This is a broader series of interviews to focus on the Magento Association. The goal of these interviews is to increase awareness and increase membership for the Magento Association.
The event happens on August 3rd, 2022 in Jakarta Indonesia
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of Magento association or something. We don’t know what to call it yet, but this is promoting the Magento association today. I have Muliadi Jio from Indonesia, and he’s the organizer of Meet Magento. Indonesia
Muliadi: hey, Brent. Hey everybody. Good to see you all. And talk to you again, Brent
Brent: let’s dive right in. Tell us a little bit about your event, and how long you’ve had it running for.
Muliadi: This is if I count it this is supposed to be the, instead the six or the seven-year we run in Indonesia. So it’s always been offline, of course. And then the last two years, unfortunately, during the pandemic, we have to switch to online for a couple of years and this year.
Muliadi: So we are so excited. Finally, we were able to do it again as an in person meeting. And so far the respond, at least from the advertising for the sponsor side. They’re so excited. It’s been a while there’s no event and everybody just jump in and join. So we’re very excited.
Brent: And traditionally, you get a lot of people at this event.
Brent: Tell us about your attendance
Muliadi: and things like that. I remember when we started seven years ago I think that’s close to about a hundred people which is where we see, oh, that’s a good audience to start at that time. And then as we go year after year, I think the last. In person event on what’s that right before pandemic 2019 that one is actually around 600 people show up on the event.
Muliadi: And we can always unique us. So we have Three different track traditionally, so one track really for business and one track really for a solution. So where the sum of the sponsor can talk in the solution because they’re bringing their solution to it. And then the last track’s really more technical discussion.
Muliadi: And yeah, we have about 50/50 about like merchant versus a engineering dev flow burst kind of audience. .
Brent: And how about your venue and the location? Tell us a little bit about Indonesia. Why would, why should we all come to Indonesia?
Muliadi: Why would we want to come? I think most you have to, if you’ve never been to Indonesia, I think a lot of people very funny when we talk to a lot of people, especially from American or from the Europe, obviously a lot of people know Bali more than the Indonesia itself.
Muliadi: So when we talk about, do you know Bali. Indonesia, maybe not but obviously Bali sits in Indonesia and where we are is in Jakarta, which is the kind of the central the biggest city in Indonesia. We are close to two hours away from Bali. By flight.
Muliadi: Yeah. And then we’ve been doing this in Jakarta because like it’s all the business and all the enterprises all have the headquarter in Jakarta. It’s fun. You can fly to Jakarta and then you can, obviously once you’re in Indonesia, you should just explore to any, like to Bali and all the rest of the, a exotic islands on the east part of Indonesia.
Brent: And of course there’s so many exciting and beautiful places to visit in Indonesia. Obviously going to a Meet Magento event is such a great opportunity to travel and meet people. And from the sponsor standpoint maybe tell us a little bit about some of the merchants you have there and why somebody would want a sponsor.
Brent: A Meet Magento event.
Muliadi: Yeah, we traditionally very very localized as far as like our event. A lot of the sponsor, we get a lot of local sponsor, but obvious some we open up for a lot of international. Businesses that want to get their business exposed to Indonesia market, which is well known for the big population and the opportunity here.
Muliadi: So that’s always the kind of the attractive point to be able to get your business exposure to here in Southeast Asia especially in Indonesia itself. Yeah at our event is always free. That’s the unique part. Compared to any other event around crossroad on the other meet change event I think we are the only one that is free and fully funded by the sponsors.
Muliadi: Luckily and then, yeah it’s exciting.
Brent: And you have, you said you have three tracks that you’re running in conjunction with the event?
Muliadi: And they yes, there’s a three tracks. It’s a whole day event.
Brent: So you have a business track, a developer track. And what was the other.
Muliadi: It’s what we call it.
Muliadi: The solution track it’s really for people can present their product and basic more like showing kind of solutions. And typically we use that for the sponsor to be able more engaged and able to demo the product and stuff like that. But digital this year seems like we are going to
Muliadi: blend it together. We have a lot of different kind of speakers this year. Not only just a group sponsor, but as well, like a lot of the business practitioner. So we mix around all inside the three track that we have. We still have gonna have three tracks, but not like really divided that way anymore.
Muliadi: For this year.
Brent: So part of this is the Magento association now helps to promote these events. And Magento association has paid memberships now. So I’m on the membership committee. And our goal is to increase membership.
Brent: What would you say to people
Brent: who that, what would you say to people who encourage them to join the Magento Association?
Muliadi: I think let’s go back with the heart of this Magento is the community and this Magento has been really successful because all those community support. So I think the Magento association is becoming the form of that. And naturally we want to be part and this association and participate as much as we want
Muliadi: and that’s and in the form of the paying membership, I think that’s at least a little bit that you can do as far as participation, and that’s a lot more to participate. I believe you are also involved with much more than just a paying member. You are also involved in the comittee and a lot of the different stuff.
Muliadi: And I, I think that’s what we are looking forward with the Magento association. So we can recreate this vibrant community back where everybody can participate and basically yeah, I think in our maybe like blessing each other, something like that.
Brent: Go back to the beginning. And why you decided to put on a Meet Magento event, had you attended events in Europe?
Muliadi: So it’s by accident actually, I went back to Indonesia way back on 2010. So it’s almost 12 years now. Initially I just going back here because family reason and I was already have a good relationship with Magento. I was in the states for 16 years and right before I went back to Indonesia, I worked with a company called Guidance, which is.
Muliadi: Partner of Magento. We are among one of the first partner working with Magento directly, still in the Culver City office. Naturally when I went back to Indonesia at that time I’m building the first set of developers for Guidance and really focusing on Magento and it started with only a couple of us.
Muliadi: And then the team grew to five. And 10 and all of a sudden become a full team of I think at that time we still have about 15 people concentrating, really delivering the gentle project for our US clients, a lot of, but then Indonesia eCommerce picking up around 2012 to early 2013.
Muliadi: So then we get a lot more exposure with a big comp, a big company that interested to know more about Magento. And obviously at that time I still go back and forth, always attending the Imagine. We miss the Magento Imagine events. That’s been really great. And I met a lot of people there.
Muliadi: Some of them were was the founder of the Meet Magento association at that time still . And so we have a talk and then we would think, okay, maybe we can build a community in Indonesia. Why don’t we try? And then I talked to a couple folks on the Magento and they also interested to
Muliadi: build exposure in Indonesia. So we just launched our first event out of the blue working with Magento, working with several I’m trying to remember. It’s been so long and yeah, but that’s, it’s turned out really good. The event we get a lot of support from the local company, as well as audience that coming in and show really interest on the platform and interest in the building the community.
Muliadi: So just that’s becoming now every year after that, we just continue to have the events until now, basically. Guido is one of the first person actually flying to Indonesia on our yeah. Guido. Yeah. Guido Jensen. Yeah, he put
Brent: on the, I think they put the very first event in the Netherlands and I think Meet Magento, Netherlands by far is one of the best ones that’s out there still.
Brent: It’s such a fun event. Yeah.
Muliadi: Yep. And then the following year or year after two years after that, Thomas also fly to Indonesia. So yeah, it’s been really a good run. All right. Followed them, saying that I need to
Brent: come one of these years. I’ll come
Muliadi: next year. You need to, I’m gonna keep saying until you come here, please do so
Brent: tell us, how do they find an event?
Brent: is it
Muliadi: your address? It’s re really from information? Yes. So the official website is called very easy to remember is the M A G E dot ID. So it’s a mage.id as. So you can go to the website, you can see the agenda, you can see the speakers that are already set for this event. It’s gonna be on August 3rd.
Muliadi: So not too far, it’s less than two weeks. Their venue will be the venue address will be on the website and you can register there right away too. And like I said, it’s free.
Brent: So just outta curiosity when you do a free event, do you find a lot of people don’t show up?
Muliadi: Obviously with the free event typically the, from the registration and the show up is probably it’s a industry stranded around 60% show up or so 40% most likely not show up.
Muliadi: Yeah. But it’s still it’s still good number. We we’ve like we, with all the registration that we have it’s a good turnout
Brent: for us. Yeah. That’s a really good number. I know that so we organize meet Megento India. and did, have you been to meet Magento India yet?
Muliadi: Did you come?
Muliadi: No. No, you have to come we’re planning. I only went one time to Bangalore. Oh, that was
Brent: Magento live. Yeah. Anyways we get we pay, we have people pay, but we do get an incredible attendance. It’s in the 90%, the people that buy tickets come to the event. Yeah. I think all the meet Magento events and I’ve been to meet Magento Singapore as.
Brent: So that whole south Asia , meet Megento events you do such a great job putting those on I tended last year, virtually which was a very good event. , I stayed up late to to be a speaker in my evening. Thank you, morning. It, it was very good. I actually spoke the night and followed watched a lot of the speakers.
Brent: Yeah. Thank you so much for being on. I will put mage.id on the show notes and I wish you all the best in your event.
Muliadi: Thank you. Thank you, Brent. Really great talking to you as always. Thank you. And good night.
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If you can do one thing to speed up the growth of your email list, “learn to love the popup.” Kyle Stout answers some of the most crucial questions regarding your email marketing strategy, such as knowing if you’re sending too many or not enough emails and what to do if you’re still sending every email to your entire list. He also helps us understand some of the common pitfalls merchants fall into with email marketing and how to avoid them altogether.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today I have Kyle Stout. Kyle is the founder of Elevate and Scale, a email marketing agency. Kyle, go ahead, and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you do day to day and maybe one of your passions in life.
Kyle: Thanks for having me.
Kyle: Day to day is pretty much working with eCommerce businesses, with their email marketing helping them increase sales in their sales process drive up customer lifetime value and also just long term keeping a healthy email list. So people stick around and wanna buy. And then yeah, outside of work, I I’m really big into fitness.
Kyle: I love to get active and hang out with family and friends and get outside.
Brent: So let’s just dive right into email marketing is email marketing still relevant today?
Kyle: Yeah. So it’s funny cuz you always hear every few years or so the email marketing is dead thing comes about, but I feel like it’s only marketers that say that as a joke and it never really is something that’s ever.
Kyle: Something that actual users or business owners are saying, but email marketing to me, why it’s always been relevant is because it’s a platform where you have direct access to your customers and you own that platform. And over time, as we’ve seen attention shift from different social media platforms and things go from maybe where we were a lot heavier and blogging in the past, and then it shifted to social media.
Kyle: Email marketing was there was tried and true all along. And right now, especially with paid media costs all over the place and a lot of uncertainty in the market. I really think that over the next year or two, you’re gonna see people revisiting their email marketing strategy because a lot of businesses have I don’t wanna say totally neglected it, but maybe just, didn’t realize that they weren’t doing as much with it as they could.
Brent: And do you think that email is what we’ve discussed? That it’s still important, but so from a strategy standpoint, how much of that should be put back into email and how much should be put onto social and other channels that are out there?
Kyle: Really, I think ideally you have both. I think of it as email marketing serves as a great function to help you get a better ROI from your top of funnel marketing.
Kyle: So you still wanna have your social media and doing anything you can to bring in new leads, bring in new customers and email marketing, cuz there’s two ways you can look at it. Part of it is just having some automated systems in place to maybe to help optimize your sales process. So help you get more revenue from the traffic that you’re already getting to your site.
Kyle: But then once you’ve got this growing email list, you’ve got this database of people that you can nurture and continue to get repeat sales over time. I really look at it as, partially something to help you get a better ROI from your top of Mar top of funnel marketing today, but also just helps you get better lifetime customer value in the long term.
Brent: Do you think one of the big mistakes that merchants often make is marketing the same email to every single client on their list.
Kyle: Definitely it’s one of the biggest mistakes I see is that, and again, a lot of times people just don’t know any better. Like they’re just going off of that worked in the past and it just wasn’t email marketing and all marketing, just wasn’t quite as nuanced in the past, especially digital marketing.
Kyle: But yeah you really wanna personalize the content. So you want to be segmenting your list and sending different messages to different people. That’s most likely to resonate with them.
Brent: From a personalization standpoint. Is there any particular strategy that you. Talk to clients about, and I just I’ll frame that in the sense of, at some point it gets a little creepy when it’s too personal.
Brent: Is there a balance between the two?
Kyle: So yeah, there’s a lot of new technology where they’re trying to, totally personalize the email and. Talk to you, Brent, specifically about things that I can imagine where it’s gonna get really creepy, like what you’re saying, but really what I’m talking about more is at a higher level, just being able to segment people on your list and there’s different.
Kyle: Ways that you can segment. So you can segment people on different profiles based on if they’re a lead that’s never purchased before. And then you have customers who have purchased one time and then you maybe have repeat customers and then maybe you have VIP customers, and those are different groups that you could segment and then send a different type of message.
Kyle: Because the VIP customer, you’re gonna talk to them very differently. You don’t really need to educate them on your product anymore. They’re like the close friend they’re in on the joke they’re in, on all the inside jokes, they know what’s going on. And you’re also gonna wanna show them more love for being a VIP, whereas a lead, they might be almost a stranger and they might need to be reminded of some of the value propositions and the brand story and all that other stuff
Kyle: that they’re just not maybe aware of. and then there are other ways you can segment so you can segment based another really great way to segment would be, especially for e-commerce businesses would be based on engagement. So breaking down groups of people you can have, you can create segments for example, like a 30 day engaged group, meaning that everyone in that group have engaged with your emails or your website,
Kyle: however you decide to define it in the last 30 days. And you can expand that out to 60 days, 90 days and so on. And every business will be a little different, but after you send emails to these different groups, you’ll get a high level overview of not only how engaged they are, but how they respond to different offers.
Kyle: And you’ll find that the people who are most engaged, they wanna get more emails from you. So you can actually email them more often, or you can send them a more diverse content. Whereas the people who are less engaged, it might not be that they don’t like your brand or don’t like your products.
Kyle: It could just be that they only wanna know whenever there’s a really big sale going on or a new product coming out or something like that. So you might email them less frequently.
Brent: Maybe walk us through how they test that engagement. Do you look at open rates, click through rates, things like that for the engagement.
Brent: And then if they seem like they’re engaged I know it still goes back to a tipping point where, Hey, you send ’em something every day, pretty soon they’re gonna unsubscribe. And I know there’s a magic amount of time for every engaged customer, as opposed to somebody that’s just wanting to learn.
Kyle: Yeah. So the way I do it is you have your key metrics you wanna track. So open rate, click rate conversion rates, and you can first, let’s just say for an example, send an email out to a 30 day engage group. Actually, one way, if you just wanted to test this, if you just wanted to say over the next week, do a quick test and get a baseline for all of this.
Kyle: You could send that one email out to your 30 day. Engage. Look at the metrics and then that’s, there’s a baseline for you. And then send the same email out to the 60 day engaged group and exclude the 30 day engaged folks, because you don’t want to that to throw off the data and look at the metrics there
Kyle: and then you want to have a certain threshold, like you said, of where you don’t want to go below that. The thing about open rates is they are a little inflated right now because of iOS. But traditionally it’s all the rule of thumb has always been, you don’t wanna go below 20%.
Kyle: If you send out to that 60 day or 90 day engage group, and you see the open rate fall below 20%, then you know, okay, that’s the threshold. I need to pull back and focus more on these groups up to that point. And then maybe only include those people in the big, like the black Friday type of promotion and, but so open rate’s one thing, but you really also wanna look at click rate.
Kyle: And this is gonna vary a lot from brand to brand. There’s industry benchmarks, but honestly it’s all over the place. So you really wanna look at just historical data for your company and compare that. Sending that first test to the 30 day engage group, and you might find that even the click, rate’s not where you want it to be with that group.
Kyle: But that’s a better determinant of engagement right now than open rates, because a lot of times open rates are higher. They’re showing as falsely higher than they really are. And clicks are also not only is it easier to get someone to open. It’s harder to get people to click and we’re not getting those false readings on the clicks right now
Kyle: like we are with opens. So I would wa I would pay a little bit more attention to that as you’re doing that whole test.
Brent: When you include engagement, do you include social media? Just website visits, if you’re tracking holistically across and you know that this user’s, they’re looked at Instagram, they’ve visited your website but they haven’t opened an email.
Brent: All that goes into the fi the factor of some kind of engage.
Kyle: Yeah, so you can go, you can get into social media and all that. In general, I stick with email and website engagement. So looking at, if they’ve either gone to the website or you can even create these different segments that are targeting product interest.
Kyle: So whenever someone visits a product page in the last timeframe, or they’ve added it to cart in that time, Then they are in the engaged group, whether it’s based on pure engagement across the board or interest in that particular product
Brent: You mentioned iOS a few times and there’s the post iOS 14.
Brent: That is blocking a lot of of information that we can see through some platforms. Is, has it changed the landscape on how you measure engagement?
Kyle: It really is one of those things that’s been blown outta proportion. We were all like bracing ourselves for it. And, and preparing by looking at our engagement groups.
Kyle: And when I say that, the segments that we create and someone’s email account and doing some reporting on, okay, it’s going live now and what’s gonna happen but honestly, the way it’s played out. It’s inflated the open rates. And so we just don’t really pat ourselves on the back as much as we used to about open rates and
Kyle: that’s been the biggest change, I have not seen a significant change in impacting these engagement groups to where or these engagement segments, I should say to where, we’re getting this negative feedback. Like people shouldn’t have been included in there or the conversions.
Kyle: And actual purchases don’t seem to line up anymore with the clicks and everything else with the email. It’s really just an inflation of open rates has been the main thing.
Brent: Yeah. Maybe explain to our listeners why open rates would go up?
Kyle: Because it’s showing that the iOS devices that receive the emails it’s showing them as having opened the email, regardless of whether or not they didn’t.
Kyle: So this is gonna be, this is going to come down to your list and lists that have way more iOS users on their list. They’re gonna have more skewed data and if you want to get. Let’s just say, you feel man, this is really clouding my data and I don’t like this. I just want more clarity.
Kyle: What you can do is similar to what I was mentioning earlier, where maybe you run a test where you create some different segments. You can create segments to exclude iOS devices, and then send an email. To you can go pretty wide or, whatever you would normally do, but take out those iOS people and then see what the numbers are.
Kyle: And. .
Brent: Yeah. And it sounds like the amount of segments isn’t like too many segments isn’t necessarily bad until you get to a segment of one user .
Kyle: Yeah, exactly and also, so that’s really the thing, the bigger your list is the more room you have to do to create more segments, which gives you more room to send more emails without everyone getting every email. And that gives you the potential to scale up the revenue you get from your email marketing. But like you said, if you try to take it too far, too early, you’ve got groups of, 5, 10, 20 people. It’s probably not worth all the effort.
Brent: As a new business, you mentioned earlier growing your list a lot of people look at buying a list from somebody and I think that’s not the way to do it and probably illegal in a lot of countries, but, and if you send them email, I should say what do your recommendations around growing that list and making sure that it continues to grow and doesn’t decrease.
Kyle: Okay. Yeah. So regarding buying lists and I’ve never personally done it, I’ve never seen it work. I’ve known many business owners who have shared that they’ve done that, or, and I’ve seen the analytics and I can tell you, I’ve never seen it be a really worthwhile endeavor. And especially if you consider all the risk, but the damage it could do to your domain and all of that potential legal risks.
Kyle: I wouldn’t even mess with. So it’s gonna come down to the type of business. So for e-commerce businesses, oftentimes you’re not going to do the typical lead magnet type of approach, like a service business would. But you definitely can. So the first thing is you wanna look at your website and you need to have some sort of offer to get people in.
Kyle: So I know a lot of business owners hate popups. They just personally hate them. They hate going to a website and seeing a popup, the first thing they land on the site. And. Honestly, I used to hate popups too, but knowing what that popup can do for your business, you will learn to love them.
Kyle: You can create popups in a way that aren’t so intrusive. You don’t have to have the one that pops up as soon as they hit the page. You also don’t have to have it take up the entire page and you can make it very easy for people to leave to exit out of that popup. So in general, I would recommend at least having an exit intent popup.
Kyle: On your website, that fires, when people are leaving and give them some sort of offer to get into your email list for eCommerce it’s typical, but the thing is it works is usually you will see a small discount, a coupon code that they have to sign up for a 10 to 15% discount.
Kyle: The bigger the discount, the more opt-ins you’re gonna get. But ultimately it doesn’t necessarily mean those would be the best customers long term. So I don’t think it’s necessarily the best idea to go really aggressive and go 20, 30, 40% 10, 15% works. It could also just be free content.
Kyle: It could be a free guide. Or it could be, a free trial. So there’s different ways you can do it. Doesn’t always have to be a discount. It could be a value add where they get something extra for free with their purchase, and that’s gonna have high purchase intent cuz someone who’s signing up for that is already thinking well I’m planning on making a purchase.
Kyle: So I want that. I want that free bonus. So you definitely gotta have something. Your website itself, then when it comes to getting people to your site to sign up, that’s where it varies. From what I’ve seen in the last, six months of what’s working with paid media. So a lot of times I’ll be working with the brand and I’m working side by side with whoever’s running their paid media, and there’s always this temptation to have the whole ad campaign be based around, signing up for something free on the list.
Kyle: And I can say that the majority of the time, those freebie seekers. They don’t purchase and they don’t stick around and they really drive down the engagement of your list. I’ve found what’s better, is to go after customers and send ’em to your site and have your site optimized to where they’re going to see these signups.
Kyle: So see those popups or whatever you have in place and get. Actual interested customers to sign up for the offer thing you don’t wanna have your first impression going out to cold traffic or going out to strangers, be some freebie thing. You really want them to be interested in the actual products or services that you sell.
Kyle: And when they get to your site, they just find out that, oh, it’s like a surprise. They happen to get this extra thing that incentivizes them to sign up.
Brent: So I’m gonna highlight two things. So learn to love popups. I like that one, but the freebie seekers, I think, is something I’ve heard over and over again where people think that getting your list bigger is gonna be better no matter how you get that name.
Brent: And I suppose it doesn’t hurt to have that user, but having that pop up or giving him some value is probably more well, is more important than just the free thing they’re gonna get. So just talking about mistakes and I can think of one mistake that’s very annoying that I dislike is when you’re signed into a site and you get that exit intent pop up, or you bought something from them clearly, you’re their customer.
Brent: Worst case is you’ve signed in and you get a popup to sign up for their email, super annoying. But even if they know your cookie and theoretically cookies are still around, we should block that popup. If you know that person, especially if they’re on the list.
Kyle: Yeah, and that’s a really easy fix.
Kyle: In your software. We like to use Klavio most of the time with eCommerce businesses specifically. It’s just a box. You check whenever you’re building out your form, there’s an option to exclude current or existing Klavio contact. So anyone who’s already signed up, they won’t see.
Kyle: And it’s actually an opportunity to present them with something new. So maybe it doesn’t have to be a popup now for an exist. Contact but maybe offer something up to get their birthday so you can surprise them on their birthday later, or, just get more information about them to enrich that customer experience.
Kyle: So there are times when you would want to target the people that are already signed up specifically, but, you wanna do it in a way that adds some value to them? You’re no longer just trying to get their contact info anymore. So in general I like to just leave them alone for the most part.
Brent: So may, maybe you could go over a few more mistakes that companies typically make for email.
Kyle: So first one the biggest one is what you were saying earlier. People just emailing the entire list instead of, trying to. segment and somewhat personalize the content towards people. Another thing is email frequency, and this goes both ways. Cuz a lot of times you’ll have smaller businesses emailing too frequently because everyone wants to grow.
Kyle: So they want to grow faster. Email is a great channel for driving revenue and they just get a little I think in my opinion, they get a little too excited too quickly. They get a taste of the email of, what it’s like to send an email. And all of a sudden you see a bunch of users on your analytics dashboard, on your site, and then the sales come in and you burn out your list way too quickly by doing that.
Kyle: You haven’t even let this list grow and mature and let these people stick around with you for a while. Then on the other. You’ll have big businesses that have a huge list. And let’s just say they’re only getting five, 10% of their total revenue from email marketing. a good gauge of if your email marketing is, doing a good job, at least when it comes to the situations where people can click the email and buy the product, they don’t have to hop on a sales call or any of that would be if you’re generating 30% of your revenue from email marketing, you’re doing a good job with your email marketing.
Kyle: And if you’re below that, then there’s probably either some room for improvement with what you’re doing, or there’s also potential that maybe you’re just not emailing enough depending on the situation. So yeah, it, that the frequency thing goes both ways. And then another big mistake. These are like the greatest hits right here would be only emailing your list when you have a sale or a promotion.
Kyle: And again, it goes back to sometimes people just get, they see what that does. They see that spike in revenue and they don’t like to send an email out that doesn’t get a massive spike in revenue. and I definitely encourage you for the major holidays. Yeah. If you wanna run a promo every major holiday, go for it.
Kyle: If you get into a sticky situation and you need a quick infusion of cash, okay. This is a channel you have available to do that. And if you’ve been taking care of your list, then it’s okay to do that. Whenever you need to, but. But really you want to be showing up. You wanna have different reasons to show up and educate people, inspire people, entertain them, give them other content.
Kyle: And the big thing is try to get them to buy without having to discount, give them reasons to be excited about your product, to care about what your product does, the problems that it solves for them without having to give them a discount just solely, because it’s a good offer.
Brent: Yeah. I remember interviewing the founder of Gigz.
Brent: They’re a gifting service and instead of giving them a discount, they would give something to somebody based on a purchase. And they always equated discounts with with the decreasing revenue. And if you do too much of it, obviously you get people dropping off. Is there a point in which you send too many emails and that becomes counterproductive?
Kyle: That’s typically what I have seen over the long term. And it’s deceptive because at first you can get away with it for a while, because a lot of times let’s just say, let’s just say, you’ve been running your business for several years. Things are going well. Maybe you switch to a different team or person who’s managing the email marketing and they want to drive up those sales numbers because it makes them look good.
Kyle: And maybe they honestly just have pure intentions and they think it’s what’s best for your business, for whatever reason. And the people on your list, aren’t used to getting these deals all the time. So they might actually take advantage of two to three back to back sales. They might just reach into their wallet several times in a row.
Kyle: And then you would think as the business owner, oh man, every time we do a sale they keep buying, they must love it, but it never lasts. It really never lasts. And then by the time people notice the decline because every email you send out, you’re gonna get some unsubscribes. If you have a big list, you’re, there’s always gonna be, there’s a million of reasons why someone would unsubscribe.
Kyle: It’s just a normal part of email marketing. It doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong or they hate you. But that you keep emailing more and more. And you keep doing these big promotions more and more. You’re going to get more of that. And eventually if you’re not paying attention, you’re losing more people than are coming in.
Kyle: So that’s one problem. But then the people who are sticking around now, they’ve gotten trained to where I they’re only gonna buy. When you offer a discount. So now the random impulse purchases those go away. And now they know, they always know there’s another sale right around the corner. So why would they, in fact, I’ve found myself as a customer doing that with companies where I genuinely do like their products, but I always get this.
Kyle: It seems every time I would make a purchase, they would have a sale a few days. So I swear it was almost like, I always, I wondered if it was planned or something, and I’d have this regret. I’m like, if I waited three days, I could have saved a lot of money and I got to where I’m like, oh, I only buy whenever they have a sale now.
Kyle: Cuz they have ’em frequently enough. So why not?
Brent: Yeah, I can remember buying a pair of Cole Haan, and having that exact same experience where they’re constantly bombarding you with emails and then suddenly you buy something and then you get another email. That’s 5% bigger discount or something. It was anyways, I did unsubscribe from Cole Haan eventually, cuz it was so annoying when I got that.
Brent: And I guess that just illustrates the point that there is never. Nobody has it down. And Cole Haan is a pretty big company. And you’d think maybe it was just my own experience, but big companies make these mistakes and they’re still making these mistakes. So it’s always good to be looking at all those numbers.
Brent: What are some of the key metrics that, that a marketer should look at to ensure that they’re not making some of those mistake? Is there leading indicators that say, oh, I’ve sent five emails this week. Maybe that’s too many.
Kyle: Yeah. So there are, and actually I want to say something really quickly about what you just shared, because this is a really common misconception I think is that when people look at these big brands, you assume that this it’s this big successful brand.
Kyle: I know they’re spending a ton of money on their marketing. I know they can hire the best consultants. They can get the best information they’ve so they must know what they’re doing. And. I see them just making terrible mistakes all the time. My theory is that it’s because when they get to a certain level where they can bring in so many people, they can just, they just have the money to buy so much traffic buy.
Kyle: Acquire so many new people onto their list that they can burn through it. They can afford to burn through a lot of people. I don’t know what’s going on with the overall picture with their marketing, but I would definitely say if you, if your gut is telling you I don’t know, but this big brand is doing it.
Kyle: Definitely question it because what works for them will not usually work for most small businesses. But so looking at your metrics, of course you want to month to month, you should be looking at your averages, open rates, click rates, conversion rates, and also there’s also certain things.
Kyle: So for example, with an e-commerce business, you can have what’s called a welcome series or a welcome series for non buyers. Which is the typical automated email sequence that someone will go into when they first opt in through that popup. That one is very sensitive to the traffic. That’s hitting your website.
Kyle: So that’s one way to look at I know whenever we see the sales. And just actually overall engagement, not just sales deviate from the norm, pretty aggressively, either negative or positive that company has made some changes with their paid media. And sure enough, I’ll have case we’ll have a call and be like, okay, we’re seeing some decreases what’s going on.
Kyle: I I wanna get more context to make sure it’s not just what’s happening with the emails. That happens more often than not it’s that entry level series is a good way to gauge the quality of traffic that’s coming in. So that’s one thing to look at. but you can also run engagement reports on those different segments that I talked about.
Kyle: So having those key segments that you’re gonna be emailing most frequently in Klavio, and in the other tools, you can run an engagement report where you can see the open rates, click rates, and average order value of that particular segment. And you can see. People are starting to disengage more. And if you’re looking at a highly engaged group, like a 30 day engaged segment and you start to see people disengaging in that one, that’s a really bad sign.
Kyle: Okay. Something is definitely wrong. We’re hammering this list or this particular segment way too hard because just by its very nature of how that segment is created, everyone in there should. engaged. And then another thing to look at something that people might have to Google is you can look at the unique reach.
Kyle: So the unique opens the unique clicks on your email list. So that would be the total unique people, cuz it’s one thing to. A lot of times you’ll have the same people who continue to open and click all your emails. You just have a lot of people who are engaged, but you’re not seeing the big picture of everyone on your list.
Kyle: So when you look at the uniques, whenever you measure that, so that’s just a key there. Whenever you’re, if you’re Googling this or you’re talking with your email service provider, then you can see how many unique people you’re reaching on your list. Cuz ideally you wanna be reaching more people month to month.
Kyle: So if your list is growing or even if it’s staying the same. You want to be engaging more total people, total unique people. So I like to measure unique opens and unique clicks as a way to know, okay. You know what? Even if sales were a little down this month, we’re getting more engagement from more people and that’s usually a sign of better, long term success.
Kyle: Whenever you see those uniques going down, that’s something where, okay, if we’re reaching fewer unique people, then the odds are that the sales will come down. Let’s just say sales are, steady. Those sales will come down because we’re just reaching fewer people. And we can’t always rely on the same people to keep buying and buying.
Kyle: Cuz depending on the products you’re selling, you run out of stuff where they’ve just bought it all they’ve bought all that they want or need. So you really want to be looking at making sure you’re actually reaching more people within the list that you have, and also trying to retain more of them.
Brent: And I would imagine that these numbers all flip flop, when you’re talking B2B to B2C, like it’s a completely different arena when you’re talking, how you engage with the B2B customer compared to how you engage with the B2C customer.
Kyle: Yeah. B2B is very different where. See B2C is I guess what I’m talking about.
Kyle: When I say B2C, a situation where it’s not gonna be like a, a really expensive product where someone has to hop on a sales call or anything like that. It’s something where they can click the email and buy right there. So you get really objective data. With B2B it’s a little trickier because you have more things involved in closing that sale.
Kyle: So a lot of times you’re using email marketing to get people into a sales call. And then from there it could be that you follow up with email after that, and then you get the purchase. So that’s one way to measure it, but you can’t neglect what happened during the human to human interaction.
Kyle: Of the sales call. So you have to be tracking that. So a lot of times you can’t get clean metrics where a lot of times people aren’t just going to click a link in an email and pay the invoice like that. It’s gonna be a manual process where a salesperson emails them an invoice, and then you get that and then you get the payment that way.
Kyle: So from there, it’s really more about mapping out the whole sales process step by step. So looking at each stage of your sales process, adding in automations, when you can so automated email or SMS or whatever you wanna. In between each of those steps where you can in between the human interactions. To try to move people along and you can measure that you can measure opens and clicks and how many people are moving through.
Kyle: And how many people signed up for the sales call, but then how many people actually showed up? So you need to start tracking all of that stuff as well. So it’s not quite as clean as it can be with B2C, but there’s still a lot that you can measure and give you a pretty good idea of what’s going on.
Brent: I think the important part there is putting it into a place where you’re tracking everything. So some kind of a CRM , where you manually put notes in for. Phone call or even better you call directly from the CRM. So that call gets recorded as a call with the client and then that engagement would then just play into your engagement with the customer, no matter if it’s in person or on the phone or through some kind of a service.
Brent: Kyle, we have a couple minutes left here. If you had some great bit of advice in 2022, to give somebody that wants to start email marketing, where would they start?
Kyle: You need to have an offer and you need to at least have someone on your list. You definitely need to have a way to get people on your list.
Kyle: But’re but really the most important thing that it comes down to. And I think what’s. Forgotten is we look at all these systems and ways to optimize everything. And we need to get back to remembering that there’s another human on the other side of this email and just thinking about, okay, what content are they really going to care about?
Kyle: Or when it comes to my product or my service. What really matters to them, what do they really care about and crafting it around them and having your emails be more conversational. And it doesn’t mean you can be salesy or ask for the sale and all of that. It just means being more thoughtful to what’s going to help them make a buying decision.
Brent: One last question or advice that you could give the client, then learn to love popups, right? And let’s just say you don’t have HubSpot or Klevio or something like that, but you just want to get ’em into, let’s say you’re using MailChimp or whatever it is.
Brent: I remember hello bars or whatever it was called before. Is there a free tool that you would recommend to get that popup going on your website? That’s fairly easy to install and get running on whatever website you’re running, whatever platform you’re on and you can install your popup and get it rolling.
Kyle: I think MailChimp has the popup capability. But most of them have that built in. And then there’s a bunch of like fancier tools where if you wanna get more advanced, honestly, the free tool that’s within your email service provider, most of the time is good enough.
Kyle: It’s gonna take you a very long way. You don’t need to get any of the other fancy tools. A lot of times those things you it’s just, you don’t have enough traffic. For the small amount of performance difference that you’re gonna get to even matter. It’s just gonna add an extra cost and some of those things potentially even weigh down your site and slow it down.
Kyle: If you’re e-commerce, you can go with Klavio. You can start out with a free account and you can use their free you can, get a popup going. I believe MailChimp has a popup tool. I just haven’t used MailChimp in so long, but pretty much all of ’em have a popup tool it’s already gonna be included.
Kyle: So if you’re, even if you’re paying for the cheapest plan, you already have that. I just say, don’t even overthink it right now. Get a good offer on that popup, get it live and then focus on getting people to show up to your site so they can see
Brent: it.
Brent: It. All right. Cool. Love your popup. I’m gonna keep saying that over and over again.
Brent: Kyle as we close out, I gave everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you like to plug, what would you like to plug today?
Kyle: Okay. Yeah. For anyone who’s interested in elevating their email marketing, you can go to elevate and scale.com and there is a link there to book a call, which is not a traditional sales call, even though I know everyone says their call is not a sales call.
Kyle: You will get information prior to that call about our service and everything. But the point of that call is to give you clarity around how email marketing fits into the overall strategy for your business. So we’ll actually break down your sales process on that call. If you have numbers that you can share, that would be awesome, cause it makes it even better.
Kyle: And we can identify where the most immediate opportunities are for you right now to get more revenue from your existing sales process. And then talk about a strategy for you to grow your business over the long term with email marketing. Perfect.
Brent: And I’ll put I’ll put those links in, in the show notes for this Kyle Stout.
Brent: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It’s been a great conversation.
Do you want to improve your conversion rates, decrease abandonment rates improve your acquisition efficiency, and spend? Have you ever created a customer journey? Nadav Charnilas helps us to understand and answer these questions and more.
Nadav is with Namogoo. Namogoo helps to maximize each online journey’s potential for eCommerce brands by experiencing everything through the customers’ eyes. The Namogoo Digital Journey Continuity Platform automatically gathers non-PII data on customer behavior, website, product, device, and environment to give each customer what they came for and get everything else out of the way.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this journey with Talk Commerce. today I have Nadav Charnilas. He is with Namogoo. Go ahead and tell us what you do in a day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Nadav: Thanks, Brent. So like you said, my name’s in Navav. I am the director of product marketing here at Namogoo.
Nadav: We’re located in Lia in Israel. I run all the product marketing functions at Namogoo. So that means all the positioning and the messaging and the sales enablement working with product and working with sales and across all the different roles here Namogoo. So yeah, creating all the all the collateral around our different products.
Nadav: As far as a passion is I used to be a passionate runner. I used to run like half marathons every few months, but then I had kids. Not so much anymore.
Brent: yeah, kids will do that. There’s always time in your later in life to get back into running. So don’t get me started on that. Good. So let’s dive right into customer journeys.
Brent: For just a little bit of background, let’s help our listeners understand what is a customer journey for a brand.
Nadav: right. So that’s everything. So if you’re a brand or an e-commerce brand it’s everything that your visitors, your shoppers go through from the minute they see, become aware of your brand to the moment they.
Nadav: Go to your website and browse your product and then go to check out and put things in their in their cart and check out and convert. And then even how do they come back to your website and their journey back? So it’s their entire experience from creating awareness about who you are coming to your website, shopping and converting.
Nadav: And then hopefully coming back and creating loyalty.
Brent: And I know that if you’ve ever, if you’ve ever attended a tech conference or they’re talking about platforms to do this a lot of times as a merchant, you feel, or you could feel as though this is only for enterprise platforms or huge retailers in the world is customer journey good for anybody? Any size store?
Nadav: Yeah. Every store has a customer journey, right? Everybody does acquisition. Everybody brings people into their site and you wanna, and your shoppers they have to go through a few steps on their journey until they find the product that they want until they realize that they trust you as a merchant.
Nadav: Until they’re ready to. So yeah, everybody has a journey and everybody needs basically optimization of their customer journey because it’s customer journeys are inherently complex. No matter how big you are, obviously the bigger you are, the more complex it is. But the level of complexity, even for smaller stores is immense.
Brent: And what’s, what are some of those challenges then as you move into trying to find out what is your customer journey?
Nadav: Yeah. So we at Nomogoo we’ve actually been working with, so we started off working with some of the world’s biggest eCommerce brands. And now as we’ve matured and as we’ve grown we’ve opened up our platform to smaller brands, mid-market brands, SMBs.
Nadav: And what we found is that everybody in the market, in the e-commerce market and more so mid-market and SMBs they face I think basically there’s a couple of like segments of issues that they face. One issue is with their marketing stack. One place is that it’s really hard.
Nadav: Everybody wants to move the needle on the KPIs in their customer journey. We even did a survey a while back of e-commerce leaders. And we saw that e-commerce managers, marketers, 75% of them have tools and data at their just disposal, but they still struggle to, to put it all together to act on their customer journey.
Nadav: They have a hard time maintaining that data stack and that marketing stack. They have to work with a bunch of different functions in their organization. Sometimes they’re not always aligned in priorities. It takes a long time. And even when those things are set up, those tools kind of work in silos.
Nadav: They don’t roar in the same direction. They’re all roar in a different direction. So it’s really hard to align those tools around their segments and the messaging, and it creates problems. It creates a very hard experience in actually moving KPIs in the direction that you wanna move.
Nadav: And then the other set of problems is what every e-commerce manager or whatever marketer at an e-commerce company wants to do, which is improve conversion rates, decrease abandonment rates improve their acquisition efficiency and spend. Create brand loyalty and get people engaged in coming back.
Nadav: And what do you do? What are the tactics that you use? What’s the data that you use? What are the segments that you use to move those KPIs in the right direction? And beyond that there’s a slew of other problems, right? So there’s privacy issues now with GDPR coming up or GDPR existing and the cookieless world coming up and and issues around all of that which makes it difficult to use the data that we’ve all been used in using there’s testing issues.
Nadav: And I think pretty ubiquitous around every e-commerce brand is there’s a blind spots in the customer journey. So we don’t know what we don’t know that’s going on in the customer journey. It’s hard for us to see what our customers see within the journey.
Brent: Yeah. So I think you the two points are the two main points you talked about the moving, the KPIs, improving conversion, things like that.
Brent: The first part of that is there is a myriad of data. And how can you help your marketing professional or marketing manager harness some of that data and put it into a place where you can actually do something with it.
Nadav: So that’s why we created at Namogoo, why we created something called we’re calling the customer journey operating system.
Nadav: And the way you can think about it is if you think about your computer, you’ve got a bunch of apps on there. But you really couldn’t use them and take advantage of them. If you didn’t have an operating system, it would just, you’d have to know the code, or know which code to go to, or it’d be very difficult and complex.
Nadav: And that’s why, what’s why window Microsoft and Apple, they created operating systems. So you can have one place to go and you can. Use all your different apps, right? So that’s, if you think about the customer journey, it’s very similar, both whether you’re thinking about the different data points that you need to use and all the different tools that you want to use across analytics tools and personalization tools and customer market, customer communication tools, and all these different tools that exist in silos.
Nadav: You want one place to go where you can activate all these different things. So that’s what customer it is what customer journey operating system does. It. It brings in all these, all the data points, all the events and segments that you as an e-commerce manager has have on your site. It standardizes the data for you.
Nadav: So it’s all defined in the same place and it lets you activate those different data points across your different tools, whether within. CGOS which is what we call customer attorney operating system, or across your own tools. So whether it’s Google ads or Facebook ads or something like a dynamic yield you can use your tools with the data that’s already centralized and standardized within CGOS.
Nadav: And that data is also based on, like I said, Namogoo’s experience with eCommerce, right? So these data points are proprietary data points that are pretty unique, right? So there are things like your shopper that comes to your site. What device are they using? What’s the, what’s their internet connection.
Nadav: What’s their device speed strength. Do they have shopping extensions like honey or Amazon shopping, Simpsons built into their browser? So a lot of these things that we usually don’t think about when we’re thinking about conversion and engagement that we found are actually really important to understand what the customer intent is.
Nadav: The shopper intent is whether they intend on buying or they intend on abandoning and taking action on those things. So we’ve built. All these data points based on our huge network of 1.2 billion unique users that create indications of intent of the shoppers. So basically we’ve created an operating system that is one source of truth for your data points.
Nadav: So your segments, your events, your attribute. You can grab them immediately from CGOS without the need of, to talk to a developer or an analyst or any. So you, as a marketer you implement this tag on your site and you get all those things prepopulated, and you can use them across your tools. And on top of that, we’ve also got AI, which bubbles up different insights for you.
Nadav: Whether they’re correlations between data points and KPIs, or there’re interesting things that are happening within your sites data that we kind of pinpoint for you. So I think to your question it’s a long winded way of getting to your question. We make. Working on that data and moving the needle and understanding what’s important and working across your tools much easier than it was before and much more impactful.
Nadav: So you can actually see the things that really make a difference for understanding when a user is intending on purchasing or when a user is intending on abandoning or anything else that you’d like to know about your shoppers.
Brent: Yeah, that’s fascinating. Even digging into the extensions that they may have in their browser.
Brent: If you were looking at the customer and you wanna know, or you wanna personalize their journey, how do you balance between. Being a little bit too personal to just being anonymously personal. So we talk about the runner example, that this person’s a runner. You give them a group of runner things rather than giving them specific things that are so to them that they’re like, wow, this they’re like watching me.
Nadav: I think that’s something that we at Namogoo were very aware of. All of the data points that we include in in CGOS they’re all cookieless, non PII, so they’re all GDPR compliant. So what does that mean? It means that the data points that we take are not things that are considered infractions of any privacy laws.
Nadav: And it’s all aggregated, right? So I can create these segments based on these data points that are an aggregated to an aggregated point. So it doesn’t become. Doesn’t become like things that I’m showing you like, oh, Hey Brent, this is the exact thing that I know that you like, the color blue and that you’re a football fan or or something like that.
Nadav: So here’s the team that you like and the blue shoe that you want. It’s a lot it’s aggregated to that. So it’s personalized and it helps conversion. But it’s also still mindful of privacy laws and the general feeling of a shopper that they’re not being followed by a big brother type.
Brent: If you’re a marketer, do you want to rely more on the journey platform to bubble down those those segments? Or do you want to have some of your segments come up because you’ve relied on them over time.
Nadav: so I think it’s a two way street, right? So the beautiful thing here is that you can actually, with CGOS you can import your existing segments from your tool, right?
Nadav: So if you have your tools in Facebook ads, or in your, a analytics tool like Adobe or anything, any other tool that you are working with, you can import those segments into CGOS and then you can export them into your other tools. If you want to. Or you can take these pre-populated proprietary data points.
Nadav: Explore what’s going on with them create correlations with other data points, create new segments and then push them out into your tools. So basically you can both use the ones that you know, or are successful for you, and you can use them as they are across your tools, right?
Nadav: Create that standardization across your tools, or you can use our AI and the things that we pinpoint for you or the things that you find yourself as you explore the data and export it into your different tools.
Brent: And do you think that a lot of times marketers get caught up or get caught in what they’ve had in the past?
Brent: And let’s just continue with that without analyzing, looking, what is new out there and taking some of that new data in and maybe creating new segments.
Nadav: Definitely. I think it’s, I, as a marketer can say that I’ve, I’ve fallen into that. I’ve got my same my same segments that I’ve always created based on data points that I’ve always used.
Nadav: And I try to use them again and again. And then the problem with that can be, trying the same thing over and over again, without working. Is usually not gonna be successful. And also trying to share these segments across tools is also usually unsuccessful because you have to redefine them and they’re defined differently across your tools.
Nadav: So I think both having a tool that kind of pinpoints for you, the interesting things that are happening gives you points of data that are new, that you haven’t used before. And. A company like the Namogoo with the massive network that it has knows are impactful for e-commerce brands.
Nadav: And then being able to use that in a standardized way across your tools is can be extremely impactful.
Brent: Do you have an anonymous example that you can share about a merchant who found something that was surprising that they wouldn’t have normally have discovered if they were just using their automated marketing platform, that doesn’t track all the different things.
Brent: Cause I can see how, if you’re not putting everything into one big bucket or at least tracking everything holistically, how you could really miss out on certain parts of that data coming through.
Nadav: Yeah I can think of, there’s a few example. I’m trying to think about which one would be probably the best one to use.
Nadav: I think one of the data points, one of the interesting data points that we have is does the visitor have ad blocker on, right? And AdBlockers can be a pain for marketers for a lot of different reasons. One can be, you can be targeting your campaign at these you can be targeting like a Google ads campaign.
Nadav: Or whatever type of ad campaign at shoppers with a, with an ad blocker. And then you’re basically spending money on somebody who’s never gonna see your ad, or you’re running AB tests on ad and that kind of muddies up your data. So we’ve had customers, vendors sorry merchants out there that, that have used that data point to block out those ad blocker, shoppers and improve their spend efficiency, right?
Nadav: Their acquisition efficiency, or to improve their AB testing ability. And that same goes, another data point that we have is is the user in incognito mode. So that, that can be also very, that can tell you a lot about that user. That user is interested in privacy. They don’t wanna maybe they don’t want to answer all kinds of questions that you want to ask them.
Nadav: So you might want to change the way you have forms for them or the different type of messaging that you show. Another type of data point that we have is is is a weather data point. This is the shopper in the general area where they are like, what’s the weather.
Nadav: And we found that different for different products. The weather can affect their conversion rate. So you can see in real time, by the way, all the data points are in real time. And they perform in real time what the weather is like for that shopper and provide them with a different offering.
Nadav: So if you’re selling hats and you know that it’s sunny, then maybe that’s the time to create ads for your hats at that time. Or if you know that there’s rain. Maybe that’s a time to offer free shipping or a free delivery if you’re sending out food, maybe people don’t wanna leave the house.
Nadav: So these things will let you do a lot of personalization in real time with data points that I in, in the research that we’ve done is not something that most marketers use.
Brent: Yeah. That is really good though. Just jumping back into ulus and maybe the iOS 14. Privacy, things that have come up, it sounds like a lot of the things that you’re doing are naturally things that aren’t gonna be tied directly to some user’s account.
Brent: So you can anonymize this quite a bit, talk about the challenges that now merchants have, who say relied on Facebook ads for their for all their income and how that has really been hindered through some of the changes in privacy that have happened.
Nadav: Yeah. So I, as we all know, that’s been a huge challenge for marketers.
Nadav: And I think we’re going towards a world where cookies become less and less available, for across different platforms, whether it’s Facebook or anything else. So it’s becoming harder and harder to personalize messaging and ads and even the actual, user experience on your own. Using the traditional means that we’ve always used as marketers or e-commerce managers.
Nadav: And that’s really why one of the reasons we created this solution is we have the ability to, to both anonymize and aggregate our data. And it’s all cookieless, right? It’s all, we don’t use cookies. It’s all session based data that, that is completely in line with GDPR and privacy regulations.
Brent: Just as a privacy thing though, for abandoned carts, in order for you to know that someone has abandoned a cart, they have to be logged in, you have to know something about them to be able to target them, to tell them, Hey, this was in your cart or can you know that they’ve come back again?
Nadav: That’s a great question.
Nadav: In our product that still works if you are anonymous. So for, in most, I think in most solutions, yes, you need to know that they’re registered or you need to know who they are and collect that personal data in our solution that, because it’s session based. It’s anonymous again.
Nadav: Now if that user is registered, obviously that’s that you’re probably gonna have that data and you can, by the way, you can import that data into CGOS. If you choose to, if you are a vendor, if you’re a merchant and you’re one of our customers and you want to import that the data that you have, that personal data that you have into CGOS that’s up to you, it’s completely customizable.
Nadav: But the data that we provide that’s, autopopulated within CGOS none of that is, is it’s all cookieless. It’s all anonymized. And we can, because it’s session based, we can see things like cart abandonment, even if you’re not registered.
Brent: right. And you can target them again when they come back to your site.
Brent: Yeah. Okay. Do you see, I think I see Apple pushing towards this really really private world and maybe Google going the other way. Is there, do you see trends from the big tech companies wanting to push one way or the other.
Nadav: I think everybody’s going in this direction. I think Apple and Google are setting the kind of setting the scene.
Nadav: And I don’t, I personally don’t see anybody going in a different direction and even the and. And I think it’s a, for the world, it’s a good thing, right? Nobody even we e-commerce even we marketers and e-commerce professionals, we don’t wanna be tracked either. And nobody wants to feel like they’re being tracked on a personal level.
Nadav: And that’s why I think solutions that aggregate. And provide you the ability to personalize without kind of infracting on people’s privacy or GDPR regulations is really important. And it’s something that’s gonna become more and more important as the years go by and as, as vendors like Apple and and Google become more and more privacy focused.
Brent: Do you think there’s a way of ever getting around the fact that you’ve looked at, let’s say a running shoe store and then for the next two weeks, all you get is targeted display ads for running shoe stores, or for myself, I get umpteen million Adobe ads because I’m on the Adobe website. .
Nadav: Yeah, I get the same thing.
Nadav: I’ve got I’ve as a product marketer. I do a lot of competitive research and then I get followed around by every competitor that we have get, I get their ads. I think as cookies become less and less available, that’s probably gonna happen less but there’ll probably be different solutions that are I assume less obtrusive to your into your privacy, right?
Nadav: So there’ll probably be different solutions that are aggregated and put you into different groups that kind of try to predict whether you belong to a group that is going to convert for brand X and brand y. But it’ll probably be a little less intrusive than it is right now. Is there a way to get around it?
Nadav: Yeah. If we use, if you use incognito mode in everything you do if you don’t use WhatsApp and and you stay off that kind of platform, that probably is gonna, you’re probably gonna get targeted a little bit less. But today in like a world with cookies, it’s still gonna happen,
Brent: yeah, and I guess I was going down the path with this question to lead into, is there a better customer journey or does a customer journey platform in general kind of alert merchants to say, Hey, dial down the creepiness factor.
Nadav: I think it does allow it, so it allows it allows you to be efficient with your target.
Nadav: It allows you to actually give your shoppers a personalized and relevant experience. That’s better within their customer journey. It allows you to remove blockers from your customer journey, which is a huge problem for a lot of vendors without, yeah, without being like super privacy creepy, without following people around with. All over the place, but still targeting them when it’s relevant. A lot of times, even with the way things are now with a lot of cookies the targeting that you get just doesn’t seem relevant, right? Like it’s not at the right time.
Nadav: It’s not like it doesn’t talk to really, to the, to what you really want. It’s just dumb and rule based, it’s oh, you visited our site. So now you’re gonna get this ad for the next 150 years wherever you go which is inefficient for everybody, like the customer ends up hating it, cuz they, they get inundated with ads that aren’t relevant for them.
Nadav: And for you, the merchant, you’re just spending a lot of time on hands. And that’s why solutions AI based solutions like ours. They we have a prediction engine that can predict when a shopper want intends on purchasing when they intend on abandoning. And you can create different segments based on the different data points that we do that make it really smart.
Nadav: And you can target in real time. Shoppers or prospective shoppers with targeted ads that make sense for them at the time, instead of the blackening their sky with with ads wherever they go.
Brent: What if you had some advice to give to a smaller merchant, even as they move into maybe medium size merchants, how would you tell them to start looking at or analyzing their customer journey?
Nadav: I think the important part is understanding first of all, understanding, like what are the KPIs that are really important to you, right? What’s the there’s, there are vanity KPIs and there are important, there are KPIs that are really important to you. What are the things that are really affecting your bottom line?
Nadav: Is it conversion rate? Is it average order size? Is it abandonment rate, like where what’s the thing that’s impacting you the most? And where are you? Where do you find weakness? Like where are there big drop offs? Where is there a number that’s lower than you would’ve expected it to be?
Nadav: Try to see your customer journey, both based on those KPIs and from your customer’s eyes. So sometimes when we see the journey from our customer’s eyes, we discover things that we wouldn’t see as in our day to day. Are there blockers there? Are there distractions are there things that are affecting them that we wouldn’t think of in the day to day?
Nadav: And try to act on those things. In real time. So when a customer is facing a problem when they have when they’re, when they intend to do something that, that is either positive or negative, you can find a way to act on that. An example of that for us at Namogoo is another tool that we’ve that we’ve developed.
Nadav: It’s called intent based promotions is a tool that knows to present promotions, to shopper. Based on their intent to their probability of acquisition or probability of abandonment. So if we see somebody that has a high probability of abandonment, maybe at that point, we’ll show them a promotion of X percent off, or if we see somebody that has a high probability to, for, to, to purchase, then we might show them. A lower promotion, or we might not show them a promotion at all. Even if there’s, in other cases, you’d have a site wide promotion that they see. So solutions like that kind of save you margins.
Nadav: Aren’t like a one size fits all solution. I think that makes sense for mid market in smaller brands, right? Because it really helps you be efficient. And get the most out of each shopper that comes to your site. .
Brent: How about the idea of reducing friction across the entire journey?
Brent: How I, how much importance do you put on that?
Nadav: That’s BA that’s basically how we started at NA mobile. The original product that we developed was something called the customer hijacking prevention. And that was there’s something called ad injections that come into e-commerce sites.
Nadav: It’s unauthorized ads from competitors or from other brands. And sometimes they. They’ll be attractive enough to take your customers off of your customer journey and take into their own customer journey. So that’s how we started in identifying those things and blocking them where needed.
Nadav: And we’ve developed that into newer and and a broader use cases. Right? So one of the things that I’ve already mentioned is shopper extensions. So shopper extensions can be very useful for you as emergent or they can do things that you don’t want them to do, they can provide coupons or discounts where you don’t want them to provide coupons or discounts or to shoppers that you wouldn’t want them to get discounts, or it can do comparisons to your competitors and funnel your customers to other sites.
Nadav: So these are all things that we’ve been very focused on throughout our history. and we know for fact that it affects a lot of e-commerce brands. And there’s a lot that you can do. You, one of the first things is identifying these things that are happening in your customer journey. And then you can fight back.
Nadav: You can either block them. Or you can analyze when it’s actually good for you and when it’s not good for you and pick and choose the places you block, or you can do something active and engage with promotions that are personalized or messaging that’s personalized. And there’s a lot of different ways that you can interact and with your shoppers to overcome these blockers and these things that are distracting within your customer journey.
Nadav: And there’s a lot of distractions in the customer journey for, I think almost every. .
Brent: Yeah, that’s amazing. NAA, thank you. Today for this has been a great journey to go through in 30 minutes. At the end of every podcast to give our guests a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug.
Brent: What would you like to plug
Nadav: today? Yeah, I think I’d like to plug obviously Namogoo and and our platform I mean for if it isn’t clear from from everything I’ve talked about until now, Namogoo is a digital journey continuity platform, and it helps currently over a thousand brands shape their customer journey.
Nadav: And what we do is we make each customer journey fit each and every shopper’s needs. And if all of that has been interesting, whether it’s our customer hijacking prevention, Product our intent based promotion product or our customer journey operating system, which basically provides the underlying infrastructure for e-commerce brands to power their customer journeys in real time.
Nadav: If any of that is interesting to any of our listening listeners and please visit Namogoo. That’s N A M O G O O and learn more and we’ll be happy to talk to you and let you know about our solutions.
Brent: All right. First thing then, where did the name Namogoo come from?
Nadav: That’s actually, I actually recently found out so Namogoo is, comes from a Hebrew word. Namogoo basically means in Hebrew is a plural of they went away, they disappeared. So basically the solution was for your shoppers, that disappeared because they were taking away because of ad injections or because of shopper extensions and things like that.
Nadav: They went away. They disappeared to your competitors. So that’s the word in Hebrews it’s Namogoo.
Brent: That’s great. And what is the best size merchant then? What would you like to speak to anybody? Or is there a good fit for your platform?
Nadav: Yeah we speak to SMBs. All the way up to enterprise customers.
Nadav: If you’re, if you’re a very small brand it, the solution you might not have as much value from the brand because you might not see as much of these interruptions or these things that are coming up. But as, but if you’ve grown, you’re already like an SMB, you have some activity on your site, you have some orders, things like that around a thousand orders, a month.
Nadav: Then you can already start to see value from these products. And we’d be happy to talk to you.
Brent: Yeah. And I always say in marketing, you don’t get any good marketing until you have some data to analyze, to see what exactly that’s gonna happen. So you can always speculate, but having actual data and volume, there is always a great great thing
Nadav: to have.
Nadav: Yeah. Yeah. Our data is based both on our, like I mentioned, our huge network of 1.2 billion unique users, but also it. As it’s implemented on your site and the more data you have, obviously the faster it learns and the more accurate it becomes.
Brent: Nadav thank you so much for being here. Thanks for staying up late.
Brent: And and coming on the show today and I appreciate it. Thank you.
Nadav: Thank you so much, Brent. And thanks everybody for listening.
Subscriptions are for everyone and merchants need to examine their catalogs and learn what they can be selling constantly month over month. We interview Evan Padgett with Stealth Venture Labs and learn about subscription commerce. Even is a tenured eCommerce executive dedicated to driving performance and growth in fluid landscapes with nearly 20 years of operating and marketing subscription commerce businesses.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Evan Paget. He is the C O of Stealth venture labs. Evan, go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you’re doing on a day to day basis and maybe one of your passions in life.
Evan: All right. Thanks, Brent. So Evan Paget, Stealth venture labs chief operating officer here.
Evan: Hitting my 20th year in the industry this year, actually. And pretty much the entire time inside of subscription commerce companies or here at Stealth overseeing the acquisition marketing for subscription commerce companies largely. Been around the recurring revenue model for a long time.
Evan: I spent a lot of time in recurring revenue models in women’s fashion running brands, like just fab and shoe dazzle. With unique sort of membership models there and a stint as the chief marketing officer at a company called thrive market online grocery company mixing the the model of annual membership and, really awesome club prices for organics and non GMO, really healthy foods.
Evan: And then here at Stealth, really just running and building this company, we’ve had an awesome run building up a marketing agency focused on. A lot of the team here coming from vertical inside of brands and we’ve just had subscription commerce brands gravitate towards us. They also tend to do really well in acquisitions.
Evan: My job is pretty much managing the entire company bringing in the team, making sure that with a lot of our bigger clients at the higher level strategies are sound and being met and channel expansion, everything like that operations you name it. I’ve seen it all at this point.
Evan: And that’s what we do here at Stealth have a good time doing it.
Brent: I’m excited about subscriptions. I think that subscriptions at all agencies should be a practice. We’re gonna learn today how much it helps to drive revenue for merchants. And I think that subscriptions should be the basis for a lot of how merchants are gonna grow their business and help them create better ROI on every one of their products.
Brent: And so maybe dive into what platforms you’re looking at and and how you’re helping to enable subscriptions.
Evan: What I tell people about subscription commerce and how you’ll get this question just generally, how do you, I jump into subscription commerce. Few things come to mind.
Evan: One, you have to create a technology or work with a technology. So Shopify has several different plugins, personally biased towards recharge as a great option for most subscription type platforms. When I say most meaning a routine monthly billing and shipping a product or some kind of or access to a product
Evan: covers that really well, but there are sophisticated subscriptions that exist out there that could be based off of triggers or different bespoke, timings, or variable pricing subscriptions. That maybe you have parts of recharge. You need a little bit more custom work or there’s other subscription technologies out there to jump in, but the beauty of subscription, and you might hear me say this and I’ll switch back and forth between the terminology here, subscription and broadly speaking, creating a recurring revenue stream is actually the goal. Subscription is a recurring revenue stream.
Evan: But it’s also not necessarily exclusively depending on your product, the end game, meaning you might have a service fee, that’s a subscription. You might have a subscription that is for exclusive access, or if you are a scarcity type commerce company, meaning you have rare things, you only get 50 of them in stock.
Evan: And you wanna say. Paying members get an hour head start, right? That’s a recurring revenue model as well. So a lot of that I’ll switch, my terminology between saying subscription or recurring revenue model, but the point being the beauty of a subscription model and what you’re trying to get to is predictable revenue over time.
Evan: And it’s basically a machine that allows you to have with really good accuracy. Predictability in your business cash flow management of your business. And usually not always, but usually higher lifetime values of customers for you to be able to go out and attract more customers with acquisition marketing, the one who can pay more for a customer.
Evan: And has a better product can usually win them. There’s a lot to unpack there, as I look at it once you’ve determined a technology, there’s a lot of them out there. You need to be thinking about what your recurring revenue model’s gonna bring to the customer. And I can elaborate on that some more.
Evan: What you’re looking for, is a few is like five key things. Your subscription’s gotta have five key things that, that pretty much help it be successful. One passion audience meaning a subscription and recurring revenue model establishes a relationship between a company and a brand.
Evan: And that passion goes beyond something transactional. You really gotta nurture that relationship. You gotta communicate with them about their package, their tracking their shipment, why they’re buying what they’re buying and what it stands for. Doesn’t have to be cost driven, but it needs to be something that sort of shows the convenience or shows the value it brings to their life.
Evan: So that’s one thing. Ideally, the number two thing is you want that audience to be as large as possible best example I could give. And we work with a lot of these. Our meal at home companies, everyone’s gotta eat. Therefore you’re addressable audience, pretty much everybody on the internet at any given point in time.
Evan: If you have a really passionate audience, but they’re very niche. if it’s too small, they can be very hard to find any cost effective manner when it comes to acquisition marketing. But not to say you can’t find them, but then at a certain point you hit. Terminal velocity a little bit more quickly.
Evan: So that’s number two. That’s the second thing you need is that audience to be large? Number three is this is the hardest one I think is having a unique value prop. You can make a, me too company, right? You can do a copycat of somebody else doing something that you like, maybe. Maybe you got a better supply chain or maybe you own the factory, or maybe, there’s things like that could give you a little bit of a competitive advantage, but seeking the thing that makes you different and using that as a claim or as something that you could put in front of customers is critical because when they’re bouncing you against your closest competitor, if you guys are copycats of each other, down from your claims, your pricing and everything, Then you gotta coin flip chance of winning that customer and it’s gonna come down to the other things like reviews or credibility or how long you’ve been in business.
Evan: So finding a unique value proposition that, that says we do this, or we are unique because it’s our own brand and we’re not reselling third party product. I don’t know what the answer is there, but finding something that’s unique to you, that’s number three. With that uniqueness, good unit economics.
Evan: This question comes up a lot. What do I need to be doing? What’s my margin need to be when I’m doing subscription on the internet. And I always say start at 50%, 50% gross profit margins delivered to the customer before you’re before acquisition marketing, before your team, before all that, just shipping the product from your fulfillment center.
Evan: Cost of goods with shipping, with the actual product itself, to the customer’s door, 50% gross profit margins at that level, give you room to grow and scale and throw money into advertising lower than that, you’re gonna find that you struggle to scale your advertising because your CAC, the fluctuations in CAC can lead you into really challenging territory when it comes to your overall bottom line margin.
Evan: And EBIDA And it’s also gonna be difficult to scale because media prices tend to only go up over time, as we’ve all seen those number four, the economics and last piece that you were looking for when you’re building out a subscription, is it needs to solve a pain of some kind. It needs to solve something for the end user to make their life better.
Evan: Meaning I’ll use meal at home again, cause again, I have a lot of experience and this vertical. Meal at home. It’s not just food delivered to your doorstep. That’s a feature. A benefit is you’re now not having to spend time going to the grocery store. You’re not having to fight about what we’re eating for dinner tonight because the food your meals were delivered for the next several days.
Evan: And you’re picking which one you wanna do. You are now creating less gravity for that consumer because they now have something delivered conveniently to their door. And that is now releasing them from a pain that they were feeling before. And that’s that’s one example, but you gotta find a reason why your product alleviates a pain from the consumer.
Evan: And once you do that, you have all five of those things. You gotta really great. Subscription model, I think.
Brent: Those are five great points. So just keying on the number four, you said having that economics on there A lot of subscription models offer a discount on top of just getting that subscription as an incentive to get it a subscription.
Brent: Do you feel as though there’s some built in economics in there for that guaranteed revenue over time where you might want to at some point dip down to some level. I’m not arguing about the 50%. I think that’s a great value. But having that revenue maybe cut into in the beginning where later on, you might get some more margin and then secondly the idea of a recurring service, a long time ago, we did some work for a music company and we did fan subscriptions.
Brent: So from that standpoint the margin is essentially a hundred percent, there’s no real cost to it. It’s just trying to get money or a Patreon or something like that, where you have a subscription. All you’re trying to do is get revenue for something.
Evan: Yeah. So the the beauty of subscription and recurring revenue models is I’ve worked in subscription companies where the first order that goes out the door with cost of goods.
Evan: And this is an extreme version is actually negative. We’re losing money. We’re losing money by shipping to the customer on that first order, even before customer acquisition cost, I’ve been in a major subscription company where that is how we started. Our goal was like, Hey, we’re breaking
Evan: even before customer re acquisition cost and team and everything just breaking even that was success for us. But the reason why as subscription, you’re bouncing against an LTV you are buying and optimizing your media against an LTV. And that allows you to be, hypercompetitive even unbelievably competitive on that first order, which is very common.
Evan: Huge discounts on subscriptions on that first order. I don’t think that’s a bad thing because look, you need to get people to take a leap of faith on you. If you’re consumable, if you’re something that you eat, if you’re something that you drink they wanna try you out first, before they jump into could be a year or more of commitment.
Evan: You’re buying against an LTV. And when you’re doing that, you’re looking at, Hey, my average customer. And you model this, we’ll probably talk about this in a minute on the on the financial and how to build up a subscription company, but you have a, typically a forecast model looking at your attrition, your revenue, everything over time, and you come up with an LTV and let’s just say for hypothetical sake that your LTV is $400.
Evan: I would always say, Hey look, do you wanna maintain. A LTV to CAGS ratio of four to one for conservative scale and three to one for aggressive scale, meaning you, you trying to lean into that. You’re not maximizing your EBITDA or bottom line profits. You’re reinvesting heavily back in an increase your media spend.
Evan: And that’s with 50% margin. If your margin’s less, that ratio’s gotta be better, but at a 50% margin, you’re basically saying on $400, LTVs. I’m gonna make $200. I could spend $100 to make $200, and then you have team and everything after that. But at least from there you get your ROI. If you’re an e-commerce company without a subscription element attached to it, you have to be getting that ROI on that first order.
Evan: Otherwise you are just literally burning money and you’re waiting for them to come back. And you might know that customer comes back and purchases three times throughout the year. But sometimes that’s two, sometimes that’s four. And you don’t know when they’re coming back, subscription creates predictability there.
Evan: And you’re not just focused on making sure that oh, I got a customer for a hundred dollars and they bought $400. That’s how it is when you’re doing e-commerce. We do a subscription commerce. You can draw that out a little bit, and that allows you to be competitive in the advertising space and also make sure that you’re
Evan: controlling your downstream revenue.
Brent: You mentioned the media spend, what out of a percentage of that would be your typical media spend or would be a recommended media spend and let’s just let’s compare to the subscription. Like you’d probably wanna spend a little bit more on media for subscriptions as compared to a one time buy type of product.
Evan: Yeah, I think the generally yes. And I think it’s more about the scalability subscriptions, the compounding effect of revenue over time with subscriptions allows you to have money, to invest to, reinvest into marketing. When you are an e-commerce company without a recurring revenue model behind it.
Evan: You might have months where your ROAS is sitting very comfortably at five or six or seven. And then you’re saving some of that for months when that ROAS is two, three or four. And you’re and then your media availability becomes really touchy, but with LTVs generally being hired with recurring revenue models.
Evan: That kind of gives you the ability to. Can continue to create a sustainable growth trajectory as long as your CAC stays within a bigger range and also you can really just hone in on understanding your customer’s needs and desires and improve your product over time. Where. Most e-commerce models,
Evan: they just have a position in the marketplace I’m and I’m not do on e-commerce models. Okay. There’s still a lot of them that exist and they do really well. I say you really want to unlock revenue potential for your company is find a recurring model to go along or be the primary offer and have regular, e-commerce to go along with it, but just the ability to reinvest into media and control your numbers more holistically predictably.
Evan: That’s the big benefit of recurring revenue models on top of, I, generally I’d say higher LTVs customer LTVs, et cetera. The beauty of it is it’s if you do it right there aren’t any surprises with e-commerce. I find that you could be surprised a lot and those surprises are usually not positive ones.
Brent: It’s just a little bit on surprises. The supply chain issue, especially in the subscription market can be very painful, especially if you’ve had a standard product that you’re selling over and over again. What do you recommend to merchants who have something and suddenly it’s outta stock for a month?
Brent: Does that lead buyers to have to look somewhere else? Or do you just try to source something that may be more expensive and lose money for that month?
Evan: Yeah. This is probably the hardest part about subscription. And it, the hard part is understanding and seeing the cliff coming because usually the beauty of a eCommerce company non subscription is if your inventory is low for the month, you could just pull back your marketing and maybe your website isn’t as fun.
Evan: Are you. You come up with another angle to get people excited. So they’re not coming back to your website and being like, oh wow, this the merchandise this month is not interesting. But you’re not as primed to lose money. You might lose momentum if you’re an e-commerce company, subscription commerce, though, here’s the rub you usually know pretty far in advance.
Evan: If you’re, unless even if you’re manufacturing your own stuff, running your own supply chain, you’re ordering. Four to six months in advance, unless you have manufacturing here in the United States or locally to your country, wherever you’re at. If you’re ordering from anywhere overseas, you’re ordering four to six months
Evan: usually more even in advance. So you’re tying up your working capital in that product. You gotta give yourself a certain amount of buffer, cuz the earlier you procure your inventory, the more working capital you have just sitting on your shelves in a warehouse, which is important when you’re managing your cash flow.
Evan: The other side of that, if you’re cutting it way too close to being like, oh, it’s gonna arrive in the warehouse on the third and we’re selling it on the seventh. All it takes is a little jam up in the port and all of a sudden you’re like, yeah, Hey we know we’re supposed to deliver and unload on the third.
Evan: They’re not gonna get to it until the 26th of next month. It’s Okey dokey. So when you’re a subscription company, you now have to get ahead of that. And you’re doing something like sourcing product locally. If you have a, the ability to get inventory, if you’re in fashion, for example, you can always maybe find.
Evan: More fashion products that you could throw in your box, but if you’re your own supply chain, if you’re your own first party brand, you might just be low on inventory that month, which means you’re gonna have a huge bump in attrition. You’re gonna have to convince your customers to stick around and say Hey, we have some problems here or you’re paying.
Evan: Exorbitant amounts of money to somehow get that date of the 23rd back down to the 15th. And you’re able to say, Hey guys, we just have shipping delays for a week, not a big deal. But you have to scramble. Now, you usually see that coming usually, meaning, if your boat leaves, from wherever it’s coming from on time or early you’re like, okay.
Evan: And I, maybe you build in buffer time look, we’re gonna get this in the warehouse. Gonna sit there for a. Then, maybe it sits there for two weeks instead of a month, you build in that buffer, but that comes at cost. It comes outta working capital cost, because guess what, they don’t let you get your inventory without paying for it.
Evan: So you have the ability to create cash flow models that answer these questions for you and give you the means to, to create alternatives. But. If you’re not planning. And if you don’t have these check downs between how to get my inventory, how to replace my inventory, what happens? I always like to say always think about what happens if a boat sinks and I’ve been in
Evan: that business and I’d had product that was important. That was on a boat that sank. What do you do? And what plan do you put a place to, to do that, between communicating with your customers, finding alternative product, trying to rush something from somewhere else who knows. But everything comes with a calculated and quantifiable cost and risk.
Evan: And you really have to think about that. The beauty of subscription is you usually see that coming. It’s usually not the last minute. You see the horizon of alright, 60 days from now, we’re really low on inventory. We can find things. We have to act quickly, but we can solve this problem.
Evan: But it’s expensive. It is expensive and you gotta be, you have to have rainy day funds for that.
Brent: Yeah, I think you keyed on two points there. The first one is you talked about the fashion business and maybe the box model. Compare that to just buying toilet paper where you want to get it every week or every month.
Brent: Actually maybe not even toilet paper, something a little more like coffee, let’s talk about coffee. Because somebody really likes some coffee and you need to fulfill that exact same thing month over month or week. Yeah. Week after week where a fashion you do have the option of of mixing and matching and taking
Brent: what you have that’s most popular, but also what you have in stock. When you’re looking at the strictly subscription call it the pantry business that another big platform uses how do you manage that? If somebody has something that they really want every month and then suddenly it’s gone.
Evan: Yeah. So depending on the timeframe, you have to do that one, one beautiful thing about subscription. If you’re selling the same product one thing you can do is slow down customer acquisition. If you’re paying I, if you’re doing advertising for customer acquisition and it’s the same product conceivably, coffee’s a good example.
Evan: Like your coffee starter box from the company you order from and your recurring subscription. They have the same, goods in them. And what you do is say, okay we’re gonna be short 5,000 units in two months from now or three months from now. What you do is slow down your customer acquisition cost to say, okay, we, I think we can pick up 3000 units.
Evan: We’re gonna get a little less customers. Now, those less customers I get now are also gonna be less customers later. So you work into the number that you. I think above all my opinion on this is do your best to not upset the customers that you have, the customers you’re going to get. You will get them later chasing customer acquisition,
Evan: and I have a big tirade on this one, is what ends up crippling most up and coming subscription companies and consumer packaged goods. A good example, a practical example outside the one I just gave right there. Your company, and let’s just say your customer acquisition costs $50. Okay. Keep it easy numbers.
Evan: And your payback on that, your media payback periods for most subscription companies. Usually around three months, if you have a healthy subscription, you’re getting fully paid back on your customer acquisition cost after about three months time let’s just say you’re spending $50,000 a month to get a thousand new customers a month.
Evan: That’s a again, easy numbers here. What that means in your company. If you have not done this analysis is you have $150,000 in working capital tied up in your media, right? 50,000 a month, three months until you’re getting a media payback. You are always having $150,000 in media working to, to keep your current pace.
Evan: What I see happen a lot of brands jump in, they have some tailwinds, good news. They’re C is lower. Awesome. They think they wanna dial it media. Hey, you know what? We got the cash spend a hundred grand this month. Sound good, everybody. We all feel good. Great. Guess what? A hundred grand a month,
Evan: for three months to maintain. Now you’ve doubled your working capital for media to $300,000. Somebody’s gotta come from somewhere. It comes off the balance sheet, but uhoh customer quality. Maybe you’re going a little too hard. Maybe they’re jumping on because you ran a buy one, get one promotion and it’s dropping customer quality.
Evan: Even though your CAC went down, your customer quality went down. Maybe you have a little bit higher first cycle churn. Now your media payback’s four months. Oh. Now instead of $150,000 on working capital you’ve created $400,000 in working capital to support your current media. Guess what you also did.
Evan: You bought more inventory because you got more customers that are gonna be coming in 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 months from now, from all the new subscriptions that you’re planning on getting that, and you’ve increased your media spend. So now you’ve committed more working capital to your product. and just because you saw tailwinds and you see an opportunity there, you’ve consumed 500, $800,000 of additional working capital out of your company.
Evan: And what happens if that boat sinks? What happens if your product’s just gonna show up late jams up in the port? No one’s fault necessarily. Can’t really avoid it sometimes. The truck carrying your product, got in an accident it’s delayed a week now. You’ve overextended your company
Evan: significantly. And that leads to people having to do distressed fundraising. They have to go out and get desperate bridge capital because their vendors still gotta get paid. Their teams still has to get paid. They have to still order more product down the road. And they’ve overextended themselves on their own working capital.
Evan: This all comes together with planning your subscription business well makes an elegant machine that is controllable. There’s several levers to do that, but being too aggressive when the grass is green could really end up jamming your business up in ways that and I think if you were to.
Evan: 10 subscription company operates successful ones say, sort of 50, a hundred million dollar plus businesses. They all have that story. Every single one of them has that. We went a little too hard and it blew up in our face. So that’s one thing I always tell people, like plan ahead, but don’t stretch too far because unless you’ve got
Evan: a rich family or rich uncle. That’ll just write you a check by asking them, you could end up significantly crippling your business because you cannot control the market conditions. You can’t necessarily control your competitors. You also can’t control the nature and volatility of a boat on the ocean.
Brent: yeah. That’s a great point. That brings up the question. How do you properly measure and forecast your subscriptions? Is there a model to that?
Evan: Yeah, proforma modeling, subscription waterfalls. These are terms that you usually hear a lot if you’re into the space, but it’s not very hard to do this.
Evan: It’s just a little bit complicated. Meaning there are a handful of key KPIs. You need to know one, your revenue, of course, revenue per box revenue per shipment, whatever that is for your, for every single cycle. And that cycle could be monthly every other month, every quarter annual. don’t really know, right?
Evan: Every business has its own revenue stream. And you need to be looking at, if I just say, if I use this the most rudimentary example of I’m a subscription box company that sends a box every month and it doesn’t matter what I’m sending in it, but just as go with that, you need to be looking at what is typically referred to as a churn water.
Evan: And another term you hear a lot in subscription is cohorts, and this is all very important. If you’re gonna go out and raise money on your subscription, these are the words that the investors love to hear and understand cohorts, cohort being typically defined as new customers. You get in a month or in a period of time, but typically a month, that’s a fixed number.
Evan: That number doesn’t change. You get a thousand customers this month. That is a fixed data point that never adjusts. You’re always gonna get a thousand new customers in April of 2022. And then by cycle usually month again. In this example, you’re looking at what’s called the churn waterfall and you’re applying churn percentages to each month.
Evan: So your a thousand customers after one month might be 800 customers. And then you apply, 20% drop off there. Then that 800 customers, it may lose 10% of that 800. So now it’s gonna drop to 710 customers you’re gonna lose or 720 customers. It’s gonna lose 80 customers. And that seven 20, maybe you apply another 10%.
Evan: And there’s I have a lot of experience on different types of models, but generally speaking, usually in that first cycle, typically the highest attrition, 20, 25% of all your subscribers gonna drop off. after that 10 to 15% on that second cycle on a monthly cycle. Then from there, you’re usually looking at about three to 5% per month.
Evan: If they stick with your product for three or four months, they’re not dropping off at high clips anymore. As long as you maintain quality service. Now, when you have all those customers and then you have the revenue attached to them, you can now plot your revenue over time, what are you gonna collect? You can also project your inventory demand over time, how much product you’re gonna be selling from that cohort.
Evan: And then you layer on multiple cohorts. So you build a model that says, okay, this is what our customers were in April. This is what they were in March. This is what they were in February. And then you get a final total from every single cohort of all right, I’m gonna. 4,000 boxes this month. And I know if I ship 4,000 boxes, I put three things in a box.
Evan: I need 12,000 units plus or minus for this month in demand plus new customers for that month. So maybe it’s 15,000, whatever your new customer rules are. Now you can track revenue, you could track product demand. You could track you could start applying customer service interactions for workforce.
Evan: That a every thousand boxes we ship out, we get 10 tickets, we have this math, right? So then you know that from sending out 10,000 boxes, I’m gonna get a hundred tickets. So then you know, how many customer service agents you need. Now you have your revenue planned up. Great. Awesome.
Evan: Now you gotta plan out your media. Media advertising. If you’re doing direct to consumer advertising on Facebook, Google, et cetera you’re balancing that with a new customer acquisition cost number. So spending $50,000 at $50 fully blended CAC means something at a thousand new customers. And you’re tracking that as media dollars spend over time.
Evan: You used that revenue model that I mentioned to derive an LTV all an LTV is. There’s different versions of LTV that people use. But, generally speaking, there’s two that make sense. You’re of your gross revenue per customer after discount. So just what you’re gross, getting from them, which is typically referred to as an LTV number.
Evan: And many of them apply their margins after that. So they’ll reduce if you have 50% March and it might say, Hey, my LTV is, $400, but my LTV after cost of goods is $200. All that does is really tell you what you’re dropping further down on your P and L sheet, right? So once you have all that, now you’re looking at trying to layer that into cash planning.
Evan: So this is the tricky part, managing your cash flow because cash is coming in when you’re selling product cash is going out for media pretty much real time, not unless you’re a gigantic. Media partner spending tens of millions a month. You’re not really getting terms with Facebook or anything like that.
Evan: You’re not able to get an invoice at the end of the month for Facebook. They’re not floating that you’re, they’re just hitting your card every thousand dollars you’re spending. But inventory there’s long lead on that and you gotta look out and say, okay, Hey, eight months from now, we need 20,000 units and I gotta buy those next month.
Evan: I gotta make sure I have cash for that. And where is that cash coming from? What happens if it’s a little tight, do I need to slow down my marketing? Maybe you do. You run those scenarios. You start having all of these numbers in place. It’s not an incredibly large set of numbers, but the primary numbers being, cohorted customers churn your revenue per cycle for those customers and your media spend.
Evan: And product demand, those five things. When your product’s gonna hit, you can work backwards and build a cash flow analysis you could build and understand all this from understanding your initial cash balance of what’s gonna go out. What’s coming in. And you do that. You can really manage a business again.
Evan: It sounds complicated. It’s really not. It’s just, you have to be planning far further in advance subscription you’re always looking forward. E-commerce you can find opportunities. I’ve, the drop ship, world’s the most prime example of this, but even just anyone else that’s been like, Hey.
Evan: I go buy a hundred thousand of these products right now at a great price. Let’s just sell ’em sweet. Let’s do it. Drop the cash for a hundred thousand units or something. You’ll spin up a website, do run some advertising. You try to make money off of that. And you close that chapter. Subscriptions just require.
Evan: It’s more like a locomotive down the you’re going down the tracks and you gotta keep it going. You gotta keep it rolling. You gotta pay attention to enough things. The moment you disregard a lever you can end up blowing something up and that’s not what you wanna do.
Brent: So we have about five minutes left today. If you were to give some nugget to a merchant and they would like to enter into subscriptions, or they would like to find some products that may be already in their catalog. how would you recommend they start to find that right product and start doing subscriptions.
Evan: Yeah, one thing I always say is just listen to your current customers. If you’re an e-commerce company, you already got a company rolling. And it is healthy. Maybe you’re doing five, $10 million a year in revenue, have some money on advertising, listen to your customers. They’ll tell you the things they want on a recurring basis.
Evan: They want to get access early. They want to get. Consumable product, if you sell that they wanna be part of a membership for some reason. That’s not everybody, you’re not gonna convert a hundred percent of your existing customers into it, but listen to your customers. If you already have some, if you’re coming into the market with subscription, I largely say, look at what solves a pain the most.
Evan: That’s the biggest one. What would be the thing that if you had it in your life or, everybody, had it in their. It would make their life easier. If it’s getting food delivered at home. If it’s getting toilet paper delivered at home, if it’s laundry services start there and see if you can build up and work backwards.
Evan: See if the economics works, not everything is meant to be in a recurring revenue model, but I do think that almost every business can create a part of their business that has a recurring revenue component to it. So doesn’t mean that, one of the questions I got asked, we put on the spot, which I thought was literally like mattress companies, right?
Evan: Like online mattress companies Purple like Casper, all them. How do you make a recurring revenue model out of that? I said, look like, yeah, then people don’t need mattresses very often, but would they pay more for, would they pay 50 year, $50 a year for no questions asked replacement? If something happens, maybe, but in that guarantee, the warranty of expensive goods is one of the oldest subscriptions that’s ever existed.
Evan: Could they get on a subscription for quarterly bedding? Like people have not a nice bed. If they were to get new bedding every quarter, that’s seasonally relevant. Again, not everybody would want that, but there’s some that would want that if they bought a bed from you, they want bedding, think about that.
Evan: But try to find something that solves the pain for the customer base that you’re going after. And ultimately that has the biggest applicable audience. If you can find pretty much adults, 24 and over to cater your product to, you can find a subscription stream there that will hit on all of those marks to end up solving a pain, have good economics, create a service and a relationship and, make people’s lives better.
Evan: That’s where I begin. And then on that. And then last piece be adaptable. Nobody gets it right on the first swing. You just, you really just don’t like every subscription brand that exists out there today. Right now, if they’ve been around for more than a year, probably year, maybe two years, they are different than when they started.
Evan: They have a different product line they’ve expanded, they’ve changed. They’ve pivoted their pricing, their service, their quality, all that stuff. Usually for the better know that it just don’t overthink about where you’re trying to get to. But if you see an opportunity, it will evolve with the company into what the market needs.
Brent: I think as everybody knows in the marketing world measure test, and then yep. Do it all over again to see how well it worked. And these are great opportunities that everybody has with every product in their. Online store or in, in retail store, whatever that thing is.
Brent: Like you said, with the mattress, there is opportunities for subscriptions across almost every product certainly is gonna be some that don’t apply. But if you look at what are the big box stores are doing, I think the add-on warranties and add-on products, and I the mattress pillows are a great example of how a mattress company would leverage the fact that somebody’s sleeping to the fact that you could brand a pillow that goes along with their mattress anyways. Absolutely. So yeah, this has been great, Evan. As I close out on every podcast, I give the guests a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like, what would you like to plug today?
Evan: I just say that, if you what I was talking about, curious about how to build out a subscription platform, reach out to me, evan@Stealthventurelabs.com or it’s just Stealth venture labs.com. And see what we’re up to see how we can help. Sometimes we advise sometimes we just jump in and run this business for you.
Evan: Also I’d like to say that we are building out. If you go to our website we have a fully functional 5 0 1 C three, which is really important to us. Something we call our impact lab. where we as a company built a 5 0 1 C three and built a product focused on teaching young entrepreneurs from really tough areas of the country, how to build and launch their own e-commerce business and actually fund with cash.
Evan: Their first $5,000 in media spend After we help them build a website and show ’em how to do all that. So something we’re really passionate about is a developing the entrepreneurial spirit and the bridge to get from an idea to an online presence. So something, if you’re ever interested in donating or helping and mentoring reach out to us about that as well, it said something really important
Brent: to us.
Brent: That’s awesome. Thank you so much. Evan Padgett from Stealth labs. Thank you so much today. And it’s been a pleasure having you on the show.
How do merchants transition from email to SMS? Osa Gaius walks us through some large issues around regulation and also issues around just understanding as a brand, and how to leverage SMS the right way. We talk about how to not make your consumers upset when you send them communications once or twice a week.
Osa strongly believes that great technology should empower people. This stems from the fact that he grew up in Nigeria with little exposure to computing. That experience has fueled his passion for elegant and useful software products. Osa is the CEO and founder of Parrot, a mobile payment platform bringing customers closer to the businesses they love.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk commerce today. I have Osa Gaius Osa, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you do day to day and one of your passions in life.
Osa: I’m the founder and CEO of Parrot.
Osa: We are a SMS payments platform that helps merchants collect money directly over text. I got started working at MailChimp and that’s where I really became familiar with e-commerce space. When I’m not working on Parrot and running the company, I spend most of my time making hip hop music and really hiking here in San Francisco.
Brent: That’s awesome. So today we’re gonna talk a little bit about texting and the importance of texting. Why don’t we dive into that? I know that I’ve worked a lot in emerging markets and texting is much more important than it is here.
Osa: Yeah. Yeah. Spot on. And that’s been my experience before starting Parrot.
Osa: Like I mentioned, I worked at mechi and while at MailChimp, I went back to Nigeria where I grew up as a kid. And that’s where I really got to see exactly what you’re describing, which is merchants and consumers in Africa and in Asia using texting as the primary way to communicate with each. But also to transact and buy and sell goods.
Osa: And so when I came back to the us, what I really tried to focus on was how do American merchants over the next 10 years transition from email to SMS and the biggest challenges there we found were, large issues around regulation and also issues around just understanding as a brand, how to leverage SMS the right way and not make your consumers very upset when you send them communications once or twice a week.
Brent: Yeah, I think you, you keyed in on a really good thing there making him upset because I think people are still well and Americans, anyways, I think C SMS is their private little zone. How do you get around that to help them feel comfortable with getting a SMS message?
Osa: Yeah, I think the biggest challenge that a lot of
Osa: merchants are gonna have when they try to text consumers, right? Their customers for the first time is making sure that they treat SMS as a sacred channel. I think how you just described it is perfect. A lot of consumers see it as a private space. They see it as a place where their friends and families can communicate with them.
Osa: They don’t see it as an email inbox where anyone in the world, including spamers and fishers and bad actors can get. SMS really feels like where I’m talking to my mom or where I’m talking to my best friend and having a random brand that I’ve never shopped at, or I don’t care about trying to get into my SMS conversation feels like an invasion of privacy.
Osa: It feels like someone’s bothering me. And so what we recommend for brands is think about how you would communicate if you had your best customer in front of you. Like not over an email, not over Instagram, but if you had them literally in front. What would you say to them? What would that conversation look like?
Osa: And we think that if brands start there and if you write down that conversation on a piece of paper and you text it to yourself as a merchant, that’s gonna radically change how you approach your SMS strategy. Because now you think about it as a person, communicating with a person rather than a brand shooting campaigns or dumping advertising into someone’s phone and the brands we work with when they do that, they’re able to leverage SMS in a radically different way, by starting from the human perspective.
Brent: Yeah, that’s a good point. I was on, I was involved in a CRM demo yesterday and it was it was more of a retail CRM. And SMS was a bigger part of that. I would say the only thing, they didn’t really do what I thought they could have done better was to separate out that sacred part of it.
Brent: They did add SMS, just like email. May, maybe you could dive into the differences between email and SMS and maybe some of the reasons around why email seems to be less popular.
Osa: Yeah. I think one of the biggest challenges of email is, when we started and when I came to America 20 years ago, It was pretty uncommon for businesses to email you.
Osa: It’s a few and far between maybe Amazon was one of the main merchants who would email you back then. But you fast forward 10 years and I’m, out of school I to start working and now there are so many companies like Melham constantly contact Klavio who just specialize in email.
Osa: And the real reason there as you called out is emails seen a massive rise, right? It’s the primary way that businesses choose to contact their customers both before and after they Purchas. And the challenge there has been email is non interactive. And so you’re really treating the email inbox, like a space for advertising, very similar to the actual physical mailbox in your home.
Osa: Like you just, you put stuff in there, businesses put stuff in there and they hope you look at it, it’s not really intended for you to respond to you or even to really interact with, and the challenge with SMS. one out of 10 emails get opened. So you, as a business can be cavalier about what you put in the email, because it really doesn’t matter to be honest, if only one out of 10, people will ever open it.
Osa: But with the challenge of SMS messages is nine out of 10. People will read a text message, you send them. And so while that may be exciting, because you can now put, a discount code in front of them or a sale in front of them, it can also be annoying because nine out of 10 people are gonna see that when they’re driving their kids to work or to school, or when they’re driving to.
Osa: And they have to feel like whatever you put in front of them is gonna be life changing or it’s gonna be exciting. It’s gonna make ’em feel like, Hey I really want to deal with this brand. I want to communicate with them or ideally I want to respond to them. And we think that’s the biggest challenge people are gonna have as they transition for email is.
Osa: Although email open rates are significantly declining. 10% compared to open rates or SMS, which are 90%. We think there’s a bigger challenge if you screw up SMS because a lot more people are gonna see it. And that’s something you, you can’t really recover from
Brent: that interactive portion of it,
Brent: do you equate that a little bit with how brands will go out on social media? Then they’ll put out a message. People respond to that message, but then the brand never responds back or they don’t interact with that message. Is that a danger that people have with texting that nobody’s gonna come back to them?
Brent: If they do
Osa: respond? Yeah, we think that’s a major issue that brands have to think about, if email was great because people knew they couldn’t respond, a lot of emails would come from no reply@brandx.com. No reply@nike.com. So consumers were trained to never interact. Whereas with social media, consumers feel like, yeah, if a brand posts something on TikTok, I should be able to comment.
Osa: And hopefully the brand will get back to me and say, they liked my comment. If I ask for, if I give some review or some feedback, or if I post some user generated content on social media, I expect the brand to engage with me and a lot of brands to your point, just ignore that, right?
Osa: They don’t have anyone to deal with it in the case of SMS. I think a lot of brands are saying if we can interact on social media, we definitely can’t interact over SMS. So let’s just ignore any responses. We get to our text messages and we think that’s a really bad mistake to make. Now you’re training consumers who are used to ignoring your emails to also ignore your text messages, because it’s not a conversation it’s just honestly spam.
Osa: And we think that the right way to approach it is to take a percentage, right? Maybe it’s 20, 30% of your customer care time. The time your support reps would spend on gorgeous or Zendesk, just like dealing with customer feedback and then put those people on SMS conversations, help them, learn how to respond to customers or engage with customers, especially your VIPs.
Osa: Over text, because those are the people who you want to be in a conversation with in real time, especially when you know, there’s an issue with their order when you want their feedback on something, or when you just wanna let them know about something very exciting that’s happening with your business.
Osa: We think that’s the right way to be thinking about SMS, as opposed to treating it like an email inbox where people can expect no responses.
Brent: Do you think some of the. So I think SMS is fairly common in the financial institutions, at least just to get updates and things like that, but there is no, there, I think they’re pretty explicit as well about saying you can’t reply to this.
Brent: You can reply to say stop, but otherwise this is just a tell you that something’s happening. Does that sort of cloud it for merchants who would like to use it more as an interactive channel?
Osa: Yeah, I think you raised a gray point around financial institutions. I think those. For me when I went to Nigeria and came back, what I realized was that the financial institutions in the us, particularly the credit card companies and the banks were using SMS the best way, in the sense that when something is wrong, when capital one, for instance needs you to confirm that you indeed trigger a payment on an e-commerce store somewhere or at your car dealership, they’re gonna send you a text and say, Brent, did you actually mean to make this purchase and you as a consumer have to respond one to that text message from bank of America or capital one.
Osa: And we think that’s one of the best examples of interactive transactional texting, right? Because it is a transaction, your bank needs to know whether or not they should treat that thousand dollars charges, fraud or not. Or whether that she let it just happen. And, you can continue on with your day and you’ll notice that when you do reply.
Osa: Yes. Yeah, it was me. I was the one buying the. They’ll always say, great, we’re gonna let the charge happen. Or we are gonna block that charge. Please try again, in five minutes or so. And we think that for a lot of brands, that’s the way to be thinking about, responses from your customers is when you’re texting them, you want them to be able to make something happen in the world.
Osa: By responding to you, whether that’s, getting points or store credit for responding to you with a review, whether that’s confirming yes, they do wanna buy something that was previously sold out. That’s we, that’s the way we think the branch of approaching this is treat it like you’re a bank.
Osa: Like it’s a sacred, very important moment. When you do text someone and they should be able to get value out of it by responding to you. If they can’t get value out of it, by responding to. It starts to feel like you’re bothering them anyway. Whereas in the case of the bank, I’m getting a lot of value, I’m being protected, but I’m also getting to confirm a charge that I want it to actually happen or stop a charge that I did not want to happen.
Brent: The so the banks versus merchants that may I let’s just say that financial institutions are pretty good at not abusing it, but. my experience with some merchants have been, Hey, sign up, get a 20% discount code for SMS.
Brent: And then pretty soon I’m getting an SMS message every single week for something that I’ve already purchased. And it’s a super annoying, so right away, I’m like, okay, I’m gonna opt out of this list, cuz this is crazy. I don’t need to, I don’t need to get a he phone email every week I bought your headphones, right?
Brent: I’m not gonna buy another pair. There has to be an awareness as well by the brands when to overuse it.
Osa: Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things we felt longer part about and still think long and hard about is, why do brands abuse it? Cause I think initially our response to brands when they came to us was, no, you can’t use us because we can tell you’re gonna abuse it.
Osa: And we kept asking them, why are you abusing it? What’s missing for you. And I think the first thing that we found was that a lot of these brands. They do email marketing or even SMS marketing, to be honest. Their retargeting is very I’ll use the word non-smart right, because they don’t actually know that Brent has bought the pair of headphones.
Osa: When they’re texting you, they don’t know you bought a pair of headphones when they’re emailing you. They pretend they do right. Cause they have some segment somewhere in Klavio. That’s supposed to indicate that he bought before, but they don’t know what you bought. They don’t care what you. They’re just gonna shove as much stuff into your inbox, which could be your phone or your or your email inbox.
Osa: And they’re gonna hope and pray that you click because the brand, in the case of the performance marketing manager or the, the director of marketing is only tracking click throughs, they don’t actually track. Did Brent open the email and engaged? Did he respond to the email? Did he transact based on the email and that’s unfortunately how they’re treating SMS?
Osa: It was like, we don’t really care what Brett. We just know he bought one time. So he’s more likely to buy again. Let’s just shove, whatever we can in front of him. We hope to God, our click through rates are high. But when we asked the brand if you were the bank if you knew that Brent had a credit card, like right next to him and he could confirm he wanted to buy something from you over email or text, would you still send him the annoying emails?
Osa: And they said, no, of course not. Cuz if I know what Brent bought and he was in a. I wouldn’t sell him a pair of headphones. Again, I would sell him some accessory or some new thing we’ve got. And so I think for a lot of brands, that’s the right way to think about SMS is, it really is one to one.
Osa: You should know what Brent has bought, and you should know what you’re putting in front of Brent at 9:00 AM in the morning. Because if you don’t, then it’s gonna feel like you don’t know what you’re doing as a brand. And Brent is gonna unsubscribe. And we’ve seen that in the data, right? The brands that do SMS.
Osa: Have low unsubscribed rates, the brands who don’t have extremely high unsubscribed rates and SMS ends up not being a good channel for them six months after they start.
Brent: I think that unsubscribe thing is a great kind of topic to go down. There is rules around or there’s best practices let’s say around email and how often people should get emails.
Brent: It has to be. Even more important to learn and know what this is for SMS. So what is your advice to merchants who are sending and how many you should send and how often?
Osa: Yeah, so you know, where I’ll of start is by just giving folks an overview of the regulatory landscape.
Osa: There’s really only. Law that matters when it comes to SMS, particularly within the us. And that’s the telephone consumer protection act or the TCP. And a lot of merchants I recommend, go to Wikipedia, just spend maybe a few minutes glancing over the TCPA overview they’ve got there. It’s really good.
Osa: And the thing that’s important about the TCPA is that it highlights a few important rules for merchants, right? Because they, the government in the us knows that people will love to use the phone as a way to get in front of consumers. The first rule a mentions is that you should. Aim to only text consumers between 8:00 AM and PM third time.
Osa: That, that can be difficult if you don’t know where your customer is. If you don’t know where Brent is, you may be emailing or you can be texting him at the wrong time. But 8:00 AM to PM is a general guideline. The second is that unless you have explicit opt-ins so unless at some point you can verify that he, the consumer gave you their phone number and said, yes, I want to get text messages from.
Osa: unless you have that opt in, you have to pay $500 as a fine, for every text message you send for that person. That’s not for every, every time the person says stop, but every time you actually text them. And so those are the kind of two, like regulatory things. You gotta keep in mind. When you start texting us, you gotta have opt in and you really should honor that 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM.
Osa: But the question you’re asking is if I’m honoring those two basic rules, how often should I text people? Some, providers who do SMS marketing and have an incentive to make you text more. We’ll tell you that you should text people twice, three times, four times a week, because that’s mostly what you’re doing over email, right?
Osa: You’re just hitting their email inbox every day or every other day. What we recommend is you actually do not do any of that. You should really only text people at most, twice a month. And the reason we say twice a month is because if you’re texting someone more than twice a month, it means that they’re buying, they intend to buy from you more.
Osa: Twice a month. And if you know that they’re not gonna buy from you twice a month it’s a little weird to text them. Because at that point you’re really just tweeting their inbox, like a spam folder. And it’s not a spam folder. It’s the spam folder is the email inbox. So use that for more heavy weight communication, sales and things like.
Osa: But the real reason you should put a text in front of someone is when you want them to take an action. And that may mean, you’ve got a 50% off sale on your site. Cool. Like we get it. You should text that to everyone, but otherwise you have to really be judicious about what you put in front of people.
Osa: Now, maybe in five years, it’s gonna change because consumers will have a spam folder on their phone as well. That automatically gets silenced. That doesn’t trigger notifications. But until we get there we recommend you treat every communication you send over SMS is mission critical. And that may mean you have to spend extra time on your campaigns and be a little more judicious, but it’s really worth it to do that because nine out of 10 people will read your text message and will be able to ideally take an action.
Brent: The spam folder thing, I think for 20 or 25 years now, people have been saying email market. Or email is gonna die out. Do you think that email marketing is ever gonna die
Osa: out? Yeah I the interesting thing with regards to email is, for a lot of brands, it still works right. For a lot of brand. It makes a lot of sense, because I think a great example is if you’ve got a hundred thousand people on your email list and you can guarantee. 10% of them will open that email and interact in some way, right? Whether they click through for sale or they click through for restock, that’s not bad if you’ve got a hundred thousand people on your email list.
Osa: And so I think brands who tell us that email is working for them, have a massive email list. Some have a million people on their email list because they’ve just built that email list through various tactics. They might have bought some emails. They’ve got a large list. The challenge in SMS is war.
Osa: SMS is not cheap, right? It costs you money to actually send a message to a consumer. Second, you can’t buy any phone numbers because that’s illegal, right? You can’t buy phone numbers and just start email, start texting those people. And so we think that for brands, it’s gonna take you a while to build a phone number list.
Osa: And so it’s really important to not compare email to SMS in the same way, because you can get away with a lot more over email. You can get away with a lot more spam, right? To be honest, because there are no significant fine. as you would in SMS. And so for brands who think emails working I would, recommend that they think through, okay, if emails working today and it continues to work for another year or two, the real question for you should be if your open rates are around 10, 20% today, can you project out?
Osa: Can you forecast with your open rates are gonna be in five, three years, cuz if you can do that and it holds for you then yeah, you can continue using email and only leverage SNS once in a. But if you know that email is already dying for you, if your open rates are sub 10%, then maybe it’s time to start mixing in other channels and thinking about what are we gonna do when email eventually fades?
Osa: Because it’s not dying tomorrow, but as we can see with gen Z and millennials the open rates continue to decline for those emails.
Brent: Yeah. And I think it’s from a marketing standpoint, it’s always good to try other channels and test and make sure that it’s working. I do want to pivot a little bit to, we talked a little bit about CRMs.
Brent: I know some, some brands that have done well, or let’s say airlines, some of the airlines have done well with messaging and they’ll move you to SMS and you can talk to an agent directly through SMS talk about how brands can use from a customer service standpoint, their SMS to really get
Brent: better at helping clients. Yeah.
Osa: Yeah. I think, if you go back to the bank example, when there’s an issue with, a payment it’s very common for capital one or any of the other credit card providers to send you a text and say, Hey was it you, we think that’s a great example of automated customer service, right?
Osa: Because there’s a real issue, if you don’t respond to this. we’re gonna treat whatever happened in the world as fraud, or we’re not gonna treat it as fraud, which is even worse because now we’re letting the charge happen that should have been stopped. We think that’s a great example of customer service because the consumer needs to do something right.
Osa: May take an action and it’s dire it’s mission critical. And in this case, the financial institutions have been able to leverage texting to do that and have been able to automate the texting. Because that way you can happen in real time, a human being doesn’t have to actually message you when there’s.
Osa: And we think that for brands, that’s the right way to think about customer care is what problems are mission critical for your business? What things do consumers need to know about vis-a-vis, their order vis-a-vis a review about your business even, right? What kinds of things are gonna be critical for your business or critical for the consumer and how do you move those away from the email inbox where people might not even respond or might respond late?
Osa: Might not even see. Into a channel where people are gonna say, yeah, I’m ready to solve that problem right now with the brand or I’m ready to respond to the brand. And the immediate things we’ve seen are around customer care. When an order is fundamentally messed up, right? When something’s significantly late, that’s a place where you want to get in front of the consumer as quickly as possible and say, Hey, we’re here,
Osa: we know it’s happening and we’re here to resolve it with. In real time, you can get in touch with us. I think the other approach that we see today brands use is like live chat on the website, which, works it’s okay. The consumer has to log in, find your website, live, chat you and that’s fine.
Osa: The other approach is to have the consumer just email you, and that’s gonna go into your Zend desk. You’re Gorgeous. But we think in the future, a lot of brands will start to look for ways. Leverage SMS is a way to really stand out from the other brands in their category and say, Hey, if you’re a consumer, you can get in touch with us this way, but more importantly, we can help you solve large problems directly over text in a way that you couldn’t over email support or live chat support.
Brent: And I’ll go back to let’s just say Delta airlines has been, especially during the pandemic they’ve offloaded some of their live customer support to texting. And then they usually run you through some sort of a filter to see if you really are going to talk to somebody in real time.
Brent: And then you do end up talking to a real person. And I would imagine that real person is managing probably three or four or five, six queues. So from the merchant standpoint allows you to have more active conversations at once and from the. Client or the customer standpoint, it allows you to feel as though they’re actually hearing you without a bot.
Brent: So I think there is a difference hearing that robot or that AI behind it, Hey, I’m gonna respond and they’re just going to send me some garbage back is there’s no real person there compared to a real person who’s
Osa: really helping you. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s something we think a lot about at Parrot.
Osa: Parrot. We provide every brand who uses us an AI that can handle some automated customer service kinds of things, but we always make it clear to brands that automating all your customer service is not the goal, especially when you’re in a channel like SMS, because you should let the consumer know, Hey, this is a bot you’re talking to, but there is a human being available, right?
Osa: You can always type human or agent to get right. Really into a conversation with someone because there are some issues. If you imagine hello, fresh in the us here if someone, has an issue with their delivery because their meals got delivered, but it’s all messed up or it’s not refrigerated properly.
Osa: That’s a situation where I want to get in contact with a human being as quickly as possible. I don’t want to go through a bot and have to explain myself. And so we think that mix of automated plus human is gonna be how the best brands stand out over the next 10 years when they’re leveraging SM.
Brent: Yeah. Just tell us a little bit about your company and how it’s solving some of these
Osa: problems. Yeah. Parrot really is a simple way for brands to collect money directly over SMS. And the reason we focus on collecting money and payments over SMS is because we realize that for a lot of brands, they do not have the infrastructure to do what capital one or bank of America does.
Osa: They can’t go process payments or handle charges over text and for the brands who can do that’s gonna be a superpower in the future. And we’ve already seen some brands like verb energy, like Dirty Lemon which is now part Coca-Cola build infrastructure to collect money over text, because that allows them to provide a radically different customer service experience, but also to get offers and incentives and also campaigns in front of their consumers that consumers can say thumbs up.
Osa: Yes. I want that. A great example would be, Dirty Lemon sells energy drinks, and they use SMS to remind people every 30 days to reorder and they process that reorder directly over text and send consumers a receipt. And so Parrot helps merchants who can’t be capital one. They can’t build that secure, simple way to check out over text.
Osa: We provide that infrastructure for them and we think really that’s the future of SMS, right? It’s going. Spaming people are going beyond spray and prey and really focusing on how do I solve a problem with this customer and then get this customer to transact in the same channel that they were actually having a conversation with me in.
Brent: I think one of the differentiators for let’s say Africa specifically is that you can make payments directly with your SMS provider. Do you think the US is heading in that direction?
Osa: I think one of the challenges in the us is that the carriers here, the phone carriers, Verizon ATT so on and so forth have not really embraced payment over text as a core part of their business.
Osa: One can argue that’s because, they’re inherently monopolistic right. There are a bunch of reasons why it haven’t. But I think one of the other challenges here is that the banks, right? The Capital Ones the folks who could provide the infrastructure for this kind of thing, Don’t really play nicely with the carriers.
Osa: Whereas in Africa and Asia the phone carriers telecom plays very nicely with financial institutions. And so here in the US, we’ve had to essentially build that infrastructure, that to allow for payments over text. And so at Parrot, we work with the financial institutions on one hand, and we also work with the telecom providers, Verizon ATT to provide us infrastructure to merchants.
Osa: It didn’t exist and it needed to be built, but we think that over the next 10 years, the best brands will leverage this infrastructure that we built. And there will be other folks, right? Like Parrot to help actually solve these problems. But we think it’s the right time to actually go build that.
Osa: That way. If you’re a merchant, you don’t have to go talk to ATT and do this yourself.
Brent: The whole payment over texting I know. What 10, 10 years ago, or something like that, maybe even still today, you could buy something from a vending machine, over a text. It wasn’t super clunk. It wasn’t super easy, I think now with smartphones, you could, you can do it over apple pay.
Brent: Do you think some of those things are moving in front of SMS for payments, or do you think SMS still has a place that’s more seamless to make those payments at say a vending machine? some local thing.
Osa: Yeah. Yeah. think brick and mortar is really interesting at brick and mortar, payments where you’re not buying something from a merchant who has no physical presence who has a physical presence.
Osa: So the vending machine being a great example, right? That’s a physical thing that the merchant is set up. Or when you walk into a restaurant and pick up some food they’ve got a physical presence. And so you can either tap your card. If you’ve got one of the contact list cards or you can double tap Apple Pay, just tap your phone.
Osa: We think for a lot of physical purchasing, that’s gonna be the best way. Cuz a lot of folks have really nice credit cards that you can just tap and walk away with with your food or with whatever you are buying. I think the challenge for a lot of merchants who are online though, is that they don’t have a physical presence.
Osa: And so you can’t really just pull out your card from your wallet and tap it to your phone and buy when you’re on online merchant. You can use apple pay if the merchant supports it. But we’ve seen that, a lot of merchants across the internet do not support apple pay.
Osa: Whereas 90% of physical merchants in physical stores do support apple pay. And so we think that there needs to be some in between for merchants to be able to engage you when they don’t have a physical presence think of an online store selling t-shirts they need a way to engage you and get you to transact.
Osa: But unfortunately, Apple pay or a contactless credit card. Isn’t really great in that situation because again you’re on your phone, you’re walking around and your phone isn’t really intended to be a point of sale system. It’s really just a browsing device. And so that, that’s why companies like Parrot will, I think, need to exist for those merchants.
Osa: But the other thing we’ve seen merchants do is actually open up physical locations. Right? Think of Warby Parker, think of brands like that. They just say. Online is too difficult. I’m just gonna go open a physical store because that way I can get that, ease of transacting. People can just walk up, tap a card leave.
Brent: Yeah. And that’s a good point. I went to NRF in New York in January and Amazon had a popup store that had everything in it. You just walk through, get whatever you want. I can’t say that I could buy anything with SMS, but , it certainly was an online in person popup store that that they’d setup
Brent: At the end of every podcast I give the guests a chance to do a shameless plug about anything. You’d. What would you like to plug today?
Osa: Yeah, I’d love to plug get Parrot. We getParrot.com is our website. If you’re interested in learning more about how to collect payments over text, or if you got conversion problems and you’re trying to solve that in the next 30 to 60 days, please go to getParrot.com and we’ve got a bunch of resources for you to explore there, but also a way for you to get in touch with us and get a demo and learn more about Parrot.
Brent: I’ll put these in the show notes. And how would they get in touch with you
Osa: through your website? Yeah, the best way to get in touch. Yeah. The best way to get in touch is to getparrot.com. Or you can send us an email at osa@getparrot.com, and we’ll get back to you as quickly as possible.
Brent: That’s fantastic. It’s been a great conversation. Thank you so much for being here today. And I look forward to some SMS texting in the future.
Osa: Definitely. definitely. Thank you for having us.
Do you have the best available people for each part of your supply chain and within your own organization? David Edgerton Jr helps to debunk the myth that there isn’t talent in this low unemployment economy and maybe we are just overlooking it or worse excluding it because of bias.
David is the founder and managing principal of The DEJ Group LLC, an executive search and recruiting firm dedicated to uncovering the real needs of organizations and bringing forward a diverse set of candidates with an array of backgrounds and experiences. The company focuses on increasing the economic inclusion of people from underrepresented communities through employment.
Talk Commerce DEI Talk
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of talk commerce today, I have David Edgerton Jr. He is the managing principal at D E J group, LLC. David, go ahead and do an introduction much better than I did. Tell us what you’re doing day to day and maybe one of your passions in life. Oh,
David: absolutely. Again, I’m David Eton, Jr.
David: And thank you so much for this opportunity to be a part of your podcast. I appreciate the invitation I’m the managing principal of the DEJ group, LLC, which is an executive search firm that I started. About, eh, I’ll say about two years ago working on two years now before that I was doing management consulting and working with minority business owners to help them grow and scale their businesses.
David: And we’ve pivoted into executive search because. That is the space that we have found a passion in for our own business. And it helps when you’re coaching others, that own businesses that actually have a business yourself. There’s an integrity part of that that we wanted to make sure came out and it is very transparent open with our audience and who we work with.
David: What we say we do is we match diverse talent with inclusive companies. So there’s a DEI piece of that, where we do some consulting with firms on their workplace inclusion practices and we try to make sure that as we go out and find talent, that the organizations are ready to receive that talent as well as cultivate that talent so that they stay there.
David: And also help the organization really bring the right people in to put ’em in the right seats so they can grow and scale themselves. So that’s what we do overall. We’ve been successful in doing several searches in the non-profit space, in the retail space where we operate and the manufacturing space and the healthcare space.
David: So those are the industries we try to hang around. And have some success. Most of our business so far has been coming from the nonprofit space, especially in the philanthropy and the development areas. So we’ve been doing a few searches in that space here in the Twin Cities and we do national searches.
David: By the way, we don’t just focus here in the Twin Cities, we the clients we have are here, but the search range goes all the way from coast to coast. So that’s what we do. We also. Do some adjunct work in several universities in the business and entrepreneurial space. And yeah we are busy right now, especially in this job market.
David: So just like other firms are really scrambling, trying to find talent. We’re just as busy trying to find the right talent for our clients. So that’s what we do.
Brent: I saw a statistic this week that the Minnesota unemployment rate is at about 2% historic lows, the lowest it’s ever been so it must be a challenge to, to find anybody for any job right now.
Brent: It
David: is a challenge. Now what’s interesting about that fact is that 2% rate is what it is, for everybody, but for people of color, it’s three times as much. So it’s somewhere around five to 6%, which is above the national average. So it just depends on, the demographic that you’re going after.
David: And so that’s what makes it really interesting. because there are people there. There’s talent out there. That’s ready to go to work. But it seems that in some cases we’re not finding that talent. So one of the things we talk about as a part of our business is that we want to debunk the myth that the talent doesn’t exist, especially when you hear numbers like that.
David: So for us it’s not just, finding the talent to fill these roles. It’s also making sure there’s a diverse state that you can choose from. So that’s the main thing that we focus on.
Brent: We met in a diversity training session, which I attended. Yes. And that was very good. Thank you very much.
Brent: Thank you. And I, you had some great points about entitlement and some of the reasons why people of color and other less non-white bald guys. Aren’t. even getting the opportunity to go to jobs. Yeah. Maybe we could talk about that. I thought that was very interesting in a in that as an employer, as an entrepreneur, we should always be aware of that.
David: Yeah. And one of the things I could get into as you asked that and make that point where I ask that question is this concept of an inclusive value chain that I have actually done a talk on and what it is. What you could do is look at your supplier, your supplier, you, your customer and your customer’s customer.
David: That really is like the, what we call it, the supply chain right overall. But the reason we are using the term value chain is that value is created from upstream and it flows downstream. So in the way that value is created, there are opportunities where you could look at that whole entire process and say, you know what?
David: Do I have the best available resources for each part of the chain, whether that’s suppliers, as far as now, we get into supplier diversity, right? Channels that we sell through world that’s channel diversity. And then inside the organization is where we should really focus on, are we hiring the right kinds of talent?
David: Where are they coming from? And things of that nature. So one of the things that we talk about there is. When you are looking at your personal and professional networks, this is where we derive a lot of our talent choices referrals, things like that. I think in that session that we were talking about earlier I mentioned that.
David: If you are listening to people that look like you sound like you and are connecting with people that are very similar to you, which we naturally do as human beings. And we don’t consciously look for the differences and we don’t consciously look for opinions that oppose us. We tend to acquiesce if that’s the right word to a certain kind of think and a certain kind of decision making.
David: which limits what’s very possible. So one of the things that I wanna do as a part of our firm was why we focus on trying to bring diverse talent is we only wanna, not only want to bring people that look different and sound different to, but with different perspectives as well. Because when you do that, you end up with a more superior product or superior service, especially if you’re creating one yourself.
David: So you need that to sharpen what you’re offering. You need that to help you with any blind spots or any, biases that you might have that tend to. To bleed into how you make decisions. So if you’re already, if you’re always working with and connecting with people that always agree with you or like you there’s so much, you’re leaving.
David: On a table that could actually make you better. So that’s why we focus on it more so than anything else. Plus, a lot of people say that’s just the right thing to do. People have different perspectives on right or wrong. So I don’t usually just go with, it is just the right thing to do well to whom.
David: Right. the thing about it is at the end of the day, if you want the very best product, you need to get the, all the perspectives possible on it, on your service, how it’s being sold, how it’s been marketed, how it’s being consumed, how it’s been used, you need all the perspectives you can to make it the very best product it could possibly be.
David: So as an entrepreneur, that’s what I actually look for that kind of feedback and that kind of perspective to help me be better.
Brent: I’m a board member on EO, Minnesota, one of our goals and we have a diversity and inclusion committee now. Yeah. One of our goals is to increase diversity and that’s not just for people of color, it’s just women, everybody just diversity across the board.
Brent: Yep. I know that some other chapters have. Automatically put white males on a wait list to join. Are those type of strategies, something that you would recommend or is there certain strategies to become more diverse?
David: Oh, here’s yeah,
Brent: I get where you go. I’ll let you go. And then I’ll have another question to follow up.
David: that’s a great question, actually. Here’s the thing you can’t do any of this without everybody involved and I think people have made this mistake. a lot across the conversations we’re having across the initiatives. If you leave white men out, you’re actually making it worse. Because if you look at the numbers, there are more of them so what you gotta do is you’ve gotta make it so that
David: everyone can be included including white men. I was at a company and I was the diversity director for this company. And one of the things we did was we created these groups called ERN employee resource networks based on the different types of groups that wanted to get together and be represented and be able to support each other.
David: And one town hall, one of the guys got up and asked me questions about this. He said, can we have a white men’s ERN? And I said, yes. And people looked at me like I was crazy and it was because I said, yeah, because you should be able to connect with other men like yourself and white men and be able to have a conversation.
David: Here’s the thing though. What type of conversation are you having that helps with diversity? That helps be more inclusive? Now what we’ve had historically before we’re white men getting together and not having that kind of conversation, which is why we got what we got now. So it’s not that, there’s a challenge with white men getting together.
David: that’s not the issue. The question is the target of the conversation and what you actually come up with that will help the situation versus take shots at the situation and make it worse. So there to leave white men out of it, I think is very detrimental, because we need everybody to really contribute and have a perspective and really look at it for what it is.
David: See the problem with, excluding white people and white men specifically. Is that it makes it feel like, oh, so now we have to punish people for where we are instead of saying, oh now that everybody hopefully has taken the right attitude about this to say, yeah, we have a problem collectively.
David: We need to solve that problem. And usually they’re more white men that have influence that have finances that have all the other things that have traditionally been helpful in making change. You need them as partners. So if you can help with some of the mentality around, it, it should be good for everybody.
David: It should help everybody. Or at least everyone should have the same fair shot. That’s really what I focus on. It’s not that you should just give people a color stuff. That’s not where I’m coming from. You should give underrepresented. And I don’t like to use that term underrepresented, cuz I I did a post on this a few weeks, a few days ago.
David: I said underrepresented is not the right term. Excluded is the right term because underrepresented says, Hey, I just went out and I invited everybody to come. And only one black person showed up. Okay. That’s underrepresented because you asked everybody to come and you made it so everybody could come.
David: But the reason one person showing up in most cases, because you put some stuff in place, so they couldn’t show up. That’s not underrepresented, that’s excluded. So let’s be open and transparent about that. But to exclude people that could help you is the wrong thing. So those strategies, I don’t suggest those.
David: I suggest things like let’s make sure that people understand what it means to truly be, for example, and ally and what the parameters are around that. Because allies today, can step into a situation and help, but they can also step right back out. And sometimes they don’t think about that part. when they’re talking about, Hey, I’m an ally.
David: I stand with you. Yeah. But tomorrow you don’t have to stand with me. You can step right back out and the situation doesn’t change. So are you really having an impact? I know that’s a long answer, , but as far as excluding white men from the conversation you just can’t do that.
David: That’s just not helpful. You won’t go for it.
Brent: You brought up some great points in there. So the first thought that I have is employers who just give lip service to to being diverse or saying we’re posting out there on LinkedIn. Yeah. I wanna be diverse.
Brent: So I’m gonna hire a more diverse group of people for our company. Yep. And then they never do anything. That’s right. Is there, like we talked about that whole pipeline or that journey of the opportunities that you have to get to a job. And then when you’re in that job, how do you feel included or excluded and then the total makeup of that company is there a way to hold leaders accountable
Brent: who just give lip service?
David: I have a statistic. I might have shared that in that session that we had since, and I’ll use George Floyd’s murder as a point in time since that incident, when a lot of companies and a lot of leaders started to say, okay, wait a minute. We’ve had enough. We’ve seen this too many times.
David: And this is major. This event affected the planet. You saw protests in Belgium, , about what just happened, not like a few miles from where we are. So with that, 50 billion dollars, I think was promised through the media from very large companies. A lot of folks said, Hey, we need to, do something about this and we’re gonna pledge this money.
David: Only 250 million of that 50 billion at the time that I checked on this, which might have been a few months ago, was actually received and actually went to those places. So here’s what happens. People will say, Hey, we’re together and we’re gonna give this money and we’re gonna make this better, but no one follows up to see if they actually did it.
David: They hang on the fact it was said by these large companies, another one the CEOs of all these companies getting together, saying we’re gonna sign this petition. and we are gonna stand together against, an racism and white supremacy, all these things. So we see that in the media.
David: Okay, great. So you signed a piece of paper that says you’re with this, but we don’t see. And we don’t follow up to say what came out of you signing that . So sometimes it feels like these things are happening. In the moment where the attention is, and companies are leveraging this to, I’ll say, position themselves to be on the right side of the discussion yet what they’re not doing is sharing with you
David: what they’ve done since then. and the, any improvements that they may have made since then. So we call that performative marketing. There’s a term for that performative marketing, and it’s performative because it is a performance. You put stuff out there to say, Hey, you’re doing this. You put stuff out there to say, oh we’re with you.
David: We’re doing this. But then when you look at the numbers don’t move. So when you started going back to the thing about accountability, , it’s very hard to hold some of these companies accountable because at the end of the day, unless the board’s involved, unless the senior leadership team is involved and they’re committed to some of these things, unless you’ve got some folks who can just say, you know what, this is what you said you were gonna do.
David: This is what you did. What happened unless you have folks in that position to do that, it’s very hard to hold people accountable because in some cases, They don’t really have to do anything. And I think that’s the piece that people don’t wanna really, accept and really understand companies don’t have to do anything about diversity and inclusion.
David: They don’t. And the reason why it’s such an issue is because they don’t, it’s hard to enforce something it’s hard to, get traction on it because if you have a few people in the right places, That don’t agree with it. They’ll stop any kind of initial they’ll stop any kind of project, any kind of improvement, because they don’t agree with it and nothing will be done.
David: So the answer to that is one of the things we’re gonna talk about when we talk about entrepreneurs, my thing that about that, and the answer to that is to help companies who are diverse, who have diverse leaders, usually startups and smaller and middle size companies. Help them grow because if you help them grow, they create the cultures that attract the right type of diversity.
David: They also build out and invest in the communities where the founders come from. So now you’ve got that investment going back to those communities that need it right. And as they continue to grow. They continue to help with the conversation, cuz it proves that the people that are in those organizations that come from those diverse backgrounds actually can do what they say.
David: They can do what they say. They’re doing and they actually do bring a good product of service to market, but they get crushed by the big guys. Because, ah yeah we don’t want to innovate anymore. We now going, we’re now gonna buy our innovation. That’s what Microsoft Google, and some of these bigger companies doing though.
David: They don’t innovate as much or really any anymore. They wait for a startup hot startup to come along with something that’s disruptive that they could not organize their teams. To, go do, and then they go just swallow ’em up. And there’s nothing wrong with a nice exit. Don’t get me wrong entrepreneurs out there who might be saying, wait a minute.
David: I’m thinking about selling my company one day. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is to really solve the problem. From my perspective, let’s get some companies that have founders that look like me and others. The opportunity to really have a chance to survive and thrive and actually take off.
David: And I think that would help with the conversation and actually help with the gaps that we have and the challenges.
Brent: So circling back to the discussion about the $50 billion. Yeah. You’re saying, or it is really. A one could say a PR stunt and I’m sure that the idea behind it or the motivation behind it, wasn’t a PR stunt.
Brent: Yeah. But it was certainly an opportunity taken from marketing to raise the awareness of some brand, whatever brand that is. And and then after that PR has been done there. Really no motivation to follow through on it.
David: Right there, there isn’t. Because it’s like the latest news, you hear the news, you read it.
David: Great. What’s the next story kind of thing. And we’re starting to see a little bit of that, but in the challenge of, for example, the George Floyd murder, we keep seeing in the news. Unarmed black men being killed by police. In other situations, we keep seeing injustices, for example, that keep happening.
David: So what companies are doing is saying, okay, that’s why they want to be on the right side of it. But at the same time, we don’t have some overarching accountability partner or for to say, okay this is what you said you were gonna do. You did not do it. Therefore. So the only thing that you have is I guess we’ll have to wait till the next thing to happen, to see what people are gonna do and see what band ride we gonna jump on.
David: But here’s an example that I would go back to the sixties to tell you why I think it can work if we do it the right way. The when Martin Luther king was in, I think it was Alabama Selma, Alabama, 1965. I think first time we went over to. Pettus bridge. It was all black pastors and they stopped and they didn’t go any further.
David: And they went back three days later, they came back to do the March again, but this time he had white pastors and black pastors and they went over the bridge and they kept going and it was successful. The reason I used that in a lot of my talks, especially DDI type talks, I say it takes all of us to do this.
David: It takes all of us to do this because the freedom is supposed to be for everybody, not just the minorities, just not people who have been disenfranchised. It’s supposed to be freedom for everybody. So just as you are free enough to start this podcast and have your own business and do everything that you’re doing, I should have the same freedom.
David: And you wanna hire who you wanna hire. It doesn’t matter who they. so should I that’s the land we live in, right? Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to be framed. that? That’s the case. So for us, it’s more about, we really need to figure out the best way to engage with incumbents, large institutions who were built using.
David: Some of the things that we’re actually now fighting against , but at the same time they have the resources and they have the things that we need in order to make a change. So to make that change I say, I don’t wanna say start at the bottom up, cuz we’re not at the bottom, but I would say start from a different part of the discussion for me.
David: It is. let’s help. Small business, medium business, be large businesses. Let’s help small businesses, medium businesses be larger businesses that are more inclusive because they’ll do just based on research and just based on what I’ve seen in myself, they’ll do the hiring of other. People of color, they’ll promote people of color to the right kind of roles.
David: They will give them opportunities to have their own franchises, have their own kinds of, startups and things like that. That’s the way to get to it. And I think if we were able to invest more into that, there’s a stat somewhere. I’m trying to remember how it goes. I think we would add.
David: 2.5 trillion to our GDP. If we only allowed businesses of color that are owned by people of color, to just have the same rates of success that white businesses have. Now, when I say have the same rates of success, I’m not saying do anything different, but what I’m saying is. If a black business goes to a bank and asks for a loan or asks for money, they should have the same probability of getting that money as a white business.
David: And we all know that businesses of color, lack in getting access to capital. from structural things that have been put into the financial industry in institutions and into the financial industries. What I’m try to say there. So if we just let everybody have the same shot, that’s why I keep going back to that.
David: If everybody had the same shot of success, without any of the things being put in place to keep certain groups from having success, then we would add that to the economy, which would create jobs, which would probably solve a lot of the problems that we’re having right now. So that’s how I would look at that.
Brent: Yesterday I heard guy Jeffrey Brown talk. Yeah. About the fact that as a white guy , he gets in front of leaders and he can talk about diversity, where there may be less opportunities for somebody of color to get in front of some of these leaders. How do you then trickle that down to getting the opportunities for everybody?
Brent: I thought he made a compelling, not an argument, but he. Make a reason of why he does that. Because sometimes people might not even listen. I think you said oh yes. Earlier people only listen to what they wanna listen to. And they listen to the people they agree with.
Brent: And our current political climate it’s more fragmented, right? We’re not hearing anybody. And if we are, we’re gonna tell ’em, they’re some kind of horrible expletive and then we’re gonna, we’re gonna kill ’em on Facebook and whatever, put all kinds of horrible comments on a post, which is no, that’s not what we should be doing.
Brent: So no, for what sort of advice would you give to a white person that wants to. help. Raise the awareness, I think is the first step. Make sure that everybody’s aware and then actually start taking some actions. Yeah, that’s a
David: great question. I tell you there’s a lot, I think some people may not agree with this, but I’m just gonna say it I think there’s a lot one.
David: The first thing you gotta do is I think you have to, before you try to help somebody that doesn’t look like you, first thing you have to do is understand. How we got here, the biggest problem that I see, and it’s usually one of my big frustrations actually is when you talk about the conversation of, okay why do we have the gaps we have?
David: Why do we have the challenges we have? Why. Some folks don’t want to talk about how we got here systematically, historically, and don’t want to acknowledge those things. In fact, you’ve got now I hate to be political, but Hey I am who I am. You’ve got folks now writing laws that say that you can’t talk about certain things in school and getting them passed right.
David: That are really. History, not making anybody feel guilty as they put it, but it’s history. These things happen. So when you acknowledge these things that have happened, things that have been put in place that have disenfranchised certain people and certain types of groups, you’re saying, okay, we, we can agree that it happened, but now here’s the hard part though.
David: On both sides, you have to now say, okay, it happened, what do we do together going forward? And that’s the challenge. So if you don’t acknowledge what happened, you can’t come to some common ground to say, okay, now what do we do to go forward? So a person like you just mentioned, who’s says, Hey, I talk about racism and white supremacy.
David: And I talk about the things that have happened and I’m white. When I do this, I am white, for example. The reason it’s good is because the folks that don’t want to have the conversation with somebody that looks like me, they can at least have a conversation. So the question there would be, can you hold each other accountable now?
David: That would be a good outcome. So when you start talking about the performing of things that we talked about earlier with these companies and leaders they should hold each other accountable. Actually, the CEO of Target, for example, should hold the CEO Best Buy accountable for what Best Buy said it was going to do.
David: And Best Buy, gave $10 million to an organization recently that I’m familiar with to support black and brown businesses being, funded. They said they were gonna do that. Target said we’re gonna, support black and brown business. so somebody else should hold them a account. So what they said they was, going to go to do hopefully fortune five, something like that.
David: There’s this initiative, I think it was 1 million black jobs or something from saying that that was signed by, I think it was. 10 big companies said, Hey, we’re gonna hire I think 1 million black people in the next 10 years or something create jobs for them because we realize they’re one of the groups that have been disenfranchised.
David: Okay. Somebody should host those companies accountable to, to do with that. Since you put it out there and then you did the marketing and did the YouTube and the tos and all that stuff to talk about it, where somebody should hold them accountable to that, but that but getting to the point. White people being allies.
David: Yes. We need white people to talk to other white people about what white people have done and hold people accountable and say, this is what we should be doing now. And not be afraid. Here’s a key piece though. Not being afraid that they’re going to lose something. because the fear of loss is one of the reasons why some folks are very complicit.
David: And here’s another thing I saw the other day that might, speak to this when you’re talking about this. And my brother said this while back it’s sometimes, and I hate to keep saying white people, but it’s just the easiest thing to say. but sometimes white people don’t realize that they’re acting as a group.
David: my brother said that one time. And I thought about that just before I really started doing DEI work. And I kept that thought like right here. And it’s an interesting thing. When you see how whenever something happens with a certain protected group or a certain community, if someone does something, let’s say it’s negative, then it reflects on the entire community that they’re coming from.
David: This is where we get this thing where people talk about black on black crime, and say, oh this person did this and they murdered this person. So now it’s a black on black thing. You fix your own problem. You’ve heard that you’ve heard that. What’s interesting is no one ever talks about white on white crime.
David: because when crime happens and it happens to be Caucasians in the mix of that, no one looks at it as that’s white people. They look at it as that’s an individual, you notice that, think about all of the shootings that have happened recently. They look at that and say, oh, that white person, oh yeah, that, that person did this, not the group did this.
David: So that interesting dynamic that I heard and it’s one that I’ve been said of steadying out. That’s one that needs to change. Either it’s everybody’s an individual or everybody’s part of the group it’s one or the other, not the middle, which is, oh if a black person does this, then it’s black people.
David: So now we’re gonna just look at the group and say, this is what they do. And when white people do it, oh it’s an individual that doesn’t reflect on the group. So that group dynamic piece. that’s the thing that if we tapped into a little bit more and say, wait a minute, now, if you did something well, we’re all white.
David: So you made all white people look bad. Imagine if that was the conversation. . If you did that, you just made all of us look bad. That’s not what we want. We want it to look like this. That could be the start of something really cool. Actually, just that little dynamic of, Hey, no, that, that person looks like me to, they could think that’s me doing that mass shooting or that , whatever the thing might be, that embezzlement of millions and millions dollars, Hey, that made all the white people look bad.
David: So we don’t see that as much, but it’d be neat to see something like that.
Brent: Yeah. I think one thing that that I heard yesterday was that entrepreneurs are change leaders. They embrace change. And part of that is feeling uncomfortable in where you’re at.
Brent: And a lot of conversations like this make white people as a group, feel uncomfortable. Yep. Cause it’s not comfortable to talk about anything other than what is comfortable. As a definition. If we were to say that the, maybe the top three things and I hate to put it that way, that’s okay.
Brent: Somebody like me could do to help increase the awareness of diversity and I’m. And again, I’m gonna go back to EO Minnesota. We’re not diverse in terms we’re all white males. We’re not all white males, but I bet it’s, I bet we’re at 85 or 87% male. And then it’s probably, yeah. The per the numbers.
Brent: Aren’t great. How would we go about, and I’ll say we as a group, white men go. doing those, some of those things. And I think the, for me anyways, the first step is being able to have those conversations and feeling a little uncomfortable in it. Yeah. And if you don’t feel uncomfortable either, you’ve made it past that mark of it’s we’re all one big group.
Brent: Yeah. Which I doubt there’s a lot of anybody out there that feels that way, or you’re gonna feel uncomfortable and you should embrace the uncomfortableness and then start working on ways that we can work together.
David: One of the things I always ask people when they say. , I’m uncomfortable.
David: Let’s talk about why you’re uncomfortable. See nobody asked that question, right? They don’t say, okay like I’ve been in sessions and people say I don’t feel comfortable not even talking about this. But we never asked the question why don’t you feel uncomfortable? What is that?
David: And what you will see in the root of a lot of these is one white people don’t want to be labeled as racist. They don’t and they’ll say I’m not racist. That’s the first thing that pops up. I’m not racist. Nobody’s saying you’re racist. As far as you are a bad person, you grew up wrong. None of that’s not the challenge.
David: In fact, when we start talking about racist and racism, it’s a system. See you and I both have biases and we have I’ll call it. Prejudices I’ll even go that far. Because we’re individual. But racism. Is a system. It is a systematic way to disenfranchise a group of people, especially people of color. So what have you put in place in covenants and laws and regulations that say that this group of people are less than, or they can’t have the same God given rates as Americans that you have when you put stuff in place that makes it so that people cannot live the way you live.
David: That is a racist system. And if you don’t do anything about the racist systems you’re benefiting from, now I can call you racist, but realize the context around why I’m calling you that now it’s not that, oh, I have black friends because you get that all the time. I have black friends and I go to, different organizations and I support black people.
David: Yeah. But what have you done to take down? The laws and the regulations that kept black people from owning homes, whatever you said about, for example, when they did the interstate system and they built all of those interstates from the fifties through black neighborhoods and displaced them, what’s your opinion on that?
David: Whatever you done about that, there’s this new thing now called the reconnect Rondo, for example, in St. Paul, we’re just talking about, Hey, let’s build a land bridge. 94 on that stretch because that’s where black people in their neighborhoods used to be thriving, not bothering anybody, but, Hey President Eisenhower said, we need the, our interstate system to happen in 19.
David: I think 51 is when that was. And they in several cities, not just here, several, I just hear several cities. They built those interstates right through black neighborhood. So the question is, what are you doing about that? What do you, first of all, do you know that? Go back to the knowledge and the history and stuff you need to know, but then what are you doing now to write the wrong.
David: and are you writing wrong or are you just saying, oh, that just happened. My grandfather, my great grandfather. They might have been a part of that, but that’s not me. Yeah. But guess what you got trust fund that or you have some investments coming to you and inherit just coming to you because they benefited off of that system.
David: So in other words, you kinda are indirectly tied to that. so the question is, what are you going to use that for, to make it right? If you truly call yourself high or truly call yourself a friend of the movement, if you will. So that’s the kind of stuff that, if you’re talking to other people that look like you about and holding each other accountable, that’s where the change starts.
David: It’s very wrong to look at the folks that you’ve disenfranchised and tell them to fix it. But at the same time, we can’t stay the victim either. So there’s the other balancing part of that. We can’t just say, oh this happened to us. This happened to us. This happened to us. Woe is us?
David: No, we have to have, we also have to say, okay, this happened to us. What are we doing now? To make it better, which is why it’s gotta be a partnership between both sides to really get to where it needs to go.
Brent: Yeah. I really like that. Are you are you, why are you uncomfortable? That’s a great question to ask.
Brent: Yeah. And it’s a great question to ask of everybody of themselves. Yeah. So we have a little bit of time left. Sure. I, and this conversation could go on and on and I’m very, I’m really enjoying it. I think that making sure that let’s just call it a change agent. I think that’s a great word.
Brent: For anybody to, to spark change and to feel uncomfortable for a bit and then ask those questions. I think moving forward, it would be great if if people would embrace some of this and I also like the term that you said, ally create allies and work across people and genders and everything.
Brent: Yeah. and I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna make a blanket statement that it, that yeah, I think we all have to start doing one thing at a time. Yeah.
David: We do one person and bring it home to like the EO, for example. One of the things, when you talk about, being more diverse and things like that, I think you have to look at.
David: I’m gonna tell you why it is what it is. It is what it is because most of the people have similar experiences. Therefore they have similar expectations, right? And when you have similar expectations, the first thing that happens is, and I’m not gonna call this privilege, even though some people define this as privilege, but I might as well I’ll use word, now that I said that but here’s the privilege you have. You can say, Hey, Johnny, struggled got his business off the ground. Now it’s $2 million a year. He’s headed towards 5 million had these type of opportunities to get it going. Great. So did Bob, right? Larry too, we throw Larry in that too.
David: So you look around and if everybody looks the same, you automatically think. There’s a bias for what I’m talking about now. I can’t remember the name of it, but cuz they’re like 16 or 17, but there’s a bias that I’m about to describe to you. You look around and you say, okay, it’s a confirmation bias is really what it is.
David: Everybody looks like me. And we all have very similar experiences to how we got our business to where it is. And our business is at a certain level. This is how it should be for everybody. That right there, as soon as you say that and think that way you’ve just excluded a whole lot of people that could potentially be in the organization.
David: And if you make your rules around that, for example a million dollars revenue is the minimum you have to make to even be a part, for example. And I’m making that up. I don’t know if that’s a rule or not, but let’s say that is right. You just cut out a lot of people that could be in, because you got a million dollars as the nut, you gotta crack just to be a member.
David: But here’s the thing. If everybody around the room looks like you and they made that million dollars, then they think that’s what it should be. See what I mean? So that’s how that bias piece starts to creep in because you’re around people that are like, you. Who may have similar experiences, yet you’re not just demonstrating true empathy. Here’s what empathy is. Empathy is I don’t have to go through what you have gone through to understand what you’re going through, but I can still support you. sympathy is when we go through the same thing I say, oh yeah, you started your business and you struggled and all that.
David: I did the same thing and I, so now I understand you that’s sympathy. We need empathy. And I talk about in one of my talks, how empathy is a strategic, competitive advantage, when you can help people and see people where they are based on what they need. And it has nothing to do with you now, you that’s called de privileged.
David: If you want to use a term, I might have invented a term right then. That’s de-privilege. That’s saying, Hey, let me take all of that out and really look at the situation for what it really is. That’s how you begin to diversify your organization though, because you’re now saying I’m not gonna put into this, the perspectives and thoughts of how I got here and now make that the requirement, because there are people around you that look different from you sound different from you come from different ways of life.
David: they don’t have that exposure. They don’t have that experience. They don’t have some of those things, but they would be awesome members in your organization if you could meet ’em where they are. So that’s what I would say a about that. How do you make sure that you are empathetic, truly empathetic?
David: To all walks of life and how you’re truly empathetic in how you build your networks and build your connections, your circles, your stuff like that, because it’ll make you better. it just will. Once you see that, oh wait a minute. It’s not the way I thought it was. Or at least for everybody it’s not.
David: But you just learned something that just makes you better. And the same thing with me, I try to find people who do things differently and have different perspectives, cuz it just makes you better. And it lets you know that there’s still some human in humanity.
Brent: I’m gonna close us out here with some coincidences, because yesterday empathy was one of the topics that was talked about.
Brent: And I have a quote because it really struck me. Empathy is one of the qualities, young businesses, lack, most entrepreneurs build things and solve problems for people in hopes of a return on investment, which people with high empathy do not generally expect. And I thought I actually took a picture of the slide down the screen.
Brent: Because there are definitely two different types of entrepreneurs. There’s one that are empathetic to their employees. And this can then fall into everything, right? Yeah. The empathy for diversity for having gender, any type of thing. Or just having empathy for that individual who’s in your company.
Brent: And then the other side of it, that is just that, Hey, we need to get our billing out of that person. And if they’re not gonna be around, we’ll find somebody who can do it. I don’t care about that person. I care about the return on investment of that person. Yeah. And to slide, the scale at a slide, the needle, or however you wanna say it is that we all have to have some empathy for our fellow human beings, no matter what they look like, no matter what gender they are.
Brent: And. And see them as they are, instead of seeing them as a
David: number or seeing them how we want them to be . Yes, exactly. See, that’s the thing. If you see them, how you want ’em to be or how you think they should be, that’s the problem. That’s not empathy at all. And that’s, you’re right. That’s why it’s lacking because we wanna see people how we wanna see ’em versus see them for what they are.
David: And what they can do and what they can become. And it takes a sacrifice from yourself. You have to deny yourself in order to really help somebody be what they’re supposed to be irregardless of what you think and how you process. So that’s being selfless. And in business, we are taught and have been taught, especially in the United States, since the beginning, it’s all about what we want and who we are and what we’re after.
David: So it’s almost dally opposed, from being an entrepreneur in some cases, unless you’re one of those ones like the ones that are coming up now in the social space and the B Corp kind of thing, where you’re like, I’m gonna create this because it’s solving their problem, regardless of what I think, the more that we have, some of that kind of thinking, I think that gets us on the right path.
Brent: Yeah. And that we could keep going David on and on. But so we’re, as I close out every podcast I give I give my guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you would like to plug
David: shapeless plug. Would you like to plug the. I’ll tell you our executive search firm is, has been, really doing well.
David: You can follow us. The DEJ group.com. That’s our website. You can follow me at David Edon jr.com. So I have a little site that I keep and I’m on Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram and all those things. So if you ever wanna follow me and see what’s up, what we’re up to, you could do that as well.
David: But no, we just appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation and we’re gonna. Looking for the talent that people say that’s not there and it’s gonna keep showing up cuz I’m gonna show them where they are. And hopefully they’ll take a chance of these wonderful people and make their organizations better.
David: And I just appreciate you inviting me to be a part of this. So
Brent: thank you. And David, I’m gonna invite you back again because I feel like this is a conversation that could keep going and we could have spent probably three hours oh yeah, we should definitely plan on the, another future topic around this.
Brent: And. And figure out how can we all feel more
David: comfortable. Absolutely. I I tell you, I can help you with that now, but the thing about it’ll be painful at first . Yeah. It’s like that, it’s like that first shot you get when you’re little, you realize every 10 years you need a shot to keep that back, keep that immunity up.
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Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of talk commerce today. I have JJ Reynolds JJ, no relation to aluminum foil, but still a great last name. JJ is a marketing and analytics expert. JJ, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us what you do day to day and maybe one of your passions in. Hey
JJ: thanks so much for having me the first off, my name is JJ Reynolds.
JJ: Again, no relation to Reynolds rap at all. But I run media authentic, which is we’re a small, nimble team of data analytics marketers. So basically we help marketing teams report on their numbers from everything from customer acquisition costs to stick and churn to how well your Facebook ads are doing and everything
Brent: in.
Brent: that’s great. Thanks. So today we are gonna talk about customer acquisition. I would like to talk a little bit about the difference between D to C and B2B in an acquisition cost. And, but I’ll kinda let you drive some of that, some of those topics maybe just tell us what are some of the misconceptions on acquisition costs, especially from a
JJ: merchant point of.
JJ: Yeah, definitely the biggest I guess misnomer around customer acquisition costs it comes on both of those customer side and the cost side. So in order to have customer acquisition costs, you have your happy customers and you have to have your costs and you have to divide the two. Just for everybody listening that didn’t know what we’re talking about.
JJ: The both of those things can be defined differently. At every level of an organization, whether you’re a small, nimble team or a big like hundred person team is a customer, a free subscription. If you’re a SAS company or a $7 makeup brush, if you’re a, an e-commerce company. And on the flip side so like basically to start off, is that a customer, right?
JJ: Is that defined as a customer, to everybody in your entire team? And you need to get everyone on board with that because I’ve seen big tuffle and curve ruffles and all types of things happen about defining what that customer. Is so once you can define that, I’d say, write out on piece paper, then you need to define costs, right?
JJ: So is cost your ad spend? Is it your marketing team? Is it the agency running it? What is the definition of cost? Because the agency or your marketing team. if you’re running ads, which is the most, the simplest customer acquisition cost you can have is the ad spend divided by customers. Once you define what a customer is that’s the easiest thing, right?
JJ: And so if you can define what your costs are, if you’re gonna use ad spend, if you’re gonna use marketing costs, because in theory, marketing if you’re having a person running your ads, that’s a cost. If you could define that next, then you have a great baseline because someone just asks what’s a better what’s the good customer acquisition cost and for market eCommerce or make or SAS.
JJ: The answer to that question is better than it was yesterday. That’s the answer to the question because everyone’s trying to get a lower customer acquisition cost. And so that, that’s my thoughts in broad strokes about. How to simply go about it and have the least amount of confrontations at your organization company, or even like small business, depending on the size.
Brent: Yeah. So we’re talking here, we’re talking, maybe a D to C customer where you’re trying to get as many people to, to to purchase something. And what does it cost to get that customer? I think if you, if, then if we dig in a little deeper it’s, if they’re gonna buy something else, that’s. Average customer value or average average customer length. Tho those things also play in to that initial cost. And then if they’re buying a subscription or if they’re just buying a hairbrush. I don’t buy a lot of hair brushes and I don’t really need a subscription for one, but I would imagine there’s people that buy hair brushes, I’ve never bought one.
Brent: But having said that it is PO there’s a different once you’ve acquired them, they’re worth, every customer could be worth different. So you also should define how much you should be spending potentially, cause if you have a subscription that, that the acquisition cost could be higher, but.
Brent: Total customer value would be higher.
JJ: Exactly. And my favorite metric to have on a dashboard for that exact question is what is the like cycle you expect? And what’s your What’s your not like a stick rate, but what’s your rebuy rate or repurchase or reengage rate. So for example, if you’re a pool company selling chlorine it’s gonna be a year, right?
JJ: Every summer people are gonna buy it. So you should say, Hey, we acquired a thousand customers this summer or in the month of June or whatever it might be. When did they buy next? Probably next June. They’re not gonna buy in July cuz they just bought like three months of pool supplies. And so what you need to do is you need to look at the next buy. So the next June, how many of those customers that you acquired in June, 2020 bought in. June or summer 2021. And then if you say, oh, 60% bought again. Now we got something to go off of. If we can say every year, 60% is who reengage with us, rebuy, repurchase, re give us money.
JJ: You have a much better way of saying projecting the future of what’s gonna happen when you acquire today. It’s a very loose metric, right? We’re not like looking exactly this percentage, this number like from a SAS, like standpoint people. Do that. But that’s usually really the most helpful and I guess actionable.
JJ: Oh I cannot hear you
Brent: most important thing. There is to get the number of staff, establish a baseline and then see where you’re improving. So you’re right. That number is flexible and it’s not a set number it’s different in every industry. I think that you’ve mentioned gauge a few times.
Brent: The most important thing then how do you get them to engage on something?
JJ: Yeah. I, again, I would love to, to play with definitions of what is, what does engaged mean to different people? Because marketers I love us all. Like we all love to make up new terms of what different things mean. So at your what, whether you’re trying to engage someone to do a bajillion different things, right?
JJ: You could have them engage with a blog post, which is. The blog post, and you should measure for that is Hey, let’s see how hit 90% scroll on our blogs. And then you can measure, there are people who are reading your blogs. There are page views of your blogs, because page views just means someone clicks on something and need a good title.
JJ: Doesn’t mean your content was actually helpful. From a reporting standpoint and from. A measurement to then action, right? Because reporting is only useful. If you take an action on it, at the end of the day, doesn’t matter. How pretty the reports look, how bold the numbers are.
JJ: You need have an action. So whatever the engagement metric are, whether it’s reengage with a product to say you, you sold a, an RC car and you wanna sell the upgraded wheels. Like you could have them reengage and buy. Set of wheels or to just have your content marketing, be like, we’re gonna try and get our entire email list to at least read one blog post to the end, the, to the end of it.
Brent: Yeah. And I think you’ve brought up a really good point about engagement and how that is different from taking the action. I can remember a client that we had that had a huge amount of volume on their site, like a million views. and their orders were 400 or something like that. They were just using their site to display information and they’re driving people to retail where they could be taking advantage of action items on that to make them buy something.
Brent: And I think what you’re saying, and what I hear you saying is that the engagement part of it is important, but then during that engagement, we want to take, we want them to take some actions, right? So maybe you could go into what are some of those actions? Typical merchant could do or entice them in that engagement to take those actions.
JJ: Yeah. Like I love breaking it down to a customer journey that you can actually measure. And then ultimately that you can like, again, action on it. And so the biggest fail point I see in most eCommerce, like every business, every single online is just. The default metrics that are given to you by any platform of conversion rate, right?
JJ: That’s a big thing everyone talks about. What is a conversion rate? Is that number of people who you hit your site to purchase, or is it number of page used to purchase number of sessions to purchase number of product detailed views to purchase, there’s so many ways to slice and dice that, that we wanna make it.
JJ: Sure. It’s hyper focused. You like the action taker, can actually dive into it and say, Hey, this is the problem. So what I personally love to do is take every page of a website and define what the goal is of this page of your website. So for example, a blog post, what is the purpose of this blog post?
JJ: And it might be different. Everyone has I just wanna have like epic content that people read that could be the goal of the blog post. And to have people understand who the brand voice is. Some people write blog posts to have call to actions like every 300 pixels. And so if you wrote that thing, okay.
JJ: Let’s start at the top. You have, remember who saw blog post, like page used. Page loaded. You might wanna do 20 seconds on page people who stuck around. They’re now aware that you even offered a blog post, you even had that to be there. I usually use engage as a 50% scroll, so Hey, they engage with our content.
JJ: We know they actually like. did not just leave immediately. They investigated usually to say, Hey, they saw a call to action or whatever the goal was for at least five seconds. So if you see your call to action, you’ll blurb there. Boom, five seconds. Now they’re like in they’re investigating what the heck is happening.
JJ: And then initiate is, took the action that I wanted them to do. So click the button. So now. If something is broken, safe, for example, your content sucks. You’ll see impression to engage terrible dropoff rate, right? You they’ll just be like, oh yeah, 90% of people didn’t scroll 50%. Doesn’t matter how great your call to action is at the bottom of your blog post.
JJ: No one saw it. So that’s like my actionable journey, for lack of better terms that you can really start to dive into immediate. Yeah.
Brent: Just a sidebar. If you’ve ever looked at a recipe and you’ve looked it on your mobile phone the content layout shift, cumulative layout.
Brent: It takes into that account horribly when you’re going through your recipe. And you’re getting a popup ad, that’s changing every 10 seconds. And that’s a negative on that, but I love this four step process. So page views. Amount of time. So you said 50% scroll investigating. So where are they going?
Brent: And then and then action in initiating an action. That’s they, I think that just really boils it down in a nutshell. Yeah. And then how do you, so you help, you would help them determine where that drop off is. And so it, maybe if it’s under investigate, how would you help somebody to increase that, that percentage?
Brent: Yeah, like the
JJ: easiest. We’ll help people like set this up, cause by default, none of this is being collected aside from like page views, right? Like most of the time, not all the information is being collected. So that’s of step one is defining all these terms for them, for a client of ours or even talking with somebody over the phone.
JJ: But what the goal is that these numbers jump off the page. And so if you go say for impression to aware. and we normally see like a 90, like 95% continue, 90 to 95%. If you’re at 80%, there’s a problem with your above the fold content. Like plain and simple that’s it like above the fold, something’s wrong with the expectation of what someone was expecting to see.
JJ: And then each step, we have some kind of like benchmarks depending on the industry and also just like intuition where you’re like if we make it into a funnel chart, you’re like, it let’s see a nice, beautiful tape or fall off. And if you’re like, whoa, that thing got really like skinny, fast.
JJ: Let’s go see what, like, why is that the case? Was it the fact that. We had a YouTube video that no one’s watching, that’s taken a half the screen. Was there a popup that’s happening at 15 seconds that makes everyone leave, seeing that happen? Not a fan of popups personally. And yeah, that, that’s where the actions come into play.
JJ: You see these percentages and then if they’re not what you would expect then you have to go in and hop and make, hopefully make a change that is very easily tied to those percentage.
Brent: Yeah. And I like that. I just to, for the listeners who don’t, I think above the fold and below the fold is pretty obvious.
Brent: So you’re saying 80%, if they drop below, you’re talking about a bounce rate, right? So that first time they land, if they pop off of it without doing anything within and 80% of those people are popping off that, or more than 80%, that there’s something that’s wrong with the visible section that somebody sees, as soon as they land on that page.
JJ: Yeah, exactly. That and bounce rate is like my least favorite, like thing, because by big default, just for everyone listening, who’s seen bounce rate, right? Like it’s a metric that a lot of platforms will give you. Bounce rate is normally calculated by people who load a page and then do not continue. There’s no other events on a page.
JJ: So what that means is someone could read the whole blog post, sit there for 30 seconds. but they didn’t do anything. They didn’t click on anything. They didn’t go anywhere. So to Google analytics or whatever your platform is, they were, they bounced, they read the article and left. They didn’t click anything, but that was great.
JJ: Like they read the whole article. So that’s something to just consider is how define bounce rate for how you like the listener. Want to determine it? Like we use 10 seconds, that’s it like 10 seconds. And we have an event that fires that then. This person didn’t bounce. So you could say 30 seconds, you could say they have to scroll 10%.
JJ: You can define it. However you’d like to, by default, I’d say it’s not the most useful metric, because a lot of people probably are engaging with their content.
Brent: that’s interesting. So are you saying then, oh, so if I’m the merchant, I have access to my Google analytics. I’m seeing my bounce right on this landing page.
Brent: That’s super high. Does Google analytics have the ability to tell you, are we looking then at how much time they’re looking at each page as compared to the bounce rate, then you can still get that out of Google analytics.
JJ: It. Yeah. So by default and we’re getting it into technical technicalities now.
JJ: Universal analytics, which is like the current Google load platform. Doesn’t how, like, how they calculate time is basically the distance between two different events. So event one happens of page view loads, and then event two happens of clicks to product. And then it calculates the time between those two event.
JJ: if there’s no second event, they never click to a page. The time is zero. And so which, for example, if you have a blog post that was saying like how to fix your sync, right? If you have a very hyper specific problem of like you are a plumber and you’re wrote an article of how to fix your sink in five minutes and your article is the best, it just says it clearly, like this is your problem. This is how you fix. And there’s no action. They’re just awesome contents. People who load the page, look at it, read it, and then leave bounced. They read the whole articles stood there for five minutes. , but then there’s no second event for Google analytics, universal analytics to define the time.
JJ: So that’s like a very technical thing. Just wanted to make sure everyone knew that Google a looks for, which is the new version coming out soon. Or it’s already here, but the new it’s gonna be launching the next like into production, I’d say in the next little bit does it solve that problem, but just wanna let you know for.
JJ: The current state of affairs, that’s how it is defined.
Brent: no, I think that’s really interesting. And I think there’s so many I know that there’s so many merchants that are probably looking at their Google analytics and saying, wow, this page is terrible. It’s bouncing right away. But people are really only looking at just one page they’re not looking around.
Brent: So maybe some. Some tips on how to get around on, I’m assuming first thing is to have some called actions at the top of the page to get some, to push to the bottom of the page and just get some to engage
JJ: on the site. Yeah. I’d say the number one thing is define. the purpose of every page of your website, right?
JJ: What’s the purpose of this? Because for example, you could have a blog, like the plumber example I just gave that’s like all these things. And the goal of that, the purpose of that article is to rank number one in Google and to build retargeting audiences for your ads. All those people are having plumbing problems and you wanna build lookalike audiences of these people.
JJ: Because you know that they have problems, that could be your purpose of the page. Is that, so define the purpose of your page if it’s a product detail page, if you’re like for all the eCommerce people, where it’s like, Hey, buy this water bottle, what’s the purpose of this page to get them to fricking hit the buy button, or add the cart button. And so you wanna make sure that you’re measur. For that, but then every step before, like they engage with their carousel. So define the purpose of your page. If it’s a blog, if it’s a piece of content, some blogs are very much more call to actiony where it’s like, Hey, here’s how.
JJ: If you’re a plumber, here’s how to do this thing, buy this part, right? This part will solve your problems. This is how you solve the like world piece, right? Click this button. Then you wanna measure for that button click and if people saw the button to begin with so that’s probably the most actionable piece of advice that like everyone can do.
JJ: Just audit your, every page of your site to be like, what’s the purpose of this page. And is it achieving that if it’s not, let’s delete it or let’s fix it right.
Brent: I like that. I, I think deleting it I suppose deleting, it would have some organic search that somebody would land there and then they’re like, this makes no sense to me and I’m gonna leave.
Brent: Would it be better to have it still and, but updated or make it try. Try I guess the point of where we’re really making here is we always wanna measure, we wanna create a baseline and then continue to measure and investigate always. We don’t wanna just stop. We don’t wanna leave something stagnant and there so you know, I’m interested in the second part of your journey, the 50% scroll.
Brent: Does Google analytics measure that the current version, the G GA universal, or do I FDA have a different, does the consumer have to have a different tool or the merchant have to have a different tool to do that part of it?
JJ: Yeah so there’s kind of two tools that work hand in hand with each other Google analytics, which I like to say is like the.
JJ: Data storage, right? It’s like your warehouse of where all the information that you stored live, but then there’s another tool called Google tag manager, which is what tells Google analytics, Hey, store this piece of information, right? By default, it collects a few things like page views, some platforms like Shopify will add some extra pieces to that.
JJ: But at the end of the day, you have to explicitly tell Google, Hey, I wanna store this information and you do that via Google tag manager. And it. Like impressive as far as what you’re able to do. I just mentioned all these metrics. So you probably have never even thought were possible. But you can measure for example, did someone see something like what we do call to actions, right?
JJ: If there’s a call to action box, we want to say how many people saw this call to action for at least five seconds. And then how many people clicked the call to action . So then now. You have a much more actionable thing of saying let’s change this call to action box to then improve that.
JJ: But by default, no, not many of these metrics are collected out of the box for nearly all analytics platforms, right? Whether Google analytics, Adobe analytics any of the other platforms, not usually collecting that.
Brent: Yeah. And I just we won’t get into technically again, but the Google analytics free version, doesn’t actually.
Brent: Report all the data reports, a subset of the data. Is that correct? Still like it’s doing 60% of your data. There’s a certain amount that it doesn’t report.
JJ: Yes. And it depends on how many events that you’re storing. Most of the time you’re pretty much good to go. Like I’d say unless you’re like.
JJ: Doing significant volumes of like 10 million hits per month. You’re gonna have pretty much the, like all of it there, and then you’d want to use a tool to make sure you have the action, of like, how do you wanna visualize this information? That makes sense to you? That’s the, like the last piece, like the top of the iceberg, right?
JJ: Is how do you wanna actually visualize this? Because row and columns are only. For some things at the end of the day, you might want to have a nice little funnel that says, whoa, how did people view this content for each stage? And what’s the dropoff rate.
Brent: Yeah. That, that brings up a really good point is like, how do you report to your boss what’s happening on the website?
Brent: And then maybe how do you get your boss to actually read it?
JJ: Yeah. And for that, like I am data studio is my go-to. Like we use that power users of data studio even have an entire free blog with nothing to ask of data studio.vip. Which is, there’s not even a, you can’t even give money if you want to.
JJ: Data studio.vip is what we like. I basically, I just post about how to visualize things for your boss and for clients. Though, number one thing, just hot tip. If you’re visualizing any information is what is the one takeaway from that report? And what is the action you’re gonna take from that take.
JJ: So that’s it. If you can define those two things your boss will be like, oh, I understand this because you are gonna be very tempted to be like, look at this really cool thing about Hey, you want mobile? We actually do X, Y, and Z. If there’s no action, it’s useless. Like you can collect information out the Wazo, but if there’s no action might as well just delete the report.
JJ: And I’m like genuine on that part. Like I’ve deleted pages of reports that we have, because there’s no action behind it. So we need to rebuild that to make it action. .
Brent: Yeah. And, I think the boss is always gonna look for what, how does this affect my, the bottom line? So those actions are gonna lead into something.
Brent: And I think that you’ve brought up a great point about how you present that data. And maybe you could come up. Maybe you could just share maybe the five top points that somebody should be looking at when building out a report. There’s always something they should do. Like they should be looking at actions.
Brent: but what are some other data that we should be seeing in a report? And then when is too much data, is it possible to have too much data for a boss?
JJ: It, yeah, it depends who the stakeholder is. And I like to define this as far as I’m gonna call it C-suite but like the highest level of reporting who they’re not like actually practicing the thing, but there’s a, C-suite, there’s a manager, of like person who’s over that. Then there’s the practitioner, those three levels, you can define them. Like I use Csuite just for clarification, but the highest level, a mid-level and then the practitioner. And so the practitioner’s gonna want all the nitty gritty details, because they’re gonna say.
JJ: For example, Facebook ads. What’s our clickthrough rate of each individual ad. They’re gonna wanna know that so that they can tweak each individual ad to improve those clickthrough rates. The C suite does not care about each individual ad at all. They want to know how are we doing overall as far as clickthrough rate, as far as Even just rev, spend to returns.
JJ: And so define who your stakeholder is first and then take the one takeaway that they should have. So for example, if it is a practitioner maybe like, how are we trending overall? Month over month because they usually don’t look at that. So that might be useful report for them to be like, Hey, we’re trending upwards.
JJ: And then they can go to their manager and be like, look at this guys. We’re fricking crushing it. Whereas a manager might wanna say, how are we doing on each individual platform by broken down. And then the C-suite the top level might wanna say. How are we doing it as a company, as a whole, for all ad networks or whatever it might be.
JJ: So define the stakeholder is number one, priority. Number two priority. Define the simple the easiest answer. That is to the question. So define the question first, then the answer. And then if you can pull the action into that that’s gonna be ideal the higher up that ladder. You go though, the less.
JJ: The actions to be less defined right at the C-suite like the action is whatever they, the C the CEO or the C-suite wants to do. We’re trending downwards. How are we gonna fix that? That’s not me as the dashboard builders problem. That’s the C-suites to figure out how
Brent: to fix that. . Yeah, so visualization, it could be a pyramid, right?
Brent: The less data at the top with the most important data. And I guess it’s, just like it’s important to get what is success in a, in a software project you want to get what success from your user at the end of every sprint you wanna know what’s successful for your boss. What do you deem as success?
Brent: and then just give them that data. And if you start giving them a whole bunch of data, then some of that success gets watered down. So if you look at a, if we’re looking at this as a pyramid the the highest level, the C-suite is gonna wanna see that boil down data at as they define it.
Brent: And then I suppose it’s step to the middle management or somebody to tell them. This data’s also important. We should look at that. There’s some education involved. Maybe you could talk about how to educate people as. yeah,
JJ: I education’s gonna be the big piece of this. Cause a lot of people, whatever you reporting on, whether it’s your CRM information, your eCommerce information, even your like your warehouse, if you have a warehouse as far as shipping, as like, how are we doing as far as stock to like capacity. Are we like running outta products or are, is our, all of our warehouses full, right. That could be a very useful report for somebody to know Hey, we can actually add more products to this warehouse. It has capacity. So at the end of the day, you have to define what are we actually looking at?
JJ: Are we looking at e-commerce stats? Are we looking at warehouse stats? Like a number I tell you 823,000. That means nothing to everyone listening. You’re like that’s a lot. I’m like 823,000 pixels, like on my entire website. Ah, not that much. You to define what it is that you’re talking about to whoever it is you, because if you build this information to you, it’s intuitive.
JJ: You’re like, oh yeah, of course this is good. You got 823,000 pixels. Awesome. But to somebody else, they’re like, I got no idea what this means. So the more you can do to either in your, if you’re building a dashboard or if you’re building something report, a PDF, whatever it might be try your best to simplify the explanation of what every metric is and how it’s defined.
JJ: You like I mentioned, engage, engage. What does that mean? What is engage? So you can define that for the end user. So hopefully it allows you to hop on less calls, as you as the data dashboard builder collection reporter.
Brent: Yeah. And I think going back to a developer conundrum, getting you as the practitioner, sometimes you get caught into what you’re doing.
Brent: And you forget that all this granular things you’re doing, maybe they’re not that granular when it’s put together makes a nice pyramid, but sometimes nobody cares about the little tiny piece that’s at the bottom. What they care about is how does that piece affect the top and then explaining that.
Brent: And then that’s, where the middle level comes in to help boil down what really needs to go upstairs? Yeah, go ahead.
JJ: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That my favorite analogy is it’s a bunch of. In order to have a beautiful report for that’s super actionable for somebody, whether that’s a practitioner or that’s a manager, or that’s a C-suite level, that’s gonna be the last domino to fall over.
JJ: Is that beautiful dashboard. The first is building a website, right? That’s like your first thing. You’re gonna have to have a, or building the data collection system of however, you’re collecting all this information that we’re talking about. And then you’re gonna have to have a way to report on it, to store it, all these pieces action.
JJ: So each domino is gonna push the next domino down that hopefully if you can line all those dominoes up to begin with, then you have a really streamlined way to get point a to point Z really fast, but it’s knocking that first domino down. So that’s the way I can most easily define this entire process.
Brent: Yeah. So I wanna just talk a re just briefly. I know that you’re a videographer, correct? This this idea of adding video to content and adding content or video content to products, and then having that as part of your content action where are you seeing that going? Is that it’s been around, but a lot of, I, I’m just gonna say a lot of merchants Haven, an adopted video, like you would think they should.
Brent: How important is that? .
JJ: Yeah. Just for everybody listening, like I used to I shoot, I shot videos for production for a while. So I’m very familiar with the video process as far as on a site, it can do both pros and cons and that’s where the biggest thing is to say, define what we’re trying to do.
JJ: And the biggest, if you’re trying to educate really quickly and there’s a video. It might be a great use case, right? It might be an awesome use case to define who you are, introduce your team, introduce what’s happening. How’s what’s about to go down by your next action. I’m a big fan of that personally.
JJ: But if everyone’s on mobile say for example, you’re a lower A ticket product or maybe it’s a less investment right. To do. And someone’s a soccer at a soccer game watching their kid play a game. They’re not gonna watch your video scrolling through during halftime. There’s not.
JJ: So if that’s the use, if that’s like where people find it, like not a great case for a video. But if it’s like, Hey, everyone’s always browsing on desktop because they’re trying to solve this problem because they need to do X, Y, and Z. a video might be an awesome use case. So I just defined where the user is in that journey of like, where would they physically be?
JJ: Is usually my biggest tell. And are they on a desktop? Because mobile’s usually not the best. And then a video might be an awesome. Use case.
Brent: Yeah. And it would be good as supplemental information. And would you, maybe in a stacking and a responsive version, you could push the video to the bottom of a blog post if you want to have it on there, but still want to have your main content for people to read through.
JJ: exactly. Yeah. And I love to measure you can measure via tag manager, people who play your video. So then you can say, Hey, here’s people who saw the page, right? People who played the video, people who watched 50% of the video, and then you can say, is it worth it for us to invest in video? We actually had a client that was like, we’re going all in on video.
JJ: But we were gonna test it with, I think, five production, like high production videos education content, and. I was like, cool. Let’s define what success looks like first. So for these first five videos, you’re gonna invest a lot of the time money effort into what they’re like. Okay. If 50% of the people that hit this page watch 50% of the video success.
JJ: Awesome. We’re gonna do basically and success, like we’re gonna do double down on this. We’ll make 10 next month. It was like 90% of people watched 70% of the video. like just knocked their benchmark out of the fricking park. And so if they didn’t define that up front of what are we trying to do?
JJ: It’d be super hard to take an action on that because we did, because we’re measuring it because we had all these dominoes lined up. Now they’re like we’re doubling down next month and we’re gonna even have more content people to en engage with. And we’re just gonna keep measuring it to say, Hey, if we ever drop down to our 50%, 50%, we’re gonna either slow down or reevaluate it.
JJ: So that’s a very actionable, hopefully actionable, or at least real life use case of video.
Brent: Yeah. And I think at least YouTube anyways people sometimes get stuck on YouTube and then they, instead of going back to Google to search for something, they’re just searching for more videos on YouTube because they’re enjoying it.
Brent: And I know that some of the merchants have put up content just to drive traffic from YouTube to their site. And then you could also embed that video with your product. So anyways, exactly. Yeah, so we have, couple minutes left here. If you were to have some insights on marketing trends for a D TOC right now, what would you, what would be a nugget you could give a merchant going into the last half or the second quarter of of 20, 22.
JJ: I’d say defining what you’re trying to do is gonna be really important moving forward. It used to be super, super easy to do just about anything online. There was no competition. There, mark, the, there was a blue ocean of for everyone who’s read the blue ocean book would reti really recommend.
JJ: So it was super easy to do anything. You could basically throw money. And make money back and you’re like, oh cool. This is gonna be awesome. So the biggest thing I’d say is define what you’re trying to do and what success looks like to know if you’re gonna keep doing more of that, or if you need to shift paths and what the minimum amount of effort required to get an actionable result is because a lot of people entered online in the past 18.
JJ: That’s a fact so you have more competition online. Whether that is also good, because now consumers are much more understanding of the online process. So you have to define what is the good enough for us and how do we improve that so that we know that we’re improving. And then how can we All the metrics that we’re trying to increase because that’s gonna be key in the net, like moving forward.
JJ: You’re just gonna have to be on top of your game as far as knowing your numbers so that, if you swung and you missed to not do that again, because you can swing and miss that’s. Totally. Okay. Just don’t keep swinging and missing. .
Brent: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I like that defined success. And again, in, in in the software world, defining your success at the end of every deliverable or what is the deliverable I think is a great way to look at it.
Brent: What is the success out of this is is really good. And then I like that minimum effort. What is, what can we do at a minimum to get to what our success is? And then what is overdoing it? I think you, you said Briefly got a video again, you could spend $20,000 on a one minute video. Would that be worth it?
Brent: Or should you just go out and get yourself a GoPro and make some fun, fun video on the road that would get you the same effort for very little cost? That’s good. JJ, as we finish out, I always give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug about whatever you’d like to plug. What would you like to plug.
JJ: Yes. If anybody has would like to build out more visualizations for what you’re doing. Data studio.vip is tons of free resources on how you can do this for yourself. We’re building that out as we speak lots of awesome content. If you want this done for you, anything that I’ve spoken about media authentic.com.
JJ: Sure. There’ll be like a link in whatever bio we’re talking about here. And we can figure that out for you, but W feel free to connect any way. You’d find.
Brent: Yeah, and I’ll put those I’ll put those URLs and contact information in the show notes. And I’m a big fan of data studio. So data, studio.vip, I think is great.
Brent: Thanks for that. JJ Reynolds thanks so much for being here today. It’s been a great conversation. We didn’t even get to B2B. But I think this is super valuable content for any merchant that wants to do. I I think you’ve made it easy to understand, and I think this, that four step journey for a client or for a merchant to understand what their clients are doing, what their users are doing are really important.
JJ: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me Brent. And if we ever need to talk about B2B, let me know, because we’ve got lots of examples on that as well.
Have you ever felt like a kid in the candy store? Imagine if that was your day job! This week we interview Ken Shenkman, who has been running his family business since 1992 and is on BigCommerce.
Nestled in sunny South Florida, The Bulk Candy Store sees its staff as family and its customers as close friends. Bulk Candy Store has been helping celebrate memorable events with sweets and snacks since 1992. Every day is a celebration, and sharing those moments with the people we cherish is priceless. Whether you are ringing in the New Year or just gathering to make merry, the Bulk Candy Store has all of the sweet treats you need to make the special occasions of your life exceptional.
