Mastering Email, Popups, and SMS with Ben Jabbawy from Privy

Kristen:

Thanks so much for being here today. How are you doing?

Ben Jabbawy:

Hey Kristen. Super excited to be here. I'm doing great.

Kristen:

I am so excited to talk to you because we have a huge shared interest in relationships in email and SMS, which I am excited to dig into it with you. Before we go into that, can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and about Privy?

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah, for sure. Hey everyone, I'm Ben Jabbawy, I'm the founder and CEO over here at Privy. If you're not familiar with Privy, we're the leader in e-commerce marketing, so we provide tools, education, and support for small and growing brands. We have over 400,000 shops that use us. We've helped drive three billion in sales for our merchants, and we have users all over the world.

Kristen:

Wow. Those are some pretty impressive numbers, I must say. And that's why I'm so excited. Obviously, I think this is a good place to start, you're saying you've got 4,000 shops using Privy in the platform. So obviously you're working with a pretty astounding amount of data that you can pull from, so what big picture trends are you seeing in DTC email marketing right now?

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah. One of the things we talk a lot about is building customer relationships, that's the foundation for everything. You hear a lot in the news about like the rise of CAC or customer acquisition costs for Facebook ads and Instagram and algorithms changing all the time. And our view is you be doing stuff that brings audience to you, so great content, and we can touch on that later. We also need to actually build relationships that you own. And for us, historically, the anchor of e-commerce and our bread and butter as a company has been providing tools that help these merchants actually build email relationships.

Ben Jabbawy:

And increasingly, as the rise of text becomes a thing in e-commerce, giving everyone those same set of great tools to build relationships, whether that's an email relationship or a text or both.

Kristen:

Yeah. And I love that you hit on the customer relationships thing, that really the theme of this whole season. As I'm recording it, it just seems to be that the conversation that keeps coming up is as CAC costs rise, as retention becomes more important, you really have to figure out not just how to build an audience but then to connect with that audience. And I think the thing about email that people tend to overlook in this space is, it seems like this old school way of doing communication, it's been around for so long, customers are tired of us in the inbox, all this stuff.

Kristen:

But what you said, it really comes back to, it is a channel that you own, and that is really, really powerful. You don't own the channel of Instagram, you don't own a lot of the conversations you have. In email, you have this super unique experience where you are actually one to one with your customers. I know there's a lot of misconceptions about email dying in the space, and I'm sure you have some thoughts on this. I'd love to hear what you think on that idea of email is going down, SMS is going up because I don't really see it that way, I see that they are two very different channels.

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah. You're going to need to interplay all channels that are relevant and all channels that you own, and that's a big part of the future of our company. But I think, just focusing on email for a second, I threw out a big number, Privy's merchants collectively have driven three billion in sales through email marketing, majority of that three billion coming in 2019. That's 200 million email subscribers that we've helped capture for our merchants. And the reason that works well I think is when you pair email as a channel with how it should really be used. Let's dive into that. You ask, "What's working?" And I think one of the big things that we hear that...

Ben Jabbawy:

It's like if you buy that ad on Instagram and someone comes to your store, is the ultimate goal to get them to purchase on that same visit within a minute of being on your site for the first time? Yeah, that'd be amazing, but how often does that really happen? It's hard to get your brand story, your founder story across in such a short interaction, right? And so the reason, even though there's like a lot of huffing and puffing around like pop-ups and all that stuff, the reason those things work well is because it gives you as the founder or the marketer more at bats to educate that visitor who's interested but not yet ready to buy.

Ben Jabbawy:

Email's such a low friction way to tell that story using content, using your own human language, the way that you talk. All of those things can just work really well and visually through email.

Kristen:

Yeah, and I totally agree with all that. I'm excited to really dive into this because pop-ups have been a pretty hot conversation recently, especially-

Ben Jabbawy:

I know. I saw your Tweet the other day, you love pop-ups.

Kristen:

I love pop-ups. I don't love all pop-ups, I think that's also because I'm like a jaded digital marketer who spent her life trying to deal with pop-ups and trying to work on the systems of pop-ups, there is that perspective that we got to give out, I have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about it. And so I think consumers still, they don't all hate pop-ups as much as I do, but then there's that followup question where most pop-ups are 10% discount on your first purchase. You get an email. Are you seeing, starting from the beginning of email and we're talking about lead generation and people on your list, what are really the best practices around those pop-ups that you're starting to see come up?

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah. Massive data set, that's one of the benefits I think we can help teach people here. And I'll also get back to your Tweet on benchmarks. Let's think about it this way, so in a pre Privy world, the behavior is you drive traffic to your site, you make sure your site tells a good story, good photography, all of that. And you've got a footer form jammed in at the bottom of your site, and you hope that people opt in so they can get your great content and learn and purchase.

Kristen:

And honestly, those footer forms are really hard to find if you're not looking for them, as I've learned.

Ben Jabbawy:

Totally, it's like an afterthought. The origins of where this all comes from is, it's simply removing friction to getting in that email content. And so has it been abused in some cases where it's generic, it looks ugly, it's not timed well or targeted well? Totally. And that's a lot of what our successful users do differently, but it is a fantastic way to build that relationship. Now, from a dataset perspective, one of the things that we see is that there's really like three different things you can go to market with that impact conversion the most. You talked about that 10% offer pop up. And the way that I think about it is, the content of your form, whether that's a pop up, a bar, etc, is what is going to carry the most weight on conversion rate.

Ben Jabbawy:

And the three that we look at are what I call a sign up form, so that's an embedded form or a pop up that's just like, "Hey, welcome to Ben's Merch. Here's my founder story. I'd love to share specials and new product launches with you." And so if you do that, there's no offer, there's no contest, nothing. What you should expect is that 1% of people that see that form will sign up. That might be awesome, but that's like the benchmark that we see. You flip forward to what you were describing, like super simple offer, "Hey, join our email list, you'll learn and you'll immediately get a code for 5% or 10% off your first purchase." That's an offer. What you expect there is converting 5% or more of people that are seeing that offer.

Ben Jabbawy:

And there's levers there, how strong is the offer, etc. And the third category is this enter to win, spin to win type methodology that you see a lot, which I'll just say the numbers then I'll give you my opinion on it, is you're actually converting 15% or higher traffic, which is why you see it everywhere. But the thing that we coach our users on is like, you need to think about your brand, you need to think about like how strong is your content, what's your nurturing look like? Because it may sound great to convert 15% of traffic, but those are typically lower quality subscribers. And there's like some brand impact on that, let's not avoid the elephant in the room.

Ben Jabbawy:

So I think like for the brands that are open to experimenting, it's not always just about an offer or an enter to win, but the data that we've seen shows that you actually have varying levers that you can use to ratchet things up or down or focus on quality and targeting, but those are the three most impactful components to converting new visitors into leads in your email database.

Kristen:

Yeah. And I really love how you broke those down for us. Something else that I'm thinking about that I think it leads right into this question is, all right, so these are the kinds of people that you're converting and you could expect to convert somewhere around this amount. And then the question becomes, okay, so you have a great pop-up, you feel good about the content on it, but then when someone gets into your email list, then how was that experience for them? Because really quickly, I think you can either set up an expectation for your customer that, "Hey, our emails are really highly valuable. You're going to get a lot out of them. They're very entertaining."

Kristen:

That first email sets the stage for, are they going to open our next 10 emails or are they going to ignore them completely and we're just going to be annoying them. What are your tactics for next steps on these pop-up forms? How do you follow up in a way that actually builds a relationship versus just blast out discount codes?

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah. The biggest mistake we see is that after someone signs up for your list, whether that's through an embedded form or a pop-up or a fly out, whatever, is that you don't send an immediate welcome email. First of all, let's talk about what happens if you don't do that. What happens if you don't do that is you're growing your email list and then two weeks later you send a newsletter about a new product announcement and I'm like, "Wait, Kristen? What the hell is this?" Spam, or unsubscribe. So I think like the most critical thing is when someone's joining your list, they expect something. When I buy an airplane ticket, I expect an immediate email confirmation.

Ben Jabbawy:

Otherwise, you're like, "What just happened?" And I think what that represents is like that is the beginning of a relationship that you own. That is the moment that you as the founder ideally are telling your story, like, what led you to start this brand? Was it all the underwear that you wear just really was itchy and so you wanted to come up with a better under brand? Tell that human story through that auto-responder and send it out immediately because that sets the expectation of like, "Okay, yup, I was on their site. Yup, I remember these guys. Okay, next week or later this week, I hear from them again with like the next set of education in that flow like that."

Ben Jabbawy:

That's what needs to happen immediately. Otherwise, it gets stale and that's where like the high unsubscribes comes into play.

Kristen:

Yeah. That email is one that I've pointed out a lot in my content before, is that very first email because it's like the handshake, it's your very first impression in the inbox. So if you can send that first email making it really, really deeply enriched with content and very valuable to the customer and connecting with them, like you said, on that human level and giving them the human story, you're just bringing them into your ecosystem in a way that actually feels good for a customer versus feeling like, "Oh, they just want to get my sale and they're going to move on for me. And that's pretty much all that I'm on this list for."

Ben Jabbawy:

Totally. Yeah. And I think there's a couple other missed opportunities in the email world that I'll just throw out there. I think there's always a time and a place for the transactional feeling email. Card abandonment is a good one and when we can get to that, but I think one of the big missed opportunities here is like, if I were designing the perfect playbook for email, I'd get people on my list, I'd tell my story immediately through one and then probably a followup auto-responder trying to get them back to the site to purchase. But a lot of people think that once that purchase is made, that's it, and let's, let's send them the receipt and then we'll hit them with our newsletter next.

Ben Jabbawy:

I actually think there's this moment where it's like, "Okay, this person just bought my product. I know that they're in this state where they just completed a purchase, and they're may be a couple of days away from receiving that product at their house. And so that gap is another huge opportunity to build excitement around your story, your differentiation, while you know they're waiting for their product. That's the perfect time for education about like why your product is different, what materials are you using? Are you sourcing like environmentally friendly things or locally sourced products?

Ben Jabbawy:

Whatever that is, that's your time so that when that product actually arrives and they're unboxing, they have so much built up appreciation after the purchase is made. So that welcome series or order confirmation flow, it's just another big missed opportunity that we see with an email marketing.

Kristen:

I'm so glad you brought this up. It's funny, I have a newsletter with Retention Bites and the second one I ever did... actually no, I think it was number three, and I'll link it up in the show notes because I actually talked about this exact point in time in the customer journey because I do a lot of buying products and testing the customer experience and reporting what I find, and I found that is probably one of the biggest holes in the entire customer journey for a lot of DTC businesses. As the order is shipping, it's really... The first interactions you tend to have with a brand are very transactional. You make the order, you get the confirmation, you get a shipping confirmation, you get a delivery confirmation, and then oftentimes you get like one to two days later they're asking you to review the product.

Kristen:

And that's about all that the welcome series involves, when that time in between shipment and receiving and unboxing is actually a really good place to build that customer relationship, to get the branding across, to get your story across, to build excitement because then you're able to give them that instant gratification feeling that you don't get with e-commerce, it's not like walking into a store and walking out of it. And then by the time they're getting the product, they actually know how to be successful with it, they know how to use it. They're going to get it integrated into your life a lot faster.

Kristen:

August Uncommon Teas does a really good job of this, so does Rooted NYC, they do a really good job of this too. They have emails that go out telling you how to open the box correctly, little things like that. I love it. And I'll link to those emails too in the show notes. But I'm really glad you brought that up because I was just thinking about this last week.

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah, no it's huge. Even, just to throw out a couple other ideas, tactical stuff for merchants, think about your top three reasons for refunds. After that box is open, what are people complaining about? And we view that, obviously flip it to be positive around why some of that stuff happens. We know that people complain that when they put on our brands, they might sweat. So let's weave into that post-purchase but predelivery email series education around do we recommend you're wearing socks with your shoes or not? Or how to wash them, and what's so interesting about the materials?

Ben Jabbawy:

So that you can try to address from a customer support perspective seemingly common questions that are actually intentional and part of the brand story. It's just a big window that we see missed within audience development. Yes, you need to capture leads. Totally. You need to nurture them and you need to drive that sale, but that first purchase is really the beginning of the relationship.

Kristen:

Yeah. And I think it's important for brands to think about it and that way that that first purchase isn't just like this flat conversion, you threw a bunch of tactics at the wall, something worked they bought something. That way of approaching business might've worked 10 years ago and Facebook ads were super cheap in acquiring customers was easy. Now it's, that first purchase is actually the beginning of what you hope to be a very long relationship, so it's so important to focus on the experience really right up front. Are there any other bad habits or big opportunities you see that brands are missing out on an email?

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah, it's more on site conversion, but we live and breathe this concept of a cart saver. And I'll talk about it because it kills me as marketers or founders, whatever your role really is, we have this behavior of like, okay, we're driving traffic to our site. We're spending all this time and money. This site looks amazing. Maybe we have captured that email. Maybe I haven't. They're in the cart right now. Right now, they're on my site in the cart and they are about to leave. And I'm okay with that because I think I'm going to grab them with my abandoned cart email series. And I think the thing that people miss is that you're only sending abandoned cart emails if your e-commerce storefront knows who that customer is.

Ben Jabbawy:

And so that means they have to have either made a purchase in the past or they have to have been far enough along in the checkout flow where they've included their email address. But the majority of your abandonment is actually happening when someone has products in the cart but is not yet in the checkout flow. And so rather than letting that person just leave, especially since majority of those people are anonymous, that's where you see people doing these, not just exit intent, which I know you have a stance on, which is great, but when you marry the concept of exit intent with intelligent targeting, because...

Ben Jabbawy:

Here's there's the perfect example of that. I generate an ad on Instagram, and I don't know who she is, but Kristen just landed on my site. So I've paid to get this person here, they don't exist in my email database and she actually has browsed the site and she has two times my average order value in her cart right now, and she's about to leave. The intersection of capturing her through an exit intent pop up, only if she has certain attributes that she qualifies for, that is the power of traffic diversion.

Kristen:

Yeah. And that's where my exit intent pop up stance really goes to a lot of websites that just blast you with a full page, super annoying, not at all targeted towards me full page exit intent. But I really like especially that the specific tactic of, if you've got someone on your site with a cart that is over your average order value and someone who seems to be very high buying intent, that's when you can pull in the popups and things that are actually working for those specific people. And I think a big thing that we keep talking about and you keep bringing up is really how these journeys and these tactics you're using are personalized to the customer experience that they're specifically going through.

Ben Jabbawy:

Exactly. One of the reasons that Privy has grown so quickly is, as direct-to-consumer businesses, I put all my money on the fact that every DTC team has had a brainstorm or a whiteboard session where they're like mapping out some email marketing automation flows. Like, "If this happens, send this, if that happens, sends that." So there's all this time and energy poured into email marketing automation off of the site, and there's all this time and money poured into paid traffic generation and retargeting. But if you're not converting traffic, then all of that energy you're putting in at the top of the funnel and at the bottom of your funnel and your lead nurturing has this massive gap in it.

Ben Jabbawy:

So everything that we try to do before we got into Privy email and Privy texts has been focused on just educating merchants on how to devote that same level of attention and love to traffic conversion that you are already doing and spending money on elsewhere.

Kristen:

Yup. Into really actually nurturing relationships, I think is where that shift is happening in DTC where there's been so much time and resources and energy and content and information put out on the very top of the funnel, and now people are starting to trickle into this idea of, "Well, if we were to actually take a lot of this investment that we're doing into the relationships we already have on our channels, there's actually a lot more revenue that can come out of those people than just people who land float away from your site."

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah. That's exactly it.

Kristen:

Now, we got to talk about SMS because this is a super-hot topic and a dangerous topic at the same time because there's a lot of things going around with SMS has 99% open rate, you got to get on it. It's like email, you got to get your message across. But there's also really high penalties for doing it wrong and for texting a customer when they didn't specifically opt-in to be texted. And then also I think a lot of consumers are pretty weary about SMS. I know my husband especially is like, "Oh God, please don't let DTC brands text me, my email is already enough." So I think that people are going to have to tread lightly on and really have a good strategy moving forward. What are your thoughts on the SMS channel coming out this year?

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah, it's a great question. Here's where I would say, there are handfuls of times where myself as a consumer have gotten so much value out of text. I go back and forth to New York City a lot and take the train. So I always opt-in for text message alerts about train, the delay, timing, schedule, etc. Or when you buy a flight and you ask for your boarding pass via text, that's real value. And so what I would say about texts is you should be doing email and the audience size of email, you should expect to be a bit broader because I think people are more willing to opt-in for email. And you should think of texts as really transactional targeted moments that can add value.

Ben Jabbawy:

And so you shouldn't be rushing to do broadcast text, you should be thinking about, how can text as a communication channel add value into some of the use cases and workflows that I already know are important. And so here's an example of that, card abandonment. Right now people probably have three, four, or five email series first day, second day, third day, etc. And I think that makes sense, but imagine if rather than just dragging that out, maybe your first email in the series goes out an hour later and that's customer service oriented, "Hey, I saw you had this in your cart, I'm the founder of the company. Any questions that I can help answer for you? Did you fill our 90 day guarantee, we reserved your cart and link back."

Ben Jabbawy:

Maybe the second day or the third day there's a coupon included in that, and maybe after that there's like a text that goes out, "Hey, inventory's running low, we reserved your cart and the coupon we sent you yesterday by email is expiring." hat's the interplay between communication channels that I think is working really well for brands that have tested text.

Kristen:

Yeah. It seems like, and I really like how you're honing in the inter-playing between channels is thinking about SMS not just as its own separate channel to broadcast other messages, but thinking about, how does it work into the experience the customer's already having, the customer behavior that's going on, parts of the funnel that it could actually be really helpful. I actually just this week tested Dollar Shave Club, launched text messages and I was a little bit weary because I've had some experiences with other brands that weren't so great and I just wanted to test them out, and it was a wonderful experience. I texted them, asked them a question about their deodorant, got a nice answer back and within five minutes I had it added to my account without ever having to go to the Dollar Shave Club website.

Kristen:

That was an amazing experience and things like that where that could have happened via email and they probably have had that happen via email a bunch of times, then they just said, "This would probably actually be really useful to happen via text." And having that just work in with emails. Another use case of this is actually we're working on this at Churn Buster, adding in text messages into things like dunning campaigns. So that goes very along the lines of, we're actually thinking about it as not its own separate channel to get customer and action, but it's an added layer of communication. It's another way to contact somebody, not just using it as two different lanes, we're trying to engross them together.

Ben Jabbawy:

Totally, totally. And actually, I think that's one of the challenges that I see is if you're adopting separate vendors for email and for texts, that's where I see some danger happening, because in the use case that we talked through around cart abandonment, I want to know that if I have fully legal compliant opt-in from Kristen, I want to know that if she abandons her cart, I want to control what emails she's receiving when and what texts she's receiving when on a single spot so that so that really, there's no risk of me sending her an email and text at the same time. How annoying is that?

Ben Jabbawy:

So I think we should expect that the volume of texts you send should be lower than email, and the amount of proper opt-ins and subscribers you have for texts should be lower than email because you should really only be using that channel in very, very specific use cases.

Kristen:

Yeah. So do you think that the SMS falls a little bit more into the category of retaining existing customers versus trying to bring in new customers?

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah. I think it depends on store and the demographic. I know internationally, SMS is actually probably bigger than email. So it might make more sense for international stores to focus on text as that lead nurturing channel, but I think it's going to be different for each brand, but I think it's for the most part. The early wins around text for brands will be around, "Hey, how do I simplify the process of what I'm trying to achieve right now as being a customer?"

Kristen:

Yeah. I love that. That's such a good tactical place, I think for brands to start with SMS while staying safe. For sure. Now, something I definitely want to talk to you about before we get to wrap up is you guys actually from an internal perspective, you guys at Privy went through pretty extreme period of change in the last decade or so, five or six years ago, and you shifted to really focusing in on e-commerce customers. Can you just explain a little bit, tell the backstory of that and then really what did you learn about e-commerce and your customers during that time period?

Ben Jabbawy:

It's interesting. We started with brick and mortar retail, the thing that I realized was like, "My gosh, if you run a brick and mortar store, you are balancing a very different life than if you are running an e-commerce only store." So as an example, like, "Oh, your store clerks don't show up for work." Or the heat is off and you're like running around. And so typically, if you're in brick and mortar, I know a lot of this is changing at least at the time, you're actually get the benefit of foot traffic and you're less likely to be focusing on digital marketing all day long because you've got all these other distractions happening inside the store and the benefit of people walking by and just coming in.

Ben Jabbawy:

And so it was really hard for us even though the product itself at the time, that was focused around conversion and promotions and just controlling all of that yourself without IT, even though the product resonated, it was the wrong market. And so we basically went out of business, we just wrote a great blog post on this, head to privy.com/blog, and I go into way more detailed.

Kristen:

I'll make sure to link that up too. It is a really great article.

Ben Jabbawy:

Good. Thanks. But I think what I realized was like "Oh man, we're going to go out of business if we don't figure something different out here." And we were in a dark place financially, we had an acquisition that fell apart on the one yard line. And I really didn't know what my options were, but I reached out to a handful of customers to let them know what was going on. And the thing that I realized was in one or two of them, one was a Magento store, one was a Shopify store, they were like, "This is the greatest thing we've ever installed, and here's why." Like, "Yeah, I've got this great brick and mortar business, but my revenue, three commerce is growing so much faster, and the anchor of my e-commerce business is the size of my email list."

Ben Jabbawy:

And we've never had a tool to grow our email list because all the incumbent email providers, MailChimp, etc, all fantastic companies were built around email and retention marketing as opposed to the simple acquisition workflows that you need to just remove the friction of someone joining your email list. And so that was the thread that, the holy crap moment for me where we just started talking to more e-commerce businesses, understanding how quickly that market was growing and how few ESPs at the time had acquisition tools. So we were just like, "Let's go all in and let's build the best e-commerce only, small business friendly, easy to use way to convert traffic into email subscribers.

Kristen:

Yeah. I love the story because it really revolves around the idea that even though you guys hit a bad place with the business, what ultimately turned it around was talking to customers and getting to know the stories of your customers, which is something we talk about all the time on this podcast, for DTC brands is really if you feel like you're stuck, start talking to your customers because you're going to find out so much and it ultimately can turn around a business completely like it did for you guys, which is why I just think it's such a cool and interesting little story to tell the listeners because it really shows the value of getting to know your customers, and especially getting to know your best customers.

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah. And look, I think as founders, whether you're selling direct to the consumer or you're a SaaS company like Privy, as founders it's easy to get distracted with like, "Oh, should you be raising money? What's the next step in my business?" And actually, as I work with entrepreneurs, I'm always pushing them away from that because so many of your business problems or seeming problems can just be solved by talking to your customers.

Kristen:

Yeah. It's amazing how much you can get out of talking to customers, honestly. You've been in the DTC space now for awhile, what have you really seen changed since you've been working on it? What are the things that you're seeing really evolving in the future?

Ben Jabbawy:

The amazing thing about e-commerce right now is there's incredible vendors everywhere. There's apps for this, there's apps for that, and I think over the years, what's happened is every merchant now, if you look at their Shopify admin or their big commerce store, whatever platform they're on, they literally have like 20 apps installed. And I think that's fine, their point solutions will always be stronger and more advanced than all in ones, but I think now we're a few years into this and we've seen these point solutions actually don't speak that well to each other, first of all. One of them by the way, if it's a guy or gal in a coffee shop, could take down my entire store on Black Friday and we've seen that year over a year.

Ben Jabbawy:

And you're spending in for things that might [inaudible]. I think one of the trends that we see happening, especially if it's the small end of the market is consolidation, there's always going to be a place for the most advanced stuff, but we're bullish that as a brand you can remove a lot of the complexity around marketing playbooks by getting that out of an all-in-one and just build more confidence around telling your story, which is the hard work, the content regularly about why you're different and differentiation and providing quality service. Those are the things that differentiate and that are hard. The marketing automation, those concepts are now proven, and that should be the easy part of growing any e-commerce store.

Kristen:

Yeah, I love that, because that is really where I see the change coming is the brands that are winning and that are going to continue to win are the ones that yes, they have all the benchmark stuff in place, they have the marketing automation in place, they have all this, but they've done the really, really deep hard work of talking to customers, understanding the customers, understanding the customer stories, respecting those stories, and then being able to just build out the customer relationships through all these channels that you're building. That's what I'm so excited about and right now that's happening and how it's going to keep moving forward.

Kristen:

So this is I guess a repeat question of this, but we can put it back on Privy. What are you most excited about for Privy? What are you guys building this year and the next few years that you're just really stoked about?

Ben Jabbawy:

I think for us, that interplay of communication channels and providing a really easy to use interface to unlock key use cases is what Privy, it's our history, it's our bread and butter and that's what we're all about. We want to make it easy to actually grow your business. So for us, we launched Privy email in 2019, that's grown like crazy, super simple e-commerce email marketing. And on February 25th, we launched Privy text. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

Kristen:

It's exciting.

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah. Just like super small business, dead simple text messaging for e-commerce. And the beauty of that is you'll get the full benefit of all of our list growth tools for texts out of the box. So that's what I'm super psyched about and really just educating people more. So we launched our show today, The Ecommerce Marketing Show, and working on building community and all sorts of fun stuff. It's not just about Privy and our software, it's really about like, "How do you actually tell your story? How do you grow an e-commerce business? How do you take product photography?" We really want to be the education and the coaching around entrepreneurship growth.

Kristen:

Yeah. And we're super excited to watch you guys build all this out. Obviously, this is a lot of what I'm doing as well, so that's why I was so pumped to have you on the show because a lot of our ideas really mesh it and we're so focused on education, which makes it such an exciting space. So second to last question, what do you want to see more from DTC brands in the next three to five years? I feel like I've pressed you on the same topic now in three different ways. I've asked the same question three different ways.

Ben Jabbawy:

No, it's great. It's great. Look, I think the easy path is to open a store, buy an Instagram ad, and instantly I have traffic and I might have a sale today. That's the easy way to get traffic. I really want to encourage anyone who's working on a direct-to-consumer business or thinking about starting one to build their audience through story and content as early as humanly possible because that is the hard part of all of this. And doing it in a way that keeps your costs down without dependencies on Facebook, if you can get started on that early before you quit your full time job, then you are going to be a lot more successful when you actually launch the product.

Kristen LaFrance:

Yeah. And that's really what I see too, is it's starting to be...It used to be that you would start with products, get stuff up, get traffic, and then build a community. Now, it's going the opposite way that if you start with community, if you start with content, if you start with your story and then introduce products, it's actually a much safer, much more exciting and then oftentimes, much more profitable business to run because you already have those deep connections, you're not trying to circle back and build them after you have everything out.

Ben Jabbawy:

Exactly.

Kristen:

I love it. Well, last question. Where can people find more about Privy and follow you?

Ben Jabbawy:

Just head to privy.com, P-R-I-V-Y.com. We've got all sorts of great resources there. Check out The Ecommerce Marketing Show on your podcast app of choice. And I'm just @Jabbawy on Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Kristen LaFrance:

Love it. Does anybody ever call you Ben Jabbawockee, because every time I see your name, that's what my head wants to do?

Ben Jabbawy:

Literally, all the time. That was my nickname growing up.

Kristen LaFrance:

I bet. I love it.

Ben Jabbawy:

I've heard it all. I've heard it all.

Kristen LaFrance: 

I've heard it all. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. Ben, this is wonderful.

Ben Jabbawy:

Yeah. Thanks for having me, Kristen. This is great.