Welcome back to another episode of the Brand Builder Show!
This week we’re joined by Ben Jabbawy, founder of eCommerce marketing platform Privy.
Ben and his team at Privy serve over 100,000 customers and have helped them collect 500 million email addresses and drive $7billion in revenue.
So, it’s safe to say he knows a thing or two about building and monetizing a list of engaged customers. In this episode, he breaks down what every brand builder should be doing to develop this valuable asset in their business.
Helpful resources:
- BBU Instagram
- Ben on Twitter
- Ben on Instagram
- BBU YouTube Channel
- Explore Brand Builder University – content, courses & coaching to help you grow your brand.
If you got this far, there’s a chance you enjoyed the episode… if so, please consider leaving a review – we really appreciate it!
Talking points:
00:00 Ben D. introduces Ben Jabbawy
00:41 Ben J. talks about his e-commerce journey
06:51 Importance of building a customer list
11:20 Building sustainable traffic to your store
15:18 List building
21:20 Best converting offers for welcome pop-up
26:27 What happens after growing a list
30:46 SMS marketing on Privy
35:26 Why is Privy the best solution for list building on Shopify?
36:56 Where to find Ben J. and Privy
Welcome back to another episode of The Brand Builder show. I’m here with my namesake. Ben. Great name. Great to have you here. Ben. Ben is the founder of privy, which is a journey, which we’ll get into. But thanks so much for joining us on the show today. Ben, great to have you here.
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah, I’m psyched to be here, Ben. Yeah, I’m
Ben Donovan
I’m excited to dive into your journey and and the tactics that we’re going to talk about in the world of this building brand building. And there’s going to be lots of nuggets, I’m sure in here for lots of lots of people. So just give us a bit of background before we dive too quickly into a bit about your journey with E commerce with Privy. Bring us up to speed with where you’re at now.
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah, so Privy today is one of the leading marketing automation solutions for Shopify brands. We also serve big commerce in Wix commerce, but mostly Shopify today, we’ve got over 100,000 Shopify stores that are actively using privy to grow their customer base and drive more sales. So the platform itself spans across like things on your website that help you convert more, we call that our conversion suite. Things like pop ups and spin wheels and dynamic shipping bars, all that we’ve got an email marketing suite. And we’ve recently rolled out a text marketing suite as well. So known for working with small and mid sized brands. And I started the business 10 years ago,
Ben Donovan
10 years ago. Wow. I didn’t realize it’d been that long.
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah, yeah. It’s crazy. Yeah.
Ben Donovan
What made you decide to start it?
Ben Jabbawy
I was naive and thought I could start a company, you know? No, I, so both of my parents, I don’t know if you can see these logos back here. But both of my parents had their own small businesses. And I was a little technical. So I studied engineering in college. And they were like, Oh, Ben, you, you know, computers, like build me a website, what’s, what’s Google ads, what’s email marketing, and so I just kind of was like doing this stuff for them. And I realized, wow, you know, they actually want me to teach them how to do it themselves, and have tools that let them do that, as opposed to buying, I mean, spending on big agencies to kind of execute work. So I thought, wow, you know, love my parents, now they’re in their 70s, back then they were in their 60s. If their appetite is to adopt self service, marketing technology, then there’s a huge shift coming where, you know, the next generation of small business owners that you know, is a bit younger, in digital native by age is going to absolutely want that stuff. Right. And so, you know, that was kind of the original Genesis, a set of tools that let them kind of capture leads and run promotions themselves. And, you know, we didn’t really start an E commerce at the time, but obviously, we pivoted the business and only support ecommerce now. So from 2015, I think it was until today, it’s been all about supporting Shopify, Bigcommerce and Wix businesses.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, that’s great. So you had a bit of a team built up before you launched into E commerce. I imagine there’s a lot of coding development, that kind of stuff that needed to be done.
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah, we were about five people. When we first launched ecommerce, myself and developers, so raised a little bit of money. That’s a whole journey. And then we grew the team we focused on using that round to get to profitability, which we did. And then we realized, wow, you know, the business is really humming. And we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to do something really massive and a space that’s growing quickly. So we did raise a Series A of funding. And then we built the business to about 100 people and ended up selling to attentive the leader in SMS marketing.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, incredible story. And you know, you mentioned you got 100,000 and uses that’s, that’s incredible, you know, in a software space as well, it’s something real special. So I imagine there’s lots of people that are interested in buying it, obviously want to talk about tactics for E commerce. But yeah, entrepreneurs always want to hear about, you know, exit stories. So what was it an easy decision to sell at that time?
Ben Jabbawy
You know, we ended up getting a few offers, and I was very thankful about that. You know, it’s funny, before we chose attentive, we had a very baseline integration with them. And we saw our biggest customers were actually moving from privy to attentive, and we thought, oh, wow, that’s interesting. And the CEO of attentive, amazing guy, just said to me, Hey, like, we want to buy the company, we’re going to give you all the resources in the world. So for me, I don’t have to think about fundraising anymore, which is not something that I love. And I get to focus on small businesses, which is what I started this company for. And you know, there was going to be no pressure to move upstream to larger enterprises. And so the offer from attentive was a great one. And it’s been a year now pretty much almost a year. And like, I’m having fun, more fun than I was before the acquisition, you know,
Ben Donovan
yeah. And you’re sticking around long term with pervy, yeah,
Ben Jabbawy
yeah, I’m here, man. I mean, you know, what I realize is like, it’s incredibly hard to build a business. I love our customer, I love solving more problems for the customers that we have. And I see a lot of opportunity ahead for us.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, that’s awesome, man. Well, congratulations on a great journey and 10 years, it’s, it was a lot of hard work involved there. So thanks. Good, let’s talk some tactics thing, because you are, as you’ve already alluded to, in the trenches every day helping people with the topic of our discussion today, which is growing audiences, marketing, etc, etc. And I think it’s a really important conversation for a lot of our audience, because a lot of them would be predominantly Amazon sellers. And we’re trying to really build out this knowledge base of becoming Brand Builder building brands on Amazon. Of course, that’s a great traffic source. And we certainly still subscribe to that method, but also, you know, diversifying off of Amazon, growing, you know, lists, assets, all that kind of stuff. So, if you were in a room with an Amazon seller that was only selling on Amazon right now, why would you describe to them? Or what would you say to them is the importance of building a customer list?
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah. There’s very few things on the internet that you as a business owner can own? Yeah, right. I think if anyone’s ever found themselves getting, you know, a warning email from Amazon or getting delisted from Amazon, you may already kind of have that fire in your belly. But really, the only three things as a brand that you can own on the internet are your website, your email list, and your SMS list, right? Facebook owns your followers, Amazon owns your customers. And you know, same for Etsy and other marketplaces doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sell there, those are fantastic places to get distribution, and jumpstart a profitable business. But at the end of the day, if your goal is to build a long term brand, you need to figure out how to tell that story, how to build real relationships with customers that no one can take away from it. And that’s why I think it’s so important, right? Because we’ve seen over the last few years, like, you know, part of this was the apple issue with Facebook, right? Like Facebook’s getting more expensive use, Google’s getting more expensive, right? And actually, I don’t even know what what’s happening on Amazon. But I imagine it’s a similar story, it’s getting harder to stand out. And so like, at the end of the day, the things that you can control are like content that drive people to your website and help you get found and how you engage a customer less through email or SMS or both.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, no, that’s so true. And you’re right, PPC costs, you know, cost per click is up, you know, sort of 30% in the last 12 to 18 months. So, you know, that is, of course, a concern, and I think needs to be a factor in this decision for people. But obviously, the challenge for Amazon sellers often is like, well, I get all of these customers that come to my listing every day and all I have to do is make sure I’m ranking for these keywords and the customers keep coming. So you know, why would I put all of this work in because there is work in setting it up. But in a way of trying to maybe incentivize them. What do you typically see with your clients? Is there a figure you can put to you got X amount of people on your list, you should be making X amount of money. Are there any studies, case studies? You do like that?
Ben Jabbawy
Oh, yeah. So we’ve got a lot of data, right, we’ve helped our brands collect about a half a billion email addresses,
Ben Donovan
I believe it’s $8 million a billion dollars.
Ben Jabbawy
She over $7 billion in sales through previous campaigns. So, you know, we definitely have the data there. And certainly, now that we’ve added our email marketing solution, we see like revenue per send to so you know, a single lead on your email list for DTC business should generate $30 in sales each year, at least. So that’s, you know, not all of the contacts on your list are going to buy from you, right, I think everyone hopefully understands that. But that’s the value of every single lead that you generate, right. And then for each kind of, let’s say, you send a newsletter or a promotion, like for each of those, you should expect to generate at least $500. That’s the data that we see in our platform.
Ben Donovan
Yeah. So list size,
Ben Jabbawy
not just across all our customers, right. And again, we serve small business, right? So obviously, we’ve got businesses that you know, are making 10s of $1,000 on every cent. We have also customers that make one order on an honest end to, you know, 50 people, and they’re psyched about that.
Ben Donovan
Yeah. Yeah, that’s awesome. Good stuff. Okay. So, you know, a seller and econ brand owner that wants to start growing their list growing this asset? What are the first things that someone should be thinking of in order to start down this process?
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah, I would step back one level, what I would say is, Amazon is Amazon, you’re getting traffic, people are searching, you know, you’ve got customers hitting your your listing, that’s great. On your DTC site, you need to think about how you’re going to build sustainable traffic to your store. Right? How once you have that traffic, you’re going to convert it into an email lead, or an SMS lead. And then the third thing is, as you build that list up, how you get them back to the site to buy either for the first time or repeat sales, right. So that’s kind of like, I don’t care what your business is. But if you’re selling DTC on Shopify or something like that, like, that’s the kind of equation that you need to figure out
Ben Jabbawy
From a content like from a traffic perspective. If you have, you know, profit or budget from your Amazon business, you could give it a jumpstart by buying Instagram ads by buying Tik Tok ads, stuff like that, doing some influencer stuff that absolutely could be a path. If you’re in business, and you’ve got budget. If you’re not, you got to do it the old fashioned way. Right. And we’ve been, we were just talking about this before the show. You know, I tweet a lot, I don’t remember the specific tweet, but a tweet that I did a year ago about, you know, 12 months from now, you’re gonna wish that you were investing in SEO and organic content. And you are and it’s now driving sales for your business like that is what everyone listening needs to understand. Right. So I think, if I was trying to jumpstart a DTC business cold right now, what I would do is, as the founder, I would start writing a blog post or two a week, about the target customer that I have, right? In your case, it was stem toys, right science, technology, engineering and math, right. very niche. That’s the beauty of content for DTC is like it should be niche. And you’re not going to see a sale from that blog post when you publish it today. But if you get in the rhythm as a founder of publishing content regularly, and I’m, I’m here with a podcast, and I’ve seen what it’s done for my own business, it’s amazing what will happen in six to 12 months, it’s really true, and that traffic will keep coming. So that’s one. The other is we live, we live in a visual world, right? So like, every every one of your customers, I guarantee is either on Facebook, or Instagram, or Tiktok, or Snapchat or something. Right? And so you as a founder need to figure out how you’re going to get in front of those people. Is it you know, funny videos about your product? Is it educational videos about your product? Is it just you as the founder doing behind the scenes about building a business, right? Or is it you know, finding real creators that, like, have an audience of your target customer but you need a strategy for traffic? That’s not what we’re going to focus on today. I think we should We’ve talked about list building and a couple plays that I really want to make sure everyone understands. But once you get traffic to your store, then it’s about converting them. Right.
Ben Jabbawy
In a perfect world, a visitor will end up ordering. Right? I think, if you launched, if you’re live, you look at your analytics, you realize that’s really not how it works. And, you know, for every 100 People who hit your site, two, maybe three of them will make an order two or 3%. website conversion to order. Right? There’s sites that do better than that. That’s fine, you know, but that’s probably what you’ll see. So the question then becomes, okay, if you’re, if you have any success driving traffic to your store, what are you doing to build that relationship, because you know, that this person is going to leave most likely, without making an order. And so that’s where list building comes in. And I think list building, its reputation comes and goes, every couple of years. Right now, this building’s hot, again, because of all the changes in Facebook, but a lot of people hate popups, they hate the term pop up. But my data on our platform shows that lots and lots of people put their email in, in exchange for an offer in exchange for learning more, because they’re not ready right now, they’ll even put in a phone number to learn about you more through tax. So. And in the data that I shared, you know, the 500 million email addresses, like that’s real, right, 7 billion in sales from those contacts. Like that’s very real.
Ben Jabbawy
So I think pop ups got a rap because, you know, people think of them is like, there’s no targeting, right? So what I want to make sure on this episode is that anyone listening understands that the approach and strategy that I recommend, after 10 years in this space, for list building, is very similar to what a lot of the Guru’s talk about for email marketing. And it’s all about segmentation. And if you take that same level of segmentation that you’re thinking about for like, email automation flows, and you think about your website traffic with that same lens, like, that’s where the magic of list growth comes in. And I’ll give you an example. Right? You bought an Instagram ad, and someone clicked. So you just paid to bring this customer to your store. They’ve, you know, added something to cart, you know, maybe it’s 50 bucks, whatever. And technology helps you detect that they have 50 bucks in the cart, and they’re leaving, and they came from a paid ad, you have no idea who that person is, you won’t be able to send them your fancy email automation, right. So like that combination of value in the cart. Maybe number of visits has not ordered before came from a paid ad, I’m going to get really aggressive and show that person an exit intent pop up if they meet those segmentation criteria. And we call that a cart saver. Right. So cart savers, you know, they’ll convert about 10% of people that are abandoning cart into a lead. Huge value there. That’s just like one simple example of a really targeted pop up that I think every single store should be running. And probably one or 2% of them are because, you know, they’re not thinking strategically about less growth.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, yeah. And that’s one of the reasons I a loved your content, b, you know, became a user of privy like we use it, as I’ve said to you, and the a big part of why I loved it so much and didn’t use just another, you know, because there are other solutions out there, right. But we’re pretty excels, I think is in that segmentation. And you can only show pop ups when someone scrolls a certain amount of the, you know, bid on site for a certain amount of time, exit intent. All of those things like you say, I think I came into trying to build out a DTC site thinking, pop ups, do we really want those? Do we want to be that kind of brand? And, you know, you have helped me through, you know, your great podcast as well. Educate me on actually this. It doesn’t have to be a spammy thing. It doesn’t have to be a bad user experience. And as you said, you know, the stats show that it does convert well,
Ben Jabbawy
yeah, I mean, that’s awesome that you listen to the podcast, I wasn’t sure if anyone does.
Ben Donovan
I’m just getting up getting a million visitors a day.
Ben Jabbawy
Oh, kidding. Okay, but yeah, no, look, I agree. I think someone just tweeted yesterday or two days ago how much they hate pop ups. And it was like a huge threat like everyone was piling on. But those same people are the ones touting retention marketing through email and SMS. So my question to the group is like, What the What is your list growth strategy, if you’re not willing to, to kind of put an offer in front of your customer that will help you as the business capture the lead, it’s just, it’s amazing. And I have even customers that have kind of boomerang. And over the years, that started with us, had tremendous success with like really targeted list growth efforts, shut them all down. And they’re back a few years later. And their biggest problem is that they need to grow their list. And so I think, the best time to get some of these systems in place on top of your website, I’m not even shilling privy, like previous got a great free plan, it’s awesome. I just, there’s, there’s a lot of a lot of great ways to do this. But like, even if you get 100 visitors to your site a month, get a welcome pop in place for new visitors get a cart saver in place for non subscribers that have money in the cart that are leaving, right at a minimum. And then just have the confidence that as you grow your traffic six months from now, or 12 months from now, you’ve got some of the right like website, funnel stuff in place. And there’s a lot more examples of great targeted plays that you can do on your site. But you know, those are the two kind of absolute basic ones that I would get started on any single ecommerce site.
Ben Donovan
That’s good. And then for the welcome, pop up what you see and as the best converting offer.
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah, so that’s a good topic. So let’s dive into that. So when you have a pop up, or any type of form that you put in front of a consumer, there are certain things that impact the conversion rate of that right. Hands down the offer, is the thing that impacts it most. Right? So yes, you design matters, yes, targeting matters, but at the end of the day, it’s what’s in it for me as a consumer. And so we’ve found, there’s really three types of our categories of forms that that we see. The first is what we just call a sign up. And that’s like, Hey, join our list, and you’ll be the first to get news and updates, right, almost like what you see that the footer of a website, right, where there’s nothing really in it for them, that you should be converting about 1% of people that see it. Okay. And that’s like a fine thing that like, but it can be much stronger than the next is a true offer, right. So that’s join our list and get x and x could be a code for 10%, it could be $5 off, it could be free shipping, on your first order. If you’re doing something like that the strength of the offer itself, obviously will drive the signup rate. But you should be targeting a benchmark of 5% signup rate there. Then the third category is a little bit more kind of aggressive. And it’s like what we call enter to win or, you know, it could be like a spin the wheel, which we offer, and you’ve seen all that stuff. But that’s where you see signup rates kind of climb well above 10%. And they’re great. You know, we just saw some data from the team that those like spin wheels will collect about five times more signups than on average across all previous customers than a pop up. However, a lot of that is a little bit lower quality from a lead perspective. So I think, you know, that’s kind of a framework. And what I like to tell people is like, if you’re super anti discount for your brand, start with a signup, right? No discount. If you realize, oh, I’m driving revenue from email and you’d like to have a bigger email list. Turn that signup into an offer for 10%. Start small, right 10% off code. If you’re a first time customer, watch that signup rate grow, watch your revenue from email grow, and then say, Okay, what other opportunities do I have to either increase the signup rate or find more targeted, you know, groups of people that look like on my website to get in front of?
Ben Donovan
That’s good. Yeah, that’s very helpful. Good. breakdown for people I think but the key obviously is just getting started. Get started with something because too many people are, you know, missing the opportunity. And, you know, so get started.
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah, I think the, the, it’s very common and this is not a crack. I love all founders and operators it’s hard stuff. But the most common thing I see is that a brand will will have spent money and time setting up like all these automated email flows. And then similarly on their paid traffic, they’re spending a lot of money on paid and you know different retargeting funnels and this and that. And so like you’re driving traffic, you’ve got great nurturing, but you’ve got this huge gap in the middle, because you’re doing nothing to convert that traffic into leads.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, for sure. Quick question, which is slightly off the beaten path here. But you mentioned the email opt in in the footer of Shopify? Is it? What do your customers tend to do with that? So they tend to then like, somehow setup it because we’ve not found a way to sync that to your list? It’s all in Shopify, but there must be ways to do that, right?
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah, so a few things like if you are using privy, any contact that lands in Shopify will land in a platform like privy to just say no. However, a lot of our kind of advanced customers, what they do over time is they replace that footer form with a previous embed form, we have an embedded form style. And the reason for that is, you can kind of create some of the mat the same magic that happens after someone completes a preview form. So as an example, maybe after they put their, you know, email into the footer, you want to reveal a coupon code, you want that code to be unique to that person, right? Or you want to drive them to, you know, like, your social page after like, you can customize the thank you page versus like, you know, traditional, you know, templated embedded form, like there’s no control over those, those types of things.
Ben Donovan
Okay, cool. Good stuff. No, that’s yeah, that’s helpful. Once a customer begins to grow the list, what should they do with it?
Ben Jabbawy
What you shouldn’t do is, wait until Black Friday to send your first email, you know, which, like, there’s a lot of people listening that probably laugh and like, they’ve been there, and I’ve been there with customers. I think the first thing you need to do, there’s, there’s like four automated emails that I every ecommerce business needs, right? The first is what we call a welcome series. So you just did a great job capturing that lead, have a series of three emails that welcomes them, that tells the story of the product or the brand. The second email, you know, maybe your your showing some reviews, some social proof, or some more information about the product, the third email, maybe there’s a code, or maybe you promised that in the sign up, and you’ve got it. So have a welcome series in place. Right. The next is cart abandonment. Everyone look at your Shopify analytics, you’re going to see it, you’re going to be like, What the hell is going on, everyone abandons their cart, this is normal behavior, you should expect about 60 to 70, maybe even more percent of people that add to cart, never make it to checkout. And that’s fine, but have a cart saver pop up, and then have a two, maybe three email cart abandonment series, the first of that series, what I recommend is super simple. Just like a plain text almost doesn’t need to be full of images from the founder. Hey, I’m Ben, I’m the founder of this store. I noticed you were looking at products ABC. Did you have any questions about those? I’d be happy to answer for you. Right Start there. Then the second one of that abandoned cart series, what I’d recommend is a code. Hey, you know, we saved your cart. You know about supply chain issues. I don’t know inventory is limited. Here’s a code for you know, 10% off your first order. And it’s good for 24 hours. And then again, you know that like the matt we call it our magic cart reminder block. It’ll show them what’s in the cart. And then the third is just a follow up one more day later. Hey, the code expires tonight sort of thing. So that’s classic, simple, don’t need to put too much thought into it. Have that and then you’ve got stuff going out after right post purchase. Send A confirmation. It’s easy to do in any platform. When you it’s like post purchase, but also one after fulfillment to the fulfillment trigger. And then from there like, so those are that’s actually three. And then just like get yourself in a rhythm of sending, like, ideally, twice, three, four times a month but like, it’s got to be at least once a month, send us some something, Are you launching a new product? Right? Is it? Are you doing a Father’s Day Sale? A Mother’s Day Sale? Is there a holiday coming up that is in some way related to your brand, like keep your list warm, even outside of the automation?
Ben Donovan
was really good, really helpful. You talked to me about obviously with attentive, acquiring privy, attentive, being very strong and SMS marketing, you guys obviously leaning a lot more as many other people, right. It’s quite a buzz topic, SMS marketing? How have you sort of integrated that into the privy experience? And again, what are you seeing as like the best use cases for that with your clients?
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah. So what what we have seen is that, there’s still a tremendous amount of people that haven’t done a great job implementing email, the foundation of email marketing for their business. So I think that’s, that’s the core, that’s where I would start, if I was starting a brand, what we’re starting to see is that there are pockets of your customer base that want more. And maybe they check email less, right. But everyone, you know, when when was the last time you didn’t look at a text message you got right, versus your email inbox. So what we’re starting to see is that there’s a probably a subset of your customer base, maybe your top 10%, most loyal that prefers text. And then, as a business, one of the cool things is like, I’ll share some stats on email marketing, a great, you know, benchmark for email marketing is about 20% of people that you send to will open it, about one to 3% will click it, right click something. And so with text, it’s very different. You can’t you platforms don’t know open rates, but I think it’s safe to assume 98 99% look at the text. But the click rates that we’re seeing are easily over 10% clicks. And so, and it happens fast, right within minutes of the text going out. So that’s like what’s so amazing about text. And originally, we weren’t sure when we were just getting into it for our clients, like, you know, with email, you need a list of 10,000 20,000 1000 like you need some scale, because open rates are lower, and clicks are lower. But with text, it’s so different. Right? I we just had a great story of a customer that was hesitant about text. But it was like, alright, I’ll just try it. I love preview, you know, I trust these guys. They built their list to 28, contacts 28 They sent their first text, and they drove $800 in sales to 28 text, double contacts. So the revenue per subscriber is significantly higher for text than it is for email. And you should expect that the list is smaller and more intimate. So you know, where as I said, you should be doing for regular kind of broadcasts, email sends a month to your list, and then the automated ones. With text, I think, you know, you got to be a little bit more careful. You can’t be as like, frequent with it, but the results are stronger. Candidly.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, I’ll be honest, that was my concern with because we build a lot of qualified leads through like a post purchase many chat flow that we have. And one of the options in there is to integrate SMS signups and I haven’t done it yet because I am, you know, maybe limiting belief is the you know, texting customers is a little bit spammy, but it’s similar to email pop ups, right, you know, limiting beliefs and
Ben Jabbawy
yeah, it’s such a great a great thing to talk about here for a sec because I I’m getting the same pushback that I got when I first started educating customers around this growth that I’m getting that like, oh, I don’t want to put a pop up on my site like I I would never want to hit a pop up. It’s the same thing for text. And usually, when that’s the reaction, but the platform data that we see shows people are opting in, people are not unsubscribing, from texts, and people aren’t clicking in buying from texts, like, that’s where I say, okay, that’s the opportunity for brand new owners, because, you know, maybe for some of the people listening, like, maybe you should only be doing SMS for your customer list, you know. So I think it’s an opportunity. It’s early in this new marketing channel, the rules are stricter, you can’t like mess around with opt ins. And you know, if you end up using Preview for text, we handle all of that for you. But like, smaller list, it’s going to be more engaged, it will drive more revenue.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, that’s awesome. I know, you’re super busy. And I said, about half an hour. And we’re kind of going over that. So I want to honor your time. And, and kind of draw things to a close. As much as I’ve got a billion other questions I could ask you. You’ve kind of already answered the question for us in everything you’ve alluded to. But if someone is looking to get started with growing their list on Shopify, etc, why is privy in your eyes the best solution for doing it?
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah. Pretty started with a focus on website conversion. And that means that for about eight years, before we got into email, the only thing that we did was list growth, and website conversion. And so that means we approach it with similar level of science, to the big marketing automation companies, and what they did with like, how to engage a list. And what that means is, we’ve got way more functionality, way more segmentation than everyone else. But for me, the point of pride about privy is that even with the free plan, you’re gonna get live chat from a real rep at privy, that will respond to you during business hours in a minute or less. And like, that’s what privy is about, even if you’re on the free plan, because of the roots I have in small business. We’re here to help. Not with soft, not just with software, but with the education. And that’s a big part of the brand. And after our acquisition by attentive, we just continue to double down on that same differentiator.
Ben Donovan
Yeah. And I can personally vouch your customer service is great, because we had an issue a while back, and they just kind of sold it for a straightaway.
Ben Jabbawy
So awesome. Awesome. Good.
Ben Donovan
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Ben, for coming on. We really appreciate you sharing all of the info that you have your insight on this. If people do want to check out preview, what’s the where’s the best place to go? Yeah,
Ben Jabbawy
privy.com, privy.com. Or if you’re on Shopify, just search for us in the App Store. It’s the easiest install experience that way. And if you liked this sort of tactic stuff, I do a daily podcast on growing DTC businesses. It’s called ecommerce marking school. Yeah,
Ben Donovan
yeah. Highly recommend checking that podcast out guys is just super actionable content. You do like real short episodes as well. Just yeah,
Ben Jabbawy
like most are five to 10 minutes. And then, you know, we do some interviews, like an interview or two a week as well.
Ben Donovan
Yeah. Yeah, I’m so used to I’ve had to adjust to your speed of speech, because I listened to your podcast on 2x. So
Ben Jabbawy
I know I talk much slower.
Ben Donovan
But no, it’s good. Highly recommend that guys. Ben knows what he’s talking about. Get some great guests on, and love everything that prove you’re doing so please, please do check it out. And again, I can highly highly vouch for Privy on your Shopify store. It’s a great tool. There’s a great free plan as well is very generous free plan to get you started. So thanks, Ben, for coming on. We really appreciate your time.
Ben Jabbawy
Yeah. Thanks, man.
Ben Donovan
Awesome, guys. Hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. If you have, of course, please do give the show a like if you’re watching on YouTube, subscribe. If you’re on podcast platforms, and do leave us a review wherever you’re listening. We really appreciate it. And we’ll see you in another episode next week.