Conversational ecommerce. The Cartloop story with Lisa Popovici

Hello and welcome to E Commerce Growth Stories. This is your hostess with the mostest, Juliana Jackson, aka the CLV lady. And also I am the chief evangelist for OmniConvert.

And this is Valentin Radu, CEO of OmniConvert. Thank you for tuning in today for a new episode of ecommerce growth stories.

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E commerce business a bo. And we are back live. It's Thursday and it's another day for E Commerce growth stories. And today I have an amazing guest, a fellow Romanian software developer in the house. Lisa Popovich is the founder of Cardloop. Lisa, how are you doing? And thank you so much for being here.

Good, good. Thank you for the invite. I'm excited to chat.

Yay. So you're in Paris right now, but Lisa is originally from Romania. She's the co founder of Cardloop. So the founder of Cardloop because I always think. And is the co founder. Right, because he's in.

We are two co founders.

So okay, so technically I'm correct. So Cardloop is known in the market for putting the stamp and putting, you know, much more meat, as I like to say on the topic of conversational commerce. So I just want to know, like for the listeners that did not hear about Carloop, Lisa, tell us, what is Cartloop? What does it, what does it do? And why should we care?

All right, so yeah, Carloop is a conversational SMS marketing platform for Shopify and Shopify plus brands. So we help brands drive more revenue and scale their customer relationships. We basically text with customers in real time. We have a team of real people who interact with customers through text messages and we combine both sales and support in the same app. And I like to, I like to call as an extension of you know, a brand sales team. We're not just going after that short term result, short term sale. We're also going after a sustainable and long term growth and that, you know, building that relationship with the consumer and the customer.

Lifetime values I like to call it.

Yes.

So you are, in my opinion, you guys are the bad, you are not the bad guys of SMS marketing. You know very well I'm like the most and I'm not the only person that has mixed feelings when it comes to SMS marketing. But you guys, in my opinion, you are the good guys because you are bridging relationships. You're building a great engagement with the customer from the first purchase moment. Tell me, how do you think, why do you think so many people are like me having super mixed feelings with sms? And how are you guys differently for our listeners?

Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I feel like people are still skeptical about SMS marketing because maybe they have had bad experiences. For example, I was just saying to Andrey yesterday that I keep getting like for two years now messages from Sephora that I cannot unsubscribe from and I cannot do anything about them. And you know, I think I will block that number. He gave me the idea. But it's, you know, that bad experience that I, I have gone through. So it would be only natural to me to say, oh my God, I hate sms. I don't want any company to text me because it feels so intrusive. And I always tell our customers and brands that there's a super thin line between being annoying and actually delighting customers. And you have to pay very close attention on how you approach SMS marketing. A lot of brands are treating it as email and that's the worst that you can do. And you know why, why we approach this human way of doing SMS marketing, this conversational way of SMS marketing. And actually I can start with what actually is conversational SMS marketing. So you know, unlike marketing blasts which push out promotion discount codes, offers on and on and on with no intention of offering personalized real value conversational SMS marketing on the other side focuses on engaging customers, offering support, getting real time feedback and also getting a bunch of insights. And what we're doing is we're treating it very empathetically and other mediums such as email or push notifications cannot really offer that, cannot really offer that empathy, that one to unreal connection. And the beauty of going conversational is that it can be used for almost anything, not just recovery abandoned cards, you can use it to gather customer feedback, to provide support and just even all the way to placing an order or returning a damaged item. You can do a bunch of things with SMS marketing if you do it the right way. I agree.

And I would add that besides brands creating sms, like the channel of sms, such as the email, they're also treating it like advertising channels, because all the. I mean, I get a shit on. I don't get the Sephora ones, but I get the cotton ones. You know, the. The store here in. In Romania, and you buy from cotton one time and then they just blast you with that. This is just annoying as hell. And it's not even like they're not even trying, you know, like, oh, check out these new pants. Just.

Just click this link.

Yes. Because that links look very safe. But I want to talk about safety and those particular parts about SMS later. I just want to ask you. A lot of SaaS develop products that would make their lives better first. So what happened in your life that you said, you know, you woke up one day and said, you know what? I'm gonna. I'm gonna build this platform to help companies bridge the relationship with their. With their. With the consumers?

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. The idea behind Carloop came from our frustrations because Andre and I were merchants ourselves before Carloop. So we had a couple of commerce brands. And there were two main reasons why how Carloop was born and why Carloop was born. So one of them was we were super frustrated by the amount of abandoned cars that we were getting, and we just couldn't wrap our heads around why was the problem. We thought everything was working perfectly. The website was optimized. So what we did is we manually gathered phone numbers from Shopify and we were texting people through WhatsApp in a very friendly, personal way, just like you would text your friends. We were saying, hey, Juliana, this is Lisa from this store. I saw you were checking out our product. How can I help you complete your order? So pretty similar how we're approaching people right now. What we saw is that people actually appreciated us reaching out, and the reply rate was awesome, and we were able to convert those abandoned cars. That was one moment when we thought, okay, so this conversational approach is actually working, and we should build something that would actually help us to do it at scale. And the second reason was, I believe it was 2018, and we just woke up one day with Facebook shutting down all our business accounts. It's pretty typical. This happens to a lot of merchants, but it happened to us as well. And the worst thing was that they shut down everything we didn't have a backup one. So we were like, for an entire week we thought that we were going to lose our business because all our marketing efforts were relying on Facebook mostly. So that was like a turning point for us where we said, okay, we don't want to rely on external marketing channels anymore and we should really start building our own audiences and you know, owning the channels that we're at and try to, you know, try new channels and see what's out there. So these were the two, the two main reasons. And last year when we started, we saw this huge trend in SMS marketing. It was getting more and more popular, but most tools were fully automated, you know, and we saw this gap which was adding that human touch into SMS marketing.

I agree. And I see SMS growing as a conversation topic on its own. Like it's this whole conversational e commerce on its own. SMS as well as, you know, as a market voice. And what I see happening right now is that SMS is promoted by the SMS software companies as a revenue channel, as a sales channel. So of course, you know, like everyone, and that's my tram people, our listeners got used to my tram. It's hot, everyone, it's hot. I have to keep my windows open. But so the software companies that develop solutions for sms, just like companies that develop solutions for email or for ads, are always trying to justify their own ROI as a software. So of course you're going to push the merchant into a zone where you're creating revenue, which is a fast way of showing that, okay, my software works. So I see that there's a huge lack of education when it comes to sms. What do you think about this and how are you guys contributing to educating the market more on smart, the actual value of SMS being an engagement channel versus a revenue channel?

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Where you know, when talking to our customers, of course we're educating them and we're providing guidance and we have dedicated account managers who actually, you know, make sure the merchants are successful but in a sustainable way. And we try to teach them how to actually leverage SMS marketing in order to have a long term success. So that means from just crafting the ideal message, as I could say, and just educating them on, hey, you should always try to say hello and introduce yourself in your campaigns or just try to maybe at the end of that message to put a question, so it's an open ended conversation or a conversation starter, not just put that discount and that link. So we're always trying to emphasize these small details that actually matter. And yeah, through our content and through, you know, initiatives like this one that we're chatting right now, hopefully brands can see and they can think twice when they want to start sms or maybe they want to improve their efforts.

Yeah, that makes sense. And I just feel like this is a whole E commerce problem, the education on different matters. And I think more than ever, all of us that are selling technology, we're responsible to educate the consumers and educate also the brands that sell to consumers as well on how the consumer should be treated. Because all of us are consumers, you know, even if we own brands, even if we develop software, even if we're doing data, because I saw June there in the audience. Hi, June. We're all consumers, so we have to treat the people that are buying from us just like we would like to be treated when we go and purchase online. So another big issue for me, and maybe I'm hoping you will kill that for me today. A big issue that I have with trusting SMS entirely is the privacy and security of sms. So regarding, you know, regardless of being the sales channel is also a channel known for a lot of fraud and, you know, security problems, and there's still a lot of fraud happening in sms. So I just want to know, how are you guys doing it from a technical perspective? Like, how do you ensure that the channels and the origination and termination points of the SMS are safe for the consumer? Because you know what happens with brands. You might get a Twitter notification with your code to go to your password, and in the same thread you will get a campaign for a brand. In the same thread you will get your Facebook code. So it's just like, what the fuck is this? You know, so how are you guys doing this from a technical perspective to make sure that the brands that are using your technology are safe and their consumers are safe as well?

Yeah, that's a great question. So first of all, I would say the most important aspect of SMS is being compliant. So, you know, we're fully TCPA NCTIA compliant at Carloop. So during the onboarding process, we make sure every brand is following the three steps in our case is optimizing their checkout, adding those disclaimers to the privacy policy, to the terms and conditions. So these are the most important aspects. If merchants are not following those steps, we cannot really start the flows and cannot really start the product, making it work. On the other side, you mentioned getting a bunch of messages from different vendors, from different people on the same number. So what we do at Carloop is every single customer will get text only from one specific brand and actually one phone number will be allocated to a brand. So every brand gets dedicated local phone numbers. So for example, if you are, you know, if you would be a customer from the uk, you would get a text from a UK local phone number. Then you can actually add in your contact list and write something. Oh, okay, this is from let's say ShineOn because it's one of our customers. I can add ShineOn as a contact in my list and I know as a consumer I can get back to that brand whenever I have questions or whenever I want to make a new purchase. Because we keep a constant point of communication through one single phone number. So every brand gets dedicated local phone numbers for their customers. And this approach helps also with building trust, building familiarity. Because if you were to receive from, let's say like a short code or like we are number from another state or from another country, it will be very weird because you didn't really trust that number to be, you know, accurate. You wouldn't trust it to be from that specific brand that they are, you know, saying that they are. Yeah, so having dedicated local phone numbers and also respecting the compliance is very important.

No, it's great and it's very important. And Paul here just sent a question which is right on point. Actually he sent two questions, but this one fits more in this topic that we're on right now. So Paul is asking, how do you manage consent on SMS such that you might be able to, to evolve the relationship through consenting to giving more personal data in exchange for a more personalized response.

Yeah, so right now what we're doing is how we're able to capture phone numbers is either at the checkout because we're a conversational SMS tool. Not all SMS marketing tools have actually have that ability to capture phone numbers at checkout. But since we're conversational and everything is, you know, is a constant communication, we, we have that disclaimer at checkout that says, okay, by accepting this, by selecting this marketing checkout, you accept that you're going to receive promotional messages and so on. So they have to tick that marketing checkbox and also provide a phone number in order for them to become subscribers and they are aware of the fact that they will be contacted. So they have opted in for that and they know that. And the other ways are through pop ups, through all the other growth tools. But there's always, you know, that two, let's say similar to two factor authentication is that for example, if you have a number on your website and you say, hey, text us at this number to get to, you know, to join our VIP list or to get 10% off your next order. But if you as a shopper, text a specific keyword to a number, you would have to then reply with yes, aye. And I confirm that I want to opt in as a subscriber. So there's always extra steps in order to make sure we are fully compliant. This is how we're doing it right now. I'm not really. Mostly we're capturing phone numbers, we're not capturing other data right now.

Cool. So, Paul, I hope you are satisfied with the answer. Just so I switched to my next question. Paul also wants to know if you guys are present in Latin America right now.

We're only in uk, us, Canada and Australia.

There you go, Paul. Cool. So I want to switch a bit into a more strategic. I wanted first my audience to get to know more about you and about Carlos. But now I want to ask you to share with us what's the strategy that your customers right now, your users right now use? That includes Cartloop, that it works. So share with us something that any brand that installs Cardloop today, either on Shopify plus, either on Shopify, can do directly with Cardloop to actually get some results.

Yeah. So with Cartloop you can do a bunch of stuff. The main thing that you are going to start with once you finish your onboarding process is your card recovery flow that will start automatically. Once everything is set up so you're fully compliant, you chose your brand personality and you went through all those steps, your card recovery flow will start. Also, besides card recovery, this is the first feature that we started with last year when we launched, but now we've gone beyond just carpet coverage. So merchants can also leverage conversational campaigns based on they can segment their audience based on different attributes such as number of texts someone got or number of replies that were exchanged or based on purchase behavior and so on. All those attributes that you find in segmentation features that most merchants are familiar from email marketing. For example, you can send conversational campaigns. And what I mean by conversational SMS campaigns, they are pretty similar to the regular SMS campaigns. However, everything is conversational, so we provide shoppers with opportunities to reply. So let's say you're sending like a Black Friday campaign, right? You can, you know, you can provide a discount, you can, you know, tell your shop your preferred segment, whatever you want to tell them in that initial message, but if they have questions, they will be able to, you Know text that same number and engage in a one to one conversation with our team of live experts, as we like to call them. Besides conversational campaigns and cart recovery, we also have a bunch of growth tools such as pop ups, keywords, numbers that we're launching, I think next week, keywords and numbers. And basically with these set of growth tools, you can grow your audience in a sustainable way, in a compliant way and then leverage it creating segments and, and retargeting or targeting those subscribers with campaigns.

Nice. How do you guys create segments? What do you use? Yeah, what's the type of segmentation you guys do? Like, tell me more about that because that's my favorite app.

Yeah. So I can actually take a look at what attributes we have. So we have, you can segment people based on purchase behavior, based on location, based on the number of texts they got and how many interactions there were previously. Because for example, maybe you will send a campaign to a segment that also includes customers who abandoned their cart previously and you already had an interaction at Carloop with them before. So maybe you want to segment them by the number of texts that were exchanged. And also another cool thing is that we have a bunch of integrations, you know, with help desk such as Gorgis or Zendesk and with, you know, email marketing tools such as Klaviyo. So you can basically create segments in Klaviyo and import them to Carloop and leverage them so you have a wider pool of attributes and segmentation options.

Yeah, I like that. That's really, really good. I have another question from John. So I think, okay, I think he's asking about the opt in at checkout. So he's asking is the opt in on Shopify regular or just. Plus the opt in at the checkout.

Is the regular one that can be set up in your Shopify account.

Cool. Let me just click here because I'm done answering start and I hope that's okay for you, John. So I have have a question from our sponsor. This podcast is sponsored by Vitex. Paul, you are asking about Latin America. It doesn't get any more Latin America than vtex. So our sponsor wants to ask you because, you know, they're very prominent in Romania as well. They want to ask you how did you find your way into the, you know, the path of entrepreneurship? Because you're an entrepreneur, you're young, you're smart, you're running a company that's helping. Of course that ambulance is gonna pass. You're running, you're running an ambulance? Yes, it's the bloopers. This is the things that I did. So our sponsor is asking you in this path of entrepreneurship, right Again. You're young, you're beautiful, you're smart. How are you handling all the pressure of this, you know, of this, this, this industry? Because this market is crazy. Commerce is crazy. Technology is crazy. So share with us what are some, I don't know, one, two things that you have learned that keep you going every day. And you know, because as an entrepreneur, you want to quit and start over every day. So what does it help you, you know, with this process?

Yeah. So should I answer the first part? How did I got here? Or. Yeah. Okay. So my background is very non stereotypical because I actually studied and graduated from med school.

School.

So I started six years. I graduated in 2019. But while I was studying medicine, I started my, my, my first E Commerce brand. And then, you know, I sold that one and started my second one, which, you know, was, I was getting a little bit better at it. I didn't know anything, so I just learned by doing. And during that period, I felt something, that something was missing from that dedication that, you know, a doctor should have because I'm always been the typ person when I'm doing something, I'm giving 100%. And I felt like I wasn't giving 100%, you know, during med school. And I got so passionate about E commerce and the tech space that I said, okay. In the last few years, I said, okay, this is not working. I have to make a switch and I have to really follow what I'm really good at and what I really love. And yeah, I just graduated, never looked back, and started Carlo with my co founder. And to answer the second part, what keeps me going, I would say, actually I was talking with Andre today, and I feel like there are three things that keeps us going. Of course, you can never ignore the personal growth that comes with the entire process. Because I feel like I've learned so much in the past year since we started carloop that I learned more in this year that I learned in those six years at med school. Because I, you know, it's, it's you, you, you're constantly applying what you're learning by doing. And you're, you know, you're, you're practicing, you're practicing, you're practicing, you're failing. Then, then you're learning by failing. And it's so, so on. So it's, it's, it's a, it's, it's a constant growth process. It sometimes is brutal because you feel like, oh my God, it's, it's so hard, it's so challenging. But at the same time feeling that growth and it's such an enormous satisfaction. And yeah, the second thing that keeps me going is, you know, the fact that customers are happy with our service and they're actually getting amazing results. And you know, when I see we got some video testimonials in this past weeks and people were talking so nice about Carla, I was like, oh my God, I cannot believe that. And that keeps me going, you know, and. And the other thing is, on the third side of things is when we are able to bring new people to the Karloop team and see them evolving, see them growing and into the experts they are now and actually where they will actually get. So the people from the team, customers and personal growth, I would say.

Yeah, Yeah, I love that. Thank you for that. And I, I definitely, I definitely can. I cannot relate. So, Lisa, we're approaching the end. Tell people like there's. We have entrepreneurs, marketers and brands listening to the podcast. Tell brands where they should go right now to install carloop. You guys are on the Shopify App Store, clearly, right?

Yep, yep.

Cool.

So, yeah, it's pretty easy. Since we're on the Shopify App Store, you can find us under Cartloop and it's a one click installation. The onboarding process takes a couple of minutes. If you need help, we're always there and, you know, we're able to jump on a call with you and guide you through the onboarding process. So you can find us there and you can find me either on LinkedIn @Lisa Popovich or Twitter. I've been spending much more time on Twitter lately, so you can find me on Twitter as well. Yeah, yeah.

Cool. Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming. This was great. I'm excited to see you guys win again. I'm very biased. You guys are a Romanian company. We are. Romanian company for me is Romania Forever. And I'm just, just happy to see, you know that it's just more and more. Of course, of course. This is Romania. A lot of bicycles on the street. I have to edit this again. So this is what happens when you do live podcasts like this. So I'm happy because you guys together with us and a lot of other companies that are in technology that are serving global brands all the time, 24, 7. And we're helping people make progress in their lives. So I'm really excited that I talked to you today. Very excited to see what you guys are gonna do. And thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you, Juliana. Was was a great chat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is going to be live for who's watching on YouTube or Facebook. And I probably on my LinkedIn right now. We're going to release this audio tomorrow and it's probably going to be live in this weekend everywhere. So you can listen to this online. Thank you, VTech, for sponsoring this podcast. Thank you, Lisa, for being here. And I'm going to thank myself because I could go 30 minutes without surgery going on. So see you guys next Thursday. Thank you, Lisa.

Bye. Thank you.

Bye.

This podcast was brought to you by Vitex. VTEX is the first and only fully integrated e commerce marketplace and OMS solution that offers fastest time to revenue and no upgrades ever. So go ahead, check them out. Vtex.com.