Driving Retention w/ Mobile Innovation: Mobile Apps & Push Notifications for eCom Success - EP13

It's actually really not. I mean, it obviously starts at copy, and Chase and I both agree that copy is probably the most powerful thing when it comes to a good digital marketing effect. We talk about it quite often.

In the Apple world, you have to opt in, and that opt in is not so easy to get.

As you get the unification, hopefully, of the stack, being able to use the channels, maybe you send a text message to someone that has an iPhone that doesn't have notifications on. You just use all these channels kind of in cahoots. So that way it's like, regardless of who gets the attribution of the sale, you have more people having notifications on.

Hey, David, calling in from, by the way, again?

I'm calling in from Devon, Pennsylvania today.

Okay. Is that where you were raised, grown up or something? For some reason, I thought you were in New York for some reason.

So I work in New York. So I'm in New York generally when I'm in the office, you know, Monday through Thursday. My home though is outside of Philadelphia in a little town called Devon.

Okay.

And I'm here for the next 2 weeks for the holidays.

Oh, very cool. Do you commute basically every Every like weekend?

I have an apartment in New York, so I drive up Monday mornings and I drive back to Philly Thursday nights. So yeah, I kind of split my time.

Oh, wow.

All right.

That's so cool, man. I don't think I've ever— I know I've heard stories, but I don't think I've ever met someone who actually does that. So very cool.

I'm just coming up on 10 years.

10 years of doing it. So it must be— you must be real used to that drive by now.

It's— I hate the drive. I'm pulling for Elon or somebody to figure out the self-driving car. That will make the trip much easier.

You'd be a great candidate for that for sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, cool. Well, let's go ahead and kick off this pod and we'll get through this so we can get you back enjoying holidays.

All right. All right. Sounds good.

Cool. In 3, 2, 1.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it.

Yeah, you know you gotta send it.

Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.

What's up, everyone? Welcome to Send It, where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS marketing and e-commerce. My name is Jimmy Kim, and I'm here with my co-host Chase Diamond. All right, all right. Well, I'm excited today because we're back with a special guest, and I'm excited because not only does he come with a wealth of knowledge and experience, but he's gonna talk about omnichannel mobile apps and push notifications. Hey, Chase, you wanna start off by doing a formal introduction?

Yeah, of course, David. I was stalking your LinkedIn and I'm very impressed to say the least. So I'm going to do a quick intro for you. So for those that aren't already familiar with David, he's the digital leader over at Rainbow Shops. And to my surprise, I can't believe how many stores you guys have. You had over 1,000 stores throughout the US, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. It's pretty cool. That's going to say that's pretty crazy. And it was really interesting to see how many different types of selection you guys have for your customers. So women's plus sizes, clothing, shoes, accessories, basically, you know, TJ Maxx meets Forever 21 was kind of the way that we were thinking about it. And the amount of experience that you have is insane. So I know you've been doing this since the late '90s, I believe you mentioned, and you've been an early adopter and kind of a beta tester for tons of the e-commerce technology that we all know and use and like today. And you also even started one of the early price comparison websites called PriceScan. So tons of cool stuff. I know you went to Wharton. I know you've been on a bunch of kind of podcasts, speaking at a bunch of events. So we couldn't be more excited to have you here today.

Thanks so much. That's, that's some good hype. I like it.

All right. Well, so Dave and I chatted during our pre-show interview and we chatted about all sorts of things. You know, I like to get to know guests and get to know, learn about their backgrounds and stories. And there's 3 key things that really stood out, and I think that would be really great for our listeners here to discuss and teach within. So the 3 things I really learned was, you know, David's experience with the belief of how basically that you have to be where the customers are and why every retailer should have a mobile app. In fact, the pre-show interview, you mentioned that there was a 20% of your revenue comes from mobile applications. We're going to really dive into that. Another area that I want to jump into is the power of push. You know, one thing that Chase and I both don't have is a ton of experience with mobile push notifications. We started the internet before it was really that important. And I know that it's risen up a bunch, but we don't have a lot of experience. So it's great to speak to someone who does. And, you know, really, I think the biggest thing that I take away from all of this is the omnichannel side of things, right? With over 1,000 retail locations and an online D2C offering, I think there's a lot of people trying to figure out how omnichannel runs in their business and thinking about their strategy as retention marketers. So, David, I want to start off by welcoming you to the show, but also I want you to share your story because you do have a breadth of knowledge and experience. And I think, uh, all the listeners would love to know your story, David, from your words. So we'll kick it off there.

So kind of the summary of my story is my career's kind of been split in thirds. So I spent the first third doing kind of some general consulting, management consulting with a little technology consulting. I spent the middle third in the early days of the internet starting a price comparison site called PriceScan. And then kind of the last third has been, you know, with PriceScan and kind of following that space, we saw internet retail essentially be born, right? E-commerce got born in front of us. Those were the people who we serviced as part of that price comparison service. So after doing that for like 14 years, said, okay, let me take everything that I've learned and watched over that kind of the birth of that business. And now take it to the retailer side. And so that's been kind of the last third of my career.

That's awesome. All right, well, we have a lot of questions for you today. So I want to start with kind of the biggest one that came to mind for us. So, you know, in our opinion, and as well as your opinion, mobile apps are now a must-have for retailers, right? Like, there's no really getting around it. If you own the mobile app, and if you're kind of one of the early adopters before all your competitors have it, right, you could have a ton of revenue and a ton of loyalty driven. And I know, kind of, we mentioned 20% of your guys' sales comes from your mobile app, which is insane. That's a huge portion of revenue. So do you, do you believe as well that everyone should have the app and why? Like, what's— I guess you do believe that. Why do you believe that everyone should have an app?

I mean, look, you know, if we look back historically in the e-com space, there was a period of time where apps were much more popular. And then for some reason they fell out of favor, which has always kind of baffled me. I mean, you know, I think we've learned in all kinds of areas, you've got to meet the customer where they are. And there are customers that prefer to have an icon on their phone so they can click it and have you in an app-like experience versus people that want to hit you in a browser. And again, we tend not to chase if it's a 1% segment, but if it's 20%, if it's 1 in 5 people, that's real. And clearly we don't— the experience in our app is really no different than the experience on the website, right? But it's people who prefer that channel. I mean, I describe it in the same way, like in the social space, There are people who prefer Facebook to Instagram to Pinterest to TikTok to Twitter, right? It's very hard to get people to move from one of those channels to another, right? They have the place where they like to interact, and if you're not there, you miss out. So in our case, we've had native apps for the last 8, 9 years at Rainbow. And again, with offering really no incentive It's 20% of the business.

And so real quick, as you're, as you're talking about this, one thing that came to mind is you say 8, 9 years ago you brought this thing in and you're not really offering incentive. Is it really just as simple as like people come to your website and you, if you're on a mobile device, it says, hey, we have an app, or how are you getting people to download your application?

That's, that's it. It's people who come to the website through a browser, right? They get the little toolbar at the top letting them know we have an app and people kind of self-select into that group. I mean, there are some people that find us directly through the App Store, but Most people are coming to the website first.

Got it. That's really interesting. You know, I've seen different ways that people try to incentivize people like, oh, sign up for our app and get VIP and this and that. But you're just truly like, if people come to your website, they like browsing your website. Obviously you've got a clothing apparel company, which means that a lot of people are probably coming back over to check out the newest products and the releases that you might have. And ultimately people like it so much, they really just want to have a direct line ultimately. And that's what it sounds like. Yeah.

There's also— I mean, again, I think sometimes— so we're serving a customer of, in general, more modest economic means, right? So probably people in the lower half of the income spectrum. Everybody doesn't have an unlimited wireless account. And so bandwidth becomes important. And bandwidth on an app is going to be less than bandwidth on a website, right? Because the app is doing a better job at caching information.

Yeah.

And not constantly going out to repaint the whole page. Again, if you were paying for your bandwidth, you'd be a little more sensitive to it. And so provides an advantage to some people, right? It's another one of these hidden benefits that aren't obvious that you see over time or that we have explained to us by the customer directly.

Is that at all something you guys push on in your marketing? Because I didn't know that, right? Like, I didn't know that the bandwidth thing, like, is that something you guys preach and part of it? Get the app, save bandwidth, have a better shopping experience, or it's just really organic that people are downloading it?

It's completely organic.

Crazy.

It's amazing what— I mean, again, we could talk about this in all kinds of areas. It's, it's amazing how the user just naturally finds things. So like, you know, when we launched PayPal, you know, 8 or 9 years ago, when we launched Klarna or Afterpay, these things seem to go to kind of a natural rate almost out of the gate. And even when we heavily promote it, it doesn't really move it at all. People just find it. And sometimes even when we have like our latest thing is being able to, you know, buy online, have your order shipped to a store for pickup. And that's only visible— it originally was only visible in checkout. And within a week or so, it was approaching, you know, 1 in 3 transactions.

Wow.

So people could, you know, and then, okay, so then we say, okay, let's start to promote it. And we put it, you know, at the top of every page. top of every email, whatever, maybe it moves at another point or two, but again, it hits some natural rate and that's kind of where it stays.

Wow. Yeah, that's, that's super interesting. It's crazy just how ingrained the customer is and the psychology of the behaviors and what's comfortable and what's natural. And they're gonna, like you said, they wanna do what's convenient to them and you kind of have to have the channels to cater to their convenience. Otherwise, like they're just not gonna be there. I, I guess one other question I have quickly is, do you see a lot of social sharing, a lot of like direct sharing of the app? Um, you know, for the 20% of revenue, is that literally everyone comes to your site and they do it themselves? Or do you see friends sharing? Like, can you see those statistics around, I have your app and I shared it with the 2 of you and you downloaded it? Is there a lot of like referral, uh, of the app?

We don't see that. And my guess is that referral is mostly verbal or on the side. It's not, uh, it's not so formal where it's, where it's in a way that could be easily tracked.

Interesting. Okay, cool. I mean, as you're talking about this, right, like, I think you're convincing a lot of people they need to have an app. For those that don't, do you have any, like, quick, simple advice for getting started? Like, is it really as simple and easy as it seems?

So look, today it is that simple. So there's kind of, you know, in the spectrum of apps, we have essentially fancy browsers or custom browsers at the one side. Right? And at the other end of the spectrum, you have a full custom-built, custom-coded app. And then there are hybrids that are somewhere in between. The apps that are essentially just browsers with the toolbar, those require no lift on the retailer's part at all, literally zero, right? Because it's just a browser for your website. I mean, yes, you're defining kind of the top of the page kind of toolbar and the bottom toolbar. But once that's defined, that's it. And, you know, and the big power is you then pick up push notifications. And in a world where we see, look, I think, you know, we've reached peak email, I don't know, 5, 6, 7 years ago, right? And email declines, you know, a little bit more every day, every year. I think, you know, I think this election cycle we so overplayed SMS, you know, we may be— we may have hit peak SMS.

Yeah.

Having that push channel for these people who are, you know, it's another step in their relationship with the brand also. When you take the step to download an app, that is almost like an implied loyalty, whatever. You're not installing an app for every retailer whose page you touch once. So the ability to have kind of that deeper relationship that that customer has selected on their own And now having this whole new channel to be able to directly talk to them with no one really in the middle. So that's no, you know, AT&T or Verizon trying to fee us to death or tell us when we can send a message or when we can't. That's not the email inbox with Google trying to put things in the promotional folder or whatever. With push, right, we can, if we have that permission, we can directly speak to the customer. It's really, really powerful.

Okay, let's shift to that because I wanna talk about more about push. 'Cause as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, Chase and I don't have a ton of experience with mobile push. But, you know, when I remember in 2015 when web push came out, I actually created a fun app that I later sold that did that exact thing, right? Web push notification. But the reality was part of the reason why I sold it is I couldn't find a lift. I couldn't find anything special about it except for the fact that, you know, it was really cheap to send. And I know on the pre-show we talked about Fashion Nova who does it. So we're gonna go reach out to them and go find out what they see in the success there, right? But, you know, when I'm thinking about mobile push and, you know, one of the things that you mentioned was it was cost-effective, easy to use, and incredibly powerful. Like, I do agree with you. You have to be where the, where the user is. And I even believe that that's happening in the communication channels just as much as browsing behavior. But what do you think makes push notifications such a game changer for retention ultimately?

Because it's a very personal form of communication that no one gets in front of filters or stops. So when you send somebody a push message, it's going to ding on their phone, on their home screen, unless they've set it not to. There is no third party that can get in the way and screw with your message, right? And when we send email, there's lots of people that can affect where that message goes. When we send SMS, we've got very strict rules on how many messages we can send, what time of day we can send them, lots of those things. Push has none of that, right? It is a direct— if you have the customer's permission to send them push, nothing stops you from doing that.

Yeah, no, that's right. And I definitely have some apps that probably over-abuse it, and eventually I'll, uh, actually go into notifications and change and remove those notifications because they do too much of it. So there is definitely probably some level of fine line, but you're right, like, once you've authorized and given permission, they can message me anytime— middle of the night, early in the morning, it really just doesn't matter. And they can do it at whatever frequency they want to do it as well. So You're, you know, that definitely makes you start thinking about, hmm, that's a really good list to ultimately have and, and control. And it sounds like you've got to have a mobile app in order to have a correct push notification because it comes through your mobile app.

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Let's jump into, you know, talking about at Rainbow. Like, I'd love to talk about an effective push notification campaign that works for you, like something that works really well for you guys that, like, you guys play and use in your playbook pretty often. Can you tell us about how you might kind of set that up?

So at Rainbow, we really push a high engagement strategy. And what I mean by that is We want the customer to come interact with the website every day if we can get her to, right? Knowing that she doesn't have the discretionary income to buy from us every day, right? I'd rather for her to come every day, look at what's new, browse the site, add some things to her cart, whatever, knowing that maybe she's got extra money to buy.

Okay.

But trying to keep Rainbow top of mind in a world where there's You know, she's just inundated with brands trying to grab her attention. So our ability to send a daily push, sometimes 2 pushes a day, where we've got a copywriter that does it in a very entertaining kind of, you know, makes you smile a little bit, you know, just keeps that brand— if that brand comes across your home screen on your phone once a day, it's all the more likely you're going to remember Rainbow. And it gives us You know, a little way to just kind of, you know, give her just a subtle push to, why don't you come, you know, you didn't think about it, but maybe you wanna come back and see what's new on the website.

Oh, that's simple. It's actually really not. I mean, it obviously starts with copy and Chase and I both agree that copy is probably the most powerful thing when it comes to a good digital marketing effect. And, you know, we talk about it quite often. I do have a question as you start thinking about push, because when I think about the whole unified strategy, right, people are trying to figure out this whole unified retention strategy. Email and SMS is usually the core and It sounds like push should be a part of that unified strategy. I'd love to get your opinion on that and how you guys think about the balance there, or do you guys just layer it on?

I mean, you know, that's another whole subject, this whole how do we coordinate messaging across the 3 main channels we have to talk to people, right? Email, SMS, and push. Today, those come from 3 separate vendors, so we are not communicating, we're not coordinating or orchestrating across those 3. We are pushing our vendors hard though to get us there. Because I think, you know, in a perfect world, SMS is very expensive, right? But if we know that a given customer, you know, interacts with every SMS we send, we would send them more. If we know a customer has our app installed and has enabled push and we can message via push, that should almost always be our preferred channel because it's essentially free.

Mm-hmm.

And we know the way it's gonna display on the person's device is a is a, is a much more attention-grabbing way than, than the other 2 mechanisms.

David, what, what's your tech stack? We'd love to learn about your tech stack real quick, as you said that you're on 3 separate things, just out of curiosity.

Sure. So we're, we're Shopify Plus for the, for the main e-com platform. We currently use ListTrack for email, Attentive for SMS, and push comes through our app provider. So it's, it's kind of built into that app offering.

Got it. Got it. Okay. And they don't work together today. Again, I guess it sounds like they do not work together.

Hmm.

It's interesting.

Yeah.

That's always an interesting challenge.

Klaviyo has an option that does all 3, but we kind of feel as an enterprise brand, we've never been comfortable with, with Klaviyo's ability to support enterprise-level email. So we are pushing, you know, both Listrak and Attentive hard to kind of build out that whole suite. And to give us, you know, essentially one-stop shopping. I mean, I think, you know, one of them will, will get there in 2025, or that's what we're counting on.

Yeah, I think everyone's looking at expanding their tech stacks and, you know, internally, meaning like their communication levels and layers. And I know ListTrack's been around for a long time and they do a great job in the enterprise sector of the world for sure. So I'm sure if someone's going to figure out, they may, or Attentive, I know, is also working on an SMS product or not SMS. email product already, and I don't know if you've looked at it or not, but there may be something.

Their email product is done. We have pushed them hard to do push, and they have now committed to build push notifications also. So I think, you know, when they have all 3 of those ready to go, it'll be a really powerful package. I mean, when we evaluate those 3 channels, we think that SMS is the hardest one to do. And we kind of feel that Attentive is the best in the business at doing SMS. As a big retailer with a lot of digital, with a lot of physical presences in the world, you know, legal protection from, you know, there's a whole group of ambulance chasers that try to get you on TCPA violations, you know, and Attentive's approach to defending against those is just second to none.

So we've heard good things about that.

We can't imagine moving the SMS. We really want them to build the other 2 pieces so we can really consolidate this.

Nice. That's interesting. So in terms of like the priority hierarchy, it almost sounds like push is number 1, email's 2, and SMS is 3 in terms of like how you think about it. Is that fair to say? Obviously, all are important, but SMS cost is so high. Push, there's really no rules. You get direct access. Email, you probably have a massive list and it's pretty cheap. Like, is that how you think about like the priority in terms of like the hierarchy?

I wouldn't think it's— I don't think it's so much a hierarchy, right? We use them for slightly different things, right? We send lots of email because essentially we have a contract that lets us do that and we're not paying incremental— we're not paying incrementally for sends, right? It's a fixed fee. It's a big fixed fee, but it's a fixed fee. SMS, like we talked about, is very expensive because all those fees go to the carriers, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's really not the platform. the carriers that demand that. So look, we have to use SMS sparingly. Um, we send a lot of email and then push because it's, it's interesting, like you touched on before, if somebody sends you too much push, it starts to annoy you and you think about going in and turning it off.

Yeah.

So we do, we are very sensitive that we never get that on the email side. Right. I could send you 4 or 5 emails a day and you just ignore them. If I, if it dings on your home screen, it's not so easy to ignore. So we're, we're, we're much more careful and mindful about what we send via push.

Cool. That makes sense. So then customer feedback, right? We're kind of talking about that right now. Like what role does the feedback play in the digital strategy, right? Obviously, if you get notifications saying you're sending me too much Whatever it might be, you might kind of ebb or flow things. But overall, like, how does the customer feedback play a role in, in kind of the turning up, turning down, doing more, doing less personalization across the stack?

I mean, the feedback we're looking forward to— people unsubscribe, or did they, you know, did they unsubscribe to email or SMS, or did they disable push notifications? So I guess we haven't talked about this. In the Android world, you are automatically opted in to receive push. You have to opt out. So you have to take an action to not get push. In the Apple world, you have to opt in. And that opt-in is not so easy to get. So if you notice, when you install an app, it very quickly, kind of on a very small way, asks you if it's okay to do push. And if you say no, that's pretty much it. You're done. You need another way to try to incentivize the user if they accidentally do that to think about going back in to enable push. So we worked with our app vendor to literally build technology where they are sensing, do you have push enabled or not? And if you don't, it's popping an offer up just like we would for email or SMS, offering a coupon that we would deliver by a push if you would enable push notifications. And that has dramatically improved our opt-in rates.

That's kind of like a pop-up almost like you would get when you got, you know, log on to a website and you have their email and you might only show the SMS. So you're doing the same thing ultimately for push to make sure that you're capturing it. Because again, as you said, on Apple users, right, I know how much it's not just— if I remember correctly, it's not just yes you have to click on. You click yes, it opens up your notification settings, then you got to slide that little slider over in order to accept it. So So that's a lot of steps. But when they do that, they're obviously giving you very big consent ultimately.

And it's— look, it happens very quickly. And I think people are kind of— there's a little bit of excitement when you download an app and you're just looking to get into the app. And sometimes you can just fat finger and miss it. And, you know, you've hit no when that wasn't your intention. And, you know, prior to some of the more recent things we've seen with apps, it's been harder to come up with ways to incentivize people to give them another chance and to make it easy enough for them to, to flip that switch the other direction.

Yeah, it's interesting. With, with Rainbow, like, with the kind of economic group that you're dealing with, is it more iPhone or more Android? Like, which, which field are you playing in more often, or is it pretty even?

It's changed over time. Today it's more Apple than Android. That was not the case, you know, 10 years ago.

So has your revenue— so it's interesting because obviously over time the number of people downloading the app has increased, right? But if the number of people going from Android to iPhone where it's harder to get the push consent, like, do you see ebbs and flows as devices change? And as— because it seems almost like if you— if I could ask you, do you want 100% Android or 100% Apple? Like, you'd probably lean towards Android just given the fact that everyone automatically has opted in, right? Like, do you guys think about that in your strategy? Like, or how does that impact it, I guess?

I mean, like a lot of other things, there are, you know, we, we have to meet the customer where they are. So if the customer wants an iPhone, yeah, um, you know, not much you can do to convince them to buy an Android phone. Yeah, yeah, of course. And that's where, you know, again, what we've done now is, is develop this smart banner within the app that detects that you haven't done it. And look, I think we've trained, we've trained customers When you offer them something in exchange to be able to message them, that seems to be something that they're willing to do, right? Nobody signs up for email or SMS for free. We do it for a coupon or a discount. I don't think push is any different. And as long as we give them a fair offer and make it not impossible to do, that same kind of motivation works with push as it does for email and SMS.

Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. As much as you want everyone to have the Android, obviously, Some people are just iPhone. But yeah, it's interesting. It almost feels like as you get the unification, hopefully of the stack, right? Like being able to use the channels to, you know, maybe you send a text message to someone that has an iPhone that doesn't have notifications on, right? Like maybe you send an email to someone, right? Like you just use all these channels kind of in cahoots. So that way it's like regardless of who gets the attribution of the sale, you have more people having notifications on, you have more people receiving SMS, you have more people receiving emails because Right. Like with email, 20%, 30% of people might actually see it. With SMS, obviously a lot of people are gonna see it's expensive. With push, like, right, like each channel has its pros and cons, but in like kind of in unison, they're powerful together.

I mean, look, my argument is you wanna, on any given message that you wanna send, you wanna maximize reach and minimize cost. So I wanna, I want that message to hit the maximum number of customers I can reach. for the smallest amount of money I can spend, right? And the only way I can do that is if I know how you behave across all 3 of those channels.

That makes a lot of sense. And obviously at the volume you guys are doing, it's certainly, you know, cost is a big driver because I can only imagine what your SMS costs look like when you guys do send one with the amount of retail stores that you guys have. All right, David, you know, you've shared so much great information today. And, you know, one of the things that I always like to make sure is our listeners are taking something away from our conversation. And when you think about it in free tension, I think I already know the answer. But, you know, what's the one change that they could make today that would make their biggest impact to their bottom line as they look into 2025 this year?

I mean, to me, if you don't have push notifications, then going down that app road, the basic just browser-based app road, I mean, there are people that are doing it for, you know, less than $1,000 a month. This is a no-brainer in terms of opening up another whole channel to let you talk to people and a channel that has a much more direct relationship. I mean, I think it's low-hanging fruit that everybody should explore.

Yeah, no. So, you know, I definitely agree with you on that. You know, when I think about 10 years ago, getting up, making a mobile app was like a, like a whole like thing, right? You had to go hire developers and you had to do wireframing and all this stuff. And then you had to go through the stuff and it just seems like More and more every day things get easier, and now with the impact of AI and everything that's happening in this world, it's just going to continue to get easier. It's very cool to see.

Yeah, I think so too. I mean, you know, that custom app route was incredibly expensive. You then had to maintain, you know, yet another code base. Um, super, super hard and, and a big lift on the organization. Whereas today with these browser-based approaches, you don't even have to have different graphics. I mean, it's all the same. So from a, from the brand standpoint, if I'm a smaller brand and I don't have a big team, there is really no lift to do this other than when you start to write copy for your, for your, for your push notifications, but that's essentially it. So again, it just seems like, you know, why leave a, why leave a big channel on the table?

Love it. Sorry, I have one last question actually outta curiosity, what's like the retention or like the lifetime of a push user, of an app user? Like, you know, you've been around 8 or 9 years, you have probably way more data than most. Like, are people still using your app from 9 years ago, or is it mostly recent people, 6, 12, 18 months? Like, what have you seen? Because you have so much data to look at.

So we know some of them are really old users, and the reason we know this is we at one point made the following mistake. So in the, in the Google Play Store, Once you release an app, you can't pull it back. It lives forever. Even if you choose to say, look, I'm not supporting this anymore, I have a new app, I've got a new version, they do not let you deactivate it. So we have an old— we actually have 2 apps in the Play Store.

I just—

It's even more complicated. If you installed the old app, you can't access the new app in the Play Store. So anybody new that comes gets the new version. But if you on one of your devices installed the old version, you will always get that version. Now we've tried to get around it by overwriting that old version, but we can tell from the comments or feedback we get in support that there are still some people running that old unsupported version of the app. And you would think, I don't know why Google does this because it's a really lousy customer experience. All we wanna do is point 'em to the one that actually functions. Yeah. Um, but yeah, so that, that's a long-winded answer to say we still have some people that were using an app that, that's gotta be 8 years old. It is wild.

Crazy. David, you're, you're awesome. This was great. I have obviously a million more questions, but I know it's the holidays, so I'm gonna let you get going. Where can people find you? Like, where are you active on social? LinkedIn? I still call it Twitter, but I guess X. Like, where do you, where do you talk? Where do you post things?

I mean, the, the, the main place that I'm on social would be LinkedIn. So anyone's welcome to, to, to reach out. It's just David Kost on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn.

Cool.

Yeah, we'll link him to, we'll link him in the show notes. So if you wanna find David and you wanna connect with him and talk more mobile apps or push notifications, we'll throw it down there so you can talk to him about this stuff. And big shout out to Appbrew for this introduction. And you know, they're a sponsor of this pod and very humbled to have such a great introduction to learn about something we've never known. And with that, That's a wrap, guys. That's a wrap to our episode. So if you enjoyed this podcast today, please make sure you like, subscribe, follow, and leave us a rating on your favorite podcast listening platform. You can follow our show on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, IG, TikTok, and there's a few ways to connect with us. First and foremost, we do have a newsletter. If you enjoy what we talk about and want to talk about retention marketing, come join our newsletter at ecomemailmarketer.com. We drop newsletters only about retention marketing each and every week. And then of course, you can follow us on social. Chase, where do they find you?

On pretty much every platform. Chase Diamond, no A in Diamond.

All right, and cool. And you can find me on LinkedIn and X and, uh, uh, today. So, all right, so we're gonna get spicy on our next episode and we're gonna really talking about it. And David, that was great that you talked about ListTrack because we're gonna talk about them and all the ESP and SMS providers on next week's episode. And because, you know, there's some that are household names and some that you don't hear about, It's really, really cool to be able to talk and dissect where things fit in into the stack ultimately for most people, because not all apps are created alike. So with that, thank you for tuning in to Send It. We'll see you next week on the next episode. See you guys later.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far or do we have to extend it? If you You want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.