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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.