Hey hey, howdy! 🤠

This is my very first newsie 🥺 I appreciate those of you who have signed up to come along and read about the inevitables in business and in life.

If you know someone who’d be interested in learning more about Digital Experience (DX), I’d LOVE it if you forwarded this to them.

What sorts of topics can you expect from this newsie?!

• Customer Experience (CX)

• Social Media Trends and Updates

• Retention Marketing including:

  • Email

  • SMS

  • Loyalty

  • Subscription

• Time Management

• Building a Personal Brand

Want me to touch on anything else? Reply to this email and let me know.

A little about me, ✨Zoe Kahn✨

I live in San Diego with my roomie, Jackie (if you follow me on IG, you might know that our life is like a reality TV show). I manage CX and Retention at Chomps (the best protein-filled snacks on this planet 😜) and I’m a co-host of Oopsie Podcast where we talk about the biggest “Oh Sh*t” moments in business. I moonlight as a CX consultant and founded Inevitable Agency.

I’ve had some really fun experiences in my past that shaped me into who I am today. Before Chomps, I streamed full-time on Twitch (yes, I played video games full-time - my favorite game being Warzone), I was on a TV show called Frogger, managed the support team at GHOST, managed GNCs in Chicago and North Carolina and competed in Bikini Bodybuilding in the NPC.

If you’re interested in hearing more about that fun stuff, I had the pleasure of talking about my background on the Food Chained podcast by Vasa Martinez, owner of Perfy.

What’s New in DX?!

Enough about me, let’s get to the learning of the week.

📱Instagram’s New Channel Feature📱

In marketing, we’re always looking for ways to talk to, connect and alert our customers of news and sales. We always want to be top of mind - if they forget about us, they no longer are purchasing from us. The more direct the interactions, the better. AND if we could do it for free…EVEN BETTER.

You can read Instagram’s blog about the channel feature here.

The feature is basically a huge group direct message (DM) that you can invite your followers to subscribe to. You can set it so that they can chat OR so that only you and anyone you invite as a collaborator can chat while your subscribers can observe and react with emojis.

Once someone subscribes, they’ll get push notifications and be able to read your messages in the channel directly in their IG DMs. This is an amazing way to build community and to be able to alert your consumers and clients about news and sales - FOR FREE. If you’re involved in digital or retention marketing, you know that it can get pricey to send news via Email and SMS - especially as your list size grows. If you can get your followers to subscribe to a broadcast channel, this is another way to be top of mind without worrying about the fees. This is one of the reasons why app push notifications and Apple Wallet signups (which you can do through SwaptQR) are valuable to brands too.

I’d suggest setting up at least two channels for your business:

1. Social Channel - a channel where you can interact with your community AND they can chat with each other. This type of community has traditionally had to be moved from the Instagram app to things like Facebook or Discord groups.

2. Broadcast Channel - a channel where only YOU can post and your community can read and react to messages with emojis. Jackie and I have been goofing around and made a roomie broadcast channel and I’m going to experiment with sharing updates on my podcast and newsie on there.

If you want to track traffic and revenue coming from these channels, don’t forget to set up trackable links/UTMs so you can understand the impact.

This feature looks like it’s only available for certain accounts for now (accounts with over 10K followers) but hopefully, this will change soon.

Know any brands who are crushing it on these broadcast channels?? Please reply to this email and let me know!

Cutie CX of the Week

Did you guys see this story where Lyft sent the Ubers $1000?!? I saw Bri Reynolds post about this on LinkedIn and it warmed my whole heart.

The Uber Family couldn’t make an Uber account because their last name registered as “invalid entry.” These silly glitches in software are inevitable. When Lyft heard about this, they saw it as a perfect opportunity to swoop in and help and the story went viral, bringing a great amount of positive press for Lyft. UGH LOVE. 💖

Give Bri some love on her LinkedIn post if you liked this story.

I’m proud of you 🥲

This week, I’d like to feature Molly Miller. Molly is one of our Client Success Managers at Inevitable and has gone above and beyond for our team and clients. Here's a review she received:

We’re so lucky to have Molly on the team. If you’d like to join the waitlist for a free CX Audit, fill out our Audit Form!

Upcoming Events 📅

San Diego Event/Dinner - (Date TBD, hoping mid-late August)
Calling all San Diego locals in e-commerce 🗣️ Gorgias and I are hosting a get-together in August. If you’re interested, reply to this email and I’ll get you on the list (as space permits!) If you’re not from SD but have ecom friends there, fwd this to them!

Commerce Roundtable - San Diego, September 18th & 19th
This event is going to be INSANE. I’d encourage you to check out the guests on the site and make a trip out to sunny California to hang with us all. We’re going to be doing a live Oopsie Podcast ft. Dylan Barbour where he’s going to spill his biggest mistake in business and what he learned from it.

You can grab a discounted brand ticket with code OOPSIE at checkout!

Latest Oopsie Podcast 🙊

This week’s Oopsie Podcast featured Mercer Smith and yes…as our Podcast email blast said, I did cry. Jackie is our VA for our podcast now and she thinks it’s funny to embarrass me. We talk about HR oopsies, mental health and more. Mercer holds CX webinars and has resources for the community - she’s a member of our CX Discord and is incredibly kind and helpful! I’d suggest adding her to your network ASAP.

Thanks for reading, please feel free to reply and say hi and give any and all feedback :)

xoxo,
Zoe