the Shopify connection, which we'll talk about in a bit.
Speaker 4:Once they're connected, a brand can set up what we call a keyword based trigger. That keyword based trigger is monitoring posts and direct messages, looking only for very specific things to trigger off of whether those are certain emojis or certain comments, and when triggered, it results in a short direct message automation that takes the user through a sequence of questions From a user perspective, like putting aside all the kind of like API stuff and the technical aspects of it. On the front end, as a user, I might be browsing my favorite you know, say, my favorite sneaker brand. I see a post about a product. Let's imagine that it's a post about, you know, a limited run of 100 of a certain color way of sneakers that are going to be available in two weeks from this sneaker brand that I love. On the post there'll be some sort of call to action it might be, you know, comment drop to get signed up for our text alert when the product is available, when I engage with that post via comment, or it could be via a story reply or a direct message. Hi tide is picking up that automation and taking me through a private message that comes from the brand. In the brand's voice that basically says like hey, jesse, you know, thanks for your interest in this drop.
Speaker 4:We expect these products to go quickly. If you want to sign up for the list, reply back with your phone number and from there I'm taken through a short, tcpa compliant flow. Most importantly, high tides job stops at the moment of opt-in, so we're moving people into the opt-in for the platform and then we do measurement and analytics afterwards to show how you know what kind of ROI the brand has gotten from a campaign like this. But we're actually partnered with all the SMS platforms, so we don't send any texts. We simply help these platforms and these brands grow their lists faster. And from a consumer standpoint it's kind of a magic moment because I've opted in for something that I want to get a notification about in the future. Two weeks later, I get the text. I'm walking to the store, I get the text and I'm able to buy the thing that I wanted to buy. At the moment, I want to buy it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's very interesting and you mentioned that you guys call yourself like a zero party data platform, like what other kind of information can you collect? Say, is there a way to collect information about sneakers, color preference and like recorded somewhere on the platform, say in Clavio, or some like other like preferences Is there? Is that a thing that you can do?
Speaker 4:Yes. So the beauty of the platform is that, regardless of whether someone is a new subscriber or not, when they interact with a post and either input their phone number or have input their phone number in the past, with their consent, we can update the marketing automation platforms record of that customer profile. So, just picking randomly from one of our many great partners for PostScript, if you're going through that flow, we can ask you what size shoe are you In the case of the sneaker drop? And PostScript has a beautiful set of APIs that they've made available to their developer partners that allows us to not only mark that person as subscribed but actually update them to match a particular segment or profile, and I'm really excited about this over the long term.
Speaker 4:One kind of major trend we've heard from the marketing automation platforms is this is the year that they're figuring out how to bring AI to bear around. No more batch and blast tech sending. It's all about personalization. They're best suited to do that job because they're storing all these customer records and interactions and, if I can, alongside a brand, better fuel that machine and help make techs more effective, I'm really happy. So the idea of preference data as one type of zero-party data is really interesting and really important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's huge. Zero-party data is huge. Definitely, jesse. Maybe it's a silly question, but I'm sure a lot of people will have it. How is it legal? Like seriously, how do you guys ensure that a Sebastian process remains compliant, because there are so many requirements that TCPA have? One of them is to have the consent and written or electronic signature of the person who's agreeing to receive SMS. How does Hightight ensure that the SMS opt-in process remains compliant?
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's a really, really important question.
Speaker 4:So the way that we respect TCPA and allow brands to adhere to TCPA is by including extremely direct, clear and TCPA-compliant messaging in the direct message itself.
Speaker 4:So, as a user, if I'm joining a campaign by kicking off a direct message with a brand and the brand is asking for my phone number, that's all good and fine, but the moment before I'm opting in to a text list, I have to be presented with extremely clear language that covers all the TCPA requirements, including language around that I'm signing up for recurring marketing, I'm signing up for recurring marketing messages that consent is in the condition to purchase and that I'm signing up for a text list.
Speaker 4:And the SMS platforms themselves have done a fantastic job of ensuring that, when brands are launching new opt-in flows whether that's an on-site pop-up or whether that's an Instagram story post that they're including all the right language. And so what Hytide does is we actually sync up with the existing TCPA language on an account level. So for a given brand, with our integration, we pull back the TCPA consent language and we just replicate it in a way that's clear and easy to read in the direct message and then, finally, the actual moment of consent happens through whatever join method the platform uses. This is getting a little technical, but one example is many platforms support the ability for a consumer to send in a keyword to join a text list.
Speaker 4:If you're doing SMS, you're probably familiar with this experience, and so when the SMS platform receives that keyword, consent is logged and you're good to go, and then from there it's providing the ability to opt out, etc. Etc. We make sure that we're simply sending the user along to the platform's existing join flow and keeping everything super TCPA compliant and clear.
Speaker 3:Just see, I have one not prepared question, but I have to ask you because it bothers me. So there's other players in the industry and again they are similar, but maybe they are different. So I want to ask you, since you're in this industry, like provider, like vendor, like ManiChat, are they a competitor of yours or not? Or they do something different? Because it sounds very similar, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
Speaker 4:This is an interesting one, so the messaging API that Instagram built has made it really, really easy to integrate, and so, as you would expect, there are many solutions out there that do chat automation or that do chat bots or that do automated replies, and so everything from CX platforms like Gorgias, for example, falls into this category, in that they're ingesting messages for customer service, down to ManiChat and a few of the others that are more general purpose marketing tools.
Speaker 4:The difference between Hi-Tide and anyone else out there is that Hi-Tide is laser focused on SMS growth, and we have spent a lot of time integrating into the existing SMS partners out there, as opposed to trying to compete with our own texting service, and so, with Hi-Tide, we've assembled something in a unique way that provides extreme value to a brand and allows them to get up and running with these types of campaigns faster than anywhere else. Could you go and put together a series of queries to your text provider and assemble it in one place, and then put together a third party chat solution and run some of these campaigns? You could, with a lot of time and effort. We make it easy to connect in five minutes and get up and running for a very low cost and high value, and that's how we intend to win.
Speaker 3:Thank you for explaining. So you said that you trigger your automations based on specific keys or keywords, but on Instagram a lot of people to grow their account, they use some method to mention somebody else. Let's say, hey, mention five people to get into this giveaway. So first question do you have any strategy or does it trigger your automations If somebody mentioned somebody else, and do you message both people or only one?
Speaker 4:How does it work? That's a great question. This one actually comes up quite a bit, so we consider tagging as one way to trigger an automation. A popular scenario is a brand has collaborated with a influencer, for example, has a collab post up and running and both the influencer and the brand are asking for a friend tag action. In our case, the way that Instagram has built this beautiful API is that you can only run an automation in the scenario that we're describing. This is actually a comment, private reply from the person that left the comment. So while we hope that the person they tagged might come in and join the party and comment on that post, you're only allowed to respond to that person that left the comment, and that's very important clear distinction and a clear rule that Instagram has built to avoid spam-like behavior and all the unwanted DM-type stuff that you can imagine happening without stricter controls.
Speaker 3:Could you walk us through an example? Let's say, vero did this giveaway and I'm tagging somebody else and I'm receiving messages from Vero's brand. And what kind of messages I receive? Thank you for tagging. Can you walk us through some examples please?
Speaker 4:Yeah for sure. Okay, so I'm going to use an example of a brand that we actually have a case study of on our website. Check it out if you want even more detail. Let me start very briefly with describing the objective of this campaign and then I'll describe the actual mechanics of how the messages worked. So we work with a brand called Superbanzai.
Speaker 4:Superbanzai is a new entry to the market. It's a very fast growing hydration solution. So in simpler terms, it's a hangover cure or a supplement that helps with hangovers. You drink it the night, you're out for a bunch of drinks or the next morning, and they are growing this brand very fast. They were launching in a new channel. They're on Shopify, they were launching their Amazon store and they were, at the same time, launching their SMS program. So they happened to have chosen PostScript for their SMS platform and they came to us and they were like, hey, we want to do this giveaway and our objective is to get as many new SMS subscribers as possible for the lowest possible cost, and we want to do it around the Amazon giveaway. So we want to like, kind of pair it with this Amazon launch and do a giveaway around it.
Speaker 4:In their case, you can imagine a post. The post was about, I believe it was an Amazon gift certificate plus some free product, and the post had a very clear caption that said hey, here's what we're giving away and here's how to enter. Yes, this is it for anyone watching the video that's up on the screen. Now the case study In the caption. The caption had one of the requirements of the giveaway as tag a friend to enter the campaign, when or actually, let me be clear. It said tag a friend and we'll DM you to finalize your entry to the campaign.
Speaker 4:And in their case, when someone entered the giveaway, tagged a friend, they expected to receive a DM and, sure enough, seconds later they received a DM that said hey, here's the last step for joining this giveaway.
Speaker 4:That's your phone number for joining our text list, and included all the TCPA language, and then that was kind of the last step for entering this giveaway. So those are the mechanics. The results were they actually did a collab on this one that reached 60 times their follower account, so it was super high engagement. It was kind of a carefully selected collaboration that was within their kind of brand world and I believe it was like 20, I think it was 24 cents per subscriber was the cost for net new subscribers, which if you think about a percentage discount, that's really great. And then you know they're tracking some conversion stats down the line, so they're super happy with this one. It jumpstarted their post script list in a way that the you know day by day drip of people joining a pop up just can't compete with, and they've maintained a pretty high opt-in rate for this one, which is also important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So just like to confirm, jesse. So say I tagged Andrew. Andrew will receive, like, some sort of message from you as well right?
Speaker 4:No, no, so only the person that leaves the initial comment gets a message.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah.
Speaker 4:Hopefully you will have received a notification from Andre. Oh, andre, tagged in this post. You'll check it out if you're interested, you might join, but otherwise it's. One comment results in one message.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I just wanted to add the other cool thing about this campaign. I mentioned it quickly, in passing, but this is an important part of the strategy the way that Instagram has built collab posts. If you're collabing with either another brand or a influencer, you can find the link in the description below. I think people are probably familiar with the cloud post but, briefly, it shows up in both feeds. If you're the primary post, you actually have control over the comments and you can run an automation like this so that if people are coming from another audience, even if they joined that post through the influencers feed, for example, we can capture phone numbers at a very high rate, which is an added bonus of this strategy for this particular client.
Speaker 3:I recently just found out maybe it's not recent news, but I recently found out that you are able to collaborate with multiple brands. In the past, you just were able to do it only one, but now you're multiple people, multiple brands. That's right. Not sure what the limit is, but it's cool.
Speaker 4:At one point it was six. I haven't seen people do too many more than six. I think in practice now they may have opened it up further, but it's a really cool feature. Actually, I think it's one of the top underrated features on social right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wonder what the LTV of those people who are coming organically versus people who are coming through this giveaway type of posts are. Maybe you guys have some insights. I'm just curious whether or not it makes sense even to invest in those giveaways.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's a great question. This is one of the things we were unsure of at the beginning because we're like, hey, we have this tactic that we know works really well for SMS list growth, but does it convert? Obviously we have. I think we have now close to 12 different campaign types where giveaways are one campaign type, but in the early days most of the campaigns were giveaways. It's now balanced out a bit more.
Speaker 4:One of the things that was extremely important to us when we're building this platform and the V1 of it the dirty MVP version of this thing was how do we track ROI on these campaigns? Brands are running giveaways all the time, not just with high tide, obviously Objective for many of those campaigns. They're often run by the social teams where the objective is gain more followers. It's a successful tactic for gaining more followers and getting engagement up on the account overall. But there's this constant question of like, what's my ROI and are those people that are following from these campaigns or are they actually worthwhile additions to my audience? Where on social, follower count is follower count and there's no added cost per se if you're adding a bunch of low-intent people On SMS it's actually the opposite the more low-intent people you get on the text list, the more turn you're going to get, and also, you might just be sending expensive text messages to people that don't care about your brand and don't want to buy anything, alright.
Speaker 4:So the way that we solved this was, importantly we integrated into Shopify and then, for each campaign, say it's a giveaway. For the giveaway campaign, we map purchases in Shopify to the phone number that's been collected in order to show down to the scent, how many purchases are coming out of that audience that's been collected, and that's how we measure ROI for the brand. And what we found which was like surprising and a happy outcome for us in the very beginning was these giveaways do actually perform in terms of ROI, sometimes very substantially. You have a lot of people that are already huge fans of the brand on Instagram and, for whatever reason, they haven't had the incentive, they haven't gotten the pop-up, they haven't gone over to the website lately, or maybe they even churned off of the text list, and so posts like this are a really great way, that is now fully ROI-measurable, to get those people back on the text list.
Speaker 2:Yeah, interesting Guys. I just want to share a few really, really interesting stats that I got from one of these claveo studies that they've done recently. I actually found out that 95% of people that they had in their study they say that they are subscribed to less than seven brands on SMS. That's such a big commitment, right, like when you're getting someone's email. It's probably not as big of a deal as it is when you're getting an SMS, and I am subscribed to three or four brands, so that's getting that SMS is huge, that's a great stat To me.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I expected this number to be higher, but then I analyzed what brands I'm subscribed to and it's just maybe five brands. Yeah, that's true, but yeah, what brands are you following on SMS?
Speaker 4:Oh man. So, firstly, I'm subscribed to many more than seven, by nature of I subscribe for research and subscribe to follow the brands that we work with. So everyone from Seek to a great underwear brand called NADS to Superbond's, I'm getting text all the time and it's actually a pretty fun way to stay on top of what my brands are doing. So, personal standpoint, I am subscribed to a great service called Bottomless that sends me coffee on a regular basis and they do an amazing job of SMS marketing, both from a transactional standpoint but also, you know, kind of sharing about the brands that are coffee brands that are launching on their platform. So that's one that I love.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's nice. So you are an experienced SMS user, I guess. So from your standpoint maybe more as a user and not as the owner of this platform how can brands ensure that they maintain that momentum from their successful SMS list gross campaigns and maximize the potential of this new acquired contacts? Do you have any recommendation? Are there any specific strategies or tactics that you can recommend?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So there's obviously a huge body of work around effectively using an SMS list in general, so I won't really touch on any of that stuff. You guys could probably teach me a lot about that. What I do know about is, you know, for some of these social campaigns, effective segmentation is really really important, and then you know being aware of where that person is landing in your existing flows or existing setups.
Speaker 4:What I mean by that is, you know, typically a brand will come to us. They have two objectives. Number one they have something you know that they're dropping soon, a new product that's releasing. Maybe they have, you know, a new fashion capsule. Whatever it is, there's something going on that they want to run a campaign around, because that tends to work really well for social and does a great job of pulling in high-intent people. Making sure that you're both segmenting the users that have interacted with the campaign on a very granular level and also getting those people into the proper welcome flows if they're new subscribers and like telling the difference between a new subscriber versus someone else that has joined in the past or that is an existing subscriber these are all fairly simple settings in the customer automation platform, but just being thoughtful about what message you want to send to who is the whole name of the game, and it's just as important for this channel as for an overall program.
Speaker 2:Or, even more important, I got this like again, going back to my stats, I love good stats. Going back to this study by Clavio, they actually asked people what are the main reasons consumers unsubscribed from SMS program. And okay, let's play a game what do you guys think is the number one reason why people unsubscribe from SMS programs?
Speaker 4:Too many SMS. Too many texts.
Speaker 2:Too many texts, like 73% of like responders said that yeah, too many SMSes is like number one reason why they would unsubscribe. Also, people said that the same message many times is like a big reason to unsubscribe. Or messages that don't have a purpose. To be honest, they don't necessarily understand what it means like probably like messages without clear.
Speaker 3:How much purpose can you put in those 166 characters?
Speaker 2:But I mean you can, you just have to be very like purposefully using the CTAs right when you're sending traffic. Good, clear call to action, like. I've noticed that like I mean brands that I work with every time we send the link to like a blog post or something this SMSes are not performing as well as, say, promotional SMS with like link to the product directly. But that's just like my experience.
Speaker 4:I think that you know this is, you know, getting a little further into general SMS best practice world. That I said I wasn't going to comment on, but I think, like you know, it's about value exchange. Actually, that text has to be valuable in some way, whether that's just timely or whether it's actually, like you know, thoughtful content. For example, for this coffee company that I was talking about, this is not what they're doing. This is an imaginary example. I would much rather you know, know which two coffees are, you know, coming up and, like I don't know, maybe a line or two about what makes them special, maybe like what region did they come from? Who's the farmer that produced them? That sort of thing, as opposed to what I don't want is I don't want a coffee joke of the day hitting my inbox at 7.30, preparing for my morning meeting because, like you know, maybe that's fun the first time but it's going to get old quickly.
Speaker 3:But I think if I ask the same question, you and Vera Vera probably will prefer coffee joke every morning.
Speaker 4:Yes, that's a good point. That's what.
Speaker 3:I was about to say.
Speaker 2:It all comes down to like understanding who your audience is. I guess right, yeah, Always, always.
Speaker 4:I wonder how you know. One area I'd like to learn a lot more about is email. How does all this stuff compare to email? Is it, you know, kind of the same general principles, or is there anything dramatically different when it comes to retention for opt-ins and subscribes In comparison?
Speaker 3:to what SMS.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Vera go ahead.
Speaker 2:I mean in email you work with a bigger real estate, right? The email itself is bigger, so you can definitely be more adventurous with a copy. You can be.
Speaker 2:People are more forgiving with emails. You know, sms is like more personal, almost Like I'm very careful with who I give my SMS number to. With emails I'm like I had like a bad word in my head for that. But with emails I'm very adventurous. I get my email to like everyone like seriously, no, it's bad, it's like bad. Every morning I wake up to like a hundred unanswered like promotional emails. But that's maybe that's a part of the job. That's what I want to believe anyways, but I do love a good email.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, people are more like forgiving with emails. But I think the same principles apply, right? No, I think you're right the right timing, right right message to the right person and stuff like that. But even with the emails, we do collect zero party data about like your preferences, like what do you want to see in your inbox? What you don't want to see? Maybe you want to put your emails on hold for 30 days. Maybe you only want to receive like promotional emails from us. So that's like a big portion of what we're doing. Andri, do you have anything to add?
Speaker 3:Yeah, same, agree with everything you just said. And also, it's so easy to unsubscribe from email. You just type in stop Because emails, emails is sorry, sms was emails you. There's preference page. There is like hey, why you're unsubscribing? There's like now they have one click unsubscribe, but still it redirects you to different page with SMS. So you just need to be more careful. Okay, and last questions for me in terms of cost efficiencies, in comparing not sure if you run some kind of test, but collecting phone numbers for SMS through high tide versus just organic, like somebody visiting the website providing their phone number on the opt in form have you run any tasks and compare the cost?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So there's a couple of ways to think about this. There's a couple of components to the cost for a high tide campaign. One is the cost of our, of our, you know, saas costs, which are, you know, range anywhere from. We do have a free plan, but our typical brand is paying anywhere from 150 to like 350 bucks on average. There's some usage based components built in and then there's the cost of the campaign, which could be, you know, if you're doing a, if you're promoting a drop, for example, and you're putting up images of the product or teasing the product or whatever, there's zero cost.
Speaker 4:If you're doing a giveaway, that you know cost might be a $300 value of something that, as a brand, depending on your margins, it might cost you 30 bucks or 150 bucks, whatever the cost of the product is. We typically compare that to discount oriented opt in. So the reality is, most brands, vast majority of their phone numbers, are captured through discount pop ups and so if you're looking at an average AOV, let's use that, use a hundred bucks because it's easiest, and a 10% pop up, you know, 10% off somewhere around the 10% sorry, $10 cost to consumer. So maybe that, maybe that phone number is costing you as a brand, five bucks or four bucks or something in that range. By using engagement type strategies and campaigns that are, you know, up, more around products coming, connecting people with intent to buy, or wait listing or early access or VIP club or you know whatever, or like a giveaway prize, you can drive those costs dramatically down, and that's that's one of the most exciting parts about this. You know this platform.
Speaker 2:Cool. Well thank you so much, Jesse. It was so fun talking to you. We love having like a good email and SMS nerds on this podcast.
Speaker 4:I love it. I love it. I'm only wondering one thing, which is when is the podcast name going to be changed to email and SMS?
Speaker 2:Actually it's funny that you mentioned it, Jesse. Go ahead, Andri.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we are right now we thinking about to change it in not to be more email or SMS specific, but more e-commerce and more brands, cover more brands, stories and success stories and things that we can learn from successful brands, but it's still in work.
Speaker 4:Amazing. Well, you both run a fantastic podcast. I've listened to Thank you A few episodes in the past and look forward to listening more, and it's been an honor to come on and talk about commerce with you guys.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, jesse, it was so much fun having you on this podcast.
Speaker 3:Thank you, see you next Tuesday.
Speaker 2:See you next Tuesday everyone Take care.
Speaker 1:Bye. Thanks for listening to Email. Einstein. Can you feel that your marketing brain just got a little bit bigger? We ask that you please use it wisely. You've got all the theory you need to get out there and start boosting your sales, because great emails equals revenue squared.