Episode # 224: Demystifying Facebook Messenger with Ben Parr, Author & Entrepreneur

Hey, welcome back. It's time for episode number 224 and you're gonna need a notebook. Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works, from mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to ch. So if you've been following the Boutique Hub for any period of time, or if you know me very well, you know that I'm a total marketing nerd. And when it comes to strategy and list building and traffic and conversions, my mind works in overdrive. So you can imagine when you hear the podcast today, you're going to know that I was writing a gazillion notes in the background and because I know that you're going to be doing the same. Today's topic as we dive into Facebook messenger is one that so many boutiques have questions about. Maybe they're a little bit unfamiliar with, but it's certainly a trend that every single one of us has to pay attention to. Just as important as building an email list or a text message marketing list, it's critical that we also have a Facebook messenger list. So today I want to take some time to demystify what it means to use Facebook messenger but also talk about some of the trends that we see coming in e commerce all over the industry. Not just for fashion and apparel boutiques, but e commerce stores of all types. So today my guest is a brand new member of the Boutique Hub who I'm so excited for you to meet, Mr. Ben Parr. Ben is an award winning entrepreneur, an author, investor and a journalist. He's author of the best selling book Captivology the Science of Capturing People's Attention, which you guys have to read and it was named the top marketing book of 2015 by strategy and Business Magazine and Small Business Trends. He's also the co founder and president of Oqtane AI, the marketing automation platform for messenger and messaging apps. Hence our conversation today and Oqtane AI being a partner of the Boutique Hub. Before this, Ben was also co editor and editor at large of Mashable where He wrote over 2,400 articles on social media and technology and managed Mashable's editorial team. He interviewed business leaders from Ashton Kutcher to Mark Zuckerberg and you're going to hear more about that on the show today as well. Guys, I'm really excited about this episode because there's so many easy, actionable takeaways for you to capture. I can't wait to hear what action you take. So don't forget to message me over on Instagram Jalderson while you're watching or listening to this episode and let me know what action you're going to take because I really want to see more boutiques in our industry get involved with Facebook messenger because we've got such an opportunity to build a whole other type of list that's going to help us reach our customers 24 7, especially going into the holiday season. Guys, enjoy this one. This is an awesome, awesome episode. All right, guys, I hope you brought your notebooks for this week's episode because we are going to talk pretty in depth about marketing. I'm so excited today that Ben Parr, the co founder and president at Octane AI, is going to be joining me and we're going to be breaking down something that I think is scary for a lot of people. We're going to be talking about like the Jetsons and bots and robots and all the things of the future, but in a much more present and digestible way. So, Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you. I guess now I got to live up to George Jetson, right?

I mean, can you believe how far it's come? Really, though, like when we talk about bots and did you watch the Jetsons as a kid?

Oh, yes. And the Flintstones and that movie, Jetsons Meet the Flintstones.

Yes. You are taking me back. So we're actually like living in that time frame and I think a lot of people can be intimidated by all of the technology that's available to them. Do you find that people sometimes bury their head in the sand when it comes to technology? Like, they just don't want to know how much data is out there, so they choose to avoid it. But really small retailers and e commerce stores have just as much data as Amazon does at our disposal if we just know how to use it correctly.

The crazier part of that, especially as an entrepreneur, as a store owner, if you bury your head in the sand, you. You are leaving money on the table. You're leaving opportunity on the table. When there's this new channels and new data points that are, once you learn them, not that crazy hard. Like if you can learn email, you can learn most anything, but are not adopting it because Being scared or time or things like that. So it's really about just like jumping in.

Absolutely. Well, for those of you who don't yet know, Ben, we're going to talk more about your background in just a bit. I know you've got some pretty amazing things on the old resume when it comes to understanding trends in technology, but for now I want to start here and kind of back our way into that. I want to talk about Octane AI, the company that you're co founder and president at, because I find it to be so relevant and so many boutiques don't yet understand Facebook messenger and messenger marketing. So can you start there and talk to me about Oqtane and what you guys have going on over there?

Yeah. So Oqtanei, my co founders and I started in 2016 to really enable a one to one communication channel, a conversational communication channel. Like, kind of like the simple thing that we saw was that the number one use of time on a smartphone is messaging, not email. And email has been the dominant way brands have communicated with their customers over the last 10 years. But messaging is becoming and has already become for a lot of people the number one way they want to interact with a brand. More than half of consumers say that, 59% actually. So in the same kind of way where you'd be leaving tons of money on the table if you didn't connect with the customers over email or have an e commerce presence, the same is true of not having the ability to send messages over Facebook messenger and sms. And so a lot of our customers call us the klaviyo of messaging. We provide in the same way you would with email, a suite of tools to help you get opt ins for Facebook messenger and SMS and send triggered messages like card abandonment, browse abandonment which work really well and then send campaigns. So sending messages around holidays or, or even going more advanced like recommending products to customers.

Perfect. So I love how you say it's the klaviyo of messaging or the klaviyo of email.

Right.

So it's important that retailers, e commerce stores have both channels enabled, not just one or the other, but both are still essential today.

Yeah, we actually did this with Klaviyo. We found that customer connected to both email and messenger will be 31% more valuable. The revenue per recipient will be 31% more if they're connected on more than one channel like that. And messaging just provides some advantages that email doesn't. You want to be doing both.

Perfect. So let's start here with Most retailers need to understand about messaging. How do they build their list? What's your go to to get started?

Okay, so we call this like the Octane AI conversion funnel. And so it's a pretty straightforward process. So it's what? Step one, get opt in. Step two, send triggered messages. Step three, send broadcast campaigns to get people opted in. Most of the same techniques that you have for email work really well as examples. Pop ups and opt ins on the site where they can actually just check a box, it'll automatically detect their Facebook account. And if they check that box, they'll be opted in. And we provide a whole suite of tools for doing that. We also integrate with platforms like Privy and Justuno where you can get email and messenger opt ins at the same time, which is getting like two birds with one stone in that kind of case. And then there's some other tools that work really, really, really well. Two in particular I want to mention are one, a feature of ours called comment capture which will actually send a message to anyone who comments on any of your Facebook posts or any of your ads. And if they respond back to that message, they'll become a subscriber. So this works really well. If you have a lot of comments on your Facebook page, if you have a lot of engagement in general, that works really well for driving a lot of subscribers. And then two, a feature of ours called conversational ads. So it's like a traditional Facebook ad, except it's an ad that can follow up with customers throughout the customer journey. So what I mean by that is traditional ad is I target you, you click and you go to the website. And if you leave and you don't give your email, that's it. You lost that person with a Messenger ad. They click, they drop into Facebook Messenger. Now they're opted in for Facebook messages. And so if they don't go to the website, it'll send them a message. If they go to the website but don't add something to cart, it'll send them a browse abandonment message. If they add something to cart but don't finish the purchase, it'll send a cart abandonment message. And what we see in general is that those ads perform two times better than a traditional Facebook ad. And so you want to be adopting those as well because it gets you a better return on ad spend and it gets you subscribers.

Oh my gosh. I have so many things going through my head right now because I'm so excited by all this. Let's start back at the top. Number one you said was Pop ups on your site, do you find that you need to give some type of discount or perk or some type of offer when you're getting people to opt in just like you would for say your email list?

It definitely helps if you can provide some kind of incentive, a discount or something like that. But it doesn't always have to be a discount, it can be for example, a download. So like one of our customers, Earth Red Muscle offers like a PDF, you know, like workout tips and that performs really well as both like as an ad and as a pop up. And so you can offer other things that are not just discounts, but a discount will usually work the best.

Perfect. And then comment capture, which is really intriguing to me. Do people need to comment a certain word or set of words or how does that trigger set up? Or is it just anybody who's engaging with your comment now you're going to send them a message and by them responding back, they're opted into your messenger list.

So there's two types. There's global comment capture and targeted comment capture. A global comment capture will send a message to anyone who comments on any post of anything. That said, you can actually make it so that it doesn't send a message based on certain keywords or sends a message only based on certain keywords. So you could filter out negative words, swear words, things like that pretty easily. Targeted comment capture is just for an individual Facebook post. Sometimes some of our customers will do like a contest like you know, comment and like have a chance for something or something like that to win something or something of the sort and then the boost the post and that can perform really well sometimes that's super solid.

Do you have to offer your customers a way to opt out of those messages?

So octane AI offers that solution built in. So you just have to approve the message in our dashboard. So we built AI to automatically understand when people are typing different things. One of those things is when people type stop or unsubscribe and then it'll pop up the notification settings and people can opt out or can choose to change the notification settings. We don't actually see that huge of a drop off rate for messenger in particular, I think the opt out rates for SMS are higher, but the messenger opt out rates are in, you know, the very low single digit percentages. So there's easy ways for people to opt out through typing something. There's a menu in messenger where they can go and opt out. You always want to offer that, you want to be super friendly like that. But A lot of people don't opt out.

Gotcha. So if someone was new to using messenger and they want to go in and use Oqtane AI, is there a way? Like, do you have step by step guides or is there somebody that can help walk you through getting some of these set up or talk to me about that process in case someone might feel intimidated by it?

So there's a path for almost every type of entrepreneur or person out there. So I kind of like put it in a couple buckets. One is like the tinkerer, the entrepreneur who really likes playing out specific things. We have step by step instructions, step by step tutorials, a video tutorial that will go step by step through everything. And then more importantly than that, we have a playbook that we put out each year that goes into detail on all the things you can do and how to do them step by step. This year's playbook is octane AI.com playbook and it goes through how to set up the ads, how to set up comment capture, how to customize your browse and cart abandonment messages, and even how to do more advanced things like sync your customer list to Klaviyo, trigger Facebook messages based on your apps, like if you're using Stamped or Yotpo or some other review app or all sorts of different things that maybe you didn't even know were possible. And then finally there's like an option that we have where if you're busy but you really know you want to implement it, we have a team that'll either help you implement it or help you get to an agency or connect you with an agency partner that'll help you implement it. We have a bunch of agency partners who are really good at this. We do it with some of our customers as well. So whether you want just like instructions or you want us to do everything, there's an option for it all.

Gotcha. Perfect. All right, so talk to me about when somebody is on your list. What are kind of your best practices? And I'm curious if this varies by like, genre of e commerce store you might be working with, but what are the best practices when it comes to sending broadcasts on a regular basis outside of like your transactional messages?

So that's a good question. I get the question of like, does it matter what kind of like, product or category we're in? In general, no. We've seen everything from like small cosmetics to super high end furniture and jewelry. Both work really well and make a really strong return with octane AI. Oftentimes our customers make like 5 to 30% lift from adding octane to their store. Now you know, you just like get like that process. You just go and get it all set up and then once you've built up that audience, sending a campaign message in general, I would say you don't send it as often as email, but you would send around, you know, key sales, key events and set up a welcome series where you're talking about different aspects of the culture or the company. Maybe it's following on social, maybe it's some interesting fact. I would say you want to send something every month, maybe at least twice a month, but don't send like every other day and especially send during major holidays and in the lead up to Black Friday and your other key events, depending on, I guess, your kind of business.

Gotcha and video, I'm assuming any type of medium would work in your message. Can you share photos and videos as well or do they appear as links?

You can add photos, you can add videos, you can even ask for photos and videos. This is something really cool about messaging because it's not just a one way conversation. When you send a message, people will message you back. So you can ask them to submit photos. We see some of our customers say like, you know, send a photo of you and in our outfits and we'll like post or we'll share it or something like that. And we see those things work really well too. You can add a lot of media to Facebook messages.

That's a really, really good point. You know one of my favorite things to do with E commerce stores, stores on Shopify, obviously they can opt in for messenger to be a sales channel which enables all of those transactional like shipping notification type messages. And I always go back to talking to them about how can you make this more conversational, not just packages out for delivery. Hoorah. Right, but how do you tie a question into that? So talk to me about just like you said, making this a conversation, what are some best practices when it comes to transactional messages that can get an E commerce store more bang for their buck and the time they spend on that message.

So on the transactional kind of message, it's just like short and sweet and to the point works really well. You can put buttons basically where it has like the text, like Shop now as an example that we see work really well as a text and adding an image to provide that visual does work really well as well. So the nice thing is you don't have to do anything super complicated in the same way that you have to like build an entire email newsletter template. So something short and simple works really, really well for messaging.

Gotcha. Have you seen other like shipping notification emails or some of those that feel a little bit more standard, people adding in a question or something that prompts more of that conversation into those messages?

Yeah, so you can ask actually and you know we have a feature called Questions for this. You can ask questions, you can have a trigger after someone makes a purchase, you can have a trigger and part of the welcome series, you can add again. You can ask for photo, you can ask for video. There's lots of interesting things you can definitely do and try with the interactivity element of Messenger. So yes, and then of course like you want to also be turning on like win back or things like that. One integration we have is with a company called Smile IO for loyalty. We or it'll send a message 14 days after the purchase and it'll ask you if you had a good experience with the product. If you did, it'll actually like follow up with like the referral link and like prompt you to share, give you points if you share. So you can do even more things like that. And those kinds of things work really well.

Oh my gosh. A ton of Shopify integrations, obviously. Is there anything else people should know when it comes to like the basic setup or getting started with messenger and using Octane?

The basics are easy, right? It's kind of like email where like you can always start pretty easily and then you can go deeper down the rabbit hole if you want to. Starting is five minutes of connect your store, connect your Facebook page and like turn on certain automations and turn on certain pop ups, you're great. Step two, run some conversational ads. For sure you want to do that and activate comment capture. And if you do just those things, you're going to see success 100%. It's going to work. Then you can go deeper if you want to, you want to like have conversational quizzes, you want to have a broadcast schedule, you want to add more win backs or other kinds of campaigns, you can do that, but you don't have to do that to be super successful. And the stuff that makes you super successful does not take very much time at all to set up.

Perfect. So if you could say out of your most successful clients that are using the product, if there's something that they have in common with one another when it comes to using messenger, is there any trends that you see in how they use the product that makes them.

Stand out So I think one, they are running ads of some kind. If you're not doing any ads of any kind, I would probably first experiment with, you know, finding an ad type that's working for you. We see the customers who are running ads, like, you know, just take their existing ads, turn them into octanei conversational ads, and then they perform better. So that's like a pretty easy one. But you have to be running ads in the first place. Beyond that, it's across the board. We have, you know, smaller stores, we have boutiques, we have like fast growing direct to consumer brands. We have Fortune 500. So we got everything from like GoPro to like cover effects and somersault to like Leclaire boutique and what Katie did. So all across the board you can be super successful. It just sort of depends on the products you're selling and kind of the strategy.

Gotcha. All right, so for anybody who wants to know more about messenger and using Octane, we'll definitely have all the links and the things that you need to know in the show notes because I think that there's so many people. I was just speaking on this in Dallas this last week and I was mentioning messenger in one of my talks and I mean, I think out of a room of like a hundred people, maybe three raised their hand that they were using Messenger. So I know this is something that's a huge topic right now that's just going to continue to grow and, and to flourish. So tell me Ben, before you came to Oqtane, you had a pretty extensive background in tech and understand what's happening in E commerce. Can you talk me through your time at Mashable and kind of how you came to Oqtane?

So my original claim to fame was that I was the co editor of Mashable, the technology news website. This was when I was like 22 or 23 in a young gun and they gave me control of the west coast and I was super young and I ran a team of 50. I wrote 2,446 articles in my three and a half years there. Opened the west coast office, got to meet every Silicon Valley, like VC and CEO and like if it's a name that you've heard of, I probably met them through the job and it was an amazing experience. And this one, I lived in Silicon Valley. I did that for four years and learned a whole tons of things since then. You know, I started a small VC fund and invested in some early stage companies and I wrote a book for HarperCollins called Captivology on the science and psychology of attention. All of that kind of led me to co founding Octane AI with my other two co founders. I think honestly, in part because we saw this opportunity to make the communication between brand and consumer a conversational one and to change the dynamic by which it's done, to make it more one on one, to change it from. Here's a static email. I'm going to hit you over again to making it really personalized. So that was kind of like my unique journey. I've done a bunch of unique things in my journey, though.

I have like a thousand questions just coming out of that alone. But let's start here. Let's go back to the people with the hoodies. What would you say working on the west coast would be something that, you know, some of those tech entrepreneurs that were the most successful, something that you felt like they all had in common when you interviewed them, or maybe trains of thought you felt like they all had in common.

So I think the answer is focus. And what I mean by focus is you can't launch 10 product lines. You gotta launch a product line, optimize, make it successful, then add the new product line and then add the new product line. Like even like a direct consumer, for example, we see Allbirds, you know, traditionally had like two product lines. They just added a third finally. Or like, you know, Casper for years had one product line and then they just added like lights. You really focus in, you succeed with that product line or two, and then you would kind of like expand out. Having like a thousand products can seem great, but you actually can create decision fatigue for a lot of customers, and that can be a problem. And of course, this depends on the kind of product that you're selling and the kind of products you're selling. If you're in cosmetics and in fashion, you've got to have a lot of more variety. But I would say, like, don't jump into socks and hoodies and dresses and things. You want to find the relation between them all so you can tell that cohesive story.

Absolutely. Do you see someone that you met in that process as a mentor or somebody that you continue to keep in touch with today or maybe a favorite interview that you had during that time?

Well, I have a mentor and I have a favorite interview. So those very different things, though. So my mentor, his name's Mark Ackler from Chicago, actually, he was with my old entrepreneurship teacher, Troy Heineckoff. They founded a venture firm called Math Venture Partners. I'm very lucky to have had an amazing mentor who's helped me through a lot of different ideas and things. He's been just super supportive. It's really great to have that kind of person voice. I worked with him right after college before I joined Mashable. And then my favorite interview. God, I had a lot. One of my favorites, one that stands out is interviewing David Copperfield in Las Vegas. I actually interviewed him for the book, and then a conference in Vegas asked me to, you know, interview somebody, and I asked David if he would come on stage with me. He was super gracious about it. And David is very particular in the sense that he understands every single thing that's happening around him and how people would perceive him and how that interacts, like how they perceive him, the show, everything. And so he's always thinking about the staging and the presence. And it's not because he's difficult. It's because he knows it all has an impact. But he's like the super nicest guy. You can, like, message him and he'll just respond back in a couple of minutes. And you're like, are you even human?

No, because he's magic, right?

He's super magic. It's amazing. He has this private museum, the world's largest private collection of magical items, like, from history. It looks like his, like, old father shop. And he, like, clicks some, you know, snap some fingers, and it suddenly becomes the Copperfield Museum. And you're like, how do you even do these things?

That's pretty remarkable. So speaking of Mashable, I want to go on to captivology in a minute, but I want to stay on Mashable for just a second because I think you bring up a good point, and that is pr. And I think something that maybe E commerce stores, especially if they're a smaller operation, you know, just kind of building their brand that they don't realize is a great opportunity right away. So if someone wanted to reach out and achieve some pr, have conversations with editors, have some media reach, where would you suggest that they start looking to go that direction?

So there's like a super quick pr, one on one for everyone there. Maybe some of you already know this, some of you may not. You don't have a magical, like, I'm going to email my story and they're going to write about it. You have to think about what the audience of the person you're trying to pitch is. So my process is, I decide you have to have, like, an event. It's either a launch or an announcement or a milestone. You raised a round of funding, you added a major hire, you just launched your major product, something to anchor the story. And you write something super short, not like the your entire history, but like one paragraph at the absolute. Most of this is what the announcement is. This is why it's relevant for your readership. Putting in the key validators, like if some major name is backed it or is buying it or whatever else that's going to catch the attention of the reporter and then are you interested? And if they are, they're going to come back. And if they're not, they're not going to come back or they're going to say, no, thank you. So that's part of it. And then networking with the reporters and like you can meet them at events and there's lots of ways to do that and getting on their radar. There's a lot more to PR for sure, but that's kind of like the basics. It's like the short pitch. What is the actual relevant thing for the audience? What's that? The key name or anchor or validator that's going to get the attention of the audience and of the journalist and then you kind of go from there and then the rest of it is just storytelling afterwards. But it's not just, hi, I have a shop write about us. It's, you know, we just released this thing. This is why it's unique. This is why it's important. This major name is like on board with it. Are you interested?

Absolutely. I think you mentioned understanding the audience of the publication that you're pitching. Right. So if you know what is their news cycle, what's their editorial calendar, and especially in fashion, if you can understand that back to school and game day is obviously happening right now, then you can pitch content that's absolutely relevant to that reader, Correct?

Yes.

And you're not just shooting in the dark with a random story, but something that a reader is really hungry for right now.

Right. And so you have to make sure you're picking the right publications, but also the right reporter. Some reporters do not write at all about fashion or about beauty or about E commerce in general. Others really do or really focus on a specific vertical. And so you kind of have to look a little bit on the like past of what they've written, but do not write. I saw you wrote about competitor, so I wanted to tell you about my company. That never works. You should never do that. That's a no. No.

What is the worst pitch that you've ever gotten?

That would take me forever. There's no one Worst pitch, There's hundreds of really bad pitches. They're like six paragraphs long. People have done crazy things. People bought Facebook ads targeted at just me trying to pitch me bae, and they targeted my company to pitch me. And I'm like, maybe that would get some people. That was not appealing to me. That was almost stalkery to me. But it's just like not writing about why this is gonna be important to my audience or why I should care what the validators are. And, like, often bad pitches are like 10 paragraphs long. It has to be super short. You can tell more information afterwards. The reporter has a hundred emails coming in a day. If the minimum. I had 100 in a day. At the very minimum, they're going to scan the title, they're going to scan the first line or two, and then they're going to ditch it. So you have to make your impression there. And ideally you have already met them, then they're going to automatically read your email because they know you.

Absolutely. So it goes back to relationship. Did you see where in Atlanta there was a woman who took out a billboard to get Tyler Perry's attention for the same reason?

I mean, sometimes that kind of thing works. It's unique. So you know what? Actually the Facebook ad thing is unique. So I can't really blame. I didn't write about it, but someone else might. So unique stuff. You can take your shot. Just don't wait outside of somebody's door. I did have that happen once.

That sounds creepy.

That was creepy. Much less creepy than the Facebook ad thing.

All right, so talk to me about captivation marketing, because it all definitely ties hand in hand with what you're doing now and your history. I understand there's seven triggers. Is it of captivation. Talk to me about what those are and how that led its way into your book.

So I wrote my book Captivology after being an investor because all these entrepreneurs asked me for help in press marketing, customer and user acquisition, virality, and they all really fall around the same topic, which is how do I get attention for my startup? And I started doing that deeper dive, and I really, like, found a lot of fascinating information and a lot of research around the topic, but no one had really surfaced that research into something for the public. And so I really started doing that. I went through 200 years of scientific research at Attention to Memory, hundreds of studies, interviewed over 100 people, a lot of PhDs and leaders in psychology, as well as a lot of business leaders. Sheryl Sandberg, Steven Soderbergh, David Copperfield, of course, the creator of Super Mario, even Shigeru Miyamoto. And I used that information to synthesize and I found seven key triggers that captivate our attention, no matter what culture or identity, that capture attention across three key stages of attention. So our immediate attention, like our automatic reaction, short attention, our short term memory or short term attention, you know, for the span of a movie, let's say. And then long term attention and long term interest, the difference between buying something because of an ad versus lining up for the next Apple release.

Awesome. So there's three stages of attention and there's seven triggers that come across those stages of attention. Do you want to give me maybe one trigger that we'd be interested in?

So I'll give two pieces of advice here, but of course like captivology for those. If you're interested in diving in more, you can find it on every Barnes and Noble, Amazon, every book retailer you can find. But I think two that are really relevant, the reward trigger. And so I went deep into like reward systems to understand how people pay attention based on rewards. And so there's two types of rewards, intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Intrinsic is like that intrinsic feeling of, you know, success and accomplishment. External is things like money, power, all that sort of thing. And you want to have a little bit of both. External rewards are things like in the case of merchants and the boutiques, listening out there is discounts is things like that. But you need to also build the intrinsic. And those are things like building identity around the product that you have, building self worth around it, feeling a sense of accomplishment from like, you know, maybe you built something, you succeeded at something. And so there's a whole bunch of different tools and tactics for really building both. So kind of think of it as in a job, you know, you have to have the extrinsic rewards, like great salary benefits, things like that, but also the intrinsic rewards like I'm learning a new skill or I am like changing the world in some kind of way and both have to be there for you to succeed. So that's rewards. And then I talk about a longer form of attention with a trigger. My final trigger, which is acknowledgement, which is that we pay attention to the people and things who pay attention to us and provide us with validation, empathy and understanding. And I talk a little bit about why we care about celebrities. It's actually a scientific phenomenon in part called the parasocial relationship, which allows us to feel two way relationship with a person or a brand, even though it's really one way relationship. There's a lot of people who feel very strongly about a Beyonce, a Taylor Swift, even a Sheryl Sandberg. And they build this really deep relationship. And the same thing's true of people with brands. And it's because they're providing validation or providing empathy. They're showing that they care. A brand that doesn't reach out and say like, you know, I care. Here, let me show you that I'm listening to you is never going to build that relationship, that retention, that, that acknowledgement long term. And so those are like two of the seven triggers to think about. There's a whole universe there in the book though.

I'm really, really excited to read your book. I think about that in terms of, you know, video marketing obviously is such a huge part of E commerce today and specifically in the boutique world. Boutique owners that are finding great success right now are going live daily for the most part, and they're giving both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards with, you know, maybe a discount or a perk or a first to know or something that feels like that hard ROI type satisfaction. But because they're offering style and service, they're helping women feel confident and beautiful. So a different type of reward system as they understand it. But I think at the same time, going back to what you said about acknowledgement, they're almost creating like this sense of celebrity. Would you say like businesses that are using Facebook Live a lot are becoming a celebrity to their customer and building that two way relationship just through some of that authentic conversation that they're able to have through video. Have you noticed that trend elsewhere, I'm assuming outside of boutique land in this.

Industry, it's a way to scale the parasocial relationship and build what feels like the super two way relationship. Live video is really great for that. And then I also think the top brands are also building communities. And so communities are a form of acknowledgement. It's kind of like scaling the idea of because someone in the community helped me, the brand helped me. And so building that community element, especially as you grow, can be really, really powerful for retention, for customer happiness and just in general, for just, you know, more positive impact on people's lives.

Absolutely. I think about that even with the boutique hub community being so core to what we're doing for that same reason you went to Shopify Unite recently. I think I talked to you right after you got back from that trip. I'm assuming you came back with so many ideas and observations on trends in the industry, trends in E commerce Are there any ideas and trends that you think really stand out the most that you want to talk about today that would be relevant to boutique owners and retailers?

So Unite was super fascinating in terms of the things they announced. Obviously probably the biggest thing they announced there was the fulfillment network and the importance of having the ability to ship things within a two day time period and getting things to people really quickly. I think for the boutiques listening out there, it's that front end customer experience that happens with email, the website, messenger, sms and it's the backend that they don't see. It's the fulfillment, the making sure the product is correct, those kinds of pieces. That's like the second element of it all and you want to have like both things running. And luckily if you're like on a Shopify, you have the fulfillment network now to get things out much faster than maybe you could have done before and kind of use the scale of the platform to scale your own business. And so just in general that's like United just very clear. It's growing really fast. All these new companies coming into the space that are doing really interesting things around loyalty or influencers, all that sort of thing. And just like the general excitement. And so use the power of the network, leverage it for using great products and great apps and things that Shopify is launching and you'll do great.

Absolutely. So 2020 is going to be right around the corner. Before we know it, we're going to be heading into holiday as well. So let's start here. Talk to me from those key points that you mentioned, not only from messenger marketing, but captivation marketing. What are things that you think retailers should be paying attention to as they come into the holiday season to really maximize their marketing.

So we're a couple months away from the big dates. I think like one, it's just like making sure your tech stack is in place for the season and having like a clear like three month plan. I mean obviously I'm going to say you've added messenger, SMS and conversational ads to that stack, but also making sure that the stuff that you're using is integrated together. Right. So a loyalty app is not useful if it can connect your email. Same thing is like if your messenger doesn't connect your email, that's a problem too. And so make sure the stuff is connected together. This kind of like why, for example we build that our like deep Klaviyo integration and our integrations with a lot of other products like that. And then I think beyond the tech stack stuff, I think it's just tell a story through the messages that you're sending out. It's not just sale, sale, sale, sale. Maybe like tell a story of it's like 35 days until black Friday and X and y or it's 35 days until Christmas and, like, have something where they want to hear and see the next message. Maybe there's like a puzzle, maybe there's a mystery which happens to be one of the captivation triggers. Maybe there's some kind of storytelling element so that I want to tune in for the next message, the next email. So I would say telling that kind of story, making it feel more personal. You want to definitely say, like, there's a sale or there's like a new product or something like that. But you also want to make it feel like a friend and, like, tell them something of value and something that maybe is a value that is beyond the discount and telling a story so that they hear that through the next couple of months and just make sure your tech stack is really in place.

I love it. Very well said. I love the story and that personal relationship that's going to take you through the season because people don't remember what they bought from you. They remember how you made them feel. Right. As we come into 2020, talk to me more about how can you carry that over? How could retailers carry that over into 2020? If there was, like, three big things that you think retailers should be paying attention to in terms of e commerce trends in 2020 that you see coming, what would those be?

So one is retention. Retention, retention. So the people who are buying from you, you need to get them opted in for Facebook messages or for your email campaign so that early next year you can really communicate with them and build the deeper relationship. And use January, February, March, April to build a deeper relationship with them so that they buy again, so that they feel very confident in your brand, so they double their purchase and the amount that they bought from you, you know, in 2020. So retention is really one. Personalization is another. And so this is one cool thing about messaging, which is like, you can personalize by name, by what they purchased, by all sorts of information. And so the more personalized you can make your messaging to customers, the better. Rather than just being like, hi, buyer stuff. It's like, hey, Jack, hey, Ashley, hey, Samantha, hey, Ben. I know you like this thing. Let me help you find, like, the right dress for you or the right swimsuit for you for the summer season. And, you know, you can send a message out where you can People can actually answer a bunch of questions and they'll end up with a recommended product. That's the kind of experience that people really love and really converts well and really personalizes the experience. So rather than sending 10 blasts about swimsuits, maybe that don't fit person because you think it's even just the wrong gender, you know, something that's going to really fit and suit the person that you're sending the message to.

Perfect. And third retention, personalization and third trend for 2020.

Oh yes, third trend. So I'm not going to pick conversational commerce because I've already talked about that to the moon. I'm going to talk about like maybe a whole different technology. I'm super interested and I think honestly, Maybe it's not 2020 trend, but maybe a 2021 trend where VR and AR go. In terms of its interaction with stores and how you can see different products and feel them before you buy, it's becoming more and more clear that not everyone has to go into the store in order to feel everything. And that provides some of that in store experience online. I think. Actually, you know, I'm going to add a fourth one which is, I think a lot of us in E commerce ignore way too much the in store, despite the fact in store is still the vast majority of sales in the United States and abroad. And so how do you connect that online E commerce experience, your in store experience, and how do those two supercharge each other? I remember sitting in, I had a conversation with, with Jen Rubio over at Away and she was explaining that when they launch a new Away store, they have a huge spike in E commerce sales in the region around them because it's almost like adding a billboard. And so they think about not the two things as separate channels, but they think of them as each as a channel that helps the other grow. So adding a new store helps E Commerce grow, especially in the region they're at. It's almost like a billboard. And E commerce helps bring people, people into the store and you can combine the two. And there's interesting ways to do that too.

I love that. I think that's a huge trend for boutiques, to be quite honest. And some that we're seeing the most growth in are definitely combining that and becoming omnichannel and then letting that data play from one to the other. Definitely huge trend.

One thing we do with a company called YEXT is we have a store locator feature where you can actually have people's links and can send like their Location or their zip code, and it'll show them, you know, the nearest store locations or to their specific location so they can get the driving or the walking directions. So, like, you want to have the channels that you're. Your online channels bringing people into your stores. If you're a boutique and you have stores, you want to be doing that?

Absolutely. All right, are you ready for a couple lightning round questions? I know we've spent a ton of time together, which I feel like has flown by today, but couple last questions. You down?

Hit me.

All right. Morning person or night person?

More morning person. It sort of depends on the day, though.

Got it. How many times do you work out a week?

I try for three. I hit three sometimes.

Truth. We are on the struggle bus. That is real. How many hours of sleep on average do you get a night?

7 to 8? 7. I sleep pretty well.

That's pretty good. You know, I'm kind of over this hustle and, like, sleep when you're dead type thing. I have to sleep or I will be dead.

Same. I'm not productive. I just say I'm going to do it first thing in the morning. So I would say, I guess I'm more of a morning person because of that.

Gotcha. All right. Favorite book?

My favorite book as a child was the Giver and Ender's Game, so I want to start there. My favorite book is an adult. That's a harder one. I was reading a new book called Little. Not a new book, but I read Little Bee, and I really liked that book. I don't know if I have one specific favorite book. I also really like in the nonfiction side, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It's a part of the basis of my book. I'm super fascinated by the role unconscious bias plays in society.

Hmm, that sounds fascinating. I'm going to have to look that up. All right. Favorite podcast.

I have to admit that I am not a heavy podcast listener, and I need to really fix that.

Oh, man. You could say boutique chat. I mean, I always will slip a guest a 20 under the table if you mention the show.

It's secret Internet under the table. Just like lightning, you know, submission. So. So. No, no. So, like, honestly, I'm more of an audiobook person than I have been a podcast person person. So I listen to audiobooks almost all the time and, like, while I'm, like, walking or while I'm even sometimes working out, although that can be hard. So usually I choose a audio book over a podcast, at least at the moment. But I've wanted to adapt that and add a few podcasts.

All right, last question. Biggest fear. Snakes. Payroll or Internet trolls?

Oh, payroll, for sure. Snakes. They're, like, fine, whatever. I've been, like, around a bunch of snakes. What was the. Oh, Internet trolls. I'm used to them because I was the editor of Mashable. You just get it. Like, I built a large social following and you just. Trolls come with the territory. I have thick skin for that. But payroll, you know, people's lives depend on me, and so I'm an entrepreneur. That's totally what keeps me up at night if something is.

I completely agree. All right, Ben, final question. I always ask our guests this question, and I'm excited to ask it to you because you have such a diverse background in E commerce, in tech companies, in just creating what the new trends are going to be for all of our industry. And so I'd love to know, when you look at what you've created 20 years from now, 30 years from now, maybe you've got grandkids, maybe you don't. Maybe you're just having a beer with someone on the porch, talking about the life that you lived. What is the legacy that you really hope that you've left on the industry around you? And what's the thing you want people to say about you and what you created once you're gone?

You keep the easy questions for the end.

Heck, yeah. I don't tell you about them either, so good luck.

She really didn't, everyone. I had no clue. So since college, I've had a guiding philosophy. It is corny and cheesy, and it is this. It is that I have the ability and thus a responsibility to change the world for the better. And so I kind of see my life as, like, taking a winding path towards that. You know, my time at Mashable, I do think I did make the world a better place, the stories I wrote and all that. But it built towards, you know, the things that I'm doing now. Right. I built an audience. I built relationships. I continue to do so. And so I'm hoping, you know, in 20 to 30 years, they just simply said, like, he was able to change the world for the better somehow. And I'm not 100% sure how that will all look. I have some ideas of how octane AI can do that and what the future of AI and communication and our relationship with brands is going to be, but I also have other crazy ideas. And building a commercial space station, which is my stated fourth life goal. But I have other ideas too, then kind of like life, it throws random things at you and you've got to be willing to to go with the curves that come with life. As long as you kind of have like the guiding principle, you can kind of swing it all those kinds of ways. And I just hope I can end up with people saying like, yeah, he was able to change the world for the better.

Awesome. Well, I love that. And once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, right? So there's not ever just one easy answer to that question. But like you said, multiple approaches. And I appreciate that. Definitely. So, Ben, this has been super interesting. I have a page of notes myself, so I'm sure everybody who's listening to probably has that or more. Thank you for your time today. I know you're a super busy guy, but I'm really excited for the Boutique Hub and for Octane to begin to work together to see how we can improve the lives of all of our members who are real businesses, real families in real communities, putting food on the table, paying local taxes and impacting the world around them. So thank you for coming on board and for being a part of this journey.

Thanks for having me.

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