Ep.139/ HITIDE
Leveraging Social Media for SMS and Email Growth with Jesse Clemmens, Co-Founder & CEO of HiTide
Jesse Clemmens, Co-Founder & CEO of HiTide, a Shopify solution for growing email and SMS lists through direct message automation, joins Mariah Parsons on Retention Chronicles. Jesse shares HiTide's journey from helping creators manage messages to focusing on Shopify brands, emphasizing the importance of bridging social media engagement with direct messaging for retention. He highlights that 60% of social followers engaging with posts are not yet subscribed to email or SMS lists, presenting a significant untapped market. Jesse also discusses best practices for direct messaging, emphasizing the need for timely, personalized communication to avoid spam and enhance customer relationships.
Episode Timestamps:
1:51 Jesse's Background and HiTide's Origin
3:51 The Journey to HiTide
7:42 Challenges and Successes in the Shopify Ecosystem
8:00 The Role of Social Media in Retention
13:12 Best Practices for SMS and Email Marketing
21:07 Segmentation and Retention Strategies
30:40 Leveraging Social Media for Retention
41:29 Best Practices for Direct Messaging
EP. 139
JESSE CLEMMENS
TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was completed by an automated system, please forgive any grammatical errors.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
e-commerce enlightenment, post purchase experience, direct message automation, social to brand channels, creator space, business tools, SMS text lists, Shopify email marketing, social media engagement, customer retention strategies, transactional text messages, marketing messages, customer profiles, product availability, shipping notifications, ecommerce emails
SPEAKERS
Jesse Clemmens, Mariah Parsons
Mariah Parsons 00:05
Greetings and welcome to retention. Chronicles, the podcast with learnings from expert e commerce brands and partners. I'm your host. Mariah Parsons, if you're here, you're either on a quest for E commerce enlightenment or you accidentally click the wrong link. Either way, I am thrilled you stumbled into our corner of the internet, and I hope you'll stick around. We've got pearls of wisdom for everyone, whether you're running a multi million dollar business or simply just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey. Before we unleash the brilliance of today's guests, let's give a shout out to our podcast sponsor, Malomo. Malomo is so much more than just another Shopify app, their post purchase wizards, making beautiful and branded order tracking smoother than a jazz solo. So our amazing founders, like our guests, can keep their customers happy and up to date while they track their orders. So hit that subscribe button like it'll increase your LTV overnight and go listen to our other episodes at Go malomo.com that's G O M, a, l o m, o.com Get ready for insights, chuckles and perhaps a profound realization or two with This newest episode of retention Chronicles. Hello everyone, and welcome back to retention Chronicles. Jesse, so much so so so much. Thank you for being here today. I'm so excited to have you. It's going to be a great conversation. And as our listeners were not will know, I'm coming off of a break from Europe, and I'm so excited that you were one of the first people I get to while I'm still recovering from everything that is the craziness of traveling for two weeks. So thank you for joining us. Say hi to our listeners and give them a quick background on yourself.
Jesse Clemmens 01:50
Well, first, thanks for having me. I'm honored to be your first guest coming back to the States. I am one of the co founders of a company called high tide. High Tide is a solution for primarily Shopify brands to help them grow their email and SMS lists, specifically by bridging the gap between social and and brands owned channels. And our sweet spot and current focus is direct message automation, which I'll get into in a bit. I am one of the CO one of the three co founders of this business. I'm based in New York, and we've been working on high tide for a little more than a year at this point, and starting to starting to see some exciting results, and just absolutely loving the experience of working in the Shopify ecosystem, not only the brands we get to work with, but amazing partners like you guys. So thanks for having us. Yes,
Mariah Parsons 02:48
of course, excited to dive into it, and we haven't had someone who's doing what you all are doing on the podcast, so I know our audience is going to really love to hear all the nitty gritty details, everything you've learned over the past year. So but before we do that. Let's talk about what brought you to high tide, into founding high tide. What gaps were you seeing? Like, Share, share, I guess the leading moments up until last year, when you were like, You know what? We're going full in we're going to create this software for the gap that we're seeing.
Jesse Clemmens 03:15
Yeah, in some so our our origin story is, in some ways extremely typical, and in some ways kind of weird and roundabout. For me, high tide is a return to my marketing and martech routes. I spent a whole bunch of years at meta. Then at that point, it was Facebook, at Google, at a bunch of programmatic ad tech, like startups. And a few years ago, my co founders and I got together around an idea that was very much not ad tech, not martech. It was focused on the Creator space. And the idea that we had at the time was to help creators who are getting tons of messages on multiple social channels, Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, etc, to help them organize those incoming messages from their from their fans and from their audience, with the primary idea that these creators were businesses and that they had, You know, there was a real lacking of business tools to help them organize these messages. And we built a really cool solution. We realized that the solution that we're building was more of a nice to have than a must have. This is, you know, little more than a year a half ago, and at the same time, when we were talking to our then customer set, which was these creators, we realized that they had a problem that was very similar to the problems that brands were facing of inconsistent reach on social. So we were talking to creators that were doing all kinds of things, but happened to have a sweet spot of creators that were selling one of. Kind art products on Shopify and using Instagram specifically to reach their audience and talk about their products and their creations and actually make a living selling them on Shopify and sometimes Etsy. And at the time, one of the solutions we came up with was to help these creators build their own SMS text lists. The argument was, we were organizing all these messages for them in a in a mobile application that they could install connect to their socials. We helped filter and sort all these messages. Let's get as many people as we could that were there kind of like engaged audience, slash potential customers. Moved on to text list so that these artists could actually reach people directly and reach them 100% of the time, rather than guessing whether a single Instagram story or post would reach like 5% of their audience or 50% of their audience. The solution in terms of conversion from like Instagram followers into tech sign up was incredible. We had, like almost immediately, great success in building lists. And our next hurdle was we realized that the customers that we're serving, they actually didn't have much use for these text lists. Texting was too expensive, and the consistency for building a text program, and the amount of time and investment that needed to go into sending out texts regularly was just kind of like something they were not interested in at the same time, we're like, Hmm, we think that this could actually work really well for people that already have existing lists and want more subscribers, and can already quantify the exact value of a subscriber. And the Shopify ecosystem is probably a really good place to bring this kind of tool that we built. So we sunset the Creator app, we moved into the Shopify ecosystem. Kind of rebuilt the whole thing around the same premise of automating direct messages between Instagram accounts and followers engaged users, and now we have 100 plus brands on the platform, from public companies all the way down to single founder brands. And you know, we finally have a match between the solution that we built and and a market, and that's where we are today. So it was kind of a winding journey back to martech, ad tech for me, but happy to be home in a similar way that you're happy to be probably back in the US to a certain degree. Yes, yeah,
Mariah Parsons 07:30
look at that full circle. We can just end the episode there. You know, there you go. No, that. It makes a lot of sense, and I'm thank you for walking us through that, because I think the creator and just social space right now for a lot of Shopify brands, and that's where, obviously my expertise is in less so the Creator space, but the Shopify ecosystem, and I hear time and time again, just from brands and consumers alike, of their shopping more on social, right? They're going, I know, I use social to shop all the time, and so the it makes sense why you'd want to have text lists rather than the inbox for social media is just all over the place, like you have people all the way from people who are trying to, you know, maybe, Like, scam or break into your account, or, right, there's all, there's like the malicious side of social media, of just the craziness of it all, or, you know, like, different, different reasons people are in your inbox. And then, of course, there's the business side, and then there's the personal side. So it all gets muddled. And I know, like, I have my mom, who's sending me things on social media is like, Oh my God, look how cute this is. And then I have my friends sending me things I have, I have inboxes and collections for like, great personal, like, ideas or things that I want to pursue. And then there's the professional where I'm like, that's a really smart marketing play. I'm going to save that because it's inspiration for other things. So it just gets so chaotic, and not that text messages aren't also chaotic, because nowadays it's also so personal and professional, but I know I am way more accountable as a human to text and look at my text, yeah, than I am like my social inbox will just my social media inbox, I should say, will just go on red for so many more days than my texts will be, yeah? So it makes sense that you know, you're trying to bridge this gap between creating a constant communication Avenue with people who are following you on social or following a brand on social.
Jesse Clemmens 09:34
Yeah, yeah, totally. And in some ways the interesting, the interesting part about social is, you know, every almost as table stakes, every brand knows they need to do social, are doing social. Have built audiences. Have invested a lot of time into building those audiences, and are continuing to build and grow them. But the the like directly measurable. I. The value of those audiences is very inconsistent, meaning, you know you've built a brand following of 100,000 followers. Any given piece of content might reach 5% or 90% of them. Or if you have a viral reel or Tiktok or whatever, maybe you're reaching far outside of your following, and that's kind of the best case scenario. And on the other side, you have text messages, where, by nature of most, I think the stat is US consumers are on average, signed up to seven or less brand text lists. So as a brand, once you've earned the right to deliver directly into someone's pocket in their kind of most intimate channel, that's a great place to be. And you can use that that you can use that right for many different things. One of those things might be, you know, delivering, timely shipping updates. Another thing might be offering a Black Friday deal, and so getting into that spot is really valuable. And from what we've noticed, most of the energy brands have put towards getting, earning the right to deliver to SMS is done via on site, pop ups, via TCP, opt ins on checkouts, and yet, there's this whole other pool of audiences that have been really hard won on Instagram and Tiktok that are really ripe for conversion, and that's the area that we're focused in.
Mariah Parsons 11:40
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It totally makes sense. And I, I haven't heard that stat before, of seven to 10 brands consumers being registered or opted in for SMS. Yeah, it's crazy, right for a brand, yeah. But like, now I'm like, I'm going through my list that I'm opted in for SMS, and it kind of checks out. Um, yeah, because I know, like, which ones, you know, I'm very much looking forward to seeing SMS text from and it is not, you know, it is not a ton, so there's a lot. So when you're thinking about converting, I love the piece that you said about high conversion, because someone is opting into your SMS. I think SMS is one of those things that because, I'll say it's quote, unquote, a newer channel, comparatively right to like something like email marketing, because it's a newer slash, more intimate or more personal channel, because that's where there's less marketing material in our daily lives as consumers. Do you see that there's any from like the brand side? There's any reason as to why any brand wouldn't want to try and convert social user users to SMS like I know from my experience with Malomo, we have seen that consumers really want this, specifically transactional text messages, right? Because they are trying to get their package immediately, especially if you live in an area like myself, like packages can be stolen all the time. So it's like, soon as something is delivered, I want to be like, I want to be notified about it, and I'm running to go get it, or my roommates or someone else. So with the marketing side of SMS, I then see some brands be hesitant, because they think that, or they know that the inbox is so the text message inbox is so personable because that's where you're getting all your other notifications. And email right now is a little bit more saturated with marketing messages. What's what's been your experience seeing how brands are thinking about the SMS inbox right now
Jesse Clemmens 13:48
the most the you kind of hit the nail on the head, on the initial setups of the question, which is brands that are valuing opt ins the most for SMS, meaning people signing up for their lists are ones that already understand the value of an individual subscriber and can be confident that the subscribers that they're gaining through some new channel like high tide social direct messages are going to be of equal or greater value to the programs that they're already running. The way that most brands think about SMS, you know, when we're thinking about SMS programs, it's often, you know, even for me, where I'm at in the weeds of it, I'm often thinking of the kind of campaign experience where I'm getting a text about a specific thing that's happened a brand is dropping a new product, putting something on sale, hyping up an event that they have going on. All these kind of, you know, moment in time campaigns. Those are, those are a huge. Huge piece of the SMS game, but usually those are built on top of an even more important part of the program, which are the welcome automations, where when an individual user signs up to a text list, they're going to get a battle tested sequence of text over the course of probably a week or two weeks, introducing them to the brand, reiterating the value of what the brand offers, educating on the product, educating on value props, and importantly, offering any sort of new customer discount that might be interesting to that person. And so when a brand has a well tested program for both automations, you know, meaning, welcome flow and these like event specific, you know, calendar specific campaigns, and they can do really well with adding new channels, because it's just a matter of looking at the numbers and saying, all right, we stood this thing up. You know, we turned on high tide, for example, or maybe we enabled, I don't know, Alia, which is like a pop up optimization tool. And 30 days out, how many new subscribers do we get? Number one and number two, how are those subscribers converting to either new customers or retained customers that are purchasing more from me. And so when brands have a firm starting point, or a firm grasp of this, the numbers for their starting point adding new channels is a, you know, can be really effective growth tool, because you can measure the output really quickly, and then you can decide whether you want to continue or not, or, you know, invest time in something else. When, you know, and we, much like I'm sure you guys and probably every other technology solution out there, when you bring on a new customer that has not done the early legwork of, like, baselining what they're already doing. And, you know, having a program that's already running successfully and done the fundamentals, then, you know, adding new numbers to a list that's not being effectively utilized in the first place is, you know, is not a great use of time. And so one of the things that we get excited about is, many brands are really focused on the on site, conversion of traffic into text, and you know, even email subscribers, and you know many of them are now a few years down the road with SMS, and they understand and can measure it properly, and they're ready to tap into new pools of of growing that list, and one of the best places for doing that is social, and that's why we're so excited about what we're doing.
Mariah Parsons 17:46
Yep, totally makes sense. And so the notion that you're, you're kind of like the timeline of a brand that you all are working with is usually someone who has done the, I'll call it like, quote, unquote, more typical SMS growth of like the or the low hanging fruit, maybe is a better way of saying that of they have already tried to do, you know, just with their email list, getting people to sign up through SMS or repeat customers and all that, and probably doing so through other like motivators, like the checkout opt in of getting delivered new information, you know, all those other things that we see typically in the process of converting customers. And I want to double tap and ask you a question on new customers versus repeat customers, because you hinted at it real quick. And is there any type of differentiation that you see between brands of, okay, someone is on your social. Can you can like, Can you all see, okay, this is someone who you know can connect the Shopify data to see, okay, there are really VIP, or they're a repeat customer, so they should maybe be getting XYZ flow, and maybe not getting a welcome SMS flow, or the same typical welcome SMS flow that a new customer would be getting, that maybe you know, they're less familiar with your brand. XYZ. Is there any type of that segmentation that you all are focusing on right now, or that brands are totally trying to focus on? Let's go,
Jesse Clemmens 19:15
yeah. So there's a few really general categories of users that we see, you know, flowing through social direct messages into the SMS and email platforms. The way, I think this may be helpful for context for the audience that you know, 10 second description of what we do is brands will post content. Sometimes it's content that they already have on their roadmap. Sometimes it's new content that's specific for these campaigns, but the content is always engagement oriented. It could be hyping up a new product that's dropping and asking people to comment if they want access to that drop. Maybe it's a giveaway where they have some sort of sweeps or giveaway concept, and they're asking people to engage with a. Post, to tag a friend, to enter the giveaway, literally dozens of different formats that you can enable with high tide or solutions like high tide. When the user engages on social, they get a direct message from the brand in the brand's voice that says something to extent of you know, thanks for your interest. To complete your sign up to get the you know, to get a text when the new product drops. You know, give us your phone number and opt in in a regulatory and compliant way, a regulatory compliant way. From there, we are deeply integrated into all of the major SMS and email platforms, from postscript to attentive to Klaviyo, yappo, a whole bunch of others, and we, through our integrations into those platforms, can understand whether a user is number one, not signed up to a list. Number two, currently signed up to a list. Number three, are they signed up? You know, which list are they signed up to? Are they on the SMS list? Are they on the email list? Are they on both? And then finally, most importantly, to your question, are they already a customer, or are they, you know, someone who we can convert to be a customer in the future, they have never purchased before. And based on all that knowledge, which maps to a subscriber profile, we can then send different messages back. For example, we might know that someone you know has entered a giveaway. We've asked the brand has asked for their phone number upon them typing their phone number into the DM, we know that the, you know, via Shopify data, we know that that person is already subscribed and has purchased, you know, one time before. And when I say we, I mean the brand, because this is all their data. And, you know, we can ask that person via direct message to do different things. One common thing is they're already signed up to a text list. Let's ask them for their email instead. So a lot of what we do on the retention front is filling out customer profiles, people that have already purchased it, purchased before, but they're not on the text list, or they're on the text list, but they're not on the email list, or vice versa. And that's where that kind of retention power comes in, what we see a lot, I think the I think the historical average for the last year or so is around 6% about 6% of the people that come through these flows through social to opt into your text or email list are people that were already on your email or text list in the past but have opted out. So, you know, maybe there was a mistimed text or too many texts that went, you know, last year at one point, and the strategy has since changed, but that person decided, You know what, you're number eight on my seven text list that I'm signed up to. I'm going to type back, stop, and I don't want to hear from you again, and here we've now earned through social the right to get them resubscribed, and that's a not insignificant amount of of the activity that we see across the platform. And so yeah, bridging between these different platforms and the different ways that data is stored for the brand, and then figuring out the the optimal message to send to a person is a huge part of what we do.
Mariah Parsons 23:24
Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I love the use case of getting someone to re engage or re subscribe or re opt in, because I know a lot of the times when I'm seeing things on social, right, you see a brand for the first time, and then you know, a year later, or something, you they have a new launch and your interest has peaked, or whatever else. Right timing. There's a lot of reasons that white people shop, um, and I love the use case of see, being able to see, okay, this person was previously opted in and trying to re reinvest, or get them to reinvest in your brand. And I'm wondering, do you, is there any, I guess, like feedback from the customer of why they originally opted out that you all are able to look into, like, say, is the too many messages at once, and it you were the eighth on my list, then that's why, you know you got the cut. Um, is that anything you all are concerned with, or is it you see it as you know, once you get that re engagement from social back, you know, you're not trying to draw attention or something like that, where they once adopted and had made the decision to opt out,
Jesse Clemmens 24:35
we leave that to the SMS platform. So they, they, they're the ultimate owner of a lot of this data, and they, you know, they have best insight into, you know, what marketing messages a person has received and why they may have turned off, and based on what I've seen in the last year or so attending various events that the SMS platforms have have hosted for agents. And partners, they're getting really, really good at understanding what messages should go to, what people at what time. So not only can they decide what to do with someone that's reactivating, for example, put them into like, a sensitive category where, okay, they've turned off in the past. You know, we sent them five text messages a month. Maybe let's only include them on, like, the most important thing, because they may prefer to receive less text messages. Or, let's, you know, let's ask them in the re welcome flow, like, what do I prefer to see only new product updates, or, you know, fun facts about our brands. And so they're getting really good at that. And all of it is, there's two things coming to bear. One is, these platforms have been around long enough, and they have this crazy amount of of messaging history. You know, after being in the game, most of them have been in the game for at least a few years now, with hundreds and, if not 1000s of brands on the platforms, they can start to process that data and make really smart decisions, putting aside even the new AI stuff, which is kind of just takes what they could already do, insights wise and and makes it, you know, actionable and run on its own. So that's a game that we're not just not part of what we do. We are more about finding the optimal point of engagement in other channels that consumers are already interacting with your brand on, and then offering them a chance to opt in, where we then hand the baton to the people that do you know text and email optimization best, and, you know, partner with them to convert those people into customers. Yeah.
Mariah Parsons 26:51
Okay, cool. So this conversation around retaining customers and seeing which customers are brand new is obviously lends itself very well to retention as a whole. And I with now the background of seeing you know in your experience what the best practices are for brands, what brands are concentrated on right now, I'd love to hear what in what ways do you think the brands that you're working with are focusing on retention. Because obviously we just talked about segmentation, and that's a huge one right, of making sure that you understand the customer to the best abilities that you possibly can with all the data from every single platform that you can pull in. But I think there's a lot of opportunities for retention on social media, specifically, and so because you sit in that area of obviously connecting social with SMS, I would love to get your take on this, because I think a lot of brands focus on social with the viewpoint of acquisition, because it's obviously such a great platform to be able to acquire new customers, but it also is an amazing tool for retention and getting people to really be invested in your in your brand and your story, and, you know, the new products that they're rolling out and checking it way more than someone would, you know, probably check your website and like, put in the effort of keeping in your domain. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on kind of like the best or one of the best retention plays that you're seeing the brands you're working with roll out right now?
Jesse Clemmens 28:27
Yeah, yeah. The the really shocking thing when we first started exploring this area was the reality that is sort of counterintuitive, but the reality is, the people that are following you and most engaged even on social, the people that are on your text list or estimate or email lists and and your best customers, you would kind of expect a high overlap between those sets. You're like, okay, my best customers are the ones that are commenting on all my posts. Are most engaged, and they're already signed up to my text list and email list, so I just need to find more of those people and what we've seen and in our unique vantage point of mapping social and these own channels, it's actually not as high of overlap as you would think. When we launch with a new brand, we aim to get you know a pretty good chunk of their followers converted into SMS or email subscribers in the first few months. And what we find is that people that are engaging with posts almost almost 60 actually, a little more than 60% of people that are coming through post engagement and typing in their phone number or email for whatever offer the brand is providing are not yet on the email or text list, and that means there's a bunch of people that are really willing to engage on social. People that are not the same, people that go over the website, plug in their phone number on the pop up and, you know, are added to the list. So there's a huge untapped opportunity to just get in front of people that are already hyped about the brand, but that are not like, you know, clicking over to the website all the time. One example of that, that's a really simple example that we highly, highly encourage is cases where you have fans of the brand that may or may not be customers already that are simply, you know their their problem, and the reason the problem that you're solving for them by getting them on your email or text list is to let them know about product availability. There's two common cases where this could be true. Number one is a drop, a new colorway of a product, a new flavor of a protein, like, you know, new sneaker side, whatever the case is, they just want to know when the thing's available. And they may not check their email. They may not be popping over the site to look at the quantity of items that you have on that particular product page, but they're scrolling Instagram. And a really easy play that we always encourage brands to use is if they have a product that's kind of been selling out frequently and being restocked, and just use social to ask people if they want to be signed up to be alerted when the product is available. This could be with a pinned post, a story, anything to use social as another surface area to just make people aware that you know something is coming soon, and they may want to be a part of it, and there's a really surprising number of people that just want to be alerted when the product is restocked, but they haven't gone over to the product page. And maybe there's not even a, like, a sign up for text when it's available widget on the Shopify site. So that's a really, that's a really easy win for many brands.
Mariah Parsons 31:58
Yeah, yeah. I love that use case, and I have definitely done that as a consumer, of signing up to see when if something's out of stock, especially for like, newer up and coming, or SMB brands, where it's, yeah, like, it flies off the shelf. Or I'm thinking of one brand specifically passion footwear, where they they're, like, blowing up right now, and their convertible heels to flats, um, and I follow their founder, and just like I'm constantly engaging with their content, and just never can get the shoes that I want, because they flow high off the shelves, right? So, um, that is, that is I know exactly like that. Example is how they how they made sure that I could see on my text of when they're dropping specific products. And then, of course, there's obviously other other messages that are interwoven between it, with sales and everything like that. And I even see this application with Black Friday Cyber Monday coming up, because we're recording this mid October, but I see the use case with, like you said, any sales, but Black Friday specifically, of trying to, you know, get ahead, quote, unquote, get ahead, of specific sales, or having those people who are opted into your email or your SMS list To get, I guess, like additional benefits, and then being able to promote that on social, and then you're tapping in some of that FOMO marketing where you can see, like, Okay, our right, our customer base or our fan base, if you're subscribed to SMS, then you get, you know, access to this sale an hour before or a day before, like all those other different use cases that you can decide if it fits your brand and it fits your messaging, of course, but I love that play of getting people to make like, getting people to just like want, who want to be tapped in making sure that it's easy for them to get tapped into. And I it is interesting. The that you said, the overlap between all the different cohorts of people who are following you and people who are already subscribed and people who have already been customers, isn't as much of an overlap as you would think, because I would 100% if I was a gambler, I would 100% say most people would think that would be the case. Not, you know,
Jesse Clemmens 34:21
yeah, yeah, there's, there's a lot of untapped potential in these social followings. Another thing that we've discovered recently, that's what's really cool, that we're spending a bunch of time thinking about, and I've just designed some products around, is most of what we've done to date has been getting organic, you know, organic posts to convert into SMS and email signups, and there's a whole another world of people that are engaging with ads that are, you know, maybe not following, maybe never even visited the brand profile on. Instagram that are, you know, dropping a comment, tagging a friend and doing so in the line at Starbucks, and this, you know, as a brand, this might be your moment. This is like, when you should, you know, ask for their number. Literally, you're in line at the coffee shop. It's, you're the brand, it's time to ask for the number, or you're never going to see that person again in many cases. So there's just so much untapped potential. And the beauty of of these messaging programs is meta has done a great job of building really clear both technical documentation, but almost more importantly, policy guidance on when you can message people, how often you can message them, who needs to make the first move, all this stuff that is really set them up for, turning this direct messaging stuff into a really powerful business tool, you know, and also avoiding the spam type behavior that you could see coming Out of tools like this, if they were mismanaged or not not looked after properly. So that's been that's been really cool and exciting. And like, I think one of the things that I was thinking about before our chat today is, you know, as marketers, we think a lot about the word impression. Actually, we use the word impression all the time, like usually to talk about ad impressions or social impressions, or whatever moments of showing up with a consumer. And what I thought was, when I originally was thinking about what we could talk about today. What I think is really cool is that as brands have kind of like gotten the fundamentals of ad impressions, organic social impressions, and, you know, maybe some other places they interact with consumers, as those things have become easier and easier to manage through the other great technologies out there. There's all these other moments that historically have felt secondary, where you can interact with consumers. One of them is, you know, shipping and order notifications. And you know, in some cases, those are impressions that matter even more than, you know, seeing the fourth ad from a brand, the moment where you're like, where's my order, where's the thing that I, that I, that I, you know, wanted yesterday, that hasn't shown up yet today. And these are, these are moments where you can make, you know, really long, lasting impressions and build trust and win lifelong customers, just like that kind of moment of someone interacting with your Instagram post for the very first time when they're like this brand looks cool. Let me tag my friend in it, so capturing what would otherwise be like serendipitous interactions, or even just like for you guys, I think historically, purely transactional moments, and instead saying no, these are actually moments for impressions and for building our brand and winning lifelong customers. So that's really cool.
Mariah Parsons 38:13
Yeah, isn't it funny that so many things come down to timing, even all of this right taken out of the shop by ecosystem and customer relationships and all of that is and that's what we see, like you said, of people just wanting to know where their package is at, especially if the timing is not right. Of you know, they were told one thing and then there's a delay or XYZ reason, there is a high possibility of escalation of frustration and feeling like there is a total panic on the consumer side of just like, oh my god, something went wrong, or I got scanned, or blah, blah, blah, blah, or it got stolen, right? Like, all whatever you put your money towards, sheer panic if it doesn't match the expectations you have. And I love that you brought up this case study, because it is one that we see time and time, time and time again, of this kind of like, Aha moment with brands, where they're like, Oh yeah, no, no duh. Like, this would be a really crucial moment to be like, hey, as a brand, we got you, we see that there's a delay, so sorry about it. Your order will be there in two days. Let's make it up to you with XYZ, or, you know, some, some way to mediate the relationship, to make sure that you don't, you know, lose that interaction just because of the poor or a delayed or something going in a different direction than what the consumer wanted. And I also want to note that something that I find which is so unique to social is the creativity of the platform really lends itself for just random interactions where then a brand can say, Okay. This is serendipitous, where I can see, okay, this person share, commented, tag this friend, like you might not know as a brand, why those two people are be you know, with why person one is tagging person two, but you that person knows that that number two person better than you will right, as a brand. So it's like, if you can jump on that opportunity and be like, How can I see that, even if it's for a funny reason, where it's like an inside joke between the two people, if as a brand, you can capitalize on that and kind of, I guess, like interject yourself into, okay, there's some reason that someone found this to be interesting to send to your friend. I think that's where high tide can really capitalize on that, because you maybe that second person would have never come across your brand, and person number one doesn't even have to be your follower, right? If you're just like going viral, or if it's just popping up on their feed, then you can kind of exactly, can't predict the creative aspect of social like you can with, you know, people who are really engaging with you already, like, it's just sometimes random. But if you can take that random moment and then make it, I guess, relatable or less random, it's, it's such a genius play for a brand to be able to get, like, a quick win of just some with something as simple as reaching out and being like, Hey, would you maybe want to subscribe? Blah, blah, blah, for sure. So much,
Jesse Clemmens 41:31
yeah, and like the what you just said, like the Hey, would you like to subscribe? Thing that's so freaking important, because it used to be when I was a few years back, when I was working at meta and some of the students other ad technology platforms, we were building all this infrastructure to be able to reach people in what we would call deterministic way, meaning, like, all right, if someone looked At a pair of shoes on zap like the the classic example, if I looked at a pair of shoes on Zappos in 2013 I was going to see those sneakers for the rest of my life across every website. And that's like, that's kind of like the bad, the bad outcome from some of this targeting stuff, the better outcome was, if I looked at a pair of shoes on Zappos, ideally, I would next see those shoes right at the moment where I was considering my next purchase. It would be the exact, you know, shoe that I was interested in, or a variation on it. And it was like, Ah, perfect. Like, this is exactly what I was interested in right now, even though I'm looking at another piece of content on random website. All of that has become much, much harder and harder in the last couple years with this constellation of changes to the ad ecosystem. And, you know, some of the changes Apple has made, and cookie targeting, you know, kind of waffling back and forth between being, you know, out the door and back in, and just all those crazy changes to add targeting, and the fact that there's also way more competition in the Shopify and D to C space, because all the tools have made it easier and easier for people to start brands, and so they're all competing for the same impression that all this heat up, doesn't it doesn't mean that like marketing is not effective anymore. It just means it's harder and harder to reach people if you don't have direct permission to send them a text or an email, which are the last true ways that you can reach people, definitively so when you do have the moment, all this is to say when you do have the moment, you better ask for a phone number or an email. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 43:38
yeah, I love that. I'm going to wrap us up here in a minute, but you had hinted on and with your experience at meta, I think this would be really interesting. Of the guidelines that to make sure, like, the right timing, to make sure that you're kind of, like, avoiding spam, or, you know, trying to make sure that you land in someone's inbox at the correct time. Can you give, like a high level overview, if people want to, you know, know, more research that on their own. Because I think that would be something that's really important to our viewers. But if you could get the give like a boiler plate of, I guess, best practices, I think that great way to round out the episode.
Jesse Clemmens 44:16
Yeah, for sure, the 32nd version is there used to be all these tools to allow you to message people in bulk on Instagram, and none of them were actually sanctioned by Instagram, but all of them were really dangerous, because they would put you in spam jail. In the last three, four years, meta has created a developer program that allows companies like high tide, to build on top of these APIs, but the bargain is you have to follow really specific rules. And the rules are you can only reactively message people, first of all, so you can DM someone if they leave a comment on a post. You can respond to them if they direct message you. You can direct message. Message them if they mention you in a story, but you can only do that once. So if you know someone is commenting on a post, the use case is the variety of use cases. Maybe they need help with their order, and you know you want to connect them to the CX people, or maybe they're really interested in a product, and you want to direct message them and ask them if they want to get signed up for the postscript or attentive text list for that product. If they're interested, they'll continue, which, in our experience, is like 60, 70% of the time, people that you know have a clear indication that they want to engage will keep a conversation going. And as long as that conversation keeps going, it can be continued. But what you can't do, which is really a really good thing for everybody, is you can't bulk message people. You couldn't say, like, all right, I want to eat. I want to direct message, you know, 3000 of my 100,000 followers today and let them know that we have a sale going on. It's just a crappy experience for everyone, and meta has taken great lengths to protect the platform and the user experience. So there's a bunch of rules around how often you can message people and in what circumstances, and part of our value is keeping track of all those rules and forcing them and keeping accounts safe.
Mariah Parsons 46:17
Okay, that was a great, great, you know, high level overview. I know there's so much more detail to go into there, but this has been wonderful having you on the podcast. Jesse, thank you for making the thanks for having me, yeah, yeah. It's been I know our listeners are gonna absolutely love this episode. I'm also just such a personal and professional admirer of everything that's on social it just will never cease to capture my interests. So it's always a highlight of my day when I get to talk about things that I don't normally get to talk about. So thank you for creating that opportunity,
Jesse Clemmens 46:48
absolutely. Thanks for having me on
Mariah Parsons 46:49
awesome, wonderful chat soon. You.
