customer journey

Talk-Commerce-Irina Poddubnaia

Win More Customers By Providing The Ultimate Post Purchase Experience with Irina Poddubnaia

Think about the last time you placed an order on an e-commerce site. You get a confirmation email, and what’s in it? Usually, only shipping and fulfillment information.

Most online stores provide limited information and miss an excellent opportunity to upsell customers when they are not expecting to be up-sold.

Irina Poddubnaia tells us how her solution helps store owners maximize their transactional emails and turn them into marketing contact points.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to Tak Commerce. Today I have Irina Pad. Please go ahead, introduce yourself. Pronounce your name the way it’s supposed to be pronounced. Tell us your day-to-day role and may be one of your passions in life. 

Irina: All right. Thank you Brent. My name is Irina Pad. I’m from Bulgaria and I’m the founder of Trackage Dot.

Irina: We help entrepreneurs with post-purchase customer experience. So basically everything that happens after the buy button is Preston in eCommerce store. And when it comes to passions right now it’s public speaking and everything that’s related speak, just speaking and speak and singing as well.

Irina: So that’s one of my passions right now. 

Brent: Oh, awesome. Are you gonna sing for us? . 

Irina: It depends. , we’ll do one thing here, . 

Brent: We’ll leave that, we’ll leave it right to the end. So I did warn you that I have a project called The Free Joke Project, and maybe we should, we could do the free song project next, but we’ll do the free Pro Joke project.

Brent: All I’m going to do is tell you a joke and you can tell me if that joke should be free or if it’s one that we could charge. And since you did mention singing, I found a joke that has at least some reference to singing in it. Here we go. Did you know Mortal Combat is based on an old Scandinavian church song?

Brent: It’s a Finn Hymn.

Irina: That’s a good one. I I don’t know about if you should charge for it, but that’s a good. 

Brent: All right I’ll just one more quick one. Why is Pavlov’s hair so soft? Because he conditions it. Yeah, I know. They’re all really bad. I apologize. All right. So wouldn’t say that 

Irina: they’re bad. I’m just saying that Yeah.

Irina: This is like the hi and intellectual humor. It’s not 

Brent: just like it’s only for sas. That’s, it has to be smart people. All right. So let’s talk about PO I, I’m very interested in post transactional data and how you can get people and we are a magenta agency. My day job is work running a magenta agency and we’ve done a lot of work where in the card after they check after they ac even after they pay.

Brent: We like sometimes would the customers would like to hold that transaction and get ’em to buy something more. So tell us a little bit about your. And how it helps people post transaction. 

Irina: So what we do is basically, so I can just start from the beginning. 

Irina: And why they do that, because the conversion is from five to 10% of extra sales just from looking at the order status. So we helped like we literally just took this functionality and made it available outside of Amazon. So you can plug it into your store. That’s built with Shopify Commerce.

Irina: Magenta is in the plans. We don’t have a direct. , but we do have an integration with Zapier. So it’s possible to pass the data. So what it creates is it creates a tracking page where customers can see additional products the actual information about where order and when it’s coming to them and also the brand and social media accounts and the delivery information, whatever you want to put on the page.

Irina: It’s 100% customiz. And you can change all the bits and pieces of it. So it’s a drag and drop builder where you can literally just customize everything. So one other thing that I didn’t mention is that also those pages, they have localization. So if a customer is from a different country or if you are shipping internationally you can just customize the page with specific language.

Irina: That’s that’s region. Because we support customized emails as well. So emails can be in their local language when the tracking page can be in local language. So the entire thing. So what Trackage does is we are helping the customers not only understand with the like the package is coming to them, but also to see additional products while we’re where.

Irina: Browsing for the information they were actually looking for. So that’s how we help e-commerce stores bridge the communication gap and also lower the customer support load because people don’t have to ask the the question, the fail the question, like, where is my order? Where is my package?

Irina: That overloads customer support and e-commerce, so they don’t have to ask because it’s already answered. . 

Brent: So tell us some numbers. Do you have some hard numbers that kind of show how successful this is in terms of, it brings a lift on post transactional purchases by 10% or 15 or whatever that number is?

Brent: Yeah. And then all the secondary part of that question is, do you rely on discounts or coupons or anything else to bring in or do people just buying. 

Irina: Okay. I can tell you about our numbers currently. First thing that we measured is the open rate for the post-purchase emails that talk about the status of the order.

Irina: So basically we’ve seen the open rates around 60%. So that’s way higher than any marketing emails that you. . Another thing is that like from those emails customers, they visit the tracking pages one or two times per day when they are actually actively waiting for the order. Instead of just going through the email every time they just save the link and they go and visit it one or two times.

Irina: So during that time various sliders so what we’ve seen that then the sliders were. The conversion rate wasn’t that high. It was around like four, 5%, like it was on the lower end, but when they made them animated and they started moving the conversion rate raised to around 12, 10, 10, 12%.

Irina: Customers were actually, when we are waiting for the order, they literally have nothing to do. And they want to get the package repair waiting. But they don’t know how to facilitate that process. So instead, they are li left with just some free time and they start browsing the product.

Irina: And if the products are interesting the customers are buying. So we’ve worked with this influencer. They are creating an animated series. And this katoon gathered a very passionate fan base with free million follow. . It’s called Metal Family. If you want, you can check it out.

Irina: Like very cooling. And they have remarkable sense of humor, , so I would say so, and this fan base they were like when they launched their first comic book they were not prepared to handle like the amount of orders they were going to get because they printed the whole batch of 10,000.

Irina: And it was sold instead of two months. How we were projecting it was sold in one week, and after that they had to fulfill everything and what they’ve seen. So from those 10,000 orders like originally, wasn’t there, but we joined in be middle of this process. So from those 10,000 orders we’ve seen around 7% extra sales.

Irina: So that result around like 700 or that’s exactly what it. And so 700 text orders from the tracking page directly, but then we don’t measure the indirect sales. Some of the customers we were going through the logo to the website, we were going through the social media and then back to the website.

Irina: So that’s like the indirect conversion. So maybe it’s around 15% or something like that because we didn’t have the detailed analytics at that point. And what happened then? , the customers were waiting and instead of writing to customer support like they previously did because metal family, they were overwhelmed with the amount of questions they got.

Irina: Because the customers, they were, again, you can imagine this is a Katoon series. What kind of immature customers were there? So very immature customers were sending messages to all the social media accounts. We knew five messages from one customer, like every. . So they had to ease that pain.

Irina: So we had to ease that pain for them because once the emails started get going out and people were getting proactive communication, they stopped asking the questions and the customer support just co I don’t know, side with relief because all that enormous I don’t know, like a ton of sta questions.

Irina: Like it just went. So after that happened and the last bit of functionality and what we also helped metal family with was getting reviews. So at the end of the purchasing experience when the customer actually gets the order they, they experience this I dunno, like burst of enden when they open the package and they finally see the thing that we ordered.

Irina: And it’s the perfect moment to ask for a review. Because in most cases with what I’ve seen with e-commerce stores, they use just timed automation. So in two weeks there is an email that goes out asking for review. But what if in two weeks your customer hasn’t received the order yet?

Irina: And that happened to me a couple of times when I ordered from China or sometime from us. Like it, literally, like it asked me for a review when I didn’t yet get the product and when I’m fighting with the customs to get it out of , outta the post office. The idea is, so what we did, we configured the automation, the standard one and it started asking for reviews and every fifth customer left the review around five stars.

Irina: So that was 2,150 reviews from 10,000. . That’s enormous, I would say. And those reviews they can be used on the product pages, on the, I mean on the store itself and on social media. So there are a lot of ways how you can capitalize on social proof. 

Brent: So the social is the, is that how you leverage other customers to bring in 

Irina: more customers?

Irina: Yes. And we have one feature that is like the killer feature, but it’s not yet. Then the customer review is four stars and more. I think we’re going to make it configurable so that you can adjust the threshold. So if review is positive we will ask the customer to share it on social media with reach media, for example like video or a photo of them interacting with the product.

Irina: So let’s going to probably get some sales from. I’ve seen some companies that were capitalizing just on oh, you were going to post review anyway. How about you get some like some money from the brand that you’re posting it for? So yeah, there are quite a few companies that are focusing on TikTok commerce.

Brent: Yeah. Are you focusing then on making are, so they get an email and then they go and open up the email to go to this, to, to the custom tracking page or? Custom tracking page that you’re generating automatically there right 

Irina: after checkout. The custom tracking page is going to be available the entire time how it’s set up like technically.

Irina: When the store signs up the trackage and they install one of the apps, or they just configuring integration with like the third party. . We will get the tracking page inside of Trackage and you can create multiple tracking pages. By the way if you are promoting different things or if you have different brands.

Irina: So you can configure tracking pages for every occasion. And the tracking page, it’s standalone. You can put it on your custom domain or you can use trackage domain and you can plug it in anywhere. It’s responsive, so on mobile and on desktop, which works seamlessly. The idea is that page is always there, but the content based on who is looking at that page changes.

Irina: So they can look by the order number or by the tracking number that they got. And if we don’t remember both, they can enter their email and they’re going to get an email from Trackage that’s going to send them their tracking page. So this way we. Just this is a security feature. Because if we were allowing them to just look up any email, that’s not a very secure 

Brent: feature.

Brent: Yeah, that makes sense. I’m interested in your own journey. In your bio that you moved to China without speaking Chinese, and you ran a fulfillment company and then you now. You’ve launched the SAS company remotely without any funding. Tell us a little bit about that journey.

Brent: Like how did you end up in China and then are you back in Bulgaria now? 

Irina: Yes. I’m back in Bulgaria for the last six years. And that journey to China, it started just by me feeling adventurous. I. Because at some point in my life I was just working in an office I was selling frozen berries in bulk.

Irina: So it wasn’t a very exciting job to tell you the, like to tell you the truth. And at that point I thought that I knew everything about commerce and how videos are done because I was selling the. , like ev, everything, like in trucks and even higher amounts. So we, we had never sold any ships, by the way, because that’s a lot but the trucks, yeah.

Irina: And I thought that I understood everything like with bills of lading how the deals are them, how to accept the payments, invoicing, everything. But that wasn’t, When they came to China we found the the variety of suppliers of everything you could imagine. There were literally plazas.

Irina: Those are skyscrapers of like full to the brim with goods of various kinds, like a plaza for smartphone accessories. That’s not an exaggeration where it is a whole city of like smartphone accessories. You could literally just find everything. What we realized at that point was that it’s not about the suppliers, it’s about the customers, because we didn’t have that many customers at that point.

Irina: When when we came to China and we found all the suppliers, we found how to work with them. We figured everything out. We still were forced to understand marketing, to reach out to customers, to do the prospecting selling, and that’s. and that’s how we were surviving. So we figured out the pay dads and it was the full experience because we had to survive based on how well the business performed.

Irina: We didn’t take any funding ever. We didn’t even know what was a possibility. That’s right. . So that’s how my like Chinese adventures came to an end when we lost one of our biggest customers. And then we felt like overwhelmed with all evaporations and like packaging the boxes. Because again, for two and a half years my main occupation was to go to a warehouse to accept the goods, to pack the goods, to ship it to the logistics company, to negotiate with suppliers check.

Irina: And I even stopped speaking English that much just because we were working with Europe and like it wasn’t necessary. And I, like all the time I was exposed to Chinese, so my English kind of went. . So yeah, at some point I realized that’s not what I want to do in life. I wasn’t born to package boxes.

Irina: That’s not something that I want to do. And that’s when this part of with Johnny ended and after that we moved back to Bulgaria. We. like we were. Yeah, at that point we were very discouraged because like we attempted to work, we attempted to create our own business. It wasn’t the next Amazon unfortunately, or even the next early express.

Irina: It wasn’t like. Yeah. And that’s when we realized that we could do something with the tools that we developed for ourselves while we were in. So everything from inventory, acceptance keeping track of all the shipments keeping track of all the orders and yeah, we just wanted to bring all the experience with Beca to a better cause and make it available for our e-commerce entrepreneurs to use.

Irina: So that’s how Trackage was born. And that’s how it’s still there . . 

Brent: Yeah. It’s interesting that a lot of these great there’s a lot of great tools that get developed in-house and then suddenly the entrepreneur who’s selling something realize that they have a great CRM or inventory management or whatever that tool is, that software tool, and suddenly they’ve decided their own, their old business is no good and here’s much better business.

Brent: Do you feel as though. Branching into a whole new culture helped you be more competitive. I just did working in China help you be a better entrepreneur when you went back to Bulgaria? 

Irina: You know what I definitely can say uh, happened is that I lost my like rose tinted glasses. So I started actually looking realistically at the world of business and.

Irina: it’s un like we, like at the beginning of a journey, we lost unfathomable amount of money. Like with just purchasing own goods or just, I dunno, like the logistics partner losing the packages and who knows what else. We experienced all the hardships of working with people that we didn’t know anything about.

Irina: And we didn’t have experience with all those different products that were ordered from us because we literally offered to buy anything from China, from us. And that’s that was probably a mistake right now I realize it was probably a mistake. We should have niche down. We should have just studied with niche, understood the quality requirements found with West suppliers, and then just scaled that.

Irina: But instead, we just went broad and developed the tools instead of developing the. . But again that’s a learning experience. I I will never say that. I’m not glad it happened. And after that I now realize how important that is to understand the customer before the supplier, because there are a lot of suppliers, but the customers, they are the backbone of a business.

Irina: And if you don’t have any sales, you don’t have a. That’s 

Brent: easy. One. One of my experiences with buying products from China is that documentation is often just Google translated. Do you find that same type of, did you find that, say I’m assuming you sold products to Bulgaria and it was maybe they put, they did a Google translate into Bul.

Brent: Into Bulgarian and nobody actually, no humid actually read. read the text. Is that something that is overlooked in China or is it something that that people just don’t think is important? I’m, and I’m just saying specifically language, like we, you get some products that are coming from China that are just translated into English, and it’s clear it was done through a machine.

Brent: It wasn’t nobody actually read it. Who’s an English? 

Irina: Yeah. In case of our deals I was translating everything, so that wasn’t the case. So yes, I did remember when we got some materials, they were very poorly translated. And I did have to, I did have to spend a lot of time to adjust, rewarding and to literally make something out of.

Irina: The cluster of words or keywords that I received as specification. So that was fixed by me, basically. And I remember how we were creating all the documents just because we were requirements of the customs, not because the suppliers provided them from the suppliers. We literally got big thank you and the goods

Irina: That’s all we got from it. So yeah I believe the problem literally exists. But I think with AI tools that are currently on the market, you can adjust that. And the translation tools were also getting better. Then we were in China communication was done just for the mobile phones.

Irina: We were writing in English and showing them some Chinese characters and they underst. I think right now it’s, it would be through Google Speech or something like I’m going to talk to the tool I dunno, Skype maybe. They introduced some on the fly translation. So I think right now it’s much easier to communicate anywhere in the world.

Irina: But at that point it was challenging. 

Brent: So your experience coming outta China and then into Track Ma and. I know one thing you’ve said about Trackage is it helps the merchant put their store more on autopilot. Just can you explain how it, how that works and how it, I know you’ve said that there’s less customer service involved, but it can’t always be a hundred percent autopilot.

Irina: That’s why we’re not saying that 100% of customer support requests are going to be automated because if the customer has a question about the size chart or about the customs clearance or something like something was shipped to wrong location, you still need to have customer support and you need to reply to those customers.

Irina: But all the repetitive questions, the ones that can be answered by robots, Like the, where is my order? The limo request. That that one can definitely be automated. And with automation, literally, nobody’s going to ask you that question because it’s not going to be an issue for the customer.

Irina: They are already going to know when, like, when the order is coming, where is it where is it coming from? I know what carrier it’s shipped through. And also they will have information about the delivery, very funds, whatever information you want to put on the tracking page because the more information you give to your customers will less likely they are going to reach out.

Irina: Whereas some illiterate people who are still going to go to customer support and ask a question, I I totally understand that there is going to be a percentage of people who are still going to not understand what’s going. But that percentage is going to be minuscule compared to the previous amount.

Irina: So that’s just like the customer support side. A lot of automation is also coming from operation side. So for example, with chi, with Chinese suppliers we had to deal with this interesting situation where the supplier is providing you with a tracking number or the information about the.

Irina: But then the tracking number doesn’t have any tracking information, so that means the tracking number is either incorrect or the product has not been shipped. And if for example, this situation is left unattended for a week or two, the customer is going to get anxious, we are going to start asking for very money back.

Irina: So we had to monitor all of that. And that’s how in Trackage we have two counters. They is an idle and they in. So days in I is counting until the package is actually moving. So until the status in transit appears on the package. And the other one days in transit is counting how many days it’s in transit whatever the package got lost in the post.

Irina: So this way the business can proactively reach out to those customers who were unfortunate enough to experience a deliver. And if it’s in the initial stage of communication with the supplier, they can reach out to the supplier and ask like, where is the package, when they’re going to ship it?

Irina: And if a supplier is unresponsive for where is an issue, they can even refund it and find an our supplier to buy product from. That’s specifically handy for a drop shipps for hours. It’s not we handy, but still you can poke your suppliers or even knock at where doors and. what package it should have been shipped three days ago.

Irina: What’s going on? 

Brent: Yeah, a really good point. A lot of ERPs will generate a tracking. They’ll generate, the package has been shipped even before it gets to the post office, or UPS picks it up and UPS doesn’t assign a tracking number until they’ve actually taken possession of the package.

Brent: So that’s a great feature right now, yeah. And if you were to offer some, bit of advice to a merchant going into the holidays right now what could they still do and what should they be doing after the holidays? 

Irina: The holiday season is rather challenging for commerce, so it just literally creates an overload of shipments and overload of everything like processing.

Irina: So I guess , my, like most straightforward advice ladies keep saying keep calm , because this is going to pass, but right now you need to operate at 100% efficiency, 100% capacity. So I guess that’s so that’s wise. But after the holiday season is. You can examine and do some postmortems for some of the problems that you experienced during the holiday season.

Irina: You can see which carriers failed which carriers you might want to replace with an alternative one. . I know that on social media, there are quite a few people who are talking about diversifying the shipment volume between not just FedEx, u Ps like the like the two major carriers.

Irina: You could try our ones and see if this improves your cost per shipment or the cost like the overall margin as well. So another thing would be to evaluate your customer support after the. And see where the customer support might have failed or might have failed the communication with the customers.

Irina: Because usually during holidays people want to buy presents and if they become very sensitive to the timelines of a shipment. So if a person is not going to get their Christmas socks, for example, we’re going to be very upset. And the customer support needs to handle that and be mentally prepared that we are going to be customers with delayed.

Irina: Yeah. And the most interesting part would be to evaluate your systems overall. So once the holiday season is over, once you see over weak points where the systems are not working as you expected them to, you can definitely I dunno. Start evaluating which systems are lacking in your tech stack.

Irina: Maybe tech majors lacking Yeah. Something of a similar fashion where you can see all the orders and all evaporations on one page and understand where you are still not efficient enough. So just basically do the fine tuning when it’s below season in January or in February.

Irina: It’s the best time. Start implementing some new changes because during the holiday season, you will not have the opportunity to do that. 

Brent: Yeah that’s really good advice. Never make changes during the holidays or after October, maybe. code lockdown for people who do on-prem software. Irina. When we close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like.

Brent: What would you like to plug? 

Irina: All right. I would like to gift the listeners of top Commerce Podcast the free resource. It’s called How to Get five to 10% Extra Sales from existing Customers without spending more money on ads or hiring more staff. In this book you can see like all the key ingredients for creating the best post-purchase experience for your customer.

Irina: And definitely you will understand what things are lacking in your current post-purchase experience. And you can either implement them yourself or maybe use Trackage for that purpose. Yeah. And you can find it at trackage.com, slash flywheel dash extra sales. And I hope that in the show notes you can also find.

Irina: . Yeah. 

Brent: Yeah. I’ll put all those I’ll put all the, all your links in the show notes how they can get in contact with you and and and of course track ma.com. Thank you, ARITA. Thank you so much for being here. It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you for staying up late. And thank you.

Brent: It’s my pleasure.

Irina: I love talking about e-commerce and what you can improve in your supply chain and post-purchase experience. Thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you to Podcagent for the wonderful guest!

Unlock the Power of Your Customer Journey with Nadav Charnilas

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.

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