Q&A with Yaw and Blake

In this 30-minute livestream, Yaw Aning, CEO of Malomo, and Blake Imperl, Manager of Partnerships Growth & Insights at Attentive, will walk you through how you can now turn any page into an order tracking page, drive SMS opt-ins for transactional and marketing notifications, and post-purchase best practices.

Most importantly, they'll be answering your burning questions around best-practices for this channel.

Live Q&A with Yaw and Blake

TRANSCRIPT

This transcript was completed by an automated system, please forgive any grammatical errors.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

sms, tracking, merchants, page, customers, blake, transactional, attentive, drive, experience, updates, consumers, add, integration, purchase, opt, conversational, channel, delivery, customer experience

SPEAKERS

Brian Lastovich, Yaw Aning, Blake Imperl

Brian Lastovich 00:00

Welcome, everyone. I'm Brian with Malomo. But that is definitely not important, important today, what is more important are the panelists and discussion that we're going to be having. Again, this is a quick 30 minute conversation, what we really want to do here is there has been a new launch on the Malomo side, there's been a really new launch on the offensive side, they both work really well together. So we just wanted to take some time to go into the weeds probably show you what you probably can't find on the website right now and give you some explanation and answer some questions. So with that, let's let's kind of move forward here. So housekeeping is just like normal. There's a chat, feel free to put your questions in the comments in there. I'll look at that. And I'll interrupt these guys with these questions as much as I can. And then again, we're recording this just like every other webinar out there, but we'll share that with everyone at the end. So first and foremost, we have two speakers today, yawning and Blake and girl with attentive. Blake, really quickly, let me give you your last quick bio here. Blake heads partner community at attentive, industry leading conversational commerce platform. I've been in just ecommerce last few years, but I'm pretty sure Blake like your name came up on week one or week two within me digging into the community. Then on the other side here we have yalla Ming Yao is the co founder and CEO of Malomo. And so he will talk through First and foremost, the Malomo platform. So yeah, I'm gonna let you take it from here. Obviously, we have an agenda. But I kind of went through that before. But again, like I'll let you kind of screen share, and we'll start.

Yaw Aning 01:57

Amazing. Thanks, Brian. All right. Let's see. Let me share my screen. Amazing. All right. Welcome, everybody. Thank you, Brian, for teeing this up. Thank you, Blake for joining us. Very excited, very excited for today. So really quickly, I just wanted to touch on Malomo What what it is we do and, and then we're obviously going to walk through a live demo of the new tracking page feature that we've built. How this works really, really well with attentive, some some very interesting attentive use cases, that pair nicely with Malomo. And then we'll open it up to some q&a. So a little bit about Malomo. Lots of customers partners on the on the call. But if you haven't heard about us, we're an order tracking platform to help you manage the customer experience from the time the order is placed by your customer all the way through delivery, and hopefully very soon foreshadowing beyond that. But we work with hundreds of high growth merchants in the EECOM ecosystem, have tracked more than a billion dollars worth of ecommerce orders on their behalf. And through that we've seen firsthand the impact that tracking can have on the customer experience. We've seen about 10s of millions of visits to tracking pages across our customers. One thing is for certain, looking at all that data, bad tracking experiences can wreak havoc on your business. So, you know, we as consumers, we hate that shipping. We hate it so much, that we will change our buying behaviors as a result. I'm sure you all probably have a story about a delivery that went wrong really, really pissed me off knee jerk reaction, you probably likely blamed the retailer and not the carrier when that thing went wrong. More than eight out of 10 Consumers will actually not return to an online store after just a single bad delivery experience. We are super sensitive and unforgiving. People, this is obviously a massive problem for merchants, right with a lot of retailers. You know, we've seen more than half of the revenue is generated from only 20% of the customers who buy from them repeatedly. And repeat customers. You know, they drive most of the profit in your business. So you really can't afford to just leave the delivery experience up to chance. The ironic thing about a lot of this is you actually have no control over delivery. Right you got you got tons of control over your ads, make them beautiful place them in all the right places they need to place them. You have complete control over the look and feel of your website by an experience. And then you lose control of the experience white right when things often go the most wrong. And so at normal we've obviously been on this maniacal mission to get Have retailers back control over delivery. When a customer buys from your storefront, we want to let you control the content and timing of messages to really proactively notify your customers are delivering. When you use the marketing tools you already know and love, like attentive to send those messages, and then drive those customers to a beautifully branded high performing tracking experience that you control. The reason why we've been on this maniacal mission is because consumers view tracking a lot. So right now mobile tracking pages viewed by consumer literally every single second. So your customers want to hear from you about where their order is, this is obviously an amazing opportunity for you to control what you want them to see and feel about your brand. And so we recently introduced a couple new innovations that let you build tracking pages that we're extremely excited about. And one of those is our new Shopify theme add in. So I'm going to walk you through that today. So we're going to do a live demo. And then right after Blake is going to walk through how you can use post purchase to really drive your SMS strategy, vice versa. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen really quick. All right, wonderful. And I'm assuming you guys can see this too. So right now I'm in my my much Shopify store, I sell dog apparel and dog treats. If you're a cat lover, you can just hit that leave button right now and exit the webinar. But um, so I'm going to show you how you can take one of your existing pages and actually turn that existing page into a tracking page in just a few minutes. So obviously, we were on the best sellers page, I'm showing all of the awesome dog stuff I sell, when you install the mobile app, turning this off, you will now have access to a new Shopify app called shipment tracker. So you can you'll be able to see this under the app section whenever you want to add a new block, we've built a millennial banner to power this. And so as soon as you install the app, you click on that tracker and just add your API key. So you can grab your API key from the Malomo dashboard. And as soon as you do, you'll see a preview of the tracking block show up. And you can't see this right now. But there are a little kind of toggles that show a preview of what the tracking block looks like as you move through the different states of delivery. So obviously, this is kind of bland, so we're going to do a couple of things to make it look much better. So I'm going to add a background image on here. Really quickly. Make sure actually make sure there's no repeat. Going on, we've got a background image a little tight, we'll add some padding on there. All right, that looks a little better. Cool. So like we've got a banner hero image here really nicely branded, kind of want to add some background as separate the tracking block from the back of the banner background. So you can actually change the elements of the tracking block. So awesome, we can add a background color, you can change that color to be whatever you want. Feels a little cramped, so we might add a little bit of padding around. And we kind of want to smooth out the edges. So we might add some border radius on there. Alright, that's looking pretty good. And then you can also change the elements inside of the tracking block. So I can change the width here and make the track mod a little bit wider. I can change the button colors. So I've been using pink throughout my theme. Okay, that's great. And then as I click through, I can see that it's been looks really good, right? It's really crisp on brand. And in just a few seconds. I've kind of transformed my best sellers page into a tracking page. But the great thing about this is because it lives in Shopify, you can use all the elements inside Shopify. So because it's post purchase, we might want to show different elements here. So instead of showing a bunch of treats, we might drop in, like hide one of these and drop in maybe our blog content or forgot a video we might want to showcase that and keep people entertained while they wait for their order. Amazing. So in just a few minutes, I've got a tracking page created right inside Shopify. The other really nice thing about this is you can create unlimited unlimited tracking You just inside your storefront. And so I've got a secondary page kind of already mocked up, I actually want to segment out the experiences and drive a segment of my customers to the page I created before, an extra job, a different segment a segment of my customers to this new page. And the intent for the new page is to drive people into our SMS marketing list. And so I'm going to actually change the banner layout and put in a call to action around the the, the oops, the SMS program that we're running. So I'm going to remove this banner image really quick. Oops, sorry, I'm on the wrong tracking page. Okay, there we move that banner image. So took that background banner away. And then I've already got a prebuilt. Is it live demos? Gotta love it. Let's try this again, remove that background image. Right, thank you. And then we will drop in a little call to action image that highlights our SMS program, right. So the the awesome thing about this is you can link this image to your SMS signup form, literally segment the customer experience. So we can instead of attentive look at is this customer a subscriber or not message them updated tracking information, and then drive them to this a specific tracking page that helps us achieve our goals and objectives. So this is a perfect segue, I'm actually going to pass it to Blake, and he's going to talk through a couple of different strategies around SMS. But again, we're super excited about this new theme, Matt. And we'll give you a couple more details here at the hands.

Blake Imperl 12:08

Awesome. Get my screen up here. Awesome. There we go. They're trying to chop. Awesome, thanks so much out really appreciate it. That was amazing. I gotta say I would order from your dog. So anytime I am a massive dog fan. So that was a great call. Appreciate it. But um, Hey, everyone, I'm Blake, I have product community, as mentioned at attentive, incredibly passionate about retail and econ. Also just pioneering this idea that SMS is a lot more than just revenue. And it's really a relationship building channel at its core, which I think transitions really nicely into kind of what we're talking about today with Malomo. But just real quickly with who we are at a tenant, if you're not familiar with us, we're the industry leader in conversational commerce, we're going over 5000 amazing brands like CB two and coach in urban outfitters just to name a few as well as great partners, like Malomo. And our SMS for software helps everyone from entrepreneurs, your enterprises really strengthen and scale relationships with their customers. So as I mentioned, SMS, there's a lot more than just drive revenue. A great use case for SMS that I think is really on the rise is transactional SMS. It's actually the number one most requested type of messaging that consumers want from merchants. In fact, over 97% of consumers want transactional updates via text to update them throughout the post purchase journey. And what's even better about these transactional updates is that they fall under this category of what we call automated messaging. And we see up to 99% open rates on automated messaging 30 plus percent click through rates on these as well. And so when we're thinking about those tracking pages that I was just outlining, we're really maximizing eyeballs and engagement back to those tracking pages, and in really incentivizing all the behaviors that we want on those pages, we're also giving consumers what they want, which is updates on what's going on with their order. So just at a high level of the Malomo, and attentive integration, so you're kind of familiar and get up to speed. Our merchants really use it for four core reasons. And I classify that as to drive engagement and revenue, to reduce support volume to build brand awareness. And because simply, I think they're better together. And I feel like that's a great fourth one to put on that. But I want to dive into some cool use cases as kind of Yeah, I was showing that tracking page experience, how are we actually getting them to there? And how are we making these messages more effective? How do we personalizing how are we growing the SMS kind of experience. So at at a core, this is what I call your core for transactional tax that you would set up within the Malomo and attentive integration to the lowest hanging fruit. And they're going to make sure that they give the biggest impact and get customers back to your tracking pages, but also give them what they want, which is you know, updates on their order. And so we had order confirmed orders shipped after delivery and then actually delivered. And these allow you to give those order updates and then again, drive traffic back to site. So this is is really I think, where I want to start actually with this is we know this growth is so important, they need to be opted in, obviously, to get to the SMS program. And so at attendant, we have 24, signup units that get over 24 stars that get folks opted in. But I want to call out to but I don't think get enough attention and really are directly related to transactional SMS. And the first one here is our opt in at checkout. And this allows them right before, they're about to complete the purchase to actually opt in to the SMS program and get those order updates. So we see a lot of our merchants who will add this to their checkout, to make sure we're getting folks on the SMS list, this is a really low hanging fruit to take advantage of here. And then this is an example of a tracking page with third wallets that they've actually set up. You know, oftentimes, this is, you know, as I mentioned, every one second one of these pages is getting viewed. And you don't want to be giving this traffic, obviously back to the shipping carrier, if you can help it. So this is a great way to not only do that, but grow the SMS list as a byproduct of that as well. So we see a lot of merchants take advantage of obviously offering promotions, like getting like a 10 50% off discount. But I think something that is really great that we're seeing more of and hearing about more is really just calling out the shipping update aspect of this, you know, sign up to SMS to get order updates. And also maybe if you offer customer support to get VIP support over SMS, so you're really creating that post purchase experience. In addition to getting them on the SMS list, it's adding more value to helping them to see SMS is more than a promotions channel, but really something that they can use as a resource post purchase. Also, assuming that we're seeing two even more up the funnel, but it's not on this slide here. But it thinks important, as you maybe have signup units on site, and you want to call out more of what you're doing post purchase, we're even seeing brands say hey, sign up to SMS, just to get order updates, as you complete your order, you're gonna get texted about it. And you can also use a chance to engage in support. So you're kind of changing the narrative a little bit of it's not a promotions channel, it's more about customer experience overall. So I'm going to show you how we grow the list, what are some of the core things but I want to show you just a few examples that I think are more of a way of thinking about it from a personalization standpoint, and how we can even do better than what I outlined initially. You know, in this first example here, what we're seeing is a order confirmed update. So once the order is processed, we're using the integration to actually send the confirmation text. And we're just doing a simple, you know, first time customer versus a returning customer Yeah, was kind of talking about some of that personalization and segmentation on if they're opted in. But we can even do this with just, you know, their level of, you know, maybe the first time versus a returning customer, really simple way to give them a little bit more personalization than just a standard confirm confirmation. This next one I love, it's a cross sell, we can implement marketing even into some of these transactional tax but do it in a tasteful way. And so what this is, is they purchased one product but not another, they'd be it complements that product. In this case, they bought coffee, but they didn't purchase the French press. And we give them a VIP offer in addition to letting them know that their order has been confirmed. So great way to just do it subtly. But also you're giving them a lot of what they want already, and then maybe giving them an offer that they can think about and consider. So a great way to do this really easy to set up in the journey builder and you're leveraging this awesome integration as a result. Another one here is on the actual outfit delivery. This is where we're building the hype, maybe they're engaging with your tracking pages already. And this is great for us to get them to the tracking page, but also for building some hype within the messaging. So we're segmenting if they're a VIP. So maybe you define a VIP as someone who's purchased X amount of times, for example. And so we're gonna give them this a little bit of a personalized message, and then also drive them back to that tracking page. So again, you're getting really multiple, I'd say maximum impact out of that message there. And then lastly, ordered delivered. This is a great way once the package is at their door, you're building the suspense, we're getting them back to the tracking page, so they can see some of that information. But you're also leveraging conversational SMS, which is super powerful. And what we do it this is where it is basically asking them to tell us what they're interested in. And based on the conversation that we're having through automation, we start to kind of personalize, learn more about the customer and get them more relevant information. So maybe they're interested in learning more about how to maximize the benefits of the product, or something like that. So really great way for you to be able to engage in a conversational way. The last thing I want to kind of talk about as a new product that we just launched at a tenant, but I think really highlights the Malomo experience post purchase and this is a tenant concierge. This is a managed two way conversational tool that we just released that allows you to have all of your inbound SMS replies, or actually inbound responses reply to in real time, as well as start some proactive outreach. So there's no need for you to staff this massive in house support team to handle inbound replies. Our agents will actually act like an extension of your own team to handle all those replies. So through this we can reduce support ticket volume, we drive engagement and we're also just driving a lot of revenue through conversations. These build trust building loyalty helped to deliver them I call that aha experience. And when you think about how this pertains to transactional text, if you think about it, you know, you can you complete an order. And typically it's like a no reply email, or it's, you know, so kind of just hey, like, we're not going to respond, we don't monitor this inbox. But if you can change that dynamic, the minute that text is sent, that your order is delivered, they're saying, Hey, if you have any questions during this process at all, text us, and we're here, we'll respond, you know, within two to four minutes, we're gonna get you help, it really changes the paradigm. This is not just a promotions, or even just transactional, this is a customer experience channel at the end of the day. And so you're driving, obviously, through his experience the traffic back to Malomo Strachey pages, but then also, if they need help, they can text into this number, it really multiplies, I think, the impact that it's going to have. And so we see a lot of merchants, again, when they complete the purchase, they're going to say, Hey, this is a conversational SMS channel. So texts, and if you have questions, or even as you opt in, maybe on the tracking page, maybe on site, you're calling out that you're gonna get shipping updates, but you're also gonna get that kind of customer support angle to SMS as well. So this is really something we're super bullish on. And I think this integration really pairs nicely with it. And we're really excited, I think about what's going to be possible as this kind of rolls out. But um, yeah, that's at a high level, some of the stuff that I think that complements really well, I'll pass back over to Brian from here.

Brian Lastovich 21:20

Thanks, Blake. This is fantastic so far. And thank you to both of you for leaving some time for some q&a, I appreciate it, I really do, I thought we would go a little beyond this. So I've a few things off the top of my head that I'd love to ask both of you that I think would be relevant for the audience. And forgive me for being so direct. But I think it's probably my responsibility to do that. So get your sales hats on really quick. I guess my question is this, right? We're going into this, it seems that we're going into this new kind of environment where a lot of now e commerce providers are looking at their marketing budget and being like, do we have to cut something here? Knowing that, you know, we look at the also the E commerce stack, and a lot of E commerce merchants have a ton of technology vendors in their stack, because a lot of them are giving value. So kind of like give us your kind of perspectives of like, what is the value in you know, concise, as concise as you can be, like, have the integration of both of your platforms, so we can kind of showcase here, you know, the value and why these platforms are really important, especially in these times for E commerce companies.

22:40

Yeah. It's always add Sorry, I'm just gonna Yeah, yeah, I

Yaw Aning 22:45

mean, I'm happy to start give my two cents. I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's a difficult environment to be in. Like, I think merchants should look at every app in their tech stack and scrutinize whether they need it or not like, and I include Malomo, in that, in that bucket. Like, I don't think we shouldn't necessarily be immune to things. The reason why you you may want to keep a tool like Malomo is because you know, you every, every consumer experience is shipping through buying from you online, right, it's like you are delivering a customer experience, whether you like it or not. And so regardless of whether you use Malomo, like you should control that part of the customer experience, why I view this integration as super powerful, is like they both work hand in hand to build the other channel really well, right? Like consumers want to hear from you. They want that communication by text. In that moment, that's a prime opportunity to drive them into a first conversation with you and start to build that relationship. The merchants that are winning over the long period of time, are the ones that are building their own audiences. And SMS is becoming one of the most intimate owned audiences that you could own. Like what I tend to just launched, I think it's like insane, like to be able to, to a SMS, to a text to a customer, and get insights about what they need and want. But also provide them value I think is kind of kind of incredible. Like, it's probably what I think every marketer should hope to achieve. And tracking is just that channel. That's, that's so natural to drive that opt in. So that's my that's kind of my my two cents around, like why you should continue to look at investing in this channel. But again, it's every merchants, you know, got to make that decision for themselves.

Blake Imperl 24:38

Yeah, I think just to piggyback off I think you took the words out of my mouth, I think in a lot of ways Yeah. But I think it really comes down to enriching the experience, you know, like we know that these are the touch points that make or break and experience and like I think you were talking about it like you know, if they have a bad experience, like they might not come back and I think having a seamless way to show that you care. either experience or being transparent, and you're using another channel that they prefer, like, I think it's just a match that really pairs nicely. And I think over time, they come to expect that and I really believe that you were seeing at attentive, a lot of our merchants want more meaningful ways to engage with their customers. And this integration is does that in a nutshell. And I think that when you look at how the behaviors have changed over time, SMS becoming a more preferred channel, it is becoming a central hub, I think, but you need to be able to do things like transactional updates, and get them what they need and want. So I think it's really just got to look at it from a customer experience standpoint, and this integration, I think, really encapsulates that.

Brian Lastovich 25:41

Yeah, I would probably say to like, the, there's always been that need to like, alright, let's think about repeat transactions, right? How do we get the buyer back, but I imagine now more than ever, there's really going to be a focus on that. Going to the next quarter. And obviously, these tools, and maybe one thing that I didn't hear from both of you, but I'm gonna kind of put a spotlight on is the kind of like the, it's sort of like a variable pricing model type of thing, right? Where it's like, listen, like you're already depends on like, the shipments and spends on how many SMS like, it's not just that like, hey, there's an upfront cost, it's depending on like, actually the volume that you're the amount of customers you're talking to and so forth. And so that's really helpful when you're thinking about budgeting and stuff like that. But three o'clock, central time, four o'clock, Eastern Time. I think we can end right now actually, you're in San Diego, right? Blake? So we're covering all timezones here. Awesome. But again, thank you all for coming. All attendees. Appreciate it. Yeah, Blake, thank you for your time. We'll get the recording out that one shortly. And appreciate again, the time and attention here. We'll talk to everyone later. Thanks, everyone.