An eCommerce Podcast Hosted by Brett Curry

In this episode I had the privilege of sitting down with award-winning entrepreneur Leah Garcia, founder of Nulastin. 

Leah has a remarkable journey building a beauty brand with shocking retention numbers—80% blended returning revenue and 65% subscription-based customers. From her bootstrapped beginnings (going from zero to $17.5M before hiring her first employee!) to developing bio-designed elastin products that deliver real results, Leah unpacks the strategies that have made her company a standout success even in uncertain economic times.

Key Takeaways

• Product is Everything: Leah emphasizes that customer retention starts with having a product that genuinely works and solves real problems. Nulastin's focus on elastin (instead of collagen) as the "miracle youth protein" created a market differentiator with demonstrable results.
• Reducing Friction Points: By partnering with the right tech stack (Recharge, Shopify Plus, and Absolute Web), Leah transformed her subscription program, resulting in a 50% reduction in customer service tickets and significantly increased LTV ($436 for subscribers vs. $186 for non-subscribers).
• Smart Cancellation Prevention: Understanding that customers were often "overstocked" led to subscription innovations like offering a 10-week initial supply followed by 5-week refills, creating manageable cadences that reduced churn and saved an additional 7% of would-be cancellations.
• Consistent Brand Messaging: Creating a "golden thread" of consistent communication across all customer touchpoints—from ads to emails to customer service—helps reinforce the value proposition and keeps customers engaged throughout their journey.
• Navigating Business Uncertainty: Leah shares her approach to managing through uncertain times, including maintaining an abundance mindset, focusing on essentials, and seeking opportunities for industry collaboration rather than panic-driven decisions.

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Leah Garcia:

My superpowers. I make really, really fast decisions when I make them. I give the person that I'm going into business with or making a decision with my all and I don't keep one foot on each side of the fence.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I am delighted to welcome to the show Leah Garcia. We met in Denver, Colorado. We both spoke at Ezra Firestones last ever, the final, the grand finale, glue and Mastermind. Lee and I both spoke there. I think you spoke right after me, and so I was up close to the stage. I heard you talk and thought, man, got to get you on the podcast. And so here we are today. But Leah is an award-winning entrepreneur. She won the EY winning Entrepreneur, female entrepreneur class of 2024. So that's Ernst and Young. We'll hear more about that as we go. She's built a company called New Lastin, which is really has some shocking retention numbers that we're going to unpack and that you're going to learn from.

She's been involved with the rodeo, she's been on tv, she's sold on QVC. She's done a little bit of everything. It turns out as we got to talking, we know about a bunch of the same people, and so she's just an impressive human and brings amazing energy. Although she did confess to me this energy is going to be raw. It's going to be all Leah because she's got no coffee right now, no caffeine. And so I love that you're willing to do this podcast without caffeine. You're traveling, didn't have access to coffee. So with that, Leah, welcome to the show and how you doing?

Leah Garcia:

Thank you. I tried to make my screen smaller to see your face not so ginormous. And right now all I've got is an exclamation point that says, thanks for joining, but if you can still see me, I'm literally looking at a blank screen right now, which is fine.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, you look great. You look great. So yeah, perfect,

Leah Garcia:

Perfect. This is more like a Braille podcast, and I'm actually down with that because oftentimes I sit around staring at myself in the mirror way too long. So we're done with that. No coffee, no reflection, complete, just full on transparency.

Brett Curry:

I love it. I love it. So amazing. So let's start here, Lee, I want to get into some of your story as we go because it's really fascinating. You've done a lot of amazing things, but what is Elastin? Why did you start it? And then we're going to talk about some shocking numbers you've been able to create in terms of subscriber percentages and return customer percentages and LTV and some stuff that's really, really valuable right now. But what is new lesson and why did you start it?

Leah Garcia:

The journey really was personal problem, resourceful resource, meaningful monetization. I had an issue that was going on as I was aging and losing elastin and it manifest itself in ways I was in television, but the wrinkles, the lack of vitality, hair was thinning eyebrows. I over plucked, that was all on me. Things were happening in my body as I started aging in this world of being front facing camera. And I was introduced to this very powerful protein called elastin, and I met a microbiologist and I had my aha moment where I realized that this was truly the miracle youth protein that nobody else was really addressing. People were talking about collagen but not about elastin. So elastin was for me that aha moment. And the company was founded on science. So bio designed an elastin replenishment product for scalp hair, beautiful skin. And the thing that makes it so novel is that it's one of the first bio designed proteins that's identical to the human body, meaning that when you put this product on topically, your body recognizes it as native so it doesn't fight with it.

And now they use fancy words like biomimetic bioidentical, but your body loves these types of proteins. It says, oh yeah, I make this, I produce this. I know what to do with this so that I'm going to work for you. And it's probably one of the most natural ways to continue getting the results that you're looking for. So I fell in love with the science, even though I'm not a scientist, but that's how the whole business started was I had a personal problem. I found this solution which was elastin. It wasn't being addressed in the marketplace, and I thought, I can really change lives here. I can do something for women, especially. I started with women that wouldn't just give them results, but that would give them so much something bigger like their confidence, their identity, their sense of self, and that's what we're doing at Elastin.

Brett Curry:

That's fantastic. And so your core products are hair lash, brow, correct. So talk a little bit about your hero products and then we're going to talk about your incredible results and what we can learn from 'em.

Leah Garcia:

I started the company with two hero products, which is lash and brow, and boy, timing is everything. So we did have some skincare. I've been using the skincare for about a decade, but it was a prototype formula and wasn't really commercialized, but I used it. I've always been using science-based skincare, wound healing, tissue regeneration. I've never been an Avon girl. I've never used anything that was sort of what you would at a department store. So I don't know if that's just because of my professional athletic background. You're always playing around with what's the newest nutritional supplement or what's the newest thing that you can concoct so that you can go faster or climb higher and do all the things that you want to do to win. So the lash in the brow serum had demonstrable results within some people a couple of weeks, six weeks, eight weeks by 12 weeks.

It was just mind boggling, the changes. And so we had these gorgeous before and afters and that was a really fun product to bring to market. But my dream was always to be able to tackle the hair, but I just knew that that was to try to get the same amount of active ingredients in a 50 mil container that would give the same demonstrable results in an amount of time that wasn't going to cost somebody their arm and a leg. That was the journey that took a wee bit longer to get that really pinpointed so that we just didn't have a $400 bottle that we were trying

Brett Curry:

To sell. Yeah, little bit difficult. Even if the results are great and we all want to look youthful enough, vibrant hair and skin and brows and lashes, hard to justify 400 bucks for a bottle of shampoo. That's for short. So let's unpack something Leah, because there's a lot that's impressive about you, by the way. You're an amazing presenter on stage, you look great, you take fitness seriously. You're aging gracefully. You got so many cool things going on, but you shared this with me. You have 80% blended returning revenue, so 80% of your revenue is blended returning customers, 65% subscription based for customers. Your A OV is 90 in the 94th percentile of your vertical, and then your LTV is off the charts. We'll talk about that in a minute. But how have you done this? Because I know this is by design. You said this was the goal from the beginning. I know it's a great product, but how do you get to that 65% of your revenues from subscriptions? 80% is blend to returning customers. How do you do it?

Leah Garcia:

Well, first of all, you better have a product that works, right? And so now there's all sorts of fancy words for it, but back in the day it was word of mouth and the trajectory to getting a really nice return customer isn't just putting in cancellation prevention, finding the right tech stack, which is key. I think that if you break it down into four categories, you're looking at discover, discover your customer pain points, that's going to be the first thing that you need to do. Put skin in the game, literally something that is a personal problem that you've lived through that you can then identify and that immediately is going to give you a product that people are going to want and to understand and can be the heartbeat of the formula. And then you want to make sure that you're identifying the things in your business model that are the defeat, repeat moments, what's defeating them?

Is it a bad value proposition? Is it a shitty product which we don't have? And then the final one, which I think is really, really key is do you have a gap? Is there a frustrating technical experience for the customer? Because let's face it, nobody wants to get to the finish line to buy something, to have tech breakdown or their website not work or gosh dang it, I've already given you my credit card five times. Why do I have to go find that number again? There's these points that happen in a customer journey that will just throw them off. They'll just, I'm done. I'm done with you. That was frustrating. It wasn't fun, it wasn't pleasant. So these frustrating experience will break down that repeat customer. And then the biggest one for us, honestly, we did really well up to, geez, last year because we had such a great product, we cared so deeply about our customers, we did nice things for our customers, but I still didn't have the right tech partners, and that was really the missing link for me getting up to this 80% and 65% was finally plugging in the right tech partners.

And my tech stack isn't anything novel, but it just started working once I had left hand and right hand talking to one another.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, so it all starts with product, right? We got to have a product that is amazing that we want to keep ordering again and again. That's so good that we're telling our friends about it, things like that. That's solving a real problem. We got to then make the process easy. We've got to have good tech solutions. There's a lot that goes into that. But what's interesting, and you talked about solving a real problem, I want to give a quick shout out to Dean Brennan. He was a guest on the podcast, CEO of Heart and Soil. These are meat based supplements as a weird concept. I do plant-based supplements in these supplements, but he tipped me off on this joint care because as I've been aging, I work out, I run, I do things, joints hurt, and he tipped me off to this joint care supplement.

It's fantastic. I've never taken anything like I don't ache at all. We went on a trip to Vegas just before actually the Denver event where I spoke with you and a couple of guys were with me. We were running on the pavement and they were all complaining about being sore. And I'm like, I feel great. My joints don't ache at all. Anyway, so that's a product where I started taking that. I am not going to unsubscribe from that. That is going to become part of my routine because I feel awesome. And so same is true for you though, man, the skin is looking good, the brows looking good, the hair's looking good. We're just going to keep buying. So that makes a ton of sense.

Leah Garcia:

Talk this out. Lemme on to what you just said because that is so key, right? So you have a product, he tells you about it, you use it, it works, and then what do you just do? You told me about it. Now I'm curious. And that's what we're talking about. That's how you get that sticky customer. It's no one. If I can get on that soapbox again, and you've heard me get on my soapbox. If you've got a product because you just want to make money because you want to sell, because you just want to cut corners, do people, if you will, they might buy maybe once or twice, but ultimately it's not going to be the longevity. It's not going to be what's going to serve them well in the long run because ultimately people don't want crap. They want something that works.

Brett Curry:

It's going to be grind. You're always going to have to be hustling for that next sale where, whereas with you with your product now 65% of your revenue comes in automatically through subscriptions, and then another 15% comes in through repeat customers anyway, so it's really awesome. Talk about some of the things you did to remove friction from the shopping process to make subscriptions easier. And you have any insights on, do you get first purchase take rate on subscriptions or is it more like they try it once and then you're getting them on subscriptions through email and SMS and remarketing campaigns? Talk through some of the tactics there

Leah Garcia:

First. Yeah. Okay. So when I first started, I bootstrapped the company and my claim to fame was that I went from zero to 17 and a half million before I hired my first employee.

Brett Curry:

No way,

Leah Garcia:

Yes, that's the claim to fame. That being said, I did have, excuse me, I did have an agency that I had hired that really helped me with my digital marketing and they helped me with my paid media marketing. So I wasn't able to really control. They had their things they were working on. So I started with bold subscriptions and Bold just did not work for me. We didn't have the right website and the right theme and the right anything to manage that subscription platform. And then we transferred. Once I started professionalizing and bringing in employees and we're looking at like 20, 21 at this point, then I transferred over to another subscription platform and that one didn't work out at all. They were very tech heavy and I still didn't have the internal tech because I was bringing everything in house. So it was just a mismatched relationship, just literally oil and vinegar.

And so then ultimately I got a cold call from a recharge rep that said, Hey, Leah, so-and-so from Recharge and I don't like cold calls, but I said, you've got five minutes to convince me why I should switch to your platform. And then ultimately we arm wrestled and negotiated a good contract, which is something that was very important to me. And then I signed on and when I go, I go deep. I don't wish my superpowers, I make really, really fast decisions when I make them. I give the person that I'm going into business with or making a decision with my all, and I don't keep one foot on each side of the fence. It's amazing, a good

Partner. So they then introduced me to a web development team that at first I didn't hire, but I really liked them. And then eventually I realized that I still didn't have left hand and right hand talking and that these teams needed to all be working in Shopify Plus. So my basis for my tech stack is literally absolute web recharge and Shopify Plus. And then from there you can build out with the Klaviyo's and the postscripts and all the new things that come around. But because they all work together collectively and kind of synergistically, that made my job easier so that we could use the insights. And I'll tell you with Recharge, constantly innovating, they came out with their cancellation prevention, which was telling me I knew my customers were overstocked, but I didn't know to what degree. So then when I find out that I'm 30% plus overstocked with customers, which is why they're churning, then I can really do something about it. So then my web tech team got together and we created a really bespoke, a really bespoke journey whereby now we changed our subscription so that we open with a 10 week supply because Elastin is a product that you need to use over time to see the results.

Brett Curry:

Got

Leah Garcia:

It. So instead of maybe them picking haphazardly six weeks, despite the fact that we tell them otherwise, then they get overstocked. Then we transfer from that 10 week supply to a five week supply, for example, so that they now have a manageable cadence coming in with their subscription. And that immediately turned things around. I mean that alone, we saw an uptick in our subscription take, and then we saw a decrease in churn. So churn can hover between eight to 10 ish percent, which me I'd love churn to be about 2%.

Brett Curry:

No doubt

Leah Garcia:

I'm a dreamer. But the customers that were sticking around then became stickier, if you will. And that's when that lifetime value for our subscription customers could also be identified as a ridiculous number compared to non-subscribers. I think it's $146 for our, no, excuse me, $436 for our subscriber lifetime value compared to 186 for non-subscribers. Way

Brett Curry:

More than double.

Leah Garcia:

That's huge, right?

Brett Curry:

It's huge.

Leah Garcia:

And then we do that smart cancellation prevention, which then saves us an additional 7% of would be cancellations. And that's all done through automation and thoughtful touch points. So something that we just didn't have before, but I'll tell you the biggest thing for me, the thing that really turned my business is that our customer service team, which we have an in-house team of work from home moms that are just amazing.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing.

Leah Garcia:

We have always been one of the top performing brands on gorgeous, the platform that we use for cx, our tickets went down 50%, I'm pausing there. Tickets went down 50% by having all of these optimizations, all of this website flow, this smarter website, this smoother website, all of those friction points, once they were removed, I'm saving money, I'm making more money, and my customer service team, it has 50% fewer tickets, happier customers, and we're not even paying that higher platform anymore. On Gorg. We'd had to keep up in our fee for our agreement because we were just so much customer service, so much customer service. And now that's being eliminated.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. So now you're cutting down, you're able to staff less or you're saving on costs for answering tickets. But think about it from the customer's perspective. Nobody wants to submit a ticket, nobody wants to interact. Even if customer support is delightful, it's a stay-at-home mom, and they're just a joy to talk to. I still don't want to do it. And so if you can eliminate that, it's even better. So part of that, so let's talk about why. And I want to look at, you said something a minute ago was really important. You said, Hey, people need to take this for 10 weeks to see the results. So that's what you started selling, right? So is that like a 10 week bundle or just sign up and you get it for 10 weeks or

Leah Garcia:

Two pack for example, just a two pack of lash, two pack of brow or a two pack of the hair treatment. And that's the vibrant scalp treatment. So use it consistently, use it every day. You need to premix that fuel, if you will. You want to get those hyper results in the beginning because if not, people will lose interest. It's already hard enough that I am not a mascara where you put it on and you get longer lashes immediately. This is something that depending on where you are naturally with your hair growth cycle, it takes a while. Get those real results. So some people, depending on where they're at with that growth journey, they may have results right away. But for the most part, aging women, who is our demographic, me, I am the demographic, we don't exactly respond. Those young bucks do. So it takes us a little while to get that diesel engine revved up and we just need to make sure that people are using it and then they start seeing results. And that's when the excitement sets in. And then when

Brett Curry:

You at that point, and then you

Leah Garcia:

Go for Vegas with your buddies and your knees don't ache, you're like, hello?

Brett Curry:

Yeah, exactly. Tell me what you're taking. Tell me what you're taking. Yeah,

I wrote a lot statement. So it's a two pack so they can use it for 10 weeks, get the best results. So that's the first start. The first piece says, what do they need to take to get the best results, whether it's a physical product, something you're using or something you're putting on ingestible, whatever. So what do they need to take to get the best results? Let's sell them that. And then what did you do in terms of messaging or just making it easier to understand and to say yes to? Talk to me about some specific tactics there.

Leah Garcia:

The tactic, I think that's the most important, just if we're talking D two C and just brand building is I had a lot of fractional copywriters for a while, so we didn't have a single voice, and then we hired a gal who is leading our brand and our brand copy and her copy then hit that whole customer journey. So what we see on our macros from customer service is what we see on the post-consumer flow for our email marketing, it's what they're getting when they're seeing the ad perhaps on meta or wherever they first found out that top of the funnel perspective. So they're seeing, here's what they're seeing in the top of the funnel, here's the middle of the funnel, here's the bottom of the funnel, here's the email marketing campaign, here's how it's flowing with the SMS, here's the information they're getting from all angles.

And it all sounds the same and it all makes sense. So you're not sending mixed messages anymore. And before, I'm probably guilty of having sent more mixed messages or just not having that through line, that continuity so that we're all just really making sure that people understand what we're delivering to the customers. And it's a serum. I'm at my temporary desk here, but for example, here's, here's a sample of the vibrate scalp treatment, the lash and the brow that's in just a single box. This was one of our promo boxes that we put together. So they're all serums. You use 'em twice daily, once in the morning, once at night, and people will inadvertently say, oh, so I need to keep using that product, and if I stop using it, it stops working. And the answer is yes. If you stop drinking water, you get dehydrated. Of

Brett Curry:

Course, yeah.

Leah Garcia:

If you stop eating food, you get hungry. If you stop, I want to vitamin I can take,

Brett Curry:

That's

Leah Garcia:

It. Things change. But it's still that age old question. And that comes from, I kid you not, that comes from old school mentality before people really got a little bit smarter to realize that consistency is what delivers results in everything. If you want to stay fit, stay fit,

Brett Curry:

You, I've got to keep working out. I've got to keep sleeping well every night. Come on, that's want to do it once, it's so good.

Leah Garcia:

But it's not necessarily even a nice to have once you start fighting back mother nature, it's a must have. And this is where that longevity game comes in there because what we're doing to biohack our bodies and our health and our wellbeing is really the rage right now. And I've been biohacking since day one. I think the biggest thing I did to biohack was not have

Brett Curry:

Children. I'm sure I've never

Leah Garcia:

Said that out loud before.

Brett Curry:

New biohack don't have kids. Turns out that's also a great savings plan. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leah Garcia:

I know a lot of parents that get pretty dang stressed right now in this world. There's enough stress going on. So I always laugh that my husband and I are able to just pick up and go whenever we want. We've got all this freedom. And I could also focus on the business. So truthfully, my business is those are my children, my

Brett Curry:

Members.

Leah Garcia:

That's who I care about right

Brett Curry:

Now. I love that. I love that. My wife and I, we can get up and travel anytime we want to as well. We just have eight kids that we have to tow around with us. Actually they don't all live at home. So it's not eight, it's only like five or six. It's no big deal. But

Leah Garcia:

That to me, I think that single voice to the question going back to

What are the mechanics, what can you do right now? What are the actionable items that some of the individuals listening to can take and take from this? And you talked about that ability for us to get on the phone. And something that I always say flies in the face of what we've been taught is to really know your customer. So we do have a lot of older women who have felt unseen and unheard and undervalued in their lives. And so our customer service team is empowered to spend however extra time they need on the phone with those individuals until that individual feels like they've gotten what they need. And sometimes they can be on the phone for a long time, which is why our gorgeous score has probably gone from a 4.8 and not to a five. I mean, we're still at 94.8% of all gorgeous platforms. That's that 5% stat. But we stay where we're at because one of the metrics that's timed on gorg is how quickly do you answer those questions for people? And sometimes we just don't answer them that quickly. We'll respond quickly, but then we take our time.

Brett Curry:

Take your time. But yeah, and it's more about optimizing for satisfaction than it is to hitting some metrics that may indicate satisfaction, but not always. And so I love the way you guys do that. This idea of consistent communication, I've heard it's called the golden thread or consistency. So every message we share, whether it's a video with static image, it's on med, it's on YouTube, it's on Google, it's an email, it's an SMS, it's all saying the same thing. It's reinforcing, maybe we're hitting the same message from a couple of different angles, but ultimately it's the same thing when you get on the lander. Also the same message. Simplification and clarity are super important. Sometimes we overcomplicate things and a confused customer does not buy. So what are some of the messages, the go-to messages or what are you trying to communicate when you're creating this consistency across all

Leah Garcia:

Channels? We fall back always on our pillars at elastin. So real science, real results, real people and real responsibility. But that's the pillar. And then from the pillar then you identify what is the pain point for the customer. And it really always boils down to their sense of self, their confidence, their sense of identity, their desire to be the best version of themselves. So I'm going to go back to what you said. You said, I started taking this supplement, I feel so much better. I'm not hurting anymore. I wake up, maybe you don't need coffee. And all of a sudden now you didn't say, oh, I like where they source their product. They did a really good job of where they sourced and they're environmentally friendly and they've done all these things. Well, that's a given. Now you need to have all of that. You can't come into a beauty brand right now if you're not sustainable, if you are not taking care of vegan and cruelty-free and no preservatives and all of the lists. So we call those our safe science standards, but you can't lead with that because nobody buys a product. Nobody buys a product because it's got the best biodesign proteins and the most peptides

Brett Curry:

For sure.

Leah Garcia:

That doesn't sell. What sells is, does it do what they want it to do. So the message has to always be about what the customer needs and what that pain point is that we're solving or what that aspiration is that they're looking to gain. And then ultimately, if we don't deliver the product that really works, they're never going to come back again. But the other flip side is because of where people are, whether they've got thyroid post-treatment, post stress, aging, loss of elastin, naturally too much sun, exposure, exposure, environmental, stressing out about what's happening in our political and our culture right now, all of these things are causing people to lose their hair. And we saw this during Covid as well. So what we also have to do at Neulasta is we have to look at how we can kind of bundle that and make sure that we're still giving the customer the time they need to get the results. So if 12 weeks isn't enough, I'm going to take care of them and give them more product so that they get the results they're asking for. And whether I do that sometimes with free product, sometimes with a deeper discount, but if they call me, I will literally say, you didn't start this journey because you were just trying something. You want something. So I'm going to give that to you for as long as it takes till you get that result.

Brett Curry:

That's so good. That's so good. Talk to me about the process of reducing churn. You talked about some of the programs you run. If someone's about to cancel their subscription, how do you mitigate that? What are some of the strategies that you've used?

Leah Garcia:

Most recently, it's going to go back to just that very, very powerful buy box that people are seeing so that the web functionality, I believe I mentioned this, smoother, faster, smarter, but that buy box, which is the small powerful decision point, right? That's transformed so that it now has above the fold because before it wasn't above the fold, but it's a smarter way of customers to get the right cadence with the right subscription that they needed. And then as they go through the checkout process, not too many more decisions to make, but then there are some upsells and there are some cross sells, but mainly trying to serve the customer with a very smart flow so that they don't have to get confused or question it. So the result of that alone with that buy box and the web functionality was a 13.4% increase in conversion rate. So we immediately started getting that. And then the next part of it is just continuing to innovate when we see something that's not working. We work with the web partner now and we try to innovate and solve around the entire customer journey and anticipate their needs so that we can exceed those expectations.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good. I'm looking at your detail page now, and we'll put this in the video version. If someone's on YouTube, they can see it. But I love the way this is laid out. So the top section you automatically selected subscribe and save 25%. You got three different options, deliver every eight weeks. In the middle it says deliver 10 weeks, it's got a check mark and it's bolded and it says recommended right under it. And then or deliver every 12 weeks. And it says free shipping, cancel any time, full flexibility, try really compelling, and then it's got the strikethrough price and the price that you'll pay saving 25%. And then below that you could choose a one-time purchase. You save 12% that way. What is, so you talked about 65% of your revenue is subscriptions. What's the take rate on subscriptions when someone's checking out with these products?

Leah Garcia:

I don't have that answer off the top of my head.

Brett Curry:

It's got to be a pretty high, it's got to be a high take rate since everything else is off the charts as well.

Leah Garcia:

Being the owner of the company and the founder, I always get just a little bit puckered up there because you still have people who want that big deep discount and they're playing the game. So you're always going to get the people who are like, oh, I can get free shipping. Oh, I can get this really deep discount, possibly almost 30% on my first order. And they have absolutely no intention. They're playing the field. They might be doing the stance with a lot of other companies, but ideally if they've purchased two products from us or the Tupac, then they are going to see results. And they might have a aha moment themselves where they stick around for a little bit longer. But it is high, and we're working on it because we actually didn't have as robust of a landing page funnel as we do now. It's still not the Ezra Firestone funnel, but that is something that we're working on so that we have the capacity now to build out more landing pages so that it makes it easy for that first take rate. I want to say 80%, but I might be wrong, so don't quote me and hold me to that particular number

Brett Curry:

With every other number being off the charts, the take rate's got to be really, really healthy as well. And so can you talk about the landing page work that you guys are doing? Is that tying specific offer to specific ad and what are you doing and any interesting learnings with that journey?

Leah Garcia:

Yes, better. It's still not set up. I've seen so many great landing pages that I start falling in love with, but if they're seeing an ad for, with a particular human being being featured in an age category and an offer for lash, and then they come over to a PDP page as a checkout page versus going to a landing page where then we continue selling them on that journey where then we get that buy box that really speaks to what they're after, because at that point, they don't want to mess around. They just want to get in there. I'm like, yeah, that's what I want. That's what I want to buy. So you want to make sure that you're not confusing them. And that's what we've been trying to do is follow that journey from what ad they saw on meta, for example, to where they land and get that checkout. And it's the landing page strategy is by far the best performer, but we also find that our PDP pages are equally as good. And back in the day, we were sort of, and we would just go to the homepage and that was a disaster. I mean, it works a little bit, but it's just, it's too much. It's like too much. Nobody wants to,

Brett Curry:

Yeah, you're introducing too many options in most cases. But I will say, yeah, your PDP, which is what I just showed a second ago, it's fantastic. And

Leah Garcia:

That's only the landing page. So I can send you links to get to the landing pages, which are those mysterious pages that unless you're following a particular link, you'll never find again. I was laughing about that the other day. I'm like, geez, even I own the company and sometimes if I can't find my landing page, I'm like, what's that foreign slash, where did we go and how do you get back to it again? So funny, once I lose it, man, I can't find it again. And that's an old anchor trick that I learned from back in the day of direct response infomercial is they were just classic landing page

Brett Curry:

Marketers.

Leah Garcia:

It was just

Brett Curry:

Guthy Riner legends, legends in the game. And so what did you do with them again? Was that one of your products or you worked with Guthy Riner?

Leah Garcia:

No, but I was in the infomercial world, so that's kind of where I cut my teeth with direct response marketing is I started in the direct response. I was selling on HSNA particular AB belt, and then I helped launch the contour core sculpting system, and that's a product that was in 2008, one of the most successful shows of its time. And we went from zero to 220 million in about three years, and we had a seven to one media marketing efficiency ratio.

Brett Curry:

So

Leah Garcia:

Seven to one

Brett Curry:

A seven mer. Everyone listing is like,

Leah Garcia:

Come, we're back in the day, the Anthony Sullivans and the Cindy Crawfords, but we were watching them, they were watching us. We were all competing. But it was back, it was in the good old days where crepe erase was rocking. And I mean, I am old, so I remember the Suzanne Summer's in,

Brett Curry:

I remember watching the ThighMaster

Leah Garcia:

X

Brett Curry:

90 XI bought because of P 90 X. Yeah, actually friends that ran the erase campaigns and

Leah Garcia:

Stuff. But I always ask, do we reflect, and this is something I said in one of my presentations recently is do we ever reflect on that is really where we learned the formula for our direct response marketing. And they had three segments, 28 minute show compelling problem solution, and H one had a call to action. So if you're jumping in somewhere in between, it's here's how we're going to save you time, money, energy, get you what you're looking for. Here's your call to action. If you order now, you're going to get this, this, this, and this. But wait, there's more. And all that stuff worked. And you know what? It still kind of

Brett Curry:

Works. It still works. Maybe you're executing it a little bit differently. But the psychology there, the problem solution, the presenting it in a compelling way and an engaging way with high energy, it still works. And that's something you and I were talking about. I'm a huge YouTube guy. We are seeing a lot of people that have been historical TV advertisers now trying YouTubes. We're leaning into that.

Leah Garcia:

Love

Brett Curry:

It. But I'm also seeing some D two C brands, brands that are born online that are now leaning into connected tv, whether that's through YouTube or other platform, and they're dabbling in TV advertising, but it's direct response style, TV advertising, getting someone to take an action to visit a site to get a free download or to free trial, whatever

Leah Garcia:

Just works. I think we need to be more clever and I need to meet more of a brand recognition. I tried some, our mutual colleague Stacy helped me try to buy some linear TV spots. It just didn't work for us, but we didn't do enough. It wasn't long enough, deep enough. But elastin as big of a brand as I think we are, we're still not a name brand. So you can walk down the street and people aren't going to really recognize us. So we're staying somewhat niche in that. We have, I believe, the best science in the industry, and I would challenge anyone to match our 38 US and international patents all in the elastin space.

Brett Curry:

It's

Leah Garcia:

Amazing. We've got a category that no one else is really focusing on to our depth and breadth. But at the end of the day, again, science isn't selling. So now I've got to be able to just communicate to people that we have a beautiful product with a founder and an entire team that cares deeply for that customer journey and that we're going to do everything in our power to get them the results that they want. And they can also trust. I think small brands, one of the beauties is that they can trust the integrity that goes behind it and that what we say is what we do. Sometimes when you get that thought of a big brand, you kind of wonder did they lose it? So if JJ buys a business and all of a sudden you see it on the shelf at a target, then old school people would think, oh, they must have done something different. Now it's lost its allure or it doesn't have the same formula. And maybe they're right. Maybe people take a formula, they buy a company and then they fairy dust the active ingredients and it might not have the same punch that happens.

Brett Curry:

Right? Right. Yeah. I think your passion rings true. Listening to you talk and if someone can see you or hear you talk in an ad, it's clear you're going to do whatever is necessary for someone to get the results that they want, which is great. I want to kind of end on this. We only have a few minutes left, but times are uncertain right now at the time we're recording, we're dealing with some tariff, chaos and madness. Consumer confidence is at a low. Business owners are worried. We work almost exclusively with D two c e-commerce brands. Many of our clients don't import from China, and so they're feeling a little bit better than those that do, but there's still just uncertainty everywhere. So what advice do you have and what are you leaning into now when times are uncertain? How are you operating?

Leah Garcia:

I have been guilty of falling into a trap of feeling the scarcity mentality and the panic, but I am doing everything that I can to try to come from a point of abundance, and that might be a little too metaphysical for this podcast, but I literally need to stay true to what we do over here. We need to make money to stay in business, but do I need to make a 94% contribution margin every day, all day? Probably not. I need to take a hit with everybody going in, and I'm willing to do that so that I don't have to put it on my customers. During covid, when people were upping their prices, I stayed the same. As a matter of fact, just earlier this year, first time I increased my prices since 2017, I am going to do everything I can to get clever to figure out how to, I only get packaging from China, only my primary packaging. So that's the stuff that you see, like this

Brett Curry:

Packaging,

Leah Garcia:

And I get a few, and it's not pretty. You don't want to pay something that might cost you 60 cents and all of a sudden have to pay $2 for it depending on where you're at. I've got a product right now on the water that was a little scalp scrubber that I got from China, and it was a 50 cent product. And right now we don't know because when it went on, it was before the tax went up to 148%. And at the end of the day, if I have to pay the tax, what going to do? Say, no, I'm going to send it back. That's one option. It is an option. My CFO said, you need to deny shipments coming over right now so that you don't have to pay $26,000 in taxes that you don't know where it's going. And I agree. And then tomorrow they could change it and I could end up paying $12,000 in taxes versus a 46 versus a hundred thousand dollars in taxes. So it's huge. I mean, it's going to cut into profit margins, but my hope is that smarter brains will prevail. That somebody will at some point talk to the government and talk to somebody. And there's got to be, if enough of us come together without being hysterical and we have those smart conversations, we have to reach a point where there's stability. And I will do everything I can to join that movement if it happens. But otherwise I am just not going to bring stuff over. That's a nice to have. It's got to be a must have.

Brett Curry:

Totally. Yeah. And I think it's a really good take where a couple things to keep in mind, and you talked about mindset. I think that is underrated in some ways where yes, we get tactical on this podcast. We want to look at how can we increase our subscription take rate and how can we reduce churn and things like that. But your mindset matters, and if you are overly stressed or panicking, you're going to make bad decisions. You're going to craft bad marketing, it's just not going to work well for you. So work on the mindset. It will only make everything else better. But I always believe there's always a move to make. There's always something you can do and every other one of your competitors is dealing with the same stuff you are dealing with. So if you can be more scrappy, more resourceful, more crafty, you can find edges. And it's like there are always opportunities in crazy times like this. I do believe there'll be adjustments made with tariffs and stuff. Who knows what that will be or when or what direction it'll be. But I think you're smart. How can we limit what we're bringing over right now? I'm hearing that from a lot of different customers. How can we just bring over the essentials

Leah Garcia:

Or how do we work together? So let's say there's five of us in the beauty industry that have a similar product that might be coming. Why not set up another manufacturing or another warehouse, for example, somewhere without taxes? Share the cost on that, bring product over. I mean, this is a time where we need to kumbaya and lean in with one another. There's ways around this. Even if it doesn't change, I'm hoping it changes, but if it doesn't change, let's not panic. Let's collaborate. Let's work together. Let's figure it out.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that so much. And yeah, there will be winners during this season. No doubt. It's just not easy and not overly fun, but it's where we are. And so got to focus on solutions. Leah, this has been absolutely fantastic. I love your brand. I love the energy you bring. I love what you're building, and we need to catch up again soon sometime. So thanks for coming on.

Leah Garcia:

Thank you very much. We didn't even talk about bull riding, but we'll get to that later

Brett Curry:

Bull riding next time. So I will end with this though. People have to follow you on social. So you're a great follow on LinkedIn, but you're also active on Instagram and other channels.

Leah Garcia:

Yes, yes. I'm still old school, Leah Garcia TV Act. Elastin is where the brand is found, but I am more on the speaking circuit these days. So LinkedIn is probably one of the best places to find my whereabouts.

Brett Curry:

And you got some great content recently about those speaking engagements, so check it out. Leah Garcia on LinkedIn and Instagram. Leah, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure and we'll chat soon.

Leah Garcia:

I'm stoked. Thank you so much. Cheers.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. As always, thank you for tuning in. Would love to hear feedback from you. If you've not left us, that review on iTunes means the world to us. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

This one is a bit nerdy. But it’s soooooooooo important to the success of your marketing efforts and the future of your business.

For this episode I sat down with Tom Leonard, a fractional marketing leader who specializes in operationalizing Media Mix Modeling and incrementality testing. 

We dive deep into the often confusing world of marketing measurement. We debunk myths about attribution and we reveal what truly drives customer acquisition. 

For ecommerce brands struggling to understand where their marketing dollars are actually working, this conversation offers practical insights on how to move beyond misleading platform metrics.

‍

Key Takeaways

• Attribution is broken: Learn why Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) tools often fail to deliver accurate insights, especially in today's privacy-first digital landscape, and why they can lead to poor budget allocation decisions.
• The power of incrementality testing: Discover how properly designed tests can reveal the true causal impact of your marketing efforts by comparing control groups against test groups, allowing you to see beyond your .com sales to impacts on marketplace and retail channels.
• Media Mix Modeling demystified: Understand how MMM correlates marketing activities with business outcomes over time, providing insights into diminishing returns and helping answer the crucial question: "Where should I put my next marketing dollar?"
• Avoid the high ROAS trap: Find out why channels showing the highest ROAS in platform metrics (like branded search) might actually be the least incremental to your business, and why cutting them first during budget constraints could be your smartest move.

-

Tom Leonard:

How much is media contributing relative to customer base is a really nice place to start. And the benefit of running incrementality and media mix modeling is informing the model with some of that causal data.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we have got a doozy of an episode. We're talking about the three horsemen of measuring your marketing effectiveness. We're talking MTAs Multitouch attribution. We're talking M'S. Media mixed modeling. We're talking incrementality. It's going to be nerdy, but I also promise you it's going to be practical and it will make you more money. And so we'll hopefully make it fun as well. And so my guest today is Tom Leonard. We are LinkedIn friends first. So I saw Tom on LinkedIn posting about incrementality, talking about MMM, throwing shade on certain tools and stuff like that on LinkedIn. And I'm like, this is my type of guy. So I reached out, we had a call, and then we're like, Hey, we got to record a podcast. Let's create some insights for people on the pod. And so Tom is a fractional marketing leader. He's operationalizing MMM and incrementality testing, and I'm delighted that he's my guest today. So Tom, with that intro, how's it going? And welcome to the show.

Tom Leonard:

Good. Thanks for having me, Brent. Excited to be here. And yeah, some of my favorite things to talk through, so excited to do it. Good stuff.

Brett Curry:

It's good stuff, man. So briefly, before we dive into the meat of the content here, what's your background and how did you become a guy who's operationalizing MMS and incrementality?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah. And what does that even mean?

Brett Curry:

That's a good point,

Tom Leonard:

For sure. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So spent most of my career thus far on the agency side at performance agencies. And I'd say the crux of how I got to where I'm now, or I've been reflecting back a little bit more on the why I have such a passion for measurement. And I was at a pretty hardcore DR agency, and it was right shortly after TRUBY for Action came out when YouTube was starting to invest in, DR. Moved into a new role we had created with a centralized group of basically people who had different areas of subject matter expertise and a few analysts that ran tests across a pretty large client base. And I was our YouTube SME, and worked with a couple analysts to run a bunch of tests. And really it was to evangelize how to, and is YouTube a platform to drive growth?

And it was really interesting because I started spending a lot of time on YouTube and then also connect to TV and broader programmatic video. And it was this really interesting, for me, the biggest learning was less about how to make YouTube as effective as possible, but more how to help brands think about demand creation as opposed to just demand capture. And frankly, the difficulty of getting brands to leverage YouTube relative to connected tv, because YouTube sat so close to Google ads and therefore last click attribution and see tv, you couldn't click and was sexier in a deck. And it was just this sort of recognition of the irrational kind of human behavior just in any sort of industry or any thing in life. But it sort of helped frame up this idea of you really have to do more than just, I don't know, represent logic or rational arguments.

You really have to also bring the easy to understand clear data. And that's, I think what draws me to incrementality testing specifically and why that's sort of the backbone of a lot of what I do now. And I think I use the word operationalizing, NMM and incrementality testing. And really what I mean by that is a lot of people will run medium mix models or run incrementality tests, but oftentimes they'll sit in a slide or in a report to be shown once, but never to be looked at again. And so what I'm really trying to do with brands now is how do you build a framework and a repeatable methodology to get insights from tests, but not just leave them as insights but to take action? Because the only way that you create value from any of these sort of testing methodologies and measurement methodologies is by acting on the insights. And so that's sort of what I mean by my funky little headline of those words.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good, man. And it's one of those things where data really doesn't matter if you don't take the right actions from it. And what's so interesting, and our paths are similar in that I got my start in actually TV and radio and doing traditional media, and then I got into SEO and paid search, but I loved video. Video was my thing, but I love paid search as well. And then when TrueView and TrueView for Action came out, I was like, whoa, these are all my world's colliding.

Tom Leonard:

This is

Brett Curry:

Video and there's some search components, at least some search intent involved there. And it's direct response. I've always been a direct response guy. I believe that marketing should drive an outcome, right? Advertising should drive a measurable outcome, and that should be measured in terms of new customers and profitable new customer acquisition. And what's really interesting, Tom, and I think this kind of feeds into the conversation we're having today. There was a period of time, so I grew up reading some of the classics. So David Ogilvy of course, but John Cap's tested advertising methods, Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising. And they would do things like they would run and add in a newspaper or magazine and people would clip a coupon and bring it in, or they would call a certain number and they would track it and they would have codes and stuff. And I remember thinking once I got into e-commerce, I was like, oh man, we've got so many tools.

The world is so clear now we have every piece of data at our disposal. And now the more I've gotten into it and the more I've matured, I'm like, we've got more data. But I don't know that we've got more insights, and I don't know that we've got any more clarity. In fact, there's maybe more confusion. And I think it goes back to what you said a minute ago, this idea of demand generation versus demand capture. We're really good at measuring channels and campaigns that are demand capture, meaning they're capturing demand that's already out there. That's harder to measure the demand generation, which is usually where the magic happens. And so super excited to dive in here. I think what might be useful is let's talk about what are these kind of three horsemen that I laid out there, MTAs, multitouch, attribution, and incrementality. So let's start with MTAs first. So Multitouch attribution tools, what are they and what is your take on them?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, big question. Great question. Yeah, I mean, MTA been around for a while, different flavors and ways of trying to make it work, especially as so much has changed in privacy and the tech and tracking landscape. But ultimately the goal is to try to give fractional credit to all the touchpoints along a customer journey with a recognition that the last touchpoint click or last impression is ultimately not what drove that person to purchase. That may be the last or the only thing that you might see in something like Google Analytics or your analytics suite. But there's this general recognition that that is not what drove the purchase. So MTA, the kind of promise, which I ultimately think is a failed promise, is whether all the different touch touchpoint and then how can you value those differently. So maybe you use first touch, maybe you use even distribution.

The idea of data-driven attribution was the holy rail or the Promise many years ago, and I guess still to a degree for some is like, how do you know this channel was more additive or more necessary and therefore should get more credit than that channel? Which I think makes a ton of sense in promise. I think in reality it's really hard and I would argue impossible to do, especially as a lot of the ability to track users at a one-to-one level degrades generally my perspective, I'm very bearish on MTA, so that'll probably come through pretty strongly. But I guess I don't think the toothpaste is going back in the tube in terms of the ability to track a customer across all these different touchpoints, especially as the ability to track through or impression based touchpoint erodes. And then you really get reliant on clicks, which I think then leads to a lot of all the issues that just last click in general has. So I think it's really hard to make a compelling case for MTA. I've seen too many brands, especially trying to build MTA tools internally and just be a huge time and resource suck. And then when you ask to compare, show the multi-touch view versus last click, it's like, I don't know, 80 or 90% only had one touch point anyways, that's all that MTA model could see. So is it really that much more useful than last click?

Brett Curry:

It's sort of multi-touch when that can be measured, but usually it can't be.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, and

It never really answers the causality question either, which we'll get to when we talk about incrementality. And I always kind of tell this, I think the short story of why MT A isn't really viable anymore as all the tracking and privacy changes. But I think the slightly longer story is the kind of recognition that just because an ad was shown or a click occurred doesn't mean that that medium was needed or that channel was needed. It doesn't answer the causal question, what would've happened without this ad running? Did somebody just happen to use multiple touchpoints as navigation or was it more convenient to click on one of these ads that happened to be served? But if you're not comparing that to some sort of control group to really hard to assign causality to the fact that there just was a touchpoint.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it is so good. And it's one of those things where I remember again, early on, you would look inside of Google ads or you look inside of Meta or was back when it was Facebook only, and you were like, the data's here. I see row ads and I see clicks and I see performance and all that. Then you realize, well, wait a minute, this isn't fully accurate. If I add the two together, that's double my total revenue, so I can't just rely on what's in the platform. And that got worse as I was 14 was introduced and other privacy changes were made. But then MTA came along and it's like, oh, finally we're going to get to see the full picture. It's going to decipher, decode the shopping journey, and we're going to finally see with a keen eye in perfection exactly what caused this ad or what caused this purchase to happen.

And then we finally realized MTA is maybe just a third option. It's like, okay, Google's imperfect, Meta's data's imperfect, and then mt A, it's just imperfect too. So now we just got three imperfect things to look at and make decisions from. And in some ways it leads to more confusion than it leads to clarity. And now I don't want to wholesale discard MTAs because I do believe there's some helpful insights that can be gained there, but it's incomplete and incomplete at best. And one of the best analogies I've heard, and this actually comes from Ben Ter, who's also a LinkedIn friend, but I met him in person as well, but he talks about this analogy of, Hey, if we're trying to measure what caused people to watch this movie at our movie theater, and we look at all these results and 30% say they saw a billboard for our movies, 20% say they saw a TV ad, but you know what?

A hundred percent say they saw the poster on the door. So we're like, let's just cut everything. Let's just do the poster at the door and that's it. And you're like, well, wait a minute. Everybody saw it. Everybody was walking in the door. But the movie poster is not what caused someone to purchase. It was the billboard and the TV and some of the other things, word of mouth and other things that caused them to come in. And so this idea of causality, super, super valuable. So that really leads us to incrementality. So talk about incrementality. What is it and why are you on a quest to operationalize it?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, it's really the best way, if not the only way to establish that a causal portion that we've been talking about. It has a distinct control group, so it has a counterfactual, it has what would've happened without this intervention, whatever that intervention is. And there's a handful of ways to derive that counterfactual that control. The most common would be geographic based. So like a match market test. I've got this market over here that historically has behaved similarly to this market over here. I can see that in an AA test, the lines sort of move similar to one another. They're not, if they're influenced by outside factors, they're influenced

Brett Curry:

In what's an AA test for those who don't know

Tom Leonard:

Before an intervention happens. So just over time are those lines essentially moving together? Are external factors or stimuli equally impacting both sides of that test so that you can feel confident that when you do intervene and it becomes comparing A to B, the delta is what was a result of that intervention. So oftentimes it's my Atlanta and I don't know Memphis, maybe some other midsize city that you've done this market matching for. Historically, they both look like this on a line, all of a sudden you turn off ads on Facebook in Atlanta, what happens to your top line that Delta is what was attributed or should be attributed to advertising in Atlanta. Whereas the flip side of that would be attribution would say basically anything that was attributed to that could be attributed to that would really, it should just be the gap between a world where that ad does not exist compared to a world where that ad does exist.

We can't take credit for everything. We can only take credit for as much above and beyond what would've happened anyways. And so that's the basis of incrementality testing. There's other ways to do it. If you use a Facebook or Google conversion lift study because they own that auction or anybody that owns an auction, they can do that hold out for you at a user level. They can track all of those users regardless of if you serve an ad. Good examples are maybe easier to describe in a first party data capacity. If you're running email, you may blast all of your customers and say, Hey, I sent an email to all my customers and this many purchased. They went back to the website or clicked it. But if you just said, Hey, I'm going to serve just to odd number of customer IDs and not to even number customer IDs, I can then just compare, forget about who clicked on ads, who did anything.

I'm just going to look at my backend. I know I exposed these users, but not these users 50 50 split. They've historically kind of done the same thing. All I did was even an odd and just measuring the difference between those two groups. So really any way that you can establish a true control that passes that AA test. So before you intervene, do they continue to look similar? Are they influenced at the same rate so that you can feel confident that when you do intervene with new media, retracting media, some new sort of test that you are confidently comparing to what would've happened in a world without that intervention?

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. It's applying the scientific method with some rigor behind what happens when I turn this channel on, or what happens when I turn this channel off? What is the actual impact of this channel? And what's interesting is I remember back in my early days of being in the advertising world, this was when online stuff was just getting kind of warmed up. I was talking to this furniture store owner and I'm like, Hey, what do you do? Do you invest in radio ads? Do tv, do you do newspaper? And so as I went through Themm like, Hey, do you do radio ads? And he is like, yeah, I mean, yeah, I sort of do. And I'm like, newspaper's like, yeah, there's a big sale, something will happen. I'm like, well, what about tv? And he said, yes. And his eyes lit up and he is like, when I run TV ads, I feel it. People walk in the door, it happens. And I remember early on in my online career thinking, man, that was so unsophisticated. Did that guy really know what's going on? But now looking back, I'm like, yeah, that's maybe all that matters. That is incrementality in a real loose easy just to observe with your eyes think because you had one. Totally.

Tom Leonard:

Which I think people take for granted. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

They do.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

That's not exciting. That's not like, where's all your data? It's in my cash register. That's where all the data

Tom Leonard:

Is, especially for smaller brands, when you have the ability to feel if something's working or not working, if you double spend in something that you think is working really well because attribution says it's working really well, and all of a sudden your cash just doubles, even though your attributed number scales linearly, something has to give, right? And what has to give is it wasn't really causing any additional top line growth. It was just really good at getting the attributed credit. So I think the feeling it in the p and l is definitely overlooked.

Brett Curry:

It's valid, and it is overlooked though. You're a hundred percent, especially now that we have so many tools at our disposal. And I think another way to look at this, and look, I'm a Google guy, YouTube and Google is kind of where I really got my start in online

Tom Leonard:

Marketing.

Brett Curry:

But listen, branded search is a perfect example here. What happens, we see this all the time. What happens if you turn branded search completely off? Now, I believe, and this is top of front of the podcast, there are strategic ways to use branded search and there's ways to run it and not waste money, but a lot of people could shut it off and nothing happens, nothing. Maybe sales get in a little bit, but you take meta meta's really working and you shut it off and you feel it. Sales go down and that's an incrementality. Same is true for YouTube if you're doing YouTube the right way. And so yeah, I really like this. And one kind of anecdote here to share, we just did a test with Arctic, Arctic coolers, Yeti competitor, my favorite cooler, my favorite drinkware as well. And so they wanted to see, Hey, can YouTube drive an incremental lift at Walmart?

So they had just gotten into most Walmart stores, coast to coast. So we did exactly what you laid out there. We had a 19 test markets, 19 matched control markets. So similar markets. So think like a Denver and a Kansas City or the example, use Atlanta and whatever else that's kind of comparable. And hey, let's run YouTube in one and not in the other. And let's measure then the growth in Walmart sales, and let's do a comparison between the two in Walmart sales. And it was remarkable. It was about an eight week test. We had three test regions, so 19 markets, but three test regions, test region. One, we saw an average of 12% lift in Walmart sales. The test region two was like 15% lift. And then our final test region was 25% lift. And there were some standouts, like Oklahoma City was up 40% and Salt Lake City was up 48%.

But it was one of those things where, okay, now we look at that and we can say, okay, YouTube had a big impact. And what's also interesting, Tom, is we just ran the YouTube portion at OMG. They also did a connected TV test in other markets, not related, didn't see a lift, didn't see a measurable lift. And so it could be lots of that was not to throw shade on CTVI like CTV, so maybe they just did a wrong or wrong creatives or who knows what. But it's one of those things where it's like, okay, if you do this the right way, you should see an impact.

Tom Leonard:

And I think touching on the piece that I didn't mention, the other beauty or value of incrementality testing relative to attribution or mt a is the ability to see beyond your.com to be able to see what's happening on third parties like Amazon, what's happening in store. If you get that data own an operated store or if you can get that through wholesale data, it really simplifies. There's so much complexity. And I think that's, again, one of the rubs that I have with MTA is all of them, all of the data you have to wrangle together to try to patchwork this kind of story together. Whereas in incrementality testing, it's pretty straightforward. It's what did I spend and how did I run that spend in these by market by day or by week, and what was my sales? What were my sales? What were my new customers or whatever metric I'd want to look at with that same granularity and same dimension. And that's really it because you're really just trying to understand the relationship that calls the relationship between spend and outcomes, all that kind of muddy middle in the middle, trying to get it at the user level, which again, not going back into the tube really simplifies things.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it does. And another thing that was kind of interesting that came a light doing this test for Arctic is all of the ads we tagged with available at Walmart, shop at Walmart, find on the shelves and Walmart, whatever. We measured everything though in those markets. So you could look at Walmart sales, online sales, so the.com and Amazon. And what's interesting is the push to Walmart really worked. It's a reminder of what you ask someone to do in an ad is what they're going to lean towards. Because in some of the markets, we didn't see that much of an online lift. We saw some clicks and stuff like that, but the Lyft was at Walmart. But we also saw a pretty strong lift at Amazon as well, because I think that just speaks to, there's some people that are just going to buy everything from Amazon right there, tell 'em to go online value pro proposition. Is it on Amazon? Yeah, yeah,

Tom Leonard:

Yeah. Here in a day or two, it's hard

Brett Curry:

To beat, dude. It's hard to beat same price in a couple days. I don't have to leave my house. But yeah, really, really interesting. And so we'll circle back to that of course, but let's talk about then MMM or media mix modeling. What is that? How are you using that? And then how does that kind of relate to incrementality testing? Because again, going back to your tagline, Tom, you did not say operationalizing NTAs. You said operationalizing m and ms and incrementality. So what is MM and how does that pair with incrementality?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, basically a big correlation exercise trying to suss out without a true kind of holdout group, what is the impact and contribution of each media channel and also what would happen without media. So trying to suss out a lot of the same questions as incrementality, but basically using correlation as opposed to having a true holdout group. So basically, and I'm sure all the hardcore MMM people and data scientists will thumbs down this or whatever you can do to podcast, but hey, in this period of time, sales went up and nothing could really explain that other than the fact that TikTok spend went up and essentially doing that at a mass scale over longer periods of time trying to take into account anything that could explain that. So you'll always kind of flag it with these are promotions that happen, it should because you're going to give a model at least like two years worth of data or two years worth of data, it'll bring in seasonality and try to understand those sort of trends.

So it's trying to pull out if not seasonality, if not promotions, if not some other things that we are flagging. And it wasn't price reductions, it wasn't all these pieces, what was happening in media that could explain that change. And so that's ultimately what MMM is doing. It's a big correlation exercise, figuring out roughly what is the channel contribution to a top line revenue or order number and what's really important. I think the nicest part or the best first step with M is trying to get an understanding of a base, which is what it's going to be called or intercept what without the presence of ads, does this model think that my sales would be such that I can then calculate not a total CAC of just looking at total new customers divided by cost, but incremental to media or remove base from that equation, how many conversions were contributed because of media as this model sees, which no model is going to be perfect, no measurement method is going to be perfect, but it's a really nice place to start to say, I knew I couldn't account all new customers to advertising, but what's a good number to use or to start with?

Well, it looks like, and this will depend on the maturity of the brand, but a really mature brand, I mean super mature brand, the big CPGs might be like 99% base smaller brand might be something like 50% because you've got this word of mouth flywheel, you've got product market fit, but trying to get an understanding of how much is media contributing relative to customer base is a really nice place to start. And the benefit of running incrementality and media mix modeling is informing the model with some of that causal data. You see that a lot and there's a really powerful feature of media mix modeling is saying, Hey, yes, that's a correlation exercise, can't pull everything out, but let me inform the model or at least restrict the priors it can use or the coefficient, whatever you want to call 'em, what it's searching for to try to find a fit in this model and say, well, I did a hold out test. I know you don't have the causal data, but we ran this in this channel and that channel and helping that restrict the model and giving it data that it can't have without that human intervention can be a really powerful flywheel.

Brett Curry:

So using your incrementality test data, feeding that back into your MMM model to make it more accurate and more causal and make that correlation

Tom Leonard:

Stronger. Because the two things that are really like you're really trying to get, but you don't get with Multi-Tech attribution or attribution in general. And you do get with the combination of media mix modeling and incrementality testing is the incremental impact, the causal impact of what would've happened without the presence of ads as well as the diminishing returns curve, which we know can be really powerful and important too, is what has happened over time as I spend in that sort of a feature of big feature of media mix modeling is understanding where are you on a diminishing returns curve? Is there if I keep spending more, I know it's not going to scale linearly, but are there channels that diminish faster? Is there more headroom in other channels? And it really becomes this true optimization game of where do I put the next dollar? Ultimately the question that every marketer, every finance team is trying to answer is, Hey, if I find $20,000 into couch cushions, where do I put it? And if I need to give back $20,000, where do I pull from to have,

Brett Curry:

I want to hang out at your house and look at your couch cushions and find 20 grand? That's

Tom Leonard:

Great. Yeah, it's easy to give it back, but yeah, right. We're trying to figure out what is going to be the least impactful if I have to give the money back and cut budgets and where is it going to be the most impactful if I have another $20,000? Because the answer is not going to be found in what has the highest or the lowest ROAS in an attributed view. And in fact, that can have the complete opposite impact that you want.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, it's really great. So I want to actually talk about that point in a minute where if you've got cut budgets, which hey, listen, there's been some uncertainty even as we record this, tariffs up, tariffs down, markets up, market down, whatever consumer sentiment is all over the place. So if things get a little bit tight, what are we going to do? We can't slash marketing, we can't slash growth. I think that sends you into a death spiral, but we might have to get pull back and get more efficient. And so let's talk about that actually for a little bit. So where can you be led astray? I think you just made a post on LinkedIn about this, right? Where you start looking at performance, which feels like the smart thing to do, looking at ROAS and whatnot, and you're like, well, great, well, let's just cut the lowest ROAS campaigns and channels. We'll be fine. How does that lead you astray? And if you want to talk about your specific example to help illustrate these points, that'd be great.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, totally. I think the other one you're referring to is I think branded search, which we were talking about earlier. And I love using both a, because it can be really, if a brand is spending a lot of money there, it can be a really great place to go find those savings without impacting top line. But also frankly, it's really easy to understand. I think most people understand that up and down the organizational chart across departments, everybody sort of understands the idea of, Hey, if somebody's already searching for my brand, do I need to pay to get that click and that conversion? And I found that just the fact that it's easy to understand can be a really good gateway to incrementality testing because it's easy to get buy-in. Everybody understands that idea, whereas it may be more challenging to express that idea in other types of campaigns.

But branded search is a good example, and the example that you're referring to, kind of a midsize brand that I was working with went through that exact exercise, had to cut budgets. They looked at up and down the campaigns they were running. It was like, Hey, we just got to make the best decision we can with the best available data. They were basically running p max non-branded search and branded search and p max and branded search where had the best attributed roas Best CPA non-brand was really hard to justify in a lower budget kind of environment based off the attribution data cut that leaned a little bit more into branded search as a percentage of their budget. And over the next couple months, new customers in total revenue was declining despite the attributed ROAS and CPA looking even better than ever. And that's where was brought in, looked at all these things, saw the loose correlation to non-brand and new customer acquisition and top line, just the general skepticism that many have around branded search, especially in a low competition environment, which they were in.

There weren't many competitors in the auction that we could see in Auction Insights. So yeah, ran a very blunt instrument match market test, which at a brand of that size and for a branded search I don't think is ever a bad idea. And yeah, no impact to branded search. It was about 20% of their budget, which was substantial that you can either make the decision, I'm going to put that 20% back in my pocket or save it for a rainy day or give it to some other place in the org or say, Hey, I'm going to redistribute this to something that I see in correlation data that might help drive top line backup. Let's reinvest that in non-brand as opposed to keeping it in branded. Again, complete opposite of what attribution would say. And you see that a lot frankly with branded search is an easy one to pick on.

Same with retargeting, but really anything that's especially challenging with the black box solutions that blend, and I'm sure we could do a whole talk show on p max Advantage plus some of the things that bundled together historically radically different levels of incrementality can be a real challenge when you're then measuring on attribution. But yeah, a ranty way of saying yes, finding areas to cut oftentimes if you follow the attribution kind of data can lead to really kind of impactful in a negative way business outcomes because the attribution view just does not take into account what would've happened without the presence of those ads like Incre Ality does. And so can definitely lead brands astray as they're looking to cut.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, really interesting. And yeah, max notorious for leaning into remarketing or branded search. If you're not diligent about that, it can lean into both of those things. And so got to be mindful of that. You also quoted something that totally ties into this. It's from a shop talk talk that you went to shop Talk the show, and I can't remember who said it, but if you see high roas, I know something is wrong and that the auto targeting is just finding existing customers. Do you remember actually who said that and unpack a little bit?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, I forget his name and I could look real quick. He worked for

Brett Curry:

Mic

Tom Leonard:

The Post Dan Danone, the big CPG. Yeah, I just really appreciated that quote because I mean always wonder if I live in sort of a bubble of being super passionate about incrementality versus attributed metrics, but that was just really refreshing to hear because I don't think that's the natural,

Brett Curry:

It's not

Tom Leonard:

Thought in people's

Brett Curry:

Head spend more,

Tom Leonard:

But I really think it should kind of spark some skepticism, especially when your goal really is to try to drive new customers.

My first, especially if you think about both incrementality in the context of a SC or pex that's blending retargeting and prospecting by default and knowing diminishing returns are my first dollars, yes, they're going to be the most effective, but if they are focused on people that are already buying from me and my goal in my head is new customers, I should be shocked that I can spend a hundred dollars and drive this amazing new customer revenue and not think that something is up or even over time as I continue to spend our BS meters should probably go up a little bit more. And I don't think they do by default. So I found that comment really refreshing.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I think that really illustrates that, right where it's like most of us would think, oh, ROAS is going up great, we're printing money. Whereas maybe you should say BS detector, something's wrong here. This campaigns leaning into customers that we're going to buy anyway. And I'll give two examples here to illustrate this a little bit more. And I'll also, since we've been picking on branded search so much, I'll share a couple of ways I think we should use it. One,

Tom Leonard:

If

Brett Curry:

Other competitors are aggressively bidding on, just know that if you're not Nike and you're not Adidas and you're not like Ford or something, it's not a lock. If it's a new customer, they could be swayed by a competitor. And that's generally how we like to separate it out is like, let's have branded search for returning customers and let's make that crazy efficient or just turn it off altogether.

Tom Leonard:

If

Brett Curry:

It's a new customer, then again, we want it to be very efficient, but maybe we want it on because we don't want our competitor to come in and swipe us to give and swipe our customer. And so one example of this, I did a podcast with Brian Porter, he's the co-founder of Simple, modern, great Drinkware brand has become a friend and they did a study incrementality study and they found, I'll get these numbers off, but it was like branded search was 10% incremental. So basically what that means is if it shows that I got a hundred new customers from Branded Search, I probably would've gotten 90 of those if I had shut it off, right? Only 10% were incremental. So then what you would need to do there is you need a 10 x row as on branded search for it to even make sense. If it's below that, you're completely wasting money.

Pair that with, and you and I were commenting on the House analytics, HAUS, Olivia Corey and team did 190 incrementality studies involving YouTube and they showed with tremendous amounts of rigor that hey, YouTube is probably 342 times more incremental, meaning if you see a one in platform, it's actually like a 3 42 in terms of incremental impact. And so wildly different between those two. But again, we're just so drawn to in platform row as man, we'll just say spin, spin spend on p max and branded search when really we should be saying, let me lean into YouTube or let me lean into top of funnel meta.

Tom Leonard:

I think both those examples too are really good examples. To me it also speaks though to the importance of cost per incremental almost being more important than incremental percent incremental. And that's something I always use with branded search. I think you and I have a very similar feeling around branded search. There's definitely a time and a place for it, and it's one of those things where it might not matter that it's 10% incremental, 10% incremental relative to what Google's attributing. If your attributed CPA is a dollar and now it's $10, but your margin when you sell a product is a thousand dollars like hammer that all day long, that cost per incremental is still extremely profitable and valuable. And same with the YouTube piece. If YouTube was four times as incremental as Google said, but your YouTube was crazy expensive, it still might not be worth it even though it's four times

Brett Curry:

More

Tom Leonard:

Incremental than the platform was making. And that's how I think a lot about this with connected tv where connected TV can be super powerful and maybe more so than linear tv, but if you can buy scatter linear TV for a 10th of the cost of CTV, well it just has to be more than a 10th as effective and it's accreted, it's a positive. So it becomes more of comparison of a cost per than just a blanket. How incremental is something which I always think is important to focus on and call out

Brett Curry:

To. Yeah, it's so good. I mean measuring something in terms of percentages can provide insights and help make decisions, but ultimately it's the cost per right. Translate that into real dollars to see if it makes sense. 100% agree with you, but I think this also goes back to and use your linear TV example, and I still love TV and connected TV and stuff. Again, I'll use YouTube just because I've got the numbers in my brain, but with YouTube sometimes we'll see a $5 CPM or a $7 CPM in certain audiences compared to other channels that are 15, 20, 30, 50, whatever. Totally. And I'm like, well, if we're reaching the right person and if the message and offer are good, how could this not work? And it's one of those things where it's like, okay, we're either one of those is off, we're talking to the wrong person, that's the wrong message, or we're just not measuring it properly and that's where we need to look at it. So did you have a thought on that? You another question on MM here in just a second.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, yeah, totally. But it made me think of the idea of, I think the reason I'm starting to become way more bullish on any channel that's historically been hard to measure where I think there's that arbitrage opportunity of costs are still relatively low because people haven't all moved in because it's easy to attribute. It'll be really interesting with a house example, does that inspire a lot more YouTube buyers? That's something that Google should have put out way long ago, but I think it would undermine undermine search and that's their bigger business. And I could do a whole kind of rant and I'll save you that, but the idea of incrementality first measurement probably wouldn't be great for the search business. So probably exactly, haven't been able to make such a good point that case on YouTube. But you think about all the channels that have historically been harder to attribute, that's where costs are deflated just from a supply and demand perspective. So when you can move in and get CPMs at five to $7 and it's really effective, but most people that are measuring through attribution don't know it's really effective, that's a huge win for certain period of time until everybody's flood, everybody and the costs go

Brett Curry:

Up the market. I'm sure there's a lot of people that were not excited to see that study from house like dang it, that means my costs are going up. I don't like that at all. So really good man. So we talked about incrementality testing and I think you can use tools like House and then there are others. We're just talking about work magic and there's a number of others you can lean into. Full disclosure, they're pretty expensive, but you can also do stuff on your own too. If you've got someone that can measure this stuff, you can do a little bit of it on your own. What about the MMM side of things? What's kind of the easy way to start there? Is there an easy way to start? What do you recommend to people

Tom Leonard:

There? I don't know. I dunno if there's an easy way to do anything. I think, well, I guess that's not totally true. I think there's some ways to run relatively easy incre tests. So I think that's the easier place to start. Certainly you can always ratchet up the scientific rigor. I think the problem with looking for an easy MM solution is anybody could run a model with Robin or there's a lot of open source packages, but just because you can run a model, it could say anything. It's not necessarily rooted in this can all of a sudden predict the future and tell you exactly the contribution from media. Whereas incrementality can do that a little more out of the box. You may have wildly wide confidence intervals, but it answers the question. It gives you the comparison. I didn't do it in this market, I did it in this market.

What is the Delta Media mix modeling? You could build a model to tell sort of any story. The proof is sort of in the pudding of if I do the thing that the model says, does it change my top line? Can I see over time that when I listen to the model that improves my top line? So it's a lot easier to get started with incrementality testing. You can run poor man's match market tests as I sort you can just sort of pick, some markets historically behave similarly and there's certainly some risk there, but with a model you might think that it's an amazing model. I just don't feel like there's a great place to DIY that together without some real scientific or statistical rigor. Or if you do, you've just got to try to prove it over and over by taking some big swings.

And that's really, I sort of feel like you can get away with the kind of feel it sort of tests without really running a true incrementality test or model. If you're a small enough business and you spend a decent amount on Facebook, maybe you're not willing to turn off Facebook, but are you willing to drastically increase spend and see if you can feel something at the top line? Okay, then what happens if you cut it in half? What happens? And start to understand those curves on your own is probably a less risky way than trying to, I've never done anything in R and I'm going to run or done any sort of medium amount. I'm going to try to run one. That's probably a risky proposition.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's a really good insight. I'm glad you answered the question that way. I think, yeah, leaning into the poor man's incrementality test or just leaning really heavily into a channel and measuring your top line if you've got a small enough business to look at that, but probably if you're going to lean into MM M1, you need a couple years of data and so to be able to make some correlations and you probably need to lean in to someone or a tool with quite a bit of experience because you can do that astray.

Tom Leonard:

And on your comment on cost too. I mean it's all relative and a lot of times where you're going to need a medium mix modeling is when you're spending a significant amount in a significant number of channels, which you're probably only doing if you are spending a lot total, which you're probably only doing if your revenue can support that high level of spend, which means that a tool may not be all that expensive relative to the opportunity you could derive from it, which is where I always net out.

Brett Curry:

So I'm paying 10 or 20 grand for a tool monthly, but it's allowing me to redeploy millions in ad spend. And it totally in completely makes sense. So Tom, this has been fantastic. I'm just watching the clock. I know we're kind of coming up against it, but one, I recommend people follow you on LinkedIn. You put out some awesome content. I love reading it.

Tom Leonard:

Thank

Brett Curry:

You. People should definitely follow you on LinkedIn and you are, is it Tom, what is your handle on LinkedIn? You are Thomas B. Leonard. Thomas B. Leonard. That's probably confusing.

Tom Leonard:

I'm very self-conscious of LinkedIn, so I'm glad to thank you for saying that.

Brett Curry:

I think it's good, man. I think it's really good. I like it a lot. Yeah.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, it's been fun to start doing connecting with folks. Definitely an area that had a lot of excitement and passion for, it's fun to have these sort of conversations, so I appreciate you reaching out a while ago and that we could connect. Absolutely,

Brett Curry:

Man. Absolutely. So then if other people were like, Hey, I just want to talk to Tom because maybe you can help my brand or my business, how can they connect with you and who are you looking to or who do you feel like you can help?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, definitely appreciate that. Yeah, reach out on LinkedIn. I spend time there. I love reading everybody's thoughts and content. So yeah, reach out on LinkedIn mostly we work with consumer facing brands that are trying to understand where to put the next dollar or where to pull in the scenarios. They have to really kind of rescue people from attribution, trying to better understand where they can get more with their ad dollars. I think to your point that you teed up now is such an interesting time or anytime that there's margin pressure, there's more scrutiny on a marketing budget. Really want to try to help empower marketing teams to feel more confident with what they're doing and ultimately the finance teams to feel more confident with what marketing team is doing. Hundred percent. That's where I love to plug in, but also just love to talk about this stuff probably more than I should. So always open to the conversation.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I talk about that a lot. I've read analytics and measurement books on vacation and my wife is like, what is wrong with you? And I'm like, it's interesting. I don't know. I like it. And so totally, we are just a different breed I suppose, but I love that. And then I think this is a great way to end it where if I've got an extra dollar to spend on marketing, where do I put it? If I need to cut a dollar of spend, where do I cut it from? And that's really what this approach is about MMM and incrementality. And so I think their necessities, I think attribution is broken and or misleading in so many different ways. There's some correlations there, so we don't have to throw it out completely, but I do believe you need to lean into MMM and incrementality for short. So connect with Tom on LinkedIn. And with that, we'll wrap. Tom's been fantastic. Thanks for the time, the insights and the energy. Yeah,

Tom Leonard:

Thanks so much Brett time. Glad to connect.

Brett Curry:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. If you found this episode helpful, someone else in the D two C space or marketing space, and you think, man, they got to listen to this, please share it. We mean the world to me. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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In this insightful episode of the E-commerce Evolution Podcast, host Brett Curry sits down with Jhana Li, founder of Spyglass Ops, to tackle one of the biggest challenges holding back growing businesses: operational constraints. While many entrepreneurs excel at product development and marketing, they often hit a ceiling when it comes to building operational systems and processes. Jhana shares her expertise as a transformational operations consultant who has helped hundreds of seven and eight-figure businesses scale by creating systems that allow founders to work on their business rather than in it.

Key Takeaways

• Strategic Vision Beyond "More Growth" - Jhana reveals why simply wanting "more" isn't a strategy and how to create a meaningful vision aligned with your personal goals. She explains why many founders reach their revenue targets only to feel trapped and unfulfilled.
• Creating an Environment for A-Players to Thrive - Learn why hiring top talent isn't enough; you need systems, clear expectations, and a culture that empowers them. Discover how to transform your existing team into high performers through better leadership.
• The Four Essential HR Processes - Jhana breaks down the systematic approach to hiring, onboarding, coaching, and firing that creates a high-performance culture. Her 14-day "bootcamp" approach to onboarding new team members is particularly eye-opening.
• The Power of Radical Ownership - Find out how transferring ownership of outcomes to your team members creates accountability and allows you to step into the visionary role instead of being stuck in day-to-day operations.
• Reframing the Firing Conversation - Discover why letting someone go can be an act of service rather than something to avoid, and how to approach these difficult conversations with compassion and clarity.

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Jhana Li:

We got all these all-star athletes on our team, we're saying, why the heck are you always three steps behind me? Why are you always waiting for me to make the next decision or hand out the next task or come up with the next idea? We get so frustrated and what we realize is actually we haven't told them where they're going.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about operations, operational constraints, operational bottlenecks, issues that you need to fix if you want to scale. Because here's what I believe most agency owners like me, most brand owners like you, you're really good at product, you're really good at marketing or scale or growth, but operations, maybe that's a part of the business. You don't want to think about a whole lot, but I guarantee you, without operational systems, processes, the right people, all of that good stuff, you will hit a ceiling and we're going to bust through that ceiling on this episode today. So want to welcome to the show, Ms. Jonna Lee, she's the founder of Spy Glass Ops. More on that in a second. Jonna, how's it going? And welcome to the show.

Jhana Li:

Thanks, Brett. I'm really excited to be here. It's going fantastic. It's spring here in Salt Lake City. No complaints.

Brett Curry:

Springtime in I love.

Jhana Li:

I know. I'm ready for it. Love

Brett Curry:

Springtime. And so John and I got to hang out at an event recently hosted by one of my business partners, Tom Shipley, called Deal Con. Jonna was rocking the stage talking about how to form good integrations if you're doing m and a, but it was all around ops. And so your company, John, us, by Glass Ops, you guys help with your transformational operations company, right? So you help with consulting, recruiting, coaching. You help seven and eight figure brands and businesses get unstuck and scale from an operation standpoint. Can you talk a little more about that, a little more about your background there?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, I think you covered it beautifully. So my background is as a COO, I was in that second in command operator position for multiple different successful startups, and that's where I really learned the tools of the trade. And then I had the opportunity to be an operations coach in this coaching program that had hundreds of startup owners in it. And that was really the big unlock for me, Brett, because I had hundreds of businesses pulling back the kimono, so to speak, and just showing me the reel of what's going on behind the scenes, what's not working, what's breaking, where are they struggling as they're scaling through 7, 8, 9 figures. And so I got to just compile all this data around what are the common patterns and themes that hold startup founders back from achieving, not just the revenue and the profit goals that they have for the business, but also the lifestyle, the freedom goals, creating a version of their company that can actually run without them.

And so that is really what I became passionate about. And four years ago I started the company to help entrepreneurs go through that critical stage of growth so that the company can start to become an asset, a machine that is going to run with or without them, and they're able to take that to a successful multi eight figure nine figure exit. They're able to take that to a lifestyle business that produces passive cashflow, but ultimately it's around unlocking the founder so that they're able to achieve the best version of their business and the best version of their life.

Brett Curry:

It's so great. And yeah, allowing the founder, the visionary, you've got brilliant ideas. And again, you're a product person, a marketing person, salesperson, whatever. For me, I'm all about setting vision, forming partnerships. I like sales, I like solving interesting marketing problems. I'm not an ops guy. I can respect a good system. I can spot a good system. I'm not going to sit down and design one, and at least I'm not going to do it and enjoy

Brett Curry:

Myself.

Brett Curry:

And so I've had the privilege of working with two amazing COOs throughout the journey of OMG commerce in our path to multiple seven figures. So I see the value there and I'm really excited to unpack this and give some insights to our listeners, but would love to hear from you what are some of the mistakes, bottlenecks, issues that you see founders running into when it comes to ops?

Jhana Li:

Oh my gosh, how long we got? Okay, so I would say that statistically, right? So we start all of our client relationships with a company-wide operational audit. So we've actually looked at the data and we've run these numbers and about 80 to 90% of the time, the key and critical bottlenecks holding startup founders back fall into one of four categories. The first category is strategic vision, meaning they don't actually know where they're trying to take the company or how exactly they're going to get to their revenue

Brett Curry:

Profit goals. We want to growth is

Jhana Li:

Our vision exactly more better. That's hot strategy. Strategy doesn't offer your team a direction to run in, and it ultimately leaves the founder pretty directionless in terms of what decisions to make and what to drive towards. So a lack of strategic vision or what's an interesting one that we see, Brett, is that they'll have a strategic vision that is totally out of alignment with their personal goals. So my personal goal is that I want a lifestyle business that's going to run without me, but the version of my company that I'm building is one where the product is totally reliant on me. Nothing can move forward without me, and I want to double revenue in the next 12 months. It's like these things are at odds with each other. And so we often have to hold up the mirror and say, which do you want more?

And then let's build a roadmap to get you to that and let's adjust your business and your plan for growing your business. So it actually gets you to the goals that you have outside of just work and revenue. So that's a big one that we see fairly often. The second big one is a lack of an operator, which should not be a surprise to anyone. And this is why we layered in operations recruitment as one of our core offers because either you've got somebody who's been in that role and is now no longer cutting it, in which case we have to figure out can they grow and can the business afford the time that it's going to take for them to grow into the COO that you need, or you do not have that person. Maybe you think you do, right? Maybe it's your wife, maybe it's your best friend, maybe it's a actual COO that we hired off on LinkedIn, but are they actually the person that you need in the role? Yes or no? And we need to go out and find that person because like you said Brett, you can respect operations, but you respect it enough to not touch it and to know the value of having someone who is an expert who can actually do the work.

Brett Curry:

And if the goal is getting that building, that machine, that machine that consistently produces results and spits off cash, you got to think about ops. And I really liked the way you laid that out. And I think it's one of those scenarios where we all do want more. We all do want to grow, but what will get you there is not what got you here. What got you here won't get you there. The title of that famous book, and I think that's true both in terms of your systems or lack thereof, your processes, but also that operator, right? Yes, the COO or the operator that got you to 5 million or to 10 million is probably not the same operator that will get you to a hundred million.

And maybe because people can grow and people can change and evolve, but generally speaking, you're going to have to either upgrade that person and upskill them or find someone who can grow you to 20 million, 50 million, a hundred million and that type of thing. So really great. So I love the way you identify that. So as you kind of lay that out, where do you see people in that, let's call it 10 to 50 million range? I know it's going to be different depending on the business category, brands that can still be a pretty lean team agencies, that's a pretty big team. What are some of the hurdles that they have to overcome? What are some of the systems they need to put in place or people they need to put into place to really become that operational machine?

Jhana Li:

So this really comes down to a couple of core categories, and the big one that I see in that 10 to 50 million range is that it comes down to leadership and not just can you as a CEO founder become a bigger, better version of yourself and the leader that your company needs next from you? Can you step fully out of our executive coach calls the three levels of entrepreneurship. The first level is producer where you're just showing up, you're doing everything. Okay, we probably got out of that a while ago. We stepped out of that level. The next level is leader. Great. So now can we be a leader that is able to delegate tasks, action, align a team, drive them towards a vision, that's the leadership level. And then the third level is visionary. Can we actually hand off day-to-day leadership of our team to managers, to department heads to people who are not only able to manage tasks but actually make decisions on our behalf? And when we're able to create that, we get to step into the third level, which is visionary, where our role, our highest value work is to make decisions and set strategy on behalf of our company and to have the vision, to hold the vision, to keep the team aligned around the vision, but to then to hand off the actualization and the execution of that vision to a team that we've put in place that we trust.

Brett Curry:

So hard to do, man, so hard. As someone who I do, I am a visionary, I'm not the integrator. And so I do setting the vision, casting the vision, but giving up control the vision or delegating decision-making can be quite difficult. Before we get there though, I do want to maybe step back for a second and talk about how do you clarify, and I've got some thoughts here on what we've done as an agency and some work we've done even recently internally. But you talk about the strategic vision and the strategic vision is not more do it better, do it more. That's not it. That's not clear at all. How do you coach people or what advice do you give them to say, okay, it may be clear in your head, but the way you're saying it is not clear to your team. How do you coach people in making that vision clear?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, a hundred percent. So the first thing is that we have to clarify. Two, we have to answer two questions and how, what does success look like? What is the finish line for this business? What are the north star goals and metrics that we are going to drive towards? So what looks like revenue, looks like profit, looks like a target valuation that you want to exit at. It's the finish line of the race that you are running. If you don't have a finish line, how the heck are you going to run the race? And so what we often see challenges around the, what is that? I talked to a dude at a mastermind who exited for 50 million million. So now I want to exit for 50 million. The challenge is that's the vision, 50 million, that's the vision. I did it right? But the problem is is that 50 million means nothing. That is a totally arbitrary number. It's not attached to any deeper meaning. It's not attached to any quality of life you're trying to create. It is throwing a dart at a dartboard, picking a number and saying

Brett Curry:

That's not good or the value, value you're going to be generating and offering to the marketplace to be worth 50 million. It says nothing

Jhana Li:

A hundred percent. So we pick these arbitrary finish lines and then what happens? It gets hard to run the race. And so we end up just switching the finish line and picking a different race, and we end up just pivoting and pivoting and pivoting and creating all these different sets of goals because we don't actually have fundamental and intrinsic conviction or attachment to those goals, or even we end up hitting those goals and then we feel nothing because it didn't mean anything to begin with. And so that's the existential crisis that we have to coach our clients through where they're like, wow, I really wanted to get to seven figures. I really wanted to get to eight figures and now I'm here and I'm more trapped by my business than ever. I'm falling out of love with my business. I've never felt less free. I'm not doing any of the things that I wanted to do or that I thought I could do by the time I reached this, why the hell am I doing this and do I need you to just burn this thing down and walk away? So strategic vision again is like, let's define the what and let's define the what against what actually matters to you as a founder, as an individual, as a human, and not just as an entrepreneur. And then let's make sure that the target you're setting for your business is actually going to get you what you want. So that's the first part of strategic vision.

Brett Curry:

So good. I'll share a couple of insights from some work we've done recently here at OMG because I really believe that setting the mission and vision and things like that, it really shows the team, this is who we are and how we're going to show up. And this is very clearly where we're going. And so I'm a big fan of statements and simple statements that carry meaning and that can help make decisions and help guide you. And so a couple that we've leaned into as an agency, and then I want to talk about the thing called the V two Mom. I'm curious if you've heard of that, talk about that in a second. But the first thing that we've leaned into here over the last couple of years is we want to be the most trusted, most loved digital marketing agency that feels like an in-house team.

Now, that may seem a little bit like a strange statement, most trusted, most love that feels kind of mushy, but here's what I believe that is tied to that trust piece that ties back to competence in the agency world. People want agencies they can trust and that they trust your expertise and they feel like, Hey, if I'm getting your feedback on something, I can count on it, I can believe it, I can take it to the bank, that type of thing. The most loved piece is when I figured I would get a lot of pushback on. But actually as I've showed this to PE firms that I know and others are like, dude, I actually kind of like it because, and we've heard this, we've heard this even from clients that are leaving OMG, they're like, we love you guys. We love your team, but we're leaving for this, that, or the other. Our team is we sold or whatever, but then also feels like an in-house team. And so it feels like an extension of the team. We've had people say to us, Hey, your team feels like my team. And so we crafted that in such a way that that should guide. How are we going to respond to emails? How are we going to show up to meetings? How are we going to respond in Slack because of those things? And so that's one of the statements. Curious how that strikes you

Or anything that sparks there.

Jhana Li:

I love that so much. It is a reminiscent of an exercise that we walk our clients through EOS calls it the three uniques. We call it the golden triad. And it is the three core characteristics that you from your competitors, why would somebody choose to work with you? And the example I always give is think about McDonald's versus a five star Michelin restaurant, right? Here's the vision statement. I so often hear Brett, and especially in the agency space, oh my gosh, we want to be the best. We want to be the best agency for e-com brands, but what is the best?

Brett Curry:

That

Jhana Li:

Means nothing to me. McDonald's is the best, but STO is a Michelin star restaurant.

McDonald's is the best at being fast, cheap and easy. Those are their three uniques. A Michelin star restaurant is the best at being a luxury white glove experience, farm to table, whatever. So what are the three uniques that guide your business, that differentiate you from others? What I heard you say was loved, trusted, feels like an extension of your in-house team. Cool. What's amazing about that is that now we get to go through our entire client happiness journey and anything that does not directly drive love, trust, or seamless integration, we don't do it. We don't do it. We don't have to do it because it's not why clients choose to work with us. And we get to become the best at those three things because we're not trying to be the best at everything else. Everything. And that's where most agencies and brands get stuck is that we're too diluted in who we serve in how we serve them uniquely well. We try and be everything for everyone and then we end up being nothing for no one.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's one of those things where you can do anything. You can be anybody. Your company can be anything, but it can't be. Everything can be everything. You've got to choose. You got to select. So I'm curious. We actually went through this process. Actually our current COO is the one that turned me onto this called the V two mom vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures. So I think this was actually designed by Salesforce and marketing off there. It's really cool though. So set your vision. So this is where we're going clearly what we just talked about, your values, so this is what we believe about ourselves and what we will or won't do to get us there. Then your methods are these are the things we're going to do in all these departments, high level obstacles, these things are standing in our way and then measures.

These are clear targets that we're setting for ourselves in all these key areas. So it's been really great as we crafted that, shared that with the team, I think it's, I've already heard it sparked some interesting discussions, especially around the measures. We've got this 50% profitability target within each department and it's triggering everybody to look at like, Hey, how is that going to impact the profitability of the department, right? Because I know we got this 50% target, so I don't know that the actual structure of the strategy really matters. It's way more about do you have it? Does it make sense? And is it guiding the team?

Jhana Li:

Yes, a hundred percent. And that's such a key. That final piece is the point, right? Because what you just said, Brett, you've got this incredible vivid vision in your mind. You as the founder know exactly what that finishing line is exactly how you want to get there. But if you haven't shared it with your team in a way that they not only see it as clearly as you see it, but also understand how they can uniquely contribute towards it,

Brett Curry:

What

Jhana Li:

You end up doing is disempowering your team to be proactive. Because now again, no all-star athlete can run a race if you don't tell them where the finish line is.

And so we got all these all-star athletes on our team. We're saying, why the heck are you always three steps behind me? Why are you always waiting for me to make the next decision or hand out the next task or come up with the next idea? We get so frustrated and what we realize is actually we haven't told them where they're going. So how the heck could they help us get there? How could they walk alongside us as opposed to behind us if they have no idea what to be proactive and what to drive towards? So no, the framework really doesn't matter. EOS has a great one, V two, mom love it. We have our own right? We call it the navigational chart. It's less about whether it's the right framework and more around are you being consistent with it, and then are you repeating it and coming back to it constantly with your team? It takes the average person seven to 12 times of hearing something before it actually sinks into their brain. So we say it once and then we're like, cool, did that. Everyone's got the vision. Everyone knows where we're going. Our job becomes to be the chief repeating officer.

Brett Curry:

We

Jhana Li:

Say this again and again. We articulate the vision and the values and the goals and the metrics and all of these things again and again and again. And to us, we feel like crazy people because we've repeated ourselves a hundred times and how can they not get it? And when you feel that way, I can promise you your team is only just starting to get it. Keep going.

Brett Curry:

So good, so good. And I've heard that forever in the marketing world, just about the time you're sick of hearing an ad or hearing a message. Only then is the market even beginning to pay attention, right?

Brett Curry:

Totally.

Brett Curry:

And it's sort of similar with internal communication as well. You got to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it before people even start to get it. And so

Really great. Well, let's talk people for a minute because I'm a firm believer. This is true in the agency space, also true in the brand space. Any business, you're only as good as the people that you have on board. And I was listening to a podcast founders podcast that I love, and they were talking about Steve Jobs and maybe Elon Moss, maybe somebody else. They were talking about how they don't worry about overpaying for great talent because what they've found in certain industries may be a little bit different depending on your industry. But Steve Jobs said, Hey, the best talent, they may be two or more times, two or three times more expensive, but their work isn't two or three times better. It's 10 times better, a hundred times better, the output. And so I don't worry about that. I am getting the absolute best of my team now. Everybody's on their own journey. And so finding the right person for you isn't going to be what Steve Jobs was necessarily looking for, but how do you coach people on finding the right people when to identify that they need to hire, and then also would love to hear any hiring tips that you have. I think this is something that scaling businesses are often pretty bad at.

Jhana Li:

Yeah, a hundred percent. Oh my gosh. So this pillar of team is probably where we do the most amount of work with our clients because again, it actually becomes the deal breaker systems, not the deal breaker strategy, not the deal breaker. Do you have the right people in the right roles executing the right things and running in the right direction? Without that, your business will never be able to scale you without that. You will be that point of escalation. You'll become the system where every decision has to be yours, every idea has to be yours, every sign off and every right task needs your eyes on it and every quality assurance. If you are feeling stuck running the day-to-day of your business right now, I can almost guarantee you a root cause bottleneck is team. Now to be clear, that doesn't mean the solution is we have to go out, fire everyone and then just double all of our salaries and that will

Brett Curry:

Fix the problem. Exactly.

Jhana Li:

What we most often see is that clients will have incredible team members on the bus, but what we haven't done is created a player environment. We have a players,

But we haven't invited them to bring all that they are capable of to the table. We haven't given them a clear strategic vision that they can be proactive and innovative and creative and run towards. We haven't empowered them so that they feel confident in solving their own problems. They have the critical thinking skills to do it, and they know what they're authorized to make decisions around versus not. We haven't given them the right systems and technology so that they can be efficient and effective in their role. We're having them run around chasing down information, picking up dropped balls, putting out fires that didn't need to exist to begin with. And so we're wasting all of their time playing defense and doing all this low value work instead of doing the really high value, high leverage things that you actually paid them for. So my number one pro tip around team is that before you go out and just get better people, make sure that you have created an environment where your current people are able to bring their best to the table. And what that fundamentally comes down to is us as leaders, us as the founder, and then the leaders that we put in place to again, manage that frontline team. Do our leaders know how to build and manage a players and manage a high performance team environment?

Brett Curry:

Sometimes you don't have a players on your team, you're not ready for them. You've not done the work to make your company attractive for a players or where a players can shine. And I actually was thinking about football while you were laying that out. Honestly, I'm a chiefs football fan, longtime chiefs fan from Kansas City, and they've had several situations over recent years where they'll have a wide receiver that'll leave and go somewhere else and they don't do very good and they come back and then they're on the chiefs. They're amazing. And it's because you got Patrick Mahomes as your quarterback and you got Andy Reed who's helping call plays. You got a system that's a winning system, and so maybe a receiver that really sucks for another team. You put 'em in the chief's environment and they're going to shine because of all the things around them.

And so I think that's one of the things we got to keep in mind. It's not the key is not just paying more for talent. That just means you're guaranteed to have more money going out the door. It could work. It's not just about hiring a talent, it's about having the system where they're going to shine and the environment where they're going to shine. So what are some of the things, some of the tips you lay out there for business owners, founders to say, am I ready for A players and if not, what do I need to do to get ready?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, great question. So I would offer a reframe, which is you probably already have a players. The question is what are you lacking that's inviting them or not to bring it to the table? The

Brett Curry:

Top may be you, not the team in place.

Jhana Li:

Correct,

Brett Curry:

Correct.

Jhana Li:

Yes. So right, there are four core HR processes that I think every team needs to have to be able to consistently attract and retain a player talent. You need your hiring process, your onboarding process, which is absolutely key. Do not skip onboarding. You need your high performance management. So that's ongoing management and growth coaching for the people on your team. And then you need firing. How do we systematically either manage people up if there's underperformance or manage them out where we determine they're not the right fit and we get them off the bus? These things need to happen systematically. What I often see happen is they're happening organically. We're hiring by dropping a job description on Facebook and then hiring the first person that comes along because we needed this person three months ago and I really just need this person. And you seem smart and competent, not a proven system, not going to get you the A player.

Most of the time onboarding, we skip entirely. We just throw 'em in the deep end and we say they're an A player, they should learn how to swim. Truly a strong onboarding process will three x your average employee retention and increase your average employee productivity by 72%. And that has nothing to do with the caliber of people that you're hiring and onboarding. That just comes down to whether you are onboarding them effectively or not. Hiring, onboarding, growth, coaching, right? Managing. This is the area where we get to turn our B players into A players. This is where we're creating an environment that invites them to be their best or not. Are we tapping into their intrinsic motivators? Are we creating an environment of clearly defined accountability and radical ownership? Are we paying our people fairly with scalable compensation plans? Have we defined clear and exact roles so people know what is my job and what is not my job? There's a whole checklist, Brett, I could even send it to your group. I've got

Brett Curry:

That'd be amazing.

Jhana Li:

Eight core pillars of what goes into a high performance, a playing environment. And I'm happy to share that with everyone because just by implementing those eight things within your existing business, your existing team, you don't even have to pay them any more than you're currently paying them.

Brett Curry:

They

Jhana Li:

Promise you you will get a productivity increase of a minimum of two x because that's just how big of a deal it is when you start turning on a high performance environment.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good. And I want to go back to something I said a minute ago, just to clarify. The reason I shared the Steve Jobs of I don't care if I pay two or three x times for an employee, they're going to be

10 or a hundred times more valuable. That wasn't about salary, that was more about the right person can unlock things. But what I think is also really interesting about this environment right now is that there's a lot of A-players out there. There's a lot of great talent out there, and you can get them for a reasonable rate, like a good competitive salary. It's not the insanity that was kind of mid pandemic when everything was just off the rails. It's kind of more of a normal job market to a certain degree. And so there is good talent out there that you can find. So would love to have that checklist. We'll put in the show notes, we'll share that with everybody, but I also like the way you laid that out. So hiring, onboarding, ongoing coaching, and then firing. It's got to be systematic. That's to follow up process. But I think what most people will do are like, Hey, you're good. So come on board and figure stuff out. Watch this person. Watch that person. You'll get it.

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Brett Curry:

Imagine if going back again, going back to a football example, imagine if that happened there. That doesn't happen. You bring on a player, you get 'em indoctrinated and what you do, they immediately go to their position coach, they go to all these practices, they're watching film, they're constantly being evaluated, everything, everything is thought of. And obviously we're not quite like a professional sports team, but we need to be more like one, right? If we want a performance-based culture, we could probably learn a lot from that structure. So

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I love that. I love that.

Brett Curry:

I want to talk a little bit about hiring just because I think that's something that

Brett Curry:

It's a big one

Brett Curry:

Is intimidating to people. We screw it up so often. I can think about a couple of really bad mistakes that I've made as a business owner when it comes to hiring, but what are some of the, yeah, yeah, I mean we all do, but what are some of the hiring tips, insights, processes you recommend? Should I go with a recruiter or no recruiter? How am I going to find the right talent?

Jhana Li:

Yeah. Okay. So a couple of best practices when it comes to hiring, especially because for some positions or many positions, Brett, your clients are hiring remote team members, which is amazing. It means we get to tap into international job markets and all of these things. And also overwhelming because when we launch our average ops COO hiring funnel, we can get from 500 to a thousand applications. So how do we whittle that down? I always say that a strong hiring funnel is like a magnet. What does a magnet do? A magnet attracts, it attracts your ideal candidate avatar, right? You're a marketer. If we wanted to build a marketing funnel, what will we start with? We would start with our ideal client avatar.

Who is this person? What do they think about at night? What drives them? What motivates them? What do they want? Let's build that for our ideal candidate. I call the tool that we use for this, the job scorecard. We have to define success in the role, and then we build a hiring funnel that is messaged towards that person and is designed to be a magnet that will attract them through our process so that by the time they get to the end of our hiring process, we have COOs who have 20 years experience being like, this was the most incredible hiring process I've ever gone

Brett Curry:

Through. Wow,

Jhana Li:

I'm so excited to work with your client. When do I get to have my next interview? Do you guys have any other job opportunities available? You want them to be so excited because you have built this just for them? What else does a magnet do? A magnet repels. So this funnel should be so specific and so fine tuned that someone who is not your ideal candidate will self-select out. They literally will just stop. They'll stop going through the process. So while we may get 500 COO applications on our average job description, by the time our process is done and we're actually looking like we're looking at applications, we're looking at resumes, we're looking at the top 20 to 30 for that role because we have such a robust process that it will literally take out 95% of the candidates that apply because they're not the right fit. And it would literally be a waste of me and my team's time to have any sort of conversation with them or to spend a minute looking at their resume. So if you're going for a remote job market where you're getting overwhelmed by just sheer volume, rely on the process, let the process kick out 95% of people so that you're only focused on the 5%, that could really be that ideal candidate you're looking for.

Brett Curry:

That's so good. That's so good. I love that. The job scorecard and really thinking about how am I going to position this so they get the job done so that it meets its objectives so that I'm attracting the right person, repelling the wrong person, really good. And again, I think a lot of us that listen to us are marketers. If you own a brand, you're probably good at marketing, but you don't really put your marketing hat on when you're crafting that job scorecard or looking at attracting talent, but you kind of should be, right? There's quite a few parallels there. It's the same thing, isn't it? It's the

Jhana Li:

Same. Humans be humans, and it's a marketing funnel. Your hiring funnel is a marketing funnel for your ideal candidate.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good. So good. Any other specific tips you can give on the hiring process? What should that look like? Should you outsource it? Should you do it? How many interviews should you have? And I know there's all kinds of conditional statements there, but any other tips on the hiring process that you'd recommend?

Jhana Li:

So we have a eight step hiring process. I can walk through it very quickly if you would like, but not to get too deep into the weeds. Essentially, our proven hiring process is we launched the job description on the front end. The job description will take them directly to a written application. So the application is going to take them off of whatever job forum they're on, indeed or LinkedIn. We will drop JD into these huge, again, these huge ponds of candidates, hundreds of people. Thousands of people will see that job description, but only hundreds of them will click on the link and apply through our link. So that's a huge filtration system that kicks a lot of people out. Then we take 'em to the written application. The written application is quick. It's easy for them to fill out, but the written application takes 'em directly to a skill assessment. The skill assessment is where we generally see 80% of candidates plus stop the process. They literally just won't submit it because the skill assessment is hard. Back to marketing here, Brett. One thing we know about marketing funnels, the greater the friction in the funnel, the higher the quality of lead, right?

Yep. Same thing with hiring. So we make it hard. It shouldn't be

Brett Curry:

Hard to, what does that look like? I know sometimes, so it was one thing we do as an agency is we give them a fake project. Here's an made up client, and here's a bunch of scenarios. What are you going to do in those scenarios, right? Yes. How are you going to optimize this? And then we grade those answers. Is that what you're recommending here?

Jhana Li:

Pretty much, yep. It's two to three. I call 'em crunchy questions that again, your A player ideal candidate will have no problem answering why? Because they've done this at three other companies already. This is as natural to them as breathing, and in fact, they fucking love it. Such a nerd.

Brett Curry:

They

Jhana Li:

Get to the end of the skill assessment and they're like, oh my God, that was so fun. I cannot wait for this job. Most people, 80% of people will say, this is hard. This is going to take too long. I don't know how to do this. I don't want to do this. And they will, again, self-select apps.

Brett Curry:

Perfect.

Jhana Li:

So that's the skill assessment.

Brett Curry:

See you.

Jhana Li:

Yep. It's a big one. From there'll then start interviews. So we'll do a culture interview, a skill interview, reference interviews, and then we'll finally close them on the job.

Brett Curry:

That's amazing. That's amazing. Really, really helpful. So we've kind of set our vision, our strategic vision, and kind of mapped that out. And we're now talking about hiring. And let's talk a little bit about what that environment looks like that allows a player to shine. I know you've touched on a handful of things, but if we want a performance-based culture, what are some things we need to have in place for that to be true? So I'm assuming you got the job scorecard for when you hire somebody, probably a scorecard ongoing where you can show someone how are you doing and how can you do better type of thing.

Jhana Li:

And again, it comes back to onboarding. So we take that same exact job scorecard, and then on the very first day of that new person starting their job, I still personally do a culture onboarding call, right? How important this call is in this culture onboarding call, we cover vision, mission, right? Your V two mom, this is when you would share that this is your vision, your mission, your core values. This is the team they're going to be working with. This is the lay of the land, and this is your performance and cultural expectations. So I'll say things like show up on time to meetings and be on camera. Do I have to say that most of clients would be like, no, they're a players. I shouldn't have to say that. Set expectations. This is client. Think of your team onboarding. Again, like client onboarding. We know how important it is

Brett Curry:

For

Jhana Li:

Successful client onboarding, to have an incredible experience, to set realistic expectations and to understand, especially in a service industry like agencies, Brett, what do they need to bring to the table in order to be successful in this partnership? That is exactly what you're doing on day one. Here's us, here's what success looks like in your role, job scorecard. And then the third and critical component to this conversation is a transfer of ownership. The single greatest characteristic of high performance teams is radical ownership. So here's your job scorecard. This is yours. Now,

Brett Curry:

These

Jhana Li:

Are not my targets. These are your targets. These are not my challenges to solve my daily tasks to fix for you. These are your tasks, your challenges, your growth opportunity, your level up, and in fact that the next two weeks of training that we're about to launch into for you, that's yours as well. You are responsible for becoming the version of you for gaining the knowledge that you need to hit these targets and achieve success as measured by this job scorecard. Welcome to the

Brett Curry:

So good, so good. And some people would hate to hear that message, but the right people, it will light them up. They will love that. So even kind of you hint about some of those things, I would assume in the hiring process as well to kind of weed out the wrong people.

Jhana Li:

Yeah. Again, the hiring process is built for that ideal candidate, the person who should get lit up. When we then deliver that message in onboarding, if by some reason somebody has snuck through the hiring process and pulled a fast one on me, the onboarding is also intense from the culture call. We launch 'em into what we call the 14 day bootcamp, and I tell 'em, the first 14 days on this rollout are going to be intense. Why? Because I want to stress test you because the person that I met in the interviews is not the person I'm hiring. That is a shiny blow up version of the person that I just hired. The person I actually hired is a person who's six months from now whose kid is sick and they left the stove on and the mailman is here, and there's a client fire exploding. And how do they show up to the team meeting? That's the person I

Brett Curry:

Hired.

Jhana Li:

I want to know who that person is, and I don't want to have to wait six months to figure it out.

Brett Curry:

Tell me more about that. That is great because, well, we've made the mistake in the past of making the first two weeks month just so easy, and part of it's like we want to be a great place to work and we want to challenge people. We want to coach people. And sometimes we made it just way, way too easy, almost boring. That has since changed. But how do you stress test in those first two weeks? What does that look like?

Jhana Li:

So I want to draw a difference between hard and disorganized.

What does an A player want? An A player doesn't mind a high pressure environment. A player doesn't mind drinking out of a fire hose in terms of learning new information. An A player doesn't mind throwing themselves into something, getting their hands dirty and figuring it out. What doesn't set people up for success though, is again kicking them into the deep end. So we're just throwing you into things with no structure, with no organization, with no guidance around what you should be looking at, what you should be focused on or what success looks like. So our responsibility as leadership is to develop that structure. So that's what we call the 14 day bootcamp, and it's that blow by blow of for the first 14 days, you're going to train on these things with these people. You're going to watch these meetings, shadow these client calls, read these books.

We're going to give you all of the information that you need. We're going to front load it. And at the end of two weeks, the goal is that you are functional, not that you're exceptional, that you're functional in the role, and I'm going to download any and all information into your brain that you need in order to become functional. It will be hard, but we've got your back. Also included in that 14 day bootcamp is daily check-ins with their manager, end of week check-ins with me, a 14 day check-in around, where are you at? Where are you struggling, how are you feeling after your first two weeks? So there's structure to it, but that doesn't make it not hard. It just makes it hard with support.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, man, it's so good. So we are running out of time a bit, but I do want to talk about the final two things. How are we coaching someone and helping them really grow and reach peak performance? And then when do we fire people as well? So let's talk about both of those. What tips or insights can you share on the coaching and helping someone level up?

Jhana Li:

So the first thing is if you want a high performance team, coach them. Every high performer has a coach. Michael Phelps has a coach, and I hear clients say a lot, if I'm hiring eight players, why should I have to manage them? Management is

Brett Curry:

Coaching the best. Want a coach? Yeah,

Jhana Li:

Correct, correct. Right. And so I have not just coaching as in an end of quarter performance review. We do active growth coaching on a weekly or biweekly basis with our team members. So every week for new team members, every other week for veterans, they are sitting down with their direct manager. And what I am working on, again, included, I'll just send Brett, I have SOP and tools and templates for literally all of this. I'm just going to give it to your people. Does that work?

Brett Curry:

Amazing. Amazing.

Jhana Li:

Thank you so much. Yeah. So that includes in there a script and a one-on-one template for how I run these meetings. But essentially I am taking the last one to two weeks of their performance in the role, and we're using it as data. Where did you do well? Where could you have done better? What are you going to do differently moving forward? What are you struggling with? What's blocking you? I have a lot of clients who have a lot of fear around giving constructive feedback,

But you're a coach. Constructive feedback is literally your job. What you're afraid of is demotivating someone. What you're afraid of is making them feel bad. But that must to do with the culture, not the feedback. If the culture says that you getting feedback means you've done something wrong, then yeah, I'm going to be afraid to give feedback or receive feedback. If instead, feedback is an act of service and coaching to help every single person on this team level up all the time. I have team members coming into those meetings being like, what could I do better? This is what I struggled with. How would you tackle this? I feel like I really botched this meeting. They're looking for it. They're leaning into

Brett Curry:

It

Jhana Li:

Because they recognize it for what it is

Better, which is an active level of service, and they want to get better. So again, this is where we get into the less tangible side of team development, which is like, what's the culture that you've built around growth and feedback and failure? How does your team respond to failure? How do you respond to failure? If we can control the cultural context, then every single day my team is showing up, looking for an opportunity to grow. My job is to just hold up the mirror and say, Hey, here's your next gap. Here's your next opportunity. Grow this way.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. It's so good. Well, let's talk a little bit about the F word firing. So when is it time to fire and move on from somebody? What insights can you share with us there?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, so if we've done all the rest of this stuff correctly, then firing becomes actually a pretty easy process. We've got a job scorecard. We gave it to them on day one. We transferred ownership over those targets to them. We aligned their goals with company goals. We've coached them every single week, and we've established a regular rhythm where if there's a gap in performance, we're immediately calling it out, offering feedback and trying to correct it. What then happens if that person is still not able to perform? We have an immediate conversation, and it's a very simple conversation that says, Hey, this is the job scorecard. We covered this on day one. This is your job score card. We covered that on day one, and you're performing down here. Help me understand, what do you need for you? Again, radical ownership stays with them for you to close this gap, and what do you need for me to be successful in that?

So it's a growth coaching conversation to start where I call that the pep, the personal elevation plan. And that is, Hey, as soon as I see a gap, I'm going to call it out, and we're going to co-create a game plan for you to close that gap and take radical ownership for doing so. Then if I don't see that they've closed that gap, then we'll escalate to a pip. That's the last warning conversation of like, Hey, to be clear, you cannot have this job if you're not meeting the expectations outlined in the job scorecard. So again, help me understand why haven't I seen the change and what needs to change in order for you to be successful, because we both want you to be successful here.

Brett Curry:

So the PIP, that's the personal improvement plan, right? Correct. This is where you got to improve here else. This is going to fit. And my guess is, John, if you are a company and you're leading someone through this process after the pip, some people are going to make it a lot. People are going to be like, yeah, this price isn't right. Correct. The firing is not going to be a surprise to anybody at that point. You go through that process, it's going to be a pretty natural next step for you and for the person you're firing.

Jhana Li:

It's not a surprise. And what you'll actually see is people will just quit that phrase, manage up or manage out. Credit to Layla Hermo for teaching me that one. When you've done a great job of building a high performance, high pressure environment, people who don't like that, who don't want that, who don't want to be held accountable to constant growth and constant targets will leave. They'll literally just leave,

Brett Curry:

Which is akay even better, right? Than having to f

Jhana Li:

Fire, which is best case scenario. Exactly.

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

This is so good, and one thing I'll share too, and we've had our ups and downs as an agency when it comes to ops and hiring and firing and things like that. But what I've also found too, because I think there's this fear that business owners have too, about firing. I can't think of a single time that we fired someone at OMG where I've had outrage from the team. Almost always it's like, yeah, I saw that coming, right? Or yeah, we got that. We did have to go through a couple of rounds of layoffs as an agency about 18 months ago. That sucked, and that sucked bad. A lot of agencies and a lot of e-comm brands had to do that. So I did get pushback there. People were like, how could you let this person go? I'm like, I know. I know. It sucked. But the firing piece, I've never had anybody. How could you, I mean, maybe the person's getting fired, but everybody else was like, yep, yep. Saw that Maybe you're a little bit late.

Jhana Li:

Do you want me to offer you a reframe so that even that person,

Brett Curry:

Please, please,

Jhana Li:

Is on board with it? And guys, this is, again, this is coming from me messing this up so many times because I really care about my team. I do. And so I don't want to fire them. I don't want to hurt them. Oh my God. Maybe they're going to get better. I'll give them just another month. Just another month, and then we all know where that ends. Anyway,

Brett Curry:

Right?

Jhana Li:

Here's the reframe. I will offer you, your job as a business owner is to create a vehicle for growth. Growth for you, growth for your clients, growth for your team. People deserve to be successful in their roles. They deserve to be able to grow with your business. And if they are in a role where they cannot be successful or where their pathway for growth had diverted from yours, then it is an absolute act of love and service to let them go and find the other opportunity where they will be successful that does get them to their goals. They deserve that. It is in fact selfish to let your own emotional discomfort at the conversation, keep them in a place where they cannot be successful. So when I show up to a firing conversation, that's the lens that I bring. And guess what? I still get coffee every month with half the people I've fired because they're so grateful and I'm so grateful, and we love each other so much, and they've found another job opportunity or started a business, and they've become these incredible next level versions of themselves. And all we did when we fired them was determine that, Hey, the next version of you can't be unlocked here.

That's okay. That's so okay. But it's time for us to part ways

Brett Curry:

And understanding that people desperately want to be successful.

Jhana Li:

They do.

Brett Curry:

They know that they're not being successful with your company if they're in this position, especially if you've got

Jhana Li:

A job scorecard,

Brett Curry:

Especially if you've going through this, measur them against that process, then they really know and they really know. Right? And one story that I heard, this was in the book, radical Candor, which is one of my favorites because I'm not naturally a candid person. So that book really helped me. But I love the story between Steve Jobs and Johnny. Ive and Steve would ask Johnny like, Hey, did you give this feedback to your teammate? Did you tell them this isn't good enough? And Johnny would be like, well, I don't want to hurt their feelings or whatever. And Steve would say, no, Johnny, you don't want to be nice. You're just vain and you want people to like you, right? It's like you've got to give people the feedback. And of course, we don't have to put on our Steve Jobs and show up just the way he did, not our personalities. But it's one of those things that say like, yeah, the frame you gave, it's actually not kindness. If you are, and maybe it's actually selfish if you're holding onto somebody when you need to let them go so they can go not be miserable somewhere and be successful somewhere,

Jhana Li:

Or you're holding onto that piece of feedback that you're unwilling to tell them when it's actually just depriving them of the opportunity

Brett Curry:

To

Jhana Li:

Know what the gap is so they can do something about it.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. So good. We could keep going. You've got me fired up for operations. I'm not even operations guy. This is amazing, John, this, I can't believe it. So good. So definitely share with us the SOPs. I'll get that out. We'll put that in the show notes. Anybody can get that. But also, I'm confident there are people listening that are just like, I don't need the SOPs. I just want to work with Jonna and her team. So how can people connect with spyglass ops? What does that look like? Who are you right for? Talk to us about working with you.

Jhana Li:

Yeah, beautiful. So guys, the best way to connect with me is actually on Instagram, and if you will add it into the show notes. But I'm just going to give you guys my entire resource vault. So DM me the code word vault, click on the link in the show notes, DM me on Instagram. It's the best way to get in touch.

Brett Curry:

What Instagram handle

Jhana Li:

That is at the Jonna Lee. So J-H-A-N-A-L-I, Jonna Lee.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. And so DM you the word vault.

Jhana Li:

Correct.

Brett Curry:

You'll get the whole thing there. The whole all the goods, man. Okay. That's amazing. Jonna, this has been fantastic. I can't wait to review this, share this with my team. Really, really good. I know this is going to create transformational change for people that listen and apply and especially those that get your details and or work with you guys, but you guys are really, you're geared to work with brands, work with agencies, work with just service-based companies. You can work with just about anybody, correct?

Jhana Li:

Yeah. We work with online based startups, right? So eCom brands, given that you're running your business off technical systems, remote team building, that's the stuff we really specialize in.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Jonna Lee, ladies and gentlemen at the Jonna Lee on Instagram, connect with her there, DM her at the word vault and you'll get all the goods. Also put stuff in the show notes as well. So with that, Jonna, thank you so much. This was amazing. Thanks for bringing the energy. Thanks for bringing the insights.

Jhana Li:

Thank you, Brett, it

Brett Curry:

Was fantastic.

Jhana Li:

Appreciate it.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. And thank you for tuning in as always. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? If you've not done so, please leave us a review on iTunes and if you know somebody who's struggling with ops share, share with them this episode and with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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In this timely episode, Brett Curry sits down with Nick Flint, Director of Email Marketing, to tackle the pressing challenge facing e-commerce brands today: how to maintain profitability amid rising tariffs. As import costs surge, they share actionable strategies for protecting your bottom line without sacrificing growth. Whether you're considering price increases, optimizing marketing spend, or leveraging email to boost customer loyalty, this episode delivers practical solutions you can implement immediately.

Key Takeaways

• Strategic Price Adjustments That Won't Kill Conversions: Learn how top brands are implementing 5-20% price increases, creating premium limited-edition offerings, and shifting from percentage-based discounts to flat-dollar thresholds that protect your margins while maintaining customer appeal.
• Cut Costs, Not Growth: Discover the hidden areas where you're leaking profits—from underperforming ad spend to unnecessary software subscriptions—and how regular P&L reviews can reveal thousands in recoverable expenses without compromising product quality.
• Email as Your Profit Preservation Tool: Capitalize on relationship-building email strategies that turn price increases into opportunities, including exclusive "lock-in" offers for loyal customers and subscription incentives that stabilize revenue during uncertain times.
• Inventory Intelligence for Cash Flow Optimization: Master the delicate balance between avoiding stockouts and preventing capital-draining excess inventory with practical forecasting approaches that protect your cash position.
• The Human Touch in Challenging Times: Find out why connecting authentically with customers through personalized communication may be your greatest competitive advantage during economic pressure—including specific question-based campaigns for your most valuable customers.

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- All right, Nick Flint, the buzz for right now and likely the foreseeable future is what do we do about the tariff madness that's impacting our industry? And so wanted to have you on here so we could talk briefly about what are some ways that we can mitigate risk, that we can protect profits so we can cut costs so that we can still find opportunity for growth and opportunity to thrive even in this climate. And so let's dive in. But first of all, how's it going? By the way,

- I'm doing pretty good over here. Really starting to dial in with some of our clients and the strategies that they have with these new changes and what they might see in their price structure, differences in the future.

- Great. Well, email's gonna play a big part of this. So Nick is our, our director of email. And I think now is the time we lean into the tried and true, right? Doing more for our customers, leaning into them more. Email is one of the, the most guaranteed returns and the lowest cost to execute on. So now is the time for emails. We'll lean into some tips there, but ultimately what we're looking for right now and whatever brand wants is how do I protect profits? How do I continue to grow? How do I protect profits? And I think ultimately the first thing, Nick, that we gotta look at is how can you increase prices and or increase profit per order without tanking conversion rates, right? Without killing conversions. 'cause not just as simple as raising rates through the roof, right? Raising prices through the roof because then people will stop buying. And so let's talk through some suggestions here on, on what we can do. So, so raising prices. One thing to keep in mind, Nick, and you know, we've been talking to a lot of our, our bigger clients. I've had 10 to 15 calls recently. We've been texting, messaging, you know, talking to clients frequently. And so one thing I'm hearing a lot from bigger brands is, Nick, they're just gonna raise prices. They're just gonna raise them, have not heard fully, you know, what, what percentage kinda lift that's gonna be that that's gonna be brand by brand, it's gonna be depending on the category, depending on how much room the brand thinks, they have to still remain competitive. Depends on the strength of the brand as well. But also a lot of people are just gonna raise prices, right? And so I think you gotta look at that and whether that's a 5%, 10%, maybe a 20% increase, it's gotta be on the table and you gotta be talking about it. One of the other things that we're looking at is how do we maybe bundle things and come with creative offers so that we can raise the a OV and and like the raise the profit per order. So what, what are your thoughts on both of those items? What are you hearing? What are you seeing?

- What's, what's funny is a lot of the stuff that we're looking at, you should be doing this year round, but it's really top of mind right now. Like

- Yeah,

- What does it come down to? Charging the right amount and then cutting your costs across the business when possible and trying to run a lean operation so you stay profitable. And it really comes to the forefront where you're starting to look at every dollar, every statement, every transaction coming through. Yep. So some of the easiest low hanging fruit that they can be doing right now to help raise that average order value, not give away too much margin. 'cause if you can not discount your products and extra 10%, that kind of combats that 10% extra that you're paying Yes. Over on your, your cost of goods coming across the seeds. So off the bat, one thing we've been shifting is the initial, just the popup offers on the site and the intro, instead of going with like a standard, you know, 10, 20% off your first order, we're putting a minimum threshold in there now. So, you know, $10 off any order of $50 plus if they're gonna spend 70, 80, 90 bucks, that $10 is gonna stay the same and not gonna be that fixed percentage versus 20% off of your $90 order. It's eight bucks that the brand saves.

- Yeah, I love that. So, you know, one, one of the, the best tools we have to grow our email list and grow our email marketing is the, is the popup in the offer. But nows may be a time to, to be less liberal with your, your discount. So make that a flat dollar amount so it doesn't scale to infinity. Also, maybe just raising the threshold for when that kicks in. So yeah, we're, we're going to limit that, right? I think the other thing to think about is, is, you know, how do we bundle products to, to, and create some interesting pricing there where we're, we're still getting more profit per transaction even while maybe our, our cost structure, our cogs have gone up. So I think that's an interesting one to look at. And it's something you've talked about Nick, and we, we've seen this with brands like Nike and others, is it's not just raising prices, but how do we introduce things like limited edition specials? How, how can we introduce things that feel more valuable and are more valuable so that we can charge a, a premium? So what, what are your thoughts on that

- For these limited edition items? It works for whatever level you're at. That, that's one kind of really unique thing about this strategy. If you're selling a $10 cup, launching a limited edition collab with someone, or even like a new colorway, you're just doing 200 of, you can now sell that for 15 instead of 10. Same thing on like the sneakers. Just like you talk about, you know, instead of $150 via sneakers, you're now going for 180 'cause it's a limited edition release. So if you can find some kind of way to implement scarcity with a new product, launch a new variant, we have a coffee brand doing this, they're leaning into more select roasts from around the world and they're really putting the emphasis on the Costa Rican farmers who are making these beans. And that's why it's slightly more per bag, but the quality's there and people appreciate it. And you also see people start to splurge on some stuff like that, you know, when they're starting to look at their own bank accounts a little bit tighter, you know, I'm not gonna go buy a new car right now, but you know what, I'll spend 15 for bank coffee. Might not my coffee. Yeah, totally. It's every morning then. Really good.

- Yeah, it's a really good thought that, that even when the consumer is, is pinched a little bit, even when the consumer confidence is low, it's not that they stop buying, right? We still, we all, we love to buy things. It's our favorite recreation, you know, retail therapy is a real thing, will always be a real thing. But yeah, how can you lean into something where, hey, okay, may, maybe I'm trading down in other categories, but I'm trading up in your category and and that's what you want to try to, to create there. So yeah, I I really wanna underscore, you know, this is not a time to cut growth costs, I believe, right? And, and this is, we were talking about this in our morning, Monday morning meeting today, Nick, where you know, David, David Ogilvy, legendary ad guy, the the guy behind Dove stoke and man in a halfway shirt and Rolls Royce and a number of others. He talked about, man, I I view advertising as an essential part of every product, just like I would an essential, an essential ingredient or central component. And just when times get tough, I'm not gonna cut, I'm not gonna cut the tires outta my Rolls Royce, you know, because times are tough. I I've gotta, I've gotta invest in that. And same is true for marketing. We don't wanna pull back on marketing otherwise we'll lose market share otherwise we'll, we'll create a death spiral potentially. And so lean into marketing, maybe you wanna lean into it in a more efficient manner. Maybe you raise your mirror, things like that, but don't but your advertising and growth budgets. But on the topic of cost cutting, Nick, I think this is a real thing, right? We've gotta look at how can we get lean? How can we be lean and mean right now? So what are some suggestions there? What have, what have you heard from others? What tips do you have?

- Especially on the SMS side of things, we're getting really tight with who we're sending to right now. You might have a 20,000 per SM person SMS list with, you know, 10 k those being engaged and the other 10 k is like, you're hopeful they'll purchase one day, they've been hanging around forever and you will send them those texts for the big launches or product drops. But now we want to tighten up that window so those SMS sends are to your more guaranteed segment, keep the revenue coming in from them and then as things start to normalize, then breach back out into that broader audience that you were looking at before, kind of that hopeful window you're spending some extra money on.

- Yeah, I love it. And you know, one of the other things we're, we're leaning into, you know, we do a lot with obviously Amazon ads and Google ads and YouTube and things like that is, you know, there, there are times when, when things are smooth and easy where, where maybe you kind of ignore some wasted ad spend, right? Where maybe there's some keywords that are not gonna performing with an Amazon ads with Google ads, but when times are good, you kinda let that slide. We audit, you know, dozens of accounts every month and we regularly see, you know, wasted ad spend in the 10 to 15 to $20,000 a month range, meaning you could cut that ad spend and sales would not dip. Now's the time to be looking at stuff like that. So don't cut your overall ad budget, but man, cut the waste. And so I think that's something you wanna lean into and look at right now. You know, one of the basic things we do all, all the time as an agency, Nick, is we at least quarterly and, and now I'd say you probably do this monthly, look at all your recurring expenses. What, what are, what are we paying for? What tools, what softwares, what are we paying for that we're not using? And we see this a lot where maybe you're like, oh wait, we're paying for three multi-touch attribution tools, right? We're paying for these two tools and those reporting, we don't, we don't need all that, right? And so what can we cut to get lean and mean? Because really I think right now we're kind of fighting and scrapping for every point, every point of profit that we can get. And so looking to cut expenses, cut software costs, cut, cut opex, things like that. What are the tips or insights you have on, on cost cutting? Nick,

- It is funny for that. That's one thing I don't recommend automating it is going over your p and l. Yeah. Like, yeah, QuickBooks could automate for you and shove into the different categories, but even for my own personal finances on Sundays, I sit down and I go look at every line item. And if I have a, a late fee for my gym, 'cause I missed a class, I punch myself in the arm for that $15 feed. I they hit you with

- Your wife's like Nick pushups right now.

- They, they get you with those cancellations. But looking at like cost cutting as a whole, get aligned with your inventory forecasting, sit on the extra inventory might have been a nice safe play and good to have in the future. And what if sales just spike up outta nowhere? Then I have the inventory for it. But really start to figure out how much you are selling through on a 30, 60 day basis. How much you need to be ordering so you're not running out of product. And then start saving some costs. 'cause you don't have a bunch of debt inventory sitting there in some kind of three pl

- Love it man. And this is also the time of you looking at your three pl. How can we cut costs there? How can we renegotiate? How can we lower shipping costs? Obviously talking to your factory, to your, your factory, to the manufacturers you work with. How can we extend terms, how can we maybe share in some of the price increases? So get creative there and, and really just look for any way that you can save and partner. Really nothing should be off the table because every point of margin matters at this point. And, and you know, another, another thing we recommend on the, on the Amazon side, we got a couple services we recommend where they will go and help you recover fees from Amazon because there's probably some fees you've been charged that you can get a refund on for a variety of reasons. But often that amounts to 1000, 5,000, $10,000 a month type of thing in, in recouped fees. So now is the time to look at everything like that as well. Try to save as much as you can without reducing product quality and without taking your foot off the gas pedal because you want to still be gaining market share and growing through this time. Now another thing we, we talked about Nick, as you know, hey, now's the time to lean into email marketing. So what are some creative things we can do to make our email marketing better that's going to lift sales, lift profits. What can we do right now?

- I really like leaning into the brand's tone and the brand's voice. And just remember that you're talking to other people on the other side of this transaction email or SMSI can see a lot of brands kind of just sending out this one way informational bit. One account I was auditing earlier today, a text, it was just super scientific, followed by read the blog post here. I'm like, do you think your customers really want to get this text and will it make them feel special like that the blog post? Like, come on, figure out a new way to phrase that and relate to your customers and work on your tone. You know, general population probably a little bit stressed out now as well. So connect with them on a personal level that'll make them feel more connected to your brand. And a great way to do this is just, you know, asking questions and having a real conversation with them. Especially if it's your top a hundred, 300, 500 customers. I always recommend sending out a question type email campaign to get those replies to help with deliverability and to boost your results in the future. But for now, if you don't have like the customer service backend to deal with a thousand replies, start with your top a hundred, 300 customers and figure out what question you wanna ask them and actually relate to them and have that back and forth conversation. And it's more likely could get you some referrals in the future when they send people your

- Way's. Really great. And you know, one of the other things I'll mention an idea that we actually, we did this a couple years ago for another client where they were about to raise their prices. They had not raised prices in quite some time and so they emailed their entire list. I think they started with our VIPs and then they emailed everybody, but they said, Hey, you know, we're raising our prices on this date, here's why. And I, and I think it's another way where email gives you the, the freedom to do this. You just explain this to your customers that hey, our cost of goods are going up 50% right now, so we're not raising our prices 50%, we're raising our prices 10% or whatever the case may be. But here's why we have to do a price increase. We just, we have to, right? But here's what we wanna do for you because you're a valued customer locking in the existing price through this date. And what's interesting about that is it, it's basically a sale. It's not a sale. 'cause you're not discounting, you're just saying we're about to raise our prices, but you can order right now. Now obviously there are a few things you gotta keep in mind there. If you're low on inventory, you can't do it if, if you're, you know, inventory forecasting is not precise right now you can't do it. But if all those things are good and you wanna raise a little bit of cash right now to kind of help weather the storm, it's a great way to do a quote unquote sale without doing a discount.

- Especially if you have a subscription based business. Hey, you know, subscribe now to get 10% off for every order moving forward. Yes. And that'll give 'em reason to not cancel in the future because we'll see those new price increases. Oh, if I cancel then I gotta come back into this new higher

- Rate. Yeah. And maybe, maybe make that offer just for subscriptions only. We're like, hey, we're about to raise prices, but not only are we not raising prices on our existing subscriptions, we're on this current discount. So get locked in now so that you don't have to worry about it later. And, and yeah, that creates predictable, consistent revenue, which is worth it in the long run. So Nick Flint, any, any final thoughts? How do we protect profits, cut costs? How do we find ways to win right now?

- Yeah, closing out in less than a minute here, focus on what's working for your business right now. Probably don't use this time to test out a ton of new things that are gonna cost you a lot of money. So focus on what's working for you. Communicate with your customers openly and like a human, actually connect with them. Look at all of your costs. And then lastly, consult an actual tariff lawyer. You know, yes, before you do something silly, like try to backend this secret deal with your manufacturer where they put it as half the cost when it comes overseas and you're gonna get audited and probably sent to prison, dodge all that by talking to an actual professional. 'cause it's hard to sell products when you're in a jail cell.

- Yeah, yeah. That, that cut in profits, reduce profits much easier to tolerate than prison foods. So I I like that. That's really, really sound advice, Nick. I appreciate that. And, and just final thought as we wrap up here is that even in the midst of tariff craziness and, and the way this all will, will shake out and likely change a million times here in the, in the coming months, there's always, always, always a path forward. There's always a way to win, there's always a way to grow, there's always a way to gain new customers. And so that's why we wanna bring you solutions. And so with that, we'll wish you good luck. Thank you Nick, for joining us and until next time,

- See you then.

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This is a recent recording from my appearance on Jordan West's podcast. There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the incrementally of YouTube after Haus Analytics revealed a groundbreaking report from 190 incrementally tests involving YouTube (link: https://www.haus.io/blog/do-youtube-ads-perform-lessons-from-190-incrementality-tests).

On this episode I share eye-opening case studies demonstrating how YouTube drives significant incremental growth - even when traditional attribution models fail to capture it. If you've been skeptical about YouTube's effectiveness or struggled to measure its impact, this conversation reveals why it might be the missing piece in your marketing strategy and how to approach it correctly.

Key Takeaways:

-Beyond Last-Click Attribution: Discover why obsessing over ROAS metrics can be misleading, and how YouTube drives significant business impact that often isn't captured in traditional attribution models but shows up dramatically in incrementality testing.

-The Real-World Proof: Brett shares compelling case studies, including a brand that saw Amazon sales cut in half when YouTube ads were paused, and another that achieved a 12-25% lift in Walmart store sales through targeted YouTube campaigns.

-The Anatomy of High-Converting YouTube Ads: Learn the essential elements of effective YouTube ads, including how to craft the perfect hook in the first 5 seconds, the importance of standard and "over-the-top" product demonstrations, and why 45-90 second videos often outperform shorter cuts.

-Production Value Matters: Unlike TikTok, YouTube requires slightly higher production quality (though not Super Bowl commercial level) - Brett explains the right balance and why combining polished footage with authentic UGC can be particularly powerful.

-Testing & Measurement Strategies: Get practical advice on how to properly measure YouTube's impact through geo tests, holdouts, search lift studies, and why tracking your overall MER (Media Efficiency Ratio) might be the simplest yet most effective approach.

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Brett Curry:

This is like TV advertising for our generation, but way better than TV advertising could ever be. Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today is a unique episode. This is actually a recording that I did. I was a guest on my buddy Jordan West's podcast and we dove into YouTube. Now, Jordan West is a pro. He is a master of TikTok shops. He's built multiple brands, and his podcast is the secrets to scaling your E-Commerce brand. And we talked all about YouTube. Now, the reason we dove into this episode right now, this is coming off the heels of really a groundbreaking research piece or research project that was released by House Analytics, HAUS. Olivia Corey and team there have done some brilliant work all around the idea and the practice of measuring incrementality.

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Brett Curry:

We're seeing the true impact of channels. And so they tested, they did 190 incrementality tests that involved YouTube with 74 brands, and the results were mind blowing. She was on a podcast with Andrew Ferris Albe on that podcast soon as well. But the idea here is that YouTube severely underreport or Google Ads severely underreport, the actual impact the YouTube ads has to the tune of about 70% underreporting. Or another way to look at that. The reverse is it's about 3.42 x more incremental than what you see there. So if you're seeing a one row as an example in platform, the actual impact is probably a 3.42 x ROAS or 3.42 roas, which is amazing. And so in this podcast, Jordan asked me about our experiences as an agency. We're known as one of the top YouTube ad agencies for D two C brands. So tell lots of stories, lots of examples on the creative side, on the measurement side ways we've used YouTube to grow retail sales, omnichannel sales, I think it's going to be informative, instructive, and hopefully fun. So with that, please enjoy the interview that I did with Jordan West YouTube ads.

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Jordan West:

Hey guys, Jordan West back here Today. I am so excited about this podcast episode. I have one of the experts in the space in the YouTube space that is Brett Curry on the podcast for I believe a second time, maybe even third time. Brett, welcome back to the show.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, Jordan Min awesome to be here. It is for sure, at least the second time. And maybe the third, I'm not sure, but let's make this the best one yet. That'll be our goal.

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Jordan West:

I was so happy when you reached showed to me, I'm like, yes, I want to. I was really hoping we were going to talk about YouTube. I just said, Brett Ray showed. I'm like, I will have him on the podcast. I have no doubt that there's going to be tons of value here. So really looking forward to this. Brett, before we begin and really dive in, tell for people who dunno anything about you, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Totally.

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Brett Curry:

So I'm the CEO co-founder of OMG Commerce. We are a performance digital marketing agency. We focus primarily on D two c e-commerce and omnichannel retail brands, specialty with YouTube ads as we'll talk about today. But also all things Google. We lean into meta. We're full service on Amazon and we do retention marketing as well. So email and SMS, but I'm just passionate about marketing that works and marketing that builds a brand and also drives bottom line impact. So got team of about 40. We've been doing this since 2010, won some cool awards, been featured with some Google case studies and some other fun stuff. But at my core, I'm a marketing and business junkie, and so thrilled to be talking with you today.

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Jordan West:

Awesome, awesome. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I think one of the interesting things that you and I were touching on before we actually pressed record here was this idea around trying to measure incrementality of some of these channels that are really hard to measure. So for me, everyone knows I've gone super hard on TikTok this year. I think the reason why TikTok shop was so interesting to me is that we always knew TikTok was driving business results.

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Brett Curry:

Yes. But

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Jordan West:

No one could ever tell you that there was no measure, couldn't

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Brett Curry:

Measure it,

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Jordan West:

Right? Because it just doesn't work like that on TikTok. It's not a direct response channel. In the same way now TikTok shop is right. Shop has changed all of that, and we have this nice closed ecosystem that you can measure, but I talk about this halo off of TikTok shop the entire time. But interestingly, YouTube is such a similar channel to me where it's like how many times do I, am I watching something on YouTube? I see an ad and I'm like, yeah, I should go buy that product. I totally forgot about that. I never in my life have ever clicked from a YouTube ad over into buy a product, never once because I'm watching something, but it's there with me. It's the TV of 2025.

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Brett Curry:

Exactly.

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Jordan West:

Yeah. And

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Brett Curry:

It's so interesting.

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Jordan West:

Walk me through this. What are your thoughts? Why are you still in the YouTube game and how do you continue to scale?

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Brett Curry:

I don't like to do anything the easy way. Apparently. I like to get beat up on a daily basis. So leaning into YouTube, it's a bit of a battle. A lot of people have rid off YouTube as a viable channel for growing their business. A lot of people opt to just pour all their dollars back into meta and hey, I'm a believer in meta ads. We spend on meta, even as an agency, of course, not just for our clients, but for omg, but for

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Jordan West:

Yourselves, of course,

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Brett Curry:

YouTube is so unique, and I love the way you framed it, and I fully agree with this statement. This is TV advertising for our generation, but way better than TV advertising could ever be. And I'll kind of set this up a little bit. So I got my start when I was in college in the early two thousands. I worked at a radio station and they got involved in some TV and stuff, but I just remember talking to local retailers, local furniture stores, local car dealerships, local restaurants, and they would tell me things like when we advertise on radio, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, I don't know. But when I run TV ads, people come in and people mention it, and they couldn't directly attribute, but they could feel it and they could see it. When the TV ads were on, people were coming in, right?

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Brett Curry:

That's incrementality. You shut TV off. That business goes away. And so that's what YouTube is now, and we've all just gotten addicted to last click or multitouch attribution models where we want to see the click. We want to see the evidence that this ad led to this sale or this result. Ultimately, I think we were all coming to that. We've kind of come full circle. It was like, oh, offline is so difficult. You can't measure it. Online is magical. You can measure everything. To always we're measuring online is really shortsighted and maybe not very helpful. We want to just as an example, lean in fully to roas. Well, if you want to maximize roas, just run branded search. That's the maximum

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Jordan West:

ROAS course. Of course. And then try scaling in.

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Jordan West:

Yeah, right. This is the hilarious thing. It is funny. I've been trying to lean in on how, for me, I owned a bunch of brands over the years and trying to lean in on how I can help e-comm brand owners, especially the smaller ones that we don't work with anymore. I'm trying to figure out, I'm like, how do I help you guys that are listening to this podcast? A lot of you guys are listening to this podcast, and profitability is an interesting thing. We've been obsessed with these marketing metrics that just don't matter What we see in branded search, what we see in most people running Facebook ads on bottom of funnel. I'm like, good. You think that looks good? Who cares? It doesn't do anything for your business. It's not going to make you profitable at the end of the day. This is something I obsessed with

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Brett Curry:

It off up, probably no negative impact to your business. Shut that off. You'll probably get all the sales. You're currently kidding.

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Jordan West:

Totally, totally. Exactly. YouTube again, I was telling you about a funny little small case study and from a colleague of yours that's running this ad accountant, it's us spending a ton, I think it's 20 or 30 KA month right now, but I will tell you it as we scale it up, right on platform, it's showing about a one return on ad spend. So normally you'd say, let's turn that off, right? Yeah. Well, when we turn that off, everything dies. There's no business. So that's number one. Number two, the MER is about 3.5, so I'm not dumb. I know something's happening there. So that's my sort of look at all of this of like, wait, we've got to get out of this granularity that we think that we know how a customer journey works. Come on. We'll never know how a customer journey exactly works.

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Brett Curry:

Customers don't know how their customer journey works. They don't know they're, they're seeing things and reacting and then reacting again. And they probably couldn't even stitch together their buying journey. So what makes you think you'll nail that with 100% accuracy? You just won't.

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Jordan West:

So tell me what you guys do. You've been all in on YouTube since I've known you. You're the YouTube guy, Brett.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah. I mean, this is what we're known for. A lot of big brands come to us because we've cracked the code, so to speak, on how to make YouTube ads work. And the good news is, while it's not measurable in the same way that meta ads are, or in the same way that search or shopping ads are, you can measure it. You've just got to work a little bit harder. You got to kind of triangulate the truth a little bit, but you nailed it earlier, Jordan, when you said, I've never clicked on a YouTube ad, right? YouTube is the TV of our generation. Nobody clicks on their tv. So you just use that as your comparison. And actually this is interesting. Over 50% of views now, and I've seen numbers show as much as 60% of all views on YouTube, just the YouTube app are on TV screens. It's the fastest growing platform or fastest growing screen for YouTube consumption. Yes, there's the option to send a phone or you can scan a QR code on those YouTube ads that appear on a smart TV or a connected tv. But that's so rare that usually you're doing something on YouTube, you're probably not going to do those things. And so it's just people don't interact with YouTube the way they do, even Facebook or TikTok. And so you have, I want to give you that at a core level. Yeah, go ahead.

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Jordan West:

I just want to give everybody a fun anecdote here. So my kids watch a lot of YouTube. They've got the few creators that they love. My daughters love Mariah Elizabeth, she does all these crafts and stuff, and then obviously Mr. Beast, right? Everyone, Mr. Beast,

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Brett Curry:

Mr. Beast. Beast. Yep. He's the best.

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Jordan West:

And there's these massively long YouTube ads in between, right? There's like 62nd. My kids recently came to me and they said, dad, I hope in the next election, now remember I'm Canadian and we are now going, right, of course. Just like everyone's making the swings. And so they come up to me and they're like, dad, I really hope in the next election that you're going to be voting for Pierre Polly because his tax plan seems really good. Remember this is 11 and 9-year-old. I've heard a lot of things about what he said, and I'm like, don't ever tell me YouTube ads don't work because exactly. You

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Brett Curry:

Have to be watching them, dude, that is so good. And I remember as a kid, for me, and this still was stuck in my brain and probably meant that I was destined for a career in advertising. I remember trying to convince my parents to buy Ginsu knives because I saw these great commercials and I'm like, guys, you don't understand. You can cut through a can of Pepsi and then you can cut a tomato without sharpening. And I'm just regurgitating the ad, but it's such a good example. So yeah, your kids are now a spokesperson for political qualities.

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Jordan West:

Exactly. Exactly.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's such a good story. Anything.

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Jordan West:

So what's funny is that this is years ago, I think this is 2018, maybe 2017 or 2018, somewhere around there. And we just had this little tiny agency at the time. Now we're kind of similar to your guys' size. I was actually just looking around 40 right now,

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Brett Curry:

And

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Jordan West:

I think there was three of us at the time, and my accountant decided to run for mayor, and I thought to myself, well, what's the best way that I can get him seen by everybody in the city that we live in? Abbotsford, it's called. It's like, how can I get him seen? And I was like, I think I'm just going to go to YouTube. And so I've made these really long videos of him. Remember he was a candidate that nobody knew. He ended up getting second place and getting about, I think it was somewhere around like 30% of the vote. And I was like, whoa. And even more, we have this meme account on Instagram called Asford Memes, and one of the posts on there was about his YouTube videos being everywhere. And I was like, crazy. Yes, this works. I wish I would've just tripled down on that.

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Brett Curry:

No doubt. No doubt. Yeah. Last kind of little anecdote that's related to this part of what we're talking about. We have an appliance store client, someone that I've known a long time there. They've got locations here in Springfield in Missouri where I'm based, but all over Oklahoma and stuff. So we've been talking to them for a long time about, Hey, give us a little bit of your TV budget, because they spent a lot on tv, sell appliances, give us a little bit for YouTube because we were running all their Google search ads and stuff like that. And so they finally gave us a budget, not a ton of budget, but some for a few key markets for one of their appliance chains. And they just came back to us and they said, guys in Q1 so far of this year, these stores are up 35% over last year. One of their other chains is flat, basically. And they're like,

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Jordan West:

Interesting. So you got to have a case study,

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Brett Curry:

A case study. Yeah. So I don't know if they want anything released publicly. So I've got a few case studies I can get into in detail with you, please. Yeah. Yeah, 35% over other stores. And the only thing they changed was taking some TV budget, putting it onto YouTube, and voila, they got more gross.

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Jordan West:

I mean, this is the thing that we've talked, and we've talked about this. It's funny because I'm on TikTok land over here and you're over in YouTube land, and these are the two things that nobody on Twitter really ever talks about because they can't measure them, and yet we all know that they drive both of these, drive this massive halo. Right? There is, I'm sure we'll talk in very generalizations here, but I was talking to a guy the other day who happens to do some advertising for one of the biggest supplement companies on Amazon, and they're the biggest supplement company right now on, or one of them out on TikTok shop. Their Amazon business has doubled this year with no more Amazon spend. All I'm saying is we've got, if you guys are going to get anything from this episode, just remember that in the meme curve, the person that is obsessed with Triple Whale is not the one at this end of the curve, right? Yep, yep. If you're obsessively looking at your numbers like that, that's not how you run a business.

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Brett Curry:

Totally.

‍

Jordan West:

That's not how you do it.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. So true. So let me give you a couple of examples, a couple of additional examples, and then we may want to talk through too at some point. When does it make sense to start testing YouTube ads? When are you maybe not ready to test on YouTube ads? Because I will say, even though I am a believer in YouTube ads, I talk about it all the time. I speak on stages. I get invited to YouTube offices a couple times a year to teach brands how to do this. It's not for everybody, and it's not the place to start if you're a young brand, probably so happy to talk through that. But one case study that I think is really interesting, so this was a brand we worked with a number of years ago. It's a haircare product for women with thinning hair, and this actually works so well that now the founder, he sold the business and now he's a partner in OMG, which is kind of a cool fun first.

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Jordan West:

That's so fun.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So with Kiran, they were doing a lot with direct response tv, doing a lot with Meta and a few other channels, but they could not get YouTube to work. They tried it, tried and failed a number of times. So we came in, we remapped the campaign strategy, we tweaked their creatives because the creative were powerful, but they weren't quite built for YouTube, so we redid the creatives.

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Jordan West:

Are we going to get into that? Because I think that's an interesting thing to get into is what makes a YouTube creative amazing. Sure.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah. So we can kind of dig into our formula guidelines there on creative, but we tweaked the creative, we redid the campaigns. We focused on who we're going to target on YouTube because targeting is so important on YouTube, we went from zero to a million dollars in spend on YouTube and under 90 days while hitting their target CPA. So this was direct response, applicable sales. Wow. They had a high CPA ceiling, they had a landing page that converted really well. They had a great product. They had a high take rate on subscriptions so they could pay a lot for new customers. So it all worked, but that was just purely D two C. Now, what we found then is as we started doing that for months and months and months, we were asked to help them with their Amazon business, and they were like, Amazon's really taken off. Amazon is going like gangbusters. And so we started helping them grow on Amazon. We do full Amazon channel management. Well, we hit a patch where we had to pause YouTube ads for a bit due to some internal tracking and a couple of the things you had to pause it for a bit.

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Jordan West:

Oh, my favorite kind of AB tests where it's like, yeah,

‍

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

‍

Jordan West:

I was forced to do this. The credit card bounced and I didn't see it for seven days. The best tests.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It wasn't a credit card best, but they had to pause for a bit right when they did, because we had full visibility into Amazon, we were managing Amazon branded search cut in half, cut in half when we had to pause YouTube. Then we got YouTube back and they were rock and rolling again before long, but we were like, holy crap, that's pretty crazy. So basically we came to the conclusion that it was about a one-to-one ratio for every conversion. We saw D two C, we were getting at least one on Amazon, and one of the data scientists on the team was like, it might be two. It might be two to one for every one you're getting D two C, you might be getting two on Amazon. And so it's one of these things where were they in retail as well that were they in retail as well? They were not in retail. Now I've got another case that I talk about that there was fully retail in Walmart stores. That's incredibly fascinating. But this brand, no, they were multi-channel. So they were D two C plus Amazon plus a few other marketplaces. They were not in stores at that time.

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Jordan West:

Okay, okay. Insane. And also I think that we all brand people who have been in this game for a while are those things you do that you can't measure

‍

Brett Curry:

That

‍

Jordan West:

Is the right thing to do and actually drives the top of funnel business, but then you're convinced by somebody, maybe it's a new CMO, maybe it's a new somebody who comes into the space, maybe it's just a viral tweet on Twitter or on whatever we call that thing now that just shouldn't have gone viral because it was wrong. You must measure everything. I only scale things that are measurable. And then you're like, oh, okay, well I'm going to turn this thing off and then your business tanks.

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Brett Curry:

And I think it's important. We're certainly not making the case to measure less and we're not making the case to pay attention to your numbers. It's just that not everything can be measured the same way. I heard this, some of my team made this analogy one time. They were like, Hey, think about a light switch. You flip a switch and the result you don't see on the light switch, the result is over here with the light. I was like, this is a pretty good analogy where that's a really good analogy, Brett, like YouTube, you're running YouTube, you're doing this thing right here. The results are over here. You see the results over here, they're there. You've just got to look for them. And measuring them is harder. So I don't think you should measure less. I think you should measure more. I just think you should understand that ROAS is a bad metric overall if that's all you're looking at and the whole picture, understanding incrementality and real growth and real impact. It takes some work. It takes some work to measure it. So you got to look at everything. I can also show you a case study that might be helpful. It's from RTIC coolers, so coolers and drinkware, a Yeti competitors. Happy to dive into that or I think you may have had a question right there.

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Jordan West:

I do have a question I have to put in the middle here, Brad, I'm so sorry. But how are tools like Prescient and mms, do you trust them? Do you think that they are telling the full story? Do we need to move from an MTA model into an mm M model? Just what do you think about that?

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Brett Curry:

It's a great question. So I think there's a couple things at play here. I still like MTA tools. I think they serve a purpose. We have clients who use North Beam clients who use triple whale. I like them. I think we can gain some insights there. They got different models you can kind of play with. And so it can give some insights. Certainly, I do tend to think that an incrementality test plus an MMM type of approach is probably a little bit better. I would lean that way. But I think you can also do things like, hey, if you can track in platform performance and you can do things like incrementality tests on your own, which you can do that. You can set up geo tests, geo holdouts and things like that.

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Jordan West:

Totally just do holdouts, right? It's that simple. Just do a geo. Let's say New York and California are bringing you basically the same. That's right. California and Texas, just because they're similar and similar populations. If they're doing that, you can just hold out Texas and then you can know measure the impact. There's the

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Brett Curry:

Impact. And so there's also, there's some tools that Google can help you with. They'll do things like search lift studies, they do conversion lift studies, which basically is a way for them to do their own kind of holdouts and tell you the incrementality of a particular campaign type. Quite useful. So I think that can kind of get you on the right track. And I do think one of the best numbers, the best metrics, which you really don't need any fancy tool for is mer, right? Look at your total media efficiency ratio and watch how that fluctuates as you lean into one channel over another. Hey, when I really lean into YouTube for a couple of months, my MER improves and my top line grows. That sometimes simple is all you need, but you've got to be looking in the right places. I love MMM. I've not used prescient, but I've heard good things about them. But I do think the world is probably shifting more to MMM and incrementality tests and less towards MTA.

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Jordan West:

Yeah, yeah. MTAI think was something that we brought in when we needed it, right? And especially post iOS 14.5.

‍

Brett Curry:

Solve some real problems there for a bit. Yeah, for sure.

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Jordan West:

Absolutely. So Brett, I want to get into your case study and then after your case study, I want to hear your, so guys, stick around because Brett is going to break down what makes a perfect YouTube ad.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So excited about that. I guess about a year ago I was speaking at the YouTube offices in Los Angeles teaching a group of brands how to grow on YouTube. Met the folks from RTIC, which I was not that familiar with that brand prior to that point, but RTIC is, they sell wheeled coolers like indestructible, the best cooler I've ever had. They're direct competitor to Yeti. I think they're better and they're less expensive. They also sell drinkware. And I'm a big Tumblr fan. I drink a lot of coffee. Jordan, are you a coffee drinkers? Well, Jordan,

‍

Jordan West:

I drink a cup or two a day. My son got me this cup here. I dunno, like a liter basically.

‍

Brett Curry:

It's kind of cool. Yeah, love coffee. I go to bed singing about right as some of them big fan. But RTIC has drinkware that is ceramic lined. One pet peeve, and this is going to show that I'm a little bit of a snob when it comes to drink beverages. If you drink out of a metal Tumblr, it smells and tastes a little bit like steel, right? Almost like you have blood in your mouth, a little bit of that, right? The ceramic lining completely takes that away. It tastes like you're drinking out of your favorite ceramic mug or whatever. It's brilliant. Anyway, met RTIC. They were like, Hey, we want to get YouTube to work for us, and here is our hypothesis. Can you help us prove it? We want to see if YouTube will drive in-store sales. They were just put into all Walmart stores are almost all Walmart stores nationwide.

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Brett Curry:

They wanted to know if we ran some targeted YouTube tests, can we see a measurable lift in Walmart sales? And so we said, we love this idea. They had great creatives. We coached them a little bit and helped them with their creatives, which we'll get into more in a minute. But here's what we did. We basically did some studies with the help of Google to find what cities had really high category demand, meaning people looking for coolers and wield coolers, but then had varying ingredients of demand for RTIC. And this was all based on Google's search behavior. So we mapped out and we said, okay, let's do a test. Let's choose 19 markets that we think are poised for growth, got good store count, good inventory levels, things like that. Let's match those with 19 control markets that are basically the same size and same everything. And we're going to spend YouTube dollars in the test markets and we're going to hold out and the control markets, we're going to do that for five. And

‍

Jordan West:

There was Walmarts in all. Walmarts

‍

Brett Curry:

In all of them. Yeah, exactly. So then we could do, so it's a mashed pair holdout type study. So we lean in hard and we used all of our resources to build out the right campaigns and maximize views, and we did lean in heavily to connected tv. So that was a great placement for these ads. And we measured on YouTube. On YouTube. All YouTube's connected like YouTube's TV placements. Exactly.

‍

Jordan West:

This is now

‍

Brett Curry:

YouTube tv. A lot of people ask about that. I'm a subscriber to YouTube tv. It's a good cable replacement. That's a separate inventory though. It's powerful, but it's actually a pretty small percentage of YouTube views. And if you buy YouTube ads in the platform, like in the Google Ads platform, you're going to be on traditional YouTube. But here's one really crazy side note that ties into this. More people stream YouTube on connected TVs. So the good old fashioned YouTube app on connected TVs that stream any other platform. So YouTube, I

‍

Jordan West:

Do not doubt that even for a second,

‍

Brett Curry:

Bigger than Netflix, bigger than Hulu, bigger than Disney plus, it's bigger than Hulu. Disney Plus and a few others combined. It's bigger than Netflix, but not that dramatically. So we leaned in heavily to connect to TVs. There's so much inventory, there's so much. The inventory is insane. So many people aren't advertising here because they don't get it and they don't understand it. And so CPMs are pretty low compared to men and other places. A lot of opportunity here. So we did this five week test and we measured it all along the way. We did see Lyft and D two C, so we were able to measure those and track those. All the ads said, go to Walmart, go buy this at your local Walmart. You could click to find a local store through Google tracked people that visited stores. All of this was all about local, but we did see some D two C sales, right? Some people were just like, of course I'll buy it

‍

Jordan West:

Online course. No, I want to buy it now.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, I want to buy it now. I want to buy it online. We saw Lyft on Amazon because a lot of people were like, yeah, I want to buy it now, but I don't want to buy it from your store. I want to buy it on Amazon because that's my favorite. So we saw that. But here's what we saw inside a Walmart stores. We had three different groups of markets. The worst performing group saw a 12% retail store lift in comparison of the test markets to the control markets, test markets 12% high degree of confidence lift over their control markets were very similar in size and nature and all that stuff. The best group was 25% lift over the control market. So basically they were like, holy crap, this is great. Let's do more of this. It actually lets us run a whole bunch of, or getting more of their business.

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Brett Curry:

Google was like, Hey, we got an agency excellence award for it. We really leaned into this more in the process too. We also did what's called the search lift study where Google can look at, hey, people that saw your ad versus people that didn't see your ad, what kind of impact does that have on people searching for your brand? So we saw a 241% lift in branded searches from this ad campaign, and this is where it's like, okay, you've got to kind of look at the holistic picture. And I will say, this is where YouTube really shines from omnichannel retailers. They can shine for multichannel retailers as well, but the results were stagger

‍

Jordan West:

Incredible. We don't have much time here. Brett, I want you to walk me through before you go, walk me through what the perfect YouTube ad looks like.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, there are a few elements and I've got a guide that we can mention that's free that walks through 17 of our favorite YouTube ads. It breaks down each one and shows. Great. We'll

‍

Jordan West:

Get that down in the show notes. And if you guys are watching this on YouTube, it'll be down in the description

‍

Brett Curry:

Below. Awesome. So the first thing, no surprise here probably, but you need a hook first. Five seconds is critical. People are, if it's a skippable ad, which is most of what we run, you got five seconds to really hook somebody. Some people are watching hovering with their finger of the mount over the skip button ready to click. So you got five seconds to convince them, Hey, wait a minute, check this out a little bit longer. So hook is important and what we say is you need to make sure you're hooking the right person. So don't come up with just some random hook explosion, something funny guy in a gorilla suit, something just wild. You want to interrupt the right person, right? So your ideal target, but then you want to up because you only pay based on

‍

Jordan West:

An actual view through. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you don't want the wrong, you basically want to be like, Hey, everyone else don't watch.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, you want the non-ideal shopper to skip because you only are paying for good views. And so you want someone to choose to watch your ad if they're in your market. So something to grab their intention, thought provoking question, a bold statement showing something right in their face. But it needs to be related to what you saw. So it needs to be related to the problem you're solving or the relief you're bringing or the enjoyment that your product is offering. So it's got to be relevant, a relevant interruption, a relevant hook to the right person. So the hook is critical. Next, if you're D two C, essentially most of our clients are retail in some way. It's got to be a product demonstration. You need to now show me the product in action. And Jordan, I like a typical demonstration. So what's the proper use case of this one? A good example is a flex seal, like the spray on thing to seal. If you have a leak, leak in your gutter or leak in a pot or whatever, you spray flex seal on your obsolete. So I like a standard use case demonstration. This is how you seal your gutters type of thing. But then I like an over the top demonstration. If you can throw that in there too. It's kind of like the, I dunno if you like the

‍

Jordan West:

Pepsi can thing you talked about before.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, exactly. So it's like the knife, the Ginsu knife commercial where they cut through the can or the old, old super glue commercial where they in one cut, put super glue in the bottom of a guy's shoe and stuck him to the ceiling, held it, and then he stayed there anyway. So show a dramatic product demonstration too, because you want them to see the standard demonstration and say, I could do that, right? But then they're also kind of skeptical. I like talk about Missouri, where I live is we're the show me state and our state animal is a mule. We're stubborn. We believe nothing. You got to show us before you believe us. Picture that your audience is from Missouri, right? You got to show them and they're going to be skeptical. Standard product demo and then over the top product demo. Then I like some social proof, so show me something that proves that other people like me love this product.

‍

Brett Curry:

So this can be reviews. So when we were doing stuff for native deodorant and we helped them really scale on YouTube, we said like, Hey, there was only over 50,005 star reviews. How could 50,000 people be wrong type of thing. So some kind of social proof. Then I like some kind of risk reversal or some kind of offer where it's like, hey, do this, try this, experience this. We'll take away the risk. And then a firm call to action. And so that call to action is, Hey, click here to learn more. Go to Amazon and buy it. Buy it from your favorite retailer. Something like that. So how

‍

Jordan West:

Professional does the filming need to be on YouTube? Again, I talk about TikTok all the time, right? It's the opposite, right? You don't want professional filming, it doesn't work. It's the antithesis. What about YouTube?

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's kind of the same with meta too. Sometimes it's the unpolished, the shot with the phone kind of raw candid stuff. It works on YouTube. You do need a little more polished. Think again about the frame that this is like TV and a lot of people are probably watching it on tv.

‍

Brett Curry:

A little more polished is important. Now we found that we've a lot of success with an ad that is professionally produced. You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on it, but you need good lighting and a good camera and good audio and things like that. But sometimes when you mix good production value with some raw stuff mixed in, so good high production value, then throw in some UGC either in the middle or at the end. That combination extremely powerful. Now we've also, we scaled this auto brand on YouTube a couple of years ago, and basically all they had was UGC, but it was really good UGC. And so we did UGC mashups, which just a whole bunch of customers showing their car, talking about why they love the product, things like that. But then we added some editing and some graphics and some transition that really made it look polished and that thing scaled like crazy.

‍

Brett Curry:

So it's definitely going to be higher production value than TikTok or Meta, but it does not have to be million dollar type of stuff that you see on Super Bowl commercials. You don't need that. And then I'll also say if you're running an ad on Instagram reels or on TikTok or TikTok shops, whatever, you can take that ad almost exactly how it is and run it on YouTube shorts. I will say though, I haven't seen as much results with YouTube shorts only as I have when you're kind of doing all of YouTube or you got YouTube shorts, you got YouTube on desktop and mobile and connected TVs, which takes all a little bit different format for each of those. That's when it really works. We've seen less of an impact when it's just YouTube shorts.

‍

Jordan West:

Last question, because I am late for a meeting.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

‍

Jordan West:

What length are we looking at here? Is there an ideal minimum length? And I am saying minimum because I understand that there probably is a minimum.

‍

Brett Curry:

There is. I prefer 45 seconds to three minutes as kind of an ideal length that if you could shoot for 90 seconds or 60 seconds, that's great. Ultimately it's got to check the box, it's got to hook somebody, it's got to be compelling, it's got to have the product demo and the social proof and the offer and all that. But usually if it's a little bit longer, the more you tell, the more you sell, right? The more you show, the more dough. I just made that on the spot. That's actually really lame. We've that are like 62nd cuts, outperform 32nd cuts when it's basically the same ad, just the 60 numbers, A 32nd, the 62nd does better with clicks and overall lift in sales. So generally speaking, we want to go kind of in that 45 to minute and a half range, but as much as three minutes can also work.

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Jordan West:

Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Where can people find out more about what you are up to and chat with OMG commerce?

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Brett Curry:

Absolutely. So omg commerce.com, click the Let's talk button and that's how you end up getting with our team. You can find my podcast there by clicking on resources. You can see the YouTube guide and up there as well. And then I'm active on LinkedIn, so hit me up on LinkedIn. Would love to connect to you. I do talk about all things D two C and retail and business and Google and Amazon and all kinds of stuff. So would love to connect on LinkedIn as well. Awesome. And

‍

Jordan West:

I'm looking forward to coming on your pod.

‍

Brett Curry:

It's going to be, let's do it, man. It's going to be a blast schedule talk TikTok shop. So I'm excited. Awesome. Well thanks again for your time today, Brett. Thanks Jordan. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. So let us know what topics would you like to cover on this pod. And if you know somebody that would benefit from this episode, please share it and leave us a review on iTunes. That would make our day. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Molly Pittman is a bit of a legend in the digital marketing space. Bartender turned marketing intern for Ryan Deiss, turned VP of Marketing for Digital Marketer, turned entrepreneur - Molly's story is an inspiring one. And she flat out knows her stuff!

‍

In this episode, we dig into some real gems. We go pretty deep on what's working now on Facebook, but we also talk about the benefits of building an in-house team vs. the benefits of an agency. We discuss entrepreneurial lessons and what life is like in Amsterdam (where Molly currently lives).

‍

Here's a look at what we cover:

‍

• Why being fluid might be the most important entrepreneurial trait...and why it's important for digital marketers
• Why curiosity and fascination are crucial in our current marketing landscape
• What CBO is and how it's impacting Molly's Facebook ad campaigns and what you should do about it
• What the 3 facets of Facebook's new Quality Ranking are and how to optimize your ads
• How low quality rankings can dramatically drive up costs or get your ads shut down
• Plus more

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(04:51) How To Analyze A Hooks Effectiveness

(16:43) Engagement Metric’s Impact On Top Line Revenue

(23:21) Creative Strategies & Targeting

(33:24) Maximize AOV Through Systems

(44:43) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Molly Pittman 
• Smart Marketer 
• Nathan’s Famous
• Olive My Pickle
• Eugene Schwartz's
• Ezra Firestone
• Haus - YouTube Case Study
• RTIC Coolers
• Arrae
• Ella+mila
• Flewd Stresscare
• Recovery Labs

‍

---

Connect with Brett:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

‍

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

‍
---

‍
Transcript:

Molly :

Meta wants people to engage with stuff on their platform and they are going to reward advertisers that do so

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And back with me is the world famous, Molly Pittman. She's an agency leader. She's a CEO of Smart Marketer. She's running masterminds. She's on every podcast imaginable. She's speaking on stages. She's rescuing dogs. She's making the world a better place. So what's up, Molly Pitman, how are you?

Molly :

What's up, Brett Curry? This is really funny, but when you say world famous, for some reason I think of Nathan's hot dogs. I think they're, it's like world famous hot dogs.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you're so much cooler than Nathan's famous. I mean, that is a legendary hotdog eatery. You know what I like about Nathan's famous is they don't serve ketchup on their hot dogs. I'm a fan if you're going to do a hot dog, you got to do mustard. But I'm also a fan of, now that I'm in my mid forties, I just really don't do hot dogs a lot because I feel terrible after I eat one. So

Molly :

Yeah, I think once you know what's in a hotdog too. The only ones I'll really eat, we have a farm to table restaurant that my husband runs and our

Speaker 3:

Business

Molly :

Partner is a farmer and he has amazing 100% Colby beef hot dogs.

Brett:

Dude,

Molly :

I feel good about eating those.

Brett:

Absolutely. Yeah. Got to go all beef. None of the additives. Nobody always got time for that.

Molly :

It's a great brand. We're talking about it. Hey, they do that hotdog eating contest. I mean they something going on.

Brett:

They do. And when was the last time you saw an ad for Nathan's famous? Probably not in forever, but we're talking about it because of the hotdog eating contest, just the iconic brand. And so yeah, it's great. It's great. This segment unofficially brought to you by Nathan's famous hot dogs. So you're welcome. Nathan's.

Molly :

Hey Nathan, we would love to do your marketing, so reach

Brett:

Out. Reach out. You need some D two C, you need need some omnichannel stuff we can help with. Sell through and Walmart, whatever you need. We're your team.

Molly :

Right? I saw something this week that blew my mind. Nothing really blows my mind anymore, but this was very interesting.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, what's

Molly :

That? It was a brand in my newsfeed selling pickles, but they were selling pickles in a bundle. So the average order value isn't $5. It was a really cool D two C brand, I think it was called Olive Pickle. And the whole hook behind the brand is fermented foods are really good for your gut. Wow. We've left them behind in society. You need to get more fermented foods into your body. So they're selling pickles. I think they're selling sauerkraut, kraut.

Brett:

Wow.

Molly :

Deida seed eggs. That

Brett:

Was super interesting

Molly :

For pickles. You never know what you're going to see on the internet.

Brett:

Yeah, and it's true, right? Get you some kraut in your diet. I don't really like plain kraut, but on a Ruben, sure. Get Yeah, some pickles in there because kombucha, whatever. You need some fermentation in the gut for gut health. That's brilliant. And so yeah, leaning in with a good angle, good hook one. That's true. And then bundles. So do you remember what was the price point on these

Molly :

Pickles? Yeah, the bundles were about 30 to 50 bucks and then there were multiple bundles. So I bet their AOVs over 50 bucks, get people on subscription. Let's rock and roll.

Brett:

That's what you need, man. You get that AOV over $50, get a decent conversion rate on Facebook or on Google, and you're ready to rock. So hey, if somebody can sell pickles D two C with good ads, you can sell your product as well. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. So what we thought would be fun is I run OMG, so we lean a lot into Google and YouTube and Amazon. Molly is just running smart marketer and they do a little bit of everything, but a lot in meta and paid social. And so we're going to talk about, hey, what are we seeing? What's working now? What are we telling our clients they should be leaning into? What are some of the trends we're seeing? Because we get to peel back the curtain in a lot of accounts. We get to see stuff. So what are we seeing? We thought we just lay it out for you and confident you're going to have at least a couple of takeaways that you can apply it to your business right now. So with that, Molly, what's some interesting stuff you've seen lately? I think you told me you had something kind of tactical but kind of wild that you wanted to share.

Molly :

So one thing, and I like this episode, Brett, because I think my favorite part of the agency game, other than getting to work with a bunch of awesome companies is I feel like our brains, we get so many data points from all of these businesses and then we get to zoom out and say, okay, everyone that's succeeding, what do they have in common? What are the trends of even our conversations? And I love that about this game. I think when you're running your own brand, it's really fun, but sometimes you're kind of in a cave by yourself. So that's really the goal here, guys, like giving you all this information. And one thing, Brett, this is tactical that we started doing, that's having a really big impact across all of our clients, is really thinking about the concept of a hook, which has been around hundreds of years. Everyone defines it differently in marketing.

We define it at Smart Marketer is essentially a message or a theme that you are using in an ad to get someone to buy your product. And it has to be something that existed before the internet. This has to be a way people were selling to each other in conversation back in a fish market a few hundred years ago. And all of us as marketers we're using hooks every day and email and ads on billboards. I mean, this is marketing, but it's been something that's really difficult to measure. So we created a system, it's started in our ad creative department out of a need, and now it is company wide and it's really simple. So everything that we do of course starts with the hooks. What's the why? Now we are starting to put the hooks through a really cool naming convention, which Brett, I can send you and people can download.

Speaker 3:

That'd be

Molly :

Amazing in the show notes. Very simple. You look at our hook library, you come up with your hooks, you're probably already doing this. You choose the naming convention that you want. The naming convention is a reflection of the business goal. We know every campaign has a different goal. The hook, so the message and then the angle. There are so many ways to actually use a hook, right?

There's so many different formula styles, we call them angles. So we are putting those details into UTM parameters. So they're passing back to triple whale Google Analytics, wherever it is that you do your measuring. And then for a brand, we can literally pull up a report, Brett, of the hooks that are working for their business and what's not working for their business. And what's cool is that this shows us opportunity, it also shows us risk. So when we started doing this, what we discovered for a lot of clients is like, oh, you are relying 80% of your marketing efforts across the board are this one message, this one group of people. And then if you layer on the idea of upside Eugene Schwartz's model that he came out with 50, 60 years ago, understanding a market and essentially that scale comes from solving problems in the market, but then starting to scale up your hook so they can speak to an unaware part of the market.

This analysis is showing us that piece too. So we can, for example, look at a business and say, oh my goodness, we are using zero unaware hooks. There is so much scale left for this brand. And it also starts to show us opportunities. Okay, what's working? What other hooks are similar to what's working? How can we go into the creation process there? And again, this is every channel using this same tracking mechanism where we usually use tracking for attribution, which is so important. Totally, and you should continue to do it. And this isn't perfect. But now we are using tracking to actually try to put science behind something that is usually seen as art. And brands that are able to do this are scaling so much more quickly because they are able to see those opportunities and the messages that they're using.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good to be able to understand, okay, what are the hooks, what are the angles that are actually working? And then what are we missing? Because a lot of times it's just one hook that wins or it's just one offer that wins and that can cover up a lot of ads that are underperforming. And generally speaking, I mean if you have one great hook, one great angle that can work for a while and to a certain level of scale, but if you want to go beyond that or if you want to be diversified or if you want to be able to sleep at night knowing that, hey, if this one thing stops working, we're not sunk. I love this analysis because then it shows you, okay, what types of offers do we potentially need to lean into and test? And then understanding why are those not working? So you can push ahead.

Molly :

Yeah, a good example of this is one of our dog supplement clients. They have been so pain benefit, your dog has allergies. Take this supplement. Your dog is anxious. Take this supplement your dog. Is this, take this very much in the problem solution aware. And no matter how many new UGC ads or certain variations of ads we created, we couldn't scale. And it's because we weren't reaching that unaware part of the market.

Brett:

So

Molly :

Once we saw this hook analysis, we started creating stories of Bobby, the world's longest living dog to 31 years old and dang backing longevity back to a need for the product and starting to develop those hooks that are more built for that unaware audience. I think this is a huge missing piece, Brett, for most businesses, they're not zooming out enough. They think it's more creative, more creative, and a lot of it is no, you got to really look at the hooks that you are using. And really a hook should only make up five to 10% of your marketing efforts. If you're really diversified,

Brett:

It's good. And if you look at the, let's go back to the pickle example just because that's top of mind, then it's kind of fun. So they're leaning into, Hey, fermented foods are good for your gut, that's great. That's going to hit a ceiling. That's not going to appeal to everybody. You can also lean into something that's kind of basic, but hey, these are the best tasting pickles you ever had. So these are people that are pickle lovers, but maybe there's a freshness about these pickles that somebody wants or maybe lean into, Hey, this is best for hydration. Why do athletes drink pickle juice? Nothing's better. I'm just making itself on the spot, but nothing's better for hydration. So you lean into a hydration angle, you look at all the angles or you look at like, Hey, we're just going to lean into how do these pair with different foods. We've got hooks for audiences of people that like to put a pickle on their hot dog versus other things. But that's a really good call out. I think a lot of us get stuck on one hook, one angle, and that is not going to build a scalable business. And so being able to codify these or label these hooks and begin to form an analysis is super powerful. As you guys have done this. Any other insights or any surprises that have kind of come out of it?

Molly :

I was just surprised how many businesses really are relying on one or two hooks, and those were the clients that we have had the most difficulty scaling. So it's something I knew, but it was amazing to have data around

Speaker 3:

It

Molly :

Because you say something to this like a client without data, they're like, oh yeah, Molly's just talking about nerdy marketing stuff. You show them the data, Hey, you spent $500,000 last month and 450,000 of it essentially was the same message. This can't continue now they're bought in.

Brett:

Yep, yep. Because every offer, every angle, every ad eventually stops working. It's just like that's the nature of marketing. So you've got to be inventing the next thing. And one thing we always talk about as we're looking at hooks with our clients is obviously the goal number one is attention, right? You got to get attention. That's really the point of the hook. And going back, you mentioned the fish market, people walking by local merchants or whatever, or even trade shows. We go to trade shows a lot, OMG does. And what's even more important than what's on our banner and what's on our signage is what the people in the booth say as people are walking by, Hey, would you like whatever. I'm trying to think of some of the great hooks we've used, but what you say there,

Molly :

What's that conversation?

Brett:

Let's start conversation. Yeah. How are your ads doing right now? We hear so many people saying this type of ad is sucking right now. Are you feeling the same thing? So yeah, what you say, there're super important, but goal number one is attention, but it's got to be attention with the right person. So with the right audience. And then it's got to be attention in the right way, meaning you got to interrupt someone in such a fashion that they're thinking about you, they're thinking about the problem solution. They're thinking about enjoying a tasty pickle, or they're thinking about my dog and how can I care for them? Not just interrupting the right person in any old random way, but interrupting them and getting them to pay attention based on your product. And so all those things have to be going together. And what's really interesting, while I mentioned this for you record, but just in an order, a large CPG brand, and I can't talk about the category who they are or anything, but they have done all different types of creatives, but their founder story creatives have been working a little bit better than others.

And so they've just gone ham on founder story stuff. This is a brand that's trying to appeal to a younger audience, but actually a pretty diverse audience. Founder's a little bit older. And what we saw, all of the growth, all of the scale was happening with 65 plus audience. Now that's not bad unless you want to be diverse in your customers. And so just another reminder that the hook we were using, the person we were using was appealing to an older audience. And so looking at that in detail, what is the hook? Who's providing the hook? Who's the hook appealing to? It makes a big, big difference. And you start to look in the data and then you see what you need to do next.

Molly :

And Brett, imagine that is a hook analysis. You guys would've been like, Hey, you're spending X amount of dollars with this hook. This hook is good. What are other styles and variation of people? We can use this story hook, but it doesn't always have to be you. Okay? That's where we think the next amount of scale is coming from. So

This is where I spend most of my day to day, and I love it on with our creative director, our email director, our director of advertising. Part of my job is analyzing the hooks and pumping out new hooks that other people they just can't see. And Brett, I was telling you, we've recently took the last three years of meta ads data from every business that we are connected with. So there was over a billion dollars of spend in very different types of businesses. And we used AI to start to analyze trends of what truly matters to get the results you want, the scale you want, the rollout you want, all of the things we want. And one of the most surprising things that came from that actually led to the conversation we just had was that for social, for meta, for Instagram, TikTok works in a similar way. We've always known that the social proof and the engagement on the ad was important, but this analysis blew my mind when only picking one variable that was most important to the overall

Speaker 3:

Success,

Molly :

You would think that that would be a OV or conversion rate on page or some metric that feels very close to the bottom line. What do you think it actually was?

Brett:

So what metric

Molly :

Led to success monetarily most frequently? So

Brett:

Well, maybe you kind of gave it away, but is it the social proof, like the engagement with the ad number of people liking, sharing, things like that, commenting on the ad?

Molly :

It is. Yeah. I did kind of give that away. And that Brett is also what led to this conversation because we've always known that it was important, but this allowed us to go out on the ledge a little more. The example I was talking about, tell a story about Bobby, the dog that lived 31 years, then start to transition that back to the sale. The fact that so many people are commenting and engaging and reading that story was actually more impactful than how close to the sale is this particular marketing message. So it's not always the case, but it was so and it makes sense. That's what Meta wants. Meta wants people to engage with stuff on their platform and they are going to reward advertisers that do. So a really silly example of this that I wouldn't replicate, but it just proves the point. We have a student who sells floor cleaners and they were saying the word caulk to call cure your

Speaker 3:

Bathroom.

Molly :

Well, other people heard that as another word that isn't as appropriate,

Brett:

Right? Right.

Molly :

Totally

Brett:

Different meaning. Totally

Molly :

Different meaning. So the social proof is insane on this ad. It's their highest converting ad in terms of sales.

Brett:

Yeah, that's so funny. That actually reminds me this will be a fun story, Ezra, and this was several years ago. I went to his house in New York. We were about to launch one of the versions of our YouTube course or whatever. And so he and I are doing a webinar and they're taking screenshots of what's happening in this webinar. And towards the end I throw a piece sign kind of like this. So whoever's doing the ads, can't remember who it was. They just were grabbing screenshots. And so they grabbed a screenshot of my peace sign, but when they did, they cut off my index finger. It just was like, I'm totally throwing the bird at the camera. So it's like by the course, and I'm just flipping off the camera. And that ad worked really well. It was a total accident, but I had so many people text me, you're throwing a different kind of energy right now in this ad. I'm like, yep, yep. So buy my course. Anyway, sometimes that from Brett, Brett Curry, nobody was expecting, nobody saw common caught him off guard record sales on that thing. So I got to use that. Again,

Molly :

A way to summarize that, Brett, is essentially when looking at a correlation metric of which secondary metrics on platform most effect sales, it was engagement.

Brett:

So interesting, and this is something we're talking about a lot right now. I'm sure you guys are too, and this is a buzzword, everybody's talking about it, but incrementality, right? Or what activities can I engage in? What platforms, what channels, what campaigns, what ads are incremental, meaning they're leading to new customers and new sales that I wouldn't have already gotten?

And what's interesting is we find there is a meta very incremental in general, YouTube when done right, very incremental. It's also difficult to accomplish at some points. But Haas Analytics just did a big study at our house and they found that YouTube is extremely incremental. But what we find there, and we just did a big push on YouTube, did a big case study with Arctic coolers, my favorite cooler, also my favorite, Tumblr, YouTube, and Google did a case study on it, but we did a big push to see if we could use YouTube to drive in-store sales in Walmart. And really almost all the campaigns we ran were view based. And so we were leaning into view rate metrics, overall engagement rate metrics and click through rate metrics. We were really not optimizing towards conversions at all. And I mean we were looking at some things, but it was really more about that engagement. And I think that's what's interesting. If you look at net new customers that you reach, it's probably some of the view and engagement metrics that signal incrementality and also that lead to a sales lift.

Molly :

Super interesting. And even before we go all in on creative production or offer production around a new hook, that's exactly what we're doing. Let's set up some quick ads, is not to sell anything, but we can test 10, 15 hooks with five angles a piece, even just with copy really quick. Okay, let's look at the engagement metrics. Let's pick the hooks with the most engagement. Okay, now let's go deeper in production here. I think it's so important.

Brett:

It's really great, really great. What are you seeing on the creative side? Anything new this, we talked about hooks and angles, but anything else on the creative side that you're finding is working especially well now?

Molly :

It's interesting. What is most interesting is how different it is for every brand. So some things remain true, but we have quit trying to even say, here is a formula that works, let's create this for each client. It's really, let's analyze this account. We talked to a company earlier today that sells apparel. Not that video can't work for them, but still images crush for them. So when we take them on, we'll go deeper down that rabbit hole, then we'll come back around and figure out why video's not working and can we get it to work. Where the account I looked at right before that, Brett was complete opposite. It was like, wow. So also just creative is really where we, again, hooks are marketing 1 0 1, but it's still 90% of people are not going deep enough. So for us, creative is way less now about a template or how it looks matters, but 80% of what we're doing is that hook research. We go deeper into that every single month. The more time we spend there, the bigger the lever is for the creative. This is not always possible, but I would rather produce less volume, higher quality creatives where if you get a 20% hit rate on those a month, that is really good. One creative can change an entire business.

Brett:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Molly :

Our creative director, Ben, he made one ad for one of our clients that sells leggings that doubled their business because it opened them up to a completely new market.

Speaker 3:

That's crazy.

Molly :

People come to us, our service is expensive. And they're like, oh, I could go get X amount of creatives over on this service. And it's like,

Brett:

Sure, sure, yeah.

Molly :

That's not the way we want to look at this. That's not what this is about.

Brett:

And that is the beauty of the right creative is that it can unlock scale like nothing else. And obviously the campaign structure is super important. The way you buy media, the way you structure it, it does matter and I think it will always matter. But man, creative is just such a massive lever that if you get it right, you can really unlock some scale. One of the things' kind of interesting, we got a client that sells furniture, they sell gaming chairs and stuff. Kind of cool

What I think people need to consider when they're looking at hooks or understanding what reshot test and how can I leading into it, have some confidence that this is likely to work. I think it's all about what is most important about this product, what does the client care about related to this product? And then what's a way I can show that or demonstrate that in a way that's believable? And so I think that combination is kind of why it's a little bit different for every business because your customers are a little bit different. What they're going to believe or not believe is probably a little bit different. What's important to them is also different. But this was an example. This was an awesome gaming chair where they kind of led with some weird adjustments with this ad, some weird adjustments that I'm like, I don't think anybody cares about that.

So we started talking to gamers and figuring out what they liked and they wanted neck support. And I don't ever think about neck support with my chair working on a computer, but sometimes they're reclining and gaming, so next support and back support. And so it's like, okay, well then we have to lead with that. We have to lead with that in the ad. And so I think it's often less about do we lead with UGC or do we lead with a picture or do we lead with something kind of crazy and well, it's like it depends what's most important and what presentation is going to be most believable than do that.

Molly :

Yeah, most people start with the presentation part and that's all they focus on. And it's like, no, just because you did UGC doesn't mean the marketing message is good enough for this to

Speaker 3:

Work.

Molly :

And I guarantee you for gamers, what it really is is they spend so much time on the computer, they don't want to be a hunchback in 10 years. So starting with that as the problem that you're solving and the who of this is becoming more and more important With ai, you look at meta every month that goes by our ability to specifically target people in platform based off of us actually selecting interests or us telling meta who we want to target that's decreasing and it will only continue to decrease, but that doesn't mean we just run broad campaigns. Yes we can, but just, Hey, here's my product, want to buy it? Because now with ai, the main way that meta is deciding who they're going to target is by indexing your copy and creative who is pictured, oh, this person has a cowboy hat on. So this probably is more of a western market. Oh, this ad copy sounds like it's written to women over the age of 50. We should show this campaign to that audience. So your copy and your creative is the new targeting.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. Just to riff on that a little bit, what are you guys seeing? Because I know the trend has been over the last few years, that going a little more broad in your audience targeting, so who you're speaking to, who you're showing the ad to, obviously really important, but the trend has been kind of going broad. Is that what you're seeing on Maddix? I'll share my perspective on YouTube. Are you still crafting audiences pretty frequently? Are you leaving it up to the algorithm?

Molly :

So we're still doing both because the options are still there. And yes, broad works, but you're missing a lot of scale if you're also not getting granular. This isn't a, which works better. This is the difference in I spend a hundred KA month or I spend 200 KA month. This is a scalability thing. But also Brett, even with the broad styles, depending on the brand and how many avatars or hooks are at play, we are building broad campaigns where maybe all of them have no targeting, but the offer, the copy and creative are built towards the

Brett:

Creative is the targeting, isn't it?

Molly :

Exactly. So that's where most of the scale is coming from.

Brett:

Yeah, super interesting. We still see on the YouTube side, there are a lot of campaigns that we'll scale with pretty open targeting, but I think it's interesting, this is one of those differences between YouTube and Meta. We are still seeing most success with audience targeting and looking at in market audiences or audiences based on someone's Google search behavior or what else they're shopping for. So that's almost always the way we train campaigns and get things going is by being pretty focused in our audiences. We'll open it up more as we go, but it's a really interesting thing with YouTube is that the audiences do matter. And then the other thing we have to look at is placements. YouTube is kind of notorious. There's some really great placements and some bad placements. You got to weed that. You got to weed that out. So

Molly :

That makes sense.

Brett:

Yeah.

Molly :

And Brett, one more quick thing on this is we've noticed a big difference in CPMs. So let's imagine we're selling a haircare product for women. You launch a broad campaign that really just sells people on this product, Hey, this will help your hair grow. This is most people. That's what they do. It's all about the product. You are entering the auction and meta is going to place you in front of people that are actively searching for a haircare

Brett:

Product. So true.

Molly :

So true. It is the most expensive application of the market. That's the most expensive part of the market you can be in. Now, can you win there? Maybe, maybe not. I hope you can. Okay. What if we take that and we position it to moms? The ccpm is probably half right. We've completely changed the economics of the media buying because of the creative and the copy.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really good. On the YouTube side, it's a little bit different where sometimes it's just the structure of the campaign, but if you can still say kind of focus with the audience, but you can do some things that will lower your CPMs by half or a third, that can be a complete economic game changer for the performance of that campaign.

Molly :

And so

Brett:

We're looking at a lot of innovations there

Molly :

And just who you're getting in front of like, okay, you get in front of someone for haircare products, that's okay. But then it's really like they are solution aware. They're comparing you to a bunch of other people.

Brett:

You

Molly :

Can make the sale. But what about showing up in front of someone who's lost a lot of hair because they had a baby and they haven't looked for a solution? No, you're not competing against anybody.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, it's really good,

Molly :

Really good. It's really how it's always been. It's just different, if that makes sense. The broad targeting is there, but it's the exact same thought process that we've always used.

Brett:

Super interesting, super interesting. What are some of the recurring conversations you're having with clients right now in terms of what they're wanting and how you're guiding them to get that?

Molly :

Yeah, I mean this is always a conversation, but it's interesting where this has been leading recently in terms of success and really trying to boost a OV, really trying to boost what a customer is worth after 90 days, after 120 days, and especially for physical products, we have been preaching, Hey guys, how can you sell a system instead of a product? So here's a good example. We have a client that has had crazy success the last few months, not to brag, but they just told us today hiring us was their win on their company meeting today. But it really, it's

Brett:

Good. That's what every agency wants to hear. So kudos to you guys. That's awesome.

Molly :

Well, it's good marketing, but really it was one thing. So they sell mouth guards and there are many different applications of their mouth guards. Like you could wear the mouth guard to help you with snoring. People wear this mouth guard for MMA fighting. So there's lots of different avatars, there's lots of complexity, but they have a night mouth guard and they have a day mouth guard.

And yes, they were cross-selling upselling. They were using these together. But we said, Hey guys, no, we need to send all traffic to a product page that is positioning this as a system based off what that person wants. So a snoring system, a high performer athlete system, and then you are prescribing to them that they need to wear this one during the day and they need to wear this one during the evening. Okay, that's an immediate two x of their A OV. Now they're coming back later to buy both of them just because we prescribe this as a system instead of a la carte product. And this is something all of us can do. That's a really simple example that's like, duh, that worked. But every business can do this. You think of supplements. Anytime we can sell two or three supplements as a system instead of one off and upsell, it's a huge game changer. So that's a conversation we are having with every client no matter what they do, what are the offers we can build? Because if someone wants to solve a problem or they want an end result,

They want to be told what they need to do. A array that used to be a client of ours, they sell supplements and now yes, they sell a supplement that helps you lose weight. Yes, they sell a supplement that helps with bloating, but they also have their lean and tone system. So it's like if you are losing weight, you also need to tone your muscles. So why don't you buy these two products together? It's simple, but it can make a really big difference. And then if they say no to that, okay, now let's downsell them the a la carte product.

Brett:

But

Molly :

It changes the economics of the media buying in a big way. If you're able to double a OV or raise it by 50%, it's like, okay, there's scale right there and what we're already doing

Brett:

That doubling or even 50% lift in a OV that can unlock another level of scale on meta or YouTube that you're not getting now because there's a certain percentage of traffic that you've got to just bid a little bit more for the cost a little bit more. But if you change the economics of your offer and what your A OV is, now you've got more money to play with, which is super interesting. What's also cool about that is I think it does a few things. One, it positions you differently. So we were on a lot of Google shopping and Performance Max and stuff. I think it's great. It's a lot of comparison shopping, but that's where I'm usually just looking at one product, one product of this company versus all it's comparison shopping. I'm looking at just product versus other products. That's fine. But what if you said really what you need to solve this problem you're looking at is you need a bundle, you need this system, you need these things because if you only take care of this one thing, then you're not going to get the results you want. If you are not toning and losing weight, you're not going to feel as good, right? Or your body composition is going to change. You'll lose weight, but you're going to have a higher fat percentage, whatever. You can start to paint that picture.

Molly :

And

Brett:

So I think it differentiates you as well as changes the economics. And then also if you get better results, you get better results for a customer, they're going to spend more and going to tell more. And again, it's a virtuous cycle there.

Molly :

And you can get really creative with this, Brett, if you allow your mind, Ellen Mila, the nail polish brand that both of us have worked on, they have so many colors of nail polish, but nail polish a bottle, there's only so much you can charge for that. So we posed this question to them guys, what is a system you can sell? And their owner came up with a brilliant idea, Skittle nails. You paint each of your nails a different color that completely changed their business. Now we show them the Skittle nails in an ad, they want it. We've created a trend. Now they're buying five bottles instead of one. So this can be done in almost every scenario if you let your minds really go to a creative space around it.

Brett:

And I love that you framed it that way. It's really about letting your mind go to a different place than it always goes to. Because in e-commerce marketing, what do we think about? We think about very product specific marketing. This is my joint care supplement. I'm just going to think about joint care audiences and stuff like that. Well, but what if we step back and thought, what does the customer really want and what is the problem they're really trying to solve? And if they bought a combination of things, what would give them the best results? And let's lean into that and what would also increase consumption? And so

Molly :

I

Brett:

Love it. Really smart looking at systems instead of products. It's great.

Molly :

And then Brett also, especially if it's a consumable like nail polish, now you have them on subscription at such a higher rate than you would have with one product. I want to leave you guys with one business that I think everybody should check out that's doing most of the things that we talked about today. I have no affiliation with them, but they're just, we nerd out about brands that are doing smart things. I'm

Brett:

Always looking for good marketing.

Molly :

Yeah. I want you guys to go to their website, check out their ads in Facebook, ad library, everything. So it is called Fluid stress Care, F-L-E-W-D. Have you heard of them by chance?

Brett:

I have not.

Molly :

Okay. Which makes sense because this part of their brand is mostly for women. So I found them through a Facebook ad. And what they've done is taken a commodity product selling essentially bass salts that have been around hundreds of years, but with a twist, which is my favorite commodity with a twist, something I've heard of before, but different than I've ever seen.

Brett:

So there's immediate acceptance because I've heard about it before. But this is making it this way new and exciting and a reason to

Molly :

Buy Never this way though. So they are infusing vitamins into the soaks

So that they have specific in results. So they have a sad smashing soak. That's for when you're sad. They have an ache erasing for when your muscles hurt. They have one for stress, so they have one for anxiety. So not only is it smart because it's commodity with a twist, they didn't name these products. Here's the lavender soak, here's the rose soak. No, they are all named a specific thing that we're wanting to work on. So that's the second part of what I love. Their branding is insane. You guys just have to check out their website. It's simple, but it's beautiful. It works. But what I really love, especially if you guys check them out in Facebook ad library and see the destination of their ads, they are also selling a system. So their entry point offer is $80. That's what I bought. My first purchase with them was $80. It was a sampler pack where you try all of them, then they get you on subscription.

Brett:

Brilliant.

Molly :

I love everything about this brand. They're doing everything that we're talking about. If you guys look at their ad library, they so understand their avatars and the hooks they got me with basically, Hey, stressed out female entrepreneur, this is for you. That is me. That's exactly, now I'm on subscription every single month. And what's cool is I recorded a podcast just reviewing this brand on the Smart Marketer podcast. Someone listened to it, connected me with one of their owners, and I got to chat with him and just nerd out.

Brett:

It's amazing. It's amazing.

Molly :

And then I learned, if you go to recovery labs.com, this is the really cool part you got to check out after we're done recording Brett, they have duplicated this brand, rebranded it a little bit just based off of color, repackaged it. It is the same thing, but it's for men who are wanting to recover from certain athletic endeavors. I've really never seen that before. Take a brand that works and actually duplicate the brand to another avatar that is next level.

Brett:

And what a brilliant thing to do too, because I'm a dude and I'm also larger. I'm six three, so I don't really take baths. I don't really fit in the bathtub. And you're probably not going to get me to change my mind there by a stress relief thing.

Speaker 3:

But

Brett:

Maybe just if I was pushing hard in training and you said, here's how you recover, here's how you increase the training. Maybe I secretly do like a bath, but I'm not going to admit it, right? But if there's that angle, I'm like, okay, I'll try that.

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Brett:

That is so smart. That is awesome. So Recovery labs.com you said was the brand for men. What was the flu? What was the other one?

Molly :

Luge Stress Care. F-L-E-W-D. Stress Care. And one of their owners also has an agency, so his team's running both. And it's so cool. Guys. Go look at their ads in Facebook ad library, look at the site. It is the same. Marketing principles, just a different person. So

Brett:

Fantastic. So cool. So check that out. Brilliant. I know we've both got hard stops in like 60 seconds, but Molly, you've got some cool things going on. You've got mentor, your mentor table group, you've got Smart Marketer Live coming up. I dunno if you want to mention dates or anything like that, or if you just want to tell people to go to your website and check it out. But what asks do you have for people as we wrap up the podcast here?

Molly :

Yeah, check us out@smartmarketer.com. We did launch a new mastermind for seven figure business owners, which is really exciting. We are getting great reviews. We have tons of access coaching live events. It's really not a Mastermind, it's more of a coaching program with the community. Brett Curry's in there, so check that out under our mastermind tab. It's called Mentor Table. And then yes, we are doing our big annual events, smart Market or Live Again in October. Brett will be there, you guys are sponsoring. And tickets for that will be available on our website at the end of March.

Brett:

Awesome. And can you reveal the city of that or is that kind of under key?

Molly :

Back in Denver. So

Brett:

Back in Denver. Mile High.

Molly :

Yep. Exactly. It's great

Brett:

Spot. Great spot. Awesome. Molly Pittman, blast. As always, thank you so much and look forward to the next episode we get to do together.

Molly :

Likewise. Bye Y Allall. Bye, Brett. Thanks.

Brett:

Bye-bye. See you. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. So let us know what topics would you like to cover on this pod. And if you know somebody that would benefit from this episode, please share it and leave us a review on iTunes. That would make our day. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

In this episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I welcome back Chris Mercer (co-founder of MeasureU) to discuss how e-commerce store owners can transform their approach to data and understanding customer behavior. We dive deep into Microsoft Clarity, a powerful free tool that helps visualize how users interact with your website, and explore how AI can be leveraged strategically to enhance measurement and business operations. This conversation is packed with actionable insights that can help you understand what's really happening on your website and how to make data-driven decisions that boost conversions.

Key Takeaways:

• Microsoft Clarity: The Visual Analytics Game-Changer - Discover how this free tool provides heat maps, scroll tracking, and screen recordings that help you see your website through your customers' eyes. Learn how its built-in AI can analyze patterns across numerous user sessions to identify friction points you might otherwise miss.
• The Measurement Mindset Shift - Understand why e-commerce measurement is really about "listening" to the customer side of the digital conversation. Mercer explains why you should focus on behavior patterns rather than just conversion metrics, and how to set up proper expectations before analyzing data.
• From Data to Action - Learn the three-step framework for effective measurement: 1) Plan what questions you want to answer, 2) Gather the right information, and 3) Decide in advance what actions you'll take based on different potential outcomes.
• Strategic AI Implementation - Discover Mercer's revolutionary approach to using AI effectively. Rather than telling AI "how" to do something, learn to focus on communicating the desired result and letting AI determine the optimal path to get there.
• UTM Parameters and Traffic Identification - Find out why properly tagging your traffic sources is critical for understanding which marketing efforts are working and how to optimize them for better performance.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(04:41) What Is Microsoft Clarity? 

(16:40) Shifting Your Mindset About Measurement 

(19:10) How To Get The Most Out Of Microsoft Clarity

(33:52) The Measurement Framework

(42:36) Simplifying Measurement for Actionable Insights

(47:24) A New Approach To AI

(58:29) Conclusion 

---

Show Notes:

• Chris Mercer
• MeasureU
• Social Media Marketing World
• Michael Stelzner
• Mike Rhodes 
• Ralph Burns
• Microsoft Clarity 
• Why We Buy
• AutomateToWin.com
• Jeff Sauer
• Unreasonable Hospitality 
• MeasureU.com/evolution 

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

---

Transcript:

Chris:

E-commerce owners in particular need to understand how their stores are operating specific to the behaviors. It's not just about ROAS and ROI that's important, but it's about how you're getting ROAS and ROI.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today I've got a long time friend, a return guest coming on to the pod, but we also discussed leading up to this that it's been too long. He was a guest, but it was years ago, plural, more than one. And so I've got on the pod with me today, Chris Mercer, AKA Mercer, probably nobody calls you Chris except for maybe your mom. I'm not really sure. But we're going to talk about some CRO stuff, some cool new tools. And then I think we might just blow your mind a little bit talking about the way Chris AKA Mercer is thinking about ai. And so we're going to dive into that. But with that, Mercer is the co-founder of Measure You and he and I go way back though because I think we were a couple of the OGs speaking at Traffic and Conversion Summit I think for maybe four years in a row, something like that. You may have spoken there more times than that, but I think it was four years in a row. Does that sound right to you?

Chris:

It was a while back. And then I think we may have crossed paths to it, the Social media marketing world, social media

Brett:

Marketing world, shout out to Michael Stelzner. Absolutely. Great event then. Yeah, I think the last pod we did Mercer was GA four

Chris:

Maybe. It probably was, yeah. Which makes it years ago because

Brett:

Kind of been an old story now

Chris:

Back universal to GA four days. Absolutely right.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome man. And so certainly want to hear what you got going on at Measure U. And I know for the longest time you talked to with smart people, Mike Rhodes or Ralph Burns or some of those guys, and if there was ever a question about measurement or how to set up your Google Analytics or how to really measure what's going on in your business, the response was always just go talk to Mercer. Right? He'll take care of you. And so delighted to have you back on the show, man. And so do you want to give everyone just a quick update on what's new with Measure U and kind of what you guys are building there?

Chris:

Yeah, absolutely. So measure u.com, so it's measured with the letter u.com. We've got a whole community out there. We've got a free community now with training resources and places for people to get help that are just sort of starting out. And then we've got the done to do it yourself level courses and everything else that's there for people of various techniques and skills if you're just starting out all the way to experienced people that need to level up. And then we've got done with you training. So we just sort of made this one stop shop where everybody can understand measurement because to your point, back when you and I were on those stages, first kind of meet and greet, this is what, a decade ago, we've probably been doing this stuff now. So it's like when that was around, there was pretty much Google Analytics and that was the tool. There was a tool, now there's thousands, there's Tag Manager, there's Looker Studio stuff, there's Big Query, people have to have first party databases. Now there's data transformation, there's all this stuff to try to keep up with in the measurement industry, measurement truly has become a department. And so Measure U is there to help educate and make sure that people in the companies have their skills in-house, whether it's a measurement department or just the marketers that understand how to use measuring to improve their results.

Brett:

And I can attest to the quality of the training as we have team members inside of OMG that want to level up on their understanding of GA four, any type of measurement, we have sent them through your courses and receive rave reviews. So shout out to what you guys are doing and kudos to you for Ability, just a great company and some amazing training that's leveling people up on the measurement side. And I think it's good transition to talk about CRO for a minute and a tool that you were telling me about that I was actually unaware of. But before we kind of talk about it, I think it's really important to underscore that what we don't need right now is more data. That's not the solution. Exactly. Just give me more numbers. I want more data on my business is no, I want more insights. I want more clear actionable data going on. Here's a problem or here's an opportunity, let me then fix that or exploit that. And so with that in mind, let's talk a little bit about Microsoft Clarity. What is Microsoft Clarity and why are you so jazzed up about it?

Chris:

This is one of my favorite tools, and this is kind of the benefit of being a part of Measure U because Microsoft Clarity has been around for four or five years at this point, right? It's been around for a while, maybe even longer than that, but it has essentially what it is, is a replacement. I think for tools like Hotjar, crazy Ag, any sort of heat mapping, scroll mapping, screen recording, mouse flow, things like that. Lucky Orange is another example of a tool that used to do that or does that. But what Clarity did Microsoft in particular when they created Clarity, they wanted to have an answer to Google Analytics. They wanted to say, this is our analytics platform, but they didn't want to do what I think Facebook's mistake was because Facebook, way back in the day had Facebook analytics, which had a very brief one year existence and then went away.

But it's because they tried to just create Google Analytics and everybody was like, well, why would I do both? This is ridiculous, except theirs was more limited. So what Microsoft did is said, okay, we're not going to do the data side, we're not going to do the data tables. Don't get us wrong. We're going to have data, but it's not going to be these ugly tables and charts, and your job is not to sit and figure out how to analyze reports all day long. That's not what we want you to do. We want you as a marketer to be able to understand what's happening on the site, understand the behaviors that are happening, and then be able to now that you know those behaviors, to be able to say, Hey, if those are the behaviors we want, awesome. Let's scale traffic. If those are the behaviors we don't want, here's some insights that might be something you can do to adjust the marketing or adjust how the site is on your side.

So those behaviors are less likely to occur and that's what those heat maps show. So they will show visual, and this is what I like about this platform, it's visual, so it's intuitive for somebody who's not a trained data person or something, the people who own the stores, you're running a Shopify store and you're not quite, you don't really consider yourself a numbers person, but you know need to kind of know your numbers. You're in that I need to take my medicine, but I don't really want to, you know, need to. Microsoft Clarity is that spoonful of sugar to kind of grow back to that Mary Poppin song, right?

Brett:

Love

Chris:

It is the spoonful of sugar helps medicine go down and it's freaking awesome because it's visual. So you can instantly, intuitively understand what a heat map is telling you by the color code. What parts are red are really hot. People are seeing this. Parts that are blue are not so much. Same with scroll maps. They have a thing called click maps where you can kind of see generally what area of the page is being clicked on,

Should that be the area that's getting clicks. These are the questions that you can start answering. And then finally it does screen recordings so you can actually see users as they're interacting with the page and you can see the recording of it. They want from page one to page two to page three, the entire session. And there's nothing better than that over the shoulder view of actually seeing a user do that and go like, wow, maybe that's why the checkout isn't quite working. Or maybe that's why this particular product isn't selling compared to all the other products we have in our catalog that are, let me go see people who just saw this product page versus the other product detail pages. And then you can watch and see how they're interact with that. There's nothing better than that. And the other thing I'll say about it, because it's very easy to understand, it's also very easy to set up. It's literally just a piece of code, a script, just put it on your site, whether you use Tag Manager for that already, some of you already have that with Shopify stores or BigCommerce, whatever tool you're using, however you're getting measurement on those sites, clarity does it the same way. The beauty of it though is where a platform like GA four truly requires some setup to get the most from it. Clarity doesn't. Clarity will give you action, just drop the code

Brett:

And you're good.

Chris:

Action actions, yes, you'll be able to interact with these reports, give it a day or two just to collect some data, but that's it. And then you can instantly start going, oh, that's something useful. I can do something with this without having to worry about three hours of learning how to use the tool.

Brett:

Totally. So we got heat maps to see what are people seeing, we've got this click breakdown, where are people clicking, how are they clicking? And then you've got the screen recordings and it's so valuable because we want to see our marketing and specifically our landing pages and our website through the eyes of our customer, and this is what this tool allows you to do. It's free, it's easy to set up. So pretty

Chris:

Powerful and it's free. Exactly right. Didn't mention that, but Microsoft is just gladly paying for it on their end, which is awesome and it truly is a fantastic product. I'll say one other thing that's a huge pro for this versus some of the pay tools that I no longer use was the paid tools. You would have to go in there and set stuff up. So I would have to say like, oh, I need you to set up screen recordings for this page and we have to do it before the email hits so I can see what people are doing. And if somebody forgot to do that in the company and traffic already hit, then you go back to look at screen recordings that were never going to be there. You forgot to set 'em up, right?

Clarity, everything's on all the time, all pages. So it's not like you have to say, I need to set up a heat map for this. What you're doing with Clarity is you're going to Clarity and you're just looking at the heat map, which will already be there for every page that has clarity code on it. It's doing that now, the catch, because everyone's going to be like, how is that? The catch is it doesn't keep it for very long. So 30 to 90 days is kind of all you're going to have some of this data for, but that's all you need it for. That's all you need. It is for that just what's going on right now, are these behaviors we want? If so, scale if not change, right?

Brett:

Yeah. It's very rare that you want to go back and look at your heat maps from six months ago, a different page, different design,

Chris:

And honestly, you can snapshot, you can just take a little graphic image and just snapshot it if you want. Right? Totally makes sense. You can download the data, by the way. So usually you have access to do that sort of stuff too. It really is a fantastic

Brett:

Platform. And then there's also AI that's kind of baked in. So with some of the other tools, you've got to manually break things down, kind of decipher, especially screen recordings are super cool in that you can see what an actual user's doing, but then that's a lot of data to sift through the AI science

Chris:

Going to, yes, I'm going to restate that question because you sort of gave away the lead there, right? Oops, oops. But you go, okay, well how do we use heat maps? How do we use scroll maps? How do we use these screen recordings say in the past, and we will cover this aipi in the second, but in the past you would have to look at the heat map and the heat maps are different because you can see 500 people seeing the page and you say, okay, do I have enough data? And it kind of, okay, cool. Now this is something useful versus one person on the page. If that one visit you don't really know how to change, you need a lot of people seeing it. That works for heat maps, that works for scroll maps. And again, you can kind of tell by the colors what's working, what's not.

But with screen recordings, you would literally have to watch a screen recording and then you have to watch another screen recording, then you got to watch another screen recording, and then you have to hope that you're detecting a pattern out of all of that. It is problematic. They're powerful but problematic. I was literally at a conference, and this was years ago, but it was a CRO conference, which I thought was exceptionally dangerous to be talking about this. They were talking about this new screen recording tool. This is back when it was New Tech, and they were talking about how somebody was going through the checkout and they were watching the screen recording and they were playing this for everybody on the screen. They're like, see where they stopped right here? Right around payment information. That's how we knew we had to change the cart. And I was like, or that's when this person's kid came in and said, Hey, dinners, where's dinner? Or, oh, I got to get my card. Oh, they expired. Crap, I have to go call the bank now. Or a million other things that would've caused that or the doorbell. And it's like they made a decision off of one screen recording, assuming this person was definitely going to buy no matter what, and they couldn't figure out how to use the truck checkout. And it was such a mess, I thought

Because it was just based on one visit, one person's opinion changed their company, which is dangerous, right? Because you can make a lot of bad decisions that way. So the beauty of Microsoft was with chat GPT when they invested in this, so Clarity Hass been around before chat, GPT was a thing, but when Microsoft came into chat GPT and bought into it, they instantly integrated all of that love into their platform. So now they download, essentially what they're doing is they're downloading all the dataset in the chat, jt, they've already got their assistance perfectly written to be able to give responses that are useful and it'll analyze all of that. And so instead of just even looking at a thousand screen recordings, you can literally go in there and say, I want to see the screen recordings where they saw this product detail page and they came from our, let's say, promotional email for Father's Day or whatever the thing was.

So we want to see how just this really tight segment of people interacted on screen recordings. What did they do? Did they do the behaviors you want in? I don't even look at the screen recordings anymore because now you can create that, what they call filter segmenting is all that really is. You create that little filter and then you just say, summarize all the recordings and it'll look at 'em all, it'll analyze and then it just sort of chat. G PT spits out a story and it'll say things like, well, it looks like a user was, maybe because some of us have membership components or a login, it looks like users were having problems logging in. And you'll see numbers next to that comment. What those numbers are are the actual screen recordings where users had problems logging in. So now instead of going, I'm not sure what that means, you go, okay, let's go see that.

Brett:

And

Chris:

Now what it's done is it's told you a story and said, if you want to go find out more, here's where I got that from. If you want to take a look yourself, which you should always do, we never let AI just make decisions for us, but it's a tool. I wouldn't let my computer automatically just work and do everything for me without ever checking it. Same thing with ai.

Brett:

Totally, totally, totally. Yeah.

Chris:

But it makes it so much faster to get to action because you don't have to watch a bunch of videos. You can just have it build this segment and then say, what is this generally telling me? What are the trends and patterns that you see? And it will do the same thing for heat maps and scroll maps and the click maps and everything else. So

Brett:

Not

Chris:

Only

Brett:

Can you do that, it's so good at doing it's right,

Chris:

Exactly. Which ation data pattern

Brett:

Recognition than humans are.

Chris:

And here's the key, I get asked this a lot, how are you guys using AI for data? And the answer is not much honestly. But that's because the way that we use measurement, we don't need AI because our reports operate. Our reports the way they're made operate faster than ai. They don't need interpretation. So I don't need AI to interpret anything. They just tell me the action automatically. So that's how we do that. That's why we don't need it. The reason it's powerful with Microsoft Clarity is because Clarity is adjusting their data and they're pre reformatting it, so it's garbage in, garbage out. That's the problem with ai. Everyone's sprinkling AI into Google Analytics for if Google Analytics four hasn't been set up properly, it's going to make bad calls because the data isn't useful. Clarity understands, Hey, chat, TPT is going to be looking at this, so they're automatically organizing it for you, so you don't have to do that.

So chat t PT can do something useful with it. So it's all contained, right? It's all in their platform. There's nothing you have to do at all, which is again, why I really like it, because I think e-commerce owners in particular need to understand how their stores are operating specific to the behaviors. It's not just about ROAS and ROI that's important, but it's about how you're getting ROAS and ROI. And if you're not seeing the behaviors going through the site, are they looking at your images that you just replaced or are they not even looking at the images? You can tell stuff like that with clarity. Are they looking at the testimonials so they even scroll down and spend some time doing that? You can literally what they call smart events with this platform. Again, little bit of setup at this point. This is what I like about it. The platform grows with you, but you can literally say, I just want to know the people that have seen our testimonial for a certain amount of seconds and have interacted with it, looking at the reviews of the product, whatever it is. And you can have a nice little segment of those. That's why I love this platform because within seconds, within seconds, could you not of looking at something, you'd be like, okay, now I know what marketing action to do.

Brett:

Yeah,

Chris:

And there's no setup. It's just activation super, which is super cool,

Brett:

Simple. And it's one of those things where really our goal with CRO or marketing in general is about behavior modification. How can I guide someone through this journey or through this process to one, be interested in my product and then to trust it and then to buy it? And so where are they getting hung up along the way and help me make sense of that. And so let's back up just a little bit. Now we've got this really great overview of how the tool works and even the AI component, which is amazing, but what should we be looking for? What strategies should we form as we look at, okay, we're going to set up Microsoft Clarity, plug it into our website, what should we be thinking about to make sure we're getting the most out of it?

Chris:

So I'll start with a mindset and then we'll get into a little bit of a framework. So the mindset really is just like you and I are having a conversation, I'm going to adjust what I say based upon what you're asking.

You're going to adjust what you ask based upon what I say. It's a series of listening, responding back and forth, right? Digitally that same thing is happening. And I think most digital, anybody in the digital world forgets this. Humans are still human. They're just now interacting as humans with a digital thing. So there's still a conversation that's happening except now it's happening on the website. In fact, you probably have heard yourself reading copy from websites so vocalizing, it's a little conversation for most people. So when you're on that and you think about this, well, if you and I were having a conversation, I can easily adjust listening to your side so I can adjust my side and vice versa. That sort of happens naturally. But how do you do that digitally? How do we listen in to the user side of the conversation, whoever's on our stores? So we listen in through measurement.

Brett:

That

Chris:

Is why it's important to have behavioral measurement because if you're not listening for that, you will never know their side of the conversation, never know. And so you have to guess or ask other people to guess for you through professional masterminds and things like that. That's what happens. And then everybody eventually just sort of settles on this is the style everybody should do because everyone's been doing it and it ends up never being tested because no one ever took the time to learn to set up measurement so they can hear their users tell them, Hey, if you move the button over here, I'll buy this. Hey, if you add testimonials that are more like this, that feature this stuff, instead of that stuff, I'll totally buy this. Hey, if you add images that are this high quality or a video demonstration, I'll absolutely buy that. But if we're not listening for those behaviors to see how the impact our sales, how can we possibly make the move and how can we be confident that the move is more than likely going to move the needle?

Brett:

That's

Chris:

Why listening is so important. So the very first step is that mindset shift. If I have to use measurement, not just for O and r, o, I get CPAs cost per lead. I understand all that. Yes, clear not the only thing, right? It's like those are the results, but you also need to know how you're getting those results and those are the behaviors left behind. So that's the mindset shift. So the way then to use a tool like this is you're coming at it with, okay, I need to listen in to our user side of the conversation because they're going to tell us what's working, what's not, and what to change. They want to also be successful. They want you to be successful. Why else would they be on your site if they had zero interest at all? Right? They ultimately want to complete that journey even if they couldn't. So now we're going to listen in for that conversation. So what we're listening for are all those little how behaviors.

What I would start with is three. One is the start of the journey, whatever that means to your business model. We'll get to specifics with e-commerce, but the start of the journey, the end of the journey when they finish that journey, and then someplace in the middle at least one. Now what we'll do is do a bunch. So as you get better and better at measurement, you start adding more steps. You understand more specifics of the journey, but it might start with who started looking at a product detail page, any product detail page. That's the start of a journey. It could be for e-commerce, the checkout process when they're starting to begin checkout, and that starts, so it's not the view cart, but I'm actually starting the checkout process. That might be the middle step that where they're actually considering completing the journey at this point. So the one they're aware of, there's a journey. The second step they now considering completing because that's what they be on the checkout. And then there's that final transaction step of them paying for whatever G average ticket is, and then they complete. So the beauty of that is if they're not completing, meaning, if you're not making sales, you would at least know some ideas to why. And Clarity can tell you this because did I mention it also has funnels? Then you can set up funnels of clarity. Again, one-stop shop to get started with.

So you could set up a nice little funnel and say, okay, why are we not getting bottom of funnel sales? Is it because everyone's getting stuck at the checkout process or stage of it? Because obviously with e-commerce you've got multiple stages normally. So it could be that you could set all those up, or is it because they're not even seeing the product detail pages to begin with? So we have something even further up, we have to get fixed so we can get traffic to those pages. Maybe they're not making it through your category pages or whatever the user journey happens to be, but the beauty of it is you can set it up and then ask those questions, have those questions ahead of time, and then when you've got it set up before you go into it, think about the actions you're going to take before you even look at it.

This would be my biggest tip I can give anybody because when you go into Clarity, when you go into any analytics platform, I think the gut reaction from most people who are not measurement oriented in the beginning, they haven't learned the skills yet. They think it's open up the platform and they go, what do I do with this? Let me try to figure it out. And that's where they start. That's already your game over. You've already lost the game if that's your first thought. So instead of that, what you do is before I open up Clarity, you go, alright, I know I'm measuring for the people that are product detail pages, I expect maybe 30% of those should go to the cart. At least half the people should complete the cart for this average ticket. This is what should be happening. Now let me go to Clarity to see is that happening?

Because what's happening now is you're going to clarity to say, I understand how my marketing machine should be working. How many e-commerce stores should be working now? Is it working the way I expected it to? Now you're going to Clarity. Clarity to say yes or no, but because it says yes or no, it's not just giving you information anymore. It's giving you an action now. Oh yes, great, I'll scale traffic. Oh no, it's not okay, let me dig into why and what can I adjust to fix that and why is one working really well, but the other one's not. And that's where I would look at especially with e-commerce descriptions. Did you describe one just a little bit juicier than you described the other pair of shoes, and maybe that's why they're bearing first pair but not the second pair. Were the images better? Was there a closeup version of the stitching on one of the shirts, but the other shirts don't have that and maybe that's the quality and that buyer was would be for quality signals.

Was there a video demonstration on one of 'em that's selling but the other video aren't on there? Maybe we should create more video demonstrations of the product or being worn or whatever used, whatever the widget is that we're selling. So those are some of the things you can do with that platform that are very, very quick and it doesn't take a lot of learning. It just takes awareness. Now that everyone's listening to this, they're aware that that's a thing, just keep that in your head, just be aware of that, never forget that and you'll automatically get more value from this tool.

Brett:

It's really interesting that you frame it that way. So this is a conversation and it totally makes sense. If I visit a website, I'm going there and I've got a question in mind, I've got an interest in mind something and I'm kind of conversing with that page so to speak, but no one is necessarily listening to my frustrations or my excitement or whatever. And that's where measurement comes in and that's where some of these tools come in. But it does seem to me like there needs to be some training or some understanding for how can I listen and listen effectively. So it sounds like part of what you're saying is have some expectation going in of what should be happening on this page. Are we setting something up specifically in clarity for how it's going to measure, or is there much customization on the setup to get in and be able to listen properly or not

Chris:

Really? Yeah, really good question. The answer is yes and not right away. So I'm going to give you another phrase that I want everybody to repeat as a mantra. Just get good enough to get going, come back and make it better later. Because the tendency is, oh, it does funnels. Oh cool. Oh, it does smart events. Oh, okay, cool. I'm going to set up all this stuff without even using the platform at all. I'm going to figure all this stuff out. And then you're having committee meetings and everyone's like, what do you want to measure? What do you want to? And everyone's like, well, I think, and then you hear this, the most dangerous phrase in any organization, I shudder to even say it. What would be interesting, as soon as I hear that phrase, I'm like, interesting does not mean useful. I just want to hear what is be useful.

Brett:

We're not here to be entertained.

Chris:

Not exactly don't care. It'd be interesting to know if people from blah blah, blah, blah, I know it's not interesting at all if you can't make it useful.

Brett:

Once you know that, what would you do differently?

Chris:

Exactly right. That's how you handle that. You say, that would be cool. What actions would you take? Actually first thing used to say, what do you expect the answer to be?

Brett:

If

Chris:

They don't even have that, it kills it. And then if they do have that, you're like, cool, what actions would you take? If it's within that range, actions would you take? If it's lower, what actions would you take If it's higher? And if they know those three directions, they totally are ready to see that number because now they know what to do no matter what. If it's perfect, they know higher. They know if it's lower. They know because they've preplanned it, they thought it through, and you want your team doing that. So these are really good questions to ask

Brett:

And sometimes to know what's specific questions to ask or how to converse, you almost just need to listen to the raw stuff a little bit, right? Just get in there and check it out.

Chris:

Yeah, and I'll go back to get good enough to get going, come back and make it better later. With Microsoft Clarity, the good enough to get going is just turning the thing on. Take the code again, it's clarity.microsoft.com to go there. You'll create a free account. You can log in with your Google account and then, or Microsoft account, doesn't matter. Create your account. It'll give you a piece of code. Put that on your site 24 hours later, go back in and start looking at screen recordings. Start playing with filters like, oh, how did people with my Facebook traffic do yesterday? How are the ones with my email that I sent yesterday, how did they do? Just start getting used to how that platform works, but for a specific purpose, right? Because you're trying to see how is email different from cold Facebook traffic? It should be wildly different emails, right? Have a No, I can trust with the brand. Facebook Cold traffic probably doesn't. Let's just retargeted. In which case it may be it will, but all of a sudden you start seeing differences and you start going, okay, cool, I can see what maybe I can do with this.

But all you're asking when it comes to questions, there's only ever two types ever. There are results questions, which are typically questions around the end of the journey. And then there are the how questions, how are those things happening? Most companies are asking the results questions, how many do we sell? What average ticket is? What's a good conversion rate? Stuff like that. But how steps they don't really ask questions around. And what I mean by that, and I don't mean today, but I mean eventually in the not too distant future, everybody listening to this could be setting this stuff up. You can have a report that says, okay, not just they landed on the product detail page, they landed, they stayed for at least 10 seconds, which implied that they wanted to be there. It they've confirmed as not an

Brett:

Accidental clicked. They're in the

Chris:

Exactly wasn't they were trying to play a game and get a gold coin to watch your video or something, right? Fat

Brett:

Problems are trying to hit X and they click on your ad type of

Chris:

Thing. All the reasons. Yeah. So now you can see that 10 seconds there. Then you would go, okay, well, did they actually start interacting with our product detail page? Are they clicking on the different images that are there? Because a real buyer that's looking at stuff probably would, let's hit the side of the buy, which is different. But an investigative buyer would start investigating. They would look at reviews, they would scroll into the description, they would start interacting with variations, large, medium, blue, yellow. They're starting to play with colors. That's a completely different behavior you can absolutely measure for. And by the way, bullet audience is on. So now you've got, okay, this product detail page, how they are supposed to work. I know a certain percentage will do this with the images. I know a certain percentage will do this with variations. Certain percentage will do this with reviews and testimonials, whatever the product is.

And now you have an understanding of how your product detail page is function, what are the behaviors they generate? And then what you do is you start comparing them to each other because occasionally you're going to find one of your product detail pages crushes it. They just buy everything with this product. And you start going, okay, what is that one? How is that different from these other ones? And that's again where you can go back to clarity. Let's do the heat maps and see if they're completely different. Let's compare and contrast. Do the same thing with screen recordings, see if they're interacting with it differently. Eventually you can and should use tools like GA four and other things to grow out your measurement skills. But I want to emphasize, yes, all that's there, but that's like talking about what the end of the marathon's like and trying to motivate yourself by saying, I'm going to cross that marathon, but I can't even get to the end driveway right now.

So you shouldn't be thinking about the winning the marathon. Just get to the mailbox and make that your win. Turn on clarity, start to use it. I think that platform especially is because it is so intuitive to use, doesn't require a lot of where are things. And I'll give you another example of that. When you come into the dashboard, this is how I know they speak marketer on their dashboard, they will say, rage clicks, and it'll give you a percentage. You know what rage click is? A rage Click is when somebody's clicking on a button or something,

Brett:

They rage click, rage click is a category inside of

Chris:

That Microsoft. And from day zero they have had this, they came out with a platform dashboard says rage clicks. It's when you're clicking somewhere and it's not quite working, so you're clicking again, maybe the site's slow, maybe something's not hyperlinked, right? Maybe something looks like a button, but it's not. And then you go, oh, it says like 7.2% of that people were being raised goes, would you like to see the recordings? Yes, click. Now you've got all the recordings. They will pres segment, please tell me ai, please tell me what's going on. And it goes, oh yeah, it looks like this button on this page is having problems when you see it. Yes, I do watch. Okay, let's go fix that button. Instant action. They have another one called Quick backs, which is when people go to a page, this happens a lot in direct response where it's like sales page and some people find it useful to hide a price.

So then they go to the cart to find how much it is, and they go back to the sales page to see if it's worth it. Anyway, so that idea of quick backs, they go to this page and they immediately go back to the previous page. They were searching for something. What were they searching for that we should have provided on step one that they thought they would find on step two? Clarity builds you an instant segment like that. So it's a lot of this, it's made for marketers to be as intuitive as possible for them to take immediate action such that they go, I kind of like this platform. I wonder if we should set up funnels now. And then you start getting into, okay, now I have to start using the platform. And whether you use YouTube to do that is fine. Measure you.com. Obviously there's courses on that and we can show you to do that too, but I don't think it's necessary on day zero. Day zero is just create the account. Everybody here has now been educated. Go to Clarity microsoft.com, create your script, activate

Brett:

It, you know enough to get a now, plug it in and insert.

Chris:

Exactly right.

Brett:

Yeah. One of my favorite retail books is called Why We Buy by Paco Underhill. I'm not sure if you've read that, but

I

Haven't been alone. Dude's been around a long time. And so what they used to do, maybe they still do it, but they would have people that would just sit in retail stores all day and track people's movements.

Yes.

What do people do when they walk in the door? How do they approach this display? What if there's something that they want to get the feel for, but it's all packaged up? What do they do then? What do shoppers do when it's like a female with a male and the male looks impatient? How long do they stay and shop? What if we put seats over here for the dudes to sit so then their female companion can shop a little longer? It's a fascinating book and really creates some great insights, and he kind of helped reshape retail experiences, but this is sort of what you're doing digitally. That's exactly how are people interacting with my stuff with my

Chris:

Online store.

Brett:

Now, how do I shift it to make it better for them?

Chris:

And this comes from retail, it comes from grocery stores. They have planograms, they have the floor plans. So and hopefully most people know this. When you go in a grocery store, there's only going to be one place where that milk is, and it's at the worst possible location. So you walk through everything. Very, yeah, very back. Make sure you walk through everything. Where the cereals, are they way up high where the adults can see them? Nope. They are eye level with the kids. Everything is planned. Everything is there for every inside

Brett:

Based on science and observation,

Chris:

Everything. They have an understanding of how much Walmart knows how much boxes are supposed to move through this little three foot section of the shelf that are supposed to do. They have that measured. Digital marketers are missing the boat because they don't treat e-commerce like actual commerce.

Brett:

And

Chris:

That's what I mean by digital marketers kind of lose their mind. They're like, oh, but the digital world, it's different on the internet. It's not, humans will always human always. So you have to treat them like that. Humans,

Brett:

Humans are always human. I love that.

Chris:

Humans are going to human, so you just go, okay, they're going to human anyway. We're just going to measure it so we can see what they're doing. And the beauty of it is the old fork folklore where it was like, I don't know how prioritizing works, but I'm not sure which half

They want to make a quote from 150 years ago. And now that became, oh, well, now can be a measure, everything. But it was always about the attribution. Part of measurement. That very last step is all anybody ever cared about. So we could kind of answer that question, which surprise doesn't have an answer, but the problem is that was the decoy. What they should have done is what you were talking about. Go, let's sit in the store and see how people use the store. Just the shop, walk the shop. And now you can totally do that automated all the time. It's called Microsoft,

Brett:

And get AI to do some of the

Chris:

Watches and get AI to do the analysis,

Brett:

Help you out. Pattern recognition, some of the

Chris:

Heavy lifting. Yes.

Brett:

Yeah, it really makes sense. So any other anecdotes, love the framework, love the setup and the mind shift and all that. But any anecdotes or thoughts on like, Hey, these are the types of things you can really uncover and shift and then the results you can see there?

Chris:

That's a good question. So in terms of it depends upon, let me just go through the framework quickly, maybe

Talk about some of those. So the way you use measurement, and this is another little bit of a mindset shift, but important measurement is not about the tools. Your tools are almost irrelevant. Some tools are better than others, easier to use than others do more things than others do different things than others, but they're just tools. The problem I think in most digital businesses in general is they're overwhelmed with tools. They do not need more tools, but we always have new ones. So Sumo is one of my worst things. Like, oh, don't go in, but I have to go in and you come up with 45 different app. So it's like, I understand the desire to have tools is shiny objects, but with measurement in particular, because there's so many tools, Wiki reports, triple Whale, Hiro, GA four, Microsoft Clarity, insert 75, others that were just created because AI now.

So it's always everywhere all the time. With that, you have to have a measurement strategy that tells you how to use your tools and when to use your tools in the way they need to be used. If you don't have a unifying strategy to kind of coordinate all those tools, you end up getting a bunch of different reports that aren't coordinated. So of course Facebook tells you something different than what Wicked Reports tells you, and you're like, I don't even know what's going on. I don't trust anything. We're just going to do it. I think I'm going to do anyway, which is what most marketers do, or most business owners Trust my gut. Trust my gut, because yeah, and half the time they're looking for the data to justify the decision they've already made, right? Yeah. So instead what we're going to do is you go through a framework, right? Go through a process. So we're going to move from just kind of wander around the dark, not sure what's working, what's not all the way through. We automatically get improved, optimized revenue and results by just following a series of activities

Brett:

Using

Chris:

Measurement, how to do this. So the first step is planning out our measurement. So really three keys to that step. We asked the questions, we talked about that already, results and how I need to know the result of my journeys. I need to know how those journeys are happening at whatever level I'm comfortable with. You start where you start. It's a muscle. And that's what people don't understand about asking questions. They think I'm going to get a magic list of a thousand questions, and they will always, it's not how it works. You start with results and how questions at whatever comfortable level you can handle. The next time you do it, you've already had some experience with the results and how questions, so you ask different more enhanced results and how questions, but now they're coming from you, not me. So your questions will be better yours.

So you do the results and how questions, we gather the information necessary to get answers to those questions, and that's where you're setting up your measurement. You might say, oh, I'm going to use Clarity to get that answer, or this one I'm going to use a spreadsheet, I'm going to pull from Shopify reports or whatever it happens to be. And then you have your actions, and that's what we talked about earlier where you have to have an understanding of at least a guess as to what that number's supposed to be, what the answer is supposed to be. I am asking the question around our average ticket. I'm going to gather all the information from shopper report so I know my average ticket and then my average ticket should be three to 350. Cool. What if it's with three to three 50? What are you going to do?

Well, I'm going to scale traffic. What if it's 150? What do you do if it's really low? Well then I'm going to start looking at upsells and the related products and see if maybe they're not doing those well, what if it's five, 600? What if it's way high, unexpectedly high? That's interesting to you. I'm going to see if maybe there's a product that's kicking that off. Maybe if they buy product A versus product B, it leads. So now I'm thinking about the activities before I even set up my measurement, and I already know what I'm going to do based upon the things that I don't even have yet turned on. But now I'm excited to do it because I already know how to fix things because of that planning process. So very quick, but very powerful questions, information, actions. So then you go into your build and that's where you're using clarity. You turn it on. If you want to set up funnels, you can, doesn't really matter. Just play with stuff. The one thing I would definitely suggest people do is pay attention to UTMs, just three letters, UTM. You can Google that. There's a billion different trainings now on how to use UTMs, but they identify traffic so that you can tell the difference between an email sending you a visitor versus Facebook cold traffic or the latest webinar you did, or product, demo, whatever it was.

Brett:

Got it. So to use Microsoft Clarity, you need to set up UTMs.

Chris:

You don't need to. This is the key. You don't need to. You should though, because if you don't, clarity can't tell the just student email and Facebook, you know what I mean? If it's not told what it is, it'll guess. It can make a decent guess, but be a guess. And I would much rather tell it

Brett:

A hundred percent.

Chris:

And the way that we do this with TMS for those are a little more advanced on the UTM thing. The way that we identify as UTM identifies the source of the traffic. So it's Facebook, Google, Microsoft email, ke. In our case, we use Keap. So it'd be Keap is the source, the type of traffic it is paid is it's social where I'm not really paying for it, but it's out there. Is it an email? Is it a podcast like this?

And then finally, the purpose, and this is the part that I think people mess up on their traffic. They're not telling their measurement system why the visit was there in the first place, what it supposed to do. Because if Facebook can't tell me, Hey, listen, I'm a Facebook ad. I'm the one that's got a picture of a horse at it. I am retargeting the audience of people who have come to the Academy Insiders page, but they didn't quite buy yet, but they did see the offer and the order form. So I sent them an ad with all the testimonials of people, my job is to get them to close, so they should be closing. That's how you need to judge me. Please let me know how I did compared to the other ads that are doing the same thing. And then right after that, there's email that says, oh, by the way, I'm email number seven of the 12 part auto responder series.

I'm talking to community members who have come in for free and they're using their resources. I'm getting the user's resources now. I'm trying to make them aware that there is a program they could upgrade called Academy Insiders. Just let me know how I did on that compared to the other emails. And now all of a sudden, you start understanding which traffic sources are causing which results. So you can start using those traffic sources better, which means efficiency in ad spend, which is what everybody tries to call ROAS and ROI. But it's really in the behaviors that tell you what to do with that when you're willing to listen. But listening takes time and patience, which most people don't want

Brett:

To. Most people do not have. We want an easy button, we want an easy solution. We just want to fix this ad or

Chris:

Spend

Brett:

More money here. Make this easy for me. But the thing about this is, I think once you learn to ask those better questions and learn what to do with the information and how to kind of decipher it, it's extremely empowering. This is almost like it's a superpower. If you could develop this, I'm sure you start to get pretty juiced up about, man, I've got stuff I can use to move the needle in my business.

Chris:

Your confidence and your level of certainty and the level of drama drops, right? Because you're not guessing anymore.

Brett:

I mean,

Chris:

You are, don't get me wrong. There's always the element of uncertainty. It's a

Brett:

Hypotheses in some that, yeah, it's

Chris:

Huge probabilities that start happening now. You're like, oh, well, the customers told us. It's like sending an email to your list saying, Hey, would you be interested if we started stocking brown shoes instead of gray shoes? And they're like, oh my God, yes. I would love brown shoes. I've put Brian Brown shoes from other people. I'd love that you carry brown now to carry brown shoes. You don't just go, well, maybe not. I don't know. And if you did, what would you do? Would say, cool, here's a link to pre-order brown shoes. And then they buy it and you're like, okay, now we do brown shoes. Because the market told us to do it. It wasn't hard for me to do that. It was simple. I just listened to what they wanted me to do in order for them to give me money and for me to provide the value. That's it. It goes back to that listening to the conversation. And that's the trick. When you're using your numbers, when you're using your measurement, no matter what tool it is, clarity or otherwise, you just compare it to what you thought was going to happen.

But that means you have to have a guess, at least as how this thing works. How does your machinery work? How do the behaviors work? Think through that.

Brett:

No, go ahead. Finish the

Chris:

I was going to say, most students will come to us and they'll say, well, we're just trying to figure out how our e-commerce stores work, how people move through the store. That's what we're trying to figure out. My first answer always is the same. How are they supposed to, and it's blank,

Brett:

Blank.

Chris:

Like, I never thought about that. But that is literally the equivalent of dumping a bunch of stuff into an empty warehouse, opening up the doors, seeing who buys what, and goes, oh, I guess we sell shoes. Because nobody wanted the bikes. You would never do that. You would plan a shoe store and then you would try it out. You would always have a, here's how it should be working. But again, digitally we skip the simple steps because it's simple. But simple is the skill, simple's the skill, and it

Brett:

Takes five minutes

Chris:

Fast. So here's what

Brett:

We expect. Now we're going to measure it. If it's higher than expected, what does that likely mean? And what are we going to do?

Chris:

If

Brett:

It's lower than expected, what does that likely mean? And what are we going to do? But then you prove it out. And

Chris:

If it's in Goldilocks, if it's in the sweet spot, what are we going to do? Also, what if things are working? What do you do? What

Brett:

If we hit that expectation? Exactly. Exactly right.

Chris:

It might be, oh, we're going to have to order more inventory. It might be that just to bring it, not even to digital marketing, but more just brass tax, e-commerce stuff is, oh, well, if that's working, we can start scale traffic. So we should order from China now because it's going to take six months to get here, or whatever the thing is. So a measurement can impact all areas of an organization, not just the marketing.

Brett:

You said something really interesting a minute ago, and I want you to maybe unpack it just a little bit. You said the way you set up measurement, it's so straightforward. You don't really need AI to unpack it or to bring clarity there. Can you talk about what that looks like? Because that was super interesting

Chris:

To take a step back. What's happening right now, like chat ct? It's very easy. AI Studio will also do this. If you go to ai studio, google.com people, everybody here has access to that too. You can show it your Google Analytics and say, tell me what insights you see,

Brett:

Which

Chris:

Again is basically saying, tell me what information you see. Just tell me in words instead of numbers now. And it'll say, oh, well, it looks like your direct non-traffic. You're doing a lot and PayPal seems to be really selling a lot of business for you. And you're like, okay, but you're still going to be like, well, what do I do? So then you're going to ask ai, what should I do with all this? And AI doesn't know to say no, or you shouldn't be asking me the question. AI just gladly gives you the results. So it'll say, oh, you should do this, that, or the other thing, but it's not right. And the problem is you don't know. It's not right, because you don't know measurement either. So it's blind leading the blind. You're asking blind questions. This thing does not know how to say no.

That'll give you an answer, but it's going to convince you your genius. Now you're finally getting insights from your data that you couldn't see before. But the problem is, again, it's garbage in, garbage out. That data hasn't been set up properly. But almost everybody, because they, most companies don't have measurement departments yet. They're starting to. They're finally because of the efficiency push, they've realized, oh my God, measurement's a department. Now we have to really do this. So the ones that are now, they can start to say, okay, here's how this is supposed to work. Is it working like this? And now you can see, compare and contrast and actions become much, much simpler, right, to get to. So anyway, the idea behind the AI ability, it's typical AI is you're going to Google Analytics four saying make up a story based on what you see here.

It's going to make up a story no matter what. It doesn't mean it's a useful story, but it's going to sound awesome. You know what I mean? So I can prompt AI to say, look at my Google account and proof that Facebook is awesome and it will do it because I asked it to. So that's the problem with ai. The way that we do our measurement is we make it so that AI is not necessary for at least up to the reporting phase. But this is why. It's because what we already talked about, we've already listed out our questions. We already know the information we're going to

Brett:

Collect. We already

Chris:

Know the know we're.

Brett:

So

Chris:

We've already preplanned when this number says 37%, no matter what that number is, we've already known is that within range, higher or lower, and we automatically know what steps we're going to take to optimize because we planned for it in the action step.

Brett:

Got it.

Chris:

So we don't have a need to go to AI to tell us what we already know because we saw the number. Think about this, like your car dashboard. That's always my favorite example with this because people go like, this is impossible. You can't really do that. You totally can. Your car dashboard did. When you driving down your street, you see how fast you're going. You see that number, you instantly know hit the gas or hit the brake. You do it

Brett:

Unconsciously. You

Chris:

Instantly take action because you see the number. You don't need AI to tell you. Right? The

Brett:

Query chat, DBT, what do

Chris:

I do? Yeah, even it was automated. You don't need AI to tell you if you're the one in control of it. So that's the point is you can make your dashboards, especially for marketers, they need to be like one minute dashboards in and out because marketers do not need to be looking at numbers. They need to be marketing. You

Brett:

Need be doing stuff. Yeah,

Chris:

Exactly. So that's how we think about that. Make the report simple so it leads to action. So now we don't have reports that we don't have to analyze. That was another thing. I'm trying learn how to analyze reports. I'm like, well then your reports are too complicated. Why would you do, that's a waste

Brett:

Of time. It makes sense. And then you're leaning into AI for the complex, time consuming. I'm just sifting through all these recordings and now AI's looking for patterns

Chris:

And

Brett:

This is

Chris:

Where we're doing it. BigQuery data and combining it with the CRM data and that stuff can definitely be used. But remember we've got measurement muscles, so nobody should be trying this at home yet to

Brett:

Practice for this

Chris:

Going to a gym, right? I've gone to the gym for 10 years now. You're not going to have the same measurement muscles that day one, but you will have them as long as you keep going to the same gym. It won't take you 10 years to grow that muscle.

Brett:

So

Chris:

Practice it and get used to it and eventually, yes, all this stuff will come to pass and you'll have AI and big create databases and first party and everything else, but you don't start there. Keep it really, really simple. Get used to it, which again, bring it back full circle. That's why Clarity is such a powerful tool. It's a good quick start.

Brett:

Love it, man. I know we use clarity as the gateway into this conversation, and I think it's a powerful tool. I'm excited to use it for our website, but really this is more about that conversation you have with a customer. It's about setting expectations and how are we going to measure what matters here and then make shifts there. But super excited about that. We don't have a lot of time left, so I'm going to do a grave disservice to this topic, but I want to at least get a couple thoughts. We'll tease this. Okay. Then we planned maybe session two, but then also I want to send some people to some of your resources where they can dig deeper.

Sure.

I love how your dashboards are simple. You can understand them. You don't need AI to unpack it. We use AI for more complex stuff, but how are you guys using AI in your business and how are you thinking about ai? That's different because as I hear you talking about ai, it's quite different than what I'm hearing from other people. So would love to hear that kind of the brief overview and then we'll send people to some free resources and stuff.

Chris:

Sure. So I'll by saying, I've been using AI wrong for the last couple of years,

But I've been using AI like everyone else has been using AI for the last couple of years, which is why I'm getting the same results that everybody else says they get, which is it sounds like AI wrote this, right? And you get that sort of like most isn't really useful or it took me longer to figure out how to do with AI than just doing it by myself. So I'm not going to worry about it and all the same stuff. And it is because I had the wrong strategy. Just like with measurement, you need a unifying strategy of how to think about measurement tools to unlock the tools. Same thing with ai, and it took me a long, long time to realize that. So shout out to sean@automatetowin.com. He's a buddy that is a huge system engineer, super geeky when it comes to ai, and so much so he speaks AI more than he speaks human. But I have fascinating conversations with him because we're so systems oriented together. We share that overlap. He's the one that really led me to this insight where he's like, listen, humans, and this is the way I would describe it back, humans, we talk about results and how questions humans think in terms of results and how we're trying to get results, but the way that humans try to get results is we explain to each other how to get the result.

Brett:

We

Chris:

Can't quite see the result, but we know the first step or two, so we know that. So we describe that first step or two and we'll figure out three, four or five when we get there. Later as we get closer, we'll figure out the next steps. So there's always that we communicate in terms of how for the actual result that we want. So there's results and how in that way we don't quite know the how, but we have an idea of what the result is. And with humans talking to other humans, that's okay because humans will work out the how's amongst themselves. They speak in terms of how's what humans, again, humans are going to human when they interact with ai, they interact with AI as if it was human, and they are discounting to their detriment that the fact that AI is very different.

AI also has results in how the difference between a human and an AI is humans are trying to figure out the how and they kind have an idea of the result. AI knows every possible, how that exists ever will exist, ever. It knows everything all at once, all the time. It doesn't think in terms of time sequence, it's completely different formatting. You can't wrap your head around how it works. You shouldn't even care. It's not relevant. It just knows everything. So the fact it knows everything is awesome. I don't have to teach it how to do anything. It knows how to do stuff. What it needs from me is what result I want to have it deliver. So the way I've been sort of training this recently, and especially we started with our team, which unlocked everybody, which was so cool because now everyone is the power of 10. So that was great. We didn't have to add to headcount, but we totally added to headcount at the same time. Creativity. Totally.

Brett:

Yeah.

Chris:

So essentially what's happening is when you're going to ai, we're not saying, oh, you are a professional copywriter who's really good at writing product detail pages for Shopify stores. Please now go look at this catalog and write descriptions based on blah, blah, blah. That's all fine. Don't get me wrong. You're going to get someone decent. But it's also going to be like, well, that sounds like ai. So what instead I would do is I would say that and I would put that into a prompt. I try to do everything I can spell it out the way I do it. This is my biggest tip for ai. Take all that out of the prompt. Don't send it. Just write it out the way you think you should write it out. Then re-prompt it. What you're going to do is you're going to say, please analyze the following prompt until you fully understand the intended result.

Note, I'm not telling it the result. I'm asking it. Look at what I'm saying here. You figure out what I'm trying to do. So then it does that and it'll say, oh, okay, I see by your prompt you're trying to get me to do this, this, this, this, and this. Awesome. Now write that prompt, rewrite that prompt so I get a result better than the intended result. So now what I'm doing is I'm telling ai, you figure out what the result is. I don't know how to speak result. It needs to hear result, though. That's when it really performs well, and I cannot tell it how, because if I tell it how I constrict it, if I say You're a copywriter, it now knows, okay, I know everything about copywriting, but it forgot about the farmer, orange grove tree that had a blog post. That may have been the secret weird sauce thing that could have given some cool creative answer. Won't even think about it. I told it not to accidentally.

Brett:

So

Chris:

Instead I say, understand the result I'm trying to get. Then create for me a prompt that will get me better than that. In other words, I can kind of describe Mountain One. What I really want is Mountain Two, and I can't even see that, but you can. So you tell me how to get an even better result than I even know is possible because you know how, and it does it. Then you take that prompt when it gives you that prompt. It'd be the trick when it gives you that prompt. You start a new chat, you have to start a new session. This is the first prompt. And that first prompt is so important with AI because it sort of sets its space in its database of content.

Brett:

It frames that whole chat.

Chris:

Exactly. Right. Everything's framed from that source. So if you accidentally triggered it to talk about cats, the musical, even though you wanted cats, the animal, it's always going to start with cats, the musical as its base and try to stretch over it. It's only going to be answered so much stuff. But if you nail that prompt and you put it in the exact right spot, it gives you better results because everything that it needs is right there. And the beauty of it is, I'm not telling it where to go. It figures out where to go because it understands the result that has been.

Brett:

It's been really, really clear on the result, and you're using the AI to help you get really clear on the result. And then you're just taking that.

Chris:

And when I say clear on the result, I mean not clear at all on the result. I understand I'm not speaking. I'm trying to communicate the result as best I can as a lonely human.

I speak in terms of how I would like this and this. You should be this, it should be this. It should create a sales page that's highly likely to convert to three different avatars here, the avatars that want blah, blah, blah. Then I say, take all of this. Tell me the result I'm trying to get. And he goes, oh, you're actually just telling me to do this. Cool. Now give me better than that result. What's the prompt? I would tell you for that excellent new chat entered that prompt that it created for itself. So there was never a human interaction at all from its perspective. And then all of a sudden you get this amazing, amazing response where you're like, okay, all of a sudden I get emotional driven words, benefit driven words, value-based things, open loops without having to say that because it already knows that stuff.

Brett:

You don't

Chris:

Have to tell how I see this healthy result I want.

Brett:

Can you think of either a specific example of what this looked like or maybe just general how your team has been able to tap into this?

Chris:

Oh yeah. So we just talked to our developer this morning as a matter of fact, on the offers call we had with our team. And as I was talking to her, except it used to be, oh, I need Jeff, my co-founder, Jeff Ser. So it was like, oh, I need Jeff to write copy on this, and I'm just waiting on the copy or the three bullet points that I need or whatever the things are. Now she's coming to us with complete copy that's written, and now this is what we've built out. So there's a little bit of build that's happened, but remember when you build these things out, they're bricks. Now you can use 'em over and over again. So it takes an hour to build it, but once you have it, you have it forever. And this is a great tool. So I've built an Avatar gem that's three different avatars and they are extensive like 300 pages each. So we know everything about these people. Journal entries. I've got 'em based on sales call transcripts. So everything's in there for the different avatars. So she'll take the copy that she got from the initial prompting that she was, again, speaking in terms of results. She uses the results style prompting. So she'll get this decent copy. Then she'll go through and say, Hey, I need all the avatars to look at this, and then tell me what they agree on.

And then you will literally see a conversation where it's like, David, he's like, well, I'm kind of concerned about the team really buying it for my team, and I'm not sure this headline really speaks to me. And then Alex comes in and says, yeah, totally walks for me though because I'm doing this for my skill. And Sarah comes in and says, well, I don't know. I'm kind of world for clients and I'm not sure how this would help my clients. And then they all have a conversation. Then they will say, well, we're thinking about this. And then it goes, you know what? We've reached a consensus. This is the one we think we should start with that is most likely to help us. So what I've basically done is create avatars that write our sales pages. I could, and again, I didn't do that by saying, create me an avatar that can write sales pages.

I asked it for result after result after result, and eventually I started getting an avatar that was so good it could write sales pages, so I could ask it to do that. That wasn't my intention. I didn't build an avatar write sales pages. It was so good. It started to be able to do it and have conversations and help our team members. I've got Notebook LMS with another popular tool with Google that are training podcast. That's a little podcasting feature. You can prompt that. So I set up custom training. So it'll speak to you as part of the Measure You customer experience team on how you can use some unreasonable hospitality from that book. A Reason Hospitality, such good book, such good book, good from that. So we have that. I've got a webinar optimizer that will go through the webinar and go through the 10 steps of every webinar, rate it on a scale of one to 10, and then offer suggestions. But it's talking to Jeff or Julie or whoever did the webinar. So they have these auditory trainings that they can always have. So I have constant experts on demand all the time for whatever I want, and so does the rest of the team. This is the beauty of it. It's not just me that can use this. As soon as you create anything, one of those little bricks and ai, a feature you can use over and over again. It can be used by the admin assistant now to write

Brett:

Copy, to

Chris:

Write all the emails. So the admin assistant literally is doing that. She's writing all the email stuff because AI gets 80% of there. And I'm not saying humans go away and just let AI do its thing. Go all there. So we still edit, we still touch it on the way out. We make sure it's brand standards and all that fun stuff. But holy cow, the idea of AI is it collapses time.

And that's the trick. Speed is the new currency. I don't think money's going to matter much in the future, but speech or will. So the people who can get speed to result the fastest will get whatever the value is that society has to want to distribute. So get fast at stuff, get AI in things and realize, I think to summarize that it is game over and game on the old way of doing stuff. We have to stop playing the old way. I come to work and I work through my computer. I'm using my computer to have this call right now with you. But I don't think like, oh, I'm using a computer right now. It's just embedded in my brain how it's like breathing. That's what AI needs to be. So for me right now, I work through AI for everything that is my computer level now.

So in the beginning when it's new, you sort of think like that, but pretty quickly it just becomes embedded. And now you just do everything through ai. It's like AI layer that everybody operates. And I wouldn't let a team member of mine use a typewriter because they didn't want to use a computer. So I would never say, you don't have the option to not use ai. You have to use it in this way. And then once we do that training, because it is so inherently intuitively useful, they instantly fall in love with it. And then they come back and they're like, oh, I figured out I can do this. I figured I'd do this. And I'm like, this is awesome. Because they're going to hundred X themselves in a year. They're going to 500 x themselves in two years. Easy. And then where are we as a company? Much, much better. So ai, everybody should be looking at that.

Brett:

It's amazing. So I knew we would run out of time. I got a million questions related to that. We'll have to come back. You have to come back. We'll talk about that way to open the loop. Another, yeah, way to open the loop, exactly. But if someone's listening to this and they're like, okay, I want to go a little bit deeper on measurement, actionable insights there. What resources do you have for that? And then any resources around your thinking related to ai, any blog posts or courses or anything like that?

Chris:

Yeah, good questions on both. So I would say measure u.com, again, measure in the letter u.com is where our company is. We've got a free community that you can join. So if you go to measure u.com/evolution. So again, measure u.com/evolution. And now you know what? I'll say that for two reasons. One free community that'll take you there. Second is look at how I'm UT Ming. So go into the browser window, everybody at Shopify stores, and you'll see where it says E-commerce Evolution is where it came from. It was a podcast for the purposes of the community from a podcast that I recorded in February, 2025 that talked about AI basics. It'll say all of that in there. So our measurement systems know why you came and what sent us, right? So this is another example, just eating our own dog food. But yeah, measure you.com for US evolution. We do AI training now in Measure You, and we've got another division within that called Profit School that we're doing a lot of more of the business ops AI training. So if you go to measure u.com, you will get access to the AI training stuff too. You'll be able to see it there.

Brett:

Awesome. Awesome, man. Mercer, this was gold, buddy. I always love to talk to you. My head explodes and then I'm always just amped up to go do some of the stuff you're talking about.

Chris:

There you go. You're going to be installing Clarity in a half hour. I can feel it,

Brett:

Right? It's going to be on the site before I go home today. There you go, Mercer. Thank you so much, man. So measurement U,

Chris:

Measure.com. Measure U,

Brett:

I'm sorry. Measure you say the URL again because I'm going to butcher it if I try. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll go measure u.com. Yep. Yep. Slash evolution that gets you to evolution. Yes. Awesome stuff, man. Really, really appreciate it and excited to do this again, and we'll try to make it a little shorter than a year or two from now.

Chris:

Looking forward to it. Thanks, Brian.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. Let us know what you'd like to hear more of on the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

In this eye-opening episode, legendary Amazon expert Kevin King reveals game-changing insights about how Amazon's search and ranking systems really work. From the little-known concept of GeoRank to Amazon's powerful AI engine Cosmo, Kevin shares insider knowledge that every Amazon seller needs to understand to stay competitive in 2024 and beyond.

Key topics covered:

• The truth about Amazon's GeoRank system and why your products might rank differently across regions – plus actionable strategies to influence your rankings in specific geographic areas.
• How Amazon's Cosmo AI analyzes your listings, images, and customer feedback to determine visibility – and why you need to start "selling to the AI," not just optimizing for keywords.
• Why the future of Amazon search is shifting from keywords to intent-based shopping, and how tools like Rufus are changing the way customers discover products.
• Fascinating insights into Amazon's incredible data collection and how it's shaping the future of personalized shopping experiences.
• Advanced marketing strategies combining AI with custom audiences and personalization that are generating "ridiculous conversion rates.’

Whether you're doing $100K or $100M on Amazon, this conversation with one of the most knowledgeable figures in the Amazon space will transform how you think about optimization and marketing on the platform.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:08) Understanding GeoRank

(18:09) Exploring Cosmo

(21:24) From Keyword to Intent-Based Search

(27:47) Brand Building Beyond Products and Problem-Solution Marketing

(32:12) Embracing AI and Customer-Centric Sales

(39:15) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Kevin King - LinkedIn
• Billion Dollar Sellers Newsletter
• Marketing Misfits Podcast
• Norm Farrar - LinkedIn 
• AMPM Podcast
• Helium 10 
• Tom Shipley - LinkedIn
• T&C Summit
• Podcast Movement Show
• North Face
• Patagonia 
• My First Million Podcast
• George Mack - X
• DataZapp
• Reddit

‍

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

---

Transcript:

Kevin:

Us as sellers, we use the tools and we try to influence what Amazon, what we think our product is. But Amazon's like, yeah, Kevin, you can say that your product's the best or it does this or this or this, but reality is what the customers say.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I have an esteemed guest. This guest is a legend in the Amazon space, billion dollars sellers. My guess is Kevin King. He's the host of two Count 'em two podcast Marketing Misfits with our mutual friend Norm, also the AMPM podcast with Helium 10. Been hosting that for two and a half years. He's had over 220,000 students host the billion dollar Seller summit, the billion dollar seller newsletter, and then he is also an Amazon seller. So he's doing this stuff in real life on a daily basis and is just doing very, very well. So probably didn't need to do that introduction because if you're in the Amazon space, I say the name Kevin King, you know the guy. So with that, Kevin, welcome to the show and how's it going

Kevin:

Man? It's going great, man. You talk about all my gray hairs, how I got all my gray hairs here, doing all this crazy stuff.

Brett:

Yeah, I'm joining you, man. I'm joining. I got the grain, the goatee here, and so it happens. It happens for sure. But yeah, you and I connected at our mutual friend Tom Shipley's event in Nashville

Kevin:

Deal. I think we met before. I think we met at a trafficking conversion years

Brett:

Ago. We have for sure, for sure.

Kevin:

I think we met somewhere, or maybe even more than that maybe.

Brett:

I think you're right. There's been TNC, we both, I think both spoke there and then a couple other events. But most recently was that Tom Ship was event. As we were chatting, we're like, we got to do a podcast together. What are we doing here? Haven't ever made it happen. So yeah, we're 300 episodes into the eCommerce Evolution podcast and just getting Kevin on the

Kevin:

Show. Congratulations.

Brett:

Yeah, I was looking that up. You doing a little research on chat GPT, less than 1% of podcasts get to 300 episodes, so I

Kevin:

Just went to pretty podcast movement show in August in DC and they actually said there that the average podcast makes it to seven episodes.

Brett:

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I heard. There's this phenomenon called Pod fade where

Podcast hosts is like, eh, I thought this would be more fun, or I thought this would be easier. I thought I'd publish one episode and become famous. Does not happen. Right? It's a grind. It's a grind, but you got to love it. So a variety of topics I want to talk about. Kevin, I want to get into AI a little bit as we go. I know you're doing some really unique things with ai. I know you're talking to just some of the top sellers on Amazon, some of the top brands that are doing cool stuff on Amazon, but you introduced this concept that I was not very familiar with at all. And in one of your newsletters recently about rank, so ranking on Amazon from a geographic basis or at a geographic level, can you explain what geo rank is and maybe some misconceptions around ranking that negatively influenced the way people approach selling on Amazon?

Kevin:

Yeah, sure. So Amazon, for the longest time it was no matter where they had the product, they would ship it to you. So that's why it was two day delivery. So if I'm living in Austin, Texas and I order some construction paper that's sitting in the closest warehouse is Los Angeles, Amazon would get that over to a warehouse near to me and within two days and get that to me, maybe they should sent that by Prime Air. Maybe they sent it by before Prime Air, they were using regular airlines and the cargo holes and Cargo Airlines and they would get that over close to me. And you know what, this is getting a little bit expensive to actually do this. We need to change this system to where we only show results for what's nearby so we can get to 'em the same day or we can get to them within a day and cut down on our distribution costs. We're going to charge it at the same time we're going to raise the fees to the sellers so we can make a little bit more margin. That

Brett:

Has been the theme of this year. How do we charge sellers more?

Kevin:

Exactly. But if you take a look at their p and l, look at how much more profit they had off of that. So they're raising the price and cutting the expenses, which is smart business. So what they've done is, so they basically went to, it was a direct route. So it's like in the old days of airlines before deregulation where if you wanted to fly from Los Angeles to Waco, Texas, there had to be a direct plane or you had to go through some other little city. And the airlines came up with this hub and spoke system where they said, okay, we're going to have hubs and like American Airlines for example, has a hub in la Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago, Chicago, Miami, JFK, and Charlotte and almost all their flights at some point go through one of those hubs. They do have some directs in between, but a lot of almost all the flights go to those songs and then they disperse the people out. It's a much more efficient system. So about two years ago, Amazon started like, we got to get control of this distribution system. We have, I don't know what the number of warehouses they have now is 300, 3 50, something like that.

Brett:

It's a lot.

Kevin:

So what you used to do is you would send into what's called a cross stock. And so if when you go into fulfill to Amazon, FB, a, Amazon would say ship it to these one, two, or sometimes you get lucky and they say ship everything from Austin to Dallas. Other times they'd split it up into three locations all based on their algorithms and where they need the stuff and their systems. But a lot of times from one of my businesses, I sell wall calendars. I would just ship to Dallas, it's convenient for me, Austin and Dallas, it's cheap. Gets there today, it gets checked in quick and it would go to what's called a crosstalk. And these crosstalks have airline code. All the Amazon warehouses start with the same as the local DFW one, DFW two, whatever. And those docs didn't store it where our shipping doesn't store the product, it actually disperses it out.

So if I send a thousand calendars in, their algorithm will say, oh, take these thousand, break it down, send 27 to Waco, 16 to Sherman, 25 to Houston, and 82 to Austin, whatever. And they were paying on their dime. They're charging us indirectly, but to get 'em out to those warehouses to get 'em closer to the customer. And then they cited this last year like this is stupid. We need to regionalize this and do the hub and spoke system. So they broke it down into eight regions. So Amazon now has eight core regions in the United States where everything in that region is serviced by that region. And so they really don't want to show you something for sale if it's not in stock in that region because it's going to cost them more to get it to you and it's going to take longer. And so if you're not in stock, I

Brett:

Think another important point just to note there, Kevin. One, the operational efficiency and really nobody understands logistics like Amazon, but they also know that if they can show a customer, Hey, you get this tomorrow or you get this within however many hours that increases conversion rate purchases go up, the shorter the time lag is between clicking and buying and getting the product the more people buy. So showing people what's local increases conversions.

Kevin:

Case in points, last night it was 10 30 at night and I was doing some sort of a little project. I needed some black cardboard stock to put behind this little picture. I go on Amazon and it shows me a bunch of stuff, and this was on a Tuesday and it says a lot of it'll be delivered on Thursday or Friday. I'm like, no, no, I want the stuff that's going to be here in the morning. It's 10 30 at night. And so I click on the filter, it says, next day delivery, show me only the results for next day delivery and it filters it down to 200 instead of 600 or whatever. And it showed up hour at 10 30 at night. It showed up at 8 45 this morning. That's crazy. It's local and Amazon knows that. And so they went to this system where now when you ship to Amazon FBA, they're asking you to do ideal situations five or more locations because they want you to share some of that cost and spread it out, otherwise they charge you a fee. In a lot of cases, they're moving more and more towards this where they don't show results if it's not local. Your results when you type in black cardboard paper in

Brett:

Missouri,

Kevin:

Missouri may be different than mine. And so knowing that it's going to influence your rank, and if you use some of the tools that your ranks heating 10 other software tools, monitor your rank, you might see different results than what I see because based on your IP address. So there's ways to influence that though. Just like in retail, if I'm going into a Walmart and trying to get into a Walmart store, let's say in retail, Walmart takes my product and says, we're going to test you, Kevin, in a hundred stores before we roll you out to all 4,000 of our stores, we're going to test you in a hundred in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida and see how it goes. Well, I want to list those stores because I'm going to go onto Facebook or somewhere and I'm going to target those cities and run ads from my product and say, Hey, my construction paper is now available in Target in Huntsville, Alabama.

Go pick some up, send me a picture of it and we'll send you a free gift or whatever so that people are going in buying it. Then the executives in Little Rock, not Little Rock in Arkansas, in Bentonville, Bentonville, Bentonville are looking at it and going, holy cow, this stuff is actually moving. Kevin is doing good. We're going to roll you out to a hundred more stores. You gave 'em the system that way. The same thing you can do on Amazon, so you can influence, you can't really dictate where you ship your products, Amazon let you say. Well, you can use tools like Helium 10, and there's other ones, smart Scout and some others. They'll show you heat maps and they'll say, if they take a look at, they tie it to the A PA of Amazon, they take a look at the backend and they say, this is where your distribution is. So Amazon may say you have a thousand units in stock. Well, these heat maps will show you exactly which warehouses Amazon has 'em in based on the API. Interesting.

And then you could target, you can say, oh, shoot, looks like Minneapolis. I'm a little bit low on, I'm not ranking very well on, and I know I'm selling well everywhere else, but for whatever reason, Amazon hasn't sent enough or they can't keep enough in stock in Minneapolis, let me influence that. But I can't go in and say, I want to ship to Minneapolis. Amazon dictates that. So I go in and influence Amazon's algorithm the other way I go and use Pinterest ads where you can actually geotarget or use DSP on Amazon where you can you geotarget and coming soon to sponsor ads. I think it's in a beta invitation only now you'll be able to geotarget your Amazon ads. And so to actually influence that. So that's coming and it's pretty sophisticated and it's what a lot of sellers are not aware of it and how it's affecting them. They've been testing it, playing with it for a while. So this is nothing like groundbreaking, just didn't announce last week, but it's becoming more and more and more of a factor as Amazon gets their systems dialed in.

Brett:

Yeah, this is really exciting to me because I think a lot of people are just thinking about Amazon as where do I rank on Amazon or how do I show up organically or in paid on Amazon? But there is no such thing as just how do you appear on Amazon? How do I appear to unique users in geographic areas and where are there opportunities? And while you can't dictate exactly where Amazon stores some of your stuff, you can't influence sales in Minneapolis and you increase the velocity of sales, they're going to get more product there that's going to make things work better. Now, what I was also looking at, Kevin, as I was reading your newsletter is so Amazon wants to show stuff that's close. So I'm in Missouri, so whatever region we are in that I can get stuff in the next day or two, that's what I'm going to see first. But they're also looking at what is selling in my region. They're also looking at what's popular, what's moving in my region because, and I remember reading this as well where Amazon knows that, hey, north Face sells really well on the East coast. Patagonia sells better on the west coast. I'm kind of making some of that up, but that's true. There are different brand preferences or product preferences in different geographic regions, so they're going to show they're going to rank things differently based on what's selling in a region.

Kevin:

Yeah, exactly. And some of that's where you may get shoved out by Amazon, so that's where you use the outside traffic tools like Pinterest and some DSP and other stuff to actually influence Amazon. So now they think you're selling well in that region, and so that actually bumps you up on the list. It bumps you up in the rankings.

Yeah,

But Amazon, I dunno if you've ever done this, but it's amazing the amount of data Amazon has on us as buyers. Have you ever asked for your report from Amazon?

Brett:

I never have. We use Quicken, and so I can just look at my purchases on Amazon. I'm always like, I cannot believe how much money we give to Jeff Bezos every year. It's an astonishing amount, but no, how do you get the data on your,

Kevin:

There's a link. A link. You could probably Google this. I can't remember off the top of my head. It's an Amazon official link. It's for buyers. I'm not talking about for sellers. There may be a version for sellers, but for buyers.

Brett:

So you can see your buying history on Amazon.

Kevin:

Oh, it's way beyond that. No, it will blow your mind. So I did it for me. If you want to do this, just Google, it's free Google, Amazon buyer history, download PDF or something, you'll probably find the link. You'll have to log into your buyer account and then it'll take you to a page and you click a button and it will spit out a PDF. It takes it, it is got to pull it from this Oracle databases and whatever. So it takes it a few hours. You'll get an email link to this PDF. Mine went back to 2000, I'm sorry, 1999. First time I used Amazon and it was 742 pages. But it's not just what I bought. You would think, okay, yeah, of course they know Kevin. Of course they know everything I bought. I could look at my Quicken and I can tell you the same thing. No, it's everything I've ever watched on Amazon Prime, how much of it I watched, where I stopped, where I paused, how long I paused the fonts. Every computer I've ever used the IP address, I've, every computer I've ever used, it's the screen resolution of every computer I've ever used. It's everything I've ever hads a wishlist and taken out. It's every link I've ever shared. It's every address I've ever used. It's every game I've ever played on. Its every video I've ever watched on.

Brett:

I'm sure this is released now due to privacy issues. Amazon's maybe

Kevin:

Forced release years, but they don't publicize it. They don't want you to know it. It's scary. They know everything. And we talk about AI and LLMs and stuff. They got their own LLM right there. They know everything about.

Brett:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Kevin:

And

Brett:

I think you could maybe argue that Google has just as much or more data on what we look for and what we like online, but I don't know that anybody has more data on what we buy. And plus the combination of all those other things like Amazon, the amount of Amazon data that they have is unreal. And I think it's a large part of the reason why they've become the number three online ad platform, right? Leaning into some of that data creates great advertising opportunities as

Kevin:

Well. Well, you look at too, I mean one of the things I say right now is take it beyond just though those TikTok, I always say if you want to know somebody, ask 'em Can I borrow my can borrow your phone for a few minutes, roll our TikTok

Brett:

Feed TikTok know

Kevin:

You for sure, and you'll know everything about that person, what they're into, what they're currently watching just based on that feed. It's so good. It's scary what the data that's out there and there is no such thing as privacy in the United States.

Brett:

That is a really good point. Really good point. Yeah. Privacy is kind of an illusion I believe. Speaking of illusions, as we look at what are some of the myths around geo rank, which I think maybe we talked about, but how do we influence that? How do we influence that in a greater way so we can see maybe where we're not selling as well regions, we run ads around dsp, we around YouTube or on Facebook, whatever to try to get the sell through in those areas. Exactly. What else can we do to influence

Kevin:

That? That's the major thing right there is running that outside traffic in those weakened areas to actually influence that. That's basically where you can try to help influence it. Right now that's pretty much all you can truly do right now.

Brett:

Totally makes sense. But it also makes sense that, hey, if we're looking at Helium 10 and we see what our ranking is, that's kind of just a nationwide number or that's wherever. Actually maybe it'd be better to clarify that wherever

Kevin:

Pull it from,

Brett:

It's wherever it's pulling, it's wherever it's being pulled from.

Kevin:

Wherever their server, wherever their D-P-N-D-P-N pull it from.

Brett:

Got it. Okay. So then how do we get that region level data? That's where we look at Helium 10 and kind of look at those heat

Kevin:

Map there tools out there that will actually let you choose by region, ranking by region, and they're using vpn, so they're using a VPNs or not VPNs. They could be using actual physical servers and different locations and I think that's coming to Helium 10 where you can actually see the eight different regions and it'll break it down. Nice. Okay, cool. Regions.

Brett:

So love that. I think that's going to be news to a lot of people. Geo rank, you don't rank the same way in all regions across the us. It varies based on a number of factors. Talk to me about Cosmo. Cosmo's also a unique thing, new-ish thing on Amazon that influences search results and impacts both sellers and buyers. But what is Cosmo?

Kevin:

Cosmo is Amazon's AI engine that interprets your listing basically. So Cosmo is built, it's hosted on AWS, there's several components to it. Amazon comprehend is one of them. Amazon Comprehend will take a look at your listing and we'll comprehend what is this listing really about? Because us as sellers, we use the tools and we try to influence what Amazon, what we think our product is, but Amazon's like, yeah, Kevin, you can say it's your product's the best or it does this or this or this, but reality is what the customers say or what do we think or how are you wording this in such a way? So Cosmo takes a look at that and it analyzes the sentient, it analyzes the customer reviews to see what they're actually saying and analyzes your pictures. So it actually goes in and analyzes pictures. One of the examples I give is if your Amazon listing, let's say you're selling beach umbrellas and that's your listing and you got a bunch of pictures in your stack of different umbrellas, but one of the pictures doesn't show it actually on the beach, physically on the beach. Maybe it's people holding it, maybe it's the walking with it. And maybe you also are trying to get other spies on this beach umbrella. So you want people to buy a rain umbrella and other stuff. So you are not concentrating just on the word beach, but there's no pictures of the word beach. So Amazon sees that in the image stack. There's no beach pictures here. We're not going to serve this up, but we're going to deprioritize this and show it. You

Brett:

Say it's a beach product, we don't see it as a beach product based on your product images. So no go.

Kevin:

So we're going to put it down even though you're running ads on it and maybe getting some conversions. Alright, we'll give you a little bit of love for that and raise you up a little bit in the A nine, but we're not going to ranking you fully on it. So they're analyzing that. And I did a test, there's a tool luva org I think it was that you could upload a picture and I have the AI analyze this picture and tell me what it is. I took my cell phone and on the back of my cell phone I had a little case. Okay, so it's an old guy. I had reading glasses, so it's like little fold out reading glasses and I pull 'em out. And so I took a picture of my phone on the ground with the little reading glasses just kind of sticking out to the side and I put it in. I said, what is this? And it misinterpreted it and misinterpreted the image as a mobile device, a mobile phone with a key chain. It's not a key chain, it's a little eyeglasses that sit on your nose. Interesting.

Brett:

Sure,

Kevin:

I got to sit on your nose. And so then I took the picture and I rearranged the eyeglasses, took it out from underneath half of it underneath and positioned it differently. It got it right.

Brett:

Yeah, because they thought the glasses were connected to the iPhone.

Kevin:

So those kinds of things are now that's part of Cosmo. It's called Amazon recognition.

Brett:

Yeah, interesting.

Kevin:

And Amazon, you can go to AWS and type in Amazon recognition, upload photos and Amazon will spit back what they think it is.

But

They're using that to now analyze and try to determine patterns and what you're really selling and what the customer's really looking for. What's the actually intent or the buyer. And I think it's going to get to the point where in the not too distant future where it's not going to be keyword searches anymore as much Amazon will never get away from that. There's going to be some people that do it,

But they're just going to get more intent based. It's going to be where I type in, I'm taking a trip to, it's going to be more prompting. I'm taking a trip to Clearwater, Florida with my family. What do I need? What do I need? Amazon, we just talked about this 742 page PDF. They know everything I've bought. They know that maybe I don't have children, but let's just say I had children. Maybe they know that I have an overweights 12-year-old because I've been buying larger size kids' clothes or something for a 12-year-old. They know that my wife has a sense of sensitivity. She's always buying these creams of some sort for skin skin. So it's going to then suggest, in my suggestions, it's going to then suggest, oh, you're going to Clearwater, Florida. When are you going? And maybe ask a question or two qualifying question, oh, I'm going July 3rd.

Okay, July 3rd to the 10th, the weather's going to be this and this and this. Alright, here's what you need. You already have a beach chair. We're not going to show you any beach chairs. Or maybe we're going to show you one you bought one four years ago and you need to upgrade. Here's the new version. And it's going to show you, oh, you need this S SPF 50 for the wife, you need this for the kid extra wide chair for the kid beach chair. You need this, this and this and you need a beach umbrella. Let's just throw it in. Whatever. And that's the type of stuff. I think you're going to start seeing more intent-based results rather than keyword based results.

Brett:

Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. And I think in the near term or even now with Cosmo, we have to understand what does the AI think about my listing? What does the AI think about my pictures? And it's no longer just keyword stuffing and gaming the algorithm.

Kevin:

You got to sell to the ai.

Brett:

Yeah, you got to sell to the ai. And I think there's still good overlap between the two, the things that

Kevin:

Are working. So defense right now, right now it's still you got to do the old way. If you quit doing the old way, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot. But the new way is coming and it's coming. I don't know how long it's going to be. Rufuss is the test of this, so Rufus, the next, it's taking the Cosmo data and let's put it in a set of a technical way, let's it in a way that the average user can interact with. And Rufuss is only on mobile right now and it's a little rough around the edges, but just so was the first iPod, so was the first iPod. So they'll get this dialed in. But that rufuss taking the Cosmo data and taking your history and taking what it knows about you and trying to suggest, and I'm not the expert on Rufuss, but my friend Vanessa Hung, has figured out ways to actually influence that on the backend.

And a lot of that is by making sure that you're not just keyword stuffing, like you said, that you're actually talking situational things and putting situational stuff and filling in all those backend little fields that a lot of us skip some of the simple things of fabric and color and whatever. But being very complete and thorough and actually giving thought to exactly what's in your images, not just the pretty images, but actually images that'll convert, but also giving thought to what's the AI going to think of this? And then you take that a step further. I have not played with this yet. It just came out. I have a story coming in my newsletter about it, so I'll be playing with it tonight actually. But Perplexity just introduced shopping and a lot of people that have been playing with it have been saying it's better than rufuss.

Interesting.

It ties into Amazon. So actually it's a better tool to get results on Amazon than Rufuss itself and it's shopping and they did it just in time for right before Black Friday and Cyber Monday that we just had. So they did just in time for that. And they're saying this is the next evolution of shopping and it's not just going to Amazon, it's going all over the web and picking stuff. Google's doing some stuff with the Google lens.

Totally.

They're doing, there's a ton of that kind of stuff coming and you're going to see this evolving and becoming more and more and more. It's a shift in the way you search. So I don't know how the adoption rate will be 3D movies. Were supposed to be the next hot thing 10 years ago and everybody was buying 3D projectors and getting little glasses and that didn't take off. So maybe it doesn't take off, but I think this is going to take off and this is where the future's going to

Brett:

Be. Absolutely. I think exactly what the flavor is or is it rufuss or something else, but this is going to be the future for sure. I think the thing we had to think about now is we always used to talk about SEO. We still do, it's still relevant, but SEO for Google, SEO for Amazon. But now we're also optimizing for the ai, right? Because I do think the way most users are going to interact with platforms, the web in general, but also Amazon and other places to shop, is going to be kind of with an AI assistant. I would love to get your take on Rufuss and how popular you think it's going to be. But I watched my 7-year-old son, he used my iPhone. He was shopping for, he wanted to get this toy from the movie cars and this tractor trailer thing, and I didn't tell him to do this. He saw the rufuss thing, he clicked on it and he started asking it questions, how big is this? Will this fit? Can I drive the car into the trailer? Stuff like that. And I was like, that's really interesting, but that's probably the way we're going to interact with the shopping platforms

Kevin:

And that's how you guys start doing your backend is figuring out what are those questions When you launch a new product,

It's focus groups, it's knowing your customer and it's going to get to the point where right in the past we've been able to control our destination in a way by controlling the keywords, look for the opportunities, look for someone where someone else is not optimizing on these keywords or only three people are, and there's a lot of depth. I can just go fill in the gap or I can beat this guy, I got a better price or more reviews or whatever that control that we've had is going to start going away. And the control now is on the ai and you got to start selling to an avatar. You got to truly know your customer and truly become a true brand, a brand's, not a logo and a name, but a true brand and actually know your avatar and know what are the questions that a 7-year-old is going to ask. That's our audience.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so powerful, and this is something we've been speaking about for a long time, I know you have too, is that long-term success on Amazon, it's building a brand, not just selling products, right, selling products. Anybody can do that. That's going to come and go, but building a brand that's about really understanding who are you serving? So what's your positioning for your brand and what problems are you solving and having that clear avatar picture and then understanding what are the use cases, where are the questions, where are the problems, what are the things someone needs to know and how will they interact with the ai? So I can bring that to the surface or allow the AI to bring that to the surface. Really powerful and it's a different way of looking at it.

Kevin:

One of the things I teach in one of our most recent presentations I just did in Singapore, and I'm doing it on a webinar soon is it's on the psychology of marketing. I'm known for lots of hacks and stuff, and teaching hacks and hacks can be great and can get you out the bind, but like you said, it's not long term,

But the psychology of marketing, your 7-year-old, the way he's approaching things is the same as you and I did 30 years ago when you were seven and I was 57. No, I'm just kidding. It's the same. It's just different technology and different ways of doing it. So if you understand the underlying psychology, and so I did a presentation called the psychology of marketing and how to do it on product sales. And one of the things that's, I heard this actually on my first million podcast, a guy named George Mack, really brilliant advertising guy out of the uk. He said that you should actually do the advert before you choose the product. So not the other way around. Right now we choose the product based on all these tools and then we create advertising around and say, no, it needs to be first. What is the problem? Then go figure out how you're going to sell the problem. And in two seconds or less, you need to actually, they need to say, that's me. Not two seconds to stop the scroll with some sort of crazy waving or crazy flashing or whatever, but two seconds, they look at it in two seconds when his words or when they're scrolling, they don't give an F about you and they're like, oh, what's that? Oh,

Add that ad is me. That's my situation, that's my problem, that's my solution. Two seconds and then what's the product that fixes that solves that. A perfect example of that is of doing this is the baby changers. So you go into the airports when people travel this last Thanksgiving, everybody's out traveling, you're traveling with a baby, sometimes you need to change the diaper, so in the old days you'd find a place to do it and then now a lot of us have seen those little things. There's a little diaper changing station, the little thing that folds out of the wall. Yeah, totally makes like a little table. Well, the people that were manufacturing that 15, 20 years ago, were trying to sell that to airport facilities managers or whoever manages the stuff in the airport and they were putting this out and putting out pretty pictures with the thing, how it folds out and folds back up of happy families, mom, dad, kid all sitting there smiling, holding a happy baby that's not crying, and that was their ads that they're using in their brochures, in their marketing, and they sold something like a little less than a million bucks, maybe $800,000 worth of these things.

They then changed the marketing to a single picture and the single picture was a bathroom stall, dirtiest all get out with toilet torn toilet paper on the floor, a little bit of pee on the toilet, and a woman leaned over with a baby on the ground trying to change the diaper, the only big space that she had, and they put a tagline tag, it's

Brett:

Horrifying, right? It's horrifying. We got to change this.

Kevin:

Sales went to 800 million.

Brett:

Wow.

Kevin:

That's what I'm talking about is when you guys start thinking about it in those terms, it's problem solution, and that's how you move along.

Brett:

I think that's why Amazon, before they launch a new feature, before they launch a new initiative, what they do internally is they start with a press release. They start with what's the press release? Same thing. What's the ad going to be for this feature? How is the customer going to benefit from this? Should we even do this?

Kevin:

Yep, that's a good point. That's exactly the way Amazon does it, is start from the end and work backwards and I think somebody goes start the other way around in the Amazon world. Another thing you're talking about, an AI that I'm testing right now, that's just scary. We're talking about privacy and how much Amazon knows about you and there's no privacy in the US is I'm doing two things right now. There's a fellow that I'm testing this with for my newsletter. I've been running newsletter ads on Facebook and doing lookalike audiences to my list. It's doing all right, but there's a guy that came to me and said, look, I have an AI tool that combined with a couple other things that we're doing. I can find out anybody that's searching on Google, so if anything that's typed into the Google search bar, I can create custom audiences of that without them even knowing. I'm like, how are you doing that? I said, don't worry about it. We got it figured out. I'm like, okay. So I said, I'm game. I'll try it. So you can say that if I want, I'll test it for my newsletter. So I want people that are Amazon sellers, 7, 8, 9 figure sellers. So what would they be typing into the Google search bar? They'd be typing in Amazon seller support, Amazon seller central

Tips for DSP or something. They're not going to be typing in, how do I sell on Amazon? That's a new person. I want the experienced people. So I gave him a list of keywords and he went back out and pulled a two week run of trailing report of 484,000 people that supposedly fit that audience profile. He then imported that automatically into meta into a custom audience in the meta, and I'm testing it right now. We started five days ago and it looks like it's freaking working. We're doing lookalike on it and we're doing direct to them raw. It looks like it's actually working pretty damn well. And then he's able to take that information as four 84,000, overlay it with Apollo and some other stuff, and give me this spreadsheet that's got their physical address, their LinkedIn profile, their all this other data, their age, all kinds of other crazy stuff. And so I'm like, holy cow, you could do this across all kinds of platforms for all kinds of products and dial in better than what Facebook is dialing in. Is it still early? Give me another couple weeks and

Brett:

Totally. Yeah. Yeah,

Kevin:

This may, but if this works, my company, dragon Fish that I mentioned earlier, we're going to be offering this up. I'm not going to get that source out right now, but there's another fellow I just met in Montreal this last weekend. I was up there on some other business and we met with him and he's doing personalized stuff with AI right now. So where I can give, set up a landing page, enter my email address, you could take it a few steps further and ask a few questions if you want to. Levesque is ask method, all knowledge, ask two or three questions, makes it better, but just with an email address instantly, he can actually go out and figure out who I am. He reads all my social media, he reads any blog post I've ever posted, anything that's out there on the internet reads everything about me, and they can customize the next page to make.

The next page says, let's say, Hey Kevin, since you're a Texas a and l, Maggie's football fan and the big game is coming up Saturday, he know I posted about something. You might be interested in X, Y, or Z, or I'm an Aggie too or whatever. He can customize it and do you this with emails, set up an email sequence that customizes each email take. I did a test with him and took my, I just gave him the URL, my website, billion dollar sellers, and he sending me a five part email series as a test, and it's freaking dialed in. It looks like this guy researched me crazy. It's powerful. And he says it's in beta and the people that are using are seeing ridiculous conversion rates. And he just did it with, he's going to do a press release. He did a press release. I was trying to get press, sorry for somebody, and rather than just buying a press release, he went out and had the AI pull all the reporters that have ever written about, I'm just going to make this up a slow feed dog bowl,

And

Here's all these reporters that put in gadget and gizmo and whatever ever spoken about a SFI dog bowl and find their email address usually on their byline or find their contact or using Apollo. And then he told it, go read all the articles every one of these reporters have ever written, and he read all the articles and then it created a custom message to every single reporter that said, Hey, Brett, great job running for the Washington Post. That article you wrote on X, Y, and Z on the dogs was amazing. It really did this and this and the other article you wrote about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in this one, did you know that we have this new dog bowl that does x, y, z? Because you said that was a problem you'd like to see in this other article you wrote, we'd love to send you one if you want to take a review of it.

The person gets that like, holy cow, this person researched me. He does all this in a matter of 15 seconds, 30 seconds that that's where we're going to in marketing. It's this power. I'm about to test it with postcards or it's custom postcards to every single person. So if I'm selling hiking boots and I know that I get you to come to my website and I can even use retention.com or DA app, or not even have you enter email address and probably match up 50% of you, I could then, Brett, you come across my website, I'm going to know exactly what you're into because I'm going to immediately use Daaz app. Oh, there's his email address, Brett omg.com, dot com or whatever it is. And then, oh, here's all the posts he's made. Oh, he mentioned, he may have mentioned that he's going to take a trip soon with his family and go climb out to Kilimanjaro in Africa. Let me send him a postcard, drop a postcard in the mail, not a Facebook ad because postcard marketing still works very, very well. I'm going to send a postcard in the mail automatically that's cut the coast hardest custom printed by companies that do this. It's tailored to him. It has a picture of Mount Kilimanjaro, has a picture of my boots, and it has something to the effect of, I'm not going to say I know that you're going there, that would freak you out, but I'm going to say that

Brett:

Little too creepy. Yeah,

Kevin:

Not too creepy. But I'm going to say something to the effect that, hey, as an avid hiker that's concerned about the quality of the seat and wants to be able to hike an extra three hours a day without sore feet, our boots are the best boots. People have them from Mount Kilimanjaro to Everest and beyond, and they're great, and you're like, holy shit, I'm going to freaking Kilimanjaro. That's

Brett:

Crazy.

Kevin:

The boots I need, that's where it's going to get to. And that's

Brett:

Where, yeah, and I think really what AI is allowing is all the little things that would take hours of research or an unthinkable amount of time to actually execute on. It's allowing it at scale, right? It's allowing these customizable messages and direct outreach and building audiences and all these things that we'd love to do, but you either need a massive team of people to do or just can't do in general. AI is making that possible, for sure. Good. Any other perspectives on Rufuss or Cosmo or what we need to do as sellers to really take advantage of those?

Kevin:

The biggest read my newsletter, of course, billion Dollar Seller, there's always tips and strategies and tools in there, but beyond that is really thinking about selling to a customer, not to a keyword, selling to the AI and doing enough testing to know what are people asking? Looking right now, you may not know you're launching a new product. I don't know if my 7-year-old is going to ask, does the firetruck fit through whatever you said your son was asking? I don't know that, but maybe they've been asking that question and some of the other similar products or other similar toys. So analyze those reviews and see what people are asking. Look at the q and a section

And analyze that. Go to Reddit. Reddit's a massive tool right now, and Reddit has exploded in popularity. It's been around 20 some odd years, just went public, but Google put a bunch of money into it, and when Google put the a hundred million or whatever it was investment into it, they actually boosted it and its ramping. So Google, Reddit is exploding, but there's a lot of tools that will monitor Reddit threads, and there's a lot of good discussion that goes on in these threads of pain points and of issues that people are looking for beyond just what you see on e-commerce platforms. And sometimes you can get some really good insight off of that. So taking that kind of data and then structuring it in a way like, okay, what am I really going to focus on here? Maybe it's too massive to try to include everything, but what am I going to really focus on here? Maybe you create three different versions of your product, and each version is slightly different packaging, slightly different color or whatever,

Brett:

Just bit, right? Built specifically for an avatar,

Kevin:

Built specifically for an avatar, and that's where you got to go.

Brett:

Yeah, this is the headache pill. This is the low back pain pill. This is the soreness pill. Maybe all the same active ingredient, just slightly different, but different products. Position.

Kevin:

Ty Tylenol does that. Totally ol migraine Tylenol, this Tylenol ex. You look at the

Brett:

Ingredient, the main active ingredients, the same. There's some other things added, but yeah,

Kevin:

Yeah, exactly. Same

Brett:

Thing. Yeah. And so I think, man, I love the points you made there where hey, build the product for a customer, not for a keyword. Think about that avatar, build a real brand. The AI is going to be able to uncover that, optimize so that the AI can uncover what's going to be most important to your shoppers. Think about how to really influence rank, not just on a national level because that doesn't really exist, but think about those geo rank opportunities. Love that. And of course, subscribe to Kevin's newsletter, the Billion Dollar Seller newsletter. I'll link to all of that in the show notes. But Kevin, how else can people connect with you? So if people are like, man, I need more Kevin King in my life, I need to attend some of these events, or

Kevin:

I don't want that. It might be dangerous for your health, dangerous for your wallet, but dangerous for your wallet. But no, I mean, I'm on LinkedIn. Just a year ago, August of last year, I got on LinkedIn for the first time I was ignoring LinkedIn and it's growing pretty good. So I post on LinkedIn, so that's a good way to reach out. Just Kevin King or billion dollar sellers.com is my newsletter. It's free every Monday and Thursday of action. It's not a marketing email. It's a lot of actionable tips and strategies and news about what's going on in the world and tactics and the latest in the software side and everything. So those are the two best ways probably.

Brett:

Awesome. Check it out. Kevin King, ladies and gentlemen, Kevin, this has been awesome. Can't wait to schedule round two. I will not wait another 300 episodes. It will be much, much sooner.

Kevin:

Awesome. I appreciate it. It's been fun. Thanks for having me on, Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. Give us the feedback on the podcast. Leave us a review on iTunes if you've not done so already. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

In this tactical episode, OMG Commerce's Email Director Nick Flint reveals game-changing strategies to maximize what should be your most profitable customer acquisition and retention channel. With rising costs across advertising, shipping, and operations, Nick shares how leading brands are using email and SMS marketing to protect and grow their margins in 2025. Whether you're doing $2M or $50M in revenue, these practical insights will help you unlock more revenue from your existing customer base.

‍

Key takeaways:

• Why getting organized across marketing channels is critical for scale – and the simple tools Nick recommends to coordinate email, SMS, social, and paid media for maximum impact
• How to design "bigger A/B tests" that drive real insights (including one test that recently doubled campaign revenue for a client)
• The counterintuitive reason why adding friction to your email-to-purchase journey could significantly boost conversions
• Why SMS is becoming increasingly crucial as email deliverability tightens, and the exact tactics to build your SMS list without annoying customers

‍

Plus, Nick shares his unconventional "cat keyboard" subject line test that generated unprecedented engagement for a pet brand. Don't miss the bonus segments on advanced segmentation strategies and mobile-first optimization techniques that could unlock hidden revenue in your business.

---

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction

(05:09) Organizing Your Email & SMS Strategy 

(11:01) Implementing Bigger A/B Tests

(17:59) Being Unique in Your Brand Messaging

(22:14) Leveraging SMS for Enhanced Engagement

(26:20) Bonus Tips for Doubling Email Results

(27:40) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Russ Henneberry
• AI Marketing Mastery with Russ Henneberry 
• Ultimate Email Marketing Testing Checklist

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

---

Transcript:

Nick:

As we add it and it gets more popular, more and more people are taking us up on those SMS offers.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about four ways maybe going to sneak in a couple of bonus ways if we can for how to get the most from what should be your most profitable, most effective channel for acquiring new customers, but also increasing repeat purchases, increasing lifetime value. We're talking about retention, marketing, email plus SMS. I have our resonant expert, our eight year veteran. This guy has been in the D two C space in email marketing space for eight, count him eight years. That is not an old joke. You can tell by looking at him, dude, as young and fit and spry, but he is been at the game a while and so welcome back to the pod email director for om g commerce. Nick Flint. What's up Nick? How you doing?

Nick:

What's up Brett? So apparently established is the new old, since he said eight years, you're pretty established.

Brett:

Established is the new old. But hey, there's only one of us on this call has a little gray, their facial hair and that would not be you. So, but yes, you are established, seasoned, all of that good stuff. Now, before we dive in to these four ways to smash your results or get more profitable, get more effective with your retention marketing in 2025, you just completed something that a lot of people aspire to and this is not your first rodeo, but you just completed a marathon, but not just any old marathon. Nick, where did you run a marathon?

Nick:

That was in the beautiful New York City. Turns out

Brett:

The big apple,

Nick:

Now it's the biggest marathon in the world. So I don't know where I'm supposed to go from here. The biggest am best over 50,000 people. So I got to figure out which one to pick next

Brett:

50,000 people. Do you know where you finished? And it's okay if you don't want to reveal this or where did you finish in that roster of 50,000 people?

Nick:

I think in the late 20 thousands. So maybe 20, 26, 27, 8,000 we're up

Brett:

There. Very respectable and I believe, and you and I were actually just in New York recently had a leadership offsite there, meeting with some partners and with our leadership team. So we were kind of hanging out in NYC, which was a good time. And you revealed to me one of your fastest miles was mile 26, which is crazy. So you saved enough energy to really bust it that final mile. Tell us about that.

Nick:

Yeah, so I have this little TikTok series going on where I do a mile doing different things. So a mile with a weight vest on a mile, pushing a truck a mile while juggling. And one of the ones I haven't done yet is how long does it take to run a mile after running 25 miles? So when that 25 kicked in, I had to book it and get a nice video at the same time. It hurt.

Brett:

That's amazing. So anything for TikTok or the grim, but that final mile after running 25 miles, your 26 mile was like eight minutes, right?

Nick:

Low eight, yeah, it was a tough low eight for sure.

Brett:

Dang. Pretty good, man. Pretty good. So hey, I think you could compare e-commerce and especially if you look at our fiscal year of e-commerce, it's a bit of a marathon and every mile every month is a little bit different. We got to approach it a little bit differently. And so as we're recording this, we're kind in the home stretch of 2024, so we're wanting to maximize what we're doing now, but really our eyes are also on 2025. So let's dive in, Nick, we got four ways to make this the best year yet with your retention marketing. Let's talk about way number one

Nick:

Today we're going to talk about doubling your email and SMS revenue in 2025. This channel is still alive and well, you just got to know how to use it, right? I know you're price spending more on ads than ever before. You're probably spending more on shipping than ever before. You're probably paying your employees more than ever before. So let's go ahead and maximize this to help bring some of that profit margin back into your business.

Brett:

And I think it's really important to note, and that can be a little bit depressing, Nick, if we look at, hey, you're paying more frauds in your before, more for shipping and cost of goods, more for your team, but that's the way business goes, right? It's never going to get cheaper in most cases for most of your business. And so email can be a great adjuster, it can be just a very effective lever to pull to dial up your profits and your business. And I think a lot of brands are just missing out on all the opportunity that's in front of them as it pertains to email.

Nick:

The last leg of that was you should be charging more than you've ever charged before. So toss that on top of everything else. So get those margins back by up and those prices on the site. Absolutely.

First thing you got to do before anything else is just get organized within your business. You want to make sure email and SMS tie in with everything seamlessly. And a couple of ways to do this, the main one is getting a content calendar laid out. You can use notion, you can use Google Calendar, you can use Google Sheet, you can use pen and paper, whatever works for you, but just make sure you have a full picture of everything that's about to happen within your brand. Blog posts, social media posts, product launches, any new ad initiatives. I think of those email and SMS is tied in as well.

Brett:

Yeah. And where do you think most brands fall short here? So you've got a unique perspective, Nick. You audit dozens of Klaviyo accounts every year for some pretty big brands that we talk to. And what are some of issues or the misses that you see when you're auditing accounts as it pertains to being organized?

Nick:

They stay too siloed. The different marketing efforts that a brand could be doing. Sometimes if it's an owner running their own business doing everything, they have all that tracked in their head and they don't necessarily have to have this set up. But the more complex your brand is, you have someone running Facebook, someone running email, someone running your website. You got to make sure everyone's communicating with each other to make sure everyone's aligned and on the same page. And the next thing is getting ahead of the game. A lot of things seem to be very last minute for the brands that I audit, it's like, Hey, this is going out tomorrow. I'm going to get it done tomorrow morning. So it's ready to go, which the more of a heads up that you can give yourself and more of a headstart, the more seamless it'll be when something actually goes live.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really important to note that the structures in the systems and the marketing calendars you had in place at $2 million in revenue are not the same as when you're $10 million in revenue. And the structure you have in place when you're 10 million in revenue is not the same as what you'll need when you're 50 million in revenue or beyond. And I think it's really important to note that this is not just about working smarter, right? We don't work five times harder to go from two to 10 million or 10 times harder than that to go to a hundred million. It's more about getting the right systems, the right communication processes in place, maybe partnering with the right agencies. Quick plug to Nick Flynn and the email team. But yeah, it's about getting organized because this cannot just live in your head as the entrepreneur operator. You got to get your teams in sync.

And yeah, we definitely see this. We have a unique perspective because running Google and YouTube and running Amazon, running email for a lot of brands. And so we see the need to coordinate even within our teams, but a lot of brands are missing that. So any practical tips there? I know you laid out a couple of tools and I know your perspective. My perspective is tools are just tools. Whatever you use, whatever works for you is the best tool. But any tips or tricks to make those tools effective or to make marketing calendars a reality,

Nick:

Start easy. Start with Google Sheets, get that free version up and running before you go into some complex page software. Utilize that free one. You can get a simple dashboard set up and the perfect example would be, we're diving into black Friday this week, so let's pretend you sent out an email saying 20% offsite wide, come and get it. They go to your website, they enter the code hopefully and they check out. But now imagine if your website had the banner that said 20% off the product page is also mentioned that they're posting on social media organically on your stories, getting people to go to the site. And then also your paid ads are also mentioned that 20% off sale, that way if someone's browsing on social, they're going to end up on your site and get reinforced and they're getting the same message across everything. You don't want it to be disjointed.

Brett:

Yes, it's really great where everything is communicating the same thing makes a ton of sense. And so you talk about the calendar, but also KPI tracking and this is something that you do internally for all OMG clients and we can actually look and see all our clients together and see who's really performing, who's lagging, things like that. What are some of the things you recommend getting on that calendar, and then what are the KPIs that you're recommending? We track,

Nick:

Again, keep it simple and straightforward here. Let's say you have eight campaigns lined up for the upcoming month. Those are eight unique emails going out, set up four unique AB tests you want to run for these campaigns. And that way you can use the learning from those for your future campaigns and add that same learning into your flow, all those flows you have up and running. So let's say it's almost unrealistic to keep AB testing every campaign. You got to get some normal ones out there as well just for the sake of the time if it takes a, set them up. So we have four broad tests within those eight campaigns. I just sent out an email today actually showing off one of our recent AB tests and the analogy I used was, if you're a shoe brand and you have a shoe launch coming up, I want some drastic AB tests in here. So I want to have show them the shoe and that variation one of the email V two that your AB testing, don't show them the shoe on one side. Hey, if we show it to them, they're going to like it. They're going to go to the site and buy it on the other side. If you don't show it to them within the email and you make them click through to your website to actually see it, they're getting targeted with a pixel, they're going to hit with all of your flows. Now in the future for all of your future campaigns and the launches for your new shoes, do you want to show it to them or not?

Brett:

Yeah, it's so great. So building in, we can't test everything because done is better than perfect. And if we strive for perfection in everything we do, you're just going to do less stuff and you're going to likely be less effective. So in eight campaigns, yeah, maybe we're running four ab tests. I really like looking at that. We're tracking our KPIs and then that's informing our next round of tests, our next round of campaigns. Super, super smart. Now I believe that kind of leads into one of the next big things to double your results, and that's bigger AB tests, right Nick? So maybe we talk about that next. I think that's a natural tie in to what we just discussed

Nick:

A hundred percent. A lot of times when I'm hopping into accounts and giving some audits, giving some recommendation, as I'm looking through the campaigns or the flows, the AB tests that are set up are two different subject lines that are pretty similar to each other. And the hard part there

Brett:

Is do we want to say big, what's your takeaway at big sale? Or do we want to say huge sale? Let's test big versus huge.

Nick:

And it's like a 0.2% difference. Everything looks the same and you don't actually learn anything from it. So have these broad tests. I'll go back to that shoe example. Within the imagery, should you be showing the shoe by itself? That way you can see the details, you can get a little bit more of an up close look or should you be featuring models wearing the shoes within the emails? Then you can see what it looks like on a person. You can get the outfit inspiration going on, have these broad tests within your campaigns and then transfer that data. I like about three days to pass by to get a fair gauge of enough people have gotten it clicked through and purchased at that point, three days afterwards, pull that data from Klaviyo into your centralized dashboard. That way as you're making your next upcoming campaigns, you can reference all those AB tests from the last one all in one spot. So you can say, okay, what worked in the past and what should I do differently?

Brett:

How do you work through that and determine what should we test or what should we not test? Because there's this old adage, which I think is really false and counterproductive, where it's like you should AB test everything, test everything in your business. And that's just not practical. And I remember the old example in internet marketing 1.0 was like, test the color of your button. Is the green button better or an orange button better? And just see, and that's the kind of stuff they're generally speaking does not yield wins, but how do you decide what to test? I do think in some cases subject line testing does make a lot of sense, but how are you determining, okay, these are the elements that we think are going to move the needle. Let's do an AB test here and let's then get our learnings.

Nick:

So we'll have a broad theory to start with. We'll work with the brand owners, run some different theories or ideas by them, make sure they're on board with it, and then we will run with it from there. And afterwards we'll look at the data to make sure there was enough of a difference between the two of them. For example, for one brand that we just started working with, we had a two x increase on their campaigns. We switched to one test and the test was, and had been using these links on the website that automatically took you to the cart with the product already added to it. So on that logic, hey, let them click on this product, it'll take 'em to the cart automatically and they can easily check out with less clicks. I a hundred percent see the logic there. But instead we took them to the product page to see, hey, how does that compare to taking 'em to the cart?

And that product page brought in twice as much revenue than taking 'em directly to the cart with the yeah, literally a two XI was surprised. It's crazy. And the difference I can see there is the people who haven't brought this product yet, bought this product yet, it's giving 'em a lot more information on that product page. If there's any kind of other callouts like that free shipping threshold of the money back guarantee or the product specs or if there's an upsell process after they add it to the cart. All that was getting skipped by taking 'em directly to checkout.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really great. And then I think part of this Nick is looking at, hey, what are our core metrics and where are we maybe off a little bit? So maybe you look at performance historically and you think click-through rate is a little bit low, right? We're not getting as many people as I would expect to click through on this email. So that's when you look at, well, what if I do something radical and not show them the shoe? What if I just make it all about kind of intrigue or we're just making them curious? And so we're using curiosity as a tactic to get them to click. Or maybe in this case you're looking at it and you're saying, okay, a lot of people are clicking and we've certainly made it convenient for them to check out, but fewer people than I would expect are actually converting. So why are they not converting? Well, they're probably not converting because they're not convinced or because they need more information or because of some of the reasons. So yeah, let's change the page we're sending them to and see if that makes a difference. So I really like that. I think you've got to look at the data from the data form a hypothesis from the hypothesis then or thesis, then you create the AB test and then you take your learnings and you go from there. It's really, really smart.

Nick:

And when you're organized, you can let some of this stuff play out. A lot of the times, if you're last minute and you watch that shoe, you're going to say, shoe's live, come and get it in the subject line. Picture of shoe is here, come and get it. That's you. Don't take you. Exactly. Yeah, you're rushing it. You're trying to get these sales up. So with that curiosity thing that you mentioned, I won't even tell them what we just did. So for the AB test that I sent out an email for earlier today, I said, Hey, this campaign at two x, the client's revenue and this campaign, because we ran a test, if you want to see what that test was apply to me, I'll give you all the juicy details. And that way for all of the potential clients out there, I've now peaked their curiosity. I'm now going to get that conversation started and I can send them a more in-depth breakdown of those details.

Brett:

That's great. And in that case, maybe you'll get fewer people responding than maybe would've just clicked or something. But in this case you're like, let's see if we can get more interactions, let's see if we can get more conversations going. And that was kind of the goal. So really smart. Love that. Any other tips on bigger AB tests before we move on to the next way to double your results?

Nick:

Yeah, this one actually just started using recently. I'm sure a lot of you out there started using AI chat GBT and clog to help with your email campaign creation. And instead of me feeding it the two ideas I wanted to test out like, hey, write this campaign twice, focus on urgency for one and focus on the vegan aspect of our brand for the other. Instead of doing something like that, I would say, give me four unique value props. Write four campaigns for it. And then I kind of picked two that I think could work well. So instead of you coming up with the tests, two tests, use AI to help you with that.

Brett:

Yeah, lean on ai, man. AI should be your primary research assistant test assistant. You should start using it and everything. And quick plug for another episode that I did episode with Russ Henneberry on how to use AI to improve your marketing results. I've already gotten tremendous feedback on that episode, so go back and check that out. So alright, the two ways we've talked about so far to double your email results, one, get organized, two bigger AB tests. What's next?

Nick:

You got to be got to be unique as a brand. Get rid of all the default stuff that you see in Klaviyo. That's the lazy way out and it's not going to have a good impact for your brand. You left this behind how many different brands are using that because the default Klaviyo subject line, get rid of that. You left this behind and really lean into your brand voice as some products are becoming more of a commodity. There's a lot of people selling hats out there, there's a lot of people selling shirts. What can you do to help your brand stand out, lean on your strong suits.

Brett:

Examples there examples of how do you weave personality brand, how do you weave that into your marketing?

Nick:

So within those subject lines, keep them focused on the products that you are selling. If you are a camping brand and instead of your abandoned cart email saying You left this behind every other brand is doing, say going camping soon. Now in the inbox, I'm like, oh yeah, I am going camping soon. That's why I was looking at the tent. I should probably go buy that now so it can be here in time for my trip. Small things like that can help you stand out. You can develop your brand voice, how you're talking to people on social media. You don't have to have a separate voice. I feel like people default to professionalism when it comes to writing emails. I'm not sure why. It'll be fun and goofy and people will engage with them on social. And then when it comes to writing these emails, they kind of just go back to these safe defaults and they're not leaning into it. So figure out what your brand voice is or what you want it to be and make sure it's the same across all the platforms you're promoting yourself on.

Brett:

It's really good advice. I don't know why we sometimes lean into more formal communications when we get into email marketing, but in general it doesn't work, right? You do want that same voice, that same if it's whimsical or fun on social, use that in email. If it's a little bit irreverent and funny in social, use that in email if it's driven and in your face and performance. If you're like a sports brand or something, use that in email. I really like that advice. Don't shift the tone of your messaging just to fit some idea you have about what email marketing should be. You be unique, stand out. Where should someone look? How should they evaluate what's going on in their account to understand, hey, these are the areas where I'm just boilerplate copying what Klaviyo recommends versus where am I being me?

Nick:

So you can check into your flows. I would say look at those first. See what the current flow setup is, and you can look at your history of changes and see what was the original subject line here and what did I end up changing that to? Did I play it safe and stick to it? One of the best campaigns I ever sent out was for a cat brand and the subject line, I just mushed my keyboard and I just smashed my fingers on it. So the subject line made zero sense. When they opened that email, it was, sorry, my cat was walking across while I was trying to type this, but come check out this thing that we just launched. Dude, it's so good. And they got a ton of replies because they're a cat brand, they're fun, they're playful. A lot of the owners appreciated that. And now it makes sense. Stand out.

Brett:

We could all, if you're a cat lover, whichever one on your email list was, they've all had their cat walk across their keyboard that immediately endears them to you. It's like, yes, we're cat owners. That's what happens. And what a fun email and what a bizarre subject line, right? You're looking through your list of subject lines like, hey, just following up and our event next Tuesday and blah blah, blah. And then you just see the string of letters, the string of nonsense that you pretty much have to click on.

Nick:

Yeah, I mushed it and it didn't look random enough, so I had to do a couple to make it look random enough.

Brett:

That is awesome. That is awesome. Okay, cool. So we've got three ways to double our email here. We're getting organized, we're running bigger AB tests, we're being unique to us, we're being our brand. We're not being boilerplate. What's number four?

Nick:

This one might be the most impactful, so maybe we should have started with it. But hey, if you're hanging around this long, then you're in for a treat. The last one here, if you have not leaned into this yet, I strongly recommend that you do in 2025. And I'm talking about SMS as the email providers, the inboxes are getting more and more strict with who they are, letting into that main inbox and not sending to the promo tab even within Klaviyo, they're recommending now you stick to that 30 day engaged audience. It's going to be more and more important to own more of your customer's information, know their email, know their SMS, know their address, get them pixeled on your site too. And SMS is one that you can control because you know that they're going to see the text message whenever it comes through. You're not guaranteed that they're going to see the email when it comes

Brett:

Through.

Nick:

The best way to get started with this, I know it's kind of intimidating. There's new rules and regulations and I don't want to annoy people. There's a lot of pushback that I'll get when I'm recommending this. The best way to get started is adding the SMS signup as an optional step within your pop-up. Instantly. Some people are going to be comfortable with that and give you the number off the bat. Add it in a checkout as well. Another optional thing. That way people are opting in to hear from you because they wanted that discount that you offer them on that pop-up and they actually like your brand because they're buying from you. So you get this nice warm audience to start with. That's the first two steps and start building up your list from there.

Brett:

And do you recommend sometimes offering like, Hey, for the biggest discounts or the best deals maybe is a way you want to word it or for to find out first about new releases, big drops, big events, whatever. Give us your phone number as well. Give us your mobile. Do you deploy that tactic?

Nick:

There's three main tactics that we'll use the escalated discount. So hey, 10% off of your email, the next step they see 15% off a phone number. Sure, why not? Let's save a little bit extra money. The next one is giving them that exclusive early access. And what's nice about this step is you can also target your current email subscribers. So if you have an upcoming launch coming out, a lot of times we're hiding the popups from everyone. So either popups from all of our current email subscribers because we don't want them to see this 10% discount again. So you make a new one for your upcoming drop coming out December 1st, sign up to be the first to know about our upcoming drop. December 1st. Put your phone number here. That way all those email subscribers who you already have are going to see this pop up as well.

Brett:

It's really smart and could not agree more. Email is going to run into more and new issues as we go. Mailboxes, inboxes are full, things like that. It's still going to be a relevant channel for the foreseeable future and beyond. But you got to add SMS, and I know a lot of people have resisted a surprising number of quality brands have resisted, delayed, maybe halfheartedly tried and abandoned SMS marketing, but if you're not running it and not running it effectively, you are leaving so much money on the table. In fact, if you can just kind of, and I know this is putting you on the spot a little bit, Nick, but when we add SMS to our email clients, what kind of lift do we often see on the retention side of marketing?

Nick:

It's funny because as we add it and it gets more popular, more and more people are taking us up on those SMS offers compared to some of the email ones. So it's almost becoming more popular. A reasonable split between the two channels is like 80% email, 20% of revenue coming from out of those. So if you have 30% coming from email and SMS combined, about 24% of that will be coming from email. About 6% from SMS. So if you're doing a hundred KA month right now, if you fire up SMS, you could probably expect to lift about five to 10 KA month.

Brett:

Love it. Love it. Really, really powerful. So okay, let's do this, Nick. We've got about two minutes left in the pod or something like that. If you had to rapid fire quickly come up with two additional ways to double your email results in 2025, what would they be?

Nick:

Two extra ways. They're getting a little bonus here, aren't they? Bonus? First one I would say is you need an air horn bonus. I would say dive into segmentation and let people hear from you on a very specific level. Easiest one is past customers versus current customers. That's an easy segment to break off. Talk to your current customers differently than you're talking to people who have never purchased from you before. Or if you have a hero product, people who have not gotten that hero product yet, try to sell them on it because it's their most popular option that they've avoided up to this point. And anyone who has purchased your hero product, cross-sell them on the other lineup. Even call out like, Hey, if you love the running shoe, try out these socks as well.

Brett:

Better segmentation. I love it. All right, one more. Make it quick.

Nick:

After you get deep with that segmentation, you want to focus on mobile first. A lot of people are on their phones a lot more than last year. Even more are going to be on next year. So just double check, triple check that everything that you're sending out through email or through SMS just looks good on their phone.

Brett:

Mobile first. Love it. So Nick, I know there's going to be a lot of people listening or watching to this that think, okay, I'm likely missing something. I'm missing opportunities. There's more I could be tapping into more I could be doing. And they may be saying to themselves, Hey, it's time that I talked to a pro, Simon that I talked to mg. I want Nick Flint to look at my email setup. What can we do for people, those who want to upgrade their email and SMS approach, what can we do for them?

Nick:

We have this nice little checklist that we put together. It's actually the top test that you could be running. I know it was one of the first things we focused on today is those AB tests. And you were asking what specific ones can they run? We knocked out 50 of the biggest AB tests that we've ever done, put it onto a spreadsheet. We can give you that for the price of $0, $0. Just hit me up through email, nick@omgcommerce.com, and I'll go ahead and send you that full checklist, free of charge.

Brett:

Love it. And then we're also happy to dig in, audit your account for qualifying brands. We can get in there, show you what you're missing, show you exactly what we would do for you to take your results up a notch. And hey, I know just from talking to dozens and dozens of brands, I'm very connected, dozen agency owners. Profitability is hard, right? The D two C game, the retail game in general is hard. And so you need email and SMS to be firing on all cylinders for you to reach your profitability targets. And hey, maybe you can go loan and that's the perfect fit for you. And if so, that's awesome. Hopefully Nick just gave you a couple of nuggets that you can use to supercharge your results. But if not, then we'd love to chat. And so reach out to us, omg commerce.com, click on the let's chat button or let's talk or whatever it says, I dunno. And then we'll go from there. Or email Nick directly, nick@omgcommerce.com. Nick Flint, ladies and gentlemen, Nick SuperPhone as always, thanks for coming on, man.

Nick:

I'll go ahead and hit the outro button here. Bye.

Brett:

We got to add that. That's so good. So appreciate it, Nick Golden as always. And also as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us that review on iTunes. If you've not done that, let know what you'd like to hear more of on the show. We'd love your feedback. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

In this fascinating episode, beauty industry veteran Carey Grange shares invaluable insights from her journey building major brands like Proactiv, Murad, and numerous other successful beauty and wellness companies. From the early days of infomercials to today's digital landscape, Carey reveals how the fundamental principles of effective performance marketing remain unchanged—and how modern brands can leverage these principles to drive growth across multiple channels while building lasting brand value.

Key Topics Covered:

• The essential elements of successful performance marketing campaigns, including authentic founder stories, compelling transformation narratives, and the critical role of social proof—and why these elements are more relevant than ever in today's digital landscape.
• Why channel strategy matters: How Murad used infomercials to become the #1 clinical skincare brand in Sephora and Ulta, and what this teaches us about modern omnichannel growth.
• The truth about value creation: Why discounting isn't necessary and how to build real value propositions that resonate with customers and protect your brand.
• The importance of constant testing and innovation: Why successful brands allocate 10-20% of their budget to experimental marketing, and how this "slush fund" approach drives long-term growth.

This episode is packed with actionable insights for any brand looking to scale through performance marketing while building lasting brand value in today's competitive landscape.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(08:59) Lessons From Carey’s Time At Murad

(20:41) Elements Of A Good Ad

(42:11) Always Be Testing 

(45:20) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Carey Grange
• Growth Envy Marketing 
• Guthy-Renker
• Nestle
• Proactiv
• Meaningful Beauty
• Crepe Erase
• WEN by Chad Dean
• IT Cosmetics
• Murad
• Sephora
• Ulta
• Bare Minerals
• Boom By Cindy Joesph
• Ezra Firestone
• Flex Seal
• Ozempic 
• How OMG Commerce Throttled BOOM! Cosmetics to a $5m Per Year Brand on Amazon

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

---

Transcript:

Carey:

You might need to be on Amazon as much as you don't want to because your competitors are going to draft off your awareness and be there anyway. B, it's where customers are going to get reviews, and C, it's a built-in trust element.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we are talking about literally one of my favorite topics in all of marketing. We're talking about brand building through performance marketing. So I think historically people view those as two separate buckets, two separate worlds, two separate mind spaces. Am I building a brand and creating awareness or am I doing something that's performance driven, measurable, tangible, roas, CPA, things like that. But here's the deal. I think the two are not at odds with each other. I think they go hand in hand. And so if we think about what is building a brand other than driving demand for your product, allowing you to maintain prices, to build a following brand building allows you to expand your product line. It creates so many opportunities for you.

And performance marketing is really just marketing that gets people to take action and take action relatively quickly. And so my guest today is a pro in this space. She comes from the infomercial world, the direct response TV world, and she's really connected with so many great brands, CPG and other categories, and really few people understand brand building the way she does. And so my guest today is Carey Grange and she is the chief brand strategist for growth in the marketing. And we're going to get to hear some war stories, some good stories of brand building and performance marketing and really some lessons and some things that have always been true in marketing, how those apply to today's landscape. It's going to be a ton of fun. And so with that intro, Carey Grange, how's it going? And welcome to the show.

Carey:

Hi. Hi Brett. Well thanks first of all for having me here. I'm super excited to be here. And I also love talking about building brands through performance marketing. And that's kind of been my background since the beginning of my career. Pretty niche to the beauty space and the wellness space almost exclusively for CPG. But yeah, really working with brands that are tasked with driving omnichannel growth and finding new ways to intersect technology and media with where audiences are consuming content and find the financial utility in that. And that's actually how I see performance marketing as just a delivery vehicle for your brand message and one that generates an ROI be quite

Brett:

Efficient. And that allows it to be scalable, right? If it delivers a measurable, it delivers an ROI allows it to be scalable and yeah, love that framing. So I want people to get your background just a little bit, and then we're going to talk about some strategies and some tactics here that are very applicable for today. So you guys started in the infomercial space. What was that like and why did you get into that space?

Carey:

Yeah, well, it's great. I totally accidentally got into the infomercial space. I actually started my career at Guthy Ranker as a marketing coordinator, and it was the nineties and it was shortly after the deregulation of commercial advertising. And so people were able to do direct to consumer marketing and build that long form infomercial format. And it was the wild wild west, and it was the wild wild west, I think similar to the wild wild west that we're living in today as media continues to change. And so with that, it can be really overwhelming and intimidating and messy, but there's also a lot of opportunities. And so I think for those people who are naturally curious and can figure out how to find the utility in that media to reach audiences and build brand and generate revenue, they're the winners. And so Guthy Ranker, they were pioneers in using long form marketing to build brands.

And I like to say, in fact, I started, I was on the inaugural proactive team, which is like a mega brand, and it sold for a significant multiple to Nestle ultimately. But it didn't start that way. It started as a scrappy brand that was just on infomercial. There wasn't even an e-commerce component to it in the beginning. And so I like to say that became really an accidental brand because we had spent so much TV media on it with the sole intent of driving revenue, of acquiring customers and pulling them down an acquisition funnel and getting them to subscribe and to stick for as long as possible, and that was the objective. And then to find other brands that you could plug into that model.

Brett:

Yeah, it's super interesting because I think the proactive story where it was just strictly A-D-R-T-V play in the beginning, very similar to strictly D two C brands today. So your Shopify e-commerce brands that are just driving sales through Meta and Google and other places now expanding to other channels and then eventually wanting a big exit. I mean, that's really what Proactive did, but back in the day, pre Shopify and all that. So just as a bit of a frame of reference, so Gut the Ranker, if anybody's been in the director of marketing space, they know that name. They're the best of the best in the infomercial space. So you mentioned Proactive, that's one of their best known brands. What are the other brands that were part of the Guthy Riner family that will give people context?

Carey:

Yeah, I mean, the ones that I think people will know the best today would be Proactive Meaningful Beauty, which is Cindy Crawford's haircare Line Crepe Erase, which is a body line of products that deals with crepey skin for the aging woman when Haircare by Chaz Dean was another one. They had a partnership with IT cosmetics, they were part of that brand and had the exclusive direct to consumer distribution rights for that brand. Those are some pretty big ones that they're well known for. Yeah, it's such a good point. First of all, it was an incredible foundation to start there and to learn the industry from the ground up and to understand tracking and analytics and to even be like boots on the ground when you're adding a URL to a TV commercial for the very first time and gasping in fear over how are you going to do the attribution modeling? But we didn't even call

Brett:

It attribution

Carey:

Modeling. We didn't know what to call it yet. Will

Brett:

Anybody buy online? What are we going to do if they don't call in?

Carey:

Yeah, or no. The scarier part was will they buy online and how are we going to know the impact of our TV commercial? And it's exactly the dilemma that brands have today, which is what is the impact of our spend If we're spending over here, but we're getting the revenue over there, how do we know its impact? And so of course, again, that was before attribution modeling, but even today, attribution modeling is only so intelligent. Totally. And it becomes, you and I have talked about it before, it becomes increasingly complicated because the more fragmented media is, the more specialized each one of those channels are, the harder it is to keep all of those entities talking to each other and then to know how to look at those activities on a granular level, but then to understand how they're rolling up to your p and l ultimately, which is the objective of the brand owner, is to drive a healthy p and l. Totally.

Brett:

And it is one of those things that just the age old marketing question, how do we understand what's working? How much is it working? What's really driving growth? So what's driving incremental sales? What's more of a support medium? How does all this tie together? And I do think it's easier now than maybe it was in the early days, but I don't know, there's a lot of confusion. So we'll dive into attribution and some of those topics here just a little bit. One thing I would love to know, because you nailed it when you said, Hey, all of this has to feed into the p and l. And I think that's been one of the big resets in the D two C and e-commerce space is that pre pandemic, and certainly during the hypergrowth stage of the pandemic, when everybody was ordering online, it was like grow, grow, grow. We'll figure out profits later. It's going to happen, whatever to now, e-commerce brands know we have to be a real business. This all has to feed into a healthy p and l. And so marketing must drive business objectives. What are some of the things you learned in the infomercial space? I know those infomercial marketers or DR brands, they are dialed in. What are some of the principles you learned or some of the fundamentals you learned from a finance side p and l side

Carey:

And

Brett:

Make for a healthy DR business?

Carey:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I'd love to just step back a little bit and kind of frame it up in the context of where I probably spent the largest chunk of my career, which was actually at Murad. And the reason I bring that up is that was a true omnichannel business model. And I think that's what we're finding these pure play brands, like you were saying, that were launched during the pandemic. And really it was such an exciting time of entrepreneurialism. And as much as we see these unicorn moments of fast rise brands on TikTok and fast rise brands through Shopify and all these other areas, we've also seen a lot of brand failures because they don't understand how to run the business side of things. They don't know how to scale, and they reach that point of diminishing return. And so in fact, I read

Brett:

There's single channel, single source of new customer acquisition.

Carey:

When

Brett:

Something fundamentally shifts there, then they're in real trouble. And so there's also dangers to expanding channels and expanding customer acquisition channels. But

Carey:

Most of the successful brands

Brett:

We see are totally, most of the brands we see though are going multichannel or omnichannel. I do believe that's where you maximize value. And whether that's just to have a long sustaining profitable business or to have a successful exit, you got to be got to be more than just D two C. So probably D two C marketplace and retail or some combination thereof, hundred percent omnichannel brand. Go ahead.

Carey:

It's perfect because what you're trying to do is go, where is my customer? And so you're always looking for market

Brett:

Fit and how do they want to buy,

Carey:

Right? If you're building a brand, what's the market fit? So how do they want to buy? So if you're really being customer centric, then that will drive your media strategy, that will drive your distribution strategy. And so often you're right that singular channel is not enough, and that's actually not how customers are buying. And so one of the risks then is you are spending money and creating category awareness and brand awareness that you're not actually picking up then where your customers are making purchase decisions and actually making that purchase. And your competition will draft off of that and pick that up, those clever marketers. So if your objective is, Hey, I just want to sell some stuff through this channel that I'm really good at, cool. But if you want to build a brand and really grow something and scale it as much as you can, which is usually the name of the game of the people that I deal with, and I imagine the clients that you bring into OMG commerce, then you really are looking at an omnichannel strategy.

And then you want to go, okay, what are my channels of distribution and how is the media that I'm spending a being spent as efficiently as possible? But by efficient, I mean it's returning an investment on that direct spend, but it's also pushing the sell through in all of our other channels because it's an all ships rise. And so that's why I'd like to kind of joke about the accidental brand build of proactive, the brand building at as accidental. It was actually quite strategic. And so I often like to talk about brands are really good at knowing their what, this is my product. And a lot of innovators are so great at that, and they're great at knowing why I wanted to develop this, but what's missing is how am I now going to build this business? And that's where strategy comes in. And I have noticed that in today's marketplace, a lot of brands are playing in tactics.

I need to be on YouTube, I need to be on Amazon, I need to be in meta, I need to have social organic, I need, and there's all of these activities happening on, and it gives the illusion of growth, but the reality is it can lead to bloated infrastructures, a bunch of cross channel conflict, and ultimately an impotent marketing spend that isn't having impact, that isn't realizing the growth that you need. So at mrad, we went into infomercial as a strategy. And in fact, I was recruited specifically to launch an infomercial for the business, and it was kind of revolutionary at the time. And having come from Guthy Ranker, I was super excited because I had only worked on beauty brands at Guthy Ranker, and I thought, oh my God, I'm going to go work for a real beauty company in rad. They're in spas and salons, they're going into retail. Well, my counterparts were not as excited about me being there. I did not get a warm reception because the only people that wanted me there were the Mirad family members were Dr. Mrad and our CEO, Richard, his nephew. And so they hired me. So the rest of the

Brett:

Team see you as competition, or they just saw you as some kind of alien. What are you doing? We've got our stuff together.

Carey:

They saw me as the person who was going to denigrate the brand. How can you bring in this lowbrow cheesy format into our business? And so our

Brett:

Buyers are more sophisticated.

Carey:

Our

Brett:

Buyers will not respond to this low brow, low class, dr. Direct response type that

Carey:

Exactly, exactly. But the RADS were figure it out. I think what I did right in that situation and is a learning to apply to today's landscape too, is to then get really curious and understand why. So how could this potentially be an obstacle to your retail growth? And then how do we overcome that? And so in those days, production values for example, was a big part of it. So we had to be really careful not to have the cheesy bells and the whistles and the dings and the dot wacky stuff like the sound effects. It needed to be elegant and high end, but it also needed to do what an infomercial does. And what an infomercial does is or did, there're not as many. They're still out there. There's not as many of them anymore.

Brett:

Still out there.

Carey:

Still out there. They're still out there. But what they do is what we need today's performance media to do, which is to get your audience to stop. It's the thumb stop, it's the stop the scroll. It's to take action. If the TV's on in the background, it's to, Ooh, I'm listening to that headline. How do I stop, turn around, take notice and create need and then pull them down an acquisition funnel. So it's really, there's a lot of skill involved actually with getting an audience who's bombarded with information and a lot of external inputs to stop and say, oh, I'm curious about this. I want to learn more. I might need this. And then to actually get them to make a transaction is pretty powerful. So we needed to do creatives that did that, but that also were aligned with the brand message now in our omnichannel environment. So we had an infomercial, we had a website which was not optimized at all. And that's a whole nother story about how you build a D two C business from a technology and an infrastructure standpoint within a brand. It's a monstrous task, although much less expensive and easier to execute in today's landscape with

Brett:

So many open

Carey:

Source solutions. Easier for sure, for sure.

Brett:

I'm curious though, just real quick, why did the mirad want to do DR tv? So why did they want to do an infomercial? So I mean, their omnichannel, they're growing. Things are good, and their team didn't want it. Why did they want to do

Carey:

Infomercial? They had had an early experience with infomercial where the sales were just explosive, and so they really wanted to drive the growth of the brand period. They knew the value of it. So then what we were tasked with is going, well, what channels of distribution are we in? How do we support those channels of distribution while also making sure that this channel of distribution, which was the infomercial, which we looked at as a sales channel in that organization in addition to a marketing function. So it had a cross functionality. How do we make sure that it has all of the sales promotion and the elements that it needs to perform? And so that's what we set out to do, and we launched an infomercial and it was multifunctional in its benefits. It created brand awareness, it educated the customer. And actually, I am circling back to answer your initial question, which was, what did you learn that's relevant today? And that is what are those elements, right? It communicated on authentic founder story, which I'd say to this day is

Brett:

Still

Carey:

Powerful

Brett:

Today. Yeah,

Carey:

It's still powerful today, and it's a really powerful trust element, and that's what customers are looking for. It showed that we solved a problem. And in today's marketplace, again, people are looking to have their problems solved. So in our case, it was we were clearing acne, we were addressing hyperpigmentation on the skin, we were addressing fine lines and wrinkles. We were able to communicate a transformation benefit, which is if you use this, you'll get this result. So again, that could be shown through a problem solution, but transformation can also be shown through emotion, and that's the value of testimonials. So we were able to use testimonials, which in today's day and age is influencers and reviews.

Brett:

Yeah, UGC, totally.

Carey:

It's UGC, and it's your reviews. It's the social proof. So again, the infomercials have that social proof as part of it, but that again, is a really powerful trust element for customers. Oh, it worked for them, maybe it'll work for me. And that also had the function of that person then being able to communicate, here's how this changed my life. So it's one thing to just show a person with clear skin and you're like, okay, that looks efficacious. Maybe it'll work for me. But if you have a testimonial who now with great emotion is like, I feel beautiful. Again, I can go out with confidence. I went on a date. There's a transformation message that's quite powerful and is still powerful in today's media landscape. We were able to show the proof scientific claims, and I can kind of break down further what that formula is. But ultimately, it became a self-sustaining advertising vehicle that drove the overall growth of the mrad brand. And it drove significant sales for Sephora and Ulta placing us as the number one clinical skincare brand in both of those channels. And at the same time, it was in its own channel, quite profitable. And we were able to acquire customers. And it was great from a cashflow standpoint for us because, well, I should say from a margin standpoint, it was a tricky cashflow model because we would deficit finance the acquisition of our customers.

Brett:

Got

Carey:

It. But it's also a realtime collectible when you're selling direct to consumer, and it had better margin. We weren't

Brett:

Selling a wholesale cash right away, at least that initial sale.

So I do want to break down that form. I that'd be super valuable. I think it totally applies to today, but I think what's really important to point out here is that, yeah, you were running this infomercial. It was driving direct sales either on the phone or someone ordering online, which was kind of new-ish at that time, but then it was also driving tons of sales in Sephora and Ulta making you a top seller there. We see the same thing here, right? If you've got a killer YouTube campaign, meta campaign, you're doing something OTT or whatever, it's going to drive direct sales on your.com, but it's also going to create great lift on Amazon. If you're selling on Amazon, it's going to drive retail sales if you're doing that. And so yeah, these principles apply, but what are some of those elements? What's that formula look like?

Carey:

Yeah, well, so from rad, I actually went and ended up launching a beauty brands incubator, and Guthy Ranker ended up being mine and my partner's investment partners in the brand. So it was a Guthy Ranker beauty brand incubator. And when we would look at brands that we could acquire and do various different JV and licensing deal structures with, and we had a very specific, I guess, lens of what we would look for from these brands to be like, these are going to be powerful performance marketing brands. And it's what worked for us in the proactive days. It's what worked in murat. And it's what I see when we evaluate brands today. And I imagine the ones that you're seeing so effective with your business model of that YouTube top of funnel, and that you can then pull down that kind of acquisition funnel pushed to Amazon.

I imagine they have similar attributes. What I would say is they just happen at different times now, so it might be parsed out a little bit differently. So whereas an infomercial or a longer format might have all of these elements now, I would say, does the brand have these elements? And at what point in the customer journey do you bring these elements to the table? So I have my notes here. So the first one I already mentioned, which is that authentic founder story. And if you don't have a founder, can you have a sounding story? This product exists for these reasons. Are you able to communicate that? Because customers will resonate with that. It's a powerful trust element. It has to solve

Brett:

The problem. I want to give you a quick example here too. I think this illustrates the point nicely. We were just evaluating a pet brand. It's pet brand, actually quite a few people have heard of that are listening and they had some killer, funny, engaging multiple actors. You're laughing, you're watching, you see Kaz in the thing, and you're like, that's a great ad. They also had a very, very simple founder, just founder direct to camera, but this founder is passionate about cats and passionate about this product and how it helps cats. Very simple production quality. But I'm telling you, the CPA was very similar between that brand, that founder's story, simple low cost video, and some really high production value ads as well.

Carey:

I love that.

Brett:

I think the high production value price is a greater upside. It's probably more scalable, but man founder stories, they still work. Do not overlook them.

Carey:

I love the product so much. I bought the company message, right?

Brett:

Remember those from the

Carey:

Seventies and the eighties growing

Brett:

Up? I'm not just a hair club for men president,

Carey:

I'm also the

Brett:

Customer, whatever.

Carey:

Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. There's just such credibility behind it. I give this to my own children. I made this out of this need. And because of that, we believe you. It's a strong trust element. We think you've got our back. There's a real life person or a real life message behind it. Totally. We also know that purpose is really important for people. So again, in the absence of a founder story, if you can have a founding story, a reason for being, I think that's really important that, and if you don't have it, come up with one. And I'll say, we brought in brands that had really great technologies and we actually created a founding story behind it. We saw this need, we took our backgrounds, we've created it, and we're bringing it to you. So have that founding story. So smart, 100% smart, love it. And it gives you great storytelling about your brand. And that's ultimately what you're trying to do is that you want there to be a reason

Brett:

That's commercial is right. That's what a good ad is. It's a good story. It's storytelling for sure.

Carey:

It's what a good YouTube ad is. Actually, I was watching one of your YouTube trainings that it broke for commercial and it went to Chuck Norris's wife talking about this product that they developed that came out of her needs and his advocacy for her and staying by her fed. It was a great story. And now you're like, Ooh, what is it? I want to know more. Maybe it's great for me. Totally. So yeah,

Brett:

Love that.

Carey:

So

Brett:

Founder story, that's one element

Carey:

Solves a problem. It addresses a pain point. And the pain point could be something like, I have acne. I want to lose weight, I want to grow hair, I want to lose hair, I want to remove hair. Whatever it may be. What's that pain point? The other thing is it needs to be transformational, and that's either visual or emotionally, but it needs to be something you can communicate through your media. And maybe that's through users, maybe that's through celebrity endorsement. Maybe that's through your reviews, but ultimately, are you seeing lives transformed? I feel more confident. I feel more beautiful. I have more time with my children. I'm achieving financial freedom, whatever it may be. People aren't buying stuff. They're buying an outcome to make their life better. And so transformation is a really important emotional hook,

Brett:

And it's really transformation that you can see and feel, right? It's transformation that the buyer, the consumer can see and feel. And then it also has to be a transformation that you can convey in a way where people watching can see and feel it.

Carey:

Yeah, it's engaging and it's emotional. And I do think there's this subconscious attachment to your brand that forms as well, and a real positive brand affinity that comes with the transformation. It's inspiring. Proof is really important. Proof can come in a lot of different ways. Obviously befores and afters are really powerful scientific claims. Did we study? Is there a study behind an ingredient? Is there research? Is there, we put X amount of people on, this is a subjective claim, a hundred percent agree that they experienced X with this, but that proof, and again, you're probably not going to lead with proof and a thumb scroll, but if you're starting to pull them down a funnel funnel, make sure that you have that proof. Because again, these are all really powerful trust elements in your creatives. And then social proof. And we see now it's the old school infomercial, but it's the user generated content. It's the influencer, it's the reviews where people genuinely believe it's going to work for them. And so I don't think I need to beat the drum of social proof to this crowd. I think we all actually really understand the value of social proof in today's day and age. I think if anything, it's more how do we use that social proof now as part of our whole campaign. So

I like talking about those

Brett:

Stories. One thing I'll double click on there, which I think is important, is I remember when I was getting started in TV in the early two thousands, I would hear people say, oh, testimonials don't work. And now there's a little bit of a trend towards people saying, UGC doesn't work. And I think the only principle I would underscore there, or the only nuance there is that bad testimonials don't work and boring U GC doesn't work, but the real stuff, the stuff from real customers where they're conveying their story and their emotions, and you can feel the authenticity that works. Now, it worked 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and I think it will always work, right? It's just the lame,

Carey:

Boring system. It'll work. I would wager my house on it that it's important. And I think you raised a really good point. It's the quality of it. And I'll give you an example. We have in infomercials, we would test removing or on a website and other forms of creative, we would test moving different testimonials in and out. And sometimes a testimonial in and of itself, it can be a lever mover, a dial mover for a campaign, adding them or removing them. So I think you're right. And I think we're also living in a day and age again, where we put so much pressure on the immediate performance of our ads that if something doesn't work, we kind of make this sweeping judgment. This does not work.

Brett:

Exactly,

Carey:

Exactly.

Brett:

GC mashup, it didn't work. And you're like, well, yeah, but the

Carey:

SOC doesn't work

Brett:

Properly. Didn't run it. Yeah. Right?

Carey:

Yeah. And so strategically, the value and the value of working with agencies is you have to test not everything is going to work. And that's what traditional performance marketers do, is they're always testing and you never let rest on your laurels. Totally. You keep testing every

Brett:

Ad, every angle, everything you test eventually will stop working. So you always got to be finding the next thing. So you talked about social proof, other elements that you're looking for. Yep,

Carey:

Value, you just brought it up your offer a value proposition and value and offer too. Sometimes they're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Having a good offer is very important, and an offer can and will make or break your campaign. And I do believe offers need to be refreshed, but oftentimes withstanding between you and success is a really compelling offer. But a value proposition and value can come in a lot of different ways. And value is not synonymous with discounting. So I think, again, when you're in a world of offers and sales promotion, the first thing that a lot of rams do is they discount. And that's another fear of being in the performance marketing space, is they don't want to discount because again, they're afraid it's going to denigrate their retail brand, but discount and value are not the same. So how do you build up and create that value for your customer? And so that value,

Brett:

That's just really where the perceived benefit, the perceived benefit of the product outweighs the monetary cost. Right. What else would you say about value? How do we create value apart from discounting?

Carey:

Yeah. Well, value can come in different ways. So among them being, are you giving me more time in my day? There's value to that. Are you replacing multiple products that I'm already using with this single step? There's value to that. Is it highly concentrated? And I'm not, I can add water at home and I'm not paying these big heavy shipping fees, which is negatively impacting the environment. There's value to that. Do you have a give back program to someone else? Oh, that's really important to me. That makes me feel good about being part of the brand. Tom's Shoes one for one. There's value to that. So there's lots of ways to create value without discounting.

Brett:

Yeah, I wanted the shoes anyway, but now that I know I've got a little bit of philanthropy or I'm helping kids in need or something now that allows me to justify the purchase. So love that discussion on value. And I'm really glad you framed it, that it does not have to be a discount. It does not have to be coupons. You do not have to cheapen your brand, but you do have to create

Carey:

Value. You have to create value and then demo. And of course that's so great about a place like YouTube where you can show how the product works and just for whatever reason, what's coming to mind is, and some of your older viewers might remember Bare Essentials or Bare Minerals. It was color cosmetic brand, and it was a loose powder format, which was kind of different at the time. And they were experiencing high returns because customers didn't know how to use it and it was messy. And so in their ads, they would do the you swirl, tap buff Swirl, tap Buff. Well, by the time it got to the retail shelf, or even when they shift it to the customer, they understood how to use the product. And so demonstration is a really, I know how to use it, which means my compliance is going to be higher, which means my satisfaction in the product is going to be greater, which means I'm going to achieve better results, and I'm less likely to make a return or leave a negative review. So is there demonstration? And then of course, education and those can often be one and the same. So again, you might see maybe that's not necessarily on your leading media, but if you pull them down like a long scroll landing page, you might see some demonstration in there about here's how you use it. And that's really valuable.

Brett:

And we think that's a key component. If you're designing YouTube ad creatives, the demonstration piece is absolutely critical. I would say the same is true for Meta and TikTok as well. So yeah, to your point, if someone sees an action, I swirl Tap Buff, if that was

Carey:

Buff,

Brett:

That right?

Carey:

I can't believe that came. I was so old. But yeah,

Brett:

That was great. It was effective, but I remembered it. And that's not even my product type of thing. And so one, I think it makes it easier to say yes to the purchase because now I see, oh, this was pretty easy when we were running a boom by Cindy Joseph, when Ezra Firestone's brands, they had

Brett:

Boom

Brett:

Stick, which is kind of like a makeup stick that that could replace your whole makeup back. And so when they would do the demo, it's like, Hey, you choose one of these three sticks, you just apply it here, then you put it on your lips and the demo's super easy. You're like, that's it. That's all I have to do. And now I don't have to wear any other makeup if I don't want to. And so seeing that demonstration I think removes or reduces the buyer hesitation, helps you overcome objections, but then to your point, it ensures you use it properly. You're more satisfied with it. So more likely to leave a good review, less likely to return the product. And so demonstration is really valuable. And one thing I've heard, I'm curious your perspective on this, because I don't know that this fully applies to the beauty. I think it kind of doesn't, but I've heard Flex Seal, that's another example of start as an infomercial. Now it's become a bit of a brand like the spray on stuff that you can use to seal your pots around your house, your gutters or whatever. There's this concept of a magic demo where he

Brett:

Sprays

Brett:

Flex Seal on the bottom of his truck and then he drives it into water and it floats or whatever.

Carey:

I love a magic solo. Yeah, a visual hammer. We call those visual hammers. How are you showing visual hammers? Yeah, this is how it works.

Brett:

So you'll never use it in this capacity, but if it's good enough to do this, think what it will do for you just as you're sealing your pots or whatever.

Carey:

Oh my gosh, Oz. So how do you apply that is, yeah, I was going to say, Ozempic, what is $130 too much to spend on a weight loss product if you don't have five or 10 or more pounds to lose? So then you're like, oh my gosh, if Ozempic was the biggest audience for it was people who had more like five to 10 pounds to lose. Because if it's going to help someone lose 80 pounds, then it's going to help me get my last five off. So those extremes can be really, really powerful. But the Boone Stick is the perfect example. You guys did so many things right with that because there was a compelling, and I watched it, there was a compelling founder story, but then you did the other thing that's really important was they filled a white space, they weren't look, it was makeup and a stick.

Brett:

Brilliant.

Carey:

That doesn't exist already. So it was taking something that already exists. It's applying it in a way that, because the other piece is it needs to fit into someone's regular routine. Women apply makeup already. It hits an emotional pain point, which is I'm an older demographic, I have these concerns. I'm feeling older. I am looking older. No one's making anything for me. Traditional makeup is going to sit in my fine lines and wrinkles. No one's making anything for me.

Boom, stick to the rescue. It's simple. It fits into your routine. It's specifically formulated four fine lines and wrinkles, so it's not going to sit in there. Here's how you use it. Less is more. It's going to make you not look as age. Now you've hit my pain points. I have a founder story. You've demonstrated it. It's inclusive. You have a real broad demographic of users. And that's the other thing that's mission critical in today's day and age. So first of all, it was older women. You had, in addition to the founder who is Caucasian, you had an African American, you had an Asian, right? It was showing the range of skin tones that it worked for, and it was really representative of that customer. And then there was value because this is replacing all of those other things. You didn't have to discount it.

So I would say with that campaign, you crushed all of these things and through your channels of distribution, and it caught my attention 100%. And then the other thing that you brought up, so does it fill that white space for us? We were always looking for something that was replenishable. Can you get people into a continuity? And that might fit into the offer component and then the trust are there easy returns? So in addition to the founder story, which is a powerful trust element, and all of the things that we know to do about EasyPay, all of those things, a money back guarantee, are there easy returns? I think that's why channel strategy

Brett:

Is you're removing the risk, right? You're taking away the risk that a customer may perceive about making the purchase and just lowering the barrier to say yes.

Carey:

And my feeling is back in the olden days, that might come through easy returns and money back guarantee today that might determine your channel strategy, which is you might need to be on Amazon as much as you don't want to because your competitors are going to draft off your awareness and be there anyway. B, it's where customers are going to get reviews. And C, it's a built in trust element. I know I can return here. So there's the value and there's the convenience. So again, that's where channel strategy rolls into all of these attributes that I talked about.

Brett:

Yeah, really good point. And just to put a bow on the boom, my Cindy Joseph story there, or Boom, beauty is the brand now, but we helped them launch on Amazon a few years ago, and they were leaning heavy into Meta. We were running YouTube and Google. And so the new customer acquisition channels were on fire, but they were not on Amazon. Well, some other brands had kind of built up, launched on Amazon and were kind of squatting on the brand name of Boom.

Brett:

They were

Brett:

Just selling products capitalizing on that. So when we launched them on Boom, and there were headwinds and there were difficulties, and we did some ad strategies on Amazon. And so there was pretty comprehensive what we did there, but they went from zero to almost 6 million in sales on Amazon the first year. And

Brett:

That's incredible.

Carey:

It

Brett:

Did not cannibalize their core business. Now, I think a lot of that was just pent up demand. A lot of it was we opened up a new channel and we were able to grow that as a standalone as well. But yeah, you got to be thinking about these other channels. I know there are still some cases where it makes sense to not be on Amazon, but you've got to really think that through. For most brands. You got to be there.

Carey:

I think for most brands, you have to be there. It's a necessary evil for all of those reasons. And to your point, you're otherwise creating demand for your competition. And yeah, it's a bummer. And I feel the same way about paid search. You can put all of this effort into your meta advertising, into your YouTube advertising, and customers are still going to go to search. And if you're not buying your branded term, which is just frustrating, someone else will. So how do you keep owning that? And so again, that kind of goes back to the brand side of things is like, and you and I talked about this too, why I really value agency partnerships.

You need to really understand all of those variables, and you need to lean into the wisdom and the guidance and the experience in these respective channels that your agencies have, but also listen in terms of the education, in terms of what type of repetition do you need, where should you be taking risks, like going into an Amazon versus not fine tuning your marketing messaging, your offer, you're never going to hit it out of the gate ever. And then once you do fine tune it and nail it, you're going to have to keep updating that anyway. And so build into your budget and into your strategy and into your planning, that kind of slush fund and that time to always be learning and refining and testing. Because every time you do land on that magic mix, you kind of want to hit the gas and optimize that as much as possible while you're running that parallel path of getting the next thing going. It's a unicorn experience to nail it all at once. It's very rare. And so I think where a lot of brands miss is, again, this didn't work in this configuration, I'm out. It doesn't work. And the reality is, if you're in the ballpark, you can fine tune it and you can get it there, and you'll be able to scale your brand and drive total channel growth. 100%.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, it's really good. And so kind of those elements, if you've got them all, and you're still not quite there, it's not quite hitting your goals or your targets and you need to refine and maybe that the thumbs stop or the scroll stopper wasn't quite on point, or it's maybe you're telling the founder story, but it's missing an element, it's missing some emotion to it. Or maybe you've got UGC, but it's not the right UGC, or maybe you're showing some value, but it's not landing. And so I think that's where you got to test, you got to iterate, you got to get feedback from other people that are in your market.

Carey:

Totally.

Brett:

Elements are there. It should work. You just got to keep iterating. And so one thing I'll say, and we're bad out of time when it comes to having this slush fund or this test fund, I've heard different brands have different philosophies. Google called it for their employees, they call it the 20% time, Hey, do your core job, but then take 20% of your time and explore, do wild stuff, invent the next Gmail or the next other billion user product or whatever. I know some brands will say, Hey, we're going to take 10% of every channel's budget and we're going to try wild stuff. We're going to try just experimental. So because we're going to land on something, most of that will not work. We're going to occasionally land on something that will be a moonshot. And if you're not always testing something, eventually your core stuff's going to die, and then you're not going to have anything left. But any perspective on that slush fund or test budget or however you look at that?

Carey:

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. So I've looked at Slush fund a couple different ways. So one of them is when you have a working campaign, let's say at Rad,

We're humming, we've got all the channels going, there was always 10% of slush that was going toward newness. What else can we be testing, iterating, whatever in different environments? For example, when I was doing consulting work for Guthy Ranker, prior to us launching the incubator together, there was a resource allocation to innovation. And I got to be a part of that, which is we can't be competing for resources. We have these 100, 200, $400 million a year brand. We have a function-based organization. So good luck if you're trying to innovate and create new. And ultimately, that's how we ended up investing in the incubator they invested in. The incubator that I ended up running with my business partner was because they realized it's a very different budget, skillset, mindset, resource allocation, than what's required to run your core brand. And so some brands will do it within their company, and I've seen a lot of companies actually just create full on incubator environments. If you can create an incubator environment within your company, cool. But I like that 20% idea, which is just always facilitating that new creativity. And what's great about that is what you're learning there, you then apply to the core business. And so I like that. Always,

Brett:

Always be learning, even so it doesn't totally hit. You'll almost always learn something. There'll be some happy accidents. There'll be the accidental brand or the accidental strategy that, Hey, we were testing this, we learned something else. And so you think you've always got to be

Carey:

Testing 20% somewhere.

That's it. And I know we have to go, but that's the thing. If you're not always learning, you're missing the next thing that's happening and things are moving so quickly. And so again, that's where your agency partnership is mission critical, because when you're busy running your brand, you just can't have your finger on the pulse of how technology is evolving. What you do know is what your business objectives are and who your customer is, and what your brand is and what you stand for. And then you can partner with your agency on those strategies and what levers you're going to pull to roll up to that p and l objective.

Brett:

And for the record, I did not pay Carey to throw in those plugs for working with your agency, but we both just believe it's true, right? For the right brand. Some brands do well with in-house teams. I think that requires another skillset, and it's really hard, and it probably fits for a certain large size brand, but man, lean on your agencies, lean on your agencies because they do bring a wealth of knowledge.

Carey:

I credit some of my agencies over the tenure of my career with the success of some pretty big campaigns, it would be arrogant to suggest that I did it all by myself. I made it's 100% of team effort. And so lean into the skills, the expertise, the passion of those outsourced solutions. And from a p and l management standpoint, oftentimes those costs then can be variable to your fixed expense. So that's

Brett:

A plus

Carey:

Too.

Brett:

Awesome. Carey Grange, ladies and gentlemen, chief Brand Strateg, growth Envy Marketing. So if you're listening to this and you're like, dang, I need some strategic help, some brand growth help, I need someone like Carey to help tie things together for me. How can people get in touch with you, Carey, and what's the best way for them to start that dialogue?

Carey:

Oh my gosh, thank you. I mean, first of all, I'm on LinkedIn like everyone else, so my name is probably spelled on here somewhere, C-A-R-E-Y, Carey Grange, and growth envy marketing.com is our website. And yeah, we love working with founder brands. We love working with startups. I love working with legacy brands who are looking to inject newness and life and growth into an existing brand without losing the essence of who they are. So what's that evolution and how can you use performance marketing to drive brand growth? And that's typically to position you for some type of an exit or event. And so I love working with brands too, on then how are we driving sales and getting that healthy EBITDA and building that right, the right brand strategies, but also the right infrastructure strategies and business strategies around that. So come to our website. We'd love to talk with you,

Brett:

And I'll link to in the show notes, but it's Carey Grange, C-A-R-E-Y-G-R-A-N-G-E. So check her out. I feel like Carey, we're just getting started. I could talk to you for another several hours about this. And so we'll have to schedule round two in the near future. But thank you so much for your time. Tons of fun.

Carey:

Would love it. Thanks for including me.

Brett:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us that review on iTunes. If you've not done so, share this episode with a friend who might find it valuable. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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‍

Learn the secrets behind securing free press coverage for eCommerce brands. Contrary to popular belief, free PR isn’t reserved only for companies that hire expensive PR agencies. Whether you're launching a new product or looking to boost your brand's visibility, this episode is packed with actionable insights that could make all of your other marketing efforts better.

Key topics covered:

• The CPR (Credibility, Point of View, Relevance) method: A foolproof framework for crafting compelling pitches that grab journalists' attention.
• How to approach gift guide pitches and maximize your chances of inclusion in coveted holiday roundups.
• Strategies for leveraging product launches and press releases to create buzz and secure media coverage.
• Tips for building and nurturing relationships with journalists, including how to use email tracking and follow-up techniques.
• Cost-effective tools and resources for managing your own PR efforts, even without prior experience or agency support.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn how you can take control of your brand's narrative and secure valuable media coverage without breaking the bank. Gloria's practical advice and insider tips will empower you to become your brand's best advocate and unlock the untapped potential of PR for your eCommerce brand.

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Chapters: 

(00:00) Introduction 

(03:29) From Diplomat to PR

(08:00) PR Basics

(13:00) Gift Guides

(16:33) Crafting Your Pitch

(23:11) Building Media Relationships

(24:32) Finding Your Media Outlet

(27:27) Product Launches

(32:13) Founder Stories

(33:16) Case Studies

(34:26) Follow-Up Tips

(36:26) Tools & Resources

(37:30) Conclusion

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Show Notes:

• Gloria Chou
• Gloria Chou PR
• Small Business PR Podcast
• Free PR Masterclass

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Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript:

Gloria:

How can we disrupt that industry? Because here's the thing, if you keep paying an agency, the moment you stop paying them, they walk away with the relationships.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we're talking about a topic that I don't believe we've ever discussed on the podcast before, but it has tons of potential and I believe it's a missed opportunity for you, and that is pr, getting free press for your brand, for your product launches, and how you can leverage all of that to your benefit. Now, as you know, listening into the pod, I'm a paid ads guy. I love YouTube, I love Google, I love meta, Amazon, all of that works. All that is critical. But the best brands I know, the brands that truly scale and the brands that maintain that growth always have something other than paid ads working for them. It's either organic rankings or it's virality and lots of people just naturally talking about them or it's pr. And so can't wait to dive into this topic I have with me, Gloria Chou from Gloria Chou PR and the host of Small Business PR podcast. She's a wealth of knowledge. She's got a unique story and she's going to show you how to leverage PR for growth for your brand. And so with that, Gloria Chou, ladies and gentlemen, Gloria, how's it going? And welcome to the show.

Gloria:

Hey, thanks for having me. It's good. It's getting cold here in Brooklyn, so the seasons are changing.

Brett:

I love it. I appreciate all seasons now of kind of like, Hey, let's enjoy every aspect of life. Don't like it as much when it's a hundred degrees in the Midwest and humid. Not my F, but dude, when it starts to cool off, I just get fired up. I got more energy, I feel more alive. So yep, I'm here for it. And you're in Brooklyn. One of my favorite spots, I'll actually be there in a few weeks, but what do you love so much about Brooklyn? Are you a long time Brooklyn resident?

Gloria:

So I'm actually from la. I was born and raised in la. I also grew up a little bit in Beijing where my mom lives. So I speak Chinese. I've been in New York now for about 10 years, on and off. Interestingly enough, previously to this, I was a US diplomat, so I worked abroad in Canada and also one year in Washington dc but I love New York. It's my sole home. It's not the highest quality of life, we all know that. But the diversity here is unmatched and I love it. I don't think it's our forever home. My husband's from Italy, so I think eventually we'll move to Europe, but we got a few good years left here.

Brett:

That's great. Yeah, the energy, the cultural diversity, the restaurants, the views, so many cool things that New York has going for it. So let's just quickly make the New York LA comparison. You prefer New York over la and if so, why

Gloria:

A hundred percent? Well, first of all, I don't like driving at all, so that's a no-no for me, I love biking and walking, so just from that perspective, New York all the way.

Brett:

Perfect. So we're going to dive into PR and you've got some very practical tips and advice for retail brands, e-commerce brands, omnichannel brands on how to leverage. Super excited about that. But I'm curious, how does one go from US diplomat to PR rockstar? How do you make that transition?

Gloria:

It's a very untraditional thing. So I actually never worked a day in my life in any PR or marketing agency, and that's very unheard of. And so when I was in government, I always wanted to switch into communications. I was writing speeches for the ambassador, and I just love to see my friends win. I always say that in my previous life I was like that hip hop mc like hyping everyone up. I just love hyping my friends up. And so I applied for I kid you not a thousand jobs in PR firms. And they all said, your experience is interesting, but we're really looking for someone with that traditional agency background. And so immediately

Brett:

Nobody saw the ability to make that leap. It was not computing for the hiring managers. And I

Gloria:

Realized, wow, this is an industry that is so not narrow-minded, but very gate kept, very traditional, very kind of insiders, like cool kids club. You're either in the club or you're not. And so as someone who was never in the club, I had to literally, I got my first client and he's like, we're a small FinTech. I had no idea what that was. I didn't study finance. And he's like, if you can get us on CNBC and New York Times and Wall Street Journal, we'll pay you a couple hundred bucks. And first of all, no PR person would do guaranteed features, but I had to start somewhere. So I paid my dues. And so I literally sat with the engineers looking at just data, and I'm not a numbers person, I'm an agent that's bad at math, trying to figure out what is the best story that I can pitch. And then I didn't have any contact, so I didn't have journalists and I'm like, Hey buddy. And so I kid you not dial zero from the operator by googling New York time newsroom.

And with my shaky hands and my sweaty palms, I had to practice cold pitching from the operator and to get them to stay on the phone with me until the producer or the editor. And I think through doing that thousands of times and just emails that cold pitching made me see patterns on what worked and what I ended up getting my clients featured on everything New York Times for as Wall Street Journal, CNBC. And then I turned it into a framework. And so now my whole thing is, you know what, yes, the industry is gate kept, but there absolutely is a way to cold pitch and journalists want to hear from the founder directly. So how can we implement that as a system? And so that's what I teach now in my program.

Brett:

I love that so much because I really believe doing things like that where you're pitching on the phone live, you're getting rejected, you're battling that, you're trying to keep people on the phone. I think that's a master's degree or more in PR because a lot of people that got the PR degrees never did that and they never learned it. My son is selling door to door, he's selling solar, residential solar, and I told him, I'm like, Hey, this is a grind and maybe it's an untraditional path or nontraditional path, but you will learn sales in a far different way than somebody who's just had formal training. And so a big believer in just getting out there doing it.

Gloria:

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Brett:

So very cool. I do have just one question that I'm kind of curious about. So you're a speech writer for the ambassador. What's that? Are you listening and you're like, man, you totally butchered that line. That is not the inflection I meant for that piece. Or you were like, we just stick to the script because what I wrote is beautiful. Well, what's that hearing someone deliver your speech?

Gloria:

So it's very, in the bureaucracy, there's many different layers. So I didn't write all of his speeches. It depended on the event, and I was given an opportunity to write a few of those speeches. Now, obviously because it's very bureaucratic, there were many different people involved all the time, and it moved very slowly. So it wasn't like what I wrote was what was delivered, right? There was so many other layers to it, but it was probably one of the more fun parts of my job doing the external communications. And that's really what I love and is my natural habitat. I just didn't get to do a lot of it because when you start, you have to stay in your lane. And I realized very quickly that I'm just not made to be a bureaucrat. I'm more of a creative entrepreneur. And so that's why I gave up my pension and a 25 year career that would've pretty much set me up for life to pursue something else. I moved back home, got on unemployment and kind of restarted everything after killing my ego.

Brett:

That is the true entrepreneurial vibe and spirit there. Just cutting that loose. Who cares if I lose the pension on other things? I got to chart my own course and do my own thing, so that's fantastic. Well, as we dive in here, what are some things about PR that brands need to know that they probably don't? Because my perspective is, and we were talking about this before we hit record, I think most brands, most brands in the 10 million to a hundred or a couple hundred million are just forgetting about pr. They're sleeping on it. It's not something they're fully leveraging. So what do we need to know about PR that we don't know right now? And

Gloria:

It's so funny because brands who have made it to that level, it is so easy for them to implement PR more than anything else because they have the traction, they have all of the website assets, and most of what I teach, my founders are way more beginner than that. So if they can do it, so can the other companies. I will say that traditionally we're taught, okay, well if you want an agency, and it's so exorbitantly expensive in New York, it's about five to 10 grand a month for six months, no guarantees and a minimum contract. So I understand that if you do play it that route, if you're a founder, you're looking at the ROI, you're like, maybe I should just pour this into ads 60,

Brett:

60 grand. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I don't know

Gloria:

When I know I totally, and so what I'm doing here is how can we disrupt that industry? Because here's the thing, if you keep paying an agency, the moment you stop paying them, they walk away with the relationships. How can we break that mold and take it? I think we're not really taught that as founders because again, it's been very gate kept. Very few people are learning how to take it, but obviously after listening to this episode, it will have some actionable tips. But PR is the only activity for me that out of all of your marketing, it checks all of the boxes. So it checks the boxes of traffic, it checks the boxes of SEO because you get those powerful backlinks from a high domain authority website. And then it also gives you that trust, which all three things, it's very hard to get with social media or ads alone. And my favorite thing is I always say it's not about one or the other. It's about how can you leverage your time? Because if you can get onto one gift guide, then you can repost it onto your social media. You can repurpose that for an ad as seen in, and that's to me a way more powerful way to do your content.

Brett:

Just to piggyback on that last part really quickly, it's something we've done for years and years and it's nothing new, but a few of our clients, one that's an automotive client and one that was a skincare client, we would take clips for when they were on A, B, C or Fox News or something. Take those clips and now you can run those in paid ads. You can put those on product detail pages. You can really lean into some of those press releases in a major way. And yeah, another one of my favorite definitions for marketing is marketing is really the transfer of confidence or the transfer of trust As the brand, I have total confidence in my product, but as the shopper, as the prospect don't have confidence. So marketing is just that transfer of confidence. And I think you could argue that the few things that do that faster or better than pr.

And so yeah, I just think it's a missed opportunity and something that we all need to lean into. I think one of the misconceptions I had years ago was, well, if you want pr, yeah, you either talk to massive agency and pay through the nose and hope or you just wait, just wait and hope somebody reaches out to you, right? Hope that a reporter reaches out to you. But really the news cycle is 24 7 now it has been that way for quite some time. So news outlets are kind of desperate for stories. They're looking for angles, they're looking for content. And so if you package this correctly and you approach the right people, it's probably not that hard, right?

Gloria:

No, it's really not. I mean, we have hundreds of founders who are literally solopreneurs doing this. And so imagine if you had the scale and the resources of your audience, how much further they can go. So I will say that because the industry, the PR industry has gate kept, it made it seem like, well, we cannot do our own pr. When in reality, journalists want to interview indie brands. They want to interview not just the Unilevers of the world, because put it this way, if they were only featuring Fortune 1000 companies, they would lose their credibility very quickly. They need to feature new brands. That's how they maintain their journalism integrity. So you're actually doing them a favor. And I will say that with the new cycle ramping up more ferociously than ever, they are churning out these stories like no other. I actually have a lot of journalists who write gift guides coming into my program to teach my students, and they all say Q4, we are working overtime.

I am tasked with writing one gift guide per day. And that's one journalist. And if one gift guide has 10 products, you can just do the math on that. So there's no better way, especially in Q4, to capitalize on the fact that they are monitoring their inboxes like a hawk. And it's your time to put your name in the hat. You just need to know what to say and who to say it to. And so my whole ethos is like, yes, PR is painted as this complex thing that you need privilege and access to pay for, but how do I make it accessible? I make it accessible by really making it simple. And PR is really at its core, writing a good pitch and sending it to the right person. That's it. And if you can put the tune two together, you can repeat it as a system in your business where you monitor the inbox, where you are sending it from your inbox, and that way you don't need to depend on someone else because then you own the relationships.

Brett:

So we're getting close to, we're in Q4. Holiday shopping is about to ramp up as we're recording this. So let's talk gift guides really quickly. You mentioned that now a couple of times. It's a really popular thing for the media to create. It's a great way for them to drive traffic to their platforms. And everybody loves gift guides. We're all looking for ideas. So I'm an e-commerce brand. Let's say that I sell apparel. How should I approach this? And so what am I saying and who am I saying it to try to get my product featured in the gift guide?

Gloria:

Yeah. So I will say with any physical product pitch, you're always going to have your gift guide, which is more product focus, and you have your evergreen angles about larger trends that maybe positions you as a founder. So we have someone who is in our program who makes apparel, and so she got interviewed in Vogue and it's about the future of sustainable fashion. Now she can still take her same company, take one product, and then repurpose the for gift guide. So those two angles simultaneously will always exist, but at the time of recording, like you said, Q4 is really about those product roundups. Get on a list, link it back to your website. So when I think about gift guides, it's really important for you to first figure out, out of all the products that I have, if you have more than one, which one is the best fit for this season?

Here's the thing, you don't want to send an order form to the journalist. You don't want to sell to the journalist. You want to solve a very quick problem for them, which is I'm compiling something for various gift guide categories. How is this going to fit? So for example, the main gift guide categories are gifts for him, gifts for her, gifts for mom, gifts for dad, gifts for kids, gifts for all the ones that you read, right? There's also budget friendly gifts, stalking sufferers, travel gifts. I could go on and on and on. And so knowing that there's so many different buckets, it's your job to first figure out which of my products fits in that bucket? Is it a luxury item? Is it a stocking sufferer? Is it good for travel? Do you have any winter bundles for skincare? If you make apparels, what's really good for this cold weather season? So pitching with the season is the number one key to getting featured because that way you're constantly refreshing your pitch so that you're not pitching sweatpants in the summer. That's the number one thing.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really great. And I love the way you position that because really good marketing and what we're doing, whether it's with our ads, our product detail pages is we're helping someone solve a problem or we're helping them take advantage of an opportunity. It's aspirational. You can look great, feel great in these close, or we're solving this problem you may be facing. Same is true when you're reaching out to a reporter. It's just that the problem you're solving is not the product delivering benefit. They need content, they need good recommendations, they need something they can plug into that gifts for him, gifts for her, gifts for kids, gifts for stalking, stuffers, whatever. And so you've got to kind of package it in that way. So totally makes sense. So I'm selling apparel. I then I guess first begin to think about, okay, who is this a good gift for? And then from that I start to craft my message.

Gloria:

Yeah, so I love what you said about your marketing pitch, which we're so good at as founders is fundamentally different than your pitch to the media. Why? Because the journalist is not ever going to buy from you. So you have to take a different frame of mind. I always say, you got to take off your marketing hat and stop talking about the benefits and features and start talking about the season and who it's good for. So if you can do that, then it becomes so much easier because what we don't want is for you to pitch a journalist with your order form and benefits, and they say, well, we have an entire ads department who will be happy to take your money. Exactly. We don't want that. So how do we repurpose that pitch? And it's not that hard

Brett:

Pitches incorrectly, and you're getting sent to the ad department.

Gloria:

Exactly. They're happy to take your money. So we're not talking about benefits and features. Yes, we will in the pitch, but you're not leading with that. You're leading with the insight, the season, the problem, the trend. For example, remember the show White Lotus on HBO O?

Brett:

I've heard of it. Yeah, I've never seen

Gloria:

It. So any of these pop culture things, right? A great way to pitch. We have a swimwear founder, and it was like the pitch I wrote for her was How to pick the best swimsuit for your white Lotus Italian vacation. And people are going to Taylor Swift concert. So if you make something that would be perfect for that, it's like top 10 accessories for your next Taylor Swift concert. Do you see where I'm getting at? Absolute. It's like you're leading with the trend this season, and so it's still your product. So that's the biggest thing that you need to do. And then I have my CPR framework, which is my own framework that I came up with from pitching and being rejected thousands of times. I picked on up on a pattern. How do I get that person who doesn't know who the hell I am to say yes, tell me more. And the pitch, whether it's written or verbal, usually has these three components. So C stands for credibility, P stands for point of view, R stands for relevance. And when you put that in a pitch, it's really solid. So let's bring it, let's break it down.

Brett:

And you lead with credibility, I guess. Well, I don't want to get ahead of you, but why do you lead with credibility?

Gloria:

So I actually don't lead with credibility. That's just the way to remember it phonetically,

Brett:

But

Gloria:

I actually do it reverse. So I actually start with the relevance. Why? Because you want to grab their attention at the get go. And what is news if it's not relevant? Totally. So the beginning of your pitch should say something like, as your readers are looking for cold weather skin solutions this December, do you see how that's relevant?

Brett:

Totally, totally.

Gloria:

Or as busy moms are looking for back to school pencil cases. So that's the relevance piece. And then you go, so the point of view in CPR is usually three bullet points. Why? Because it makes the email look better and it doesn't turn them off with a bunch of texts. So it's usually three insights, three do's and don'ts, three ways that your product solves that problem better than anyone else. Three unique points. And then you conclude with very simple credibility, which is like, I am a mom and I figured this out, and now we've scaled our business and customers love us because of X, Y, Z, or we've been featured and you don't have to be featured, but it's really the least important part. And then you conclude with, I'm happy to send over some more high res photos. What I like to do is include A URL.

Instead of putting high resolution photos, it's going to cost spam. I say, put one normal photo, but then have the rest be a URL that links to other things how they can find out more. If you're pitching a gift guide, it's very important, three things, your subject line, your subject line is what gets open or not open. So your subject line needs to read almost like an article title. So instead of saying SO'S brand pitch winter gift guide, that means absolutely nothing. It needs to read why this eco-friendly Australian sheep wool sock is perfect for socking stuffer or whatever that is. And then you go into the CPR method. And so that's kind of the general structure of how it is when you're talking about your product, when you start with the relevance and you introduce why your product is solving that seasonal problem, you always want to put in where it's available. Is it at Marshall's, is it on Amazon? Is it only on your website? And you want to put the price point immediately and then you want to put where it ships to. So all of those things is going to help the journalist decide where and when to put it. So that's like non-negotiable when you're trying to pitch for a gift guide, is having those specifics.

Brett:

Super interesting. And really as I'm listening to this and trying to imagine this email in my mind, if I'm a reporter and you've done this properly, I could almost take exactly what you email me and just run with that. You've essentially done all the hard work for me. Maybe I want to reach out and confirm things or do, but you've done most of the heavy lifting for me.

Gloria:

That's exactly it. Look, this is an unnatural act, so don't feel like, oh, why didn't I, it's like we're not taught this, right? So don't feel bad that you haven't done this. It's just that the industry has gay kept it from us. And so we actually had people use the CPR method to get into Oprah's favorite things, buzzfeed, Vogue, allure, and even use it to get into retailers and wholesalers. So the CPR pitch is a way to have a value driven conversation with someone who has never heard of you, and how do you get them to quickly respond? One thing I will say is that the CPR R pitch is not writing the article for them. So you don't leave that to the journalist. The journalist knows what their editorial calendar is and where to fit your story. So don't think that you're writing this whole article and no, you're just simply offering a point of view that's perfect for this season. And the whole point of the pitch is to get them to respond, yes, I would like more information. No, this is not a good fit for me. And so that takes away the pressure of everything. It just has a very simple, simple goal and just don't overthink it.

Brett:

Got it. And it's really valuable. Yeah, we may be tempted to put on our writer hat, and I got to write the intro to the article and the that's not your job. Your job is to make this very clear, very easy to understand your credibility, your point of view, and the relevancy and working all that in. So totally makes sense. How do you recommend, so we've got our copy for the product on our product detail pages and things like that. How are you modifying that copy to fit bullet points that you're sending in this email?

Gloria:

So the bullet points are a little bit more subjective, so it could be point of view on, so if you make something that's completely unique, so I'll give you an example. We have someone who in Canada works with aboriginal native women tribes and they make beaver for hand warmers. So it's from beaver fur and means that it's, you keep it for life. It's not those ones that you throw away, right? So because it's really unique, the point of view, the three bullet points are like why the beaver first solution is better than the traditional ones that you get at your ski shop, right? One, it's sustainable. Two, it lasts long. That's what I mean by the point of view.

Brett:

That's so great. What can we expect then? So if you craft this email properly, how many of these do we need to send out to hopefully get featured somewhere? What are you seeing in terms of success rate and how much time do we need to put into this to make it work?

Gloria:

Yeah, I've had people get a response within 24 hours. I think when you first start, it's really about a volume game. So you might pitch to a wide variety of journalists, but then you always want to highlight your top 15 to 20 outlets that will move the needle for you, whether it's a refinery or a pop sugar or even outdoor sporting goods. So I always say, first you cast a wide net, but then for those 10 to 15 journalists, you really want to build a personal relationship by just personalizing the first line of the email. So it might be something like, I loved your coverage last year in Sporting Good magazine about the best fly fishing gear for dads. Are you doing it for this year? So you see how it chosen that you're actually read their article. And for those 15 journalists, you really want to cultivate relationship by engaging with their content because they're writers too. It's so common on their LinkedIn comment, on their Instagram, use social media and say, I loved your article, right? Stroke their ego a little bit. And so that's going to help you build that relationship kind of like a customer where you increase the touch points and they get familiar with you because they're seeing your name in your brand.

Brett:

How are we finding these contacts? We're building our list of top 10 to 15 media outlets that will move the needle for us. How would you recommend we do that? We may all be tempted to reach out to Fox News or CNN or something like that, but that's probably not the place to start. How do we build that list and then, yeah, walk us through that.

Gloria:

So that's a really good question. So remember I said PR is very simple. It's writing a good pitch and sending it to the right person. So with the CPR method, we talked about how to write a pitch. Now let's move on to who do we send it to. It's not going to be info@buzzfeed.com or Media Forbes. It's going to go into an internet black hole. It's also not going to be the editor in chief of Vogue because they're busy doing their speaking tour. So you want to find out who is that specific writer who writes your beat or industry topic? Is it the health and wellness reporter? Is it the sustainability person? Is it the person that covers tech gadgets? So for a lot of gift guides, you're going to look for someone that covers your industry and also the commerce or shopping writer. Those are the people who are responsible for conglomerating those shopping guides and product lists.

So that's who you want to look for. Now in my program, we have a database of a hundred thousand journalists across every industry, but you can start to do it in your own way and start to compile your own media list. And you can do it very simply by typing into the Google search bar, Google News alert and Google will create an alert where any digital article that's being published will be sent to your inbox and you can click on that article that's about your industry and copy and paste their name and email, which is public information by the way, and start to fill it into an ever expanding Excel spreadsheet. So that's kind of your own way of doing it. You can also sign up for a service called haro, which is bought by another company now. But you can type in HARO, help a reporter out, and every day it pings you with the 200 or 300 inquiries for journalists wanting to interview a specific person.

And if you fit the bill, then use a CPR R method to reply. We had someone just using Harrow and she got onto seven different pieces of media like Wall Street Journal and PopSugar this year alone. And then there's also hashtags you can follow. So on LinkedIn and Instagram, you can follow the hashtag journal request. And so that is when journalists are looking for a specific person to interview. So these are all the grassroots way that you can start to autopopulate that. But you want to have a good size media list. You want to have at least 50 journalists, and then out of those 50, your top 50, that'll really move the needle for you.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really great because it is a numbers game. You can't expect to reach out to two media outlets or two reporters and get the ball rolling. It is a numbers game, and so play accordingly. We talked about gift giving guides, and I love that angle, but you also talked about founder stories. I think that's interesting. I also want to talk about that in a minute. Let's talk about product launches because that's something our bigger brands, they're always launching new products or new lines of products. So I've got my haircare, now I'm launching my sun care, now I'm launching oral care or something like that. So how do you recommend approaching this? I'm sure it's a lot of the same frameworks and stuff, but how do I approach this if it's a new product launch?

Gloria:

So the way I think about product launches is that it's doing pr, but with a specific time sensitive call to action. So for the journalist, you're saying, I am launching this on this date. And so what you want to do is you want to create a very well-written press release, and you can see all the list of my press releases on gloria Chou pr.com/services. There's a very methodical way of writing it, but you always want to say that you're the first to do something right, because newsworthy, so you might not be the first to do X, y, and Z, but you might be the first to do X, Y, and Z in this way. So see how you can wordsmith it so that it's really punchy at the top. And so for example, I worked with a seven figure electric flosser company, and they're not the first electric flosser, but they're the first to use X, Y, Z materials to guarantee a full mouth clean in under 60 seconds. And you see how that's really the headline and the sub-headline. So I like press releases, but I don't like it when people are just putting out press releases every other week. It's kind of a waste of money. See how you can couple two or three different things? Maybe you have a product launch and then you also have a new board member,

Or maybe you won an award and then you're giving back to charity or whatever that is. And the worst thing I think, and we're not really taught this, is we're just taught, oh, well issue a press release and just hope and pray that someone will respond and it just doesn't work that way. I actually use press releases as an incentive, kind of like a bait, if you will, to get the journalist to respond in X amount of days. So instead of just putting the press release on the wire, you're writing an email using the CPR method and saying, Hey, we know that you cover consumer electronics. We've invented this really cool dental tool, especially as we get into health and wellness season for the whole family to enjoy dental health is linked to heart diseases and brain health. There's growing number of research to say that it's really, that's why we've made it very easy and under 60 seconds for anyone to clean their teeth. We've also made it so that it's good for people who have dexterity issues kind of go into that. We're going live with the press release announcement in two weeks or seven days. So let me know if you'd be interested in learning more. I've attached the draft of the press release below. I'm happy to chat. So do you see how that's a stronger call to action? You're basically using your launch as a conversation starter,

So you want to do that before you just put the press release live onto the Newswire. And so for all of my clients, I do this kind of two step process with them.

Brett:

So that lets them know, hey, this is going to happen. Almost some kind of credibility mixed in there that this is going live in one week or two weeks.

Gloria:

Also, I'm going live with or without you.

Brett:

Yeah, but then this also makes them say, okay, well I'd kind of rather be first, or I want to be early in the game, not picking it up once it hits the wire type

Gloria:

Of thing. Yeah, I got my client Forbes within one week because they just want it to be the first to break it, but you have to make it exciting for them. So that's where the pitch writing comes in. So I think this is one of the things that a lot of people aren't taught. They're just publish a press release, but you are wasting on a very precious opportunity, which is that time sensitive call to action.

Brett:

Super smart. So are you always wrapping multiple things into one press release or sometimes is it just a product launch?

Gloria:

This is a very good question. I would say it's somewhat subjective. It depends on the newsworthiness of the announcement, if you will. If your startup and you secured funding, that's important because every milestone on Google, you want to put it there as a part of your journey for your investors. But if it's something like you have a new board member maybe, and then you're also partnering with a charity, you could couple that into one and there is a way to write it. So I will say if you have multiple things you want to announce, get out a piece of paper and write in the hierarchy of what is the most important, and then see how you can couple it into one press release. Because in the press release, I've written many funding announcements about how they've secured, but then in the body of the press release, we're saying by Q4 of next year, we plan to release X, Y, and Z features. So do you see this kind of a look ahead date to get people excited?

Brett:

Yeah, totally Cool. Totally cool. Now what about if you kind of talked about founder stories, and I know this would apply if it's a new company, you're solving a new problem type of thing, but it's something to be said here, even if you're a little bit established, how can you take that founder story angle and turn that into a press release?

Gloria:

So the founder story is important, and you can put it even in your gift guide pitch, but it needs to be under two sentences. So if you're pitching yes, if you have an interesting founder story, put it in there. If it's one or two sentences now in your press release, I usually put it in about section of the press release on the bottom, how was it founded? Or maybe the last paragraph founded by two research chemists or whatever that is. If you're making a skincare product, I wouldn't say that that is the most important part because your press release is not your autobiography. It's a very time specific snapshot of something that you're announcing. So the purpose of the press release is not to announce your story. So the story will go into the press release, but you're not going to lead with that. The headline of the press release, and I do this on my VIP day, but the headline is the what and the sub-headline is the how. So that's how you can start to figure out what is the framework of what you're trying to say.

Brett:

So good. So I love the example of the oral care product. You talked about the electronic flosser, other examples that you can talk about. I just think as someone here, as an example, kind of triggers additional thoughts.

Gloria:

So for press release, I've run a lot for products that are white labeled. So we have someone who she makes a 24 karat facial massager tool that also is like solar charge, right?

Brett:

It's

Gloria:

Not her proprietary product, but then she white labels and stuff. So in her press release, we couldn't say that she was the first to do this. It's not her invention, but she is the first Filipino owned skincare brand or the first one. So it's like how can you keep wordsmithing that to say that you're the first, and let's be honest, unless it's a groundbreaking invention, you're not going to be the first but

Brett:

Not be the first anyway, right?

Gloria:

Yeah, everything is a remix, but then you still want to keep just finessing that headline in the sub headline to make it super concise and specific to that right out of the bat, we know that it's newsworthy because you are the first or the only to solve this problem maybe for this specific demographic.

Brett:

I know from a career in sales and sales related things that it's very rare to send one email and then stuff just happens, right? One email and now the reporter is jumping all over themselves to try to get you on and interviewed and stuff. How do we follow up and how much should we follow up after we send that email?

Gloria:

Yeah, I mean follow up is absolutely key because remember, they're getting a lot of emails and they just need to be reminded. And I think a lot of times, because again, this is an unnatural act, a lot of founders who are doing incredible things, they send out first email and they go run and hide in the bathroom. And so the journalist is not monitoring like, oh, this person followed up with me. How dare they

Brett:

Actually

Gloria:

Depend on you to follow up? And it's really just about top of mind. But I will give you one tip is that before you send out any emails, please install an email tracking device. So if it's being open or not. So then you don't have to make a drama in your head about, oh, this journalist hates me. It's like, well, no, they actually just never open it because it could be a deliverability issue, it could be an out of office issue. So let's for the right problem. Now, if the email tracker is telling you that they're opening it multiple times, it means that they like the story. They just don't have a place for it right now in their editorial calendar. But journalists, what they do is they have a very meticulous way of filing and foldering their inboxes so that anytime that they're tasked with something, they're going to go back and type that keyword.

So that's why I always say you have to pitch early and often so that you're at least in the running when they do search back into their inbox. Now if they are multiple times, I'm just working with someone who makes a real kids' kitchen for children. It's a beautifully designed like toy real kitchen, but for kids, and she said that the pitch that we wrote for her got opened 16 times or something like that. So it means that the journalist really likes it. And so that's when you go in and you really engage with the person's content. And so it might be commenting on an Instagram post, it might be resharing one of their stories. It's kind of like how you would nurture a lead when you know that it's kind of a hot lead. It's the same way you're building a relationship with that journalist.

Brett:

Sorry, I muted. There was a train. Totally makes sense. So as we're looking to leverage our time, whether we're the ones executing this plan or we've got a team member that's doing it for us, what are some tools that we can use that makes this process easier?

Gloria:

So the email tracking device, right? I like Chrome because I've heard that Outlook doesn't have the best deliverability. So I like Chrome and I like to schedule, send my emails in a campaign. I use MailTrack do io, which it's like, okay, it's like middle of the road, it's not too expensive. And it just gives you data on whether or not it's been and open. Obviously the Google News alert is really important. You want to have that one tip is that if you do want to take this in-house and for a lot of your audience, they do have a team, it's really helpful to give your PR person, it could be an intern or marketing assistant, like the password to an email that's different from your customer service emails. So it could be like a media ad or a team ad or just something, and then they can kind of own that inbox and just kind of keep that separate.

Brett:

Super smart. Super smart. Well, Gloria, this has been fantastic. Any final tips? I want to allow people to connect with you through socials, and I know you've got a course and some other great stuff, but any final tips or anything that you wanted to chat about that we didn't related to pr?

Gloria:

So I think we all know this, but everything you want is on the other side of the send button. And so we pour so much money in social media and ads and there is room for that, right? But why not just a reality, a little bit of that to do something that has a crazy potential upside.

So it's really about working smarter and not harder. And here's the thing, your business needs you to be. Its number one advocate. I cannot tell you how many founders come to me and join my program after they paid $40,000 for an agency. So it's not about not working with an agency, but it's about knowing how the process works so that if something happens that they don't deliver, then you are not stuck at square one with no contacts because at the end of the day, it's about building those contacts with the journalist. And so my program gives you the database, it gives you what to say, and then you can kind of repeat it. So you can find me on Instagram at gloria Chou pr Gloria, C-H-O-U-P-R. And I have a free masterclass that actually outlines word for word from subject line down to the last sentence, a pitch I wrote in the CPR method that got someone featured like 15 times. And you can watch that for free@gloriaChoupr.com slash masterclass. And if you DM me on Instagram, the word pitch, I will give you a pitching freebie so that you can get started.

Brett:

Nice. And then did I hear, are you on LinkedIn as well?

Gloria:

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn as well. I'm mainly on Instagram. That's kind of where you can get the fastest response. But I also check my LinkedIn. Yes.

Brett:

Got it. So check out Instagram for sure. And it's so true. You don't get what you don't ask for in life. You don't get necessarily what you deserve. You get what you negotiate and you get what you actively pursue. I'm fired up, man. I'm excited about pr. Like I said, I think this is a missing piece that great brands need to leverage. It will make other efforts better. You can use it to leverage your ads and you can use it to make clients stickier. And there's so many ways you can use this. And so Gloria, love this content. Thank you so much. We'll link to everything in the show notes, but go check it out. So before you hire a PR firm, talk to Gloria first and hey, I think it makes sense. Send someone through the free masterclass, do the paid class or whatever. That's probably better than paying for a high priced firm for most brands. So Gloria, thank you so much. This was fantastic and thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? If you have not done so? Please leave that review on iTunes. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

In this data-packed episode, Brett Curry and the OMG Commerce team break down the most successful strategies from Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2024. From optimal discount levels to timing strategies, the team shares real insights from hundreds of millions in tracked revenue across Amazon, DTC, and email channels. If you're already planning for next year's holiday season (and you should be), this episode delivers actionable insights you won't want to miss.

‍

Key Takeaways:

• The "sweet spot" for discounts: Amazon sellers saw the best results at 25%+ off, while DTC brands found their optimal range between 15-25% - unless going big at 50%+ (with surprising data about why the middle ground underperforms).
• Why individual product discounts outperformed site-wide sales across multiple channels, with specific insights about how this impacts Google Shopping ads and conversion rates.
• The shift to "Cyber 12" - Why the seven days before Black Friday actually outperformed the traditional Cyber 5 period on Amazon, and how to adapt your 2025 strategy accordingly.
• Critical timing insights for email marketing - Why the ninth email often outperformed earlier messages, and how follow-up campaigns frequently beat initial launches.

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The combination of broad trends and specific tactical insights makes this a valuable episode for any ecommerce brand looking to improve their holiday season performance in 2025!

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(03:33) Global Sales Trends

(08:16) BFCM Trends Nobody Saw Coming

(19:11) Strategies of Top-Performing Brands

(24:54) Analyzing Year-on-Year Deal Performance

(30:20) Successful Campaign Examples

(34:00) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Christine Shiloni
• Bill Cover
• Ghost
• Ryse
• Shopify
• Triple Whale
• Why Your Prices Are Probably Wrong - Episode 255
• Live Bearded
• CRBN Pickleball
• Manta Sleep

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

‍

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

---

Transcript:

Brett :

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and this is the Black Friday, cyber Monday recap edition. It was a wild ride. We're going to look at Cyber five, cyber 12, which is a new concept for some. And so this is going to be a high level look at how things went globally, how things went for our clients, what did the winners do, what did the losers do? How can you harness these learnings for your next sales events? And as we begin to plan for next year, because hey, when we're in retail, we're either in holiday, we're prepping for the next holiday, we're thinking about holiday dreaming about it. It's always on our minds. So with that, first I just want to do a quick health check. How's everybody doing? Mental health, physical health? Have you slept any? And with me on the pod back again. Everybody's a repeat guest here. We got Christine Shalon, Amazon director. How's it going, Christine?

Christine:

I'm good. How are you doing?

Brett :

Doing good. Doing good. We got Bill Ver Google Director. What's up Bill? Hey, how's it going, Brad? Good. Good. And Nick Flint, you're back. You were just, you're fresh off a podcast appearance, so you're like all warm and loose. Email and retention director, how's it going? Two in one month,

Nick:

That

Brett :

Might be a record. Two in one month, man, man, it's like you're basically a co-host at this point. So I asked a question, then I introduced you, but would love to hear your answers. Are you sleeping? How do you feel? How's the team? Are we still riding high or what's our status?

Nick:

It's no coincidence that within Arm's Reach is an energy drink for me. That's how it's going.

Brett :

And we are not endorsed nor sponsored by any energy drink. But Nick, what is your energy drink of choice?

Nick:

I'm a flavor addict, so my two go-tos are Ghosts and Rise. Both them have killer collabs

Brett :

Rise. Nice. Bill and or Christine, what is your caffeine source of choice and does that shift during the holiday season?

Christine:

I need to regulate my caffeine. I need to keep it pretty level, more than one cup of coffee and things go off the rails.

Brett :

We were just talking about how Christine is loud, intense, in a very good way. So you've got to make sure too much caffeine and it's too much.

Christine:

No, it's not fun for anybody now.

Brett :

Okay, yeah, what about you? For

Bill:

Me, if it's before noon, then coffee black and I might drink a whole pot. And then if it's afternoon, like right now, my

Brett :

Peppermint tea. Peppermint tea, man, I love that. I feel like so much of that conversation just really describes who you guys are, describes your personality, and a quick couple sentences is really, really great. I lean more caffeine as well, but I like to throw some healthy fats in there. And I'm with you, bill. If it's before noon, I can crush a whole bunch of it and I feel pretty good. So we're going to get into some specifics. We're going to get in the D two C side looking at Google Performance and some year over year numbers and just what we saw with our clients. Same with Amazon, same with email. But before we do that, I want to unpack a couple of global numbers that I think are really interesting. So Shopify, of course, they do their Black Friday, summer Monday tracker, you can follow along live and there's an hourly minute by minute sales tracker, which is super cool.

So I do recommend next year following that if you've not done that up to this point. But the Shopify data showed there's 24% year over year growth in terms of GMV. So obviously Shopify is not fully tracking someone's profitability and things like that. I think they generally know it, but 24% year over year growth from a GMV standpoint, 11.5 billion in sales tracked through Shopify. As of this recording, Amazon data's not outsourced, going to rely on our client data for Amazon. Also, I like looking at Triple Whale because Triple Whale, they're one of our partners we love. Triple Whale is a third party attribution tool, but also they got a lot of GMV running through their platform. So 2.02 billion tracked over Black Friday Cyber Monday. Total ad spend 313 million. Just a quick note. So 200, 2 billion in revenue, 313 million in ad spend. What's the merr on that? Anybody want to anybody do quick math in your head or paper Bill? You can use paper. I just don't use a calculator. More on that in a second.

New customer revenue, 59% of total revenue was from new customers. So kind of underscores that, Hey, black Friday, cyber Monday is a good time to drive new customers, although more nuance than that in just a second. 40% then was returning. But really the new versus returning depends wildly on category. And so this does skew if you are a repeat purchase type product, so food and Bev, some health and beauty, that's going to lean more returning customer. And then other one-time purchases are more new customers. So Art and Baby led the way with 60 and 64% of the shoppers over Black Friday. Cyber Monday were new customers. Food and Bev, only 41% of Black Friday Cyber Monday shoppers were new to brands. And then Health and Beauty about 55%. So super interesting there also, anybody want take a, well, first of all, anybody do that MER calculation? If you're all like, dude, that was Lam, I'm not into math, so let's just skip it. But anybody do the mecal?

Bill:

It's got to be like a 0.000 something, right?

Brett :

Well no, no. So it's 2 billion in revenue on 313 million in ad spend. So it's a little over a six, right? It's a little over six. Six X mer. Anyway, everyone at home was like, that was a lame segment. I won't do math on the spot anymore. Okay, it's fine. But anybody wants to see a guess what category led the way with the most sales? This Black Friday cyber money according to Triple Whale. So obviously lots of ways we can look at this data, but according to Triple Whale data, which triple whale's generally D two C brands, some omnichannel brands, not massive enterprise brands, but these are bigger Shopify and big commerce stores. I want to take a stab at what was the number one leading category?

Nick:

I'll guess Home Goods.

Brett :

Home Goods that did crack the top five. That was number four of the top five.

Christine:

What my guess supplements.

Brett :

So I'll throw them with health and beauty and that's kind of, it's a big category, health and beauty, but that was number two. Health and beauty is number two.

Bill:

I will guess apparel.

Brett :

There you go. So actually this is a weird breakdown. Clothing was the number one, but then they have fashion and accessories as number two. And I'm not really exactly sure how trip wail delineates, I mean the accessories piece. That makes sense. And then anyone wanted take it? So we got clothing, health, beauty, fashion, accessories, home goods. Anyone take a stab at that fifth category Pet? Ooh, that's a good one. But no, Christine, this is how you spend probably most of your evenings during the school year. Alcohol, I'll let you know. How did you know? Actually I was doing sporting goods. I know Christine's a big soccer fan. Her son is a great soccer player. I was leaning sporting goods, but yet after that then we got

Christine:

So much not good during. Not good during that. Yeah, we do not. So no, we

Brett :

Do not want enjoy high school soccer. I mean maybe we do with the help of lots of wine. It's round upon, it's round upon. Yeah, so alright, well let's dive in guys. So I thought it might be interesting to start with what were some surprises, some unusual things you saw either in the data or anecdotally during this season? And Christine, I'll start with you on the Amazon side.

Christine:

So two things. The first seven days saw the peak performance starting from November 21st, which those are three more days than we had last year. And the second, which I thought was really interesting is of our top performing brands, 60% of their total revenue came from deals. So extrapolating from that, those who ran deals, they were winning the day on Amazon, they're also looking at a percentage off of at least 25%. Those who went in at 10 or 15 didn't really move the needle. So 25% seemed like the sweet spot to get conversion.

Brett :

Yeah, let's talk about a couple of things related there. This year, 2024, black Friday, cyber Monday happened a full week later on the calendar. Cyber Monday was in December this year, which is unusual. And so sales have been trending that they would start earlier and go a little bit longer. It's been the trend over the last several years anyway, but this year especially more people are tracking that Cyber 12. And so the way you think about Cyber 12 is it ends on Black Friday and it's the 12 days prior to that. So basically a week before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. And so here in 2024, that started on November 21st and then on December 2nd. And so yeah, what's interesting, so the two biggest days looking at the Amazon data, the two biggest days, no real surprise, were Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but the seven days leading up to it were bigger than the five days of the Black Friday cyber Monday. Now I know it's more days, but it's still interesting because there have been some years where the Black Friday, cyber Monday, that Cyber five just crushes everything else. And so the early days of the sale were pretty strong, very strong in fact on Amazon.

Christine:

Well Amazon, if you wanted to run a deal to cover Black Friday, a seven day deal, you had to start the previous week,

Brett :

Had to start early. And so Amazon's thinking, yeah, Amazon's probably thinking how do we level out demand? How do we grab more of the wallet? How do we make sure we've got all our deals in place? I'm sure there's probably several motivating factors on Amazon's side, but yeah, they force you to get those deals

Christine:

In

Brett :

Sooner. What about from your perspective, bill? What was surprising on the D two C slash Google side of things?

Bill:

Yeah, for sure. So I agree starting earlier and earlier, you've got to play the game. You've got to jump in when Amazon is jumping in and when the rest of the retail world is jumping in.

Brett :

I mean, think about it, Amazon really kind of sets the stage. If you look at July prime day, that's now a shopping day for everybody. Walmart gets on board, our clients get on board that are not on either platform. So if Amazon starts things early, everybody else pretty much falls suit.

Bill:

Yeah, absolutely. And so I think lean into it. I think if you're going to jump in early, go ahead and launch with that Cyber 12 in mind. Go ahead and launch on the 21st. It doesn't mean you have to start promoting right away though. In fact, I would recommend launch it on the 21st, make sure the promo code works, make sure everything looks good on the search engine results page on the digital shelf, make sure Facebook, Google, YouTube, everyone is all cylinders are ready to go. And then start promoting that sale through email and through YouTube and through Facebook and all of those. What was surprising, so Christine already kind of threw out a discount number 25% and above, or sorry Christine, you weren't seeing anything from what, 10 to 15,

Christine:

10 to 15,

Bill:

You're recommending 15 to 25. Yeah, that's interesting. And so on the D two C Shopify side, what we saw when we analyzed all of our client's data is that the sweet spot is 15 to 25%. Anything over 25% doesn't seem to result in additional top line revenue.

Brett :

Interesting. You're just eroding margins at that point. So you go past 25%, you're only hurting yourself. That's super interesting.

Bill:

Exactly. So people will act on 15 to 25%, but they don't seem to act in a bigger way when you get to 30, which is interesting because over the past few years a client would ask me, how much should I discount? And I would say, oh, 30, I walk that back now I would say 15 to 25% should cut it. However, when you get to 50% and above, so we had some that were running like 50% off, 55% off, then the numbers just skyrocket. Amazing top line. Amazing, Rowan.

Brett :

Interesting.

Bill:

Yeah,

Brett :

Interesting.

Bill:

So you have this dead zone from 25 to 50,

Brett :

Man, so that's really good insight. So 15 to 25% for D two C, you're likely in the money, you're probably getting a nice lift in sales, you're probably protecting your margins a little bit. That dead zone of 25% to 50, don't go there. Don't even do it. Right. If you're going to go bigger, you got to go really big or just stick with 25 render super insightful. Love that. Nick, what about you on the email SMS slash retention side? Obviously this is a huge time of year for leaning into that email list, but any surprises?

Nick:

What still blows my mind is how many people are purchasing when Monday rolls around for Cyber Monday. I see the backend of our calendar and they've gotten eight emails about this sale already. And somehow number nine on that Monday is what gets set to buy

Brett :

The ninth time's the charm. Yep. I was going to buy, but it didn't. Yeah, why do you think that is, Nick?

Nick:

I think it's busy during the holidays. So as you're getting ready for Thanksgiving that week leading up to it, you're having guests come over, you're buying food, you're cooking, you're laying stuff out, you're getting everything ready, and then that weekend hits, you've got past Thanksgiving and now it's say, all right, I'm unwinding now I'm kind of shifting into Christmas mode. Alright, I'll start again. Come that Monday. And a lot of people, not us of course, are shopping while they're at work, so they're on their laptop shopping at work instead of working and that full week they might have off so they don't back into the office until Monday and it's time to procrastinate and start spending money.

Brett :

Totally, yeah. Yeah. I mean Cyber Monday, there was a time, I think everybody on this call probably remembers it when Nick, you would've been really young, but when we would maybe wait and shop on Cyber Monday where we had the high speed internet, right? Shop it at home over the weekend we got slow internet, but Monday we're back in the office high speed and we're shopping away. But I think one thing that underscores Nick is a lot of times we make the mistake of just not communicating enough, just not reminding enough, just not sending enough emails and enough SMS messages and we're like, whoa, man, I already sent three people are going to be sick of hearing me. And our feedback is usually they didn't see two of those, they missed them completely or they read one and they were busy but they were having a Turkey hangover or whatever. And so you got to hit 'em more. And yeah, sometimes the ninth time is the charm, so sometimes we give up a little bit too soon. So that's great. Any other surprises on the email SMS side?

Nick:

Based on the naming convention that we set up, the campaigns, we try to make it super easy for us and the brand owners to be able to look into Klaviyo or their chosen SMS platform and to see what's name the campaign and how's it doing. And we'll have something like Black Friday Live or Black Friday follow-up or Cyber Monday live. And a lot of times the follow-up campaigns were the ones beating the initial launches. So just like what you said, we got to send more, make sure you're setting those follow ups.

Brett :

Yeah, the follow-ups where it's like, okay, hey, that's almost leaning towards, I'm about to miss it, right? So I know you launched it, but now it's the follow-up, I might miss it. So I'm going to take action now. A couple of things that I pulled from the data that Christine and team put together on the Amazon side. So if you look at the first part of the Cyber 12, so the first seven days, basically the week leading up to Thanksgiving, 46% year over year growth. So big growth year over year. Cyber Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday only up about 36%. So much slower growth still good still let's get excited about it, but we did pull a lot of those sales forward. Other big wins that you saw, Christine during the Cyber 12 or during that Cyber five weekend?

Christine:

I think one of the bigger wins that our team had was selecting these deals early.

Not everyone has an opportunity to even run a best deal, which is a seven day deal. So getting in there, our team was in there making sure our clients knew what was the making sure we grabbed whatever we could. That was number one. And then backing that up with Prime exclusive discounts. So although a best deal or a lightning deal, they were our best performers by far. We did have a few brands that leaned in more on Prime exclusives. Again, they ran at 25% and that was actually our third highest generating deal. So if you're not selected to get a best deal or a lightning deal from Amazon, lean in hard on your prime exclusives. What we do though is I have the team checking them daily to make sure there's no pricing errors. So when we go live, everything is live. They can get a little tweaked sometimes. So we like to go in, check them, make sure everything's running perfectly. And one tip about a prime exclusive, if you don't know it is it will automatically pause if you have a lightning deal running. So Amazon will not let you double dip on that deal.

Brett :

That would help

Christine:

It

Brett :

Help protect your market.

Christine:

It gives you a badge and everybody wants to see a red badge that improves your click-through rate. So Prime exclusive is my second tip.

Brett :

Cool. Cool. So let's think about this. What did the best brands do this year, 2024 versus those that really underperform? Then I'll open this up to everybody, but Nick, you want to maybe go first on that one?

Nick:

When they were omnipresent across everything, that's when we saw the best results. So instead of just saying, Hey, let's send out some emails and SMSs about our Black Friday sale proactively, they had planned out, this is our social media campaign ideas, this is our paid ad side, this is what we're doing on the website, this is what we're doing for emails. And that way all those different touch points are another way to get your customer to buy because they might see it on Instagram and then go to your website. They see that banner on the site or if they are on any kind of paid ad platform, they're seeing it there and clicking through to your site. So the more in your face you can make it, the better they even got pretty deep with some influencer strategies, making sure all their influencers associated with them. Were posting those deals on their stories. So hey look, we're everywhere. You can't miss it at that point.

Brett :

So you got the marketing calendar, so of course you're hitting 'em with email, but you've also got your ads on Facebook and on Google ads, remarketing ads, and then also the organic content. So getting influencers to also post and comment about the deals and about the sales. Love that. And actually I was just buying my two youngest kids, they're playing basketball this year. I was just buying this dribbling training thing and I started the checkout process, had to go do something else, so I, I was responding to a paid social ad, but then it was email that actually got me to close, but there's so much going on that if I'd just seen the ad and kind of started the process but didn't finish it without the email, I might not have actually purchased it or might've waited until later and who knows if it would've happened. And so really great. Bill, what about from your perspective, what did the best brands do, those that had the biggest results versus those that really struggled? Do you want to compare and contrast that?

Bill:

Yeah, that was another interesting thing that we found in our data as we looked across all of our accounts doing Google and YouTube, so the best brands, the ones that really killed it now sitewide sale is very popular, did very well also doing sort of the tiered discount. If you put this much in your cart, you get this discount. If it's this much, you get this discount. That does very well. However, something interesting, what beat both of those, at least across our accounts in our data, is discounting individual products. And now, and it is a clear winner in our data and we had small brands doing it and we had very large brands doing it. And so what's interesting though, I wonder if the reason that works so well is because the discount is clear to the consumer. Because if you look at any discount whatsoever, the better you communicate the discount and the deal going on, the easier it is for the consumer who has a lot of things they're looking to buy, a lot of things going on, they're being bombarded all the time. So when you're discounting an individual item, it's right there on the product page, it's right there in the cart, it's very clear that you're getting a discount that this is rare, this isn't evergreen pricing. And so I wonder if that's why it does so well, because just right there in front of you.

Brett :

Yeah, it's really interesting. And so you saw that through the different channels within Google, so YouTube search shopping?

Bill:

Yeah, you look at our data holistically, but I do kind of like a walkthrough to see how does this look to the consumer? And so it's definitely characterized by, okay, we'll say cherry picking products, but I'm sure there's strategy there, like a product with the best ROI or a bestseller or whatever it is, but we'll say it's individual products, not like a category, not like a site-wide sale, but individual products that are discounted and it's like strike through pricing, red, discount price, add to the cart, cart slides over, you see the discount right there in your cart or your checkout. And that did the best.

Brett :

Yeah, it's interesting because I think that this specific product with this deal, very clear deal on this product kind of helps eliminate decision paralysis or decision fatigue where if I'm just saying, Hey, X percent still got to go decide what I'm going to get, and it's maybe just not as clear or as compelling where if you tell me, Hey, this comforter, which I'm buying a comforter for my wife, hopefully she doesn't listen to this. I don't think she listens to the podcast, so that's one of the guests. But if they said, Hey, this one is on sale, I'm like, great, that's the one I want. All right, done. I'm buying it. Right? Versus the other angle, just sitewide discounts up to whatever. It can work too for sure. But I like that specific offer on a specific product. It's really good.

Bill:

And I'll add one thing to call out about that. So we're promoting across YouTube and everywhere display and all that stuff P max. But when you run it that way, it's going to show up in your ps, give or take some caveats I could throw out there, but it's going to show up in your ps and when people are doing comparison shopping across multiple brands, you're going to see that promo price in the shopping PLA on the Google search engine results. I think that influences behavior as well.

Brett :

Totally. So yeah, PLA is product listing ads, Google shopping ads, if you will. And really if someone's searching for a product online, they're either going to Amazon or they're going to Google most likely. And so getting that promo attached to a product, it's going to show up in those Google shopping results very clearly in a very compelling fashion as well. Any insights guys? And it's cool if there's not, but did any specific channel, like any specific ad type inside of Amazon or any specific ad type inside of Google really shine or was it kind the usual suspects

Christine:

On the Amazon? It's usual suspects?

Brett :

Yeah, yeah, always sponsored product is always going to be

Christine:

The product. Always

Brett :

Going to win day.

Christine:

We all know the ccpc is through the roof, but we kept our ACO down, which was good. But

Brett :

Yeah, if CPCs go up and conversion rate goes up right along with it, then it doesn't matter. You protect the same ACOs or the same roas yet sponsor products, usually 60 to 70% of our, usually six 7% of our total spend is sponsored products. So it sounds like

Christine:

That

Brett :

Remain the same.

Christine:

Exactly. One thought process on the decision making to run a deal or to not run a deal besides your margins, et cetera, is if you're not running a deal, you're still paying the high cost per click and you're not going to generate the sale, you're not going to have the conversion that you need that if you are running something. So it is something to consider when you decide to potentially maybe sit it out, you're still going to have to pay the same price to display somewhere on your advertising. So God, I just want to make a conversion, maybe take the little hit and participate.

Brett :

Yeah, there's some math you can run there. And I had a podcast, I'll look at the number of the episode, but basically where you can run pricing optimization calculations. And so basically what you have to look at then is based on how you change your price, how the conversion rate would need to change. And I think that's worth looking at, especially if you know, hey, the CPCs are going to up 20, 30, 40%, maybe double in some cases what has to happen to my conversion rate for the math to work? So yeah, and I think it'd be really interesting for someone to look at because it seemed like guys based on, and this is just anecdotally based on what I heard from you, but also from the team, there's a lot of people experimenting with their deals. So the deals for a lot of our clients were not the same this year as they were last year. And so now you've probably got two clear case studies of here's how this discount worked conversion rate, here's how that discount worked in conversion rate, and now we can do some calculations. Am I right in saying that we see deals that were different this year than last year?

Christine:

Yes, only because of the date range also. So it's not necessarily comparing an apple to an apple any longer, it's more the timeframe starting the week earlier, but the actual deals were about the same. It's just what you decided to participate in. So a good exercise for us is, okay, let's take all of the brands from this year and last year. What did they do 23, what did they do in 24? And then extrapolate what actually performed the best. And now we have our 2025 roadmap.

Brett :

Got it. So the discounts on the Amazon set discounts were kind of the same.

Christine:

They were pretty much the same. Amazon pushes the discount for a lightning deal or a best deal based on your lowest price and last 30 days.

Brett :

Got it. Episode 2 55, Byron Myers from Glimmer, which one of my favorite episodes. But while your prices are probably wrong and he kind of walks through how to determine your optimal price, but I think now if you've got at least a few years of sales data around the holidays, take a listen to that episode and then work on tweaking your price

Christine:

For

Brett :

Next year. What did you see on your side? Bill deals mostly the same this year, meaning clients did the same thing they did last year. Do we see a lot of clients experimenting?

Bill:

Yeah, that's a great question. I think we were getting better, our clients were getting better at being simple and being clear. I think we had a lot of complex deals. I think on our end we also get better because when someone brings us the complex deal, it's complex for us to promote and set up. And so we up our game a little bit each year as we learn how to work with those and communicate those to the customer. And so we do see ebb and flow. Some people, some brands might have been just D two c e-commerce last year. They can do whatever they want now they have to sell into retail and they're confined to map pricing or something, so they can't run a big a discount.

Brett :

Yeah, right. Yeah. We've seen 'em with a couple of our larger retailers where their Black Friday, cyber Monday weekend was down a little bit, whole holiday period is up and profits are really up, but it's because they've pushed hard into Walmart or other retailers. And so they're like, Hey, we can only, now we're just all in agreement. We can only discount a certain amount. So that's impacted online sales a little bit, but over total sales, total profits all up. So that's the real

Bill:

Need for sure. And kind of some fun stuff, like last year we convinced some brands who had never run a discount whatsoever to go ahead and run something for Black Friday. It brought this huge wave of sales, and so now they're all about it. And so customers are watching for Black Friday from some of these brands like, oh, I'm going to buy this Black Friday. And then they run a discount. They haven't run all year and it just cleans up

Brett :

Any callouts on what was the best performer that we saw. And we can be on the Amazon side, we need to be close lipped or keep it close to the vest, so to speak. But what did we see any callouts for what was the best? And the one I'm thinking of, bill on the Google side is live beard. And obviously we can't give away any of their sales data, but they crushed it this year and they did not go simple with their offer. They went over the top. But any insights there?

Bill:

Yeah, definitely. And so that comes down to good communication. They started planning months in advance for what this was going to be, how they were going to structure their landing page and so on and so forth. So yeah.

Brett :

And what was their offer? You want to kind of walk back through and you get all the details right,

Bill:

Was a sitewide sale plus a chance to win a truck, a Ford Ranger I believe. And so

Brett :

Ford Raptor. Ford Raptor, big difference. Big difference Bill. Big difference. Yeah. Come on now. Come on. Everybody wants a raptor. Not everybody wants a ranger. No offense to the Ranger drivers out there, but Raptors, dude, that's primo.

Bill:

Yeah, no, for sure. And so yeah, live Bearded was a really good one. I'll also shout out to Carbon Pickleball. They did very, very well, and so I don't have the numbers in front of me. They did very, very well,

Brett :

Which we don't want to give away. Yeah, I tell numbers anyway. Percentages you find I guess. But yeah, man, what a great year for pickleball and shout out to the guys at Carbon Pickleball, CRBN. We met them Christine when we were at Amazon Accelerate in Seattle and people were giving away paddles. These are really good paddles, they're really good. And then we connected with the guys from Carbon and now they're clients, so super, super fun there.

Bill:

I also just want to throw in there, manta Sleep did very well. We were very excited to see the results on Manta sleep.

Brett :

Dude, big shout out to Manta Sleep. I have focused a lot on how do I improve the quality of my sleep because I think the data is just there in overwhelming fashion that that's how you, it's really one of the keys to longevity, to productivity, to being able to handle stress, all those things to be able to work out. And I know you guys are the same Nick, I hear you talking about a lot, but Manta Sleep, yeah, those are sleep masks, right? To help create the fully dark environment and maybe some other sleep enhancements.

Bill:

Yeah, it's the Ford Raptor of sleep masks.

Brett :

Nice, nicely done. Ford Raptor of sleep masks and so really helped them crush it and they're benefiting one from great marketing and a great partnership with OMG, but also I think there's just a collective understanding of I need to prioritize my sleep and make that a bigger area focus. So really good. Nick, from your perspective, any specific deals you want to call out that kind of won the weekend or won the sales period?

Nick:

Not necessarily a deal, but just how to help your brand stand out during this busy season where everyone's blasting everyone with different sales is a follow up email or text. Probably email because you get a little bit more room to work with to everyone who purchased during that Black Friday sale, just thanking them and showing some appreciation. I think commerce could be a little bit more two way. So instead of just blasting it with 20% off, 25% off, get your little list of has purchased during Black Friday and say, Hey, as a small brand, we appreciate it and we're getting all those orders shipped out and we hope you enjoy it.

Brett :

Love it, love it. Alright guys, we are just about out of time. Any final callouts suggestions or recommendations as we wrap up the pod?

Christine:

The week between Christmas and New Year's? This is prime gift card season, so if you're holding onto some inventory that if you unfortunately didn't move it, consider running a deal over that timeframe because it might save you some long-term storage fees in the end.

Brett :

Yeah, it's great. People maybe didn't get exactly what they wanted during Christmas or the holidays or maybe they just got cash and now it's burning a hole in their pocket. They got a gift card they can use anywhere Amazon gift card and so have 'em spend it on your product. 100%. Love that.

Bill:

I will say go with the Cyber 12 model next year for this year it would've been 1121 through 12 two I think we said. And use those first two days on the Shopify side to soft launch. Make sure everything's click in on all cylinders and then really go heavy on the promotion. Do the majority of your spend on Black Friday and then whatever is left on Cyber Monday, just go big on Cyber Monday.

Brett :

Yeah, and one other quick call out that I can't remember if I said earlier, but want to underscore it on the Amazon side, cyber Monday won, it was bigger than Black Friday or any other day on the D two C side. Black Friday is the winner and we've seen that consistently year in and year out that for D two C, Shopify and or Big Commerce stores and the like Black Friday is the winner off and on Amazon, it's Cyber Monday.

Bill:

Correct? I did look at 2023 data and Black Friday was the winner in 2023.

Brett :

That's why. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Closing tips, remarks or comments? Nick Flint.

Nick:

Just like how you should be splitting off everyone who purchased during this timeframe and setting up a little thank you. Think about everyone who's engaged but didn't purchase. There's probably a huge segment of your list that falls into this. You just hit 'em with your best offer the year and they still didn't buy. So internally, get together with your team and say, what could we do to get these people through the door? It might be selling at cost. I mean, it's never fun, but you try to get them in the door with a discount, it didn't work. Let's go ahead and get this product in their hands. At least you break even or get a little bit more personable with it. For a supplement brand, they're taking this list and they're emailing them saying, what are your goals for 2025? We'll help you put together a custom supplement stack. They're going to get hopefully a ton of replies and they're going to get them squared away of the new year.

Brett :

Love it. Awesome. Well, thank you guys. You delivered the goods as always. And hey, if you're listening to this and you're saying, my holiday has not been as strong or as stellar as I'd hoped it would be, and so next year I need to do something different and I want that to start right away, reach out to us. We would love to work with you. We know that everybody is kind of planning thinking about Q1 and beyond. And so hey, if you want Christine and the OMG Amazon team running your Amazon and really unlocking growth there and turning that into the powerhouse that you want it to be, or if you want Bill and team running your Google and YouTube and opening up a new channel of growth there, you're like, Hey, email is not at 40% of my revenue and growing like it should be. And you want Nick Flint and team to look at the email, then reach out to us because the time for us to do a strategic review audit. Kind of look at your game plan for the new year and help you take it to the next level. So reach out to us. We'd love to work with you and with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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‍

‍

In this milestone 300th episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I've distilled the most impactful insights from recent top-performing episodes to help you prepare for eComm success in 2025. From AI marketing innovations to viral content secrets and customer psychology insights, these carefully selected takeaways represent the cutting edge of eCommerce strategy. This special edition delivers concentrated wisdom from industry leaders to help you stay ahead of the competition.

Key Highlights:

• Why "out-of-the-box" AI is dead and how to create custom AI marketing hubs that deliver real results for your business.
• The truth about UGC in 2025: It's not dead, but the bar has been raised - learn what actually works now.
• Surprising insights about customer purchase timing: Why 60% of buyers take longer than a week to make their first purchase, and what this means for your marketing strategy.
• How Simple Modern built a half-billion-dollar brand on Amazon, and their replicable formula for category dominance.
• The "infomercial math" principle that's changing how successful brands approach omnichannel measurement and attribution.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction

(04:00) Harnessing AI for Marketing Success

(08:45) Why UGC Isn’t Dead

(12:20) Leadership and the Power of Real-Time Feedback

(14:42) The Critical Role of Offer Systems

(16:25) Strategies for Winning on Amazon

(18:18) Mastering The Art of The Hook

(20:58) Insights From Post-Purchase Surveys

(25:04) Performance Max vs. Performance Meh

(26:17) Creative Thinking as Your Competitive Edge

(28:05) Lessons From Infomercials

(29:57) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Miki Agrawal
  • TUSHY
• Ezra Firestone
  • Blue Ribbon Mastermind
  • Smart Marketer
  • Boom Beauty
• Roland Frasier
  • Business Lunch Podcast
• Ryan Daniel Moran
  • 12 Months To $1 Million
• Rachel Tipograph
  • MikMak
• Sean Frank
  • The Ridge
• Daniel Harmon
  • Harmon Brother
• Andrew Yuderian
  • eCommerce Fuel
• Steve Chou
  • MyWifeQuitHerJob
• Michael Stelzner
  • Social Media Marketing World
• Russ Henneberry
  • theCLICK
• Dara Denney
  • Motion
• Ray Dalio
  • Bridge Water
• Molly Pittman
  • Smart Marketer
• Bryan Porter
  • Simple Modern
• Eugenia Chen
  • Pandaloon
• Jermiah Prummer
  • KNOCommerce
• True Classic Tees
• Trevor Crump
  • Bestie
• Savannah Knight
  • OMG Commerce
• Will Hughes
  • Organifi
• Joran Pine
  • SciMark
• RTIC Coolers

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

‍

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

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Transcript:

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another very special edition of the eCommerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I'm flying solo on this episode, but for good reason. This episode, this very episode that you're listening to right now is the 300th episode of the e-Commerce Evolution Podcast. Now, I'm a little bit blown away by that fact when I started this, had no idea that it would go this long. To put that into context, most podcasts, the average lifecycle lifespan of a podcast is seven episodes. It's called Pod Fade. Someone starts a podcast and they start to fade, lose a little bit of interest goes away. So podcasts that enter into the 300 plus episode category, that's less than 1% of all podcasts. So thank you to you for tuning in consistently and making this show a success, and also thank you to some amazing guests.

Before I get into highlights, really what I want to do today, so I'll preview this just a little bit, is I've selected 11 fairly recent episodes that just blew my mind, changed my perspective, changed the way I approach marketing, e-commerce business, and I want to share the big idea from those episodes with you and a couple of nuggets. It's going to be rapid fire, 11 quick episodes, 11 quick big ideas, plus some additional big ideas from the content. And I also selected these because not only are they just like highlights of the show, but I believe these get you ready for 2025. I believe the competition's going to be unique in 2025. Things are going to be maybe more difficult than ever in some regards, but also I believe it's going to be a great year of opportunity. I think the economic outlook is pretty bright.

So a lot of opportunities in the coming year, and I want you to take full advantage. So these 11 takeaways and 11 big ideas, we'll get you ready for the new year. Now, I just want to show my gratitude to some amazing guests over the years. This is not a complete list of guests, obviously 300 episodes, but a couple of noteworthy ones. One, Mickey Agarwal, founder of Tushy on this show, dropping truth bombs and wowing us with their creativity and just being in general, a very, very fun episode. My buddy, Ezra Firestone, the legend in the e-com space, blue Ribbon mastermind, smart marketer, boom, beauty and others. He was on the show. He's been a multi-time guest. Roland Frazier, host of the Business Lunch podcast, business investor, leader of the Epic Challenge, just an amazing business mind. Ryan Daniel Moran, author of 12 months to 1 million Great influencers, super sharp guy.

Who else have we had on the pod? Tons of other great guests. Rachel Topograph from Mack, Sean Frank from the Ridge Ridge Wallets, Daniel Harmon of the Harman Brothers, Andrew Derian, commerce Fuel, Steve Chu, my wife, quitter Job podcast. Michael Stelzner, social Media Marketing World. And list goes on and on. Amazing guests. So keep tuning in. Got an amazing docket or amazing lineup of guests coming up in 2025 as well. So let's dive in. Let's dive in and talk about, hey, what are the big takeaways? What are these 11 big ideas and some supporting ideas that we should talk about? First one comes from Russ Berry, pretty recent episode about ai. And his big idea is don't just use out of the box ai, but create AI marketing hubs. If you are in the camp of thinking, Hey, AI is really cool, it's really interesting, but it's not particularly useful.

I can't just use AI to create a meaningful project or save myself a lot of time. It's because you're getting what Russ calls boiled chicken results, and that's because you're not using finely tuned ai. So here's the big idea. AI has been trained on essentially the entire knowledge base of the internet, right? The whole internet basically has been ingested by ai, large language models, but you know what? The AI doesn't know your business or your project that you're working on. And so what we have to do is we have to feed the ai the proper information. One analogy that Russ gave in the episode is, Hey, imagine you hired a top notch business consultant, like one of the best business consultants on the planet. You brought them in, but then you proceeded to tell them nothing about your business, nothing about your industry, nothing about your customers, no data points, no specific knowledge about your business.

You just started asking that consultant questions. You would get very generic answers, maybe insightful, but not particularly insightful for you. So Russ talks about creating these AI marketing hubs. What does that look like? Well, in chat, GPT, that's a custom GPT in clawed AI by anthropic, it's creating a project. And this is where you're feeding the AI all the relevant data for your business. So documents, reports, rubrics, customer feedback, ratings and reviews, transcripts from videos or podcasts or whatever. You're feeding the AI as much relevant information as possible. And then you're asking specific questions. And what's so cool about this, and I've done this a number of times in my business, the more specific information you feed the ai, it just unlocks a level of brilliance. And Russ also laid out a couple of other tips I think are really good. He said three main roles that the AI is really good at.

One is the scribe. So just kind of creative content. I think Claude is exceptional at this exceptional at the written language. So come up with this email, come up with this copy for a landing page, that type of thing. Again, still feed it relevant information, the optimizer. So how do we evaluate and improve what we're doing right now? So here's this landing page copy. Here's this email sequence. Here's a video script that I've got. How do you make it better? So the optimizer and then the strategist. So, hey, given all these inputs, here's our sales data. Here's historical data over the last three years, here's what we're trying to accomplish for this season. What are some big ideas? What should we do this season? So those three roles, scribe optimizer, strategists, all very effective to use the AI for. And then last thing before I move on is he talks about the RTIF framework for better prompts.

So Russ's argument is the real missing piece with AI is you're not feeding in enough relevant data. You got to bring your data to the party, but also better prompts are going to create better results. And so what does RTIF stand for? Well, it's role, task, input and format. So basically you're saying, Hey, chat GT or Gemini or Claude, or whatever, you are a marketing assistant research assistant, or you are a copywriter for a D two C brand. I need you to give me 50 headlines for this product launch. Here are examples of winning headlines in the past. Here's some examples of competitors' headlines. Here's examples of other things. And this is the format that I need that put into. And so I believe that the future is going to be ruled by smart humans who know how to lean in and use ai. I don't believe that the machines are taken over anytime soon, but I do believe that you need to learn AI and leverage it because you very well could get beat out by another agency, by another brand, by another, fill in the blank that is leveraging ai.

So Russ Henneberry's episode on marketing, ai, custom marketing hubs. Check it out. If you have not listened, it is a banger. The next guest. The next episode is from Dara Denny number, episode number 2 87, content that converts. I believe Dara is one of the leading minds when it comes to better creative for ads and organic content. And one of the things we talked about, one of the big ideas is that UGC is not dead. Coffin is not sealed on UGC, but the bar has been raised. And so the key here is that it's not that UGC stopped working user generated content. It's not that testimonials no longer carry any weight. It's just that we've seen testimonials. We've seen UGCA lot now. So just having it isn't the strategic advantage. Just having it isn't going to unlock new results. You've got to have really, really good UGC, and that's the kicker.

The days are gone when you can have bland, boring, pedestrian, UGC and just expect it to work. So no longer are we moved by clips of real customers saying, yeah, this is a really good product. I like it. I like using this product, or this has been a game changer for me. Just really bland engineer stuff. However, if you can capture video of your actual customers or real influencers saying, I've tried dozens of products like this. Nothing has worked like this, or I've tried lots of protein powders, they all wreck my stomach, but not this one. I drink this one. I feel energized. I feel alive. No bloating, no upset stomach, nothing, right? We worked with a jewelry store for a long time and a lot of guys were intimidated to go to jewelry stores. And we captured a customer saying, I used to be really intimidated to walk in the jewelry store until I went here.

The minute I walked in, I felt comfortable. I connected with the salesperson, I talked to the owner, and they gave me ideas and solutions. I'll never go to another jewelry store. So you hear a testimony like that or UGC like that, and you're moved, you feel something and it overcomes objections and it solidifies the value proposition. It brings to life some of the benefits that you're talking about. But generic, UGC, bland, UGC, it is in fact dead. And I would argue that it's probably never worked anyway. It just certainly doesn't work now. So UGC is not dead. The other thing that I'll talk about from Dara Denny's podcast, from her episode, episode 2 87, is that you need to take bigger swings. You need to make bigger tests. It's not really effective to say, Hey, this was our winning ad before. What if we change the color of the headline instead of blue?

Let's go green. How would that do form a hypothesis? Why did this ad work? What is it tapping into? What emotions, what fears, what concerns? What desires? What about our product? Is it highlighting in a unique way? So let's form a hypothesis. How can we create something similar to that, but different but edgier, better but clearer, whatever? So form a hypothesis and take bigger swings, make bigger tests. Of course, lean into what's working, but take a small part of your budget, lean into bigger tests. That's where you're going to find breakthroughs. You're not going to find breakthroughs by making small little color tests and things like that. Next one, episode number 2 79, Dave Klein. We talked about leadership and management within a D two C brand. Now, Dave Klein, one of the best management thinkers of our time. He's one of the best trainers, one of the best coaches that I've ever been around in terms of developing your leadership and developing you as a manager, your managers, and their leadership style.

And so he talked about somebody, he was at Bridgewater Associates, so Ray Dalio's company, and he talked about they had this environment of constant real time feedback. So they would, even as someone is delivering a presentation, people are on iPads giving real-time feedback that didn't make sense, that wasn't believable, this could be improved, and they just gave raw, real-time feedback constantly. Now, not everybody could handle it. Not everyone could handle the pressure, the transparency, the feeling like you're maybe under a microscope all the time. Not everybody can handle it. But those that could grew and improved consistently, it unlocked new levels of growth. Now, you don't need to go to the extreme of Bridgewater, right? There are a few places that operate just like that, but I guarantee you, your team and you need better real time feedback. So one of the best ways to do this is to invite that feedback from your team.

Let your team know, Hey, I want real feedback from you. What can I do better? What can I improve? Was this meeting good? Was this idea clear? How can I make it better? And then especially if you get feedback that's not what you wanted to hear, meaning it's feedback that's, Hey, that idea wasn't very good, or that meaning wasn't a winner, or I don't think I am aligned with you in this. Celebrate that feedback. Thank someone genuinely thanks someone publicly for that feedback that's going to encourage more of it within your business. He also did a great job laying out understanding what are the bottlenecks within a company? What are the constraints for growth within your brand? And spoiler alert, if you're a small business, the constraint, the bottleneck could be you. So go back and listen to that. That's episode 2 79 with my friend Dave Klein.

Highly, highly recommend it. Next up, Molly Pittman. Dear dear friend, Molly Pittman, episode 2 94. I think this was the $600 million meta ad survey results, how to make Meta Ads better. And the big idea here is that you don't just need better ads. You need an offer system. You need better offers, and you need a greater diversity of offers. So Molly's point was, Hey, if you're spending like a thousand dollars a day on ads right now, you may get away with one offer. So one offer, sending people to your product detail page, here's my widget, here's an offer, take it. If that's all you want to do, just scale to say a thousand dollars a day in spend, that may be enough. But if you want to scale to a hundred thousand dollars a day in spend, that's profitable, you need an offer system. So of course, you still need Buy Now offers, but you need learn more offers.

You need sign up for this webinar, offers you need, join this class offer. You need download this guide offer. You need other free offers, experiential type offers that you test. And so this is something that as she, and as OMG, as we work with supplement brands, food and beverage brands, other brands where the price of the item is a little bit higher, how can we get someone into a funnel? How can we create offers that are more than just buy this product now? So you don't just need better ads. You need better offers. Check out the full episode. Molly Pittman, episode 2 94. Next up, Brian Porter from Simple Modern Drinkware Brand. The episode is 2 74, and so they talk about how simple Moderns has sold over half a billion in drinkware in just eight years. And really this is a unique brand because it was basically born and launched on Amazon.

And so this is not just a product being sold on Amazon. This is a real brand, a multi nine figure run rate brand, all born and launched on Amazon. And so they said, really, their formula for success on Amazon, and I think this is going to be the formula that will win for some time to come, is they win the search. So they win the click and the conversion from category level searches. So Tumblr, drinkware Coffee, Tumblr, 40 ounce, Tumblr in yellow, things like that. So they win that generic search and they win that search through a combination of SEO paid search and merchandising, how to get the product on the right shelf, how to get that product to jump off the shelf. That's how you win the click. Then how do you get them to buy? That's really the conversion rate optimization part of Amazon.

So we win that first purchase. Okay, then how do we delight them so that the next time they go to Amazon, they don't search for the category terms, they don't search for generic terms, they search for our brand. Now we've won them over. Now they go look for a Tumblr or other drinkware. They're just typing in our brand name. And so that's where you consider like, Hey, from unboxing to first use, ongoing use, what is that experience like? And am I winning someone over so that the next time they come to Amazon, they're only searching for me and not any of my competitors or the generic terms? So it's episode 2 74, Brian Porter from Simple Modern. Next up, Eugenia Chin. This is episode 2 88, viral Content. Love this episode. Eugenia started the company Panda Loon. She was on Shark Tank, and her big idea is that winning with Hooks, so getting the right hook or the right opening to a video is 50% of the game to making your content viral or creating an ad that has the potential to really scale with its spin.

And so she breaks down three components of hooks that go viral. The first one is a visual scroll stopper. So visually, am I arresting someone and getting them to pay attention to my content? For her? This was she sewed and put together this panda costume that she put on her dog. And so when the dog was walking, it looked like a panda with a dog face walking around. So immediate scroll stopper is there. Then some kind of audio grabber, some kind of audio sound that goes with it. This is especially important on TikTok, and she recommends build for TikTok first because then that translates into other channels, whereas building for Instagram or other channels first does not necessarily translate into TikTok and then use text reinforcement. So can I put some text on the piece of content that reinforces the visual and the audio hook and really, really brilliant.

Watch the full episode to get the full download there. But then she also talks about leading with emotion. Do we start with something emotional? So think about it from this way. As you watch your content, as you watch your ad, what are the parts where you lean in? What are the parts where you perk up? What are the parts of the video where you laugh or where you feel something, where you're moved a little bit, whatever that is likely, that's what you need to bring to the front. Back in the old days, and this is kind of gone in a post pandemic world and just a virtual world that we live in, I used to to play ads in front of a room of people and watch them. When do they lean in? When do they literally laugh out loud or conversely, when do they start looking at their phone?

When do they seem to be drifting and not paying attention? So the parts where they lean in, the parts where you can tell they're feeling something, maybe they get a little choked up, a little teary eyed or something. If it's kind of a moving piece, I want to bring that towards the front almost certainly. So lead with emotion, 50% of your results come from the hook. So Eugenia Chin, episode 2 88, viral Content. Next up, Jeremiah Brummer, our friend from No Commerce, episode 2 62. So no Commerce is a customer survey, a post-purchase survey platform. There are other things you can do with it as well, but the primary offering is post-purchase surveys. And the big idea, the big takeaway from Jeremiah's episode is that 60% of all your buyers take longer than one week after hearing from you before they make that first purchase. And you'd be surprised to learn.

And we unpacked a couple of studies. One was from True classic Teas actually wearing a true classic tea right now that I think it was 30% of their customers, they learned about true classics and didn't buy for up to a year after that. So whatever your platform is telling you, whatever you're seeing in Google Ads or Meta or whatever you're seeing in Google Analytics that hey, it's usually one day or two days after click someone purchases, okay, sure. But that's not from the first time they saw you. That's not from the first time they learned about you. There's this old marketing adage, this old marketing philosophy that I think still rings true where most people have to see or hear of a new brand seven times before they take action. And so this should shift your perspective a little bit on what's truly top of funnel and what we should expect our ad platforms to do.

I'm not advocating that we don't look at ROAS or MER or things like that. I am advocating that we understand that the length of time from someone being introduced to your brand and purchasing is probably quite a bit longer than you think. Okay? So go ahead and listen to that episode, episode 2 62 from Jeremiah Brummer. Now, closely related episode, and I want to give love to this one as well, is Trevor Crump from Bestie, also post-purchase survey platform. And the takeaway from both of these is you should do post-purchase surveys. But the biggest takeaway I got from Trevor's episode is, Hey, the reason you think people are buying from you, the reason someone chooses you over your competitors, or the main reason someone buys your product in the first place, probably isn't the reason you think it's, and so one of the things we can ask in our post-purchase surveys is, Hey, what's the main reason you bought this product?

So Trevor gave this awesome example of a client that he worked with, and they sold underwear for kids who wet the bed, right? So embarrassing issue, some kids struggle with it for years. They went to bed, they can't stop. And so they sold these underwear training pants, so it makes you feel bigger than if you're wearing a pull-up or something like that. But the owner of the brand was convinced there were two reasons that people bought one cost savings. You buy this, it's cheaper than buying pull-ups and two environmentally friendly, right? We're not filling landfills with pull-ups and diapers and things like that. Turns out those two were not even in the top five. That was not why people were buying. The number one reason that people were buying this product is it gave their kids confidence, right? There was a real emotional reason here.

Parents said, my kid, when they're struggling with wetting the bed, it wrecks their confidence. And I'm very, very motivated, very motivated to help them. I'll invest money, I'll spend money to fix that. Okay? The environment, that's a nice bonus and saving a little bit of money on not buying Pull-ups bonus. That's not why someone invested in this. It was to give their kid confidence. So understanding that, understanding why someone actually buys your product that can unlock a new approach to your advertising. Think about how that shifts the message of your video content or your image content or your ads in general, knowing the real reason somebody buys. So check out the full episode, episode two 50 with Trevor Crump. Next up, Savannah Knight, OMG Rockstar. We talked about Performance Max in this episode, and so I love this episode not because we talk about Performance Max, because if Google follows kind of the course of their history, max will be phased out at some point in the future.

There'll be other campaign types that replace it. But what I think is true about Max that will be true forever is that campaigns are always going to lean into AI and machine learning performance Max in kind of a special way. But the big takeaway here is that your campaigns are only as good as the data that you give them and the creatives that you give them. So the real unlock with Performance Max or whatever campaign is popular in the future is give the campaign good data, clear insights into this is my ideal customer, and then give the campaign really great creatives. I think we run a real risk of becoming AI dependent or smart bidder dependent, rather than bringing our best to these campaigns and then really allowing the AI to work some magic. So that's the takeaway from that episode. Next up, will Hughes, episode 2 31, the Million Dollar Mindset.

Will Hughes grew Organify to $100 million a year run rate, but he had to do so profitably, he could not acquire customers at a loss. So had to be first order break even, or first order profitable. One of the big ideas that he talked about in that podcast was creative thinking as a competitive advantage. So how can you unlock creative thinking, creative problem solving to give your business a competitive edge? And we talk about a concept in this podcast that I love called a reticular activator. So this is a part of your brain that's always looking for something familiar or something really out of place. And so you can kind of train your brain here as well. So one of the best examples of a reticular activator is your name. Think about it this way. You're walking through a crowded airport, all kinds of noise and chaos.

You can't make heads or tails of it, but you hear someone say your name out of the clutter, your name shines through. That's because your name is a reticular activator. Your brain, your subconscious is scanning the environment, looking for things that are familiar or things that are really out of place. Another example is if hey, you decide you want to buy a car, bought my wife a four runner. Once I started looking at four runners, everywhere I drove, I saw every forerunner on the road. It's not that suddenly there were more forerunners on the road, it's just that I was in tune with them and my reticular activating system was looking for them. You can train yourself to do the same thing. Look for patterns, look for things that are missing. Look for companies that are doing something really unique and really different. So train your brain to start looking for patterns and leverage creative thinking as a competitive advantage for your brand.

Last one, actually, as we wrap up here, my buddy Jordan Pine, episode two 30, lessons from DRT or Direct Response tv. We talked a lot about infomercials, and I love infomercials. Talk a lot about the Ginsu Knife commercial or other great infomercials that are on TV P 90 X. I bought the P 90 X program way back in the day because of their amazing infomercial. But what I loved about his podcast, a lot of things, but he talked about infomercial math. So what do they expect when they run an infomercial on tv? Where do they expect the sales to come from? Well, they expect 20% of sales to come from direct response, meaning someone picks up the phone or they email in directly, right? 30% they expect to happen on the website so that we go to beachbody.com or P 90 x.com, whatever, to buy the product.

And then a full half of all sales, they expect to happen on Amazon. So even if that infomercial does not mention Amazon, we expect a lot of those purchases to take place on Amazon. Now, those numbers shift a little bit if you get in store placement, if you're in brick and mortar stores as well. But just understand, this really underscores a really important point that when you're investing in things like tv, YouTube, meta, even the versions are going to happen someplace else. In a lot of cases, you may be sending someone to your website. The conversion may happen on Amazon, you may be running a YouTube ad, which did a big campaign for Arctic coolers, may running a campaign on YouTube, but the purchase is going to happen at Walmart, or the purchase is going to happen on Amazon. And so understanding where the purchases take place and where you expect them to take place is going to impact your measurement, how you determine if you were successful or not.

And it's going to dictate then what you do based on those results. So I'm so excited for you for 2025. I'm so excited for the podcast for 2025, and I can't wait to help you crush growth this year. D two C, omnichannel and the like. We would love to work with your brand, whether that's on the Amazon side, email side, YouTube side, Google side, meta side. If your brand feels stuck, you've been spinning your wheels with some important channels. Chat with us at OMG Commerce. We'd love to run a complimentary strategic review for you and see how our team can help you level up. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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When the pandemic left Garrett Goslin without his sommelier job, he turned his passion for pickleball into an innovative paddle company. Alongside childhood friend Kyle Goguen, CRBN Pickleball has emerged as a leading premium brand in one of America's fastest-growing sports. Their journey offers valuable lessons for any brand looking to build authentic community and stand out in a competitive market.

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Key Takeaways:

• Product Innovation & Customer Feedback: Learn how CRBN maintains its competitive edge by leveraging multiple feedback loops - from pro athletes to local ambassadors - and investing heavily in R&D to stay ahead of larger competitors.
• Building a Multi-Channel Brand: Discover their strategic approach to building a premium brand across direct-to-consumer, Amazon, and retail channels while maintaining consistent positioning and storytelling.
• Community-First Growth: Explore how CRBN built a powerful ambassador program without spending big marketing dollars, and why their grassroots approach helped them compete against established sporting goods brands.
• Founder Authenticity: See why sharing the founder's story - even when uncomfortable - has become a key differentiator in their marketing strategy and helped forge deeper connections with customers.

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The episode provides a masterclass in building a premium brand through community engagement, product innovation, and authentic storytelling.

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction: The Founding Story of CRBN

(09:51) R&D and Product Innovation in Pickleball

(15:03) Understanding Customer Feedback: The Heart of Product Development

(19:00) Building a Community: The Role of Ambassadors in Growth

(24:32) The Power of Authenticity: Leveraging the Founder’s Story

(28:25) Sponsoring Athletes: A Strategic Approach to Brand Visibility

(32:20) Maximizing Amazon: Strategies for Growth and Brand Building

(40:16) Future Innovations: What's Next for Carbon Pickleball?

(42:31) The Affiliate Strategy: Quality Over Quantity

(46:39) Conclusion

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Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript:

Garrett:

I don't think you're going to get anywhere in this sport or any industry without really trying new things. And I think that's really what's setting us apart so far is just being different.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we are talking about something that has been sweeping the nation. It's incredibly popular. I don't think it's going anywhere. We're also diving into brand building, product building, some unique marketing and growth aspects. So we're talking pickleball today and I've got the two execs from CRBN Pickleball on today. I met with these guys in Seattle at the Amazon Accelerate Conference. We hit it off, we had some mutual friends. I got one of their paddles. We became bros and we decided, hey, let's do a podcast and tell people the story behind CRBN. So with that, we've got the founder, Garrett Goslin and his right hand man. I guess I don't even know exactly how to intro you, Kyle, but Kyle Goguen as well. And so Garrett and Kyle, welcome to the show.

Kyle:

Thanks, Brad. Thanks for having us.

Brett:

Yeah, man. Really excited to have you guys. And so let's tell the story briefly because I always love it when it's like, Hey, we're business partners, we work together, but we're also brothers or childhood friends or whatever. But you guys are childhood friends now. You run a very successful business together. What is that like? And then also Kyle, I know you kind of run marketing, but you run a lot of stuff. So talk about your individual roles as well.

Kyle:

Yeah, sure. Garrett, you want to start?

Garrett:

Sure, I'll start it off. Okay. So CRBN started in late 2021. I was working in the hospitality industry as a wine sommelier and the pandemic hit and lost my job. And there's not a lot of need for people pouring wine at country clubs when you can't go to any.

Brett:

I've heard. Just a quick pause on that. I think this is an interesting, Garrett. I've heard it's very complicated to become a wine sommelier.

Garrett:

It is not easy. I was studying, there's four levels. I was studying for my level three when the pandemic hit. My boss was a master song, which is the very top level, and it took him about seven years to become a master.

Brett:

That's crazy.

Garrett:

Yeah, crazy.

Brett:

So do you still like to impress people with your wine knowledge at parties and things like that, or you

Garrett:

It's definitely fallen off a bit. I've lost some of those skills, but I can still impart some knowledge on people, but

Brett:

Got it.

Garrett:

Yeah, so it was a good time while I was doing it, but when that ended, I found myself with a lot of time. I had been playing pickleball since 2017, and so being unemployed at that time allowed me to play a lot more pickleball. I was playing every day of the week, a couple hours a day. And in that process I started kind of running up the ranks a little bit, getting a little bit better, starting to play more competitively. At that time, there weren't as many people in the game playing, so my skill level seemed a lot higher than what it would be now. It's very competitive now, and I do not compare to any of the pros these days. But

Brett:

Back And you guys in southern California area, right? Orange County is kind of where you're competing?

Garrett:

Yeah, we're in Costa Mesa, Newport Beach area. So anyways, since I was playing so much, a lot of my paddles that I was using just kept kind of falling apart, breaking, falling down, falling and losing grit, surface grit on them. And it just came to the point where I was just like, maybe there's something better out there. I feel like I can find something. And there was a company doing something with CRBN fiber on the surface at the time, but didn't really the shape that they were doing. And so I took that idea with CRBN fiber and applied it to, I would say more user-friendly shapes of paddles and had it made for myself, myself and my double's partner at the time. And the idea was we'll have these badass paddles that we'll use and play tournaments with, and it kind of worked. And then we were playing at our

Brett:

Was your goal just at that time, just like you wanted to go pro and pickleball or just playing?

Garrett:

I think so. I think, did

Brett:

You think product business at that time or you were just making the paddles so you could dominate?

Garrett:

Yeah, exactly. I didn't have that thought at all. It was really just so I could have a competitive edge. And then at the club that we were playing, people started noticing our paddle and it seemed like we were getting a lot more power and spin and longevity out of these paddles. And so eventually people started asking like, Hey, can I buy one of those? We were just like, no, they're for us, sorry. And then eventually it came to the point where I was like, all right, we'll try this out. So placed an order and a very small amount and to see how it would do, and they sold out right away within a couple of weeks. And then I kind of knew we had something going here. Then Kyle wasn't on from the very beginning. But then very shortly after, once we started getting a lot of traction and I realized this is not a one man project. I had reached out to Kyle since we've known each other for the better part of 25 years, and I knew his background and his success that he's had in marketing and e-commerce, he's the perfect man to partner with and there's a lot of trust there already. So it's worked out.

Brett:

Totally. I love it. And did you guys ever at recess in elementary school ever like, dude, one day we're going to build a business together?

Kyle:

I don't know if it was in recess, but Garrett and I have chatted about starting a business in the past. I think it was more in the college years. I mean, if I think back, actually, I think the first business that I considered pursuing first real business was with Garrett. And we went as far as meeting with people and sketching out what a business plan might look like, ended up not pursuing that idea thankfully. But it is kind of fun to think back and realize that the writing was sort of on the wall and then this sort of happy accident happened. And then we have since done it and things have gone well. And I think Garrett already touched on this a little bit, but we have very complimentary skill sets, I would say, and that plus a high level of trust makes this partnership work really well.

I mean, Garrett, as he already got into handles basically all of the r and d and since the beginning, but I mean these days we have a full-time engineer with a workshop in Southern California where we can iterate very quickly, which we might touch on later in this pod. But Garrett, he handles all of that and a lot of the branding and a bunch of other parts of the business that I'm not great at and I handle, I'm more so focused on the marketing in general and specifically that's my background. So prior to partnering with Garrett, I had a pet brand that I started 10 years ago right after college. So I spent the last 10 years building up that business, building a team, running it. And so it kind of gave me, while it wasn't pickleball, paddles gave me a ton of experience. I mean, selling dog treats online in many ways is similar to selling pickleball paddles online. So I'm able to kind of bring that experience to the table while Garrett focuses on the product, since he's frankly a much more talented player. He can bring a lot to the table knowing exactly what we want want to create.

Brett:

But I hear Kyle, that you're gaining on him because you're playing more. He's got a kid now, he can't hit the courts as much. So is your goal to beat Garrett consistently in pickleball or what he striving for

Kyle:

Sure we could say gaining on him, but I would not say quickly gaining on him. And no, I don't think that's a goal. I think my goal is to not embarrass myself

Garrett:

Like

Kyle:

That or the company. And outside of that, I'm happy with Garrett being better than me. Totally makes sense. He can have that trophy. You can keep that title. Yeah,

Garrett:

Kyle's better at me than plenty of other things, so I'm going to

Brett:

Take it out.

Garrett:

Yeah, I'll just stay number

Brett:

One

Garrett:

In e-comm.

Kyle:

There you go.

Brett:

Love it. But that is interesting that you bring that up to Casso. So selling, building a pet brand, which was very successful, you built, there are some similarities between pickleball, right? Because it's a large market, so the tam for both is large, and it takes some skill to differentiate your product amidst a lot of competition. There's a lot of competition, pickleball, a lot of competition in the pet space. And so yeah, definitely you guys have cracked the code with this combo of great product and great marketing. And so let's talk about r and d and the strength of your product because I think there's a lot of lessons there that other brands can learn from. And I remember, Kyle, you were telling me this story, Adidas, I think obviously probably put a lot of money into launching their own pickleball paddles and they flopped. And I think the theory or the guest there is they just did it right without maybe a lot of deep knowledge into pickleball and what pickleball players wanted. And so you guys are pickleball players, Garrett, you played tournaments and you're competitive and the sport. How do you approach r and d and what do you think it is that makes your product so special? Because I know one thing you guys said, and I've seen this with other businesses, when you get the product right, everything else is so much easier. Marketing is easier, distribution is easier. Charging a price that allows you to have the right EBITDA is easier. So what are your secrets to making a great product?

Garrett:

Yeah, I'll start by kind of saying that Adidas has stepped their game up. I don't want to completely disparage their name. I think first their first splash into the market was a little bit more cookie cutter, and they were just kind of testing the waters to see how it worked. But they've definitely, they've invested a little bit more into r and d and stuff like that recently, it seems.

Kyle:

I think just broader, not speaking specifically about Adidas is that I think a lot of big brands have tried to get into the pickleball space because they realize it's growing really fast. And I think early on, a lot of them just assumed, look, it's just this random hobby that's very simple. It's maybe not for hardcore athletes and they didn't put the time and effort into the r and d or they just hired, they had their existing engineers develop product or whatever, or they licensed out their brand or whatever they did where they didn't develop a very thoughtful product, frankly, which was great for us because it gave us opportunity, which Garrett's going to touch on here in a second. But it was just fascinating to see these behemoths of a company across the board come in, try to do well and have every advantage in the world, and then people not take them serious in the hardcore pickleball world.

Brett:

And it sort of seems like some bigger brands or brands that don't know pickleball just coming in and they're trying to access that market. It's an opportunity. I'm trying to take advantage of that opportunity where Garrett looked at it and said, Hey, I'm trying as a pickleball player, I'm trying to solve a problem. I am losing my grip on this. My paddles are wearing out. I want more velocity, things like that. So you're solving a problem rather than just trying to tap into an opportunity. So yeah, how do you kind approach r and d and how do you approach iteration? I know you guys are always iterating, improving, launching new products, things like that.

Garrett:

Yeah, so I mean definitely from the get go it was solely myself and a couple of drilling partners that were doing the RD for the company. And from an RD standpoint, it was like you said, just based on trying to solve a problem. And I think we started with a very innovative product and noticed that it kind of caught on that technology we found ourselves. We would start high and then get caught up to, and then we'd have to make another jump and then get caught up to, so it's always been a little bit of cat and mouse with developing and innovating. So I think that's just because that we feel like it's been kind of that chase game since the inception. That's just kind of how we position ourselves now is always trying to just set the new bar. And we really started taking that seriously a year and a half ago and decided this is what we want to be doing and really pushing the limits.

So we invested in an engineer and being able to just iterate on a dime, a new paddle every couple of days, stuff like that, just really trying to, and not being afraid to fail. That was a big thing too. And it's just really trying to just push things that haven't been done before. And if they don't work, cool, at least we tried it out. But I don't think you're going to get anywhere in this sport or any industry without really trying new things. And I think that's really what's setting us apart so far is just being different.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. And so you're constantly trying to look for that next thing because if you create a great product, it's going to be knocked off, it's going to be duplicated, other competitors going to catch up, and so no product lasts forever. So you got to be constantly reinventing. You've got the advantage in that you both play pickleball, you're both in the sport, but what else are you doing? Are you going to tournaments and talking to players and finding out what they want, what they're frustrated with, how are you, any insights that other brands can latch onto for how you're iterating and coming up with those next designs?

Garrett:

I think the really cool part about this sport is it has such a passionate customer base and really strong following, and you are able to track that on a lot of different levels. And I'll let Kyle kind of take over, but there's so many different platforms and channels to reach our customer and to get feedback. And we have a lot of ambassadors and we have a Discord channel and a lot of reviews, whether it be our website directly or YouTube. So there's just a lot of ways to get feedback and really have what we feel is a beat on what's going on in the world and what people are looking for.

Brett:

That's so great. Yeah. I want to talk about the marketing and growth side too, but before we do that, what are you doing to create feedback loops and to create mechanisms and opportunities where you can hear directly from your customer?

Kyle:

Yeah, for sure. So I mean, I think kind of like you mentioned at the highest level, if I think top down it's number one, the company is full of people who are passionate about pickleball players or passionate about pickleball rather. So Garrett and I are both pickleball players. Most of our team, if not all of them, are really passionate about the sport across all different skill levels. I also think that's important too. I think if it was just people at a very high level, we wouldn't be able to think holistically about the industry. So we kind of touch every aspect. We are our customers, so that's most important. And then I think going down the different level, the different tiers that I would think about it is next is our athletes. You already mentioned that we sponsor a bunch of different athletes on the pro level and the pro scene.

Garrett's working with them very closely to get them prototypes, get feedback on a regular basis outside of what he can gather himself. So you have that at a very, very high level. The athletes that we're actually sponsoring and you go down one tier below that, we have our affiliates that we work with, and these are the hardcore paddle reviewers, like the paddle heads that know every spec of every brand, all of that sort of thing. These people exist and they're really great for getting feedback as well because while they're maybe not as skilled as some of the pro athletes, arguably they know more about paddles than the athletes do. So you kind of get that perspective. And then maybe one tier below that is our ambassadors. So we have thousands of ambassadors, mostly in the US but really globally. And so we get paddles and product in their hands and whether we want them to or not, they give us a lot of feedback.

We have a closed community with them and they're telling us all the time what they, what they don't like, new product ideas. All of that is kind of built in, which has been really cool. And then I guess one level further below that is just our regular customers. So we use what you would assume different apps and tools to solicit feedback, product reviews, and just frankly emailing people as well whenever we need to. We'll just straight up ask them for feedback if they've bought a product. So that kind of covers many different people and many different stages. It really just depends on the product that we're trying to launch,

Brett:

Covers all the skillset levels and all the use cases and different types of buyers. And so it makes a lot of sense. I want to actually talk about each of those groups a little bit, but let's start with the ambassadors. So this is going to be different skill levels. Maybe some of those are competing, maybe some of 'em are not, they're just playing with their family or whatever. How are you identifying potential ambassadors and then what does that program look like?

Kyle:

Yeah, so lucky for us, we've mostly built that program with inbound. We've never really solicited ambassadors. It's just a form on our website. People share it with their friends, they're excited about the brand. I think that's a big part of this is we've built a strong brand that people want to be a part of, so they're applying. So they fill out this pretty thorough form, essentially trying to become an ambassador and our community manager vets all of them and makes sure that they're a good fit for us both in culture is probably the most important thing. Trying to make sure that frankly they're a good person ideally and someone we want representing the brand. But sometimes that's hard in a form, but we do the best we can. And then outside of that, we're looking at all different attributes, things like how good are you at the game, but also how involved you are in the community and what you are doing or what you can do to promote our products. So I mean to boil it down, I would say our ambassadors usually fit in a couple of different buckets. One of them is just the best player at your local courts. Ideally that person is repping our product, kind of that aspirational the person you want to be. Then you also have the person who's heavily the

Brett:

Person or the doubles team that they're winning all the local tournaments, what paddle are they

Kyle:

Using? If you're getting crushed by someone or a team that's using CRBN, you're going to give it another look. Then you also have the people that are just heavily involved in the community, whether they're the person club president or the one putting on little local tournaments, influencer in person locally. So that person's great. And then another bucket I would say are pickleball coaches. So those are the people that are giving people lessons, teaching them the basics or even more advanced level tips and stuff like that. What paddle are they using and what paddles are they promoting? That's hugely influential I would say. And so we just want to get as many of those people as possible and that's been a fun experience kind of vetting all the applicants that we get and building out that community.

Brett:

It's such a smart approach where you're looking at, hey, who has the eyes and ears and the influence of our target audience, and then how do we build a relationship with them? Because I think a lot of brands that we talk to really are just leaning into paid ads. And obviously I love ads, we're running an ad agency, so big believer, but the more you can do to brand build, to build a community, to get a following, to get other people out there, becoming ambassadors for you makes everything work better. So any success stories you want to call out from the ambassador program? I think this is something that a lot of brands are missing. Obviously it's a little easier for you because this is a product that is part of a community anyway and it's growing and it's fun and people like to talk about it a little harder if you're selling pain cream or something like that. But any ambassador success stories you can talk about.

Kyle:

Yeah, sure. I think mean you hit on it like you just said, there are some advantages because our product lends itself to being out in the public and in these communities. But I think the one thing, if you can figure it out, if you're a business owner and you can figure out how to build something like this, the cool thing is it's a perfect program for a bootstrapped business or one that's got a tight budget early on. This is something we were able to build just with our effort early on in the business. We didn't have a ton of funds for advertising or hiring a nationwide sales team. I think a lot of the bigger brands don't take the time to build out these grassroots efforts because they're just like, well, we'll just hire a sales team.

Brett:

Totally.

Kyle:

And yeah, that actually is effective, but in a different way. Those people are going after retailers. We want to influence the people on the ground at the courts. So I think it's just one of many different marketing tactics people should probably be using. But for us it was once we identified big how community focused pickleball was as a sport, it was a no brainer. So I think if there's any sort of community aspect to your industry, this is a perfect fit, some version of this.

Brett:

How do you incentivize your ambassadors? Are you giving them discounted product free product? Are you paying them affiliate commissions? And obviously you don't have to share anything that's confidential, but how are you incentivizing your ambassadors?

Kyle:

Yeah, no, happy to share. I mean, it's public on the application itself. So yeah, they're unpaid outside of commission that they drive through sales, and then they also get heavily discounted product. So perfect. Again, cashflow wise, it's great. I mean we're paying them after they've made the sale. It makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint and they're really excited to do it. They love the brand and they want more swag, more gear, more everything and just be as kitted out as possible I guess on the courts.

Brett:

Very cool. I want to talk about some of those other groups in a second as well, but I got a question for you, Gary, because I think this is interesting. You are a unique business in that you are the founder and you're a customer and you've got this great story. How much are you in your marketing? How much are you leaning into that founder's story versus just leaning into the brand and maybe athletes and affiliates and things like that? How do you strike that balance? Because there's this classic story of Wendy's, right? Where Dave Thompson, I believe is the founder and always they'd hire a new ad agency and the ad agency's like, well, let's get Dave out of the commercials. I want to get Dave, but nothing performed as well as having Dave in the commercials. I think it's good to have a good mix of things, but what's your philosophy on that, you being in your ads versus just leaning on the brand or other spokespeople?

Garrett:

Yeah, I mean, I don't dunno the exact percentage split, but we're definitely using that founder story and I think to pretty great success with that. I mean, like you said, I think we're getting pretty solid feedback when we do talk about my story or my journey into starting this business. It's something that a lot of people can relate to. It's a very personal story and as much as it can be awkward for me and a little, because I definitely don't want to be in the limelight, but it's cool to be able to share something that I'm passionate about and where the brand is going from my point of view. But yeah, I let Kyle kind of finish that up, but

Kyle:

I can chime in here. Garrett's a super humble guy and frankly he doesn't like being in front of the camera. He doesn't like putting his story out there and it's been something that I've been working on with him for years basically is just convincing him that this is a story that people want to hear. And absolutely, we we're well known in the pickleball industry, but we are not one of the big, big guys in the space. There is a unique aspect to us is that we are a fairly lean team. We're pretty young in our overall business journey and people want to buy from people and you tell Garrett's story and people want to buy from him and talk to him. And so from an email marketing standpoint, a lot of the emails Garrett's writing because people want to hear from him. A lot of these big brands don't have the ability to do that because the founders or the business owners are long gone. They're not part of that. And I think it's something we can take advantage of right now because Garrett is in the weeds and I think again, he doesn't love it. But we'll continue to double down on that story because I think it's a compelling one.

Brett:

And I think Dave from Wendy's didn't like it either. I think he wanted to get out of it. I think it wasn't just the ad agencies, but he never did because it always worked. And I think it's a competitive advantage for you guys, just like you said, lean into it. As you grow, there's going to be more and more people that just come to the brand because their favorite pickleball athlete use it or some friend or they just see an ad or they see it on Amazon and they buy it and they love it. But that's something you got to lean into for now, and I think it's going to continue to pay dividends. It's really interesting. We get to audit dozens of great brands, Google ads and YouTube and Amazon and stuff, and just audit a really large pet brand. I can't say who it was or who it is, but they've got these hero videos and they're funny and they're so good and they work really well.

We're going to lean into them on YouTube, but then they have these founder story videos and it's literally just the founder, one dude on camera talking about why he designed the product. And I know it costs almost nothing and not nothing, it looks good, but the comparison of the two, the hero video and that founder video and the CPAs are about the same. The founder video, they just work. So I think you got to always lean into that because people are going to resonate with that story. So love that. Glad to hear you're doing that. Let's talk a little bit about athletes for a minute. So is this something you started doing from the beginning like, Hey, let's go sponsor athletes and we're at a stage in the development of pickleball where this is not the NBA where we're going to pay somebody millions and millions of dollars to be an athlete that reps our products or is the athlete thing, is that more new for you?

Garrett:

I'll start, I guess, but I think, so the first few months before Kyle came on into the company, I have very little internet marketing experience to almost none. And so the lowest hanging fruit was to sponsor local pros around me that I knew and that were already advocates of the paddle. So it was just kind of a really easy match. They wanted to use it, and so it made a really easy relationship. Even fast forward to now, we still do sponsor a good amount of athletes because it's just really good to see those eyeballs on it. But I, there's a lot of importance on what Kyle's doing, and so I think that's really even split at this point.

Kyle:

Yeah, I mean, one thing I would say too, Garrett, I have to assume early on, well, I guess always taken inspiration from that southern California surfing industry.

Totally. Garrett and I grew up in Southern California together by the beach every day as much as possible. And so we grew up around these brands that were created in Southern California, and so much of the marketing was sponsoring surfers. And so much of what we take inspiration from is the look the field, the vibe that we're going for as a brand, but also that as well. I think that's what Garrett knew these companies were doing. We followed a similar model, and I will say we were lucky when we were kind of early days of CRBN. The pro scene of pickleball was still kind of in its infancy. It had been around for years, but it was just starting to really garner some momentum. And so you could argue ton

Brett:

Of money flowing at that point either, right? Nobody's getting necessarily rich off of being a pro pickleball player

Kyle:

Exactly early on. So it like it matched our growth. So it was like the money that was needed to sponsor a pro pickleball player was matching the money we could afford, if that makes sense. So like you said, if I were to start a basketball shoe company today, you can't afford any of the NBA athletes, but at the time we could afford pickleball athletes. It's changed drastically very quickly, but it's still a big part of our strategy. I think what I've been able to do is combine what Garrett has done, which is that grassroots effort. These players are playing with it, people see it, they get influenced, they want to buy with the digital set of things. So when we sign athletes, we're looking at white listing ads with them, creating ad content, how can we leverage their likeness everywhere in ads, but also on our website, all our landing pages, everything to just really get the most, maximize the exposure and also the benefits that come from sponsoring these people.

Brett:

Super smart. I think that that's where you really can make a sponsorship pay for itself. You never know. You sponsor an athlete and then you may find out, yeah, they're not really that outspoken about my product, but if you structure where, hey, we're getting videos with this athlete and then we're going to create mashups with other athletes, we're going to run this in our ads, we're going to put it on the website, we're going to put it everywhere, emails, things like that. Now you are almost guaranteeing an ROI for that sponsorship, so very cool. So we've got these three A's right, athletes, affiliates, the ambassadors. Let's pivot to another A really quickly, then we come back to affiliates if we have time. But Amazon, so we met at an Amazon event in Seattle, which was super fun, but I was just a dude there attending and talking to people. You guys were guys were rising stars at the Accelerate conference. I met you guys, you had Jean jackets on with your logo and Amazon Rising Stars on it. But in all seriousness, you guys were featured by Amazon ads because you've just seen tremendous growth on the platform. I think I got a little card with my paddle that said 14 x growth, something crazy like that. But how are you guys viewing Amazon as a channel and then Amazon ads as a means to accelerate growth on Amazon?

Kyle:

Yeah, I can take that one. I think for us, our strategy frankly from the beginning is that we want to sell our products and our paddles to anyone wherever they want to buy them. And I mean if you look at just the internet, obviously that includes our website. It includes Amazon is a huge player, it includes some of the other big online retailers of pickleball equipment, but that also includes brick and mortar retail. So we sell quite a bit into retail. So we are pretty well diversified and we just want to be in front of customers wherever they want to shop. So Amazon, a lot can be said about Amazon, good and bad, but there are a lot of customers on Amazon and if they want to buy us there, we want to be there. So that's been our strategy from the beginning and we've had good success.

And I think because of that success and some of the relationships I had kind of gathered over the years with the pet business, we were able to kind of get that unique opportunity to be part of their season. One of Rising Stars, this new kind of series, this program that they've developed, that program I guess is they have it overseas and it was really successful. And then now they're bringing it to the US for the first time. So I know they're doing season two and doubling down on this. And it was a good opportunity to get a ton of content shot about our company and get some good PR and free marketing and free marketing is the best kind of marketing, I guess. So it was a good experience.

Brett:

Cannot beat that. Yeah, it was really great little documentary they put together that Amazon ads put together about CRBN pickleball and a few other brands. And so what a really cool experience to see that. And I love the way you frame that, Kyle, because we're now working with larger brands and more Omni-channel or multi-channel brands. That's really where things are headed. We've worked with Native for years and years now, and I can't really share any details there, but they started as D two C only and then when p and g bought them, P g's playbook is really retail store, that's where they grown, where they take a brand from millions to billions.

But this is what we're seeing a lot of where as we talk to bigger brands and help them craft some of their strategies, it's often retail stores are their biggest source of distribution, Amazon's second or sometimes those are flip flopped, and then D two C is third. And that's even true for brands that started D two C, but now they're just expanding. And I think it makes a lot of sense. There's still so many things that we like to buy in store trying, holding it, seeing the paddle, comparing the paddle to other paddles, or we want to buy online, we just want to buy on Amazon because it's easier and it's simpler and we can check out in seconds type of thing. So I love that approach. How do you guys view Amazon ads as that? And obviously you're a rising star there and they featured you, so you must believe in it, but how do you look at Amazon ads compared to just organic growth on Amazon?

Kyle:

Yeah, I mean Amazon ads are hugely important in my opinion, and can be hugely profitable if you do it. I think my opinion is Amazon ads are probably the most straightforward ad platform online. Totally. I mean, everyone's got their credit card out ready to shop. Conversion rates are nuts on Amazon compared to other channels. So I think it's very straightforward. It's like the most bottom of funnel traffic you could probably go after. So it's a no brainer. Obviously you need someone to be managing the ads that knows what they're doing or you need to take a course or learn it yourself or whatever. But pretty much everybody should be running ads if you're going to be selling on Amazon, I guess is my answer.

Brett:

Totally, totally. And I love that. I fully agree with that. We run an agency, obviously we offer it as a service, but we partner with Ezra Firestone and Smart marketer built an Amazon ads course just so people like it. There's a lot of people that want to learn, and at a base level, it's not rocket science. You can learn it and grow using it. And so one of the things you guys do on Amazon though that I think is so, so important, and this is what we've been telling brands for years on Amazon, is it's not just about making a sale on Amazon, it's about building a brand. You guys have an amazing storefront, you have an amazing presence. As I look at your paddles and what you're doing on Amazon, I feel like I'm buying a quality product. And then later if someone said, oh, what kind of paddle is that? I wouldn't say, oh, it's just something I bought on Amazon. I'm not really sure. I'd be like, no, this is a CRBN paddle. And I think that's a good litmus test is like, hey, if someone's telling somebody else about what they just bought, are they saying, oh, it's just something I bought on Amazon, or are they saying it's this brand? And I think you guys are definitely in that category of this brand. People are talking about you. How do you guys approach the brand building side of Amazon?

Kyle:

Well, I mean if we're talking specific to Amazon, I think it's lucky in that we're doing all that work for our website and retailers already. So a lot of times we're just taking similar content and repurposing it. I mean, Amazon has a whole slew of different requirements and different strategies you can implement when it comes to content. But yeah, we're just repurposing. Luckily we shoot a lot of stuff with our pros and a lot of different influencers and content producers. So we have a ton of lifestyle content that we just slap in a different format and put on Amazon. And that's been great. And I totally agree with you. Anything you can do on Amazon to stand out as a brand is hugely beneficial. It's a huge marketplace with every product under the sun. So anytime that you can get your logo and your brand in there and tell a story, it's worth it.

Brett:

And I think what a growing trend is, so many people have bought something on Amazon without really digging in and then they were kind of burned to buy it. And so I think there's definitely a trend where people want to buy from brands from quality, reputable brands. And so we got to lean into that. And the way I like to frame it is if I go to Best Buy and I want to buy an Apple product, it's not just an Apple products sitting on a shelf. I'm going to the store within a store, the little Apple store within Best Buy. I think that's what you should try to create for your brand. So where someone's shopping on Amazon, it's like, no, I'm experiencing CRBN. I just happen to be shopping on. And

Kyle:

I think Amazon realizes that and has started doubling down on that. I mean, every new feature they come out with is giving you more and more ability to do that. So you mentioned the storefront, same thing. We sell complimentary products, accessories and all kinds of different things. We want people to check out our store and see that we sell bags in addition to paddles for example. Those are the cheapest sales when people do that. You don't have to run ads to sell them on it.

Brett:

Absolutely. They're getting those add-ons and Hey, I've got the paddle, I love the paddle. Let me just load up with CRBN gear so I can look cool at the next pickleball tournament, make up with people jealous. But let's talk. So I want to to circle back to affiliates in just a second, but what's next? And Suge, maybe you take this on the product side. I know you may just have to tease, this may have to keep things under wraps, but what's next for CRBN?

Garrett:

So we're always coming out with new fun accessories, stuff like that. But I think most importantly, we're a paddle company, so that's where we spend all of our resources on innovation and engineering. And so we've been working on a new paddle line for the better part of a year now. And honestly, it's been just a grind trying to figure out a totally new platform for a paddle. And it's something that we're really excited about and something that we think has a potential to really change the game and change how people look at a paddle. Because right now it's just a very, not linear, but it's just the way that paddles are made right now is it's just kind of very one sided and they're like, this is how they're made and this is how they're always be kind of that. So we're just trying to flip that on its end, try something new and just say, Hey, it's not only this, it can be this or this or this. And so we're just trying to really branch out like that. So we're excited. We'll hopefully be able to announce something within the next couple months here.

Brett:

Really cool. Can't wait to see it. I love that awareness of your brand and what the brand is all about, but also what drives you, what propels you. And I think it's similar. We talked about some of the bigger brands. If you take Nike or something, they are a shoe company. Obviously the accessories and the apparel all super, super important. But I got to think that without the shoes, nothing else really has momentum. And if the shoes really fall off the map and the shoes are no longer cool, they're no longer great, I'm not going to buy the shorts either. Right? And so you guys understanding that, that you're a paddle first brand just makes a ton of sense, so very cool. Kyle, what tips, insights can you give us on affiliates? How are you finding affiliates? How is that working and is that a significant part of your growth?

Kyle:

Yeah, it's definitely a significant part. I think differing from ambassadors a little bit, I think affiliates are more of a quality over quantity play. I mean, at that level where someone has got a serious blog or social media presence or podcast or YouTube channel or fill in the blank, this is person's job or side hustle, they're focused on it and you want the best of the best that is speaking to your audience. I mean, the difference in conversion rate between the best people and the worst people is massive. And I think, yeah, we try to work with most people, but we really focus on the best people that align with our beliefs and goals, but also can sell a lot of paddles. And I think we've tried to be good partners to them. I think that's a big part of it too, is don't take them for granted.

Don't treat them like they don't matter because they do. And I think being really honest and transparent with them has been huge for us as well. I think some other brands have gotten themselves into trouble where they try to overly influenced whatever would be a review, will be on a paddle or frankly they get upset if their paddle is not reviewed. Five stars across the board. I think for us, we want our products to do the talking. Of course, I prefer someone to give us an a plus rating, but we understand things are subjective, so we want these reviewers to be authentic. And I think giving them the ability to be authentic and encouraging it is refreshing for them. So all of those things, I think most industries have these affiliates that are living somewhere and you just got to go find them and reach out and convince them that they should take the time to look at your products.

Brett:

That's really great. I love the idea that let the affiliates say what they say, let it be authentic and real. I can always tell, and I think most people can, when you watch a video and you're like, does this person really like this product? Are they really using this product or is this just a performance and they're just doing this to sell some stuff? I think a lot of times you can tell, you can sense it. Are you taking the approach where you're pretty open about who you accept as an affiliate, but then you're putting your time and resources in to those who really prove themselves that they can drive sales? Or are you pretty picky about letting someone join the program in the first place?

Kyle:

Yeah, I think we're kind of somewhere in between. I would say we're fairly picky when it comes to affiliates, but I mean if we see promise in someone, we're definitely going to double down on that. So what I mean by that is maybe they have a low, small following, but we can see the potential. I mean, this sport is so new and it's growing so fast. We've had success in kind of trying to pick the diamonds out of the rough kind of thing. You see the trajectory that people are on or that they're doing good things, it's only a matter of time until they're going to take off. So we've invested in kind of those early stage content creators, athletes, really across the board we've invested in taking flyers on people who we see promising.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so cool. I mean the industry is a rocket ship. You guys are a rocket ship, but you're doing things the right way. You're building community, you're taking risks on product, you're iterating, you're getting feedback from people, you've got multiple channels that you're using for distribution and for growth. And so love what you guys are doing. I'm going to keep watching. I'm going to be a fan on the sidelines. And also I've got your paddle. I can't wait to play. I'm very inexperienced player, but I do like it. I can't wait to track the paddle. So I'll let you guys know how it goes when I do. Awesome. If I dominate my kids on the court, I'll definitely give you guys the credit for that. So it's awesome. Hey, as people are listening and or watching, if they say, man, I want to check out CRBN pickleball paddles, where can they find it? Where can they connect with you online?

Kyle:

Just everywhere. It's at CRBN Pickleball, so CRBN pickleball and it's CRBN pickleball.com. So check us out.

Brett:

Awesome. And now in a growing number of retailers as well, so people can buy it in store and it sounds like that's really growing, so very cool. And then are you guys active on the socials? You guys like sharing the entrepreneurial journey anywhere? Are you mostly working under the CRBN

Kyle:

Name? We're pretty private. I would say just follow all the CRBN channels and when I make Garrett share stuff about himself, it'll be there.

Brett:

That's awesome. Alright, well Garrett, Kyle, so much fun. Love what you guys are doing. Keep up with the good work and really appreciate the time.

Garrett:

Awesome. Thanks Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. And thank you for tuning in as always. We'd love to hear from you. What do you think about the show? Leave us a review on iTunes if you've not done that. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

No one is better suited to serve as an Amazon Ads evangelist than my friend, Jeff Cohen. 

‍

Jeff is a founding member of Seller Labs and has been keynoting, exhibiting, and attending Amazon events for the last decade. If you've been to an Amazon event, you've probably seen him! Now he's serving as the official Amazon Ads Tech Evangelist.

‍

I wanted Jeff to join the podcast to talk about what's new and trending with Amazon Ads. This is important information even if you're not selling on Amazon. Amazon is now the 3rd largest digital ad platform behind Google and Facebook, and it's growing rapidly.

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Here's a look at what we cover:

• How vertical videos are improving shopping experiences and making ad performance better.
• What the new integration with Facebook means for shoppers.
• How Sponsored TV ads are democratizing TV advertising and utilizing Amazon's rich buyer signals.
• Prime Video Ads and what they could mean for your brand (and when to consider running them).
• Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC): what it is, and how and when to use it to unlock new actionable insights about your business and advertising effectiveness.
• Plus more!

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(06:18) The Rise of AI in Advertising

(14:14) Understanding Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)

(18:50) Leveraging Audience Insights for Targeted Advertising

(22:48) Brand Building in the Amazon Ecosystem

(28:18) Understanding Incrementality in Marketing

(35:38) The Role of Data in Marketing Decisions

(37:11) Innovations in Amazon DSP

(46:20) The Future of Brand Building

(49:43) Conclusion

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Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript:

Jeff:

So this is another, I'd say step forward with Amazon and using our AI intelligence and our large language learning models that have always been applied to some of the core principles of our advertising to make the DSP easier to use, more accessible and more perform better for advertisers.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about what's new with Amazon Ads, the latest, the greatest, the betas, the new things, stuff that marketers are salivating over, stuff that maybe we're excited about but a little bit unclear about. And so we're going to hopely clear things up today. My guest is a returning guest, Mr. Jeff Cohen, the principal evangelist of Amazon Ads, longtime Amazon guy, former VP at Seller Labs. You walk with this guy in the halls of an Amazon event and it's like you're walking with a celebrity. Everybody knows him. Everybody loves him with that. Jeff Cohen. What's up man? And welcome back to the show.

Jeff:

Yeah, thanks for having me and super excited to talk about this. And I think you really hit it on the head. It's not about the announcement, it's about how the announcements are going to be applied and what do we do with this, what do we do with it? And even more importantly, what new, and this is just starting to happen. What are the new strategies that are coming because of these announcements, right? We hear these announcements and then as tech providers, as agencies, we have to then go and apply them to our different partners, our advertisers, see what's working, what's not, how it works, and then you start to scale it across your full book of business. So it's still the early days, but I'm really excited about a lot of the announcements. I think a lot of our advertisers are excited about the announcements.

Brett:

Yeah, I'm very excited and very well said. It's like, Hey, we've been given all these new tools and some of them are AI powered tools, magical tools, but then it's like, all right, well, just having tools in your hand doesn't do anything, right? It's the application, the skillful application and the strategy that you use these to help use to deploy these. And so we're going to dive into that and really excited about it. It's one of those things too where Amazon is squarely, and this is not coming from you, this is coming from me researching, so I'm not sure how much you can talk about this, but it's like the third biggest advertising platform online just behind Google and Facebook. It's shocking how much Amazon ads have grown over the years. And in the beginning, I mean it was basically just search ads, just basic good old keyword focused, search term focused search ads. And that's great, but it's become so much more than that. And I think it's kind evolved

Jeff:

As sellers. We've covered this a little bit in our last podcast. Amazon has really become a brand building location as opposed to just a conversion focused activity. And so it's only been a year, right? It was a year ago right around now that Amazon announced that Prime video was going to start having advertising. And those only released in January, so not even a year. And if you think about what Amazon's done with a lot of the live sports properties, they're still seeing massive growth in year over year audiences around Thursday night football, they saw amazing growth from WNBA. They're launching National Women's Soccer. 2025 is going to have NBA and it's going to have nascar. So Amazon's creating more properties that are built around brand building as well as a lot of the original series. And then tying together all the different types of products that you have. There's a really cool one that launched literally like yesterday. If you haven't done it, I'm going to look it up. It's something like, it has something to do with Wicked, and it's a way to cast a spell on Amazon that's tied to the movie coming out.

But it just goes to show you how Amazon's a brand building site, and it's an ability, if you're a Prime member, you can see the movie early, there's early dates only for Prime members. There's ways to buy all of the Wicked Merch then to just buy tickets to go see the movie. And so Amazon is a brand building tool and is a tool to reach audiences at mass or at scale that it wasn't several years back.

Brett:

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And things are just coming together to make that possible, right? Amazon has always been a great place to transact and a great place to make sales, but that's only part of it. I do believe it's becoming the ultimate platform to build and further your brand if you do it the right way. And so there's several new things that I'm very excited to talk about. Of course, the new AI creative suite, new AI creative tools. So maybe we'll start there in a second. Also really excited about a MC Amazon Marketing Cloud. And one thing that we've all known for a long time is that Amazon has more behavioral shopping data than anyone. Of course, Google's got all kinds of search data, but no one knows what you buy better than Amazon. And so now we can harness that data even more using A MC and applying that to all of Amazon ads. And a MC for everyone is, I picture Oprah saying, you get to use AMC

Jeff:

And you get AMC and you get amc. We should have done that. I'm going to have to go back to the Speechwriters.

Brett:

Yeah, that's how we should have announced it. So those are cool. Some new DSP announcements, which I'm super excited about. We've been a big DSP agency for years and years now. And so yeah, and let's maybe just dive in. You want to start with AI and AI tools or you are the evangelist here. What are you most excited about? And we can start there.

Jeff:

Yeah, listen, I'm excited for all of it and I know that for you who've known me, I mean, we've known each other for quite a number of years now. You know that I'm not just saying that because of my job. I actually found the announcements this year. I don't know how you felt, but I felt like the product keynote the morning at Unboxed was, there was a different level of excitement as these announcements were made and as they built upon each other. And it's not just about a MC, but it's about how A MC is now impacting DSP and how you can measure the DSP back with the tools and measurement technology that Amazon has. The AI definitely always gets the cool factor, if you will.

And I think the easiest way to describe Amazon's AI capabilities with creative is that with the announcement of the AI Creative Studio, a brand can solve the Cold Start problem, meaning that the brand has no images whatsoever. You come and you enter in your asin, Amazon creates your product, your lifestyle images, things that you need for your ads, things that you need for your store. It can make micro seasons to add pumpkins for Halloween, but then change those to have turkeys for Thanksgiving or to change 'em again to have lights for the holidays. And you can scale from zero to nothing on the other side. If you are a larger brand and you already have content within the same content studio, you can bring in your existing content and it can kind of pull it apart to create the pieces that you need based on the DSP sizes at Amazon and all the different placements.

And it can literally read your video and create ads for you or take your still ads and create new ads for you. And so it's pretty cool because it's taking you from the SMB up to the enterprise and then from the enterprise down to the SMB, it's creating everything from still images to video to now audio ads. And the AI just keeps getting better and it keeps learning. And you're starting to see some really cool applications from brands who are applying this into their regular activity that they're doing, whether it be their ads or their stores or their product detail pages.

Brett:

Yeah, there's really, it's solving a lot of the, first of all, we're just getting started with this, so we're beginning to see the possibilities, but we're still very, very early in this game. But yeah, some of the very basic stuff, how can I take this one asset and chop it into a bunch? Or how can I retool the background of this image or chop up different sizes, stuff that would normally just take a lot of busy work, a lot of hours that really graphic designers don't enjoy. Nobody enjoys some of that stuff. The AI can now handle almost all of that and listen to be everywhere you need to be build your brand to attract new customers, to create product discovery on Amazon, you need these assets.

Jeff:

And the thing is, you might have a four by four, but you need a six by four. Well, the AI can now take your four by four, make it a six by four and fill it in. And so there's the simplistic part of it, which is like, oh, I want to take my image and put it on a beach. But then there's this little bit more complicated piece of it, which is like, now I need to size it for different types of ads. I want to add motion, so I don't want to just have my cup of coffee at the beach. I want the waves to be crashing. That creates a little bit more engagement, creates a little bit more connection to your audience. And then when it starts to use the ai, the AI isn't just doing this, the AI is also understanding your product, it's understanding your reviews and it's making recommendations. And one of the examples that our VP used that I actually thought was a great one was that he ran the system through for a blender, and when it was doing images for the blender, it started showing face mask and he was so confused. He's like, but it's a blender. It makes sense for it to have juices and things like that. But if you go into social media, you'll find that a lot of people are using blenders to do homemade face mask. And so the AI was able to pick up on these social,

Brett:

I did not know. I had not seen this trend. That's

Jeff:

Why. Yeah, so it's like even if you think back to the early days when we talked about keyword research, we were like, well, you have to figure out, well, what are they going to call this? Is it a casserole dish? Is it a Pyrex dish? And we as marketers won't always know everything we need to do. AI can make up for some of that.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, really interesting. So just because interested now, so people are blending up fibers and stuff like that, organic materials to

Jeff:

Yeah, I don't know. Or it's the chemicals that you put on and then you make a chemical. I don't know. Do I look like I use, yeah, if anybody knows, let Brett and I know, and then we'll try it on the next video.

Brett:

We got to blend up our own masks here. We'll wear masks. The next podcast.

Jeff:

I'm more into the can you blend it where you just drop random stuff into the blender and

Brett:

See if it can, dude, those were epic, man. The BlendTech blenders. But I mean, if you think about it though, that was content that built that brand. How are you going to stand out Sea of other blenders?

Jeff:

I'm going to, IM put a baseball on this blender and show that it can blend it and then still make your smoothie.

Brett:

I'm going to put an iPad in there. Back when iPads were kind of, and people were like, what? You're blending an iPad, it's sacrilege or whatever. But yeah, totally agree. The announcements that have made this year, I think they've been very substantial. There's a lot of substance there, a lot of stuff we can really use to just become better marketers and better brand builders.

Jeff:

Yeah, the AI is a great example of where that starts. And it's also like you had kind of mentioned, it's a challenge that a lot of brands have because they don't have budget or they don't have internal skills or they don't have enough to be able to scale with their agency to all the things the agency wants to do. It's making it more accessible. I think that's the beauty of ai, at least that's what I tell my kids who I feel need to embrace it. They're in high school and college, and I think you and I both agree, the next generation, you need to figure out AI because it's going to be cell phones. When I was growing up, you had to learn to live with them, and now today they're a fabric of society.

Brett:

Yeah, AI is going to be your superpowered research assistant, your marketing assistant, your copywriting assistant. It's going to give you superpowers. And so yeah, it should be attached to you at all times, almost like your cell phone is now. I think that's a good description for sure. So what of the AI Creative Suite is available now and what pieces of that are coming soon?

Jeff:

So most of the pieces, the ability to create video, to create audio and to create ads are all available within the Creative Asset library. The content studio is in beta, but I'll share the link with you that we shared at unboxed and whoever wants to sign up can sign up for it. And as they're rolling that out, you would get access to that full library.

Brett:

Cool. So we'll put that in the show notes link to the beta there for the AI Creative Studio. So yeah, it sounds amazing. Let's pivot a little bit and let's talk about A MC and kind of this A MC for all idea. First of all, quick background, what is A MC for those that don't know, and then how is this a MC for all going to change things?

Jeff:

Yeah, so three, four years ago we were starting to describe what's a Amazon marketing cloud. It sits in a clean room. If I break it down to its simplest format, there's lots of videos and articles you can read if you want to dive into this deeper. But A MC allows you to pull aggregated privacy, save data across your account to understand how things like your path to purchase are being influenced by advertising, and then use that to identify signals that you can then either market to from creating new audiences or you can use it to tweak your campaigns because you're identifying what's working. As you get more sophisticated with a tool like a MC, you can start to bring in what's called first party data. So I know a lot of your listeners are D two C companies.

Brett:

This is omnichannel.

Jeff:

Yeah. This is allowing you to connect what's happening on your store and your website with what's happening with your Amazon ads. And so especially if you're using tools like Buy With Prime, but even if you're not, you can start to see when I run these ads, what type of boost does that drive to my website or is it bleeding from my website? Because ultimately we want to know this idea of incrementality. And a lot of times what our data is finding, and of course this isn't true for everyone, is that you're not pulling away from your website. And so that as an advertiser starts to give you the confidence that you need that by marketing on Amazon, you're bringing in net new customers that you wouldn't have gained otherwise. And so A MC really starts to become this measurement tool for your brand that helps you answer these questions that you've had for a long time.

Now, a MC for everyone means that before you had to be on the DSP to be able to access A MC. Now a MC is available for only sponsored ads, which means anybody can now access a MC and one of the cool features. So it's like, okay, cool. Now what do I do with this? Right? One of the cool features I think at the beginning is just using some of our query libraries to understand path to purchase and understand how frequency of your ads, things that you would typically do within the DSP that you aren't thinking about in sponsored ads. You want to understand, well, how often does somebody need to see my ad before they make a purchase? What is the downstream impact of a sponsored brand or a sponsored display ad to my sponsored product ads? You can start to see how many people bought but saw multiple of your different ad types, and that's going to start to give you some confidence into the types of advertising that you're doing and where you want to make your investments.

One of the announcements that they made was the ability to create audiences within a MC and then to boost those audiences within sponsored ads. And so if you think about sponsored ads, you've always had the ability to create a boost for top of page or other types of placements. Now you can actually create this audience within a MC. Let's use a simple example. The audience is add to cart but didn't buy, right? You want to find all the people that have added to the cart but haven't purchased. And if they come back to Amazon and they search for a particular keyword that's in the campaign that you associate that to, then you're saying, I want to boost my bid for my ad in that particular case. And so as a marketer, I think we can start to see how that becomes, and as a hands-on keyboard operator of Amazon ads, that's where I start to ask my question, okay, so how does this start to change how I build ads? Do I bid for top of page? Do I bid based on audience? Do I bid based on both? And that's where I think some of the shifting of our strategies will start to come over time.

Brett:

So I want to dive into this audience piece for just a minute. The example you gave there makes a ton of sense. People that have added to carpet have not purchased, let's put a little bit more for them. We realize and understand, hey, they're probably likely to purchase this time around or getting close. Let's bit a little bit more how creative can we get there? So as an example, it's pretty frequent that we'll talk to brands that are a little more premium. So they're selling a product that is not low price, so they're not going to compete well on price, but it's a great product and it's more about the brand and the experience. And I think some people have this idea that, oh, will people only buy on Amazon for price? That is not the truth. If you look at the average prime household, you're talking about some affluent households and I promise you there's a lot of affluent households that don't want to just buy cheap stuff. So can you also look at like, Hey, if I was selling baby bags and we've even looked at this like high-end baby bags, diaper bags type of thing, could I target diaper bag keywords I can normally do with my sponsored ads layer in ads of people that I know are kind of higher end based on other things they've purchased? Possibly.

Jeff:

So at its core are a MC can aggregate once you get over a certain amount of data points because it's pseudonymized meaning that it's not at the individual level. And so you have to have enough data points to be able to create that audience to say that there's enough people demonstrating this and therefore it's an audience that I want to go in target. And where a lot of brands are finding success is by bringing in their first party data, mirroring that with in a privacy safe way with the Amazon data and creating audiences that could be a lookalike audience.

Brett:

Nice.

Jeff:

So this is the audience that I believe looks like people who have a propensity, this

Brett:

Is my core customer, build me a list if people like them.

Jeff:

So you could do that and then you could boost your keywords or you attach it to a campaign, you attach it to the campaign and you boost based off of the lookalike. So I would say that the simple answer is any audience you can build in A MC, you can then boost against,

I'll say the constraints are that you can only boost against a single audience. So you have to kind of decide do you want that audience to be very narrow or do you want that audience to be very broad by its nature sponsored products is a more conversion focused type of activity. Therefore, I would assume just from my own background of doing this, I would assume that I want an audience that is maybe a little bit further down the funnel that has the propensity to buy based on the activities that I'm trying to boost towards. Other types of audiences you build in A MC may be used to run more display ads or DSP ads where you're trying to build more of that awareness and consideration. And I think what's cool, and I think this was one of the big themes that took place at the show was that Amazon is full funnel advertising for everyone.

And that's I think the big power is that something that wasn't available to you in the past is now available to you and it allows you to be a little bit more sophisticated to make these business decisions of what's best for your business. And you and I both know it's really hard in a podcast to sit there and talk about what's the right way to do it because every brand and every SKU and every brand is going to have a slightly different answer. And so this is where having a test and learn mentality around your advertising really suits you to be able to build and scale to reach new audiences.

Brett:

And I think a lot of people have the mindset of, Hey, I'm just a smaller brand, even if I'm doing multiple seven figures or whatever and I can't do full funnel ads. And well, maybe that's just because historically you've had to spend a whole lot of money that's on top of funnel type ads to be able to have the tools like we're talking about here, for that to be focused enough to work. But now you've really got the tools and the technology, even if you've got a small top of funnel budget, and it can help because we don't want to all just slug it out with our competition only on sponsored product ads at the bottom of the funnel. Let's go up funnel a little bit and compete there and give our brand a bit of an edge.

Jeff:

If you're looking to brand build, and I always even equate it to the local hotdog stand down the street from me. I live in Chicago, so I have to go with the hotdog stand.

Brett:

One thing I love about Chicago hot dog stands is they do not serve ketchup at most of them. Ketchup. They're mustard only. And I really resonate with that. Kudos to you in Chicago.

Jeff:

Big debate, but that's

Brett:

Mustard only. No ketchup's no good.

Jeff:

The piece of this that I think is important is that brand building is about exposing your product and your family of products to a larger audience. That is the concept of brand building. If you're only focused on conversion based activities, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not knocking that in any way, shape or form. The level that which you can grow your brand is going to be limited when you start to look at brand building activities. And I'll give you an example. I met a brand at another conference Accelerate, which was a couple of weeks before Unbox.

Brett:

Great one. Yep, yep. I was there as well. Great event.

Jeff:

They're in the pickleball space and pickleball is hot. And I was talking to him about his advertising and he was telling me how great his advertising was doing and all these things. And I said, well, what are you doing with streaming television? Are you running ads? And he goes, no, I'm not running any ads. And I said, why not? And he's like, well, we do really well with our sponsor brands and sponsor display and we run some DSP around remarketing and retargeting. And I said, awesome. I go, did you know that Amazon has a channel called Pickleball TV that runs on Fire TV and Amazon Prime video? And he's like, no. And I go, well, if somebody's watching one of those channels, and you could target them with an ad based on that signal, and he stops me and he goes, that would be my customer. And I was like, okay, well, that's the example right there. That brand can now use the video generator to create the ad. They can use tools like sponsored television to come in with no budget and start to test across the different audiences, and they can use a MC to measure the impact and the result of how those are doing. When you start to look at a brand that like Poppy, so one of the brands we featured at Unboxed was Poppy.

Brett:

Poppy's Poppy, like the probiotic soda, healthy soda,

Jeff:

The prebiotic.

Brett:

Prebiotic, yes.

Jeff:

And what they see, I worked on that session, so I knew that their brand, and this is I think really important for people to understand their brand is four years old. Well maybe come in close to five. It was concocted in her kitchen in 2020. It's only 2024. So the brand is four years old. They had done some OTT advertising in 2023, but they really only started streaming TV and larger TV plays towards the end of 2023 and into 2024. So now mind you, they did a Super Bowl ad, they did A-W-N-B-A sponsorship, but they were able to build and scale this using streaming television, using sponsorships and using the measurement tools primarily of Amazon, but not exclusively to drive the results for their brand. And so whether you're looking at the pickleball company or whether you're looking at the Poppy, it's easy to look at them and go, but I'm not Poppy. Well, poppy wasn't Poppy four years

Brett:

Ago. Totally, totally

Jeff:

Right. And you and I go back to the days with, I'll bring up an old brand Death Wish Coffee. We knew the owner. I mean, I still know the owner of Death Wish I've known him for eight, nine years. And it's the same thing. He was able to build a brand, gain market share on Amazon in a highly competitive category and expand his brand to other channels and be very successful. That's brand building and that's the tools that are available to you that weren't as available to you before that make you look at Amazon in a brand building capacity where that investment is necessary.

Brett:

Necessary

Jeff:

Isn't the right word, that investment is an opportunity for you.

Brett:

Yeah, I like that. Let's talk about incrementality because I think this is the newer concept in marketing that really is what people newer, it's not new, but it's newer in that I think it's becoming top of mind for a lot of people and it's sort of solving the Ah, yes, that's what I want my marketing to do. And at its simplest form, incrementality is like, what would've happened if we hadn't run these ads? And what happened because we ran these ads? So are my ads actually creating a difference? So I want lay out a scenario for you and get your perspective on how A MC can help now versus maybe how MC may help in the future. So we work with a lot of Omni-channel brands. So brands that are selling D two C through Shopify or Magento, BigCommerce, whatever they're selling in store, they're selling marketplaces on Amazon as well.

So I run YouTube ads, so I'm a bigger brand. One of our brands is Arctic, their Yeti competitor. We're doing a case study, Google's one, a case study on them. So we had this big YouTube campaign that went really well. But what we know is that if we run a YouTube ad and we direct people to the website, so many people that see that and think, yeah, I'd rather just buy it on Amazon, which is fine by us. We just want to sell products, but we want to be able to see it. Right? So will you be able to connect the dots there as well? If you're sharing audiences from your site with a MC, are you going to be able to connect those dots, so to speak?

Jeff:

Yeah. So listen, omnichannel, incrementality does become difficult, right?

Brett:

It gets hard, yeah.

Jeff:

If you want to look

Brett:

At see in store. Yeah,

Jeff:

Exactly. And if you want to really look at how do you solve that, you start getting into mixed model media, you start getting into doing omni shopper panel shopper panels, and those require larger

Brett:

Holdout tests like incrementality tests and geo hold. That's which we've done those. Yeah,

Jeff:

Correct. And those were great for the brands who have the scale and have the budget to be able to do 'em, right? So then the question becomes like, then what can I do if I don't have the scale and I don't have the budget? That's when you have to start looking at things. And when I like to say directionally, how are things working? And so you're not going to have the holy grail of being able to completely track a Google ad to a website to Amazon, right? Exactly. Cookies are going away and privacy is

Brett:

Critical. Keeps kicking that can down the road. But yeah, eventually.

Jeff:

So it creates a lot of challenges for brands. But you can start to directionally see by looking at first party data and looking at a MC data, what that incrementality starts to look like and are the shoppers buying on your site and also buying on Amazon, and you start to get to a relative signal around incrementality to show you whether it's positive or negative. So I've never been a believer that incrementality is an absolute number, but I also, I

Brett:

Totally agree.

Jeff:

I also don't believe ROAS is right. So tell me the difference between a 3.5 and a 3.7 roas. And I understand it's 0.2, but what did that really mean? Well, it means directionally this campaign is performing better than that campaign. I think that's ultimately what you're trying to do and where a MC can start to help. The other data points that I think become critical is understanding new to brand audiences who has a bigger propensity to lead to a subscribe and save, which wouldn't work with an Arctic Cup. I don't think people subscribe to buy those, but people might buy more than one of them. They might be, it

Brett:

Feels like we've done that at my house. We have so many of them and it feels like that, but they're just all one-off purchases.

Jeff:

But you can start to look to see what is the 12 month, 13 month lifecycle of That's a new data point that Amazon is now valuable sharing is what is the 12, 13 month lifetime value of a customer. And so Amazon is creating so many more of these data signals that are available to you as marketers that you're able to have a more sophisticated look into that. I'll say there's always the absolute person who's, it's never going to be enough for them, but that's also the person who probably doesn't want to really spend the money to do the types of, I'm going to say this wrong, causation testing that you truly need to understand how incrementality works. And so incrementality, if you really go and read academic papers on it, is a very scientifically based data set that uses testing as a way to understand how incrementality works. And so a lot of the tools that are out there today that are offering an incremental ROAS or such are giving you directional signals to it, but you'd have to dive into their science to understand how it works. I mean, at Amazon, we have a new product that was released called Multi-Touch Attribution. It's going to be rolling out in 2025.

Brett:

Well, that'd be a part of a MC or where will your multi-touch attribution? I

Jeff:

Don't know where it's going to sit within a MC right now. Right now it's kind of its own data set for brands are accessing it through the beta, but it's all based on this scientific methodology. But that's not taking into account what's happening off of Amazon. And so that's I think, the challenge that brands have. But that's no different than the challenge that brands have always had when they've ran advertising. And so we have to use the best data that we have today to make the best decision that we can make. And as that data changes, we need to alter the decisions that we've made. And what you as a brand ultimately want to know is that if I'm spending this money, how much is this driving within my ads on Amazon and how much is this driving within ads on my website? And how much of that is crossover and that you can do with a MC, you can start to see that and you can see what that picture looks like to understand where and how that investment is working for

Brett:

You. Yeah, the goal is not to get 100% accurate data because that's not possible, but the goal is to get actionable data and clearer actionable insights. And one of the things I love about EMC is just the ability to see what is driving first time purchases versus repeat purchases and then being able to chart that and create graphs for that.

Jeff:

Well, your audience might, you can

Brett:

See this is what's driving new customers.

Jeff:

Your audience might be different. So different campaigns that you run that have a tendency to drive first time customers, you're willing to invest in them if you know that your lifetime value is higher.

But if it's bringing in repeat customers, then you're going to have a different ROAS or spend that you're looking to make for those acquisitions. So it really does add to being a more sophisticated marketer. But the one thing that I'll add and then we can move on to whatever else you want talk about is that, and I've seen this throughout my career, is that if you don't believe the data, then you're almost, I'm probably wrong to say, but you're almost wasting your time. And what I see marketers do, and correct me if you think I'm wrong, but it's the data will show them something, but they're like, yeah, but I know influencers play a bigger role, so I'm going to keep investing in them.

And you need to let the data tell you the story for the decisions you want to make. When you start to put your own assumptions into it, that's where you start to skew based on biases that you have and not based on what the data is telling you. And so if you're running influencer campaigns, there's ways to see how keywords are performing, there's ways to see how traffic from those campaigns are converting to sales and to understand the power that influencers have. And a MC can help you do that too. One of the suggestions I make to people for influencer is create dedicated landing pages in your stores. It allows you to capture them in right into your store. It allows you to put the influencer there so it's top of mind and make the connection from the off-brand to that store, and it allows you to start to see what the sales are coming from from that page.

Brett:

Let's transition to Amazon DSP for just a minute. And so obviously A MC was exclusively available to DSP clients and now it's available to all, but there's some new things coming to DSP as well. So talk about some of the new iterations, new tools, new opportunities within Amazon DSP.

Jeff:

Yeah, so the two biggest announcements around the DSP that I was most excited about was that we've changed the DSP workflow, which can be cumbersome at times and was lacking some of the features and functionalities that some of the other DSPs have within the market. Now, the beauty of this is that when you look at Amazon and our DSP, our DSP is always been known for what we called our owned and operated properties. So that's the ability to have your ads show up on Fire TV IMDB, Twitch Prime Video. But the DSP now also has quite a few publishers that allow you to be in third party websites. So your ads are broadcast across both Amazon, Amazon owned properties as well as the third party sites, bringing all of that measurement into one single place, which allows you to manage things like your frequency cap or your budgets.

And I think that's really super exciting to one, have an easier product to use, is always a big win. Two, that the product is not just more competitive with the market, but almost better than the market. I guess I will state that it's better than the market, but I guess maybe that's debatable. And then three, to be able to measure all of the insights back to understand not just how it's doing on Amazon, but how it's doing on your own channel or other channels that you're working with through a third party dataset that you would bring into a MC. So I think one of the really exciting pieces, I think the other exciting piece was that Amazon stepping forward in the world of AI has created a tool called Performance Plus, which allows you to create an A SD campaign within I think three to four clicks.

Brett:

What's a SD,

Jeff:

I'm sorry. An Amazon DSP campaign. Too many, too many acronyms. Too

Brett:

Many acronyms, man and Amazon team marketers in the military. Nobody's got more acronyms than us,

Jeff:

So I'll start back over with Amazon Performance Plus, you can create an Amazon DSP campaign in three to four clicks. And what you're doing is you're allowing the Amazon intelligence to be able to apply to get you the best outcomes for the types of campaigns that you're trying to design. So you have the ability to create full funnel campaigns that you want to and go in and tweak all the little pieces of it that you want, or you can come in and you can let Amazon's intelligence run on your behalf to see how they perform. And brands are even running these kind of against each other to say, how's Amazon do no different than how you would test another ai? Is it giving me results that are better than what I had before? So this is another, I'd say step forward with Amazon and using our AI intelligence in our large language learning models that have always been applied to some of the core principles of our advertising to make the DSP easier to use, more accessible and more perform better for advertisers. And the best way, I've always believed the best way to get a larger investment into advertising is to show better performance.

Brett:

Totally. Are you seeing any early data on how those new campaigns AI driven campaigns are performing versus standard DSP campaigns?

Jeff:

I don't know any of them off the top of my head. It's brand new, but I could probably find a case study or two to throw on for somebody that wants to dive into that deeper.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, really cool. One thing just anecdotally, and I'm curious if you've got a perspective, we've got an echo show in our kitchen, one of the, that's an 11 or 15 inch, I'm not sure, but it's great. Listen to music on it occasional I'll turn on YouTube TV while I'm cooking and watch a game or something, but I've been noticing more ads pop up when I've got the home screen that usually has our calendar, family calendar and some other things there. Then I'll see some ads on the left hand side. And it's been a variety of things. I've seen some ads for this creamer, this healthy clean creamer that we buy and it's like, oh, this is like a reorder ad. But then I've seen other things, that's not stuff that I've purchased, but I'm like, okay, Amazon is suggesting products here. What is likely, what is the campaign type driving those ads?

Jeff:

I don't know specifically the campaign type that drives it, but I think the intelligence that drives it is just that all of them are logged into your same Amazon account, which is I think one of the big powers of Amazon and their advertising campaign is that for lack of a better term, we don't need cookies to be able to understand what your signals are, but it's also triangulating the signals that you have for advertisers who are not advertising on Amazon. So if you continue to watch it, you're probably starting to see other advertisers come up where it's not necessarily about go to Amazon and buy this product. It might be about going to get some ice cream down the street. And I think that's another area

Brett:

Where some cars, some new cars place ads there as well, which is kind of interesting.

Jeff:

And you can push a button and schedule a test drive, right? And so you're probably creating some kind of signal from what you're watching on Prime video to the type of music that you're listening to, the types of products that you're buying that are saying that car may be more in line with something you would buy versus something else. I mean, for me, if you looked at my signals, you would see quite a few things that are around, I just bought a new outdoor lighting system that's all built into my ring system. So that would indicate that I'm maybe a little bit more smart

Brett:

Home type

Jeff:

Smart home. So then I might get more ads that are smart home type based because I'm showing the signals that I like a smart home technology. And I think that just goes to show what I was kind of talking about at the beginning, which is that the Amazon customer, the people who's engaging with Amazon is doing it in their car, in their kitchen, on their couch, and there's so many ways for advertisers to engage with them. And that's I think where the tagline, full funnel advertising at scale for everyone, because it's not just for people who are selling on Amazon anymore. You could be selling on your own website and you can run DSP ads that send the traffic to your website. So Amazon has really greatly expanded who can actually access this to create those ads, which I think is exciting for brands as well.

Brett:

It is because being able to target someone based on their behavior on Amazon or based on what Amazon knows about that shopper, very, very powerful because not only does Amazon have more behavioral shopper data, what you like to purchase when you like to purchase, things like that, but also what media you like to consume, what do you like to watch? All kinds of data points that Amazon has that are extremely valuable. And yeah, just this small example, but these ads on the Alexa device, I mean, choose the creamer example. Again, there've been several times where I'm like, oh, shoot. Yeah, I actually do need to reorder that. And I'll either, if I'm across the kitchen, I'll just speak and say, Alexa reorder, or you go over there and you tap it and you do your thing. But either way, the tools that Amazon is opening up, it's allowing, you don't have to be Hyundai or Toyota to use those tools.

Jeff:

And I think one of the things you just said there is really important, which is that advertising works best when it fits naturally into somebody's life. And that's the bar that Amazon has to continue to reach. Because if advertising, if it becomes irrelevant or if it becomes too much, then that's when people turn it off. Totally. And so we have to kind of keep that balance between keeping everybody privacy safe, being able to serve relevant ads based on signals and indicators, and then being able to drive the results back to the advertiser to understand how their ads are doing that really sets Amazon apart from everybody else in the space today. And I mean, I don't know, let's just kind of geek out and say, just think about where we were five years ago when we were talking about Amazon advertising and when we think to the future of the what's next? I think what excites me as well, right?

Brett:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Just getting started, and yeah, I say this all the time. I say this every year when I'm speaking in front of groups, but it's true, and it just becomes better. But there's never been a better time to build a brand you want to create and build your own brand. There's never been a better time, and it'll be even more true next year.

Jeff:

But I think the thing that I always like to kind of caution or remind people of is that brand building requires a good product. We all go back to the idea it has to be a good product, and then you have to be able to make the right investments to build the audience, to identify your product. And there's lots of different ways to do that. And Amazon has just created more tools for brands to be able to do it easier, to be able to access the creative that they need to be able to do it and to reach more audience if that's what their goal is to do.

Brett:

And let me kind of put some caveats around my statement. There may be some people listening, they're like, wait a minute. Yes, there were easier times maybe to put a product on Amazon and it goes to the moon. I know that the heydays of Amazon selling in like 20 14, 20 15, okay, it's not as easy as it was then. And yes, there may have been some times when there was less competition or you just turn on a TV ad and you go wild. But I still believe there are more tools available. And so for the savvy marketer, for the great brand with a great product, you got more tools, more opportunities to grow.

Jeff:

Yeah, I heard a podcast the other day that was actually really interesting, and it was talking about the types of businesses that are successful today and what they were based off of versus

Brett:

20

Jeff:

Years ago and what they were based off of. And if you look at when I was in college, people were running yellow page ads, not to overly date myself, it was only 30

Brett:

Years. Those were search ads, those were the demand capture ads back in the day, yellow page ads.

Jeff:

And so it's easy to always look backwards and say, well, it was easier to do something. But again, like you said, when you look back today, five years from now, you'll say that it was easier to do it today than it will be five years from now. And so you do have to continue to get more sophisticated. You have to build a product that actually differentiates itself in the market. That's not a bad thing for the consumer. I understand that maybe you were able to make money easier, but if you think about what leads to a good brand it creates, I always say, what is a brand? A brand creates an emotional response. When you say the word Dyson, you have a certain expectation of what that type of product is going to have. Sleep,

Brett:

Design, quality, solving a real problem, something I want to display on my house.

Jeff:

It was a vacuum cleaner. You know what I mean? So they built a better product and they created a brand that creates an emotional response. And so whether you're trying to do this on any social channel or whether you're trying to do this on a commerce channel, or whether you're trying to do this in brick and mortar, all of these components are still the same, and Amazon is just trying to make it easier for those that are doing it on our channel to access all these things.

Brett:

Yeah, love it. Well, Jeff, this has been fantastic. I'm super excited about the new tools and capabilities of Amazon ads. Our clients are investing more and more into Amazon ads because we're seeing the return, because we're seeing it drive incrementality. And so we'll continue to do so for those that are listening or watching and they're like, man, I need to pay attention to what Jeff Cohen has to say or need to see new announcements. How can they follow you and how can they stay in the know on what's new and what's next?

Jeff:

Yeah, so I'd say to follow me, just go to LinkedIn and type in Jeff Cohen, Amazon, and I should come up. I used to come up for Jeff Amazon, but that other guy that's bald, he beats me. Now,

Brett:

There's another famous Jeff, if I'm not mistaken at Amazon, may have you beat a little bit there by a few years.

Jeff:

Yeah, I do most of my posting on LinkedIn. And again, we talked about high level, a lot of these things. There are deep dive podcasts that other people have done on some of these products. So if you're looking to figure out how to implement these specifically for your brand, maybe go back and say, oh, Amazon a MC for sponsored ads, and there's lots of content out there. One of the things that I thought was really cool about unboxed was how many thought leaders in our space were diving into the content and sharing it on LinkedIn and other channels after the event Two years ago, I think I was one of a handful of people that were doing it, and now so many people are doing it. So there's lots of great content out there. You can always go to the Amazon ads website to get the official announcements and official releases. That's always a great place to start as well.

Brett:

Yep. Got to follow Jeff on LinkedIn. He posts awesome content, so recommend that. I'll link to your socials in the show notes as well for those that visit the show notes. And Jeff Cohen, ladies and gentlemen, Jeff, appreciate it, man. Fun as always. And I'm already looking forward to next time.

Jeff:

Yeah, appreciate having me on again and love the partnership that your company and our company has and what you guys are doing for advertisers. So keep sharing with everybody. I think it's awesome and people are learning from what you share, so thank you.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And OMG commerce proud Amazon ad partners, and so we're doing our share and staying connected and helping brands grow. So with that, that'll wrap it up for today. As always, we would love to hear from you. So would you like to hear more of on the show? If you haven't left us that review, that would make our day. We'd appreciate that. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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In this episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, we dive deep into the results of Amazon's Fall Prime Day 2024. Amazon experts Christine Shiloni and Jonathan Finkes unpack valuable insights, compare performance to previous events, and provide a strategic outlook for the upcoming holiday shopping season. Whether you're an established Amazon seller or just getting started, this episode is packed with actionable advice to help you maximize your Q4 sales.

‍

Key topics discussed:

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• Fall Prime Day performance: A 57% average increase in sales compared to last year, with some brands seeing up to 300% growth.
• The impact of inflation on consumer behavior and pricing strategies
• How to leverage different types of Amazon deals (Lightning Deals, Prime Exclusives and coupons) for maximum visibility and sales.
• Strategies for navigating the condensed holiday shopping season, with five fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year.
• Critical dates and preparation tips for inventory management, including considerations for Chinese New Year's impact on supply chains.

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(03:03) Performance Analysis: Year-over-Year Comparisons

(06:20) July Prime Day vs. October Prime Day

(17:04) Deals and Promotions: What Worked and What Didn't

(20:44) Impact of Inflation on Shopping Behavior

(22:30) Post-Prime Day Trends and Future Predictions

(24:43) Preparing for the Holiday Shopping Window

(30:16) Impact of Fewer Shopping Days on Sales

(35:15) Predictions for Holiday Sales Performance

(37:32) Final Tips for Holiday Preparation

(42:38) Conclusion

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Connect with Brett:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

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Transcript:

Jonathan :

There could be something that you see you are being hyper aggressive on and you're just getting blown out of the water and you're spending hundreds, thousands of dollars and not getting any sales from it, and there could be a good reason for that.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we are unpacking Fall Prime Day, also known as Prime Big Deal Days in 2024. Also going to give a little bit of a preview for the rest of holiday, the cyber five, the Cyber 12, whatever cyber number you want to attach to it. A little bit of a preview there as well. And so I've got back again, returning guests. Christine Shiloni our Amazon director here at OMG Commerce, and Jonathan Finkes, one of our top Amazon ad strategists and specialists. And so we're going to unpack all things Prime Day talk holiday, and it's going to be a ton of fun with that. Christine. Jonathan, how's it going? And welcome back to the show.

Christine:

You. Thank you. It's going really well. It's going very well. We had a good fall, big deal days. We did see a nice lift for our brands that leaned in on some deals, things like that. But overall, there was definitely a lot more traffic on the site and it was a lift for almost everybody.

Brett:

Yeah, going to be great to unpack it. How do you guys feel coming back to the pod? Are you getting more comfortable, more relaxed, more excited to be on the pod? Let's just be candid here for the folks listening.

Christine:

I'm super psyched. Yeah,

Jonathan :

I'm ready to find out how many followers I have. I feel like I've been on, I think it's my third time. I should probably have a brand following by now.

Brett:

You should have some kind of following. It's probably not like paparazzi level there in New Jersey, people hiding in the bushes and things like that, but there's got to be people out there requesting more. Jonathan Fincas on the po. So we'll keep you posted on that.

Jonathan :

Just got to figure out how to capitalize on it. That's it. Yeah,

Brett:

Exactly. Exactly. So Christine alluded to it, we did see some big wins this prime day, this fall, prime day versus last fall, prime day. So we're going to talk about how did this year stack up to last year. We're also going to talk about how did fall Prime day or October Prime day compare to July Prime day of this year, and is that consistent with what we're seeing in previous years? And if not, or if so, then what does that mean? And then all of this could, should be at least a bit of a bellwether for the rest of holiday. So we'll pontificate and maybe make some predictions there. And then we'll get very tactical and give you good advice for what to do for the rest of holiday and then how you can get ready. So let's do this. I'm going to highlight a couple of the bigger numbers, just kind of the broad numbers overall, looking at all OMG clients and we've got a number of seven figure sellers, a number of eight figure sellers, a few nine figure sellers.

And so this was all blended together, but I think it's helpful across a wide variety of categories from medical devices to supplements to food and beverage to home decor, automotive. It's a pretty broad spectrum if you look at the OMG client base. And so if we look at this fall prime day, so the October 8th and ninth, those were the dates. This year compared to last fall, prime day, our average client was up about 57%. So up 57% year over year for fall prime day, which is pretty great. Christine, I know you've got a couple of specific callouts and we can't mention client names, but what were a few of the notable callouts and what do you think drove that?

Christine:

So we have a supplement brand. They were up 70% year over year. They did lean in pretty heavy on a lightning deal that did over 120,000. So that certainly fed into their success.

Brett:

So just the lightning deal did that much.

Christine:

Yeah, the lightning deal.

Brett:

Yeah. So they're above the average up 70%. Our average was 57, so nice lift over the average,

Christine:

But they leaned in on a lightning deal. They also ran prime exclusives when they couldn't get the lightning deal. They ran a lot of coupons, so they went all in and it paid off for them for sure. And because they're a supplement brand, we're basically taking a loss leader because now they're hopefully going to go into subscribe and save. So it's Did they actually

Brett:

Discount to the point where they were losing money on each sale or using that term loss leader loosely?

Christine:

I'm using it loosely.

Brett:

Okay.

Christine:

I'm using it loosely, but to get them into the subscribe and save funnel for their products.

Brett:

Right, right. Yeah. And that is the advantage within Consumable. You get that first purchase, you're likely to get more. And we didn't see that. We saw that when we were at Amazon Accelerate. The three of us were there hanging out, that there's a direct correlation. People that use a coupon are likely to come back and subscribe and save. So pretty good data surrounding that.

Christine:

We have another, it's a newer brand that just launched last year. It's also, it's a coffee supplement. They were up almost 300%, 277% year over year. They did also lean in on some prime exclusives. Again, getting more people into the subscribe and save funnel, which is great for them. A beauty brand, they were close to 60% and they just went straight coupon. So you can see anybody that was running something.

Brett:

So when you say straight coupon, you mean it's not attached to a lightning deal? No Prime Day discounts, per se, just

Christine:

Coupon. They did a 20% off coupon, their entire catalog.

Brett:

Nice.

Christine:

And they're not expensive items, so it was more of a multi purchase, three, four items per sale. So they came in with some pretty good numbers.

Brett:

Nice. On the ad side, Jonathan, what did you see or anything worth noting this fall Prime day versus last or this fall prime Day versus July, purely from an Amazon ads perspective?

Jonathan :

Yeah, so most performances were on par in terms of ad spend. The average account doubled its daily ad spend. The accounts that leaned more heavily and saw into promotions and saw really big surge in traffic, those were closer to a three or four X in daily ad spend. But the biggest unique call out that I saw was that on a lot of our consumable brands, whether that's in health and beauty supplements, protein powders and those kinds of things, they saw a really big surge in PPC impressions for the 10 days in the lead up to the event, which usually in the lead up to these events with Prime Day or last year's big deal event in October, usually we'll see a little bit of a slump, especially in the first couple of days right before the event, because shoppers are like, oh, I'm not going to go on Amazon. I know the events come in in a day or two. So that was a very unique to see that traffic surge.

Brett:

So seeing the lift in impressions those 10 days prior just means there were more people searching during that timeframe and maybe scouting, doing a little research before prime day deals. Do you have any thoughts there? Have you seen any other data that would support a theory there, Jonathan?

Jonathan :

Yeah, no, it's that I think that people were scouting a bit more, but then I'm also questioning if there was some adjustments to Amazon's algorithms on the backend and that they were potentially serving ads to more shoppers than they normally do. Maybe spreading out, getting a little bit more broad on their categorical targeting. But that's stuff that's just my digging into conspiracy theories of Amazon. Yeah, interesting. So

Brett:

Yeah, could be that there are more people searching, but we don't exactly have that data. It could just be that it was an increase in impression, so meaning more people saw the ads, it could just be that Amazon's kind trying to expand the reach of those ads, showing them more places trying to drive performance on their end by showing ads more so super interesting. Now let's do this. Let's compare fall Prime day to July Prime day. The og, the original Prime day, if we remember July Prime Day, July is the slowest month in retail historically. And so Amazon decided, Hey, let's just create a holiday in July and see if we can get a ton of people to shop. And Bezos Magic worked. Now every other retailer has copied it, right? Walmart does a big, I don't remember what they call it, but they do prime day discounts and so does everybody else.

And so now it is a thing. It's an event. People look forward to it, people plan on it. And so how did the two compare? I'll give you the bigger dollar figures here, how they compare, and then we'll talk about some insights. But were, this October Prime day was off by about 38% from the July prime day this year. So 38%, call it 40% fewer sales or sales totals this October versus July last year, it was similar. It was a little closer. It was in the high twenties. That was driven by a couple of large clients though too. Some of this is deal based and whatnot, but we can safely say October or fall Prime Day, not as big as July Prime day. What are your theories there? And I know Jonathan, you were sharing a couple of theories earlier, but why do you think those two days are different and how are they different?

Jonathan :

Yeah, so it's something we've been thinking about internally is that the prime day in July is really, that's the first really big event of the year. It's also been Amazon's kind of keystone cornerstone event for, I don't know, since they came out with it. I forget how many years it's been now, like 10, 12 years ago, maybe more. I don't know. I'm not someone who's a little bit wiser or more gray haired than me. We'll have an intern look that up right now. And so yeah, so that's an event that really has a ton of brand

Brett:

Recognition. 20 15, 20 15, July 15th, 2015,

Jonathan :

Not as long as I was thinking, only nine years. So that's got a lot more brand recognition that mostly anyone who knows of Amazon, definitely any prime member knows about the prime day. And I think that there's probably some murkiness and confusion to the fall event, though we definitely saw more promotion of it from Amazon. I think they announced the date slightly earlier than they do for some of those events. Really trying to get the word out there that hey, these two days in October, there's going to be another big deal event. And so they're really trying to drum up more awareness of that event. But I still think that there is some murkiness that not all shoppers are aware that event's happening. And that might point to that impression surge that we saw 10 days out where people are like, Hey, I know there's an event happening in October, when is it happening?

And so they were just going into Amazon a little bit towards the end of September and then into the first week of October to be figuring out when that event was. And then because the Prime event in July is the first really big deal event of the year, and then this one in October is pretty close to Black Friday, cyber Monday. That kind of leaves it in this weird spot of the procrastinators among us, which I am definitely one are not going to be buying Christmas gifts in October. I'm not buying Christmas gifts usually until December, and then I'm like, I should have bought it on Black Friday. So that's why it's in this weird spot. And that's why I think also we kind of see which product verticals did the best in October, were more of the household goods, everyday purchases, consumables. So that lends to me that it's not really gift buying.

There is gift buying. About 25% of people said they were buying gifts, but I think the majority there is just seeking out the deal. Whereas back in July, it's like that's kind of a cornerstone event of the year where you're like, oh, I'm going to buy an electronic I've been holding off on, or some other big ticket item that one or two times a year between July Prime Day and Black Friday, those are the two. Or Cyber Monday. Those are the two events where I'm going to do a big purchase item, buy a lot for a bunch of discounts where it's a little bit murkier for October.

Brett:

It's interesting, the October dates are kind of in this weird space where it's almost a little, it's too early for the procrastinators. Maybe it's just right or almost too late for people that are really ahead of the game. But there's going to be a lot of people I think that see the Fall Prime day deals and say, yeah, maybe I'll wait. I'll take my chances. I think the discounts are going to be bigger around Black Friday, cyber Monday, but that July prime day, there's nothing, you're not going to say, I'm just going to wait for Black Friday Cyber Monday, unless it's truly a gift and it's only going to be a gift for the holidays. But yeah, kind of two different buying modes there. I think from your perspective, Christine, what did you see or what you see in the data about what was purchased in fall Prime day versus big purchasing categories in July?

Christine:

So as Jonathan said that the fall prime day was really more household items. I'm going to restock on something for the house. I use this cleansers. I'm going to buy more of this July prime day. I've seen more larger purchases like furniture or more clothes. It's more personal items because you haven't had a sale since last December, really. So it's more personal items, more. I'm a big fan of searching the week before adding everything to my cart that I would like,

Brett:

And

Christine:

Then I go in on Prime Day. I'm like, oh, it has a badge. I think I'll buy it. So the badges really, they get people to convert. That could be what the impressions were for.

Brett:

So it could be the people. Yeah, the impression could also be those people going in to add to the cart ahead of time to see what's going to go on sale.

Christine:

It was potentially me and I was asking my family to do the same thing.

Brett:

It's mostly Christine and her friends,

Christine:

It's mostly me. Another thought process on this October Prime from a seller's standpoint, how much of your inventory can you replenish

Brett:

Before

Christine:

Cyber five? How much are you willing to go through in October not knowing can I get any more back in for the really big traffic and when I really need it to be there? So I think that does put a little bit of hesitation in a seller's mind where, okay, I can go through it in July because I still have four months to get it back, but if I go through it in October, am I going to get any more in? So I think that's

Brett:

That's really good. And I think there's this perception for them, this totally ties into it. There's a perception with the shoppers that the biggest sales of the year, black Friday, cyber Monday and July Prime Day, those are probably the deepest discount days for me as a shopper. And so I think that's that perception, but it totally ties into the seller's mindset as well, right? Do I want to burn through all my inventory now I need to save some for those prime shopping days?

Christine:

Exactly. And October Prime day, it was started during 2020. I don't think there was one in July because there nobody could have inventory. So this was kind

Brett:

Of, well, I think it was also kind of one of those things where I wonder, and I heard theories where Amazon was trying to get ahead of the game a little bit. They were concerned maybe about can we deliver everything now? Everything is online during peak covid, and so let's start things early to ease as a relief valve for our delivery infrastructure and specifically last mile and things like that. And then it just sort of stuck, right? The fall primates

Christine:

Stuck. Yeah, why not? It worked. It worked.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. For sure. Interesting. What did we see in terms of the deals that worked versus the deals that didn't work? Any specific callouts or interesting callouts this prime day? Or is it kind just the usual takeaway is what worked this time is what works? Every time

Christine:

We did have more brands leaning into prime exclusives and even coupons. The window for the Lightning deals to sign up for any deals usually closes six weeks or so or more before the event even happens. So I think a lot of sellers are even missing that. I think the window closed in August for October, the window closed last Friday for your cyber deals, and you don't know, can I pull the trigger on that? Am I going to have the inventory, et cetera. So if you don't,

Brett:

And why is it there's such a lead time? Do we know why does Amazon require that? Is it for inventory and planning purposes or what drives that?

Christine:

I think they're trying, honestly, I think it's a demand issue on their part. Let's try to get as many people into this set a level of urgency. I better sign up now, I'm never going to get it. Whereas before you'd be like, oh, I think I'll sign up two days before the deal. So this way you can get your deals in there, but you have to be on top of it and get in early. You're not sure how much inventory you can allocate to it at that point, so much in advance. And one of the issues with Lightning Deals is it's going to populate on the last 30 days, and the same with prime exclusive discounts. So you had to be very mindful that I run any deals earlier. Is my sale price now going to be lower than I need my contribution margins? So that all kind of goes into how you plan your deals. And they're also costly deals on these tent pole days can be upwards of a thousand dollars and when you have to give at least a 20% discount that that's eating into your numbers pretty good.

Brett:

For sure.

Christine:

And that's potentially why items like supplements and things that are on a reorder basis are like, okay, we can do that one time

Brett:

More likely seller is more willing to give those discounts for those consumables.

Christine:

Exactly. So prime exclusive, I think people are catching onto that. It has a red badge, so it looks good in search, looks a little bit better than a coupon, not as good as a lightning deal, but you're still in the game.

Brett:

And why do you say that? How does the Lightning deal stand out versus the prime exclusive?

Christine:

Sometimes it's even a little bit bigger deal, prime deal or the terminology that they use on those are more eye-catching than they will on just a coupon, which might just be yellow or green, not as big either. So they're a best deal. They're really trying to push people to those deals, which increases your traffic, so it makes it worthwhile.

Brett:

So lightning deals are called out the most and usually the biggest discount than Prime exclusive than just a standard coupon kind in that order in terms of how much it's emphasized or called out on a page?

Christine:

Yes, exactly.

Brett:

Got it, got it. So I know one topic that's been a hot topic for years, it's settled down a little bit now, driving potential rate cuts, that inflation is under control a little bit, but I still think it's important to look at how do you think inflation, even though it is kind of now in that normal sub 3% range, how do we think that's, or do we think that's impacting shopping at all? Or is that impacting strategy, pricing, strategy with our clients and with sellers on Amazon?

Christine:

I think it's impacting all the way around really. I mean, sellers can only charge so much. The market can only bear so much. So they can't really increase their prices that much. They just price themselves out of the market For individuals, for shoppers, their buying power is less than it once was in some cases. So shoppers I think are a little pickier, not so quick, oh, I'll just add it to my cart and buy it. I think they're thinking two or three times. They're comparing prices, what's on sale, what's not on sale, probably impacting bigger ticket items a little bit more than household items necessarily. We might, it's stable from last year, so I don't see that we would see a big difference, kind of a new normal,

Brett:

All those things are normal or all those things are true you just said, but it's almost like a new normal for people.

Christine:

It kind of is a new normal. So that's why I don't think we're going to see a big differential in the sales from last holiday season to this holiday season. But just understanding that buyers have less buying power, they have less in their pocket than they did a few years ago.

Brett:

Yeah, prime Day July was up quite a bit, year over year, fall prime quite a bit year over year. So hopefully we'll see something similar in holiday, but we shall see. Jonathan, from the ads point of view, what did you see immediately after the fall prime day? Was it the typical lull where hey, people's wallets are kind of empty, so they're going to wait a little bit? What did you see there?

Jonathan :

Yeah, I would say we actually saw a bit more significant of a lull in the days immediately following the event than what we usually see. And for a few accounts that kind of extended out to a four to five day lull. I think that's a

Brett:

Big, were those the brands that had the biggest discounts or did that seem to not correlate?

Jonathan :

No, that didn't really have a correlation. The only correlation that I could really pull out from that was more of the cyclical purchase trends per account. Because some accounts, if they have a ton of subscriptions, then that's really more evenly, your sales are a lot more evenly distributed throughout the week. But then we have a lot of clients that are weekend heavy. And so the people who typically buy on the weekdays really focused in on the deal event. And then of course the weekend did as well. And so then all the weekend shoppers, which there aren't as much already or all the weekday shoppers, which there were fewer already really focused in on those two days. And so then the rest of that week, finishing out the week for the Thursday, Friday and into the Saturday, those were just kind of obliterated. It wasn't like 10% of sales, but it was significantly down from the normal average. But then after about the fourth or fifth day, they were back up to the pre-event levels in terms of sales,

Brett:

Normal daily averages kind of kicked in at that point. Got it, got it. Interesting. Okay, so let's talk a little, let's shift our focus. Well, any final call outs for Prime Day before we shift to holiday?

Jonathan :

Good? No, I don't think so. We're

Brett:

Good. Cool. So as we look at the holiday shopping window for a lot of people, holiday shopping kicks in earnest during the cyber five, that Thanksgiving through Black Friday, that's when it happens. Now I've heard this is like the Cyber 12 and the cyber whatever number you want to throw at it, kind of the week, extending past Cyber Monday and going a little bit before Thanksgiving. It's all kind of thrown in there, but a lot of people, that's when holiday shopping kicks off for them, interestingly enough, and this is just the way the calendar falls sometimes. Thanksgiving is five days later in the year this year than it was last year. I believe it's November 28th this year. And so there'll be five fewer holiday shopping days this year kind of measuring that beginning of the cyber five through final through Christmas or whatever. And so fewer shopping days, how do we think that will impact things and what do we need to consider there? And I'll ask you that first, Christine.

Christine:

I think the first thing to consider now that Amazon has extended their cyber event from basically Sunday through Tuesday, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, basically through the Tuesday after Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving. But if you end up, for instance, with a Best Deal, which is a seven day deal that starts on Monday or Sunday, you run the entire week after Prime Day. So one of the key things that you have to keep in mind when you have set up these deals in the past, because you set them up already two months ago, what deal placement do you get? Am I running on Monday? Am I running on Tuesday? Am I running on Wednesday? Am I running on Thursday, Friday, whatever? And how does that compare to my sales from last year and what did I run last year and what days did I run it? So what days are going to perform best for me for my sales volume? It's number one. So for instance, if you, you have no control over the timing, they usually come out about a week before the event. So it's incumbent upon, we have to check it.

Brett:

And these are prime exclusive or what deals are talking about right now

Christine:

Where you have no, these are deals and best

Brett:

Deals. Oh, lightning deals. Okay.

Christine:

So a best deal, you could potentially get the Sunday before Thanksgiving and then it's going to run seven days to the Sunday after. Or a Best Deal would start on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and run the following week. I actually had huge success with that, a seven day deal post Thanksgiving. So you need to determine out of those days, are those going to be good for me? Is that worth me spending a thousand dollars on this deal to run on Wednesday when everybody's traveling? What if I get a Thursday deal, it's Thanksgiving, is that going to work? Everyone should take the deals that come on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Brett:

But you're saying you don't get to pick

Christine:

Say, but it's incumbent upon agency seller to look at your placement that you've been offered and make sure it's worth running it if it's not worth

Brett:

Running it because you get selected and once you know your date, then you can choose whether you want to do it or whether you want to

Christine:

Reject it. Exactly, exactly. And you can say, oh, that's fabulous, love it, keeping it or That's not good. I think I'm going to cancel it. And your pricing for your deal will be affected by your fall big deal days for both your prime day, prime exclusive and your Lightning deals. So you're going to have to wait at least 30 days after that to see where your pricing is going to be and what price Amazon is going to tell you you have to sell your product for and your lightning deal. So it's a continuous checking, but it's post 30 days.

Brett:

So basically is what Amazon's trying to do is they're trying to make sure that the deal you offer for cyber is at least as good as what you did for fall prime day or something. Is that kind of what they're looking at or how

Christine:

Does that work? It's based on your lowest price in the last 30 days. So then they take the discount off of that. So if you went in now and you're like, oh, let me upload all my prime exclusive discounts for cyber week, the referral price is going to be your, if you had it on sale, that price from the October Prime day. So you just want to wait until that cycles through. You've had your regular price for 30 days, and then you can upload it with your 20% discount for Prime exclusive, a lightning deal or a Best Deal, let it cycle through for 30 days. Amazon will reset and whatever percentage off they say you should have on that deal will be based on your current price, not your sale price. So these deals are not set it and forget it because you also can assign inventory. It assigns inventory. So you decide how many units can I even sell through at that price.

Brett:

So are you saying you need to wait 30 days after fall prime day before you submit some of this? Is that cutting it close? So as far as deadlines go,

Christine:

No, because October Prime, you've already set it up, so you're fine with that because you already have the deals in the console. It's just adjusting the prices that you're going to charge for it. So it's not too late. I would say you can upload your prime exclusives October, November 15th around that date. That still gives you over 10 days to clear any errors for your light.

Brett:

So that 30 day window between

Christine:

Prime day and that 30 day window closed, the system is reset now on your current price, not your sale price, your current price. So you should be able to apply your 20% or whatever you want to do. And the lightning deals or best deals should also reset, but keep an eye on the inventory levels and you can adjust those. Also determine how many units do you want to go through at this price.

Brett:

Got it. Got it. Jonathan, what is your perspective here? So five fewer shopping days this year versus last year. How will that impact total sales? How will that impact ads? What's your perspective?

Jonathan :

Yeah, so what we typically see is that the accounts that really benefit from the gift buying, they just continue to keep increasing in sales through December until, and I guess I haven't looked at when Christmas falls in the week, but pretty much right up until the 21st, 22nd, as long as those products are still getting next day or two day or one day shipping. And so

Brett:

Christmas is on a Wednesday this year. There you go. Oh, Wednesday, yeah, midweek, midweek Christmas. Yeah.

Jonathan :

Yeah. So probably Sunday, the Sunday before will be the last day when, and again, it depends on your inventory, quantities on how great your shipping's going to be in that narrow region Saturday, Sunday. So really condenses having those five less days between Black Friday, cyber Monday and Christmas really condenses that shopping period for shoppers and gift buyers. So usually people who are going to buy are still going to buy, they have a little bit less time to buy. So the only people that are really slipping through the cracks are those really extreme procrastinators who are probably going to have to run to a retail store anyways because they're going out on Christmas Eve to buy the gift. But for Amazon traffic, that just makes those days that more valuable because there's five days that are just gone. So you really got to be on your game making sure that you're showing up, especially when you're running promos, that you're broadcasting that promotion with your advertising as prominently as possible to make sure you're really maximizing the impact and reach over that narrower timeframe.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really interesting. So I think for most brands, most products, most categories, sales should be fairly consistent. And so just the loss of those five days mean it's just going to be more concentrated and sales are going to be higher during some of those days because if you think about it, you're still going to buy gifts for your kids, you're still going to buy gifts for your spouse, none of that can change. You can't just say, Hey, fewer shopping days couldn't get you anything this year. That's going to happen. But what could shift is where you buy gifts. To your point, Jonathan, if you are a procrastinator, maybe now you're forced to buy in store versus online. And I've also seen, because this cycles through, so we have these windows where holiday shopping period is condensed. We have periods where it's extended and these periods where it's condensed, sometimes people don't buy some of the extra gifts.

So like someone buying for their great niece or something like, okay, well I didn't see a special deal and so it just didn't happen. Or, oh, I saw this deal. I'm buying this for a friend. Maybe I wouldn't normally buy them a gift, but it just was there. So some of the more spontaneous things might not happen as much this year. So again, it doesn't impact big gift buying and I don't think it impacts your primary categories. But yeah, it does condense things. And it may kind of have some fringe edge case impacts, which is super interesting.

Christine:

It may make some other days bigger even than they once were. So maybe that Saturday, the two Saturdays after Thanksgiving or whatever, there'll be some days where you'll be, wow, I'm really up

Brett:

The Saturday.

Christine:

I think we're really down before. So I think in the end it'll probably be, it'll average out about the same, but I think it could make a few days bigger than what people anticipated from last year.

Jonathan :

Totally. Yeah,

Christine:

The panic you were

Jonathan :

About to say something, Jonathan? Yeah, just another aspect of that is usually we'll see that November on whole is a little bit softer than we thought it was going to be or year over year numbers wise compared to like 2023 November year over year for 2022. And then December should be proportionately stronger year over year than the trailing one just because the shopping is more condensed into those December weeks and a little bit less into the November

Christine:

Number

Brett:

Because now cyber cyber Monday is the 2nd of December and Sunday, which is part of cyber, cyber five is also December, December one. So it's going to shift some of those November sales. The November comp will be different. What's that?

Christine:

November numbers will look a little off because you're missing eight days of prime selling in November, so it's going to probably negatively impact your November numbers. But then hopefully you make that up on the December side,

Brett:

You have to do a little bit of calendar work to, because that five day shift you'll have to, your comps will be a little bit different, but that just kind of happens. So as we prep for the holiday, any big predictions you think this is going to be? Do you think we should see similar lifts for all of holiday that we've kind of seen say for Prime day, year over year? Do you think this holiday is going to be kind of flat year over year? What are your predictions from a big picture perspective?

Christine:

I think we're probably going to end up pretty similar to last year. A couple points here or a couple points there. I think one point that you had mentioned earlier, Brett, in regards to inflation, it's still here. So that part of the equation hasn't changed. I think people will buy about the same amount of stuff that they were going to buy, even with a few less days. So I think it'll probably going to be pretty stable with last year.

Jonathan :

Last year, yeah, same. I'm expecting to have a really solid Black Friday, cyber Monday in December, election year's, a little bit uncertainty of what's going to happen there, but I don't think that that is ultimately going to play too much into Christmas shopping trends. And if there's one thing that is wholly undefeated, it is the American consumer.

Brett:

It's so true. Yeah, the election, it's such an interesting story. That election also, it's a major, major hotly contested, all polls show it's a tight race, so the election is a big deal. The nice thing though, on the Amazon side, it doesn't really impact. There's no political ads on Amazon. Thank God that's a place we can go and hide from political ads. It does impact us on the YouTube and meta side and stuff like that. But yeah, I think the election, depending on which way it goes, maybe your gathering with your family is going to be more or less depressing depending on how your family views the outcome of the election. But I think there's going to be enough window there between the election and cyber kicking off and earnest and there's going to be people shopping for therapy, there's going to be people shopping for celebration, people are going to shop. And so 100% agree with that. On the ad strategy side. Jonathan, anything, are you thinking about this holiday any differently than other holidays because of the condensed window or any just special callouts on holiday prep from an ad perspective?

Jonathan :

Yeah, so the main special callout for holiday prep is just to really know, obviously I'm working on the agency side, but if you're a seller listening to this, you just got to know your strategy going into it. You obviously need to know your margins. You need to know what promos you've got. We're already past the deadline for being able to submit lightning deals and best deals, but you can still run prime exclusives if you don't have that eligible. You can run coupons at the bare minimum. And so knowing when those are going to be running, and like I said earlier, capitalizing on when they're active, obviously, like Christine mentioned, you don't get to choose the timing for Lightning deals and best deals, but if the best deal is running over Black Friday or it's running over Cyber Monday, those are the moments to really capitalize if you're, everybody's tight on budget. But if you're really tight and you're really trying to say, I can really only really hammer in on a day or two. Obviously back Friday, cyber Monday are the best. Cyber Monday usually edges out for Amazon, especially if you are a little bit more textile product. And then also the data, it's

Brett:

Interesting because on the D two C side, it's usually the opposite on the D two C side. What we see on the Google side is that the Black Friday's a little bit bigger, but Amazon really wins on Cyber Monday. Interesting.

Jonathan :

Yeah, definitely. And then I'm always a big, I like to scrutinize waste and that really drill out as much waste as possible. And that's kind of an evergreen tactic that I have. But that's something to really hone in on for the deal events. And really, you got to be checking in on your campaigns and how they're performing throughout the day. Obviously there's going to be a lot of attribution dust that settles later, but there could be something that you see you are being hyper aggressive on and you're just getting blown out of the water and you're spending hundreds, thousands of dollars and not getting any sales from it. And there could be a good reason for that. Or maybe there's something you need to dig in and adjust. Maybe your promo didn't start running because you had the pricing wrong or something and it wasn't deep enough the discount or some other issue. Maybe you lost the buy box or something. I don't know your issue, you're going to have to see if there's an issue and dig into it yourself. And each of those issues requires kind of a custom tailored, obviously response to that.

Brett:

Totally. And it's such a good call out though, the waste piece, because yes, conversion rates are up. Yes, everybody's shopping. Yes, it's a buying frenzy. Everything is condensed anyway in a normal holiday period. It's condensed more this year, but there's still going to be waste. And you still got to be mindful, Hey, none of us want to just give all of our extra profits back to Jeff Bezos in terms the form of advertising fees. Nobody wants to give more money into Google or to Zuck than we have to, right? So we've got to be mindful of those areas of waste. And so it's one of those things where really every sale day in the holiday can be the equivalent of a week or at least several days that are normal days. And so got to have your ad team on it, whether it's internal or an agency.

And hey, this is just a quick plug, quick shameless plug for OMG commerce. Depending on when you listen to this, it may be a little late, but we would love to get in and see how we can assist you depending on when you reach out. We may be heads down with existing clients, but this is the time certainly to bring in pros. So we're a little bit over our allotted record time. I know you guys both have to go and take care of clients, but Rapid Fire Christine, tips, dates, what do we need to be aware of and what we need to be planning for to make the most of holiday

Christine:

Quick tips? Add a holiday banner to your brand store, update your brand story. Give it a little holiday background. You can quickly add holiday search terms to the back end bulk upload. Doesn't matter how many ASINs you have, just put 'em in the backend. You don't need to update anything else on your listing. Be mindful that Chinese New Year is the 29th of January. Last day to place an order is December 6th. Last day. It's going to get on the water is probably very close to the 29th. And after that, nothing comes out till the 12th. So if you see you're crushing it in the beginning of November, middle of November, cyber week, get your order in, get it on the water so you can still be selling in January, February, and March.

Brett:

Totally, man. Nothing would bring down the high from a great holiday. Like not having inventory

Christine:

Like zero for

Brett:

January to February, especially if you're food and bev or if you're anything health or fitness or supplement related January and February, or very strong, even bigger oftentimes than holiday. So you got to be ready for that. So Christine Shalon, ladies and gentlemen, and Jonathan FCUs, you guys crushed it as always. Thank you for your hard work. It was a great super, super fun prime day. I love how we have internal sheets we keep track of and we're popping messages back and forth on Slack and kind of watching how things go. It just got me real fired up for holiday. It's even bigger and even more fun. So good work to the both of you and to the team. Any final callouts, any final callouts tips, advice that you would share with the audience?

Christine:

Watch your deals.

Jonathan :

Watch your deals. Watch

Christine:

Your deals.

Jonathan :

Organize. Organize your ads with your deals and your inventory. Strategize around that, optimize continually, and just stay focused on all of that. And you'll be good.

Brett:

Now's the time to really be fine tuning that strategy. Really get that dialed in, have your playbook laid out. How are we going to execute this? Because really, you don't want to be figuring things out during holiday. That's when you're just executing, making in-game adjustments and optimizing. But you got to have that overall strategy. Love it. So thank you both. Super, super fun. Excited for our next chat about Amazon Growth here coming up soon. And as always, thank you for tuning in. Please give us some feedback. Let us know what you'd like to hear more of or less of on the show. Leave us a review on iTunes if you've not done that. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

In this illuminating episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I sit down with AI marketing expert Russ Henneberry to explore the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in eCommerce. Russ shares invaluable insights on how we can leverage AI as a powerhouse marketing tool by creating customized AI marketing hubs. This episode is a must-listen for any eCommerce professional looking to stay ahead of the curve and harness AI's capabilities to drive business growth.

Key topics covered:

• The concept of "AI marketing hubs" and how to build them using tools like Claude and ChatGPT.
• Strategies for fine-tuning AI models with your business data to dramatically improve outputs.
• The three key AI roles in marketing: Scribe (content creation), Optimizer (asset evaluation), and Strategist (big picture planning).
• Tips for crafting more effective AI prompts using the RTIF (Role, Task, Input, Format) framework.
• The future of AI in marketing, including predictions on how major tech companies will shape the landscape.

Tune in to discover how you can take your AI marketing game to the next level and turn generic AI outputs into tailored, high-impact marketing assets for your eCommerce business.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(05:14) Mistakes and Misconceptions About AI

(23:02) The Role of Prompts In AI

(27:57) Introduction To AI Marketing Hubs

(45:16) Examples of Well-Built Marketing Hubs

(51:20) What About Gemini? 

(54:14) Conclusion

---

‍

Show Notes:

• Russ Henneberry 
• theClick
• Molly Pittman
• Sway Thai
• Torchy's Tacos
• Nvidia
• ChatGPT
• Anthropic
• Claude
• Perplexity 
• Gemini
• Llama

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

‍

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

‍

---

Transcript:

Russ:

We don't need AI to get better. You need to be better at using ai.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about AI and marketing. What are mistakes and misconceptions that people make about ai? How can you turn AI into a powerhouse marketing tool or marketing assistant or marketing team member for you? And my guest is a long time friend, multiple time returning guests to the pod. Although it's been a while. It's been too long. I'm sure it's been a long time. It's been a long time, dude. Yeah. But Mr. Russ Henneberry of the click join the click.ai. We're both Missouri boys. He's in St. Louis. I'm in Springfield, so representing Missouri. But Russ, what's up man? How you doing? And welcome to the show.

Russ:

Welcome back to, I'm so excited to be here and I haven't seen you in person in even longer.

Brett:

Thanks.

Russ:

It's been forever actually. I saw you

Brett:

In Austin, wasn't it? We were both doing, why were we there? It was something with Molly and Sam and I don't know why were, were we in Austin?

Russ:

I'm not sure. You were in an e-comm event. I was at Kajabi's event.

Brett:

Got it. But Molly Pittman was there, wasn't she?

Russ:

Molly Pittman was there.

Brett:

Yeah. So we hung out, waited at a great restaurant, Austin man, Austin does food, right?

Russ:

Sway.

Brett:

We went to Sway. Sway. Look at your memory. Yeah,

Russ:

Sway. Because I go there every time I go to Austin. It's the best Thai food in the world.

Brett:

I love Thai food, man. I am a huge, huge Thai fan. And you had some kind of funky congealed beer or something, if I remember

Russ:

Right. Molly bought me a beer that slowly freezes after you open it and then,

Brett:

Which shouldn't happen. Alcohol doesn't freeze, so it just kind of turns into a gel or something.

Russ:

I can't remember what the heck happened, but a mess, hijinks ensued and Molly just sat there and laughed the whole time.

Brett:

She was cackling. It was entertaining to watch the beer congeal or whatever, and you try to deal with it, it was equally as funny or more so watching Molly's amusement at the whole thing,

Russ:

You basically just, you walk up and you hand somebody a problem and they have to deal with it. You basically have to drink.

Brett:

I'm going to watch this unfold. I'm going to see how you do there, buddy. How are you going to do with this congealed beer? But Austin such fun town to hang out in. They do food, right? Tacos. Oh my goodness. I was just in Dallas for an event with my family and Torchy's Tacos, Austin original. It originated as an Austin food truck. They're in Dallas now. So I ate some, oh my gosh, that was one of the best tacos I've had and in a long time. So Torchy's tacos, highly recommend sway if you're winning Thai food. So there you go. Some Austin recommendations for you. Free of charge on the eCommerce Revolution podcast, free charge, free podcast. That's awesome, dude. So let's dive in and let's talk AI a little bit. Obviously it's the buzzword. Hopefully everyone here has invested in Nvidia stock from way back in the day, and hopefully you're wildly rich now. And AI is all the buzz. We're not really sure who's benefiting from it other than Nvidia who's really benefiting from ai. But you and I are both very bullish on the technology being at least somewhat disruptive now. It's going to continue. But why are you so excited about ai? So much so that your membership site is about ai. I know a lot of the consulting you do is about ai. Why are you so pumped up?

Russ:

Well, because my background, I know yours we're similar age. We came up when the internet was becoming a thing. My first job in marketing, I was in direct mail and then I saw this internet thing,

Brett:

Yeah, was TV radio for me.

Russ:

So we were both doing more old school types of media and we probably, I saw the internet coming along and I was like, I'm hopping on this train. And I never looked back. And I rode that wave. And when I saw this coming out, I pumped the brakes for a while and was like, okay, I'm not going to say anything about this. I'm just going to watch it. I'm going to study it. And eventually I've come to the conclusion there's no future that I see where we aren't using AI isn't just infuse everything we're doing as marketers. So yeah, I'm all in on it.

Brett:

Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I've kind of gone personally from being fascinated by it, maybe partially afraid of it, skeptical a little bit to like, okay, no, this is going to happen. It's going to be good, but not really using it to, now I utilize AI quite a bit. I'll share some stories as we go here, but let's maybe open up with what are some of the mistakes and or misconceptions people have about AI related to their marketing?

Russ:

I think people are frustrated with ai. You mentioned earlier that where are we seeing the ROI in marketing? There's a lot of investors asking if there's a bubble here because there's so much money flying into ai, billion,

Brett:

Billions and billions and billions of dollars being invested in AI right now.

Russ:

And where's where are the sales? So what I think we're seeing right now is that intelligence has become a commodity like electricity or internet access. At 20 bucks a month, I can have access to the leading Frontier model, the most intelligent model. And that's not going to change. We're going to see chat BT five come out, chatt six, claw five, whatever that comes out. And we're going to be able to have commoditized access to intelligence. So what I'm seeing is that it's going to be how we use this resource, just like the way we use the internet. So just because everyone has asked us to the internet doesn't mean we all used it to our best capabilities. Some people won, some people lost, some people won big, some people won small. So it's going to be the same thing here is how is it that we go about using this and the business?

And probably not just the average, but the majority of businesses that I see when I talk to them are using off the shelf ai. So they're using maybe a paid license to cloud 3.5 sonnet, which is right now, a lot of people say the best model, I would say is the best model out there or chat g BT four oh or whatever it is they're using. And they may be paying 20 bucks a month for it, and they're just using the generic off the shelf ai. And what they're getting back from it is generic boiled chicken output. So

Brett:

Boiled chicken, boiled chicken is not something you're going to find at many Austin restaurant menus. So if we're going to just harken back to the good food, it is not boiled chicken. So just wanted clarify.

Russ:

Torch's Tacos has a boiled chicken taco though on Thursday.

Brett:

Do they? Really? No kidding. They do have the trailer park, which is the fried chicken and dude that's so Trailer Park, I love

Russ:

It. But I mean the key to this whole thing that we're seeing reports coming out of places like Accenture, those big consulting companies, Accenture, Deloitte, Dell, IBM, saying that what they're seeing is that Billings for AI consulting are going to go up 400% over the next five years and they're growing 32% year over year right now. And so I started to dig into what it was that they were selling to big companies like Best Buy or Target or whatever, like their clients. And what they're selling is something called fine tuned ai. And this is really the key to unlocking the potential of what AI can be for even a small business. Forget Best Buy and Target. They're paying these big consulting companies to come in and do complex fine tuning projects, but we can just fine tune $20 a month chat, GPT or Claude and get incredible results out of it.

So this is kind of the key is to fine tune it. What fine tuning basically means is that we are going to take an existing LLM model like Claude or chat GBT and adapt it to the use case that we want to use it for. So to keep on our food analogy, if we plugged all of my recipes from my family or something into Claude 3.5 sonnets brain, I can then start to have conversations with that version of Claude about my marinara sauce or about my Texas beans recipe, which if you're real nice to me, I will send you

Brett:

No way. The family, the Henneberry family Texas Beans

Russ:

Recipe, this is the Russell Texas bean recipe. I found it from being down in Austin and going all those barbecue joints and I was like, I got to figure out how to make these beans, but I can

Brett:

The marinara, not to get too focused on food here, but the marinara, you're in St. Louis. So a lot of people don't know St. Louis home of amazing Italian food.

Russ:

It's on the hill, man.

Brett:

It's on the hill.

Russ:

My marinara, I'll put it up against anybody.

Brett:

No way.

Russ:

But I did demonstrate this. I went to Claude and I said, I put all my recipes in there and I said, I just asked simply how could I improve my marinara sauce

Brett:

Recipe?

Russ:

And it says to me, you're not simmering long enough. It went and looked at my recipe. It's like you're not simmering long enough. Interesting. You're using dried herbs. Try using actual fresh oregano, fresh basil in your sauce. So it went and consulted my recipe. Right.

Brett:

Did you try any of those recommendations?

Russ:

Not yet.

Brett:

Okay.

Russ:

I'm going to make the Texas beans though this weekend.

Brett:

Well, let's see if it's

Russ:

We're going to go

Brett:

Russ Original or Russ plus clawed. What does better,

Russ:

I'm going to ask it about how to improve my Texas beans risk. But the thing is, when you go and you customize an AI and you can do this so easily, this is not a technical problem at all. Like Claude has a feature called projects where you can start a new project and upload information into its knowledge base and it will consult that knowledge before it's first and then on it'll

Brett:

Consult that knowledge plus use the llm and now you've got specific insights.

Russ:

That's exactly right. And this is the thing that people are really missing the boat on. And I think a year from now, everyone's going to know this intuitively because there won't be another AI model that rolls out that doesn't allow us to customize it easier and easier. So they are going to make the user interface and the ability to customize AI and fine tune AI to our circumstances easier and easier as it goes along. I'm sure chat, the next iteration of chat GT will make it even easier. Right now what you have to do is go build a custom GPT, which is actually quite easy to do as well. It's a little bit clunky, and I think by the time we get a year from now or whatever, we'll think that the interface with both Claude and Chat GP PT was very clunky. But right now you can already go in and start to fine tune AI for your use case, which is you're a marketer. So we are going to fine tune with the typical marketing stuff like customer personas offers that are very well written out in detailed so that because if you think about it, an off the shelf ai, it's ingested the entire internet.

Brett:

And

Russ:

So it's incredibly knowledgeable, but it also knows absolutely Jack Squat about your business or any business that you're marketing. So I've created this process, I call it the AI Marketing Hub, and all it is is just if I build one in chat gt, it's a custom GPT with custom knowledge about the client's business that I'm working on, or if I'm working over in Claude, I'm going to use projects to create an AI marketing hub. And it's sort of like a central command center from which I'm going to do any AI work with that particular business. So inside that hub, there's custom knowledge about the circumstances of that business. And then I have another hub for, so it's sort of like having an MCC for a client in Google this. Every client has their own

Brett:

Place, account hub accounts, it's all kind of connected a little bit. So let's do this. So fascinating concept AI hubs. We're going to dive into that, really explore that. I know that ultimately this is more about AI is really just a tool, so it's more about what you do with it and how you use it that really matters. But you did say something that was interesting. You said, Claude maybe is your most advanced model or your favorite model. I still talk to people that I'm like, I use Claude. And they're like, who is Claude? I'm like, well, Claude is AI right by Anthropic. And I use chat GPT too. I've got chat GPTO on my phone, but for anything creative writing, I actually use Claude. I really, really, really like it. Compare and contrast the two just briefly for those that are wondering and those that are new to Claude,

Russ:

Well, I'm using Claude for the same purpose. You're using it for any sort of content creation or copy creation. It is superior, my opinion to chat GPT. The problem with Claude, right? The reason that I end up switching back over to chat GPT quite often is because it doesn't have certain features. So for example, Claude is not Web Connect. So one of the best use cases for using chat GT is to kick over there. And I might have it go look at a webpage for me. Like, Hey, go look at this landing page and evaluate X, Y, and Z on there, or pull the copy in here so I can work on it or whatever it is I'm trying to do. So Claude for whatever reason, is still not web enabled. It will be that this is one of the places we're seeing lots of development is in these kinds of user interface type things.

It can't accept video, it can't accept audio. So the multimodal capabilities of Claude are much more limited than you get over at Chat G gt. But overall, if I'm working with text, I am going to use Claude. And then the other big thing over at Claude is this concept of projects, which we talked about and is so critical to building an AI marketing hub we're talking about and sort of fine tuning a knowledge base. But the other thing that they've released that is very cool is called artifacts, which is essentially where you're able to talk to the AI on the left side of the screen and on the right side it's building something, an artifacts what they call it. So it could be a document, it could be an application, it could be interesting, it could be a set of graphs or a dashboard or something. So you start to see where AI is going to go is do you, Brett, you remember when the first CMSs started to come out like JU Law and Drupal and

Brett:

Yeah, early

Russ:

In the day,

Brett:

Absolutely.

Russ:

Before that we were using Dreamweaver or writing custom websites and stuff like that. And once those CMSs came out, we saw such an explosion in content produced on the internet. It was like we have these, what you see is what you get editors, we call it the wyg. Wizzywig is such a huge thing because it was like it took coding out of the game at least for producing, just being able to publish the internet. Well, what I'm seeing happening with artifacts and how when I started to play with artifacts, I started to feel like I had this magic wand in my hand and it was sort of what you say is what you get. So if you can describe it in the English language, I saw somebody on Twitter the other day say something like the hottest new programming language is English,

Brett:

And

Russ:

I love that you say what you want.

Brett:

Can you ask good questions and can you articulate? Which you don't even have to be all that clear, dude, that's so good. And I'm a big fan of Claude too. Obviously you got to use multiple tools. So this is not this tool versus that tool. It's important to be educated. You should probably play with and use Claude as well. But yeah, what I'm using it for a lot of times is transcripts from podcasts or transcripts from interviews or transcripts from long videos and stuff where it's like you upload that transcript and then you can just converse with Claude about that transcript. And I've used it where I have a PDF had this offer from an investor or whatever, and I looked at it and I was like, Hey, pull these numbers from this image or from this PDF, put it into a spreadsheet for me. Okay, now clean this up, change this. It's awesome dude. And I love that. Now the best programming language is English. That's really, really smart.

Russ:

It's going to head to where if you can understand how to articulate what you want. So I really think people that are in the creative world are scared that AI is coming for your job. And there is some truth to that. I mean we just had reports that Amazon, it's Q program or whatever, just replaced 4,000 years of programming time, crazy,

Brett:

Crazy

Russ:

Using ai and it's 79% accurate. And the question is of course, what are they going to do with that? How does that impact programmers at Amazon and everywhere else when we're starting to see this? So there's that. But the exciting thing about this for me is that if you're a creative person and you've ever wanted to build something but you're like, I don't know, I'd love to build that, but I'm not a videographer or I'm not a coder or I'm not, whatever it is that is that barrier, they are going to remove all of this for us. It is going to be literally a magic wand where it's what you say is what you get. And if you want to see this in the earliest infancy, go play with Claude 3.5. It's even the free version has artifacts. And just ask it to build you a landing page for example, and it will definitely activate Claude's artifact function.

It'll start to build the page on the right side and you can talk to it on the left and say, move that button down, change the color to this. And it's just going to keep rewriting that code. And I mean the website will look like it's from 1998 because it's early days, but this is just what's interesting about it is that communicating with something and just sort of casting a spell, right? Like hey, switch that over to this, switch this over to that, and it's just speaking English. That's the programming language you're using because it's going to write the code for you in the background.

Brett:

Totally. And I'm a huge believer that there will always be a need for smart humans. Of course, we've talked about this a long time in the agency space. I remember when years and years ago, Google first came out with smart bidding, with machine learning based smart bidding, and a lot of agencies were terrified and they were like, this is not good. This is not going to be good for your business. Google is evil, whatever. I choked up, hold on. I was on a rant. I got choked up. Oh geez, this is not good for your business. What we found is it really did not limit people's desire for agencies. It kind of just allowed us to do more. Now we could focus on more things rather than just bidding. And so the way I've heard it described, which I really believe is true, you're not competing against AI per se. You are competing against people who are using ai. And so it's always going to be a partnership. Smart humans plus AI is likely going to be the future. And so is then the solution. Russ, just better prompt engineering. Is that it? Do we just need to get better at asking questions we need to get better being more clear, more succinct, more whatever? Or is there something more?

Russ:

Well, so when AI came out, I told you I'd pumped the brakes and started watching it. I saw courses coming out already. Some of the big names or whatever that are always sell course exactly four days after chat toed is out, there's a course on it. But I was basically like, we need to study this, we need to watch this. And one of the things that I saw coming out a lot was, here's a hundred prompts as lead magnet kind of thing, and here's some different things around prompts and there's no question about it. Better prompting gets you better output, but it still doesn't solve the problem that ai if it's not fine tuned. In other words, if it doesn't have any information about your business and its knowledge base, it's always going to give you generic information. I mean, consider that if you hired a consultant for your company, a human consultant, and that person came in, they were very capable and very knowledgeable and very smart, but you blindfolded them, didn't tell them anything about what they were selling, who you were selling it to or anything about the business it was trying to market.

And then you ask it questions like we ask AI sometimes like, Hey, help me build a webinar series or what new products should I roll out for Black Friday? Stuff like that. And that consultant is going to give you maybe good generic advice and that's what we're getting from ai. So that consultant, if that consultant knows what they're doing, which in this case it would be the metaphor is that AI does know a lot, it's very knowledgeable, but it doesn't know your business. So a better prompt, being able to ask the AI in a more clear way is going to get you better output. It's still not going to get you there until you actually take the time to fine tune it or add to its knowledge base.

Brett:

I want to talk about the knowledge base and the AI hub because that's really a neat concept that you've kind of pioneered here and I want to dive into that. I do want to talk a little bit though about better prompts because I think this is important. Used to do a lot of customer testimonials. We used to do video interviews with customers and then create customer testimonials from that. And I promise you, the person behind the camera, which for a long time it was me, the person asking the question, the quality of those questions, the sequence of those questions in this case, because it was human IT enthusiasm, it's an art, you would get lame answers, boring answers, timid answers, afraid answers, or you could get dynamite stuff and it was based on how you asked the question. And I think the same is true if you're doing surveys and stuff like that, the way you ask the question, you want better answers, ask better questions, a little bit different because AI is not human and not emotional, but any tips on better prompts just as a baseline that I think some people will really benefit from before we dive into the Yeah,

Russ:

And that's such an important point. I mean you're right. Surveys. I mean look, we're all marketers, so we know words matter the sequence of when we say things. And so there's no different here when you're prompting. And so what I like to do is keep in mind four, this little four letter acronym, RTIF. So when you build a prompt, if you can start out with telling the AI what its role is, that's the R part and RTIF. What is the AI's role?

Brett:

Pretend you are a marketer, copywriter, director, editor, whatever.

Russ:

Exactly. And what that does, the issue is that large language models are large. They've ingested the entire internet. So that role immediately zeroes the AI down into some domain of knowledge. So if you tell it it's a copy editor, then it's immediately going to zero down because right now you start with a fresh generic out of the box, new chat, you could literally ask it anything. So it's literally accessing the entire index of everything it has, which is everything that we've ever produced and put online. So the minute you give it a roll, you're going to get better output because it's going to be like, okay, I'm zeroing in on this domain of knowledge. The second thing to do is to give it a task. So if you give it a roll, you're a copy editor, your task is to review these product descriptions. And so now you've zeroed in even further, you've given it more clues as to which domain knowledge that you want it to access inside of a sprain, and then we give it input.

That's the I. So role task input. Now input is super important. If we can spend more time with input, the better. So one thing you could do is you could say, here's the product description I want you to copy at, and that's it. So that's all the input that you give the AI is you are a copy editor, your task is to copy edit these product descriptions, here's the product description, edit that please. Then the last one is format, which is the way you want that output formatted. So it could be that you want it long, it could be you want it short. It could be that you want it in bullets. It could be you want it at a table or you want it however you want that to come back to you is the last bit of a solid prompt. But let's kick back to the idea of this input is super important.

If you tell the AI that you want it to do to assume the role of the copy editor, edit these product descriptions and then you give it the product descriptions, you want it to edit, that's basically a zero shot prompt, what we call zero shot. It means that you've given it zero shots. And really, I don't know why these engineers want to call it shots because you could just use the word example. So if I instead say you're a copy editor, your role is copy editor, your task is to copy edit these product descriptions and then here's five product descriptions that are done right now. If you've hit five product descriptions, you have a multi-shot prompt. So you're going to get way better results because you're basically saying use these as a model. And so that is a major part of prep, preparing a good prompt is whatever it is you're asking it to do, can you give it anything more and show it something that is the proper output?

Brett:

It's really great, really, really great. Okay, so let's then talk about AI hubs, AI marketing hubs. How are you building these? What do these look like? Walk us through that.

Russ:

Well, so if we start with this idea, I mean we can go back to what I just said, which is when you give it something to go off of when the AI is fed something into its knowledge base. So it's like, let me give you some more context here so that you're not just again, pulling from this enormous index of information that you have. Instead, I am giving you examples, I'm giving you other things. So yesterday I was at a conference, actually I spoke at a conference and somebody from Google was speaking there and I went to her session and in the end I raised my hand and I said, so what you're telling us is that we need to be bringing our own data to the party, right? Because she was going through some AI enabled ad stuff that's now available at Google Cloud, and in the end what she was saying is you can bring your own data into Google Cloud and we can crunch it up and segment it and do all kinds of stuff and then use it for targeting, creating segments and improving your ad output.

And so at the end of it, I was like, I feel what you're saying is that you guys are doing all of this with Max and everything that you're doing. You're doing a lot of AI stuff already. You're doing a lot of machine learning and everything you're doing there, but that now we are able to bring our data in from Salesforce or HubSpot or our email analytics or whatever and crunch stuff up and she goes, yes, I really love that idea. I'm going to start using that of you need to bring your own data the party. And so I was like, I'm going to start using it too. I really love that. And so I want you to think about an AI marketing hub as a place where you've brought your own information and data to the AI party. So you've got the AI model and it's tremendously capable, we know that. But I think if you're like me, you are probably getting some pretty frustrating output from it. So you're just like, okay, this is good, not great. And as marketers we

Brett:

Know, and maybe that means it's entertaining but not usable. It was interesting that you created it and it's kind of impressive, but it's like, but I can't use this.

Russ:

I can't really actually use this. And so when you build a hub, whether it's through a custom GPT or through a Claude project, or you could go pay Accenture or Deloitte to come in and build an entire model off over the top of llama for billions of dollars, which is what they're doing, they're coming in and charging lots of money to customize AI for all kinds of use cases for the biggest corporations in the world. But you and I, we can take our small business, our mid-size business and we can open up an off the shelf account over at Chachi PT or with Claude, and we can start a project or a custom GPT and we just add to that project's knowledge base with information that's going to be relevant to the type of marketing that we're doing. So if we start thinking about what kinds of things you might bring to the party, the first three things I recommend because there's just almost no marketing case where we don't want to know who we're trying to sell to and what we are selling. So if nothing else, you want to build an AI playground, I call it an AI marketing hub. So use a project or a custom GPT and then upload customer personas and detailed information about offers. And this is just ugly documents in PDFs that it can read. So if you're thinking

Brett:

Clearly outlined that, hey, this is what this PDF DF is, this is what this slide deck is, whatever.

Russ:

Yep. Yeah. If you were going to unblind fold that marketing consultant we talked about earlier and begin with how do we get more out of this marketing consultant we're paying, the first thing you might tell them is, here's our customer and here's what we're selling, right? Because without that, I don't know how we're doing any marketing about anything. You're absolutely working in the blind. You'll be shocked by how much better your AI performs with just a little bit data points. If you have a good well constructed persona and make sure that you've elaborated on the most important part of a persona in my opinion, which is the pain, the challenges that cut. If you were just going to give me one piece of information about somebody that I needed to sell something to, it would be what's the problem? So make sure that part of that persona is very well fleshed out, but you build a persona, however it is that you build a persona. There's no shortage of trainings out there about building personas, but you just need to get it into a readable format. PDFs are great. You write it in a Google doc, create it in a Google Doc, and then you attach it to a project or a custom GPT and you do the same thing with whatever. Take one of your bestselling products, for example, and do a nice description of that. Maybe pull the product description

Brett:

Out so it even be like the product detail page, but put into pdf DF form or something.

Russ:

Yes. Yeah. And so you say, how do we sell more of that offer this PDF to this customer and the AI will be like, let's talk about that. I got a lot of ideas and you'll be, so what I think a lot of people are doing is they're sitting there thinking, I keep getting this average output from ai, so I really am just going to kind of put this on the side until AI gets better, until chat two, PT five comes out or the next cloud. I mean it's good. It's not great and I want to produce great stuff. We have to be producing great stuff. That's what the best marketers do. We don't build average stuff.

Brett:

And

Russ:

So this is, I think a mistake because we don't need AI to get better. You need to be better at using ai. And so if chat g PT five comes out and it's smarter and faster and stronger and able to leave tall buildings with single bound, it still isn't going to know anything about your business. So you've got to learn this skill, which is basically how you fine tune an AI and you don't need to know all the fancy dancey fine tuning tricks and moving weights and all of the weird things that engineers talk about, but we need to understand is what do marketers need to do to AI to get better output from it? It starts with giving it things like customer personas and offers.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. So I want to dig into some other details here. Maybe get a couple of examples from you too, how you've used these for different clients you work with. So personas and product details or offers. If you want to go next level though or give it more information, what else are we sending? Are we sending things like customer reviews and competitors and things like that? What else are we putting in this marketing hub if we want to go next level?

Russ:

Alright, yeah. And what want you to think about is imagine that anybody that's working on that business, whether it's a client or whether it's your company, is working from an inside of the hub. So now it becomes a game of what else could I give the AI in terms of context and information that would make it stronger and make it more useful to me? And what you find is that it can assist with everything from media buying, data analysis, content generation, product marketing, whatever it is, there's almost no scenario that it won't touch. And so other things that I have bolted in here at different times based on what it is we're working on is you might bolt things like data on there like sales data, inventory reports, website analytics, email reporting, things like that. So you can plug data into its brain and have it understand that first of all, what I like to do is give it a document and I just say simply to it, what do you see there? Because I want to see if it understands,

Brett:

Is it understanding this?

Russ:

Yeah, I'm sort of checking for its understanding. And what you'll find is that it does understand your sales reports, it understands your inventory reports, it understands these things like your website analytics. You can plug things like reviews on products in there, writing samples. If you're trying to create an AI that can more easily write like you, going back to what we talked about with multi-shot prompting, can you give it good writing samples? Here's 10 emails that I wrote already over the last month that are good model when you're writing this promotional campaign, you can put anything in there. If you've got a loyalty program for example that you're working on and you've got details around that, attach it in there and say, Hey, this is our loyalty program. Just so you know, we got a loyalty program, big market analysis, but it does become this sort of creative game, which I love Brett. It's like, what else could I give it?

Brett:

Right? That is how would that change the output and change what it actually creates better,

Russ:

Right? It's such a creative process. And so depending on what it is that you're working on, you just want to think. And if you really think of it this way, if I was working with a human who I'm asking to do X or Y or Z, what would I want them to have access to? Do they need access to my inventory reports to do this work? Do they need access to my website analytics? Because if the answer is yes, they would do a better job with these three different resources, then you ask yourself, how much effort would it be for me to get that into a format where I could bolt it into the brain of the ai? Well

Brett:

Treat it like a marketing treated like your assistant CMO or something. Treat it. I like that frame. What would a marketing employee need? Give that to the AI as well.

Russ:

And the thing is that we may not see that the next few models that come out are all that much more intelligent than the AI that we're playing with now. And we might see that they're become quite a bit more intelligent, but even if we don't, where we are going to see a lot of development in AI is going to be in its multimodality. So multimodal is an important place to be watching can the AI take in and put out, so what can it take in and what can it put out? So can it take in text image, video, audio, data code, and can it put out, so can it take in text and give you back an image? Can it take in an image and give you back a video? Can it take in audio and give you back a video? So that is where we are already obviously seeing right now, chat, GT four oh has vision. It can see things, it can talk to you. That's another modality. And when we think about how we are going to be able to give an AI context around our businesses and our customers and everything, as the modalities change, so will your ability to

Brett:

Put

Russ:

Different things inside of its brain. So if you could literally take, were we live when you were talking about the customer videos that you were

Brett:

Doing? No, I wasn't. No. I can frame that really

Russ:

Quick. Yeah, tell that story because I mean you could upload that whole video in there

Brett:

And you mentioned that Claude can't communicate with audio or video, but Claude is the tool I use most. And so had this project four client, they had five customers give these long interviews on video and ended up each one was like an hour. Now in the old days, we would sometimes pour over those. We'd watch the same hour like five times and try to piece out, pull out little nuggets of hey, this five seconds here, this 10 seconds here, we'd make for a great clip or great customer testimonial to put into a TV ad or something. So what I was able to do though with AI is I took the video, stripped out the audio, uploaded the audio to Riverside, which is a tool we're using now for the podcast. It will transcribe things. So created a free transcript. I uploaded that transcript to Claude and I said, Hey, here's the project, here's the product, here's what it does.

This is what we're trying to do, trying to create a TV commercial. And so find me five or six quotes that speak to benefits, speak to pain, speak to experience, and I need them to be about five to 15 seconds long and it spit 'em out like that. And so then I was like, okay, those are cool, but give me a few more or okay, give me a few more and make them longer or are there any quotes that talk about this? And then as I got to the ones I liked, I was like, okay, give me all of those quotes and put them in a time code spreadsheet where I can see start time, stop time and how long that quote is. And now this was all taken from tech. So Claude was like, Hey, these are going to be estimates, but we'll give you best guess. It was pretty accurate. So dude, this was something that would've taken days and could do it all in. I don't even know how long it took, but it wasn't long. It was 30 minutes. Hour or something like that. Just crazy.

Russ:

What's even crazier though is that you had to strip out all the audio you had to do. You had to actually,

Brett:

I had to do some work.

Russ:

You had to do some work to get it into a format that this tool could accept and that's all going to go away. Eventually Claude and every other model, it will accept all modalities and it'll be able to output all modalities. So in that case, you would've just uploaded the video and

Brett:

Then it probably would've spit out the video for me and then I could say, well, give me the video in this format.

Russ:

That's exactly, that's exactly right. So I think the big thing to think about here is that this whole idea of what data are you bringing to the party? Because if you're just using generic off the shelf AI and you're asking it questions like, Hey, can you make me some interesting things to post on LinkedIn about some topic? It's like, sure. One of the frustrating things actually for me about AI is that it always answers you. It will

Brett:

Always answer you, try again, try harder, dummy. That was a stupid question. Yeah, it doesn't do that.

Russ:

Yeah, it never says, I don't know. And it never, and even though perplexity one of the startup companies that's challenging, Google with ai search perplexity is starting to get a pretty cool interface in terms of trying to ask you more for more context and ask you questions and prompt you and have you select things. And that's what we'll see from all companies. They're going to try to make it so you don't have to be a prompt master, you don't have to really understand how the model works. But for now, if you ask it a question like, Hey, can you create me a LinkedIn editorial calendar? And it has no context about your business, it doesn't know who you're trying to talk to, it doesn't understand your offer, it doesn't understand anything, it will answer you. And then at the end you'll go, I guess I'll use this, and you're going to have a pretty boiled chicken bunch of stuff. Totally. Or you're going to be like, that was a big waste of my time. I'm going to have to go do this myself anyway. But then you go and you plug in all this stuff, you create a hub and the hub, the other cool thing about this hub concept is that it eliminates what I call a cold start problem.

So the cold start is, okay, every time I go to use ai, I have to reprompt give it all this information and have it understand this well, these projects and these custom GPTs have memory of their own and it's contained within that area. So it remembers things and it obviously is able to access things in its knowledge base, but it's also remembering things that are happening in those conversations so that you don't have this cold start problem, you just jump back into your hub and you start back up talking about the LinkedIn editorial or your next email promotion or whatever it is you're doing,

Brett:

Just like you would converse with your CMO or marketing associate or whatever. They've got context now you've been working on stuff together, now you can just ask a question rather than, okay, every time I got to give all this background, it already has it. So that's really cool. Can you give some examples and you practic to be careful on confidentiality and stuff, but examples cool things you've seen people do with these Well-built marketing hubs.

Russ:

So there's three roles that I like to build out and when I'm working with clients on these, I ask them, where do you see the biggest use case for these? And the big three places that I think AI can do better than the average human can is one role is I call it the scribe. So the scribe is like, it's your creative person, it's your creative role within this AI marketing hub. And so we take in, of course, if you were going to hire a writer or somebody that was going to help you with content marketing, what would you want them to have? You might want 'em to have things like editorial guidelines. You might want them to have access to writing samples that are good, maybe they aren't even yours. You go and look at a competitor or you look at some brand you admire and you say, let me pull these last 10 articles or emails or ads or whatever it is, and you say, these are good samples of what we want to be producing.

And you give that to the AI's hub, you give it to the editorial guidelines. I've built a very, very cool prompt that is able to extract the style of a writing out. I post on LinkedIn the other day, I said, and I decided to do this with an author, one of my favorite authors actually John Steinbeck from Wrote Grapes Rat and all that stuff. And I took the book of Mice and Men on PDF put it into Claude and I gave it this prompt and that prompt basically says it is a big long prompt that's like, I want you to look at this and this and this and this. Everything, the cadence, when you look at the styles, are they using idioms and metaphors and dah, dah, dah. So there's like a million things that this prompt is asking it to analyze inside of the Steinbeck piece or whatever kind of content you give, you give it. I also gave it 30. I went and just scraped 30 customer stories off of Salesforce's site and I ran the same prompt. What I'm trying to do is build a mimic, literally extract the style and the tone and everything about that data. And I went and I grabbed a paragraph from a real Steinbeck paragraph from one of his short stories, and then I actually had it write a short story Claude using this prompt that I've used to extract

Brett:

And it read of Mice and Men you gave it that

Russ:

Get rid of Mice and Men and it's also probably got a decent idea of who Steinbeck is. Anyway, but it was really this prop I think that went in there and was like, because it did the same thing when I ran it through Salesforce's stuff. And then I've created a section that's like write like Russ, so I want you to be able to write like me. And it still doesn't get me all the way there. But with the Steinbeck thing, it was crazy. I posted this on LinkedIn and I said, which one's Steinbeck and which one's clawed?

Brett:

And

Russ:

People

Brett:

Did people get it right?

Russ:

Swearing up and down, A, it's B, it's A, it's B. And I was like, no one could agree on which one it was. That's how good of a

Brett:

Mimic

Russ:

It was, right? So that's the scribed functionality. And what you want to think about is what could I give an AI to turn it into a scribe? The second functionality that AI is really good at is what I call the optimizer. So it is somebody who can evaluate assets like landing pages, ads, emails. And for this we use rubrics back in the old digital marketer days when we were building rubrics for people to say, here's what are the 10 elements of a good ad

Or here are the 10 elements of a good opt-in page, or here are the elements of a good email promotion, grade your work on this. We used to do these when I was with digital marketer. We would create, so instead of just intuitively looking at say an ad and saying, well, I see the problem with that ad, fix this. Instead, we would literally extract the knowledge of Molly Pittman, who's such a good ad person and put her knowledge into a rubric where it was like anybody could look at an ad and kind of figure out what's the problem with this ad? Where could I improve this ad? Well, if you feed an ai, a rubric like that, and then you show it a landing page or you show it an ad or you show it an email, it's able to really quickly, it scores it, it would like a professor would, but it's a professor that's got a rubrics working against for a landing page or for, and it's really, really powerful.

And so I call that role to optimizer. And then the last one's the strategist. The strategist is somebody you talk about long-term, bigger picture type marketing stuff and you feed it things like business competitor analysis, market analysis, SWOT analysis, bigger picture idea stuff and give it an idea of, and you can have these crazy long conversations with it about things like strategy. Like hey, I'm thinking of, I think I want to expand my product line in this direction. What do you think about that? What are some risks here? What are some things you can have these kinds of conversations so much context for it to be working for him. So it's pretty wild.

Brett:

That's great. So scribe optimizer and strategist, really, really great. Love that. So we talked a lot about chat, GPT and about Claude, what about Gemini, Google's Gemini? Are you using that at all? What are your thoughts? Any POVs there?

Russ:

Well, so my big point of view there is that Google, and I don't use Gemini very often very much, but Google has instant distribution. They've got AI built into everything. Just like my son, I just bought him, he's going away to college. So I got him one of the new surface laptops with copilot built in. So Microsoft has immediate distribution, Google has immediate distribution. And here's the big thing to think about that's connected to this concept of adding to a knowledge base is that Google already has all your information. So if you're using Google Workspace for example, they already plug, they can plug their AI into your Google drive,

Brett:

Legitimate right into drive

Russ:

Into your calendar, into everything. And that's where we're going with this is that the extension of the knowledge base. So you'll have Gemini, the brain, the off the shelf ai, but it will have access to, and it already kind of does. It's really early days here with that laptop that my son just got. They are not allowing certain functionality in there yet because they're saying that they're still trying to figure out the security and the privacy side of this. But that's where we're going is where you want to extend your knowledge base. We've got all your files, we have access to your Google Drive, we have access to your email, everything. So Google is a major player and while OpenAI feels like the cool kid on the block and Claude sort of feels like the guy from the village that's super like artsy and cool, that's fair. It's really going to be Microsoft and Google that. I think we'll pull ahead eventually because just

Brett:

Because of distribution and access to all the data. Yeah, it's a really good point. And Apple.

Russ:

So Apple, while they don't have a model of their own, they're just renting right now, they could easily go build one if they wanted to. And then you have Facebook, which is super interesting because they've decided to go open source and allow people to build on top of llama and it's as good as CHATT four. That's what I've heard.

Brett:

Lama's great and not played with it, but I've heard it's

Russ:

Awesome. Yeah, I mean it's amazing. It doesn't have a lot of the capabilities of this and that, but you can build on top of it and build anything you want. That's what's crazy about what Facebook decided to do is open source. Super

Brett:

Cool man. Early days. We are early innings, just like when we were first starting to use the internet, that's where we're right now. So Russ, it's people listen to this and they're like, all right, I got tap more into Russell's brain and I need to look at some of these resources. Where can people connect with you? I think you've got a mini course that people can kind of take. Where should they go

Russ:

From here? Yeah, well if you want to get your feet, well ai, you go to join the click.ai/jumpstart. That's a 60 minute course where we've got eight videos and six exercises and by the end of it you'll be like, I feel pretty good about this. So you can go to join the click.ai/jumpstart and take that little mini course and it moves fast and you'll just open up a free version of chat BT and do the exercises. And you'll feel a lot, you'll feel like, okay, I'm ready. Right? I feel like I understand this now, but I love LinkedIn. I talk to you on LinkedIn when I hit you up. So if you see me over on LinkedIn, I love connecting with people over there. So it's just Russ Henneberry over on LinkedIn. But yeah, check me out@jointheclick.ai and I'd love to, that's

Brett:

Awesome, man.

Russ:

Geek out on this stuff.

Brett:

Let's geek out a little bit. Join the click.ai I'm fired up to. I just want to take my game to the next level with ai. And so Russ is going to be my guide, so check out his resources, check him out on LinkedIn. I'll of course link to everything in the show notes, but you can find it as well just by looking. And so Russ Hena Barry, ladies and gentlemen, Russ, thanks so much, man. Ton of fun.

Russ:

It's a lot of fun. Thanks Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. I'd love to hear from you, what would you like to hear more of on the show? And as always, would've loved that review on iTunes if you've not done. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

In this episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, Brett Curry is joined by Michael Epstein to discuss the resurgence of direct mail as a powerful tool for eCommerce growth

They explore how direct mail is driving retention, building customer loyalty, and even serving as a successful acquisition strategy when used effectively. Throughout, Michael debunks common misconceptions about direct mail—highlighting its effectiveness when paired with data-driven targeting and other marketing channels.

Here are some key takeaways from the episode:

• Direct mail for retention & loyalty: Learn how direct mail can enhance customer retention and build long-term loyalty, especially in today’s crowded digital landscape.
• Direct mail as an acquisition channel: Often overlooked, direct mail can be a highly effective cold acquisition strategy—if you target the right audience.
• The power of data in direct mail campaigns: By leveraging aggregated data, you can identify high-propensity buyers, refine your targeting, and even create lookalike audiences to improve relevance and engagement.
• Standing out in the inbox: Direct mail not only adds legitimacy to your brand but also captures attention in ways digital ads often can't.

If you're looking to scale your brand—whether through retention, loyalty, or acquisition—this episode provides actionable insights into how direct mail could be the missing piece in your marketing puzzle.

---

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction 

(07:10) Direct Mail Misconceptions

(10:41) Retention and Loyalty with Direct Mail

(16:59) Direct Acquisition with Direct Mail

(24:53) Data Targeting for Direct Mail

(33:17) The Importance of Clearly Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile

(41:11) PostPilot's Modernized Catalog

(46:16) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Michael Epstein (LinkedIn)
• Post Pilot 
• Drew Sanocki (LinkedIn)
• Hexclad‍
• The Normal Brand

---

Connect with Brett:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

---

Transcript:

Michael:

You really need to start thinking about it as a medium mix and how those channels can work together to grow your overall revenue

Brett:

Well. Hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we're talking about growth through direct mail. Now, I love this topic. I'm an ad nerd from long ago, I did TV and radio back in the day. I helped companies with direct mail. I love stuff that other brands are not doing. And so we're going to talk today about how to grow using direct mail for increased retention and loyalty, also acquisition, and some new things that the smartest, best, fastest growing brands are doing. And so my guest today is the co-CEO of Post Pilot. You're going to learn more about them as we go, but Michael Epstein is my guest. Michael, how's it going, man?

Michael:

Good. Brett, always great to hang with you.

Brett:

I love, absolutely, dude. We got to do OMG hosting an event at the Google, YouTube LA offices. Recently post pilot was a sponsor. Thank you for that. But my favorite part of that was that I got to see you and we got to hang out there at the Spruce Go hanger. Google's amazing offices for just a little bit. And so yeah, give us kind of the quick rundown for those that don't know who are you and what is post pilot.

Michael:

Sure. So yeah, that office made me a little, just a little bit jealous.

Brett:

It's insane. Holy

Michael:

Cow. Anyway, yeah, so Michael Epstein, one of the founders of Post pilot along with Drew Sunki and been e-commerce operators for 25 years at this point, mostly running eight, nine figure brand turnarounds. Direct mail was one of the tools in our tool belt that we used to get quick wins from a lot of these brands who had accumulated huge customer lists over time, but most of them had been unengaged or disengaged over time. So we wanted to find quick wins and direct mail was one of those, but it was really clunky and the stereotypical experience of spreadsheets and finding a printer and batch and blasting and trying to figure out ROI. And we just said somebody needs to build Klaviyo for direct mail, so

Brett:

Klaviyo for direct mail. Love

Michael:

That. Yeah, that's what we did with post pilot, which is a direct mail platform natively plugs in with Shopify Klaviyo on your e-com stack and just makes it really easy to launch and track really targeted direct mail campaigns. And we're going to talk about how we've evolved, I think, into becoming more like meta for direct mail too on the acquisition side, which is really exciting.

Brett:

And it's so cool. Like I said, I've been a fan of direct mail for a long time, but why do you think, Michael, before we dive into retention and loyalty and acquisition using direct mail, why is direct mail having a day right now? Because I believe that?

Michael:

Yeah, it's a great question. I think one, it's always worked as a channel. I think the main reasons that it's been around for a hundred big brands have done it for a long time, continue to do it. I think the big reason that a lot of brands hadn't embraced it was because it was so hard. I mean, knowing these are brands that grew up launching on Facebook and are digitally native marketers, and to think about designing a print piece and figuring out how to mail that thing and figuring out

Brett:

How to, where do I begin?

Michael:

Yeah, it it's hard. And we wanted to make it really easy. And that's one thing that I think has gotten adoption way up. And then the other thing is digital direct mail has become more attractive relative to digital over time. I think starting with the iOS update of a few years ago where it really woke brands up to realize that one, they needed a more diversified marketing mix. If they put too many eggs in one basket, they were putting their business at risk. And then you just saw this volatility that occurred for a long period after that. It was like, we need to build a more resilient business. We need to start opening our eyes to other channels. And also it became more attractive on the cost side. So digital ads get as competition drives up costs over time. It used to be, obviously the direct mail looks super expensive relative to a 5 cent Facebook click, and so why would we do that? But now as costs continue to rise, direct mail and postage essentially stays relatively fixed, and so it just becomes a more attractive channel over time. Now it tends to cost less than the cost click. So I think those are the key factors that are driving the engagement.

Brett:

Yeah, totally agree. It's one of those things where the cost of postage mostly stays like this. I guess I don't really know who follows the cost of postage other than you guys probably, but it stayed relatively consistent, whereas the cost of digital ads has gone up. Now, I do want to say full disclosure, I'm an investor in post pilot, but I do want to underscore I'm an investor because I'm a fan, not I'm a fan because I'm an investor. So I invested because I'm like, yes, we need this. Brands need this, our clients need this. I'm going to invest in the company, but want to get that out in the open. And so I think one of the other reasons, Michael, why direct mails having a day right now is because I remember a ton back in the nineties and the early two thousands back when some of our listeners were just kids, and maybe you were a kid, Michael, I don't even know, but you open the mailbox and it is just stuffed full of postcards and coupon mailers and all kinds of other crap that you don't want.

And so the mailbox was just absolutely cluttered. Now I go to the mailbox and I've got two things or three things. There are a lot of days when there's not much in the mailbox, and so you mail something, it's going to stand out, people are going to see it, and it's also novel. I remember the first time I got a postcard from one of my favorite D two C brands and I was like, what is this a cool brand online is mailing me some paper? This is crazy. And so I think that's all part of it, right? We've got the ability to grab someone's attention, and I know we'll underscore this kind as we get into retention stuff, but there's really no way to reach all of your customers, right? We're big believers in email and SMS, you mentioned you're the klaviyo of direct mail.

We have an email and SMS department at OMG. We love it. It's very successful. But what are great open rates on emails? 30%, maybe 40%. That means 60 to 70% of your top customers aren't opening your emails. So this is a way to get in front of more of your customers and also to reach new customers as well. So really excited about this. What are some of the misconceptions, Michael, and we may have already addressed some of them, but what are some of the misconceptions about direct mail for D two C and retail brands that you would like to bust?

Michael:

Yeah, good question. I think one that it's hard. So again, the typical experience has been hard, spreadsheets, printers, all that stuff. We've made it really easy. We could launch and we've launched people within 24 hours who come to us cold and we handle everything for them, strategy, set up, creative, everything. So one, we make it really easy and two, that you need to always deconflict your channels, meaning I only want to send to people who haven't engaged with email in like six months. And that is something that we actually just published a bit of a study on this where we ran a bunch of analysis. We have tons of data from tons of brands where we looked at brands who were sending to their existing email subscribers and also sending direct mail, and we saw a three x incremental lift on

Those people who were getting booked. Now you can be more conservative and we make it easy to filter out people who are actively engaged with email. So people who have opened or clicked an email a few times in the last 30 days, maybe you want to not send to them and that's fine and make it really easy to do it. But I think the misconception is that you always have to be conflicting every, and that goes for retention and even acquisition. And I think what the big brands have really figured out, the ones who are still growing and still at scale, and this, I think better than just about anyone too because you talk about display ads and you manage a ton of different channels and they all work cohesively and together, and that halo effect, you get totally multiple touch points, lists, all those channels versus trying to say, I want to be super focused on, focused on only incremental ROAS from my YouTube and then only incremental from my Facebook, and then only incremental from my SMS, and you're putting a cap or ceiling on your growth. If you really start to think about that, you really need to start thinking about it as a medium mix and how those channels can work together to grow your overall revenue.

Brett:

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think it's one of those things where there's this old adage of you reach a customer one time, they probably won't remember it, right? You reach them two times, now they're beginning to pay attention and maybe see you reach them three or more times. Now you feel like you're everywhere, especially if that's in multiple different mediums. So I see a meta ad and then maybe I search and I see a Google ad, and now I get something in the mail, holy cow, you are everywhere. And now that message you're trying to get me to remember, I'm beginning to see it now and maybe I'm ready to take action. So I love that the combo of email and postcard, three x incremental lift for those that saw both, that is not surprising to me. And I think that kind of underscores, Hey, this is a simple thing to add to your mix. And so let's talk. I want to get into acquisition because I think there's some really exciting stuff there. And I know that's something that 99.9, or maybe that's an exaggeration, but 99% of people listening to this podcast are not doing. But let's talk about first postcard marketing, direct mail marketing as a retention strategy or as a loyalty strategy. What are some of the top strategies you guys incorporate for better retention and better repeat sales?

Michael:

Yeah, great question. There's a lot of low hanging fruit there, and you mentioned it earlier. If you look at your email, obviously it's a great tool. We'd never say don't send email, but if you look at your open rates and engagement, you're only reaching a fraction of those people, and that's your best audience. And those are people that are engaged in a blog from your brand. And so the easy wins are starting to layer on direct mail campaigns, and you can set them up as automations and flows just like you would with Klaviyo or an email flow where after a certain amount of time they haven't engaged with your email yet, it's been 90 days, they haven't taken the action that you want them to take. Send them a postcard, trigger a postcard to go out to that person. And again, you'll see incremental lift from hitting that audience who has not engaged with your other channels in your digital channels, in your attempts to reengage them.

You'll see incremental lift by sending them a card, easy wins, and around big tent pole events, black Friday, mother's Day, Valentine's Day, whatever it is, you can also start to focus on reactivation and go back. You'd be shocked at how far back you can go with a lot of these audiences and profitably reactivate them. People that haven't engaged with your email or other channels in years, three, four years, in a lot of cases, you send 'em a card and it just wakes them up and you get a profitable return, and it tends to be much more profitable than cold acquisition when you can reactivate some of these long, long defective customers. So those are some of the easy wins. Win backs, churn, reactivation, reactivation of long defective customers. You can send them as one-off sort of tentpole campaigns, or you could set them as triggered automations. And you're always going to find easy wins. I'd say almost a hundred percent of the time, we can find different pockets and different cohorts that are going to respond really well and it's going to deliver incremental revenue, and then you just set it and forget it. You just leave them on autopilot. It's just going to keep cranking for you like an email sequence does.

Brett:

Yeah, and if you look at this as a compliment or like a supercharger for your email and SMS programs, I think that's a really good way to look at it where, hey, where do we make the most money through email and SMS marketing? Well, it's by designing some really great flows. So when we come in and work with the client, this we do first, we look at welcome flows, we at card abandon in flows, we look at post-purchase flows and a series of others. But yeah, all you have to do is make one of those steps, and it's usually not step one or step two, maybe it's step five, step, whatever, throw postcards in there, right? If they have not taken action on any of the other touch points, email or SMS, put postcards in there, it's low cost. And again, it's going to be one of those differences may create a little bit of an aha moment for your customer and get them to respond.

And then to your point then, what are we doing? We're doing back to school sales. We're doing Mother's Day and Father's Day sales, we're doing labor day sales, we're doing of course, cyber week sales, things like that for your big ones, corporate postcard marketing to your best buyers or to your VIP list or to a win back list. And so let's talk about this a little bit, Michael, because I'm sure the main question people have is like, Hey, what kind of results can we expect? And I know that that's, as marketers, that's so tough, right? It's like it all depends on so many factors, but what kind of results are you seeing here in a few of the different scenarios? And then what does it cost? What's our cost per piece for doing stuff like this?

Michael:

Sure. So typically the range when brands are starting to send on retention campaigns, the range that we set is sort of a baseline, tends to be in the five to 10 x row. It's significant, but what we also tell brands is goal, and again, I'm sure you know this with Facebook and Meta and other channels too, the goal isn't necessarily to maximize your roas. The goal is to maximize your contribution, your overall

Brett:

Contribution.

Michael:

And so the key is learn. You can test into all these different segments and cohorts and then learn which ones are profitable and keep expanding your audience such that you can maximize the amount of revenue you're generating from these customers at a profitable return. So great, we launched 180 day win back to repeat customers and it got us an eight x roas. Let's go to a year, let's go to two years. We're still getting three X at a year or three x at two years. Fantastic. It's still profitable for us. It's incremental. We should be doing that all day long. And that's how you really start growing as a business. You're not maximizing to roas. You're maximizing the total profit dollars coming into the business. So that's typically a range that brands see starting out, and then it's like how do we expand?

Brett:

That's great. That's great. Yeah, and I love the way you positioned it really. It's more contribution margin dollars. That's what we take to the bank. You're not taking RU to the bank, but we do want to measure those things. Almost always these activities are incremental, right? Because you're not sending these to people that have just responded to a direct mail or just responded to email or SMS or something. So this is new. These are winbacks. So it is incremental, which is really powerful. Then what about in terms of costs? I'm not talking about all in costs and stuff. I know there's lots of factors and depending on what you're printing on and things like that, but give us a ballpark. What are these costs per piece to send out?

Michael:

Yeah, it's real simple. 55 cents for a four by six, that's like a fully loaded cost. So card goes out 55 cents, that's really it. And

Brett:

That's printing, that's postage, that's everything.

Michael:

Yeah. The only thing it doesn't include is if we're targeting cold audiences where there's just a charge to pull that data to target a cold audience, but for those existing customers, 55 cents, there's no minimum. So as many as get sent out is what you get charged.

Brett:

Super simple, super easy. Love it. Let's transition to prospecting or to direct mail for acquisitions. And I know there's a couple things that play here. One is who are we mailing to? And I would argue that the who is more important than the what in most cases, but who are we mailing to? What are we sending set up direct mail for acquisition for us?

Michael:

Yeah, sure. So there's a couple ways that we think about acquisition. Went direct mail, there's warm acquisition, which is targeting people who have engaged with your brand in some way and not converted, think more like retargeting. And then there's cold acquisition, which is pure prospect. And so on the warm acquisition side, we have the ability to match email addresses to a postal address essentially in real time. And so say somebody opts into your email, but they go through your full welcome sequence and they still haven't converted by the end of the welcome sequence, we know the chance of that customer or that prospect converting starts to decline rapidly over time. We've got to get that person to convert or you're unlikely to ever see them again. So similar to a win back campaign emails tried to get them to convert through that welcome sequence, haven't converted, match that person to a postal address, retarget them with a card, and we see a strong incremental lift from doing that.

If we go a little one step colder, it's site visitor retargeting, which we call site match, and that's where people are browsing your website anonymously. They haven't opted into your email list or bought, and we can actually identify a portion of those people and match that to a postal address and then retarget them with a card as well. And with a lot of our new tech, we're looking at factors not only about how they engage with your site, which pages are browsing, how long they spend, other factors like that, but we actually know a lot of things about that individual and we can say, oh, this person also looks a lot like your ICP. We definitely want to target them and get a card in front of them. This person doesn't look anything like your ICP. Maybe we actually don't send them anything at all. The idea is to maximize return. We always think about not maximizing the number of cards we send. It's maximizing the return on those cards and having a level of confidence that the people we're sending to are the ones that are likely to convert. And that way you can scale more. That's

Brett:

Really great. So you can see, hey, these are site visitors and we can match a certain percentage of those, so let's do that. But then let's also look at some other lists and some other data that you have access to show us is this an ideal client, is it not? And we'll just mail it to those that look to be ideal. Talk us through how many site visitors, obviously we're just getting started online, this is not the thing we're going to launch, but at what point does this method work? Do we need 10,000 visitors a month, a hundred thousand visitors a month where we can actually get a meaningful number that we can mail to?

Michael:

Yeah, I think 10,000 visitors a month is probably a minimum baseline for where you want to be. And again, there's not a minimum. It's more about having enough volume that you can get statistically relevant results and results that move the needle for your business. If you're really small and these segments or these audiences are just going to have very few people in them, it's not the right time for you. We're all busy as entrepreneurs and business owners and marketing managers. We should focus our time and effort on the things that are going to move the needle for the business. So you want to have at least some level of scale that that's going to work for you.

Brett:

Even if it's a low cost, low dollar cost, it could be a high opportunity cost. And so where you putting your attention, where you're spending your time makes a ton of sense. Now, I know we can go beyond that, but does it often make sense to start there to nail offer and language and what the direct mail piece looks like? Is this, you advise people begin before they go to different audiences?

Michael:

Yeah, typically, yes. And it's also to just get a baseline of performance. When you're talking to net new customers, the expectation is it will perform better when you're targeting to a bit warmer of an audience than pure cold prospects. So we think about it historically, a lot of direct mail has been top down, let's go super broad and super big, super cold to start with a big budget and then start to work. Then we get into customers. We actually think more bottom up. So start with the low hanging fruit, start with the bigger wins, totally prove it out at each level of the funnel. And once you've gotten some validation that okay, warmer acquisition is delivering a consistently good return, now we can start to look at cold acquisition and we have some really cool tech and tools too enable brands to do that too.

Brett:

That's great. So we want to talk about that a little bit more. Kind of broadening that cold acquisition there is kind of the who and the what, so to speak. When you're targeting site, what are you sending them? Is it postcard? Is it a trifold or a bifold? Is it something else? What are you, and I know it depends, but what are you sending to those site?

Michael:

Yeah, typically for warmer audiences you can get away with a postcard. So lower cost and what they at least have some familiarity with your brand. So what they really need is a nudge and some reinforcement to take that action that you're trying to get them to take. Whereas the colder you get, the more you typically need more space to be able to tell that brand story, educate people about your assortment, about your value props about your brand. So for those that are watching this online, here's an example, a trifold that I'll hold up so you can sort of see how big it is. This is what we call our card log and the really nice next

Brett:

Cloud. There you go. What an awesome brand. Yeah. So now that, okay, so mailer's super impressive. I'm seeing examples. I've got, was that a celebrity chef? I actually couldn't tell. It was a little bit blurry, but you got a chef there. You price some cooking tips, things like that. Who are they mailing that to generally?

Michael:

Yeah, so that's typically going to some of these colder audiences. So when we talk about acquisition where you want to show larger assortment, you really want to educate people on what makes hex clad so special and unique. You want to pull in the social proof elements, all that stuff that you would want to tell about your brand. You can fit into a format like that. And you can also use this for some of those long-term reactivation campaigns that we talked about earlier where a lot has changed about your business. So think brands with a larger assortment, clothing brands in particular are a great example of that. You've launched an entirely new collection, you've got a whole new seasonal collection that you want to show off. Larger formats give you the ability to show all of that assortment of product. And just like our postcards, our catalogs have the advantage of having no minimum and no turnaround time, like traditional catalogs, we can trigger these just like a postcard.

Brett:

Amazing, amazing. So let's talk then a little bit about the who for going to colder audiences because I think this is the part that's likely going to blow some people's minds. There was a time when we were doing direct mail back in the day that most people were just looking at, okay, I'm choosing zip codes based on income, household income based on where they are. And that's about it. And then you could begin to layer on things like Equifax data and stuff like that, but talk about all the ways you can build audiences for direct mail now.

Michael:

So this is really exciting. We've been working on this for a long time over a year and we've spent millions of dollars investing in building out what we believe is the largest and most powerful data set that you could build for direct mail. And we've built our own AI and through our in-house data science team that we think allows you to leverage that data in ways that provide much better targeting than what's ever really been again available in direct mail. It works historically, it's worked a lot like you described. We're going to find, we're going to either drop it to a zip code or we're going to find a list broker and that list broker is going to give us an audience and we're going to send to that audience and we're going to wait a while and then we're going to try and put some spreadsheets together to match who from that audience ended up buying.

But it's relying on these individual list brokers to sort of give you this audience. And what we've done is we've aggregated a tremendous amount of this data from a wide variety of sources into our own data warehouse. And what we found is that when you can look across multiple data sets this way, it exponentially improves the efficacy and relevancy of that audience. And think about it more like meta where they have so many signals about all these individuals, what they're browsing, what other sites they're visiting, what everything that they know demographically and psychographically about that individual. We've been able to compile all of that. Plus we work with a ton of brands and we have a ton of insights and learnings that we can aggregate and use to train our AI such that again, we get these proprietary signals that we can use to really dial in these models.

And we've seen the performance and we've benchmarked our performance against all the sort of traditional list brokers or people that brands are typically acquiring these direct mail lists from. And we've seen in some cases differences of two, 300% in performance. I won't say it's for every brand and it's going to work for every brand. What I will say is if you're going to use direct mail and test direct mail as a new hold prospecting acquisition channel, the best chance of success you'll have, I have no doubt we'll be using our technology. So beyond what we've seen has been possible and the results that would typically be expected, we think we're going to give you a really good shot. And this is, again, think of it like Meadow. We're building lookalike audiences by using your first party data, looking for other people, looking at thousands of attributes across hundreds of millions of US consumers and finding people that look like your best customer, not just with superficial demographic data.

Yeah, this is a 45-year-old male makes this amount of money and lives in this state. It's like, and they shop at Nordstrom and they drink Bud Light and they drive a Chevy and they have two kids under the age of five, all these different things about them. And that's going to give you again, the best chance of success using direct mail as a cold acquisition channel. We did one case study recently with a baby brand targeting expectant mothers in their third trimester. We have a ton of data, very specific, we can get super dialed and that's what to your point, it's the who more than the how, just like

Brett:

Other acquisition. Yeah, I'd rather speak to an ideal customer like a derometer third trimester with a pretty good offer that's going to do better than a great offer to someone who's not pregnant and we've got a baby product, so you got to talk to the right person. So yeah, I think you're about to break down other insights from that baby mailer.

Michael:

Yeah, that's just a really good example. And that got in some cases like a Forex on cold prospecting, again

Brett:

On cold prospecting.

Michael:

It's crazy not. We want to be on typical really transparent and set expectations accurately. Most brands who are testing out cold prospecting are very comfortable in that one to two xas range,

Brett:

But that mimics, that mimics meta. That's what you see on YouTube. So that one to two xas for cold traffic, that's great.

Michael:

Exactly. And the other thing that we've been able to build that makes it again more like a digitally native channel is because we have, we're connected, we're integrated with Shopify and we're able to track these transactions in real time and put 'em in a dashboard for you. We're also able to feed that data directly back into your acquisition model. Think of it like the learning phase of meta at first. You launch a campaign, you wait while meta starts accumulating data and signals from that campaign and feeding that information back into the model to optimize that model. We actually are doing the same thing. So it's not even like you just launch once. You wait, you see what happens and then you start the process over again. It's we're actually feeding that data right back into the models and optimizing those models over time just like you would see in a medic.

Brett:

Super interesting. Let's use a couple of examples. We talked about the baby example. I'll give you a couple more. You can choose whatever makes the most sense. So say I'm selling men's joggers, that's a product that we could talk about or hex clad cookware, if that's easier. What are you recommending? So we've started with our site abandoner list and that's who we're kind of targeting first. We prove out some concepts. Now what audience are we going to next?

Michael:

Yeah, so these are cold prospects, again, lookalike audiences of your best customers. Some of the attributes that for a brand that we recommend having to give you sort of the best chance of success. One that you have an A OV of, ideally around a hundred dollars or more. And think of it like medi, it's very tough to crack cold prospecting at a 25 AOB on meta. It doesn't matter how it

Brett:

Totally, yeah, just the baseline costs of media and it's actually using direct mail is a perfect way to look at it. There's hard costs there to buy the paper and pay the postman and all that stuff. There's hard costs on meta as well. Yeah, getting cult prospecting below $25 CPA. Yeah, almost unheard of.

Michael:

Yeah. So that's a great data point. Having some product market fit that you've been able to demonstrate some scale with. So the fact that you've been able to scale meta to become an eight figure business and have found that product offer,

Brett:

It means cold audiences convert, right? It means you've got an offer, a product that people who've just heard about you actually want.

Michael:

That's exactly it. And so demonstrating that, don't necessarily recommend brands try their first cold prospecting campaign ever on direct mail. Use meta to get some of that validation,

Brett:

Absolutely

Michael:

That traction. And then use this to diversify your mix and find higher return on those incremental, those marginal dollars that you're investing into acquisition. Then you might once you start capping out in meta. So those are some of the characteristics that we suggest. Great fits are brands that have strong LTVs. So again, you can invest at a one X or a one and a half X and know that you're going to, you can keep feeding that, keep scaling that profitably because you know that there's LTV coming in behind it. Brands that are in apparel, jewelry, what are some other baby products, crush home accessories. Those kinds of brands that have decent LT v, decent LTV and have reached some level of scale are great candidates to be testing.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. So let's compare and contrast for a minute. So campaigns that you've seen that have been unsuccessful versus direct mail campaigns that have been successful and ideally exceeded expectations, what's the difference? Is it the mailer, is it the offer, is it other factors? What are you seeing?

Michael:

Yeah, great question. I think one of the biggest things is can we really accurately describe that audience? Can we pinpoint who that customer is and is that a distinct customer? So without sort of throwing anybody under the bus, we've seen some brands who have a very niche product but doesn't apply to, there's no clearly defined customer for that brand. So I can think of there's an auto accessories brand and it's like, who's that? Without going too detailed on what exactly it is, it's just something that you couldn't really describe who that customer is clearly. And that's going to impact our ability to really narrow in that model such that we have a clearly defined target audience. It goes back to what you were saying earlier about the who is so important. If your product sort of applies to everybody, you have no clearly defined ICP, it's going to be very tough to make the numbers pencil out on direct mail.

Whereas we go back to the expectant mother example that is a very clearly defined audience. We went to expectant mothers in their third trimester of pregnancy because we determined that that was the ideal point when they were thinking about buying these clothes for a newborn. You went too early, it wasn't on their mind yet. You went too late, maybe you missed the window. That's something that we can really clearly define and that tends to have a ton of success. So we'll also tell you one, we've seen this a lot, we'll sort of tell you if we think just based on experience, we think it's likely to be a fit or not be a fit, we would rather not send this campaign if we don't have conviction. Believe me, we hammer this with our team all the time. We don't want to send stuff that we don't have some level of confidence is going to work. We don't want pissed off brands, period. And then we'll also run models and see what the models tell us. And does this demonstrate a good distinct audience that we feel is reasonable to go after? Or is it telling us like, look, there's no strong signals in this

Brett:

Audience. That's great. That's so good. Let's use another example. So we've worked with some brands. I can picture some stories or some conversations in my head where asking, I got choked up, Michael, I'm going to get a drink of water. I talk about this stuff. I get so excited. Take two on that. Here we go. Sorry Nick, sorry gang. I'm going to make you work a little bit here for your editing. Editing. So I am thinking of conversations that I've had Michael with customers where we talk about, hey, who's your ideal shopper? And they say things like, well, sometimes they're teachers or sometimes they're professionals and they make 75 to $250,000 and they leave in these areas. And I'm like, that's not an audience. That's that'ss really, really vague, but you can drill in a little bit more. And so one thing we've seen, and I do wonder if you're using this where, hey, I'm selling high-end clothes and I know that my buyers also buy from the normal brand or Lululemon or some of these other brands, they're shoppers of those brands.

We've gotten a couple of mail pieces from vori, which is kind of like the California Lululemon or whatever. I don't know if you guys did it or not. The great pieces, very tempted to buy did not, but very tempted. I wonder if that's kind of what they're doing. So I don't know that a visited re's website or anything, but maybe it's because we buy from other clothing brands that we're getting sent this. We found that type of audience targeting to work well on YouTube as an example where it's like our buyer's kind of mushy, it could be all these various things, but one way we kind of zeroed in on is the people that buy from us also buy from these other D two C brands or these other challenger brands or whatever. Can you guys access that data at all? Are you using that as you're building lists?

Michael:

Yeah, great question. And this is something that comes up and it's something I want to be really particular about, and that is that we never share customer data with any other customer. You would never be able to say, I want to target my competitors' brands or I want my competitor's customers, or I want to, again, I'm North Face, I want to go after Patagonia's customers give me that audience. We never ever would or will

Do that. There are some data sources not leveraging that sort of first party data that we have aggregated that says this person shops at Target a lot. This person shops at Nordstrom a lot. This person shops for cosmetics, luxury cosmetics at Nordstrom or at Target. This is somebody that buys this brand from Walmart. And those are signals that are part of the thousands of attributes that we have on US consumers. So we absolutely use those signals to identify who the high propensity buyers are in specific categories of products, luxury, women's apparel, makeup, jewelry, whatever that might be. But what we do not do, if you ask us to do it, we'll tell you the same thing. You cannot target another brand's customers. We don't share that information. And in no way does that information get disseminated across brands and across audience.

Brett:

Yeah, and I mean that's good business. That's smart. You got to do it legally and ethically and all those things, which I think totally makes sense. But what you describe the aggregated data, the not first party data, that's what you need and that's what we do and we're targeting on YouTube. It's like we're saying, Hey, we want to target people that buy from Warby Parker that buy from Bonobos or that buy from normal brand or Fary or something like that. And Google, Google's not giving you the actual customers, but they're using some anonymized data to find, hey, these are people that are like those that browse those sites, shop those sites, and you've got access to some of that same data, which is super powerful. And that I think is just another way to narrow down that cold audience that's more likely to purchase from you.

Michael:

Yeah, absolutely. And our AI is trained on a lot of this aggregated data and we do have a lot of signals from a lot of

Brett:

Brands

Michael:

That allow us to improve the AI training, but that's different than being able to say, again, these are a ton of proprietary signals. We a ton of brands, but it's again, not the ability to target another brand's customers. And to your point, yeah, I mean that's what Meta does today. Even more so, right? We all have the meta pixel installed on our site. It is telling brand A that you just visited brand B website. Yeah, you're producting in market for that product right now, totally serving you the ad. So it's something that I think as marketers we might not think a lot about today, but that's what's happening across all of your, it's happening marketing channels right now. You're visiting this site you just bought from that site you just bought three times from this brand that makes you a great prospect and that's the ad that you're for brand C or D, and so that's why you're getting served that ad. So I think we've become also accustomed to that, but without thinking a lot about it, we're applying a lot of the same types of learnings with our models.

Brett:

Yep. Totally makes sense. Well, Michael, we're about out of time. Anything else you're really excited about, else you guys are testing that you want to let folks know about before we talk about how they can get in touch with you?

Michael:

Sure. And it's related to acquisition. We've actually rolled out a modernized version of the catalog and I'll hold one of those up.

Brett:

This is exciting to me again, because they're so novel. Yeah, that's so awesome. So man, if I get a catalog in the mail, I almost never get them. I'm pretty likely to browse through it. And if you compare that to time on site or something, it's pretty significant, right? I get a catalog, I'm probably going to open it up and look. So can you show that one more time for the folks watching the video? What brand is that that we're looking at?

Michael:

This is one that we designed that's actually a combination of a few brands around a specific theme. So you can see

Brett:

Nice,

Michael:

It's really cool how it's been

Brett:

Me, so kind of sharing the cost across outdoor retailers basically.

Michael:

But what we love here is that you can do so much with 16 pages or more

Brett:

Where

Michael:

You can weave in content that makes this an engaging piece that you actually want to read and hold onto and great merchandising. So being able to put that story together, tell again your brand story, weave in content about we have brand that did makeup tips and showing all the different shades and things like that. You have so much space to be able to do that, that it's great. I think the problem with catalogs historically has been it's six months of lead time. When you talk about securing paper, finding a printer, that printer typically has a three or four month waiting period just to slot in because of the way this production process works. Again, you have to source audiences, you have to run hundreds of thousands at a time. That's just how the industry is always. And so we've introduced a way to do it much more efficiently.

Minimums are much smaller, starting at more like 50 K versus hundreds of thousands. Lead time is more like four weeks versus three to four months. We can build these audiences using our same technology. And so for brands that are looking to potentially move up to more of a catalog format, we've made it really much more accessible, much easier. We designed the whole thing again in days like other things versus you having to dedicate your creative team for months to put one of these together. And the interesting thing is they actually don't cost much more than a postcard.

Brett:

Wow.

Michael:

The reason is, even though it's a lot bigger, the reason is just the process for running these types of products at larger scale,

Brett:

Scale

Michael:

And at one time is just a lower cost way of producing them. So it actually allows you to send something like this in the 60, 60 and change cent range. It's crazy. Which is crazy. And we've optimized the format, we've optimized all these things to get the cost down as much as possible, but it allows you to do it. There's just a little bit more of a commitment and timeline than there is with just sending a postcard where you could send one and you could send it

Brett:

Super interesting. Again, I think there's a progression here, right? Use postcard mailers for retention, for loyalty, for win back, then use it for site. So those are browsers type do not purchase, then start testing some of these cold audiences maybe with a trifold or something. And then you go catalogs. But Michael, I don't know if it's at your house, but I know for me, I'm on my computer, my phone eight, ten, twelve hours a day, right? Working sometimes when I'm home, I don't want to look at anything digital. And if I get something cool in the mail, it's kind of fun to look through it, right? Or I can even think of times, I've still got two young kids, I've got eight total, but we get Amazon toy catalogs around the holidays or whatever, and my 7-year-old Benjamin, he'll open that thing up, he'll circle things, he'll be like, Hey dad, I'm, I made a wishlist, which usually ends up being a hundred items or something, but it's just fun. You engage with these printed pieces in ways that we don't engage with stuff online. And so I think it's a really interesting add to your marketing mix.

Michael:

Yeah, you're exactly right. And there's studies about this, but you can just sense it, sense it. Having that physical piece from a brand one is much more memorable than a digital ad or an email that's sort of forgotten almost instantaneously. And it also makes your brand feel a lot bigger and more trustworthy,

Brett:

Legitimate legitimize

Michael:

It. We hear that all the time. And there's against studies on this stuff that I won't quote, but basically think about it for yourself. You get a piece of printed mail, you get a catalog from a brand, and it just adds, as you said, a level of legitimacy and trust and it's this capturing of attention, and that's what we're all competing for right now.

Brett:

So, cool man. So cool. Well, Michael, this has been fantastic. I love this topic. I love creative marketing tactics and strategies that other brands are not using, and my guess is that your competitors are not using direct mail, so you should absolutely consider it for those who want to know more, those who want to talk to you, those who want to explore post pilot a little bit, what's the best way for them to take next steps?

Michael:

Yeah, just hit me up directly, Michael, at post piot.com, copilot.com website, find me on LinkedIn, find me on Twitter, happy to answer questions, let you know what we think might make sense for your brand.

Brett:

Love it. These guys are smart. I've known him for years. I trust him. That's why I invested with 'em. And yeah, hit up, if you got a question, you're wondering if this could work for you, email Michael, and he will shoot straight with you. And Michael, if I'm not mistaken, you've kind of upped your LinkedIn game a little bit, right? Are you posting more on LinkedIn? I know Drew Sinski is committed, he's consistent, but you guys both have good LinkedIn games going right now.

Michael:

I'm just trying to keep up with Sinski. I

Brett:

Dunno that I, that's difficult, man. That's difficult to do.

Michael:

Hey, we all are right? We

Brett:

All are. It's Drew's world. We're just living in it, trying to keep up,

Michael:

Trying to be out there for sure.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome. So check out Michael Epstein on LinkedIn, on Twitter out Drew Sunki, check out your boy Brett Curry. I'm posting consistently now, Michael on LinkedIn at least 3, 4, 5 times a week, something like that. So hit me up as well with that. Michael, thank you so much, man. It's been a ton of fun.

Michael:

Always, Brett.

Brett:

And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? If you've not left that review on iTunes, please do so. It makes my day, helps other people discover the show and you'll feel good about yourself. You did a good deed for the podcast space. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

In this episode, I sit down with Molly Pittman, CEO of Smart Marketer, to dissect the latest trends in eCommerce marketing. Drawing from her groundbreaking $600 million study in Facebook ad spend, Molly shares invaluable insights on crafting compelling offers, creating high-performing ad creatives, and optimizing landing pages for maximum conversions. This episode is packed with actionable strategies to help eCommerce brands scale in today's competitive landscape.

‍

Key topics discussed:

‍

• The importance of diversifying your offer system to reach different segments of your market and scale beyond traditional eCommerce tactics.
• Surprising findings on the effectiveness of image ads vs. video ads, and how to balance "native" vs. polished ad creatives.
• The critical role of benefit-focused hooks in ad performance, with 88% of top-performing ads featuring clear hooks.
• Strategies for streamlining landing pages and focusing on the most impactful messages to drive conversions.
• How to build a data-driven creative production system that starts with customer insights rather than templates.

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(04:35) Mistakes in Crafting Compelling Offers

(12:44) The Importance of Offer Systems

(18:02) Findings from the Facebook Ad Creative Study

(23:43) The Effectiveness of Native Ads

(29:58) The Importance of a Strong Hook

(37:28) The Impact of Landing Page Quality

(40:20) Conclusion

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Show Notes:

• Molly Pittman (LinkedIn) 
• Smart Marketer
• Smart Marketer Agency
• Alex Hormozi (LinkedIn) 
• 100 Million Dollar Offers
• Dean Brennan (LinkedIn) 
• Heart & Soil 
• Post Pilot
• Michael Epstein (LinkedIn)
• Nutri Paw
• HydroJug
• Jacques Spitzer (LinkedIn) 
• Raindrop

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

‍

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

---

Transcript:

Molly :

As we scale, the offer system does need to get more complex. If you're spending more, you need more offer styles to use and also ways to fill the customer journey.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking with the one, the only, the world famous Molly Pitman. And I always, if I ever want to know what's working now, finger on the pulse, what's working on meta, what's working in terms of offers, what's working in terms of creatives? I go to my friend Molly Pittman. We go way, way back to the T&C days. Now we collaborate a lot as she's the CEO of smart marketer and managing partner of Smart Market Agency. And so with that, Molly Pittman, welcome to the show. And how's it going?

Molly :

Brett Curry, one of my favorite people to talk to. I feel like you and I have found ourselves in frequent conversations recently of like, Hey, is this happening for you? For me? That validation and support is so

Brett:

Totally

Molly :

For entrepreneurs. So thanks for being a good friend.

Brett:

Yeah, sometimes we're sharing ideas, sometimes we're just kind of like, what the hell? And are you experiencing this? I'm experiencing this. And so the agency life is a wild one, and so we get to share that. And yeah, it's a great, I

Molly :

Call it business therapy. Business therapy,

Brett:

Yes. Glad we can be therapy buddies on this agency journey. Hey, you

Molly :

Need

Brett:

It? Yeah, without a doubt. Without a doubt. So walk people through those that don't know, and I think most people probably do, but what do you guys do at Smart Marketer? What do you do, the Smart Marketer agency and give us the latest and greatest.

Molly :

Yeah, good question. So we really have two sides to the Smart Marketer business. One is the media side that's been around 12 plus years now, and that is purely there for education. So courses, which Brett Curry is a faculty member and part of Brett teaches a few of our courses, mentorships masterminds, any way that we can support business owners and marketers in their effort of growth and staying up to date on their skillset, that is really the media side of Smart Marketer. And then of course we have the agency side, which is the done for you. So that's where we offer services like email and monetization, creative paid advertising, really in efforts to also help grow businesses, but usually at a different size.

Brett:

Yeah, I love both sides of your business. On the agency side, obviously we share a lot of clients. You guys growing on the meta side and OMG helping on the Google and YouTube side, and it's a great partnership there. Really good teamwork. Love that. I wish more of our clients use Smart Marketer Agency. And then on the training side of the media side, listen, that's how we train new people that come to OMG. We send them through the courses that we created as part of Smart Marketer, but also your other courses are fantastic. So you've got an in-house team or you've got an agency utilize those resources to get someone up to speed. And it's all performance driven, proven stuff. It's just great training, great training,

Molly :

Thank you. Yeah, it's really one business and it's just living by what we do, which is do it, know what works, and then teach it. So both sides of the business really feed one another in a great way.

Brett:

Cool. Alright, well I want to dive into a few things. So I want to talk about offers and kind of what you're seeing in terms of offers, because I think that's often an overlooked part of marketing, oddly enough, is not trying to dial in the right offer. I want to also dive into creative because I know you guys just did a huge study on 600 million in Facebook ad spend on what creatives are working and why and things like that. So we're going to break that down. And then if we have time, I also want to get into your perspective on landing pages and how do we optimize that experience once someone gets on our site. And so let's start with offers though. What are you seeing working now, or maybe let's back up a step. What are the mistakes you see e-commerce brands making when it comes to crafting compelling offers?

Molly :

Good question. Well, the first mistake I see almost everyone making, whether you identify as e-commerce, more of an info media consulting, coaching business, sas, local, doesn't matter. The big shift that we are seeing, the businesses that we are really watching succeed in this moment, going into 20 25, 1 of the most interesting parts, Brett Curry, is that none of them really identify any longer as a certain business type. And this really relates to the offers. We're going somewhere here. So take Smart Marketer for example. Are we an agency? Are we a media publishing company or really both, right? We serve a group of people in multiple ways, which allows us to acquire customers that break even and allows us to monetize and grow, which is the goal of any business. Or you take a client that comes to us, they're selling supplements, they're like, I'm an e-commerce business.

And we are able to help them think bigger picture and put things like more information or media style offers on the front end of their business. That is the secret sauce nowadays, guys, and I'm not just saying e-comm and info, I mean this can be local and services. This can be info and services, this can be e-comm and info. Any way you mix it. The businesses that are really growing are not just staying in the lane of who they think they are. What are other physical product companies doing, for example? So with the offers, what are people doing wrong? They're just not thinking out of the box. They're staying in their lane and so they're not able to grow because there are a few issues with that. Number one, let's say you're selling supplements, okay? There's only so far you can go. There's only so much market of people that, okay, my dog has allergies, I want your supplement, or my joints are in pain, I want your supplement.

There's only so much scalability there, and there are only so many offer styles that fit the e-commerce lane. You're really going to reach about 60% of what you can do. Now, if you think out of the box, if you really start to think, what else could I be doing? Could I have a free plus shipping book? Could I do webinars, free classes? Okay. Now you have not only a self-liquidating offer where any money you make on supplements or your physical products is just free money, as we like to say. You also have so much more scalability in the market because you're able to reach the people that might not immediately have that pain in the moment, and you're able to indoctrinate them, build a relationship with them, and your lifetime value is higher. So it really solves almost all of the problems that we're seeing in business right now.

Rising traffic costs, which are affecting customer acquisition market saturation. A lot of our clients have just simply reached market saturation and things like needing to increase lifetime value so we can have more cashflow in the business. So really quick, Brett, just a quick example of this. A client came on about four months ago selling supplements, doing about half a million dollars a month. Great ebitda, happy, ready to scale, but the first thing that we did was help him throw a more information style offer onto the front end of the business that's breaking even and now acquiring hundreds of customers every single day. Just got the report back. Hey guys, I'm blown away. I'm doing about 800 KA month now in just four months, and my margins are higher now. It's crazy. Now, is the media buying better? Yes. But it was a function of looking at the strategy and the offers in a different way.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. And this is why I love Alex Oroz in his book, a hundred million dollar offers. If you craft the offer, well, everything else becomes easier. Let's start with media. If you've got an offer that's highly converting, lots and lots of people are taking you up on this offer, the Facebook algorithm, YouTube algorithm, Google algorithm is going to be able to find more people like those that are converting. So it fuels your media. I think it makes the creative easier when I've got this crystal clear offer. The ad almost writes itself, but when you don't have a clear offer, you're just like, well, we're a supplement and we do these 15 things. And it's like, I don't know, you just wrote an ad that doesn't really speak to anything. And so I just did an interview with Dean Brennan from Heart and Soil.

I dunno if you've heard of heart and soil supplements, all animal-based products. So it's the opposite of vegan products, but it's all grass fed beef supplements. And so they grew from zero to 50 million in three years primarily because the co-founder, doctor wrote a book, had a book funnel and just built this massive audience. And then they launched the company and it was shot out of a rocket. And so obviously a lot of people that are listening to this podcast already have a business, and maybe you haven't written a book yet or whatever, but having an info offer, I think it's something that a lot of people are overlooking, and it's something that can give you a competitive moat because your competitors probably aren't. And if you build that community, man, you've got a more profitable business, a more scalable business, a more sellable business. So really, really great

Molly :

And really quick Brett's also understanding that the offers that took you to a million probably aren't going to take you to 5 million, probably aren't going to take you to 2050. Things do get more complex and people just really need to understand that, right? This isn't just about spending more money and being better media buyers. That's just icing on the

Brett:

Cake.

Molly :

There is. I mean, unless you have a truly novel product that people have not heard of that just knocks your socks off, this is the game to be playing

Brett:

Going into

Molly :

2025.

Brett:

It's so true. And we're both media buyers. Weve both done media buying in the past. We run companies now. So we're not doing a lot of the button pushing at the moment, but it's what we do. And when we have teams that live and eat and breathe media. But here's the thing, there's not a ton of secret sauce left in media buying. It's mostly following the fundamentals and being extremely disciplined and focused and being a real, real pro at media buying. And then really the way the game is won or lost is with offers and creatives and kind of the whole execution of the puzzle. But yeah, you're not going to just scale by, Hey, I've got a different account taxonomy or structure of campaigns that matters, but that's not ultimately going to be what takes you to a nine figure business.

Molly :

Exactly. And we hire media buyers that think in this way too. And for me, constantly being up to date on what's working on these platforms, that's a no brainer. Dennis, our director of advertising, he's amazing. That's what he smart all day every day, analyzing what's working, what's not working, constantly updating our SOPs. That is a no brainer, but that is not going to save your business. That is probably not going to be the big lever. The big lever is the shift in thinking, especially around the offers like we just discussed.

Brett:

Yeah, love it. So I've heard you talk about you create offer systems for people or teach 'em how to create offer systems. I know that's part of a larger training, not something we can easily summarize necessarily in a couple minutes, but talk us through is an offer system and how might that help our listeners?

Molly :

So your offer system is really understanding. So when I say offer, I mean anything that you're asking people to do, whether it's in an email, it's in an ad, wherever you're talking to them, in person in your store, what is your offer? Are you sending directly to product page? Is there a webinar? Are you asking them to get on the phone? I mean, Brett, think about it, the type of offer styles that could be out there. I mean, there's millions of variables, there's no way to document them and creativity is key. But what I have found is that as we scale, the offer system does need to get more complex. If you're spending more, you need more offer styles to use and also ways to fill the customer journey. So someone that's just starting out, let's say you're even spending a thousand, $5,000 a day on paid traffic, that's awesome.

If you're an e-commerce brand, you're probably sending most of that traffic to a product page, bam, bam, awesome, good for you. But you want to get to $50,000 a day in spend, that's not going to be the way difficult. You're probably going to have five to 10 top of funnel cold traffic offers that all are built differently. And a mistake that I see, Brett, number one again, is people thinking, okay, I just need five to 10 E-commerce style offers. No, that's not it, right? We're mixing in other styles, but we are also measuring them differently. So the free plus shipping book funnel that you just mentioned, we have seen stuff like that work really well for clients. But some clients will try it and they'll say, oh, the ROAS is higher when we go direct to product page, this doesn't work. And I kind of look at them like this. I have not done my job in education land if I hear that, because that is not the goal of that offer. The goal of that offer is to go and acquire the part of the market in which you have not been able to reach with the traditional marketing that you have been doing. So it's the understanding that as you scale, you need more offers and you need divers of offers and you have to be measuring these offers in different ways because they're all built for different reasons.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. I think a great comparison or good analogy here is I've always loved Google shopping. It was actually the first thing in e-commerce that I spoke on stage about was how to optimize your Google Shopping ads. What's beautiful about Google Shopping is people click on those image based product listing ads and they're likely to buy, I want these Air Jordan shoes. It's the right price, it's the right style, it's the right color. I click on it, I'm likely to buy. But here's the problem with Google shopping. It has a ceiling. You can only scale it so far it's limited by the number of people that are searching for your type of product. And so it's great to start there. I think that should be a foundation for any e-commerce brand. But if you want to be an eight nine figure brand or beyond, you've got to go beyond Google shopping.

So that's where you layer in meta and that's where you layer in YouTube. But again, to your point, the number of people who will see an ad click on that ad and then buy your stuff, whether that's a widget or a supplement or a pair of shoes, it's limited. It's a small number, but there is maybe a greater portion or a different portion of your audience that will click on your ad and read some content or watch a video or sign up for a webinar or get a free book plus shipping, especially if you're solving a really complex problem for them, they're likely motivated to buy a book, especially if it's three plus shipping or whatever. And so to unlock scale to really create this robust growth engine for your brand, you've got to have more offers. I completely agree.

Molly :

And Brett, it's also a different conversation that you're starting. That's why it allows you for more scale. So it's the difference back to my dog example of does your dog have allergies? This will help versus, Hey, do you want to be a better dog owner? Do you want your dog to live longer? Okay, those are two very different conversation. Which conversation do you think has the most volume? That's really the point that we're trying to prove. So yeah, this mindset shift, if people are not making it, they will be left behind. This is the missing piece right now.

Brett:

So we need more offers and we need a diversity of offers. And then hey, once you find a handful of things that work, you can scale those to the moon, but it's got to be more than just a, here's our product, here's the coupon code. You're going to need to think beyond that.

Molly :

Got it. That'll only get you so far. Again, unless your product is so crazy novel, but 98% of the people that come to us, this is a product you've probably seen on the market before, and we want those people to be able to win too.

Brett:

Absolutely. So let's talk creative now. So offer, I think that's the foundation. If you have clear offers, then really the creative becomes easier. But there's still tons of ways to go back. Creative. Do I use UGC? Do I do more of a hero style video? Am I going high production value or low production value or somewhere in between? And so you guys recently did a study, I believe, of 600 million in Facebook ad spend to see what works, what doesn't, and you kind of broke it down. And so if you could kind of explain how you did this test, and then let's dig into the findings.

Molly :

So this is going to be the short story. I could go down a big rabbit hole here, but the way in which we analyze this is essentially pumping all of this data into one creative report where we essentially had a proprietary formula that allows us to rank creatives as low, mid, or high performing. Because again, not everything is created. How am I supposed to measure? Someone would say, okay, well why don't you just rank them based off of roas? That's not fair. What if it's a book funnel

Brett:

Remarketing ad top of funnel ad,

Molly :

Right? Or what if it's a book funnel where the ROAS goal is 0.5? Because that is the goal of that particular offer.

You can't rank them based off of roas. So not to go into too much detail and completely nerd out, but essentially a proprietary formula that factors in number one ad spend, because we know all accounts that are being pumped into this report are direct response. So we're only spending essentially if it's working and if you are spending more on an ad or a creative, it is doing its job that's factored in. ROAS is factored in also. But we're also factoring in other metrics like click to purchase and metrics like unique link click through rate, especially for offers that are going to things like lead magnets where there isn't even a purchase being made. So we had to figure out a way, how do we create a quality between all of these? So we rank them and then we analyze the top 100 ads, and this is over 40 industries, Brett Curry, all different business types. And the three coolest findings that I think are most applicable here really gave me data to prove what I think you and I have known for a while. And the first thing, especially when looking at meta ads was that 48% of the top ads were actually still images. 52% were video.

Brett:

So cool. So crazy. So

Molly :

That shows you and you guys, this pertains to email marketing, Google, YouTube. Yes, we did this analysis on Facebook, but guys, this is also an analysis of consumer behavior in 2024.

Brett:

And

Molly :

I believe, I know consumers are now seeing 10,000 ads a day. They used to see 5,000 ads a day. Still images are amazing because if you can portray a marketing message in one click, quick glance, if you can do that, bam, someone is hooked in. So that was the first cool step

Brett:

Down. One interesting thing to just piggyback on that for a second is it would be a very accurate statement for someone to say, the majority of the time video ads win. And I think when people say that, we may hear, I just got to do video ads in because they win most of the time, and that's true, but it's like 52% of the time. So 48% of the time, almost 4.8 out of 10 of the top performing ads are images. And you can test faster, you can create more of them. It's less taxing on your team, gives some diversity to your ad set up. And so yeah, I think a lot of people have overlooked images. We want to go all video, and I love video. I'm a TV guy and an infomercial guy from long ago. I love video, but don't sleep on image.

Molly :

No. And it's especially an inventory thing on these platforms. So I hate the question, which works better. Video or image that immediately shows me where that person is not sophisticated, which is okay, but it's like, do both. Do both. And this stat proved it. I was like, yes, invest

Brett:

In images, man. Take good product photography, use AI to help you create some new image ads. But yeah, don't forget image ads. There's scale to be unlocked there for sure. Okay, awesome. Awesome.

Molly :

Finding again, Brett, the big picture takeaway there is more than meta, right? It shows you that when video became popular, things are actually circling back around now because of our attention span and the amount of ads that we see every single day. So this pertains very big picture.

Brett:

Yeah, it's always one of those things where, yeah, when something is novel, then it really stands out When it no longer is novel, then it doesn't just for the sake of being novel. So yeah, video ads used to be rare whenever we'd see them, whoa, I've got to watch this. Even if it sucks. Now videos are everywhere. So now a really great arresting image can be fantastic, and it kind of sticks out. It's kind of like in the old days, you go to your mailbox and it was just full of junk mail. Now you go to your mailbox and there's not a whole lot there. So a little something can stick out. It's a quick plug for my boys at post pilot talking to Michael later today. So that's why I thought of direct mail. But people have kind of abandoned images and so now they're novel again.

Molly :

And then the second thing that was really cool, we wanted to analyze native versus non-native, which again is relatable.

Brett:

Can you define that? What do you mean by native versus non-native?

Molly :

Very big picture. So the way we defined it is native ads look like they belong in whatever platform in which they are. So

Brett:

An organic post is what it looks like,

Molly :

Right? They're not overly designed. They don't overly feature the product, so they look like a post or a video or a tweet or whatever from a friend or family member. They look less like a non-native ad, which looks like an ad.

Brett:

An ad, yep.

Molly :

UGC has been the talk of the town the last six plus years. I mean even more than that, I'm talking about even very basic imagery that is just real, not using stock images, using real imagery. It makes a big, big difference. So of the top ads, 62% of them were native and 38% of them were non-native. So this also shows you that there is still space 40% of ads that can look like ads. And there's nothing wrong with that. You just want to balance because different consumers are going to respond to different style ads. One of the best ads for Boom Ezra's makeup brand right now, it looks like an ad. It's got the product all over it. It says this rosy makeup sold out in just 16 hours. Now it's back for you. That is okay, but we also want to balance this with the native style ads. So really a 60 40 split there.

Brett:

Super interesting. Did you see any correlation between types of products or industries where maybe native favor particular industries a little more than others, or polished ads favored some industries versus others? Or was it that wasn't a clear takeaway?

Molly :

So I wanted that to be a takeaway, but it wasn't. This was across the board. This is even piping in local business ads breadth that have multiple locations. This is really every business type. There was not a correlation. Isn't that wild? Because

Brett:

Super interesting.

Molly :

And the reason is it doesn't matter, right? This is about the consumer and what they want to interact with. I don't care what the business type is. So across the board, about a 60 40 split.

Brett:

Great. And what are you seeing any insights on what's working for those native style ads? Any examples come to mind of brands that do that really well?

Molly :

Yeah, definitely one of our clients, Nutri Paul, the dog supplement

Brett:

Company, shared client, yep.

Molly :

Shared this. We shared this client. You guys go to Facebook ad library right now and type in Nutri Paul. You will see so many examples of these. And the best part of this, Fred Curry, most of the native ads that are working the media buyer made them in Canva in four minutes.

Brett:

Isn't that awesome?

Molly :

So one that you'll immediately see is an upclose picture of a dog's dirty teeth and then an Upclose picture taken on an iPhone of a dog with clean teeth or a literal picture of a dog who's scared and hiding, and then an after of them being energetic. So it's just looking real. That's it. All the way down to smart marketer. We're running ads for a creative class right now. And of course our best converting ad creative Brett, it is actually a photo with no text overlay even. It is a photo that I took with myself and Ben Bennett, our director of creative at the restaurant that we own here in town. And it works because people stop. They're like, what is this? This looks real. And then of course, all the way up to UGC and the more complicated native styles that are out there, but basic is working better, which is so cool to see.

Brett:

And I think the real takeaway here, Molly, is that you need to do both. And we said that about the last point, but you need to do real native feeling native looking ads, but do other stuff as well. This is not about which usually works, so let's only do that. Let's do both, right? Let's get into a consistent rhythm of creating and testing content. That's where you really unlock new levels of scale. But I love that. Yeah, it's just an image of you and a guy at a restaurant. And that was an ad for a creative class, which is super interesting.

Molly :

Yeah, it's wild. And Brett, what is really cool about this is that success is really becoming more about the quality of your asset production. Of course, offer copy, creative, everything that makes up these campaigns. And the, again, is not to do what works best. Always the goal is to build assets that suffice and attract as much of the market as possible. So that is why diversification is so important. And then the third thing, oh, sorry, go

Brett:

Ahead. Well, and we've found, looking at a YouTube account as an example, usually the YouTube accounts that really scale, that unlock unusual amounts of scale. And on YouTube it's more difficult. There are more people that scale on Facebook than on YouTube. It's accounts that have diversity. They have polished hero videos that almost feel like TV production. They have UGC content, they have mashups of UGC, they have high production content thrown in with some iPhone shot, UGC mixed into those. You need creative diversity. That's where you scale. And I know from talking to people like you, that's the same on meta.

Molly :

Yeah. And then one more quick stat, and this one isn't surprising, but it's very validating. So I analyzed the percentage of ads that had a hook and didn't have a hook. And what I mean by this is feature versus benefits, which we all know in marketing, and this is still something especially big brands struggle with. You and I have worked with them. The ad is all about the feature of the product. So we went in and analyzed, and if there was a benefit displayed in the creative at all, we said it had a hook. If it wasn't, it didn't have a hook. 88% of the ads had a hook, 12% didn't. The 12% were all retargeting ads where people had already engaged with the brand. So I don't think we have to beat this over the head, but if you are not speaking to a transformation, if you are not speaking to the true benefit of whatever the offer is probably not going to work.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. Yeah. So essentially a hundred percent of the time you need a good hook, or the only time you don't is if someone is mostly sold and you're just, you're tipping the scales enough in their favorite for them to say yes. I heard a great analogy recently that I want to repeat here that I think maybe unlocks a little bit different view of this. Let's say we're selling Hawaii vacations. What you should do is talk about Hawaii and how amazing it's, and what it's going to be like when you're there, when you're on the beach or when you're in a jungle or driving a jeep on some trails or whatever. What a lot of people want to do is talk about, here's what check-in is going to be like at the airport, and here's what it's going to be like to be on the plane. And the seats are really comfortable on your way there. Nobody wants to talk about that or think about that as you hear that, you're like, Ugh, I don't like that part of travel. I don't want to go through TSA and all this stuff. But that's what we do when we're talking about features versus benefits. Talk about the benefits. If you need to throw in some features along the way, which you probably do a little bit, great, but you got to lean into benefits.

Molly :

And the biggest reason for that, Brett, is it makes it sound like an ad. This amazing hydro jug here that you pointed out. Four

Brett:

Ounces. Yeah, just hold that up. Now. I would like for be able to guess how many ounces that is. I thought that was like five, six gallons. I wasn't exactly sure, but how much water does that actually hold, Molly?

Molly :

64 ounces.

Brett:

64 ounces. So half a gallon. That's a lot of water.

Molly :

I love this water bottle. But most people would sell this as the texture and the color and how much water it holds and how it keeps the water cool. And all of the features of the product. If Molly's selling this, it's about hydration and how that's going to help you be a better entrepreneur. How you can have a half gallon of water if you're somewhere where you don't have a good water supply. Simple example. But if you don't get that, it's just not going to work or the scale is not going to be there.

Brett:

Most people are chronically dehydrated. That's why I'm actually drinking electrolytes. I'm almost done here. Why I drink electrolytes? Because my brain functions better. I work faster, work smarter, feel better, all that when I consume electrolytes and just enough water in general. So yeah, really, really good. Any other takeaway? Get choked up here talking good marketing. Lemme do that again. Any other takeaways from the study?

Molly :

Yes. I don't have a piece of data for this necessarily. I'm going to get one, but I was actually shocked by the number of ads per brand that were actually doing the heavy lifting. So the amount of ads that are tested versus the ones that actually do the heavy lifting, it's actually a pretty small percentage.

Brett:

And so there's a really great takeaway. You're going to find some outliers or some ads that do disproportionately well compared to others, but usually you've got to have the volume to find those, right? You can't just go with four ads and they're magically that the four best performing ads you've got to usually launch and test a lot of them to find those. So there's quality in the quantity.

Molly :

And it made me realize, Brett Apple, they talk about how they build product and they build product with the customer first. Where most companies build a product then figure out why the customer wants it. They start with the customer and the product comes last. And the system we use to build creatives and all these creatives I was analyzing, especially the top ones, it was reverse. Most people are building creative backwards. They have an offer or product they want to sell. They go look up templates, they start with how they want the creative to look, bam done. They're missing. They're doing it backwards. They're missing a huge piece there of the research, of the hook selection of the thorough creation of the brief that then becomes cool. You want to go use a template, great, but I need you to do the marketing work before you get there. It's not just about using a proven template that worked for another brand. So most people have that flipped and the creatives that were the top ads, they had been produced in the reverse order where what it looks like was actually the first step instead of the first step

Brett:

Customer centric. And the way my buddy Jacque Spitzer from Raindrop Mutual friend of ours, he talks about, a lot of times we start building ads by saying, what do I want to say? Rather than saying, what do my prospects want to hear? What do they want to learn? What do they want to solve? What do they want to experience? What do they want? And then we'll figure out how to tell our story in a way that really lines up with them.

Molly :

And really quickly, Brett, the way that we do it is number one, create a data based plan. So the analysis that I did needs to be done on an individual account level because this varies a bit. Or you could use the high level stats that we have, but come up with a plan based off of data for how many creatives you need and what type. Then go into, okay, we have a whole hook library, so we're choosing a different hook for each ad, and then we're writing a brief before and after because we know the avatar, we know the offer pertaining to that hook, and then every one of those ads has a unique hook. Now we go into how should it look, our whole style library and then the production and of course the feedback. So most people just need a more fleshed out system than what they currently have.

Brett:

Really great, I love the feedback loop portion. I think that's a piece that if you're missing it, then you're really under-leveraged and you're missing opportunities. So not only creating and testing lots of videos, but you've got to have that feedback loop from your media buyers to your creative team to the strategists that are involved, whether that's you, whether that's a team or whether that's an agency. Got to have those creative feedback loops

Molly :

For sure. Yeah, it saves time too, because a lot of people are just creating from scratch over and over and over, when really they should be using data from their past creatives to build iterations. Bam. Now you're not working as much from scratch.

Brett:

Totally, totally love it. Well, we don't have a ton of time left, but I do want to talk briefly about landing pages. I know this is an area you guys test a lot. You guys help with this at the Smart Marketer agency. But any takeaways, any learnings recently on landing page and landing page quality? Because really that is a huge part of this, right? The ad is designed to get attention and get a click or get some kind of action, but the landing page is what seals the deal. What have you learned lately?

Molly :

So this is not the case in every scenario, but the majority of offers, and this kind of relates to the creative actually the majority of offers, and therefore landing page tests that we're seeing shorter, more concise pages that get right to the point they're winning. And I think it's for the same reason as what we discussed with still images. I just don't think a lot of consumers have the time or bandwidth to do a lot of consumption. So again, it depends. It's something you should test. But we are shortening pages kind of going more old school, which is funny. Now on the other hand, there are cases where longer pages are working totally, we've got to test it, but shorter pages, less video for the same reason we're removing a lot of video from landing pages. It seems like people get distracted. And then just the stuff that you know should be doing the same thought process that we just went through with the creatives, that needs to be on the page, that needs to be iterated on the page, especially when you're just straight up selling a product.

Brett:

It really is fairly straightforward where whatever promise you made in the video or in the still image ad on meta or elsewhere, are you confirming that on the landing page? Is it clear that there's some congruency between your ad and the landing page? Are you reiterating those promises and those claims and those benefits? Is it visually are we seeing the product and being able to shop that product and experience it almost like if we were holding it in our hands? But yeah, then also looking at, and I love the fact that you pointed that out. We found that video works well in some cases as we're optimizing an Amazon product detail page as an example. A lot of times videos do great there because people are really comparison shopping in other contexts, you don't need it. It just slows things down. People just need to see the images and read a few things and that's all they need.

So got to test that as well. But yeah, it really is a continuation of that ad. And I do like getting to the point sooner, communicating more clearly with less fluff. One of the things I like to say is, Hey, if you make someone work, you lose the sale. If you make them think too much, you lose the sale. So make it easy and make it extremely, extremely clear. Any other final takeaways as you look at the study? You're just looking at recent experiences before we talk about how people can get in touch with you? Yeah,

Molly :

The confused mind says no, right? Yes. Just one other quick thing on the campaign building. Something that we've started doing is really identifying, let's say 10 hooks for a campaign. And then each hook has its own ad creative, and then it actually has its own block on the page, Brett. So there are different ways you can implement this, but think about it as different sections and then we are actually able to test, okay, out of these 10, what are the four hooks, the four reasons that actually get people to buy? And then that's a lot of the ways that we're removing stuff from the page. That's a little map like right, and a bit more bigger picture marketing

Brett:

Map. So smart. So smart, yeah, love that. Don't remove so much that you lose the sale, but find out the real reasons people are buying and remove the other superfluous stuff.

Molly :

I think CROs going less of button color video here, this element here, way more of message testing, which hey, that's fun. That is fun and fine by me.

Brett:

Absolutely. The testing color of buttons, that is a snoozer and you're not going to find any major winds there. I promise. It is not 2006, so, awesome. Well, as we wrap up, Molly, how can people learn more about smart market or agency? Maybe they can get their hands on this report. I don't know if that's under lock and key or if that's top secret, but how can people connect with you to learn more on the media side or connect with the agency?

Molly :

So hop over to smart marketer.com. There is a button in the navigation that says resources or free resources. So you'll find the free creative class there. That's where the findings from that report are. You'll also find some other free resources from us in different areas of business growth and digital marketing. And then yeah, if you're a business spending more than 50 K ish a month on paid media, we love to talk to you in our agency. Just click on the agency tab or the Work with us tab or go to smart marketer agency.com and apply.

Brett:

Love it. Molly Pitman, ladies and gentlemen, so smart marketer.com, smart market or agency.com. We'll link to everything in the show notes. Thank you so much, man. This has been awesome. We could go two or three more rounds. I feel like we're just getting started, but that'll have to be enough for today.

Molly :

Thank you, Brett. Hurry. Fun as always. Thanks for listening, y'all.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, yes, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. If you've not left a review on the show, we would love that. That would make my day, helps other people discover the show as well. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

In this episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I sit down with Dean Brennan, CEO of Heart and Soil Supplements, to unpack the meteoric rise of this innovative health brand. From zero to $50 million in just three years, Heart and Soil has disrupted the supplement industry with its focus on nutrient-dense organ meats and regenerative farming practices. Dean shares invaluable insights on building a brand with passionate customers and maintaining profitability during rapid growth.

‍

Key topics discussed:

• The power of organic growth and building an engaged audience before launch.

• How premium packaging and high-quality ingredients can actually protect profit margins.

• Strategies for creating compelling content that inspires and guides customers.

• Structuring your week as a CEO to balance deep work and management responsibilities.

• The importance of psychological barriers in health transformations and plans to build an ecosystem similar to Dave Ramsey's approach to personal finance.

‍

This episode is packed with actionable advice for eCommerce entrepreneurs looking to build a brand with 'staying power' in today's competitive landscape. Whether you're just starting out or scaling rapidly, Dean's journey with Heart and Soil offers valuable lessons for sustainable growth.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(04:08) The Benefits of Animal-Based Diets

(12:40) The Importance of Packaging and Branding

(19:07) Organic Growth and Protecting Margins

(24:16) The Importance of Organic Content

(32:59) Prioritizing Deep Work and Structuring Time

(42:36) Building an Ecosystem to Overcome Psychological Barriers

(45:48) Outro

---

Show Notes:

• Dean Brennan (LinkedIn)
• Dean Brennan (Twitter) 
• Heart and Soil 
• Andrew Youderian (LinkedIn)
• Drew Sanocki (LinkedIn) 
• Dr. Paul Saladino
• Seth Godin (LinkedIn) 
• Preston Rutherford (LinkedIn)
• Story Brand - Donald Miller
• Asana
• Dave Ramsey

---

Connect With Brett:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

---

Transcript:

Dean :

It is not about us, it is about the customer. It's about barriers that they have to achieve the outcome that they want in their life.

Brett:

Hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I am super excited about my guest. If you look at some of the rising stars, some of the success stories, some of the companies that you want to model in the D two C space, this one has got to be on your short list. Talking to the CEO of Heart and Soil, Mr. Dean Brennan, we got to hang out at Ezra Firestone's Blue Ribbon Mastermind in Austin, Texas. I was blown away. Not only that, not only was I blown away by Dean's story, which we're going to get into today, but I'm a client, I'm a customer. I buy the product. I'm a big fan. And so we're going to dive into the wild success behind heart and soil. But with that, Mr. Dean, Brennan Dean, welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.

Dean :

Yeah, thanks for having me, man. Really excited about this and I loved meeting you back at the Blue Ribbon event and I think this is going to be a fun conversation.

Brett:

Absolutely. So for those that don't know, heart and soil, not sure what's, for those that are not familiar with what, I'm not sure what they're picturing right now, but what is heart and soil and why do you think it's so wildly popular right now?

Dean :

Well, we could say heart and soil supplements,

So we're a supplement company. It's funny, I say heart and soil too. I usually drop the supplement piece. But yeah, we're a supplement company and I think we're a little bit different in a lot of ways. When you think of supplements, you generally think of multivitamin or something that's generally produced in a lab, a lot of synthetic ingredients of things of that nature. We've realized our founder is an md, Dr. Paul Saladino, that Americans don't really eat nutrient rich organs anymore or nutrient rich animal foods. And if you look at the nutritional profile of just liver, you'll find that it's one of the most nutrient dense, if not the most nutrient dense food on the planet. And so we kind of find ourselves in this point in time with chronic disease, just taking over rising medical costs, everything like that. It's talked a lot right now in the political realm, but we've become a sick nation and we've kind of abandoned the real foods that we used to eat that used to drive our biology and help us thrive. So to make a long story short, nobody likes to eat liver. Liver doesn't taste all that great. It's not the thing you think of when you're like, I'm going to go have a really good dinner, let me cook up a bunch of liver. So we take liver and other really nutrient dense animal foods and freeze dry 'em, very low temperature process. We source regenerative farms that are good for the environment and we put it into a convenient capsule for you to take.

Brett:

That's awesome. And I think, actually, I've got to tip my hat. I dunno if you know Andrew Derian from e-Commerce Fuel Leader in the Space. Awesome.

Dean :

I just talked with him three weeks ago, was on his podcast.

Brett:

No way. So a combination of him and Drew Sinski are the reasons I became a hard and soil

Dean :

Supplement. I just talked to Drew too a week ago. Yeah,

Brett:

Good guys. So I think the way Drew made a post or something about doing a postcard for you guys or something, and Andrew chimed in and said, I got the postcard and I ordered and it's amazing. And then I bought it from the LinkedIn post. So it was like a roundabout way of these guys in e-commerce let me know about your product. And I was like, this is really cool. And so what has been the vibe or the perception around the brand because over the last 10, 15, 20 years, I don't know, I'm just making up numbers, but for a while the thing has been plant-based and vegan and stuff like that. There has been a resurgence or maybe an emergence lately of hey carnivore diet and the fact that red meat actually is really nutrient dense and especially thing things like liver and other organs really nutrient dense. Has there been pushback or has this mostly been widely accepted? What's the Talk about that just a little bit.

Dean :

Yeah, I love that because for me, it comes back to my story I think a little bit in terms of how I found this animal-based diet and plant foods have always been, at least in recent history, all the rage in terms of nutrition. I was somebody that early on in my life, in my twenties, I had ulcerative colitis and I thought at the time that plant foods were super nutritious and that they would do my body good. Now, I will say that when I went through that experience, so I essentially doctors couldn't tell me what I was supposed to do. They're like, you just have this genetic thing and we don't know what causes it, and you're just going to have to take this medication for the rest of your life and someday you might be in a colostomy bag. So here you go. And that was

Brett:

Not what you want to hear as a young man for sure.

Dean :

It was devastating for me as a young person who prided myself in being an athlete and healthy and you're like, man, I got a lot of years left to live in my life and I really got to deal with this. What? So anyways, to get back to your question personally, how I found my way to animal-based is I tried a lot of different things. I was able to put my ulcerative colitis into remission just by removing processed foods, beer, alcohol, and then manage my stress a little bit better and sleep a little bit more. It was in college when I was diagnosed with that. And I fortunately grew up kind of in the country and my parents didn't have a lot of money. And so I thought to myself at the time, I wonder if what I'm eating is causing some of this stuff. And so I intuitively made some changes and was able to heal in a lot of ways. What's interesting is I still had issues for a while that would just surface every so often. Even when I thought I was doing everything and at the time what I thought was right was eating a lot of spinach,

I was buying the big package of spinach and I bought into this thing that it's extremely nutrient rich and you need to eat a lot of it. And I was taking it by the handful just raw, and it was irritating my gut. So wasn't until later I kind of tuned into some people who were talking about plant foods in a different way. You probably remember the paleo diet. And

Brett:

Totally

Dean :

That kind of caught my attention because I thought this nutrition thing is very hard. One day the news is telling you eggs are good. The next day they're telling you eggs are bad, totally red meat's good. No, now red meat is bad. And that was difficult to navigate. And when I started looking at things through more of an ancestral lens, looking at how did our species evolve, how did we survive all of these years with pretty much zero chronic disease, how were people able to hunt into their sixties and run and sprint and do all of these things? That was the first key to me where I was like, this makes sense. If I look at, I almost don't even need to get into the science of it, but when I look at things from this perspective, I can very easily make decisions for my health.

Should I be sitting all day? Well, our ancestors probably did that. Didn't do that. Totally. So probably not. Anyways, I'm getting a little bit off track, but to answer your question, I think that the plant stuff is kind of caught on in a mainstream way, and I don't think it's been looked at through the right lens. I think a lot of the research that you see is survey-based, and a lot of the research that you see that's against meat is also survey-based, which means that when you see a study that says for the most part, oh, red meat, bad red meat causes this, they're surveying a large population of people like let's say in the United States. And there's these confounding factors. Most people that eat meat probably also smoke cigarettes and do X, Y, Z, and that's not considered in the research. So we have gotten a lot of pushback, but I also think that's what has really propelled a lot of the growth because it's different. And I don't know if you've ever, not nutrition, but any other type of product that you've ever bought that was a little bit different that you identified with, you want to tell 10 other people. So I think people doing this kind of diet or looking at, Hey, I'm taking a product like whole package that has full testicle in it and it contains naturally occurring testosterone, which no plant has that, right?

Brett:

A bioidentical, you're I going to find testosterone in any plant.

Dean :

Yeah, a bioidentical form of testosterone that actually your body can utilize. You're not going to find that in the plant world. There's a lot of things you can't find in the plant world, but when you're taking that supplement and you tell your buddy, Hey, you wouldn't believe what I'm taking that has some word of mouth.

Brett:

You got to take my bold testicle pills. Yeah,

Dean :

Yeah,

Brett:

I was telling you off air. I did. I'm a little bit ornery. I did sneak a whole package pill to both my wife and her sister let them take it because I was like, Hey, this will give you energy. We had this family event and they were tired, so take this, it'll be great. And then I told 'em it was bull testicles. It was a fun moment for me. But what's really interesting too, and to piggyback on this and I want to get into several things, the way you're growing and some of the unique things you're doing, I got a couple of things I want to dive into there. I also want to talk about how you're running the company as a CEO. I think it's really fascinating. I always want to learn I'm leading a fast growing agency. You're leading a fast growing e-commerce company, so I want to dig into that too.

But another quick note on this plant versus animal-based diet. I did a gut health intelligence test a couple of years ago, and what's interesting, this company, I'm not affiliated with them, but they say there's not really very many universal superfood. And as I got my results back, some interesting things came up and then I dug in a little bit deeper. Only 50%, according to this company, only 50% of the population should eat broccoli. About half the population, broccoli is an irritant and it will actually block the absorption of other nutrients. Kale not a universal superfood, it's one that I should avoid. Spinach is one that I should avoid completely red meat was on my allow and even recommended list. Super, super interesting. And I found as I started shifting and eating a little more the way this recommended, I felt better. My daughter takes plant-based protein. She loves it when I take it, I feel terrible afterwards. And so yeah, I think we're missing a lot. And I love the way you said it. Just think back to our ancestors. What were they doing? They were eating a lot of meat and so makes a lot of sense.

Dean :

Yeah, it's good. And to your point of the broccoli thing, plants evolve to have plant defense chemicals. They don't want to be eaten. The fruit of a plant does. That's how it passes its seed. You eat a seed or an animal eats a seed, it poops it out, it grows a new plant. That's how it reproduces and carries on its chain. But the leaves of plants, they have a lot of defense chemicals, phytates, they bind to nutrients. And so just because you read on a package or your a G one supplement that it has this and this and this in it, it doesn't mean that your body is actually utilizing it and it doesn't mean that it's not binding to nutrients and you're just not utilizing the full source of nutrients there.

Brett:

So love this little science break. So try some heart and soil supplements. I highly recommend. Let's talk about some of the things you do that are unique that I think are really valuable. I want to talk product packaging for a minute. I remember when I first got my first order, the box was really cool. It had a bowl on it. It's a really neat artwork. You open it up, it's a glass container for the supplements. It feels really high end. It was just nice. It was a nice experience. Sometimes you order supplements and I'm a supplement guy. I try all kinds of stuff and you get just a plastic bottle and a cardboard box with paper stuffed in there. I'm assuming that's a very thing, but can you talk through why you do the packaging the way you do it?

Dean :

Yeah, very intentional. I mean, the first thing I'll say is that plastic is a big problem in our environment

Brett:

Totally

Dean :

For a lot of different reasons. But one of 'em is BPAs and the chemicals, the plastics leach into food and into water and it can cause problems with your hormones. And so being a health company that actually cares about people's health, we're never going to put anything in plastic. That's just a decision we made on day one. It's something that we talk about. So I'd say that's point number one is, and it's funny, when we were sourcing the glass and stuff, we had a lot of people just, we had so many people that were just pushing us towards these plastic products. It's easier to get on the line. It's like you have less breakage, all of these things. And we were just uncompromising and no, we're using glass and let's figure out how to do glass. We actually just launched a protein powder product today and that was a whole other thing. We are not using a plastic container. What most protein comes in, we're using a card. We have this cardboard. It's a

Brett:

Really cool packaging by the way. It's kind of a cylinder and it's cardboard. It's got your signature bowl on the front of it. Yeah, so how excited I'm about that. I don't do well with most protein powder, so I can't wait to try yours because confidence is going to be better.

Dean :

Absolutely. So that was the first part of the decision is we have to give our customers, we have to follow through with what we say we can't be. I think that's where brand trust breaks down and everything else with companies is when you say we care about this or we do this, and then you don't do it. Even the experience with the frontline team that you're working with, if you don't have the experience of how you say as a company you're going to do things, if you don't do it that way, you got a problem. So everything from the experience with our frontline teams, with our packaging, we want to be who we say we are. So it boils down to that. And then the other thing is the design on the cardboard. We just wanted it to have kind of a natural type of feel. I didn't want to overdo it. You see this packaging that's way overdone and we source from regenerative farms and we're kind of about returning to our roots as who we were back then. And that comes down to craftsmanship, who makes things anymore that are nice that they spend time on. So we thought about all those things with how we package our products and I think that's how our packaging evolved.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really great. I think there's been lots of studies on the psychology and the experience behind product packaging and of course when you think product packaging, a lot of people go to the Apple example and just how fun it is to open an Apple product and you feel good. You feel like you made a right choice when you open that product. I feel the same way when I open the heart and soil supplements. What I've also found is that we keep our supplements in part of our kitchen, so they're kind of visible as people come in. But having that glass jar out, I've noticed a few people look at it and say, what is this? Because it's also unique. It also says beef organs on it, which is also a little bit of a like, what are you doing here? I'm expecting a kale supplement. What's beef organs? But have you heard that before? Do you think this helps fuel word of mouth or are the products displayed maybe just a little bit more in a house because of the packaging?

Dean :

A hundred percent. Yeah. We get pictures from customers that send us pictures of how their supplements are displayed on their counter. Funny personal story, I think I could say it probably will take a couple of minutes. So I didn't have any experience in e-com before even getting into this whole thing. And you kind of have these proud moments sometimes. My dad works in North Carolina and he works on appliances and goes to people's homes. He was a business owner and then switched jobs at some point close to retirement. And my dad's not plugged into the health world. He doesn't know really what heart and soil is. He knows I work there and he knows it's a labor of love for me. But anyways, one day he's in this customer's house fixing their refrigerator and the customer grabbed something off of his counter and was like, Hey sir, I got to talk to you. I got to talk to you about, have you heard of heart and Soil? I was struggling. I was obese and had energy problems and he had all of our supplements lined up

Brett:

On his counter. He got the product evangelist trying to convert your dad,

Dean :

And he's talking to my dad. And I don't know, I think of some of my top wins in my career and just because I respect my dad so much and it's kind of a cool moment as a son, your dad is out in the wild in another state of the country and this guy comes up and shows you and tries to sell him on the products that I'm essentially involved with. It's pretty

Brett:

Cool. And then your dad being able to say, well, yeah, my son is the CEO of the company. That's a cool moment for your dad too,

To feel some pride for his son. That is so great. I think it's also really cool that with the right packaging and the right presentation of your product, it does impact the psychology of how someone experiences it, not just in displaying it and talking about it, but do they feel like it's working? And I know you don't eat supplements from a taste standpoint, but I've seen studies that show the packaging and the wording impacts the taste of a product, but I think it does impact the way someone experiences your product. But I think one really correlating topic here is margin and profitability. That's really been the name of the game as I know you guys have experienced, you guys launched in the pandemic, what a crazy time to launch an e-commerce brand, but then e-commerce took off. So there was a period of time there where it was all about growth at all costs, and there was wild times for e-commerce.

Now really the trend is okay, growth but profitable growth, you guys have been able to grow exceptionally fast with little to no margin degradation. You've been able to maintain your profitability, maintain your margins, and I would guarantee that some of your cost of goods are higher than others. So how do you think about that? How do you think about spending more on product packaging and more on ingredients and how that actually protects margins rather than herd it? Because I think a lot of people are attempting to make shortcuts on some of those things to give them more margin, but I think in a lot of ways it does the opposite.

Dean :

So for us, man, there's a few things that come to mind. One is the reason why I believe that we've been able to grow as quickly as we have without degradating margins is due to organic growth. That'd be the number one thing that I would even say. And that's a difficult thing to do. So you say like, well, why? Right? I assure you that it did not happen in the ad channel

Brett:

100%.

Dean :

And I was just talking to somebody about this the other day. They're like, man, what did you guys do? You shot out of a rocket ship and there were some timing things. It was a time of covid. People were thinking about their health. You had people really kind of thinking like, well, oh my gosh, what can I do to protect myself against Covid? There were those types of things that I think helped propelled us. But the number one thing that happened that people don't always realize is you got to back up. From launch date about four years, our founder, Dr. Paul Saladino, for four years built earned attention. Earned attention and an own audience podcast. Two of them every week daily Instagram posts, email newsletter. That was four years of not making a return, but building an engaged audience that legitimately wanted to hear from him and would've really cared. Seth, God always says, do you position yourself in a way in which if you left, would people miss you? Right? If he would've left on that day before launch, a whole lot of people, thousands of people would've missed him and would want to hear from him.

Brett:

Great way to put it

Dean :

That I think is the number one driver is the organic growth. And the hard part, when you get to the place where we're at right now, we went from zero to about 50 million in three years, and you hit a little bit of a different growth phase. And so the challenge is how do you continue to amplify that organic growth? Because I think the organic growth helps made the paid acquisition more efficient. It's difficult to do, you can't really measure it, but we're spending a lot of time thinking about those things right now. So organic growth is the first thing. The other thing, I mean, we pretty frequently revisit our terms with our suppliers,

Brett:

With

Dean :

Manufacturers,

Brett:

You've,

Dean :

We've made a lot of progress over the four years in those areas, which we could have easily not done and just let it go because the margins are good and it would've been no big deal. But if you can work on those operational components and save a margin point, a couple points here and there, it's huge for your business. It's huge. And it kind of prolongs the time that you can stay in business and you have extra resources to be able to hit that top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel.

Brett:

Yeah, you've got to protect margin. And I love the way you described that is finding a point or two here and there. It adds up and it allows you to either invest more for the customer, so invest in that next product, invest in that protein product, or it allows you to invest in great content or community or advertising or something, or just allows you to be a really healthy company, which then you're going to build to weather storms. Because one thing that we've learned lately is that nothing stays the same. You've got the global pandemic and then crazy inflation, all kinds of stuff, and it is not a predictable life. We live, right? And those companies that were not able to protect margin are really hurting now, really, really hurting the last year or so. It's been a struggle. And so companies like yours where you are protecting margin, you're in such a great place.

I want to talk a little bit about content for a second because this is so important. I don't know very many great brands, whether that's a consumer brand or great agencies. That's the space that I live in. Obviously as a service provider that don't do something related to organic content. And I think the very best are very good at organic content. My buddy Preston from Chubby, he talks about this all the time. It was one of the unlocks they had at Chubby and they had a 10 figure exit and then a billion dollar IPO. They started investing in organic content, fun, irreverent content related to their wild board shorts and other things that they sell. And sometimes you mentioned hard to track a return. I posted this content, what was the ROI on this content? I don't really know, but I know collectively what it does for me.

And I'm an ad guy, that's what we do as an agency. And I'm a firm believer in paid ads, but you've got to have a community as well, and organic fuels ads. It makes my job easier as an ad guy if you got go to organic content. So you guys do email marketing really well. That was another thing I was very impressed by. I would find myself reading your emails or go to, oh, delete this email. Like, oh, that's interesting. I'm going to click on that and then I'd read the whole thing. But yeah, how do you guys approach content? How do you think about it? Is the founder still really involved in content? Talk a little bit about that strategy.

Dean :

So our founder, he has his own kind of personal brand, and that's still very top of funnel for us and drives some people into our ecosystem content for us, if I could boil it down, it's like I believe that you need to have something to talk about that is worth talking about that other people care about. And in our, not that it's all about mission statement and this kind of woo stuff, but for us, at the end of the day, we want to inspire people and guide people to better health. And that's the way I look at content. I'm like, the first question to me is how can we inspire people? And then how can we guide people? How can we hit the inspiration piece? And then where in the funnel, what channels does it make sense to incorporate this more practical guidance types of pieces where someone's like, oh, if I'm shopping, do I have a shopping list?

How do I do that? And so that's how we approach content. We're like, how can we reach people, inspire? How can we give 'em practical steps to incorporate this stuff? And then how can we get them to share a piece of content with somebody else? So from a high level, that's essentially what drives it. And I think you need a product that essentially works and you need something worth talking about. And we have the blessing of our entire team believes in this stuff and they live it. Almost every single person here had a health condition that they were able to resolve using this lifestyle and our products or just eating liver. And so the people making the content, it comes through, it's subtle, but we're not relying, we're not saying, Hey, X and Y agency who doesn't really understand what we're doing. We're not having them create the content for us. We're doing it. And there's something about that

Brett:

Always better if you can do it, in my opinion, get someone to maybe help with the polishing of it or something. But the core should come from you. I think

Dean :

I agree. I a hundred percent agree. The passion comes through. And that was part of the strategy too, is like we're telling somebody, Hey, this and this can help with your health outcomes, so we better have people on camera that actually do it. We're not going to be the doctor that's telling you, Hey, don't smoke, it's bad for you, but then you're taking a smoke break and smoking a pack of cigarettes. We do it and we live it. And I think that that comes across in the content. It's a high level strategy. It's not a tactic, but it's more what fuels it, I believe.

Brett:

And that's so much more effective than having the goal of I must create content. I've got to create content today. That's what I got. And almost always that's going to come across as stilted or invaluable or you're just going to be talking to talk, but you guys are inspiring and guiding. And really your whole team is that guy that encountered your dad who's like, Hey, I got to tell you about that. I just got to tell you about it. I know you're fixing my appliance, but I got to tell you about these supplements, right? That's your whole team. And so the content comes naturally there. Am I inspiring and am I guiding? And then that's also a good way to, okay, maybe I have an off day creating content as we all have them. Is this inspiring at all? Is this guiding anybody? Is this helping in any way? Okay, I got to rework it, but I love your content, love your emails. So thank you. Keep up that work for sure.

Dean :

I was going to add one more thing to that that I think is important, and it is quite obvious to a lot of people that have been in marketing for a while, but one book, Donald Miller StoryBrand,

Brett:

One of the best dude, loved

Dean :

Donald Miller, huge fan. Yeah, I've listened to him for a while, and Seth Godin also. But that book I remember is when everything clicked for me and I was like, oh, and this is pre heart and soil when I was doing other creative marketing. But that's been one kind of guiding principle for us, is that it is not about us, it's about the customer. It's about the barriers that they have to achieve, the outcome that they want and their life. And so if you look at our newsletter, our Instagram, our YouTube, our podcast, that principle, you can see it across all of our different channels and sometimes we stray away from it a little bit, but that's one consistent that we've had from day one. And I think it's very, very important if you're, it's not about you. Who are you trying to serve? What are the barriers in their life and how do you help them with your product and with your messaging?

Brett:

Yeah. I love the way Donald Miller positions it. You are not the hero in your customer's story. They are the hero in their story. You're the guide. You're the one who's helping them unlock and get to another level of the hero journey. You're the ones climbing Mount Everest, you're the 10, Zig the Sherpa, helping them along the path to get where they want to go. And sometimes, yeah, you do have to postures, maybe I don't like the word posture, but maybe you got to position yourself. Here's why we're so freaking awesome, but so that we can support you so that you can become the hero that you want to be and deserve to be and things like that. So yeah, it's a really great way to position it. Love Donna Miller and how to build a StoryBrand. Awesome, awesome stuff.

Dean :

I had one more thought as you said that, and this might be useful, but this is an example of it. So we were maybe a couple of weeks ago actually, that the team was producing some real content for Instagram, and it was essentially showing off what we're doing at HQ and what we're eating. And one teammate kind of called it out and is like, oh, we're like, Hey, this is about us. Look at what we eat. And it sparked a conversation that was like, it's a subtle difference, but it's like, okay, let's still show what we're eating, but let's say, Hey, I come into work every day at eight. I struggle with having energy at 10. Some of you may experience that as well. This is what I eat for breakfast, right?

Brett:

Yes. You

Dean :

Flip that around and you add that context to where it can resonate with somebody and you're not just talking about yourself or just showing a highlight reel of what you're doing as a brand.

Brett:

Yeah, totally agree. Because you can be inspiring by showing someone what you eat for the day, because like, Hey, this is how I solve my energy problem. I want to help you solve your energy problem too. So here's how I do it. That's valuable. Just, Hey, take a look at what I'm eating is not

Dean :

No, exactly. That's

Brett:

Valuable. That's great. So one thing I want to get into, and this is something you shared at Blue Ribbon in Austin. We're a growing agency, we're acquiring other agencies. That's kind of one of our areas of focus as we move in the next three to five years. I'm investing in brands. I love this space, but I've got to be more and more disciplined with my time. There's a time in my twenties when we didn't have kids and I can just work all the time, and they're like, whatever. But now I've got to be focused with my time. And so I'm just really curious, how do you structure your day or your week rather as a CEO, and what insights might we be able to gain from that?

Dean :

It's changed a lot, and this is something I tweak a lot, and I think everyone should. Yeah, me too. You can set something and try to force yourself to do it for an extended period of time, and it can get to a point where it's not productive. So I've noticed that as a CEO too. There's always different pressures at different phases and you have to adjust and adapt and kind of meet the moment where it is. But there's a few things that have always worked for me. One is I do deep work better in the mornings than the afternoons, and so I'm very protective of my time in the morning. So generally I'll break out. Monday is my more management day. It's when we have our leadership meeting, and we do do that one in the morning, but we do a lot of deep work and make decisions on things, and it's more strategy focused.

I do a lot of one-on-ones on Mondays. I get those knocked out at the beginning of the week. I think it's good to kind of start the week with some momentum and have those conversations and not if you have those on Thursday, I think you've missed some days. So I'd like to get off with good energy with the whole team. The other days, Tuesday's more like product or research focused. Wednesdays I dip into the financial stuff, but my meetings, if I have a meeting with our fractional CFO or whatever, that's kind of on that financial day. But in the afternoon, the deeper work is in the morning Thursdays. I try to, aside from this conversation, what Wednesday generally if I'm talking to anybody outside of the company, I do that Thursday afternoon.

Brett:

That's great.

Dean :

I try not to kind of mess up the flow of those other days and make sure that I'm giving my due diligence to whatever the topic is for that particular day. And Thursdays are a little r and r too. I try to take the morning hikes on Thursdays, get in more of that reflective state, if that makes sense.

Brett:

Totally.

Dean :

I kind of go on and off with this habit, but I found it really helpful to write things down by hand. And so I'm a big fan

Brett:

Of, you remember better when you write by hand? A

Dean :

Hundred percent. I've tried. It's funny. Most of my life I've been at a productivity nerd, so I've tried every productivity system, workflows, connecting apps together. I've tried so many things, and the one thing that it just works every time is writing things down. I remember it better. I retain it better. And as a reflective exercise to when's the last time you thought back? What happened a Friday afternoon? What happened this week? Where was I good?

What decisions did I make? Were those the right decisions? What could I have done differently? I think most people rarely do that kind of work, easy to do. It's like any other habit that's really powerful and compounds over time, but it just is something that's easy to let go. I try to do that stuff Thursday and then Fridays, I try to keep those days light as well. And I do a little bit more strategy work, longer term, three year type thinking for the company on those days. Of course, any business fires pop up all the time and sometimes it gets disrupted. I'm not trying to paint a perfect picture for your audience, like, oh, that's impossible. But more or less directionally that's what I try to do. And sometimes a wrench gets thrown into it and that's okay. You don't stress over it. You just kind of move on.

Brett:

Yeah, totally. There's going to be days, there's going to be weeks where it gets derailed a little bit, but that's all right. You get right back on track. And I really liked the way you laid that out. The way Alex Ozzi kind of talks about it. You got either manager time or maker time. Those are the phrases he used, and it's a different mindset, right? Manager is all about efficiency and it's also about people and relationship and let's get as many meetings in as we can and let's tackle problems. The maker time, it's kind of like I need space, I need room to breathe. I need to go deep and kind of get lost in something and think creatively. And so those usually don't go well together. But my calendar is actually similar in a lot of respects to the way you're doing it. I like more meeting days early in the week because I think if you're waiting until later in the week, I wouldn't be able to focus if I didn't have my meetings and my check-ins and our all hands and all that stuff. If that was later in the week, I would've a hard time going deep the first part of the week because I'd be worried about stuff.

And so I think getting that, taking care of that, prioritizing that first frees me up anyway to do other things. I really like the way you also said, Hey, Thursday afternoons, that's when I talk to outside people from the company. And I think you have this temptation and this's, this temptation as a CEO of a growing agency, I need to be accessible and people need to be able to reach me. And no, what your responsibility is to your team and to the company and maximizing that return. You are not responsible for outside people. And so obviously you need to be accessible to a certain degree, but keep that confined. And I think that's really, really smart. So you said that that's kind of evolved over the years. Did you any resources there? Trial and error? How did you land on that?

Dean :

Yeah, I kind of landed on that. I mean, it's taken many shapes or forms, like the deep work stuff and the shallow work morning, afternoon, that's always stayed consistent. One thing that I've refined that really helps a lot, and you kind of hit on this a little bit, but I think somebody needs to take inventory of what is the deep work that I should be doing that's going to add the most value. You can go through day to day and spend time on things that aren't really that meaningful. And so what I do, and there's a million ways you can do this, is in my project management or my task management software. It's Asana. I have a custom field for deep work or shallow work and then a priority.

And what I found really works for me is that I have an input capture. So anytime in a meeting, anytime somebody texts me, anytime it's in Slack and there's an actual action that I need to take or a question in my mind of something I need to figure out, I input capture that into Asana very quickly. And so this list starts getting created in there, and I don't pay attention to that list until the end of the day. So my last 20 minutes in the day, I go into that list and I'm like, okay, is this important? Is it not? And I kind of move, and this is the key, is I will block out time if that thing's going to take more than five, 10 minutes or it involves an hour of deep focus, I block it on the calendar and I attach that task to it.

So that helps me not get distracted by this giant list of things that I need to do. Because if I set my calendar on Sundays, I set it for the whole week and it evolves a little bit. That's why I revisit it every single afternoon. I might adjust some things for the next day moving forward, but if I do that right, then when I show up every day, I know exactly what I need to do. The resources, the conversations I had are all right there. So I'm not poking around in 10 different systems to try to figure out where I'm at. And I take notes on that stuff in the task. And so it kind of keeps me on track. That's been one of the biggest, I hate the word game changer, but it's been the biggest tool that's really helped me focus my time and energies in the right place.

Brett:

So good. Always trying to get to that highest and best use of time. And not that you can't do small stuff, sometimes we have to do that, but yeah, prioritizing, preparing. So you go into your day and you know what you're going to do, and then if you get derailed a little bit, that's all right. Then you just get right back on track and knock out the list.

Dean :

And what doesn't work or what hasn't worked for me is blocking every single minute of the day because it's easy to do that if you start. Most people when they start doing that, they block out every single minute. I drove myself crazy doing that, and I failed over and over. I wasn't getting all the stuff done. And then it would just add up. And

Brett:

Then if you feel like, oh, I missed that block. Oh, I missed that block. Ah, just screw it. I missed the whole

Dean :

Thing. Exactly. Or you start noticing that tasks that you blocked, you don't actually do 'em when the time comes up. That's a signal to me like, oh, this isn't really important. So then I either delete it or I figure out somebody who should work on it. And most often or not, it's just not important,

Brett:

Really, really good. And man, that's one of the biggest unlocks is just realizing maybe I don't need to do this at all. Maybe I need someone else needs to do it, or maybe we just don't need to do it, which I think is pretty powerful too. So Dean, this has been awesome. I'm mindful of time. I know you got a hard stop. Very generous. You're very generous with your time. This was really, really helpful. What's next for heart and soil supplements? I'm super excited to try the protein, and that just got released, so that's new. But what's next for you and or heart and soil?

Dean :

A lot of exciting things. I'm spending a lot of my deep focus time right now on, I don't have an answer to the question yet, but we talk about this organic growth and how to amplify it and word of mouth, how to amplify that. And at the end of the day, for us, it's like how do we not just drop the supplements on somebody's step and walk away, but how do we actually become actively involved in their transformation and in their journey? I found I'm really inspired by what Dave Ramsey has built at the Ramsey

Brett:

Network. So good, so

Dean :

Good. And I've got a number of things planned, but what's interesting there is I had this aha moment one day where I was like, whoa, this network that Dave Ramsey has built is really good at moving someone from in debt to out of debt and happy. And then I realized that the same things that get in the way with changing your health outcomes are the same things that get in the way with personal finance. It's very obvious. Everybody knows, oh, I should spend less than what I make. Everyone knows that. It's not like it's not rocket science saving some money, not rocket science, but for some reason, 90% of people can't do that. But he's built a framework that gets people to their goal works.

Brett:

It works.

Dean :

And that's when I realized that health is the same way. It's like there's nuance in it. There isn't personal finance, but there's a lot of confusion and nuance. But at the end of the day, most people know I shouldn't be drinking a bunch of alcohol. I shouldn't.

Brett:

You should move a little.

Dean :

Yeah, I shouldn't be overeating. I shouldn't be eating all these processed foods. People have an intuitive sense of what they should do and what they shouldn't do, but they don't do it. So what gets in the way, it's those psychological barriers

Brett:

And

Dean :

It's the psychological barriers in the finance world. And so I started studying kind of his ecosystem, and I've talked with some folks over there, and I'm trying to figure out right now, how do we build even more of an ecosystem and maybe some non-physical products to actually help people in that same kind of way that Dave Ramsey does in personal finance? And I think that'll be a huge unlock for us as a business, but I think it's going to be an even greater unlock for the people that we're trying to serve.

Brett:

It's a big challenge, but kudos to you for working on tackling it. Yeah, it's not that we don't know what to do per se, it's that we don't have the inspiration. We maybe don't have tools, and then we don't have the guidance that we need. And so it sounds like you guys are providing that already to a certain degree and wanting to go deeper in that, which is really, really awesome. So super great, man. Thank you so much. Heart and Soil co. Check it out. Buy some of that new protein, try the beef organs, try anything else that looks or sounds good to you, try it. I'm confident you're going to love it. Any final words of wisdom or anything else that the audience should check out?

Dean :

I just want to say thank you. This was a great conversation. I enjoyed it. If people do want to look me up, I'm on Twitter. Dean c Brennan, you can find Heart and Soul on Instagram pretty easily. Just search heart and soil. Heart and soil supplements. But no, I've loved this conversation and I haven't done a ton of these, and I get a little nervous for talking in front of people, but this was great,

Brett:

Dude. Yeah, you're a natural man. This was easy for me as a host and super fun on it, and I wish we had more time. I guess one of those things where we're like,

Dean :

Dang,

Brett:

Conversation's over that was super, super fast and really good. So yeah, kudos to you. I'll link to Twitter and Instagram and stuff. Obviously it's easy to search and find, but I'll link to it in the show notes as well. Cool. Dean Brennan, ladies and gentlemen, Dean, thank you so much.

Dean :

Thanks for having me, Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? And if you haven't done it, leave that review on iTunes. That helps other people discover the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

In this fast-paced episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I sit down with Neil Twa, co-founder and CEO of Voltage, to discuss the future of Amazon selling. Neil, a brand owner, investor, and podcaster himself, shares invaluable insights on how to navigate the evolving Amazon landscape in 2024 and beyond. From AI-driven changes to brand-building strategies, this episode is packed with actionable advice for sellers looking to stay ahead of the curve.

‍

Key topics covered:

• The impact of AI on Amazon's search algorithm, including the upcoming Cosmo engine and how it will revolutionize product discovery
• Amazon SEO strategies for 2024, focusing on optimizing images, titles, and overall listing quality
• The importance of building a true brand on Amazon, moving beyond just being a seller
• Strategies for profitable growth, including Neil's 20% EBITDA target and minimum $12 net profit per unit rule
• The future of Amazon selling, including the potential need for design or utility patents to defend against competition

‍

Whether you're a seasoned Amazon seller or just starting out, this episode provides critical insights to help you thrive in the ever-changing world of e-commerce. Don't miss Neil's expert advice on building a sustainable and profitable Amazon business in 2024 and beyond.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(02:12) The Importance of Amazon SEO

(16:43) Preparing for the Personalized Search Engine Algorithm

(29:25) The Influence of Rufus (AI Shopping Assistant)

(34:11) Building a Brand and Expanding Product Lines

(42:48) Prioritizing Profitability and EBITDA

(48:12) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Neil Twa (LinkedIn) 
• Voltage Digital Marketing 
• The High Voltage Business Builder Podcast
• PickFu
• Bryan Porter
• Simple Modern

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

---

Transcript:

Neil:

Market the product correctly, understand the organic engine versus PPC, and then understand how we create quality products, not me too products to move them into full product launches.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we're talking Amazon growth building an Amazon flywheel, and how you should grow your brand on Amazon in 2024. My guest is Neil Twa, he's the co-founder and CEO of Voltage. And Neil, surprisingly is from my part of the country. So he's in southwest Missouri just like me and really a unique perspective that Neil has. So he's a podcaster, he's a brand owner, he's an investor, he's involved in private equity, and so he's building brands, he's buying brands, he's selling brands, so he knows the Amazon space inside and out. And so today we're really going to talk about several topics. We're going to talk about AI and how it's changing the Amazon landscape. We're going to dive into Amazon, SEO because it's still super important as we'll talk about what's new there. Going to dig into building a brand and being profitable. And also may talk about how to grow your business during an election cycle, which some wrenches may be thrown in the works a little bit. So we're going to tackle that as well. But with that, Neil, welcome to the show, man. And how's it going? Good,

Neil:

Man. I'm doing wonderful. Thanks for having me

Brett:

Here. Yeah, thanks for being here. I had a blast on your podcast. It's good show. Excited to do the old podcast swap and get you here. We

Neil:

Still managed, didn't do it in person, even though I think we're like an hour when he's southwest. We're literally an hour that hardly ever happens. Dude. I talk to people from all over the world, but I hardly ever talk to anybody in my state.

Brett:

Same. It's always like one of the coasts. We're an hour apart but still an hour. That's so

Neil:

Well had a cram of meeting below this one and one on the other side of it, so it's like I couldn't get to you in time. Totally.

Brett:

We'll get to it. Totally. Exactly. Yeah, that's awesome man. So let's talk Amazon SEO O. And the reason why this is still so important as a topic is because still the vast majority of purchases on Amazon are driven by search. If we want to buy something on Amazon, what do we do? We go and we search. Maybe we're discovering products through the recommendation engine and other things, but it's mostly still search. So if you want to win the Amazon game, you have to know SEO. So Neil kind of break down that what's the 80 20 of Amazon SEO? What are the things we need to be focused on that really drive 80% of the impact? Well, it's

Neil:

Important to understand that that has inverted and changed over the years. Organic used to be the big engine 2012 to 2017 ish. And then with the adoption of PPC and the growth of that inside of Amazon and hiring away Google engineers and reformatting the whole thing, they've now turned into a media engine that by 2026 is going to be a marketing and distribution and advertising engine surpassing the profits of their AWS, which basically runs the interwebs. So this is going to be a massive change that everybody needs to prepare for with 50 50 on the organic now and the PP 50% of your sales still come from organic. Now we will always love to see that inverted and turn that into the 80 20 where we get 80% organic and 20% PPC, which is a shot we always go for. And there's metrics you have to look at in the organic side before that's even accomplished.

And one of the things, it's a tactical level now that I've kind of explained this. Here's a strategy to this, which is basically get more organic sales and get less PPC if at all possible and use PPC to kind of power the engine, but don't make it the engine. And a lot of people miss that because they don't know things like Amazon's IDQ score, which is where your SEO engine is inside of your little playground on Amazon, within your seller account, within your asin, you get assigned a score and that score is going to go down.

Brett:

What is that score again?

Neil:

IQ score. idq. It's a score basically considered a hundred points and everybody gets a fair shot at it from the very beginning. So the engine itself, this a nine engine in the filing system is just trying to look where to place you and in this big marketplace so that you aren't completely buried by other products in your niche or what's called a node on Amazon with somebody who has 20,000 reviews. So you might want to go compete with them and they don't want to bury you. Why? Because the social aspect in commerce and the economic engine of changing products and innovation means they may not want to miss a great product that's going to market and simply bury some opportunity because the next guy has 20,000 reviews. So they built the system really as a free market, which is cool, so you can actually get a product in the marketplace even if somebody has five, 10,000 reviews.

In fact, Amazon itself has told us that in this search, in this engine that you are going to see 5% of all of Amazon revenues in the first year go to product launched in that year. Okay? It's not a lot, right? So here's where this goes. Strategy year two and year three, that goes 20% and 40% by year three. So you need to think of any market E in this day and age. You've got to battle through years two and three to make any e-commerce platform an opportunity, any paid traffic and opportunity. And of course organic search is a huge component of that done.

Brett:

Just to break that down and just to clarify that, Neil, because that's a really interesting point. So only 5% of sales in a category will go to products launched year. Actually

Neil:

All of Amazon revenues for year one SKUs are only 5%. Yeah, it jumps to 20% in year two and it jumps to 40% in year three. So those who are thinking they're going to hit their home runs in year one need to be really prepared that by year two and year three, the brand is going to mature, the reviews are going to mature. Your ranking and market share are going to mature. Your growth is going to mature along with Amazon's normal growth and expectations. So what do they want you to do? In simple terms? I want you to launch more products. What do I want you to do? Launch more products, right? Increase the base and portfolio of your product base and the engine itself on Amazon will reward you. Why? Because demand capture, we have to understand what Amazon is. It's now a demand capture platform.

It used to be demand creation when I started, which was very different, but now it is demand capture. So things like social commerce, Facebook, TikTok shops, other locations, influencers around the web and et cetera are creating the demand through that creation. But it's being captured 30% of the time from television ads on Amazon 30% of the time from paid traffic channels on Amazon TikTok shops, we see 30% of it go. We call that the halo effect. So in an omnichannel strategy, you have to understand that Amazon is demand capture. So we got to go in with the understanding that this organic engine is setting there wanting to basically present a product based on existing demand. Now, I think so many people think that you go to put a product on Amazon and you need to create demand for it. You don't actually need to do that.

You don't need to get offsite traffic to it in the first six months. You don't need to do a lot of funnels and a lot of heavy lifting. What you need to do is optimize for organic inside. That's your strategy. So tactically, what do we do when you launch an asin? Don't touch it for the first seven to 21 days. I know that the issue is, well, I'm not going to make enough sales. I just put it in there and it's nothing good. That's going to happen. But in actuality, you're going to lower that IDQ score. If you start ads from the very beginning, as will not convert well from the very beginning, and then you'll have a engine that now shows us that it becomes dependent on the ad traffic in order to expand the reach of that asin. You understand what happens? They penalize you, they penalize you because they want to make more money off of you and you and your ignorance go and put your credit card in and start buying traffic from day one and then you are now forced to buy more traffic for the life of that asin.

So how do we avoid that? Don't touch the product launch for the first seven to 21 days. Resist the urge to start no ads. What are you looking for? You're looking for that 80%. Am I dialed in? Do I get impressions? Do I get clicks? Hopefully I get some sales and I start to see how optimized my data set is for this AI engine because that's what it is. I'm not selling products to people. Amazon is I'm selling listings to an AI engine. I'm selling data. So as a direct marketer and a business guy, that's how I approach the system. So I talk about product. So many people focus on product development and r and d to the point of capitulating, any opportunity when they really need to focus on what's the data and how do I sell the product? Because sales fixes everything. And the next step is innovation of a product to move you away from the market share innovation will create more demand and those product skews that mature in 24 and 36 months, you'll continue to innovate them because we all know that products become saturated brands. Why there's 15 different burger joints and 24 different coffee shops because they're all selling similar products, but they're different brands. So in the organic strategy, we need to move towards the brands, and while we do that, we need to be able to capture the demand that already exists and it's in there running at 8,600 units a minute. So don't think that you don't have opportunity on Amazon and you need to do all this other stuff in order to drive demand for your product on the marketplace. It's moving 8,600 units a minute.

Brett:

Yeah, I mean that's the real strength of Amazon. The traffic is there, the demand is there. You just got to capture what is there and then you can move on to the next step, right? So what are some of the components of that IDQ score that we need to be aware of and that we can help guide or manipulate?

Neil:

Some of them are obvious because Amazon gives you that seller health account status and always we want it to be green. That's returns, defects rates and other things you have to pay attention to that. If your product is not meeting demand, those defect rates will go down and as they go down, so does your IDQ score, right? Just the quality and conversion of the listing can also lower it. If you are what's called unit session percentage on Amazon USP or in the marketing world, the conversion rate is lower than the top three to 10 competitors in your node that currently have that market share, you're never going to overtake them, right? You're going to be at a degraded state in the data engine before you even try to manipulate it.

Brett:

Why would Amazon move you ahead of them? They know that for every 100 people that see their products, more people are going to buy than for every 100 that sees your product. So you're going to get penalized and move down

Neil:

The page. They already know the historical data of those products. The data's already there, the system's there, the inventory's already moving. So you are stepping into a very competitive state, which means you need to do something very different to be competitive and no longer can you just throw up a listing and a he'll marry and say, well, I'm going to get a few hundred units and all my hopes and Lambo dreams are going to come true. It just doesn't work anymore like that. It really doesn't, right? So we have to capitalize on that both from a conversion perspective, which is going to do the first 7, 10, 21 days are going to tell us that how well are we optimizing our data against current market share? Alright? And then it's just going to get down to as it works better, and we have a phrase in our company, don't marry your product.

Steal someone else's girlfriend instead, right? Because that product data has to prove itself for the first 100 units, and I'm looking at it in a 90 day cashflow plan, okay, a hundred units, 90 days, can I move that in 90 days or less? The faster I move it in 90 days on a hundred unit test order, that will determine how much more inventory I'm going to put in based on conversion and metrics I'm seeing come through the first 30, 60 days. If I'm turning over that a hundred units in the first 60 days or less, I'll order a thousand units. I've seen provable data, I've seen growth in the worst conditions possible. New seller count, usually new health. If you're a new seller and you've got no stats whatsoever, a brand, no one's ever heard of or whatever, you're just at the base of all the business.

It's the worst scenario. If you can get at selling in that scenario, it will only get better if you do it. And what will negatively impact, of course, is bad product at that point because negative reviews will come in, negative seller feedback will come in and that will kill the engine. It just beats it to death. So we have to do those two fundamental things really well. Market the product correctly, understand the organic engine versus PPC and then understand how we create quality products, not me too products to move them into full product launches. The engine will reward that as that stats come in and those sellers come in that IDQ score will actually stay high enough to compete with the current IDQ scores, which we will not know because Amazon close to the test data, but we can see it in the market share of the competitors that are in the market.

Now, you may enter market with 40 to 60 competitors, but let's be very clear, there's only five to seven competitors in your niche you're ultimately ever going to compete with on all of Amazon with billions of SKUs. When you niche your product in, there's only five to seven major competitors you have to deal with and they're the ones that are going to own all the market share, right? So I'm sorry if I'm going too far detailed into your question, but I want to make sure we cover the aspects of it. Organic versus PPC. We're actually going to then focus on something called TA costs tacos. We joke about tacos, total advertising, cost of sale, organic and PPC sales. So once I see organic sales and data coming in, I'll launch my auto campaigns. We'll go through another 30, 60, 90 days guys, not five or seven minutes. I think a whole lot of people want to happen, but we'll go through the next 30, 45, 60 days as that campaign dials in as we see the data and statistics come in, then we make very data driven moves next to target products and growth that continue to mature that product cycle.

Brett:

Great. So kind of going back to IDQA little bit. So we're trying to limit things like returns and defects and negative reviews and we're trying to optimize conversion rate and things like that. What are some of the other elements that are contained in that and how do we know when we need to pull a lever to try to improve a certain element of that score?

Neil:

So with that unit session percentage and basically in the world of conversions, it can be anywhere between three to 5% at volume of movement or as high as five to 25% in terms of smaller niche based products or long tail keywords that offer that higher conversion for your unit session percentage, typically you want to target higher at the beginning and then it's going to come down if it's within three to 5%, usually for higher volume products, you're really dialed in and that's a great metric because if you get the profitability right, then it turns into a whole lot of fun, but the metric of it is if you go to the dashboard, it's changed. If you go kind of to the ASIN listing itself versus we're talking about mobile differences because 60% of all the sales on prime day were mobile, so you got to understand the differences, but they're still 40% of desktop.

That makes up a huge thing and it's easier for people to visualize this for a second, but if you go to the listing and you basically draw an F across it, you're going to come down the image side on the left, you're actually going to go over to the title and then you're going to go down through the first two bullet points. So it's kind of like a big F when they come down through images and they're looking to basically revalidate the capture they have in their mind the demand, it's already created, the audience, the conversation, the referral, the social media thing, a friend that bought it, all they're looking to do is get that validation of emotional charge off the images and say, does it fit, look and seem like something I can

Brett:

Always, is this what I'm looking for?

Neil:

This is what I'm looking for. And it's really down to the images. If that does not quite fulfill the need or something is not answered, you didn't speak to their specific need or unique situation or the solution in which that they were thinking, they'll go to the title and they are like, well, was this the large? Was this this small? Was this the heavy duty was this, well, this fit the person up to 300 pounds. Well let's do this. And if that is validated in the title and you've done a good job, they'll slip right over to the add to cart button and they'll do that in 30 seconds or less. If they don't, they're going to go to your bullet points. By the time they get to your bullet points, you may have already lost them and it goes very fast on this system.

So between the product itself, price point is just a variable of the solution if you are, and what I mean by that is if you're selling products on Amazon like 30 50 less in retail price point 30 or less in retail price point, they're going to be very price conscientious. They're going to be very review driven and I would like to avoid that altogether. So I sell products, and this sounds opposite of your brain, but I sell products 50 to $200 in retail price point because they are not thinking necessarily about the cost, which sounds counterintuitive, and they're not really reading the reviews to look for the negatives. They're looking for reinforcement of the solution. That's a very different psychology of those two buyers. I prefer to play in the one who's like, well, I don't really care if it has a 250 reviews, if there's one that has 200,000 reviews. What I'm really looking for, does this provide my solution? Is it right from me? Solution oriented to problem solve fast and hit that A to cart. Now mobile's a little different

Brett:

Products are just looking at the image, maybe glancing at the title then that's enough for me, I'm just going to buy it. But they are

Neil:

There to capture that demand. You've seen it, my kids, my wife, the 7-year-old, et cetera. We've watched how fast they're just like, Hey, this is the one I want. This is what I was looking for. This is the one that Bobby had. This is the one that SIS had. They're like, whoop, this is the one we want. Knowing the return process, knowing Amazon comes to your door, if I don't like it, I'll return it. Right? That's typically how people look

Brett:

At it. Very cool. Very cool. Talk about the new changes that are coming down the pike here with a nine and some of the AI engine driving that. How is that going to impact search and then what do we need to be preparing

Neil:

For? So organic search itself is going to change dramatically. 10 plus years over 12 years of the A nine system when it first came in, it really hasn't changed. Just the fundamental core of the whole engine policies, compliance, fake reviews, we can talk about that and how it's getting involved and all that stuff has to do with everything that revolves around that same core keyword based search demand engine, and it's all keyword based at this point, but with something coming called Cosmo, there's a white paper on it, it's out there now. You can go check it out if you want to read the white paper. I didn't. I had ai, help me read the white paper smart

And summarize and get into the details and really understand some of the core fundamentals of what's changing. Cosmo is changing as a large language model in LLM into all this data, petabytes, terabytes of maybe even zetabytes of data that Amazon has collected in its entire history, and it's turning that engine into a solution oriented, basically, it's revolving around not just everything you buy, but the people that buy what you watch and what you interact with online. I think minority report, okay, when he's walking through and it's like, Hey, you need this because you're this person, or hey, you've got blue eyes, so you need these sunglasses. It's going to know crazy amounts of things about us, and it's going to go through your Twitch and your freebie and your prime videos and it's going to look at the way you're accessing that data, what you're watching when you're watching it, and it's providing all that information back to this new engine called Cosmo, and it's then going to only present the most highly relevant products to your demand at the time you are looking at it very dramatic, right?

They're going to change the way the engine produces navigation search and results, which is going to be obvious impact to the customer. As the engine test went down, they did it on 10% of their search and market and they ended up with 4.9 billion in additional revenue, a 0.7% increase in CTR and only 10% change. So this is going to happen, and part of rolling that out is we now see rufuss coming to the table because it's going to change the way you interact with the system. You're going to become more dependent on things like this AI system called rufuss, which just launched in early 2024 just earlier this year, and that engine is starting to help you make product-based decisions based on your current data and questions you ask it. So it's formulating even more information into Cosmo to help refine the coming changes. Now, there's not going to be some date in this end, like November 30th, this is all going to change.

Amazon rolls this stuff out and you don't even know what's happening. So as a new seller, you should be very aware of that because the way you think about keywords and the way you're going to be trained to the listing and the way you're going to adapt any old training is all basically going to go away is what I'm saying. And it's going to have to change towards how do I write a natural language convincing query-based listing that has not just keyword stuff but natural language into it, right? It's going to know, for example, and this is one of their examples, that a woman would be pregnant and if she's pregnant, she might want these kinds of products based on her history or other people like her who have watched certain SOS or done certain things. It could go down as far as to her watching bridezilla on freebie and then basically showing her products that would be targeted specifically to her upcoming wedding, whereas right now it's completely general.

So again, think minority report in the way this thing is going to start tracking and showing ads that are relevant to you. It's a huge change. We've never seen anything like it, but of course the system and the data have all now proven that it's going to work extremely well. So existing sellers, if you're paying attention to this, what does that mean for you? Everything you've done with keyword, everything you've gotten away with in the last five or seven years from keyword stuffing listings or putting in semantic based queries into your language and your copy, you're going to be negatively impacted. Here's one thing you could do very quickly, just tactically right now, if you've got an image tag and a listing already running on Amazon, take the images, all of them and one by one, upload them to chat GTP or Claude AI and ask it to describe the image to you.

If the image describes something completely different than what you're seeing, you're going to get a negative strike. So if it doesn't describe the coffee grinder that's in the image, but it tells you that it looks like a dog whistle, you're going to be screwed, right? The images and relevant of the reading, the data and the intuition of the engine are now going to drive the results, not the keywords. They don't need you on the keywords anymore. The engine and the data are way more intelligent than we are, so it's going to be able to show and predict based on images and the copy language and the viewing ship and exposure online and videos and everything they're doing down to what just in time they want to buy to increase that conversion rate. And it's going to come and it's going to come relatively fast and many people are going to be caught off guard.

Brett:

Yeah, it's super interesting. So there's a couple of things that really come to mind here as I hear this one, nobody really has more actionable data and behavioral data than Amazon. Maybe Google, Google's got all your search history and the sites you visit, stuff

Neil:

Like that. Yeah, they're selling information but not products in the menu.

Brett:

Yeah, Amazon knows what you're buying and when and what you're watching on Amazon Prime or Freeview or these other channels, and so they really know you and so that's super interesting. I'm curious, so if we think about a search engine results page, so I go to Amazon and I'm searching for, I just bought a Blackstone griddle or my wife got me one for Father's Day. So I'm looking for all kinds of tools and stuff like that. So I'm looking for Blackstone accessories as a search. What percentage of that search results page do you think will be unique to me versus what percentage will be like cookie cutter across anybody that searches that

Neil:

Keyword? I predicted as this rolls out, and I could be completely wrong in this guess, but I'm going to put my crystal ball out here for a second. And guess that you're only going to see the most relevant listings to you, which may be seven to 10 listings. It may be four or five. It's certainly not going to be hundreds anymore.

Brett:

Interesting. I know when you Google

Neil:

Highest converting relative to your history viewing and intent to buy based on all the data that you've consumed or have had in your purchase history already and people like you,

Brett:

Super interesting. So I remember when Google first started doing personalized results in the SERP and they would kind of say it's about 20% of the results are personalized to you. And I don't know that percentage just probably shifted some over time, but it sounds like maybe Amazon's going all in on, Hey, we're just showing personalized items for you. I guess probably depends on the category, and I probably chose a bad example, Blackstone accessories, there's only so many of them, so maybe that's going to be pretty similar across the board. But what's really interesting about this two, Neil is to me this sounds like now you're just building products and building listings for people. Now you're building listings for your ideal customer. And so

Neil:

As you always

Brett:

Getting a clear picture of who your buyer is, what their life is like, what problem you're solving, what they're going to like about it, what kind of photos would speak to them, what kind of headline would speak to them, because then Amazon should know who's likely to buy it as well. And so this is more about marketing to people than it's building for an algorithm,

Neil:

Specialty marketing to the intent of the buyer, and they've been building that pattern of behavior for a long time, watching your frequently buys, watching data in the background of how you interact and what you purchase versus what you clicked on and didn't purchase and for what reasons you did. And they've been compiling that data for a long time and it's so much data, they haven't had the processing power to actually get it through a large language model, but now they do thanks to Nvidia and the creation of GPUs and all the stuff they're doing, they're building these hyper stacked based machines. I know the one that Elon's working with Dell on right now just went live like hundred thousand Nvidia S one hundreds or whatever the top end one that was, I forget the actual name of it. It's huge processing power. So it's going to be able to really quickly move that data, and I even predict things like, okay, I'm watching an outdoor sporting goods thing on freebie or something for the outdoor bass classic, and here it comes.

Instead of showing me a woman with Swiffer wet on the floor, it's going to show me the rods and the reels and the boat accessories and everything specialty relative to my niche and my thing. And I'll be like, oh shoot, lemme get that right. And it'll increase what's 30% of demand from television right now? I think it's going to increase at the 40 or 50% people watching it are going to end up on Amazon and buy the product because it's sitting right there. It's hyper relevant. It's like, oh, that's the fishing poll I want, and there it is. They're offering me a discount. I was just watching bass fishing. It's like,

Brett:

Yep, shoppable moments in those TV media moments. Really, really powerful.

Neil:

The risk is for those who don't listen to this, the risk is those who don't heed the change that are coming and like, well, I'm invincible. I've been there for five years. My ASINs been doing a million plus a year and I'm not going to be infected by this wrong. Your listing is going to be out of date very fast and it's not going to be optimized. You're going to have to be paying very close attention to

Brett:

That. So your advice then one is images and it does make sense and I've had a good friend of mine told me years ago like, Hey, if your images alone, don't sell your product, you need to go back to work on your images. The rest is important too, but the images, if they don't sell the product, get to work, make those better. So we run our images through an AI tool of our choice and have it tell us what the image is. If it's getting it wrong, we got to fix it. What else are we changing then? Are we changing the titles? We're changing the listing, the bullets, we're

Neil:

Looking at titles next really because titles should be very specific to the product type. So if somebody says something's heavy duty, that's really kind of a generalized term. One man's heavy duty could be, it holds a hundred pounds and another other man's heavy duty as well, it's got to hold 300 pounds. So a very good title would be something that's more specific to this is heavy duty up to 300 pounds. So we got to get more specific why? Because the engine's also going to see that and say, well, this will now be categorized into products that can maintain up to 300 pounds. It will differentiate you in the model itself. Cosmo's going to know that if you just put heavy duty, you're going to be lumped into anything that's heavy duty and not hyperfocused. But these changes are going to have to happen, and the titles I see on so many listings are really poorly done.

That's not speaking to the audience or a specific pain point or need and giving them a specific answer that's like, oh, great, this is the one that will hold up to 300 pounds at the cart. Yeah, people can change that really quick listing and title next. If images are something you don't really understand what your customer might want, and as you had said, very astutely, got to know what the customer wants and what they want. Go to pick fu. We use pick foods, great system, love that tool and get your product feedback for people who are on prime and find out which image they like the best and continue to do that process over and over again. Never settle for just one optimization now and something in six months because people like us are doing it continuously and we're going to out position you, so you have to stay on top of that. Always look to improve, then look better, put it back, try the next one looks better, leave it there and just keep optimizing for every little inch you can take because you never know that one will last. 1.0% of CTR might get you above the next largest competitor and boom, you're going to see yourself go on a ride.

Brett:

Yeah, I've said it and forget it's never going to work on Amazon. Got to, I love that initial test on pick fu where it's, it's no risk. We're just showing images of the people, they're voting, but it's almost instant feedback and then you put the winners on Amazon and see how it performs there. It's really beautiful. Two step

Neil:

Process. Always be optimizing through the listing. The title bullet points would be secondary, of course we know reviews have their impact, someone can control in someone we can cannot control when it comes to reviews and of course never fake your reviews or do any of that stuff carte blanche, right? But reviews have a positive impact course in the longevity, the things that are harder for you to incentivize or change or manipulate, so be very careful that. But when it comes down to the listing and conversions, your bullet points would be third and then of course a plus content premium level A plus content will be kind of the fourth. It's not really the first, especially when you get to mobile because back to that, again, 60% of all sales were done on prime on mobile, which means no one's really scrolling through all of that listing a plus content on their mobile. They're simply going through the images, they're validating the title, and if you notice right below that, it's add to cart. So if you don't get them in that first, second, third scroll, you lost them on

Brett:

Mobile. Yeah, totally makes sense. So only for a higher consideration product, are people really going to the a plus content? I still think it's important to kind of shape because when it does feed Amazon more information and for the few people that get there, it's great. But yeah, for a lower ticket item, low consideration product, they're making the decision before the A. Correct. They've

Neil:

Already started, they're just looking at the

Brett:

Price. So let's talk a little bit about rufuss, the AI shopping assistant, and I'll share a quick story here because I really just started interacting with Rufuss over prime day over that holiday, and so probably a lot of listeners have seen it already, but you've got a listing opened up and there's kind of these prompts that are there. Either you can ask Rufuss a specific question, your own question, or they give you some prompts like, Hey, what are customers saying? Or does this fit true to size if it's apparel or something like that. And so I was looking for a product, some cookware, no, I'm sorry, I was looking for that too, but I was looking for an autonomous vacuum, one of the smart vacuums. My wife was interested, so I found one and I clicked on what are customers saying? And it was interesting. Rufuss talked me out of buying this vac. People are pretty mixed. It's pretty mixed on whether this is effective. It's pretty mixed on whether this actually works and you can't customize it. It just pointed out a lot of the negatives, but it was pulling all of that from the reviews, which was super interesting. Well, it

Neil:

Does. It pulls it from the reviews, it gives you the summary. If you've noticed there's an AI summary that occurs now on the listings and RUFUSS helps pull that forward right away. What are the major bullet points? What are the green and yellow and what should you be cautious about? That is something to some degree that the seller can control and to some degree they cannot. In fact, much of that, they cannot control about what Rufuss has to say. So there's where the amplification and a smart amplification of this shopping assistant is going to be on the valid aspect of your product, the creation and innovation of your product, and making sure that the reviews are amplified properly through rufuss. Something you can't control.

Brett:

Yeah, so you've got to build a great product, you've got to get enough customers there. You've got to get good authentic reviews or else Rufus is going to find it, right? He's going to bring

Neil:

Find, drive right into everybody's attention because they're just seeing a point driven. We're six second or less people. We're going to skim through there and be like, okay, well quality is low. People didn't like the value of this, and that shopping assistant is going to become much more powerful as an assistant to the reviews. And we always wondered how Amazon was going to fix some of it's review based problems,

Brett:

Right? Which these are real problems.

Neil:

Absolutely. Pros on that are going to be that this is going to amplify good products better. That may have been hidden a little bit in the process of other sellers simply having more time in market and reviews. However, it's a very negative amplification. If you're not careful, it would sink the ship because it will take reviews and then anything summarized will become negative. It's also dangerous in that way, and I hope Amazon puts in a little bit more fail safes on the brand management side to stop fake reviews from manipulating Rufus summary. That could absolutely destroy you,

Brett:

Right? That's still one of the biggest problems on the platform. It still is. I think Amazon has made strides, but the negative, the fake reviews, it's still a crippling

Neil:

And people are like, well, that's Amazon. This is the ecosystem buyer. I get all that. It's a historically long challenge and a lot of data in so many sales and people are like, well, I don't see that on TikTok, and you don't do this on Shopify. You can manipulate every review on Shopify. TikTok shops reviews is just wide open for anybody to do anything they want right now. And so they really haven't put any of the fail saves against the marketplace. And so it's not really a fair comparison. You could look at Walmart, they're doing a much better job of review management and staying on target with review qualifications. They've spent more time than the other platforms getting closer to a more traditional true review and integrity of the reviews. But even as they grow, we're going to face some of these major challenges. So again, it's not apple's to apple's comparison to say reviews on Amazon are all bad in their situations manipulated because I see it on Shopify and all this other, eBay's had that problem forever, right? eBay's always had that problem. It's been one of their downfalls.

Brett:

And so one other thing I want to point out about Rufuss, which I think was really interesting. Another quick anecdote. My son Benjamin, he's seven. We just watched cars three for probably the 30th time, but if you got him thinking he's got a little bit of money that he saved up, and so he was like, dad, I want to shop or cars three toys. So I gave him my phone. Amazon was pulled up, he's looking at different options. He wants the tractor trailer that the car goes inside. And so he found one, I hear him just kind of talking to himself, not really paying attention, and then he's like, dad, look, check this one out. This one, the car will fit in the trailer. See, it says that it will right here. It says that it will. And he had interacted with Rufuss. Oh boy. He clicked on buttons, was like the car will go in the trailer, so this is the one that I want. And I'm like,

Neil:

Alright,

Brett:

Figures it out.

Neil:

Our kids getting involved as we were laughing about earlier with it, one click purchase and stuff all of a sudden with Rufuss helping them, it's like, oh crap. But the intelligent aspect of that is really cool because it's going to start giving you personalized information about your history and the products you purchased and what accessories and goods match up with those, which goes back to brand building again. If you're a single or even three or five SKU product-based business, you are not big enough yet to really have enough data for these systems to compliment you in the coming years, right? We've talked about more than five SKUs for a long time. Why Amazon told us personally that 70% of the FBA sellers have less than five to seven SKUs in their entire seller platform. I'm like, oh, you guys are. Then they told us, well, how do we get more? It was like they told us you put more SKUs in the system, you get above 10 to 15 SKUs and then all of these other things will happen. We're like, well, crap, launch more products. But still people are not paying attention to that. Why? The data you're giving the system is going to be fed into things like Rufuss and Cosmo and it's only going to amplify what you're doing, your reach and how you will control more market share and gain more market share through those systems. Not enough data and it won't be relevant enough.

Brett:

Let's talk about brand building for a minute because this has been a trend for a number of years. We've been preaching it at OMG Commerce, all our Amazon clients that you got to think beyond just being a seller, and I know that's still a term that we're using, that's fine, but think more like you're building a brand. And so you just touched on SKU count or number of ASINs. That's a critical piece of having a real brand and not just being a seller on Amazon, but what are some of the other components of how do I build a real brand on Amazon?

Neil:

Well, there's a reason why Amazon has a billion SKUs. There's a reason why Walmart stores have 250,000 of them in there's because they know that less than 20% of all those SKUs make up their 400, 500 billion a year in sales. So if we know that about retail and we borrow it for the e-comm world, what does that tell us? We need to be building a brand that has a wide enough stance on it with enough SKUs to give us those kinds of numbers. You're simply naive. If you think that you're going to take a multi seven, eight figure business out to market with one to two SKUs, in fact you're dangerously on the precipice of crashing the entire business. If one or two of them go down, no matter what platform you're on selling 'em, it could be your own website, okay? We've got to expand that SKU base app that is a brand driven asset, giving people more of what they want and different shapes, sizes, and boxes.

We know this phrase, and we've probably heard it, success is boring. Why? Once I dial that funnel in dial that vertical in and got my cylinder, I just keep putting more and more of the same products in there and just keep offering innovations and changes and shapes and colors and shapes, et cetera, and widening that base out so that I can find those other products that will rise to the top. That is a brand strategy that leads to you moving away from a product-based business and into a brand-based business that will sustain for a long time, okay? Long enough that you realize that all products have a saturation to them. Now, everybody's afraid of saturation from the beginning. I'm more concerned about saturation in the long run, which is where a product business owner should be focused on the short term, but a brand owner is focused on three to five years.

So I'm thinking very differently about a brand strategy than probably most of you are. And that's what I hope you gain from this is to get to the point where you're starting to think, I need to move more products into the market, find the ones that rise to the top, find the complimentary ones that rise with them, and give enough data to be able to get out of saturation into a hole and only segment saturation into certain verticals when it occurs, and then remove it through innovation. Once I do that, you realize product in innovation is a natural legacy of a brand, and brands like 15 burger joints on the corner don't go away when the products continue to innovate. That's why there's 15 of 'em, right? So everybody's wondering, well, what's the real difference? I mean, the simple difference isn't just more products, it's more emotional appeal and dialing in over a longer time that emotional response that your customers get.

So they're willing to talk to other people and come back and BRI you later. And then if they buy another brand, they feel bad that they didn't buy yours. It really wasn't as good as the one they got, and they'll come back and buy yours again later. So then we move into real metrics of business, the CLTV or customer lifetime value and move into larger metrics that allow us to gain more value from that instead of just looking at first purchase acquisition. Whereas so many brand owners who want to be brand owners still focus at the product side. They're always looking at first customer acquisition, and they're not considering what the value of that customer is. So in simple terms, for those who are currently selling on Amazon, Amazon itself, just as a platform happens to know this. We'll talk about the other ones in a minute if we want, but Amazon itself has a thousand dollars a year Prime membership, CLTV, 12 months, $1,000. What am I going to do as a brand owner, Brett?

Brett:

Yeah, I'm going to go after Prime Prime. I'm going to

Neil:

Go after Prime members to get them to buy $1,000 of my product in a 12 month period. That should be my CL tv. I should match that. So if I have a $1,000 product and sell one of them, congratulations. Right? True. But that's not really how it works. You're going to sell a hundred dollars product 10 times at least, and you're going to get 'em on subscribe and save, and you're going to buy other products. You should be looking at that as more of a minimum because that's what Amazon's basing its product based model and its revenues off of Match it and watch what happens.

Brett:

Really cool. So we're looking at minimum of five SKUs, right? So beyond five SKUs puts you in the top tier of FBA sellers, and I think one of the things that I like to look at is what does a customer say after they buy your product and they're talking to someone comes over to visit, they're like, oh, hey, where did you get that Tumblr? Where did you get that knife? Or whatever. If the person just says, oh, I just got it on Amazon, I don't know what it is, but I got it on Amazon, or do they say, oh yeah, it's this brand and I bought it on Amazon. And one example, a buddy of mine, Brian from Simple Modern, was on the podcast a few months ago. They built this brand, simple, modern starting on Amazon. Yeah, good stuff. But it's such that I would say to someone like, this is my simple modern Tumblr, rather than leading with, oh, this is something I got on. Amazon takes work and intentionality and understanding who their customer is and building the product for the customer, and then of course all the branding components that go along with that. But I think that's really where the game is headed, right? Brand building and not just, well,

Neil:

It really is. So in simple terms, if you're a seller or you're new, don't send product into Amazon in the original China's Chinese packaging, right? Brand differentiate from the very beginning. Then you'll move away from, I found this on Amazon to, it's actually simply modern, the Tumblr. It's in your image, in your products, in your packaging, et cetera. Don't be lazy. Take the next little step to finish packaging and branding. It could be very simple. It can increase the value. We've taken one product and innovated it by simply increasing the brand value through the packaging and sold the product for more. It's about perception

Brett:

Of that value. It makes sense. Just like packaging sells products on a physical shelf, the packaging sells products on the digital shelf. I

Neil:

Know everybody buys it. It's kind of silly, but it's the iPhone and Android box. It just, it's so different when you're paying for it and you feel the difference in it. Well, we are driven by that feeling, so we need to make brands that get that emotional connectivity and stay with us for a long time. That's why you and I wear white new balance, right?

Brett:

It's a dad life, man, the white new balance trend. But I hear there comes an age, they are coming when the comfort is just too much to resist and you have to,

Neil:

Jts are making a comeback, right? J are making a comeback. Everything was

Brett:

In high school.

Neil:

People are so funny. You talk about Brandon awareness, it's just a quick story. I was in an airport, I think it was Colorado, was headed back east a while back. I was in line, the lady who was in front of me, I believe it was Delta Airlines if I'm not mistaken, I noticed that she had some towels on her case and I looked over and there was my brand on the side of it and I go, Hey, what do you of those towels? And to your point, she said, oh, this is brand name. I got it on Amazon. I'm like, they're really cool. And she's like, and I go, I sell those. And she goes, you sell these products? Yeah, I sell those on Amazon. She's like, well, that's so cool.

Brett:

My brand,

Neil:

My product in the wild.

Brett:

That's awesome, but that's when you know it's a brand. She said the brand name first. Brand first. I do this with other products. I'm like, I don't know what it is. By got on Amazon was whatever.

Neil:

It's something I got off of. I can't even think. And that's what so much of the TikTok stuff is because literally, here's an example of that. I was looking to play with this little thing. I got it off TikTok shops and I bought it, and if you look at the product and the thing, it was selling in relatively good, but there's literally nothing on it. I have no idea who built or manufacture this thing. It's just, it's a box from nowhere land.

Brett:

Just a quick money grab right there is what that was.

Neil:

Well, they got me for my six bucks,

Brett:

Hopefully. We'll see. That's hilarious. So I've got three other topics. We're almost out of time. So one quick one, and we'll make this so brief that we're probably going to do it injustice, but we're going to go there anyway. Profitability. This one we talk about a lot. This is where really everybody in the industry is focusing is how do we grow profitably? I think there was a time in e-commerce and even Amazon where it was like grow at all costs. We'll figure out profits later. Those days are gone now we need profits today. How do you coach people? How do you think about it with your brands growing profitably? Just kind of your top two to three tips.

Neil:

So my baseline of expectation for a new brand or moving an existing brand into this position is 20% or greater. How we get there and when we get there is just a matter of the numbers. So in any 20%

Brett:

Ebitda, right? So 20% net net,

Neil:

20% net ebitda. So how do I get there? I got to have products that actually build into that. So the portfolio builds into that. So the entire brand, after all cost of operations, goods and services, et cetera, it come down to 20%. So the end result is I need to obviously start at the product level. So for us, we don't sell products that have less than $12 in net profit per unit in them. Point blank after all fees, goods stacked, returns, shrinkage, advertising, et cetera, $12 minimum. Typically we're in the 24 40 $8 range. That gives us enough profitability to acquire the customer organic sales, to obviously balance that difference and then stay in the growth mode with the business. So knowing that from the very beginning, that is where we need to go. If you're not there, you need to move yourself into an elevated position, which means you need to elevate and every product you've got can be elevated in your mind.

You might be like, oh, I see other products. There's no way I could sell this product for more money. You're wrong, point blank. So you have to be able to look for ways to innovate and elevate right all the way through to a notice of allowance for a design patent. If you can get that on the product, you're going to indemnify yourself and add additional value. Of course, you got to launch new products to get a utility patent, but you can reinnovate products in a brand or relaunch a new product that has the opportunity to innovate and get it to a utility. If you can, and it exists on Amazon, then you can go right back and offer them a cease and desist letter or a royalty agreement, and here's your royalty agreement. I now own the rest of the product in this marketplace and the becoming effect, I believe going forward.

To answer your question, kind of forward thinking in the question is that in 20 25, 20 26, it's my personal belief that you are going to need some design patent or utility patent to really defend yourself in the coming marketplaces. And that will differentiate above Chinese sellers and everything else. Especially as we see Amazon trying to make a very short term, in my mind, a temu move that's going to literally implode here along. I think there's just an opportunity cost to do that, and it's going to destroy itself. So I don't personally believe that has a long effect, especially with anything changing in the geopolitical world. I think that's too dangerous of a move. I think it's an opportunity cost. We're going to see, most likely they'll back out of it at some point because it's not going to be really sustainable in the end. But for us, brand and long-term growth is going to come at the profitability from the product all the way through the brand. So again, cost and operations get down to where's the rest of that money go. I don't hire employees.

Brett:

Nope. Don't hire employee. That OPEX has got to be really, really low.

Neil:

It has to be low, right? But it doesn't, through automations and systems and tools, now I can take one operator and have them run two or three accounts because once they're running them under SOP, once they're running 'em with OKRs, once they're running 'em within systems of automations, things we developed a voltage, things we use externally to help create the automations of that AI being one, systemized automations and tracking being another PPC automations and large language systems that basically go in and automate PPC management for us, once we know it's dialed in, that can take one person and turn them into a multi-use case across multiple businesses. And so we can run very lean in this model at very large scale with everything being outsourced, Amazon a WD, third party logistic warehouses. You don't need the freight and shipping management of that. So that gives us the opportunity to scale profitably in economies of scale without going operationally. How do I know? Because I ran a 21,000 square foot warehouse with 12 employees once upon a time. I don't recommend it. It's no fun.

Brett:

Not the business. You want to be in the business,

Neil:

You don't have to be in that business you did once upon a time. But in literally the last five years, thanks to hypergrowth expansion of the markets during a certain period whose name shall not be mentioned, that period allowed for massive growth of automations and systems that do not require me to have a warehouse anymore, to move logistics and product everywhere in growth.

Brett:

It's exciting times, man. It is a crazy time to compete against Chinese sellers and the team moves of the world and fake reviews and all this stuff. But it's also a great time because I really believe we touched on it, right? You build products now for customers, build products for your avatar and think building a brand and how do we continually extend our line and launch the next product because futureproof our business. And then how do we think about profitable growth? How do we treat this a real business and not just a money grab? How are we thinking about managing our p and l and optimizing for ebitda? Because if we want to have an exit one day or we just want to ride this thing for as long as we can, you need to treat it like a real business.

Neil:

You have to, because in my world, there's no such thing as a side hustle or a hobby business. You're going to do this, right? And then we're building and growing and of course we're exiting and acquiring as you and I discussed. And so that way I'm talking from a buyer perspective. I don't want to buy your single channel business. Totally. It must have multi

Brett:

Omnichannel, right? That is risky. I think. Yeah. The trend is omnichannel. And so for those that are listening, because we're basically out of time here, but for those that are listening, who should reach out to you and how can they reach out to you? And what do you guys do? Because you guys are buying brands, you're selling brands, you're coaching and building, helping you build brands. But talk a little bit about what you do and then who should reach out

Neil:

To? Well, we are launching, growing and Building. We're a consultancy group. We have a closed mastermind called Business Builders, which allow people to come in and I train them as CEO operators to give them a leg up, an opportunity to run their 100% owned business model. Why? Because in the end, I have a first rights of refusal to acquire that company in three years to five years when it gets above a million in ebitda. So I take them from beginning launch and all the way through growth and optimization to exit. We exit to our private equity group. So if they want to do that and they're brand new and they want a real run at this to make sure you bring 50 to a hundred K to the table, because we're going to go real fast. We're going to go hard. We're going to go into places where there's opportunity costs, but that's where the profits are.

It's where the growth will really be. It's where the market opportunity is. Don't treat it like a small business and it's going to be a capitalized inventory business. This business grows on capital inventory, which means it requires cash like real estate. So don't think about it any differently. You got to buy more real estate, more inventory to make it really grow, but you don't have to buy more people unlike real estate. And I don't need totally, it's turn tenants and termites either. Plus I can return much faster than $500 a month on a rental property at the growth and growth. So if you're in that place and you think about it and you're new, that might be something you want to talk to me about. We've got free resources, you speak to me, it's an invitation only kind of thing. We'll see if we're a good fit and maybe we get in the same rowboat.

I just want to make sure our goals and expectations are set for growth and they're set for exit, which is kind of the model we work. If you're an existing seller and you need optimizations of growth and you've kind of stagnated through some growth within your brand, you're not really sure how to turn that around or turn the gas on it. We've done that with a number of companies, anywhere between million to 30 million in sales a year and help them grow and expand and create more profitability out of their bottom line by showing them things that they really didn't optimize for before. And even from growth capital methods to grow the business through capitalization methods as well as additional products and leveling up. We teach them how to do that. And then of course with the exit in mind, always with the exit in mind.

Brett:

Yeah, love it. So you're building coaching incubating brands that you can one day buy and then build and sell again. And so it's really interesting model for sure. So what's the best way to get in touch?

Neil:

Voltage dm.com? Voltage digital marketing.com. You can go check that out. Yes. My last name is, it's three letters. You can Google me. I'm not far away from anybody. Voltage, one word. You'll find my social medias. That's another way to connect, but probably the website's the best way to unlock some training there, see what we do, understand how we move this forward, and of course, reach out to me if there's any interest.

Brett:

Awesome. Neil Twa, ladies and gentlemen, we will link to everything in the show notes if that's easier for you to find. It'll be there. But Neil, this was fun, this was fast, paces was intense. You delivered a lot of value, so really appreciate you coming on.

Neil:

Thank you, sir. Appreciate you having me

Brett:

Here. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Hey, if you haven't done it yet, leave that review on iTunes. Also, if you're listening to this and you thought, Hey, this would be a great episode for so-and-so to listen to because they're building on Amazon, please share this. That means the world to me. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Dive deep into the minds of online shoppers with Jon MacDonald, founder and CEO of The Good, as he unpacks the psychological forces that shape e-commerce behavior. In this episode, Jon and I explore key insights from his new book, Behind the Click, offering actionable strategies for e-commerce brands to enhance their digital customer experience and boost conversions.

Key topics discussed:

• Understanding the two types of online shoppers: 'satisficers' vs. 'maximizers,' and how to cater to both
• The critical questions customers ask themselves before making a purchase, including 'Does this company understand my problem?' and 'What does buying this product say about me?'
• How to create an emotional appeal that makes customers feel like they already own your product
• The importance of post-purchase communication and why asking for reviews too early can backfire
• Real-world examples of successful e-commerce strategies, including Easton Baseball's 247% increase in online sales through a simple quiz
  

Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce professional or just starting out, this episode provides invaluable insights into creating a more engaging and conversion-friendly online shopping experience.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(05:58) First Impressions and Understanding Customers

(09:59) Making it Easy for Shoppers to Find What They're Looking For

(23:07) Addressing the Needs of Different Shopper Types

(28:50) Is This Product For Me?

(33:26) Making Emotional Appeals to Drive Conversions

(41:37) Effective Post-Purchase Communication and Guarantees

---

Show Notes:

• Jon MacDonald (LinkedIn) 
• The Good
• Behind The Click
• Opting In To Optimization 
• Alchemy
• Why We Buy
• RevAir
• Easton Baseball
• Bass Pro
• 1978 Hertz Commercial (w/OJ)
• Simple Human

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

‍

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

---

Transcript:

Post-purchase, unfortunately is the step that most brands overlook, but it is the biggest lever to being successful in my point of view.

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I've got an old friend joining me on the pod, Jon MacDonald. He is the founder and CEO of The Good. And very few people on the planet understand online buying behavior, shopping, behavior, version rate optimization like Jon. And so we're going to be talking about Jon's new book behind the Click and talking about psychological forces that shape the way people shop online. And so some really cool topics we're going to dive into here to make your shopping experience better so that you can delight customers and engage them and get them to convert more. With that, Jon, welcome to the show, man. And how's it going? Great. Thanks for having me again. Yeah, we have known each other for quite some time now. It's been great.

I think this is maybe podcast number three, four. I don't even know. I'd have to go back and look, but I'm trying to remember when the first podcast we did together was, it was well before covid, so we're talking 2017 or something. 2018 maybe. I dunno. Well, we're both OGs in this business, right? Yeah, no doubt here. We're no doubt, man. No doubt. So yeah, really excited about diving into the book. And so what's the big idea behind the book? And there's some really practical stuff that we're going to unpack here as we go, but what was the big idea and why write a book? Well, I really wrote a book. I mentioned I'm an og, I guess been in CRO for 15 plus years now. It's hard to believe I started the good that long ago, but the more work we've done to optimize conversion rates, the more we've realized that to make real lasting gains, you have to pull back way further than just a conversion.

And there's so many factors that affect conversion from psychological, deeply ingrained factors that we deploy every day and they happen before the customer even begins to think about purchasing from you. And so every element of your website tells the customer something about why they do or do not want to work with or buy. So I didn't want to just tell people tactics to use to optimize those digital journeys. There's so many tactics out there. I would say CRO is actually becoming a bit of a commodity. It is, dare I say that word, but it a hundred percent is I wanted to show more about why these digital journey issues occur. Why are your conversion rates low and why a specific tactic might work for your specific audience and explain when it all comes down to it, you have to explain it as fundamental psychology behind the issues so that the teams that we're talking to can come up with solutions that work for that specific audience.

Realizing that decisions online are not just logical, but so heavily influenced by psychological factors that I felt like it had to be said. I had to bridge this gap by applying psychological principles to improving digital experiences and try to rise above that commoditization that's happening, the checklists world that is out there. Yeah, I mean it's so good and certainly there's value to saying things like, hey, better headlines on your product detail pages, headlines that are benefit oriented and that highlight the features and better product imagery and add to cart above the fold and some of those things. But those are sort of table stakes, right? That's potentially the commoditized part of this. But understanding the psychological factors behind why we do what we do as shoppers, what we're looking for really matters. And so I'm going to recommend two other books obviously. First of all, shameless plug for you, get the book behind the click, but two other books.

Have you heard the book Alchemy? I have by Rory Sutherland, I believe. Yeah, I love this. He talks about, hey, some problems in business and in sales and in social settings, they don't require a logical solution because humans aren't always that logical. And he uses the term psychological, not psychotic, but using psychology and logic. And he talks about how sometimes what you do to get people to donate more to a charity is not the logical thing. It's kind of almost an illogical thing. And so understanding the psychology there is very important. And then one book that I know you and I both love why we buy Bi Paco Underhill, I love how he talks about simple things like, hey, when you first walk into the store, this is like a physical store, brick and mortar retail store. You need a landing space and you need to feel comfortable.

And people are making decisions in those first few seconds, am I going to politely scoot out of here as quick as I can or am I going to go deeper and is this the right store for me? I'm looking at the people, I'm looking at the products. Is this store for me? Am I in the right place? And I think a lot of those principles apply with nuance to the online experience. And so really excited to dive in here. And in fact, that's a great place to start. Let's talk about kind of first impressions. So when someone lands on our site, whether that's homepage, landing page, wherever they land, they're making evaluations. And I know in your book you talk about there are two questions and actually more than this, but two questions you mentioned that I really like. One is, does this company understand me?

And two, does this company have a solution to my problem? So unpack those for us a little bit and how do we think about those so that we can craft an experience that really delights customers? Well, I think you hit it on the head with the landing area in a retail store, right? I am firm believer, and I know you've heard me mention this several times over the years that really should treat your e-commerce site as if it was a retail store. Meaning if you wouldn't do it in retail, don't do it on your e-com. Too many brands turn visitors into a number as opposed to a human because they can with e-commerce, it's easier, but there are the same psychological principles at play here with that landing, what PA was trying to talk about was basically two psychological factors that then lead to the questions that you mentioned.

The first is anchoring bias. So this is the idea that people will overly rely on that first piece of information that they encounter. So if you don't have a good landing home spot, they're going to bounce, right? They're going to turn around and leave the store or move off your website. And then confirmation bias, which is the tendency to give more weight to information that aligns with preexisting beliefs. So if somebody came to your site via an ad or a friend referred them, whatever that ad or that friend said really needs to be reinforced when they get to the site because they already have this preexisting belief from that referral or that ad. And so this is where people are asking themselves, does this company understand my problem? Because consumers are only at your site for two reasons, and that's to understand if you can solve their pain or need and if you can convert and then leave as quickly and easily as possible, get on with their lives.

Nobody's at your site to hang out. So really that first question of does this company understand my problem is all about crafting that first impression, making sure that you have a great anchor to reinforce along that entire digital journey that follows. So open that welcome mat, right? Make sure you're speaking the same language that was prompted to get them there. And then you have to follow it up pretty quickly. What does this company understand or have a solution to my problem? If you do understand it, then can you solve it? Okay, so this is really where I recommend brands do user testing to determine what your customer's needs and what their assumptions are because they're coming to your site with these assumptions formed by that first question, I have a problem, do they understand it? And then they're going to have all these assumptions that come out of that.

And so really what you need to do is address both of those questions immediately within the first third of the homepage if you can, or whatever landing page they're on, which is where it becomes a little more of a broader site journey. If you have an ad, you should take them directly to a landing page that addresses the content of that ad. Don't just send 'em to a product detail page. Don't just send 'em to a homepage. Make sure there's alignment there if you send them to a specific page. Yeah, it's so good. And so talk about some specifics here or maybe what would be helpful is looking at some examples. So what are some companies, what are some sites that do this really well? What I can tell you is how many SaaS sites have you been to SaaS products that we use every day?

You go to this site and you're like, I have no idea what this company does. It's word soup. You're like, oh my gosh, what are they trying to say? I can't tell you what they do. They're trying to talk to too many people. And this is really where I think even a lot of e-commerce brands struggle is they don't have a very clear ideal customer profile that they're speaking to. And this is where working with OMG, et cetera, where you would run ads, very specific segments that take them to very specific landing pages that when you marry those two up can really address both of these questions very quickly and get people into that next phase of information gathering. But I would say in terms of good sites that do this, the reality is I am not a fan of looking at competition. I'm a fan of focusing on yourself.

And there are, I talk about it in this book quite a bit. I know I talked about it a lot in the last book, opting into optimization. But the reality is that there's a reason race horses wear blinders. If you want to get to the finish line first, the quickest path is directly there, right? Straight line between two points. If you're consistently looking around and looking at the competition, who knows if what they're doing works for them. Who knows if you're being opted into an AB test, who knows if that tactic was brought by an executive or recommended from customers or their private equity firm said, you have to say this, right? Nobody knows what the situation is except for them. So I'm a huge fan of instead of looking at your competitors or trying to copy from others, is talking to your customers and asking them, what brought you here?

What are you looking to solve? Do you think we can solve your problem? Looking at your customer's information is really going to get you where you want to be much quicker than looking at competitors. Yeah, I think it's important to be aware of the competition, but be obsessed with your customers. And I think if you, to use that racehorse analogy, you do want the racehorse to focus, but there's also something about feeling the other horses around them. Maybe some horses get faster, and so we can do that too, knowing the competition is there, I'm getting up earlier, I'm working harder, I'm aware of what they're doing, but I'm not copying what they're doing. I'm thinking about who is my customer, what do they want? How can I delight them? And you really know that by doing user testing, by watching your data, by doing surveys and things like that.

And so if you do that, man, you are really set up for success. Well, and this is where if you notice a lot of these, I have a bunch of breakouts in the book, and if you look at a lot of these, you'll see that they're right. I specifically did not mention who the clients were. I did not mention specifically any of the branding. I left all of that out and I broke it down to just simple wire frames because what's important is understanding the psychology behind what was deployed, not who did it, and whether or not it was going to work for you in that same manner. I wanted to show an example of something and use. So yeah, I specifically tried not to mention brands in this book as much. Nice, nice. Okay. So if we're going to answer the questions of, is this product for me or does this company understand me and can they solve my problems?

What are just a couple of tips. We talked about a few, but a couple of tips to how do we make sure we're addressing that properly? Well, I think the first thing you need to understand here is with that anchoring bias, you really need to answer that quickly. So right up front, it should be the main headline. Too many e-commerce brands focus on pushing one new product or have, heaven forbid, an auto rotating banner with lots of marketing. You really need to, at that stage in this discovery phase, these consumers, they're being pretty selfish. I don't want to spend my time here if it's not going to help solve these problems I have. So with that in mind, really want to focus on very quickly addressing those two questions right up front and center and making sure that you're doing testing on that to make sure that consumers align with it.

Now, the biggest issue I see is that too many brands continue to market when somebody gets to the site. Really at that point, I'm under the belief that your marketing has won. People are at the site, it's now time to facilitate a sale. I'm not saying that you deploy tactics, black hat tactics, et cetera, that are really pushing people in that direction. But I do think this is a problem that a lot of e-commerce marketers get wrong. They think that their website is a great repository for all this marketing when the reality is it just creates more challenges for the consumer to get through that information. And it's unfortunate it's an epidemic that I see all over the place. But yeah, this really, really great point. I think it kind of leads to our next topic. One thing I just want to call out really quickly related to this, I think part of this is just really deeply understanding your customer.

And I think to do that, sometimes you have to do things that don't scale, like talking to your customer, even talking to your customer on the phone and doing surveys and things like that. And I'll give you a quick example. One client of ours, rev Air, really unique hair drying appliance. It's kind of like a reverse hairdryer. You kind of to see it, really understand how it works. It's Scott, the inventor of the product and the founder of the company, brilliant engineer and inventor. And so it's almost like a reverse hairdryer where you put your hair in it and it kind of pulls air through and dries it. Anyway, I created it for his family, for his daughters. Turns out as he started to get to know customers, women with type four hair, which I was unfamiliar with the types of hair, but largely the African-American population falls into type four hair.

It's like revolutionary. This product works like nothing else. But they only found that out as they really got to know customers and talk to customers. And so then that really shaped the whole experience on what they did online and who they featured on the landing page, who they featured in their ads and how they position things. But it really comes down to how well do you know your customers? Because I would argue, Jon, as I talk to e-commerce brands, there's a lot of brands that really don't know who their customer is. Our customers a women that's 35 to 54. I'm like, that doesn't mean anything. So you got your customer, and one of the best ways we've found to get that information is to talk to your customer service team. Yeah. Because the ones on the front lines, they are addressing the questions that come in.

They're the ones where if you say, Hey, for one week I want you to fill out this simple Google form every time you have a conversation and just answer a couple of quick questions. And really it's what type of question you answering. So you can filter by that. And then what was the question they had or what topic did you address? And is there anything else you'd like me to know? Within a couple of days, you're going to start seeing similarities. And we had this issue years ago now with the Easton baseball, they make bats. Oh sure. They around forever. In fact, if I can point, there's a bat right up there. They gave us, I see it. Yeah, it says the good. That's awesome. That's so cool with their logo next to it. But they were basically, if you went to their website, you just got a wall of bats and they all look the same.

If you can imagine small picture of a bat, they all look exactly the same in a grid. And parents had no idea what bats to buy their children, but the kids were like, I need an Easton Bats little league. This is what everybody swings. Okay, great. So what they started doing is we had 'em talk to their customer service team said, what are the biggest challenges? Well, we're getting a lot of returns and phone calls from parents that are upset. I said, oh, wow, okay, tell me more about that. Well, the problem is the kids would go and use it for batting before a game and they'd warm up with a bat, put a couple dings on it, scuff marks or whatever, and then they'd get up to the plate and the umpire wouldn't let them swing with the bat. And they say, oh, that bat's not certified for this league.

You can't use it. And the parents were so upset because they had no idea that there are different types of bats for the different leagues that have to be certified. And I can't imagine what it was like buying a bat on that site beforehand. So what we decided to do was, okay, let's create a quick quiz. First question, what league is your kid in? Second question that filters it down to maybe 10 bats. Second question, what type of hitter are they? Because not every kid is swinging for the fences, just it's the way it is in little league. Okay, we can answer that question really easily. A parent knows their kid. And then next was budget. If you answered those three questions, you were able to get it down to one, maybe two bats, and all of a sudden it's a no-brainer. As a parent, do I want to spend 400 or 200 and okay, I'll spend 400.

I know this bat is going to work for my kid now because I feel much more confident about it, they're going to go and not get half the return it. And this led to a massive 247% increase in online sales, not to mention the fact that they had severely reduced returns. So all in terms of revenue, I mean the return on investment of just talking to your customer service team, that is huge. Yeah, this really underscores something you said earlier that nobody wants to hang out on your website unless you are Bass Pro shops the physical store, and people want to go and look at the museum and just dream about boats or whatever. They don't want to hang out at your site. So no parent. But I think probably what Easton did, which is what a lot of companies do is like, oh, you want to bat we have 5,000, which would you like?

And we're like, I don't know. I'm just going to pick one or let my kid pick one or something. Well, they were filtering wrong choice. They were filtering by color, they were filtering by technical terms. We know, and these technical terms were invented by Easton. It wasn't even like industry standard terms. It was their branding team and their marketing team saying, we want to be different. So we're going to name some of these new technologies we have and everyone's going to be excited about them. And meanwhile the parents are like, I don't know what that means. Sounds cool. But so yeah, once you start talking to the consumers, you understand what their challenges are and you can help 'em through that information phase. Yeah, really good. And so that really kind of leads to some of the next questions you mentioned in the book that you talk about is can I find what I'm looking for?

And then to go back to kind of Paco Underhill and talking about the in-store experience, it's even more true there where a lot of shoppers don't want to ask questions. Now, me, if I'm in a retail store, I'm going to ask, where is the whatever? Because I don't care what I look like. I just want to go get it and get out of there. But a lot of people won't ask. And so if someone feels confused, they don't want to look like an idiot, they're not going to ask in store. And I think online it's the same. We don't want to work hard. We don't want to feel like an idiot trying to find what we're looking for. So how do we address that? How do we address that online quizzes, great example. How do we make it easy for someone to find what they're looking for?

Well, I think what you need to understand first is that there's really two types of shoppers, and neither really wants to ask questions of anybody else, but the satisfiers they're called are the folks who will take that first solution to their problem and buy it and move on with their lives as quickly as possible. And would you call this shopper again? Satisfier. Satisfier, okay. Right. And then there is what's called the maximizer. The maximizer is somebody who is going to go in and open 25 browser tabs. They're going to go to all the competitors. They're going to line up everything, compare contrast, they're going to Amazon and doing all this research. And then each of the individual brands of the products they find on Amazon, they're going to their site. These are the folks that no matter how big the purchase is, and you would think this might vary based on the dollar amount being spent or the importance to the life of the person buying it.

Not true. There are people who will go buy the first car they see on a car lot, and that's a expensive purchase. And most people's lives, or there are people who will go and buy a basketball and they'll do so much research about what the best outdoor basketball is and what's going to last the longest and have the most grip, whatever. The reality is that no matter what your price point is, there's these two type of consumers you need to answer their questions. But it's not just figuring out what the questions are and answering 'em. You need to not overwhelm the consumer. So you need to provide the information. And the best at doing this I've seen is Amazon. Amazon really is good at this because they give you all the bullet points upfront, the short information, a few photos, and then you can add to Carta buy now.

But if you scroll down, you see on almost every product, even if the brand of the product has not done this, Amazon will do it. They'll do a comparison table, here's the one you're looking at, here's some other options. And they'll have the comparison table where they are very easily showing you how they align. Now, that is for the maximizer. They're trying to keep 'em on Amazon instead of going someplace else. So as a brand, what questions you're answering are going to differ based on your products, but those two types of people, you need to make sure you're addressing really quickly the bullet points. Yes, this aligns, I'm going to buy it and get on with my life, or here's the bullet points, but here's more information that you probably want to. And if you can address that in a way that does not overwhelm the satisfiers than you are in a good spot.

And I think looking at the satisfier and the maximizer and then trying to kind of assess who am I as a shopper, I think it kind depends on what I'm buying. I'm probably more maximizer if it's a ticket item. When I went to buy my truck, I really analyzed a lot of things and I watched a ton of YouTube videos on four wheel drive trucks, and I really nerded out and had fun with it. If I'm buying a pizza cutter or something like that off of Amazon, I'm just going to look at reviews and does the picture look okay? And worst thing going to happen is I don't like it. I give it to somebody else or whatever because I really don't return things. I dunno if that's what I've learned about myself. If I buy some on Amazon, those was a really expensive purchase, I'm probably just going to give it to somebody. It's too much trouble to return. They love you. Yeah, exactly.

But I think looking at it that way, so for the satisfier, if I can neatly package, what's the minimum amount of information that someone will need to know to feel comfortable making this purchase? Can I make that instantly obvious with the pictures, with the bullet points, with the title, make that instantly obvious. And then if it's somebody that's really getting into comparison shopping, then yeah, tables, charts, graphs, videos, other things that we can provide in another category. I like coffee a lot, and Jon, I like coffee paraphernalia. I've got a pretty nice coffee maker. I've got the espresso machine. I've got a nice grinder. I buy quality beans. So if I'm looking at a new coffee accessory, I'm probably going to check it out, having fun in the process. And so having those kind of dual pads or enough information for both types of shoppers, it's brilliant.

Yeah, I would a hundred percent say you're a maximizer through and through, even though you gave the example the pizza cutter. Because the folks who are satisfied is, what they will do is go and say first image on Amazon, when they type in pizza cutter, it will say Amazon's choice. They'll click that and then add it to cart right away. Okay, yeah, that's not me. All right. So they won't even look at the photos. They're not going to look at the reviews. They're just like, it's a pizza cutter. It's backed by Amazon says, it's their choice. Let's go. It does the job. I'm out of here. So that's where it's kind of like you don't want to get in the way of those people because that's easy conversion. So make sure there's that easy path as well. Yeah, remember there's a great sales analogy. I remember one of my first sales managers that I had, and I started selling when I was in college, and one thing they said was, Hey, when someone is ready to buy, when someone has said yes, shut up.

Stop selling and take the order. Start signing the contract. You could talk yourself out of it if you keep going. And I think there's some online application to that as well. So really, really good. Any other thoughts on the information gathering stage? Oh, one other brilliant question that you asked in the book, which I love this so much, then this is a question that customers are asking, who else has purchased this product? And if I join them, what does that say about me? So can you unpack that for us? Well, really what you need to do here, show 'em exactly what the purchasing choice says about them to other people. So how do you do that? Well, social proof is huge here at this stage, right? Because I want to look at not only what the results were or how happy other people are, but who are these other people?

This is where influencers come in and why influencers have blown up over the past decade. Social media has definitely helped that, but it's just made it an easy vehicle to address this concern in this question. Now, celebrities, I mean all the way back before, I mean you had maybe not the best example, but OJ Simpson running through the airport for Hertz at the time. He was well-known enough, dude, he was so lovable until he wasn't right. The naked gun movies, he was in those brilliant, the Herz commercials. Yeah, whole nother story. But the reality is that that was saying, Hey, I like that I too have had to run through airports to get to my rental car. How cool is that? That's relatable. And so you start saying, oh, wow, even he had to do that, right? So you have to start thinking about these types of things of how are you relating to the customers and making it realize that they are part of the community now.

And there's a lot of ways to do that. There's loyalty programs, there's forms, online forms, there's ways to have these influencers do more than just post a social post or a video, but be more involved. Maybe come into a studio and make a whole video about how this has changed their lives or something of that sort. This is also where infomercials on TV work really, really well for this specific reason. Oh yeah, I can see myself in that situation or whatever. So I think this is one of those things where going back to the psychology of it all the way back to evolutionary way, way, a long time ago as humans, if we were in a pack, we had a unit together with several of us, we were safer than if we were off alone by ourselves. So the need inherent need to feel like we're part of a group is hardwired into our psychology as humans, and it's unlikely to change.

And this is where even just going back to a few years ago, COVID was so hard for so many people because we are hardwired to be social. And when we couldn't be as social because the factors outside of our own control, it became really difficult for folks. And so that just pinpoints again, that psychology that is deeper rooted in each of us that we need to be taking into consideration when we are building these digital journeys and driving people to our website and trying to get them through to conversion. And that's why celebrity endorsements mean so much, even though that doesn't seem super logical. If I buy Patrick Mahomes cleats, I'm not going to run or pass like Patrick Mahomes. But it works. Influencers, micro influencers, they work because every buyer is thinking, if I buy this product, what does it say about me? Either the way it makes me feel if I'm the only one that knows that I bought this, if it's something that maybe isn't publicly displayed or what will other people think about me if I buy this?

And so yeah, it's a really important question that people maybe aren't asking out loud or thinking about consciously necessarily, but they are thinking about it. And so you've got to address it with your landing pages, with your homepage, with your ads. Is this product for me and what does it say about me? Love that question. So good. And you can see how you wouldn't be able to answer that question effectively unless you've answered the other questions we talked about first. Yes. So these all kind of build on each other as part of that journey. Yeah. Really good. And so then moving on to the purchase and conversion stage. So now we're really clear on, hey, this is designed for me. It will solve my problem. I am in the right place type of thing. It's also saying, Hey, this is for people like me and it's going to communicate something to my community that I want to communicate.

So then now how do we get someone to purchase? And so you talk about making an emotional appeal, so getting someone ready to convert. So kind of slightly preconversion, getting them ready to convert by making an emotional appeal. Can you explain that a bit? Well, the emotional appeal is if you are answering the questions up to this point, effectively, logically they're saying, yeah, okay, this is the right product for me. I could probably fit in here. Now is time to do that emotional angle because we're ready for it. Our psychology is ready for it. At that point, one of the best ways to do this is to make customers feel like they already own that product. So what is their life going to be like after they have this product? Okay, you're buying a pizza cutter right now. Last thing, we have family pizza night.

Every Friday here we have one of those uni out on our deck, homemade pizza oven things. Love it, man. Love it. And I can tell you the last thing I want to be doing is messing around with a pizza cutter when I'm trying to just enjoy pizza with my family, et cetera, it should just be something that's done and I don't even think about, right? So the emotional peel here would be, wow, what would it be like if the pizza cutter didn't cut, right? If it was too hard to use. If you ever used one of those ones that you see at pizza shops, that rocks back and forth. Yeah, I've never used one. No. Are those great? Well, they're great if you want to lose a finger, right? Don't give that to your 8-year-old. There you go. Exactly. You see a machete. Exactly. So you have to really be showing people what it's like in their houses and why a pizza.

It's like, Hey, here's a safe alternative, or here's a good option for have your 8-year-old use it so they can be more independent, et cetera. So start talking about things like that. They're going to hit on emotional appeal of what it's like when they already own that product. What's it going to be like in day-to-day use? How's it going to improve their lives in a way that's not just logical? That car can get you from A to B, and maybe though you really want to enjoy the smooth ride because you're going to be in that car and you're going to be driving 50 miles each way every day. So you just want a comfortable ride. So you'll see some ads on TV that will talk about how quiet the interior is, et cetera, right? That's more of somebody helping somebody realize that they're in that position and that is the emotional appeal to them.

So one thing I want to mention right here, and I'm open to suggestions, and maybe you have one, Jon, we do pizza night on occasion. It's not a regular thing. I applaud you for that. It sounds super fun. I don't know that we've ever purchased a nice pizza cutter. I don't know what the problem is. I don't know if we're buying in the wrong place or buying the wrong, I don't even know what brands we're buying, but seems like every time I turn around there's a new pizza cutter in the drawer and they're all terrible. So if you've got a good recommendation or someone listening's got a good recommendation, I'm all ears. Can I tell you what we do? Yes, please. Okay. Get a knife sharpener and sharpen the blade occasionally. That is the key because they all just go dull on the just go dull.

I guess it's a knife just like anything else dull. Right? Exactly. And that's what people don't realize is I had a friend when they came over, they were here just for pizza night one night, came over and hung out with us as well, and they were like, wow, do you have a knife sharpener? And I was like, yeah, okay, here you go. And they sharpened the blade on it. And now I'm like, wow, I'd never thought to do that. So that's the hint. Don't spend any money. I never thought about that either. So we just throw the pizza cutter away and buy new ones all the time. Just got to sharpen the blade. All right, well, that was a pro tip right there. That's a free tip. Optimizing your pizza night courtesy, Jon MacDonald. Thanks, Jon. That's awesome. So speaking of making emotional appeals, and it's so important to make an emotional appeal, there's a couple of things I want to point out.

I heard this quote from a guy named Roy Williams a long time ago where he said, no person goes physically where they haven't first gone in their mind, and that includes clicking a button to purchase. I don't click a button to purchase unless I've already pictured it in my mind, pictured owning that product and what that's going to be like. And I think if you look at the advertising grates, and you talked about quiet interior made me think of the famous David Ogilvy Rolls-Royce ad, right? Where it says that 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise you'll hear is the clock dash, right? And so you're just picturing, I'm in this luxurious ride cruising down the highway and I'm hearing the ticking of the clock. And so we've got to go there mentally, emotionally for they're actually going to do it in real life. So love that, make the emotional appeal.

What else are we doing here to make the purchase to guide someone and make it easy for them to say yes and bye? Well, I think the last thing to really be thinking about is if addressing that, if they think this is the wrong choice eventually, what is the worst possible outcome that they could experience? So really what you want to do here is eliminate all of those possible issues that they could have. What's the easiest way to do that? Well offer some type of guarantee. So build trust with them throughout the process up to here that you understand who they are. You're talking directly to them, you're making it easy for them, whether they are a SFI or maximizer, all those things that we've done up to now should have built some trust now guarantee. So if you do a guarantee now they're going to trust your guarantee.

They already have built up some trust through the rest of that process, right? Then if anything goes wrong, they know they can get help. They know that you're going to take good care of them. There are so many examples of when things go bad or wrong in a purchase and then you end up saying, wow, this was a horrible experience. I'm never buying from them again. But they have built trust up with me and I get ahold of them because like you said earlier, the last thing I want to do is ask for help. So the last thing I want to do is contact them to get help, get a replacement, whatever it is. So if they make that super easy, I'm all in. I mean, we just had good example. We just had a soap dispenser from Simple Human. They make really cool modern homeware stuff, and it was just a soap dispenser in our kitchen and it stopped pumping.

It was like an automatic one to touch whatever. It stopped pumping. And I sent them an email. Last thing I want to spend my time on, it was just like, Hey, this stopped pumping. What can we do? They're like, no worries. As a two year warranty, we'll send a box right now with a new one. Just put the old one in the box and use the label that's inside. Send it back. We're good to go. Two days later, it was at my house. They two day shipped it to me and I shipped it right back to 'em. And I got an email this morning, said, Hey Jon, we got the shipment back. You're all good. Thanks. If anything else happens, let us know. And I was like, I'm buying your products again. You doubt made it super simple and telling everybody, because this was amazing.

There we go, right? I'm telling the story right now. So again, what's the worst possible thing that could happen here without a soap dispenser for two days? And they send me a new one for free. Where's possible solution? And turning even that negative into a surprise and delight kind of moment, which is really magical. And so let's wrap up by talking about post-purchase. So how can we leave shoppers on a good note really no matter what? Yeah, well, I think post-purchase unfortunately is the step that most brands overlook, but it is the biggest lever to being successful in my point of view, because you're going to get your lifetime value up and you're going to get the return on your ads up. You're going to have so much. The easiest dollar to make is when you've already sold. So you already know that customer. They already know you.

So you want to answer three specific questions here where my expectations met. So help them to understand with proactive communication, what's going to come next, right? The good and the bad, right? Oh, well, we've had customers ask this question. Our product doesn't really do that, so we wanted to call it out. Now, that is one of the best things you can do because again, you're building up that trust, you're helping retain that trust. And most consumers can be like, yeah, okay, whatever. Did this product or service work as should. This is where onboarding, no matter if you're selling on e-commerce, you have a SaaS product, whatever, onboarding matters. And it can't just be a simple email flow. It really needs to be something where you send 'em to a video on how to use the product, how to assemble it, how to, thinking of the soap dispenser.

They have online videos on how to change the soap. Seems pretty easy, but it's actually not easy. I had to watch the video, which is how I know, but I was delighted that the fact that the video was there and worked. And then the third question people have is, what I make this decision again or recommend that a friend does the same. This is where too many brands ask for a rating or a review right after purchase. Way too early, way too early. You got to give some time. You don't know. And there's some add-on services out there that you can buy that will immediately ask for reviews, and they talk about how many reviews they can get you those people. You are not reinforcing the positive experience yet. You're just racking up reviews for review's sake at that point. And then you're not getting good detail in those reviews either.

And I think that's a really important factor. Again, for maximizers are probably going to read some of the reviews or just at a podcast with an Amazon pro, and we were talking about with Amazon now there's the AI shopping assistant, and you can ask Rufuss, what do customers say about this product, about X, Y, Z? And Rufuss is going to dig through those reviews and synthesize that for you. Even Amazon has been pulling out and saying, this is a frequently returned item, and they've been denoting that now on products. And if you're a consumer, you're going to look at that kind of with some side up like, oh, I guess I have to read the reviews, or should I just go to the next product? Depending on what type of buyer you are. Exactly. Yeah. So good. Well, Jon, we are out of time. One last plug here.

Check the book out beyond the click, where can folks find the book? And also Jon, for those that are like, Hey, I'd like to work with Jon. I'd like to work with the good and see what they can do to help my company. How can they get in touch with you? Yeah, so the book, it's everywhere. Books are sold. Amazon, it was a bestseller on Amazon in multiple categories. Congratulations. Thank you. The best place to go get a book though is the good.com/btc for behind the click. And there's a code. You can use BTC podcast five zero for 50% off a copy of the book. So if you get it off of the good.com, I'm happy to give you 50% off. My margin's the same either way. So happy to share that with everybody. Or of course, Amazon, et cetera, wherever you'd like to get it.

If you want to go to hold of me, find me on LinkedIn, I'm so active on there, feel free to DM me. I do read everything that's going to be the best bet to get ahold of me personally. Awesome. Jon MacDonald, ladies and gentlemen, Jon, really appreciate it, man. Super fun as always, and looking forward to next time. Yeah, thanks again for having me. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. If you liked this show, we ask that you share it, share it with somebody else that could be inspired, buy it or could find it useful. And if you haven't left a review for the pod, we'd love that as well. And leave a detailed review just like we were talking about here on the show today. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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The best brands do things differently. Jimmy Kim has taken a unique approach to growing Sendlane from obscurity to becoming one of the fastest-growing ESPs on the market. As both a former brand owner and a current tech leader, Jimmy brings a fresh perspective to DTC. He explores what he refers to as the "retention revolution," the need to rethink email strategies, and the changing landscape of DTC.

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Key topics explored:

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• The critical distinction between marketing to prospects versus customers, and understanding when to “hammer” and when to “nurture.”
• Why sending more frequent emails can counterintuitively improve deliverability and engagement.
• The growing importance of financial literacy and data-driven decision-making in the DTC space, with examples of brands excelling in this area.
• How to effectively leverage click data as a powerful feedback loop for understanding customer preferences and refining your marketing messages. Most brands think they are utilizing click data, but they aren’t.
• The benefits of an omni-channel approach and why successful brands are expanding beyond pure DTC to include retail and marketplace presence.

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Chapters:

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(00:00) Introduction

(08:14) Transition To Sendlane

(12:43) The Importance of Email & SMS Marketing

(22:40) Indicators for Rethinking Email and SMS Strategy

(26:03) Common Mistakes in Email and SMS Marketing

(29:17) Diving into ISP Levels

(30:27) Rewarming for Deliverability

(33:06) What Sendlane Offers

(37:35) What Are The Best eCommerce Brands Doing?

(42:46) The Importance of an Omni-Channel Approach

(49:11) Conclusion

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Show Notes:

• Jimmy Kim (LinkedIn) 
• Jimmy Kim (X) 
• Sendlane
• The ASOM Podcast
• True Classics
• Cuts 
• BYLT
• Jacques Spitzer (LinkedIn) 
• Raindrop
• Jimmy Sansone (LinkedIn)
• The Normal Brand

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Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript:

Jimmy:

It's not about just top line revenue, it's not about just your click rates, it's not about your revenue that you make. It's about understanding that flow and how that is ultimately driving your business and the time and energy that you're putting in to create it.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today I have the man, the myth, the legend, Jimmy Kim from Sendlane. He's the founder and CIO, Chief Innovation Officer. Just passed on the torch of CEO to someone else, which we'll hear a little bit about on the pod. But Jim and I connected at Ezra Firestones Blue Ribbon Mastermind recently. And when you're in one of those rooms and somebody walks in and everybody's just like, Ooh, I want to talk to this guy, that's what happens when Jimmy's around. Everybody wants to talk to him, be around him, things like that. And so I knew this is the guy that I need to get to know. And of course, I've heard the hype and the buzz around Sendlane. And so really excited to dive in. We're talking tension marketing, loyalty marketing, future of D two C and other fun stuff. So with that, Jimmy Kim, how's it going man? And welcome to the show.

Jimmy:

Yeah, hey man. Thanks for an introduction. Always flattering to hear these things, but yes, thank you and excited to be here today.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And now first things first, you are a podcaster now as well. So I know you've been a guest forever, but now you and some of your buddies, you've launched the awesome podcast, spelled a SOM. So describe what that is and why are you guys doing that?

Jimmy:

Yeah, it's a show about perspective. We recognize there's all these siloed shows, but there's not a show that kind of brings in the three elements of, to me, the three, four elements of what really is entailing in D two C and e-commerce in general, which is not just the marketer, or not just the operator, but also bringing in the agency and the SaaS that kind of thinks about it. And we talk about different topics and something like AI, for example. And we all have a different viewpoint on that because everyone thinks about how these things are applied. And what we've learned ultimately at the end of the day is everything all kind of comes back to the center where we all realize we all are achieving the same goal, but we have a different goal in mind. But it all in the principle of things ultimately is aligned. So it's been a really cool show. And yeah, it's a video first podcast. It's a little bit different and unique, but we're getting some good feedback, so we're pretty proud. Yeah,

Brett:

I was checking it out earlier and really, really great. You guys have a good chemistry, good flow and tackling, really important stuff. And I love that approach. Where, yeah, agency, which that's my background, own an agency now for going on 15 years, a little bit over D two C, brand owner, SaaS owner, all trying to solve some of the same problems and do some of the same things, but coming at it from a different vantage point, different perspective. So getting that all in one room or around one table, it's

Jimmy:

Kind of cool. That's exactly right. No, thank you for allowing us to plug that. But yeah, check us out. We're on YouTube.

Brett:

Sweet. So Jimmy, one thing I'd love to know is, and I've heard a little bit of your background, but we would love to hear a condensed version of the highlights, but when did you first realize, Hey, maybe I'm an entrepreneur? Maybe you didn't have that label or that title, but when did you know, I think I'm going to be an entrepreneur? I

Jimmy:

Think I knew I was going to be an entrepreneur really early in my life. And not to bore everyone, but I have the typical stories, the lemonade stands, the car wash business, the grass mowing business. I did anything I needed to do because at the early days it was about how do I get to my goal? And the goal was to get cash. I can buy stupid things like video games and cars and stuff. It's not that different today anymore. But really early on, that's what got me to start doing things to try to figure out how to create my own wealth and money because I couldn't work or whatever it might be. My first real business stint into entrepreneurship happened after I left the car business. I joined the internet world in 2008. So I'm a dinosaur when it comes to this world of internet. I've been around since 2008. I discovered affiliate marketing. That's actually where my roots started. I learned a little tool.

Brett:

I know many by the way. I know so many great marketers, business owners, several brand owners, agency owners, got their start in affiliate marketing. Do you have any thoughts or theories? Why does affiliate marketing breed what I consider to be a really successful class of individuals?

Jimmy:

Yeah, I think people have mistake affiliate marketers for this negative connotation, but you know what they are. They're all growth hackers, man. We're all growth hackers because we do everything unconventional, different, unique, and we have to find our way around a lot of regulation ultimately. And that's kind of where people are really scrappy problem solving. And I think that, yeah, to your point, I know a lot of great affiliate marketers now that have become so much into the world that you are surprised when you hear the background was that they were slinging eBooks or promoting Amazon products, and you're like, that's what you're doing. I mean, we talked about EZ or Firestone, that's where he came from too.

Brett:

Totally, totally. It's true. And I think, yeah, unconventional you, you've got to find opportunities and no one else is exploiting if you just do what everyone else is talking about, there's not going to be enough margin in there for you, correct affiliate marketer. And so yeah, I think that affiliate marketer mindset is pretty similar to an entrepreneur mindset, so that's great. That's great. So awesome. So

Jimmy:

Yeah, so I started there. I worked for a great guy, his name was OnX Ngal. He taught me a lot of stuff early on about the internet and things. And I quickly fell in love with email. And I started my journey in 2011, roughly starting my first business. And that started off as an affiliate marketing business. I learned all this stuff, I applied it, I started making money, and then naturally like everyone else, I became a content creator, started teaching what I was doing because I realized that made me even more money. And then where I fell into Sendlane and everything else is that I had this love with email. And one day a friend of mine hit me up and he was like, Hey, I've got this PO for $50,000 for my clothing company, for this retail purchase, and I don't have the money and the banks won't give it to me, but I have this new brand that I'm building out at my clothing store.

Can I get 50 grand? And I was doing well. So I let him borrow it, and I walked into his store just a couple months later to start talking about how we're going to get repaid back. And I looked around and I was like, man, this is cool. You produced this great basic, that's really nice. It's the unique style. Well, how are you doing online? And he looked at me and he was like, we're not doing anything online. And that was kind of the moment I was like, Hey, how about I take you online and you let me launch this thing and I become a partner of this thing instead of paying me back and let me invest some money and grow into it. And that's kind of how the brand started. So it was a men's street, it was a streetwear boutique first, and then we became a men's streetwear direct to consumer business apparel business. And in 2013 I joined it. And over the next four years, we scaled that thing to about 10 million of revenue annually. And it was quite a good learning. I didn't make any money because I learned apparel. Business sucks, and it's really hard to make margin and money

Brett:

Super hard. Yeah,

Jimmy:

You miss a season and you get screwed. There's so many things that we learned from that. And I mean, I say this and I'll probably end up in the apparel business again one day, but I say that now, I wouldn't do it because it's just so hard to make money off of it. You can grow it, but making money is hard.

Brett:

There's so much appeal or so much attraction to it because the total addressable market is huge. Everybody wears clothes, and so you can kind of carve out something interesting there. But yeah, predicting what's going to be hot, what's not, and ordering enough inventory, being able to liquidate the inventory that doesn't sell. It is a different business model. And I don't think it's, for me, man, I don't think I could get there, but I do admire those that have figured that out. It's impressive for sure.

Jimmy:

No, a hundred percent. So yeah, so I had that thing going on and I had this content creator business that eventually evolved into this software business. So when I was a content creator, I would hear from my customers the problems and struggles that they would have. So we started creating products to solve those problems, to sell to them. And it ended up becoming this great model eventually becoming a software guy. And so all of that stemmed into this need and necessity. So I mentioned earlier I was an affiliate marketer, and even today is the same problem, but back then even affiliate marketers were shunned from a lot of channels, including email. And so we said with myself and the two guys who built it said, how do we do this ourselves and stop paying someone else to do it? Why don't we pull our money together and build this thing?

And that was the first day of Sendlane, and it wasn't the business who was selling the product or the deliverability engine that we built today, but that's how it started for us. And then for four years, we used this tool internally, not as a business again, but just really just internally as a tool to make money for ourselves. And then in 2017, I had the big kind of moment. That was kind of my big moment where I exited my other two things. I sold my software company, I exited my partnership on the brand side and sold my partnership back to him as he wanted to kind of take it a different direction. And then of course, I looked at everything that I had and I said, I want to go do something. And naturally, coming off of two really good successful businesses, I was like, I could go build software now.

And that's when the day of Sendlane started. So we built that company in September of 2017, was actually the official incorporation date. And that's when we started to build what we looked into. And I know what most people will think right now is like, oh, so you wanted to build another ESP? The honest answer was no, it was never the answer to build an ESP. The problem that I saw when I was coming off the brand side was that we were using too many freaking tools. Man, if you think you're using tools now, back then it was like the backend stock app, the little widget for this, the Swatch color app we're using 30, 40 different apps. And I realized, and it's really funny, but I realized I had an issue because there was this weird app, and I don't even remember the name of it, but all I remember was $4 99 cents. And I didn't know how to contact support. I didn't know how to cancel it, and it would just keep rebuilding me. And as an entrepreneur and as a founder, it bothered the heck out of me that I was paying someone. That entrepreneur

Brett:

Was like, our stick rate is incredible. Cancel. Yeah, because you can't people, they just don't leave because

Jimmy:

Yeah, exactly. We would file chargebacks, it was a mess. Anyways, I ended up realizing that the future of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to look into the future became a unification story. And then I looked at retention because I've always loved email as a side of that and said, how do I go out and unify it? So even down to my first pitch deck was always about building the unified future. So first thing I learned was it takes really long to build software. So it took me three years to build the software almost or almost four years. And I came out launching in e-Commerce in 2021. So it took me that long and during that time, I had to sell and do whatever I needed to do, sell to whoever with this old platform. And then we launched a new one in 2021, and first one was email.

And we knew how important it was, not only because of my background, but also because just the story needed to have that base foundation built in order to go into the future. 2022, we launched SMS 2023, we launched reviews 2024 so far we launched forms and we'll continue to launch into the future into 2024 into 2025 with more channels like WhatsApp and push notifications, we'll be building a loyalty motion, a customer service motion. And ultimately the goal that I've always had on my initial pitch deck vision was how can I get all the retention touch points of a lifecycle to repeat and create the second purchase faster? Because in my clothing stores, everything was eaten up on the advertising on the first sale, and I realized that that 20 30% of those repeat purchasers, that's where my money and bread and butter was. And we needed to figure out how to get that in faster. And the faster I can bring that in, the more I could invest into the future. So that's always been the vision. It's been the vision since 2017. It's never changed. I've always wanted to build the unification story, and that's what we do today. And our typical customer today is consolidating from two, three platforms and bringing it into one platform and driving their business, having better success, better vision, better visibility, but ultimately a tool that is really building for the future of innovation of how we think about things.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really smart. I see consolidation on the agency side as well. There was a period of time back, back when you had a million different apps to do a million different things. Agencies were very specialized at that time. And now it seems like push there is for consolidation as well. I want one agency or I want fewer agencies for sure on the D two C and SaaS side, I want fewer tools to do the same thing because I can just get there faster, get results faster and that sort of thing. What are some of the tips or suggestions you would give? So getting to that second order faster, what are some of the tips from the suggestions, some of the ideas, obviously the tools going to enable you to get there faster, but what are some of the practical things that people can do to get there faster on their own?

Jimmy:

Yeah, I mean, some of the things that we see in the market, and what's funny is the thing about email has been for the last 20 years, the playbook hasn't evolved that much. We started back 20 years ago and we would do two things. We'd do newsletters and drip campaigns. So those are these weekly things we sent out. And then you would just have these automated flows. What's happened now and 20 years later is the playbook hasn't evolved that much. In fact, the data is muddier, the information is a little bit more misleading, attributions at all time high because I say everyone's attributing. So it's on a high. And the thing that comes down to it is it always has come down to core principles of what email and retention really offers. So two things happen, and I'll dig on these two things. Number one, the first thing that people don't seem to understand is a difference between a customer and a prospect.

And this is a big failure point that I see in this market because a prospect who's never purchased before is not the same goal to create a repeat purchase. The goal is to create the first purchase where the second purchase is often a different motion and skill. So separating those people's core number one like that, if you can just uncover that, you will start to unlock a lot of different things because you'll realize your prospects are not where your money's made. You need to be sending them more messages, more emails, more SMS, because you need to get'em convert or get the heck off of your list. This is like your buy or die kind of mentality. It very much lives in email especially. And the number two thing that I'm seeing in this market on why people aren't successful or they're not doing enough is actually just a simple thing of not sending enough.

And I say this in the funniest way because I think there was this core principle, again, going back 20 years, oh, if I send too many emails, my customer be bothered if I send too many emails, people do this and that. But what's changed is now if you don't send email, people forget about you now because there's so much, and not sending email does not get you brand equity. It gets you brand loss that's ultimately happening. So the second thing that I tell people quite often is if you're not emailing every day to some segment of your list, you're probably missing out on revenue dollars and brand awareness and noise. So it's an overarching theme that comes into place, especially with all the changes in deliverability and all the things that have happened, they're incentivized you to send more. All these changes that happen right now with deliverability in June, those are basically, and the people who are the least affected are the people who mail every day. The people who are most affected are the people who don't mail at all or mail very irregularly.

Brett:

It's such a good point that the paradox, so to speak, of email is actually the more you send, the better your deliverability, the lower your opt-out rates. Because yes, sometimes, and I've done this before where I've signed up for something, they never email me, they email me a month later and I'm like, wait a minute, who are they? Did I sign up for this? So it unsubscribe? Maybe I hit as well if I'm feeling real salty. But yeah, it's like I don't remember now, but if you email me regularly and you're providing value, then I'm potentially going to remain subscribed. Now I want to talk about a couple things related to that. So you talked about segmenting prospects and returning customers. How does the language change, the offers change the email strategy change in SMS strategy between prospects and customers?

Jimmy:

Absolutely. So look, a prospect, too many people are trying to build value in their emails and have focus on content. But this is why I always say I give a very simple thing. You need to hammer or push on your prospects and you need to nurture your clients. And what I mean by that is very simple. When a person is in a prospect funnel, there's only one objective to get them to make a purchase because the longer it comes from an opt-in because they're usually opting in from a newsletter, 20% off coupon, whatever that intent is, that intent is dying fast. And so your goal, obviously we've got those automated messages and things that are going out, but your goal is to get them to make that purchase and do something about it or get off. So that's a very simple focus. It means the messaging should be very clear.

Direct sale offers things to get them to convert, not content, not information that they don't care about. They haven't bought into your brand, they don't give a crap about your founder store right now. They don't care about your social media. All they care about is why they came to the product. Why did they most likely click on that social media ad and why did you hook them in? And that problem that they're trying to solve or that solution, whatever that solution is, to whatever their need is, should be the focus and we should be pushing on them aggressive. Then you flip over the customer and suddenly they're already bought in. This is where you're just building relationship and you're focusing on letting them know more about your customer. You're building advocacy, you're building loyalty within the user. And if you're going to build that, that requires a very focused message around who are you? What are you doing? You still need to showcase products. You've already identified what they've purchased. You should be able to start picking that up a little bit. Is it a men's or women's item, categorize it, whatever it might be, starting to use that information. That's where you're segmenting and you're driving more effective messaging, and that's really the best personalization you can do today in this world.

Brett:

Man, that's so good. So hammering your prospects, nurturing your existing clients. Yeah,

Jimmy:

Love your customers and push on your prospects, right?

Brett:

Yeah, and it's one of those things, I'll use an analogy and it probably isn't the best analogy, and there'll probably be some pushback for people listening, but I think the urgency is the same here. You look at some of the selling timeshares or my 22-year-old son is selling solar for residential door to door. And in both those environments, they know that if the prospect doesn't close in that meeting, they're not going to close. Correct? It's not going to happen. If they were like, well just get back to me in a week, okay, it's done. It's dead. Maybe one out of a thousand or one of a hundred, I don't know what the numbers are, but pretty much doesn't happen. And I think you got to look at your prospect list that same way they are expiring and expiring quickly. You don't get them to take action in a very finite window and it's over. You missed it, right?

Jimmy:

That's it. It's over the longer, I mean, most purchasing cycles and everyone knows their own purchasing behavior cycles around initial opt-in identity to purchase, but most of 'em are happening within the first two weeks. And once you're at a two week window, slower and slower and slower, and yes, everyone can tell me about their story, how there was 180 day person who reactivated and purchased. I get that. It's a bonus, man. It's a bonus of, it's a game of mass audience and it costs money. So you've got to try to think about that because right now, prospect is actually negative ROI until it becomes ROI, and people spend and focus most of their time in that bucket. But the moment, as I kind of gave on tip one, the moment you separate your audiences and you look at a prospect, the mind blowing thing that happens to merchants when we suggest such a simple change in the way that do nothing but send the same email, just segment them out differently so that you can at least look at how the revenue and the actions are driving their click behavior and you'll suddenly see, wow, suddenly all your money's actually coming from your customers.

Why? Because that's where actually what email marketing does plays into the picture, right? Email plays on acquisition and retention acquisition on the popup and the follow-up, but really the focus is retention. And I know the stat that people always talk about in the world is always about, oh, what's my percentage of revenue? But that's a really flawed stat too, because if you have a pop-up, for example, and people are opting into that pop-up, making a purchase, you didn't do the work. I hate to tell the retention person, but that work was done by the top of the funnel guy. You just supplied a tool to help create the thing. The thing that you need to be actually looking at is your overall store repeat rate. Your job in retention is to increase the repeat rate of the business, not of the email single channel. And this is where people lose the sight of what we call an email and SMS marketer to what I consider a retention marketer because a retention marketer, which to me is the evolution of what an email and SMS marketer is becoming. They're thinking about the inventory customer support, they're thinking about feedback, they're thinking about the overall business needs of retention and how to increase that number. That to me is the future of what email and SMS drives

Brett:

So good. And so yeah, it's not just about how do I maximize email as a channel and how do I maximize the email stats and KPIs? How do I maximize retention? And I think, honestly, Jim, I think this is a trend that we're seeing across channels and across platforms. So we do a lot with Google and YouTube and a lot with Amazon ads and stuff. And really there was a day when it was all about what's in platform roas, and then it was like, well, let's look at some third party tools, but it's still about what is Google and YouTube contributing? And that's fine, but it's really more about what is our incremental growth and what is our contribution margin and are we profitable in all of our ad spend? And then how does Google and YouTube and those things ladder up to that? And I think in a very similar vein, what you're talking about is how does email and SMS lead to more retention? And if it's not, then we've got to retool, right? Yep,

Jimmy:

That's absolutely correct. And it's retool re strategy, redo everything. It can be anything that comes into your business. It could just be, and Brett, I tell merchants this, and I mean in the nicest way it could be a product problem. People hate to admit that they have a product problem. The reason why, look, I'm going to tell you something, Brett, when you see great products, it doesn't matter if they have an email SS program that's good, bad, whatever, the repeat purchase rate is incredible. And you're like, why? Because the product is so good. It doesn't actually matter what you say. The consumer has already made up their mind that they're going to come back and make that purchase.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. Marketing cannot fix a bad product for retention, marketing and fix a bad product. You may have low LTV because your product needs work. And so that's something we got to look at for sure. So if someone's looking at their business, what are some indications from your point of view that would lead someone to say, okay, I got to rethink my email and SMS strategy, I've got to retool my retention. I've got to look for the retention revolution like you guys talk about at Sendlane. What are those indicators?

Jimmy:

I think there's a lot of things that indicate, and there's no one magic bullet that comes into this place, but if I'm thinking about it at the simple thing, I'm looking at revenue that I'm generating, however I'm tracking it, right? I'm looking at the output. Are we getting, it comes into a 1, 2, 3, right? Everything is important still in the data side of things. So if we're going to get granular, the open is giving you the trend line of interest. The click is telling you how your message isn't resonating and the conversion is telling you how your product resonates through the message of interest that they've gained, right? It's a funnel. And a lot of times people only look at certain parts of the funnel and they drop off and pretend that it doesn't exist. Like an email marketer often doesn't really care what happened on the conversion of the page, but often that is the place that you need to be optimizing or you need to be working or you need to be working on the copywriting and message across both sides of that.

So to me, every one of those metric points is telling your story and understanding where the break of that story happens is where the data is useful. It's not about just top line revenue, it's not about just your click rates, it's not about your revenue that you make. It's about understanding that flow and how that is ultimately driving your business and the time and energy that you're putting in to create it. I mean, if you're using a simple thing, it should be an ROI metric email and SMS is driving 40, 60, a hundred times ROI to your tool and costs of your entire thing, not just your tool, but your agency or your marketer and having your entire team. You need to be understanding that because if it's truly going to be a big driver of business, you should be putting focus, which is where the agency recommendation always comes in for me, because most businesses shouldn't own this. In-House for example. I have a big thing about that because I believe that unless you are someone like me who's just got this obsessive love for email, go hire somebody that already knows and does things and it should be an agency because you're going to get a team wrapped around that. You know what I mean?

Brett:

Those, and I love that so much, not just because of an agency owner, and we do have a retention and email and SMSA department and a division, and we recruited a guy, kind of a top email marketer almost two years ago now to kind of build out that offering for us. And we agree there's so much that goes into it, constant need for creativity and graphic design and copywriting and then breaking down the data. And then there's both the creative side and the tedious side of email marketing that unless you've got someone that just absolutely loves it on your team, better to hire a pro. For sure.

Jimmy:

It's even simpler. Like the math, Brett, I always tell people to bath, I've got a $10 million business and three to $4 million is supposed to become from repeat purchase and retention. Why you got a $60,000 person in charge of that thing?

Brett:

Totally.

Jimmy:

Yeah. It's insanity. And even saying someone's paying 150 grand to an agency, that's still nothing to the end outcome of what that channel is supposed to produce for you. But sometimes brands are shortsighted about this and they don't think about it because they think that they're saving money or they have better control. But the reality is, and this is the other hot take on it at $10 million, honestly, it just doesn't matter. Just getting 'em a message is all that really matters.

Brett:

So good. So good. Awesome. So what are some of the other mistakes you see? So as you talked to a lot of D two C brands, you look at a lot of email accounts obviously. What are some of the other mistakes that you see? Obviously we're not sending enough, we're not segmenting our prospects from our customers. What other mistakes do you see?

Jimmy:

I mean, optimizing for the wrong metrics is always a big thing that we see. So we know the famous thing about open rates, and everybody in this market at this point knows that open rates aren't reliable. In fact, Brett, 2019, when you got a 12% open rate, that was great and somehow we're at 50, 60% and no one's questioning it. It's not because people are opening more emails, it's because there's less information. And that data is the pixel of what an open rate is, is the most rudimentary thing you can think of. You send an email, there's an invisible pixel. When it loads an image, it fires an open. That's all an open rate is, there's nothing magical about it. So optimizing wrong for the wrong rate, you should be optimizing for the click through rate because it's saying that people are seeing your message, it's relating, it's working, and they're clicking through right then it's their job on the landing page or the PDP to make the job happen.

So that's number one. The number two thing that I see is actually something I talk about a lot too, is segment and hygiene. And what I mean by that is there's an old adage of delete your old list. I'm not telling people to delete their old list. What I am telling people is to really reconsider the things that you're doing within that list and the understanding of data. Again, I talked about it, a 90 day customer who has open and active and as a customer who's made a purchase is highly valuable. But a 90 day person who is a prospect who's never purchased is very low in value. In fact, you've lost a lot of money on that person in human at this point, but people don't look at that data and really drive a decision around that. And so when I talk about this, it's like, okay, if a customer's over 30 days, and I mean if a prospect's over 30 days, great, we should still be emailing.

We should still be trying to activate, but maybe we slow 'em down, maybe we message only the hard hitting stuff towards, and maybe we just realize that they're out of cycle today and really understanding what those mean and then how to drive the hygiene of your effectiveness of your list. And so that's something that I see a lot of mistakes on. I see a lot of mistakes on too heavy of image focus. I think something that brands have forgot about is copywriting is probably more important than the actual image and words. When brands tell me direct responses, the plain text email is working so great for me, I'm like, it's not that it's working great for you, that you actually wrote copy instead of posted the picture with a 50% off sale. It's because you made someone read the words and drive the narrative to create the action.

Old school marketing, but it's 1 0 1 and people forget the 1 0 1. It's not about pretty images. It's actually about driving experience, teaching, educating, and getting someone to click on that email or SMS. And that doesn't happen through images. As always, it happens through words, which is why plain text works really well. Is it good for the brand? Absolutely not. Is it good for deliverability? Absolutely. Great because again, you're writing words against that. And then the third thing is actually deliverability. I think all the changes that have happened, it's continuing to happen right now. People are not focusing under deliverability. So I'm going to give you the one tip that everybody should be thinking about, which is simple. People look at the overarching numbers, they never dive into the second layer of numbers. You need to be diving into the ISP levels. So that means we call 'em top level domains or TLDs or ISPs, but these are like Gmail, Verizon group, Microsoft.

If you're not diving into that second layer of data and identifying what's going on there, because here's the thing, you can have a great open rate, but a really crappy delivery on a single vertical. And if it's your Gmail that's getting hurt, your revenue is down in the toilet and you can't figure out, my open rates look good, but my revenue is down. It's because your Gmail users are about six times more likely to make a purchase, spend more money than Yahoo or a OL or Hotmail. But too often we're looking too high without digging in. So deliverability is really a big driver right now, and that's changing in the market.

Brett:

Yeah, that's an area that I don't hear people talking about enough deliverability, but I would argue it's the single most important thing you can do, right? No one's going to open respond or purchase from an email they do not see that does not land in their inbox. And I think it's one of those things where a lot of the numbers mask that, to your point, that deliverability may be in the toilet and you just don't know. So how does somebody kind of dig into that and then what do they do to improve deliverability? I know there's a lot of technical things there, so we can just touch on the high point.

Jimmy:

Yeah, I mean, look, it's pretty straightforward. It's like one, obviously identification is number one. So being able to see the metrics, breaking 'em down and noticing the lack of trend. So I'll give you the trick that we think about your Gmail, your Yahoo and a OL or your Verizon, kind of our trend line. They should set the pace. They should look similar, two to six points off on your open rate and they should look similar. So that's trend line number one. The other ones will always be declining. Apple, a hot Microsoft, they'll be about half usually, and that's normal. Okay, so number one, you identify. Number two is just kind of checking through everything, the technical side, D, K, MD, mark, dude, everyone's an expert, now go hire five, Fiverr guy for $5, and he'll go do and fix your stuff if you need to or go use tools that are out there to do it or ask your ESP.

It's not that hard anymore to do this stuff. It's really easy and you need to go follow 'em and make sure that you're doing it across your entire business, not just your email stack, but your external tools you're using, your external communication you're using. All of these are important because reputation has been really big. Three, you should set up some monitoring tools. So one thing that people don't know is Google doesn't report spam rates back to an ESP. So the spam rate that you see inside tool is actually not Google, it's everything but Google. Now the data correlates with Google, so it's not too bad, but you should go install something called Google Postmaster Tools, again, completely free. Go install it. Look at your domain reputation, your spam complaints, your history, and you'll be clearly understand if something is going wrong before it's all wrong and in the toilet, which is going to lead you to number four, which is cleaning and fixing it up.

So once you've got technical, all that stuff, it really comes down to a principle of rewarming. Oftentimes the simplest fix is to stand up a new subdomain for your sending and then rewarm properly and rewarming properly is painful. It sucks, but the reality is, is that's the only way you can fix it. There is no magic hot button to just fix your deliverability if it's not a technical problem. Generally it's a volume and warming up problem that you've got to go reset up. And I saw this happen with all the changes this year between this from the start of the year to now, June. People didn't warm up after they've changed and authenticated their sending, saw their revenue tank down in toilet, not sure because they see good open rates. But then I dive in and I see that their Gmail is in the toilet, and when their Gmail is in the toilet, it's not driving revenue and results. You fix the Gmail, you start and start seeing the revenue. It's just a simple, big kind of flywheel that comes into play. So that's what I recommend without getting super deep into

Brett:

It. Love it, man. That's super, super clear and high level, very valuable. So I want to talk a little bit about features and benefits and what simlan offers because I think that there's a few things at play here. One, you entered a very competitive space. This is an industry that is rich with competitors, and it's one where there's a couple of very clear leaders, but we were talking about before we hit record that Moiz Ali, friend of mine, founder of Native, we've had the privilege at OMG of working with Native now for going on six years on the Google and YouTube side. And so I still keep in touch with Moiz, but he's kind of a D two C influencer now hosts a podcast. His tweets, her his posts on X, I guess is the way he say it now. Sometimes, man, he just calls people out on X. And so he did that recently with one of the biggest competitors in the email space and he said, Hey, I posted this a year ago on, it would've been Twitter at that time, calling you out for not having these three basic features. And guess what? It's a year later. I'm still waiting. I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but that was kind of the post, right? So a

Jimmy:

Little bit more hot taste.

Brett:

It got a lot of attention for sure. So what are some of the features that Sendlane has that you're proud of that maybe others don't?

Jimmy:

Yeah, so on that list, two of the three things that he mentions we've had for over a year. So we had those principles because not because he tweeted it, because we've already had 'em, because I've had a marketer mindset of those principles, which is where that's exactly what it was. Dynamic segmentation, everything should be real time. And I think the other thing that he talked about was why is there not a one-on-one, personalization prediction time. In fact, I get burned often right now for that because I have that, but I didn't build the old school time travel thing because I didn't believe that that worked. But everybody wants time travel, which is like localized time zone sending, right? We built something called machine learning, open optimization, which takes 50 events, open clicks, purchase behavior. We congregate a time within a 24 hour window where we believe the user will be at the top of the inbox, most active in their thing.

We use it through data. And so we built that tool a while ago and it's very successful for our users today. But it's definitely something there. There's a lot of things that our tool does different. I think that the thing that I focused on, one was this because I had the vision of unification from the early days. My product feels like it's together. It doesn't feel like we layered things on. So number one, people, the biggest difference is that it's everything you do in our platform feels the same, right? Number two, we have all these little cool features and tags. One of the things that I love is something called tags. And tags to me is this malleable tool that floats across the entire application. So we can do as simple as when you click a certain link on an email, it can tag a user for that identity of the intent that they might be giving the contextual data that they're firing back that they clicked on a men's product or whatever it might.

You can do it because they made a purchase or a web browse behavior, whatever. And then you can take those tags and fire off of those as triggers. So if they clicked on men's three hours later and they did not purchase, I could fire a men's SMS off to them and say, Hey, you looked at these men's shoes here, don't forget, go make a purchase. So we have more contextual data and we think about it. And then the third thing I think that's pretty interesting is that we're actually a pure play ESP. Again, you asked a question, why would you go into competitive? We were naive man, and when we were super naive in the early days, a I didn't know even a SendGrid existed. So what did we do? We did the most painful thing and learned how to deliver email. We built our own infrastructure.

Now, early on I was stupid, but now it's become our superpower. Not only does it allow me to pass great pricing to the user because I don't have all these cogs in my back system, but two, it's allowed me to evolutionize what deliverability is by adding more machine learning, adding more AI into it and trying to make it better and better and improve it. Right now, I'm not saying it's perfect, but we definitely have better line of sight. I can go ahead and something that I know that my competitors can't do often is I can call the head of Google, I can call the head of Yahoo. I can call them and say, Hey dude, what is going on with this customer? Why are they doing that? What can you help me and tell me and how can I drive that result for the customer? Then we bring it back down to the customer, which is something that people love, is that we have deliverability expertise at a core. We're not just a platform sitting on top of a platform. We are literally the platform. We own our own infrastructure

Brett:

Today. So good. Jimmy, you've got a unique perspective. You founded and own some brands. You were in other industries now, SaaS, founder, podcaster. What are some of the things that the best D two C brands are doing right now that others aren't? And obviously related retention is great, but just any observations you have I think would be very helpful.

Jimmy:

Yeah, I think that there's two things that I would say that I'm seeing more and more of that is happening. Number one, financial literacy. And it's not just financial, but it's also data literacy. I think that people are realizing, hey, you can make a more predictable business if you can start predicting with the data that you've got available to you, not only on the top of the funnel, but even on the retention side too. And building a business model that really is a plan shouldn't be waking up and saying, I'm going to go do 2 million this month. Top line and LED is going to pour it in there. You should model it, create goals, go after those goals and treat it more like a real business. So I see that being number one. And the number two thing that I'm seeing the best businesses do is they're using the click as more of a feedback loop, less than just a mechanism and purchase.

Lemme explain that. So again, I kind of mentioned it earlier. If I'm sitting out there and I'm sending messaging out and I'm able to start identifying what people are clicking on, what that's telling you is that this is what they're interested in. That call to action is driving that product is driving it. So for a company to start understanding who their customer is, what messaging is getting them to work and be able to drive is a really powerful thing. So one of the clients, I think you probably know him, but Ron over at Avi, for example, their brand, it's a weight loss supplement company. It was a supplement collagen company. But one of the things we did with them is they said, Hey, let's go find out who your customer is. Let's find out what they want and what they need. So this is one-on-one principle, but a lot of people skip this because they have a great product idea, but they don't realize who their audience is.

So Ron used to talk about how good health and good sleep and all these other things they didn't, and there were great real benefits to this product, but what he ultimately learned by watching what they're clicking on asking them the questions learning is that they cared about weight loss and fast weight loss look pretty simple to understand now, but when you sit back and you are the brand, it's hard for you to understand because you want to believe it does all these other things for your people and you want to push on those, get a better night's sleep with avi, right? No one cared, but it's lose weight in 28 days or whatever it might be. Everyone cared. So understanding their audience and continuing to test and understand through the data that's available instead of going out and surveying, but adding technology to be able to start identifying and learning what's working and then reapplying it into your business and strategically applying it.

So those two things are what I see in the market right now. People starting to really understand who their customers even better in having data and financial literacy. Those are the brands on the right and on the hook on the rocket right now. And true classics, for example, is a perfect company. That Ben over there, over there, dude, that man is a math finance wizard. That's what he is. Everything else, he's a great operator because he's a finance wizard and the way they operate in that business financially and data driven is so insane, but there's a reason why they're $500 million brand in four years.

Brett:

It's just crazy. Yeah, 500,000,004

Jimmy:

Years. That tells you that something though.

Brett:

T-shirts, plain T-shirts. Now Brett, their

Jimmy:

T-shirts that I used to make in 2013, they look so similar because we had created these great blanks, but we were too early, we were too naive, we didn't have it. And then you can also argue that there's cuts built and all these other ones that try to come up with them, but they've kind of kept to their core principle. If you think about true classes, you think about basics. I know they do all these other things now, but basic great shirts that are affordable, cheap, and if you throw it away, it's not a big deal because it was 20 bucks.

Brett:

But what's also cool is, and I was talking to my buddy Jacque Spitzer from Raindrop about this, that the true classics, I think they started at 12 or 13 bucks and now they're like 20 or 26, and they've continued to inch up that price because it is basically simple, but it's still a great value at 20 or 26 bucks. And yeah, they're just on fire. And I couldn't agree more with you on the finance piece. There was a time, especially during the covid boom where as clients were coming to us, they're like, Hey, just help us capitalize on growth. Just more customers. That's all we care about, make sales, right? And so we were just juicing campaigns and trying to get top line growth, but now everyone's like, Hey, you know what? Actually time out. We need a real business. We need contribution margin. We need to see what channels are actually driving incremental growth, and then where do we optimize?

How do we get medium mix modeling and get that all working? And yeah, the messaging on why someone actually buys, I think people would be surprised how often the founder is wrong. You think someone is buying because of the great night's sleep, and that's really like a third or fourth benefit. It's nice, but I'm really buying because I want weight loss. That's what moves me to make that first purchase. Maybe I stick around a little bit longer of the sleep aspect, but I'm buying because of weight loss. So you got to have that insight though to be able to lean into that messaging.

Jimmy:

And I think what you said there, I have a hot take on this that I always talk about e-commerce as the channel that it is, right? People who jump to e-commerce do it because it's the low barrier of entry, but the barrier of entry starts to increase pretty high. And there's this, I don't say that's a glass ceiling, but it's like a glass ceiling. Yeah, we're going to see the true classics of the world take off in this world, but many people will get stuck because really you can't get into distribution, retail, wholesale. This is what really matters. We tried to skip that by creating a direct to consumer business so that you can avoid those things. But really, let's be honest, the biggest brands in the world, those are the things that they nail with and you have to nail 'em. So my thing that I always talk about is e-commerce has immature market because a lot of the people started are not as business acclimated, and they haven't built a real business.

Often they're doing this because it's their first or second business, and they like this model, but eventually you get better and better, and then you realize that retail is important. Your retail takes off, your Amazon takes off your Walmart, all the distribution channel and your D two C shrinks. And if that's happening, that means that your business, you're going the right way. In my humble opinion, direct to consumer, as much as I love to hear a hundred million dollar direct, dude, that shouldn't exist. Unless you're billion dollar company, you should be leveraging a lot more of the retail side of things because that's where, to me, you build a real business of predictability and we build a business where you're not focused on the creative and the marketing and everything. You're really focused on the product and delivering a great product, selling to a great buyer who can position you on the right shelf to the right buyer in front of them and the mass audiences.

And that's to me how you build a true brand in the market versus e-commerce. And I think that's where e-commerce will always have immaturity in the market, the founders and the different people, and they do grow up, but it's always like everything else, man, Brett, the layers of growing up over time, and there'll be people that are as a Firestones room for example, and that mastermind, those people are growing up. There's plenty of the other ones that won't ever grow up past that, that will never make it into that room because they don't even understand that that education that you're learning is so important to the growth of your own business and your human mind. This is my third business. I'm still a nube man. I still consider my nube when it comes to business side of things. I may be out of the market, but then business side, I'm still learning every day.

Brett:

Totally. And we got to keep that growth mindset and that as Jeff Bezos talks about the day one mindset, it's always day one. We're always learning, we're always growing, which is really great. And I think you really nailed something that's super important. I think the best brands, the best brands that we see now are not just D two C, right? D two C is just a channel. Everyone that I see that's really growing is omnichannel or close to it. So just had a good conversation with my buddy Jimmy Sansone at the normal brand awesome clothing and apparel brand, but they've done studies where when they open a normal brand store in a market and they're in other retail outlets in that market and they're doing D two C marketing in that market, all channels go up. So don't open a normal brand store and then see other retail outlets go down in sales.

They go up in sales, and this is so true, and you layer in Amazon for those who do Amazon as well, the raising tide rises all ships. And we're doing this big YouTube push now for a pretty large outdoor brand right now. And we're seeing the same thing. We're kind of selecting different markets based on some reports we're in through Google, C-D-I-B-D-I type thing, category demand, index brand, demand index. And what we're seeing is as we're pushing hard on a market, we are seeing sell-through increase in Walmart. We're also seeing sell through increase on Amazon, and we're seeing a lift with online sales. And what's cool, what's interesting is that with these ads, we're actually pushing everybody to Walmart what they kind of wanted to do, but it's kind of wild improving everything. Yeah.

Jimmy:

You know what I always say? Here's a really big thing. I hear this story right here. This is the one story, and I hope any founder listening to this hears the story a little bit because it's important when you go to an Amazon and a Walmart and you start showing a retail, your D two C starts to come down, revenues will start dropping. But don't panic, to your point, Brett, they are going to the other channels often and they're making purchases and people don't seem to understand that. They freak out, they panic, they realize it because when you go omnichannel and you're no longer going a single channel, dude, people are humans. Man, if I'm buying something that's an edible, for example, like this thing here, if I see it at a Target and I like the brand, I'm going to buy it there instead of waiting for you to ship it to me in three to five days or I'm going to go to Amazon, I want it in four hours, right?

Look, I will buy everything and even as a D two CP moment and I try to buy it from them. But the reality is, man, the buying experience is just better. The trust is better At Amazon, for example, and as a consumer, that's where I'd like to go. And so even if I'm been buying your product, I'll still end up on Amazon to make that purchase later on because that's what just makes lend sense for me. That's my easy thing. I can buy a lot of things at once. This is why a Walmart or Target and Amazon's exist today is because consumers don't like buying a single product off a single site. They really want to go buy everything they need in one place. And I hate to tell people, but most people's products aren't products that go single store specialty unless it is a pizza oven or something like that, that has that need. But most people don't sell that kind of product,

Brett:

Right? Right. Yeah. And it's one of those things where what we see when someone goes omnichannel is direct attribution in all your D two C channels is going to look really crappy, right? Because now you're generating leads and they're going to close elsewhere. I think over time your online sales as a whole can still grow, correct? But you are directly attributed click conversions. That's going to get real messy, really muddy. And this happens a lot where some people keep different inventory on their D two C site than they have in Walmart and than they have on Amazon or whatever. And so you're going to see, okay, we do this big media push or this big push or whatever, you're going to see a different skew mix sell online than what you see on Amazon or in store, but you're 100% right as you lean into these other channels, that's when you got to just be good at business, right? Yeah. Understand business, not just the D two C tools and optimizing ad accounts and things like that.

Jimmy:

And when you look at big brands, and this is always a good learning from the big brands, when they go direct to consumer, they decide to open up, they do it for loyalty reasons, they don't do it to make more money, they do it because they know their most loyal customers will come to their site and find it. That's a whole different mindset than what people are doing today.

Brett:

And a lot of the bigger brands see, hey, the vast majority, once we reach a certain point in growth, the rest of the growth we're going to see as a brand is going to come in retail and going to come in of the channels. So really, really good. Jimmy, we can keep this going forever, man. I've got more questions I want to ask you. So that just means we're going to have to have you back and do round two at some point. But if people are listening and they're like, man, I need more Jimmy Kim in my life. I need some more of the awesome podcast, or I need to check out and see if maybe I'm going to get better results there. How can people connect with you? How can they connect with the pod and with Simlan? Yeah,

Jimmy:

So I very much found on social media on X. You can find me at Yo Jimmy Kim. I think it's on the little title thing here too. So if you're listening, it's just Y-O-J-I-M-M-Y-K-I-M. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You can search me on LinkedIn. I'm the guy wearing the hat and has a pink background there. The awesome pod is found all over any streaming service and everything you have, but we are video first, so if we always ask people, find us on YouTube, we've got plenty of shorts. If you don't want to consume an hour podcast, we got shorts, we do a lot of hot takes. It's a show on perspective, so you can find me there. And then for Sendlane side, please DM me if you need questions, but you can find our information on send lane.com. You can learn all about us. We've got a big social presence there too. So we're a little bit of everywhere and it's if you want to talk to somebody, even me and you're just starting off, please DM me. I do respond to everybody. So I tell people this and I think it's the most important thing. This is why I'm not the CEO because I want to do more of this and I want to do less of the board meetings ultimately.

Brett:

That's awesome. Jimmy Kim, ladies and gentlemen, Jimmy, thanks for bringing the Heat man and the hot takes super good and look forward to doing it again.

Jimmy:

Yeah, thanks again, Brett.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, we'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? If you found this episode helpful, please share it with somebody else that would make my day. And if you haven't done it, we'd love that review on iTunes as well. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

Ever wondered how a razor company slices through the competition?

Tune into our latest episode where Ashly Knox from Henson Razors reveals how an aerospace machinist and a team of digital marketing wizards turned a single product into an 8-figure sensation.

Forget discounts and flashy gimmicks—Henson Razors is all about precision, focusing on one stellar product, and keeping a laser focus on cash flow and financial health.

Ashly’s got the inside scoop on the principles that are driving their phenomenal growth so get ready for some sharp insights and a fresh take on eCommerce success!

‍

Key topics and lessons:

• How Henson Razors achieved 8-figure success by selling a single premium product with no discounts, subscriptions, or gimmicks.
  
  
• Why focusing relentlessly on making the first purchase profitable is critical for cash flow and sustainable growth.
  
  
• How Henson uses creative constraints and the power of saying no to stay laser-focused on what matters most.
  
  
• Mastering inventory management and the cash conversion cycle to steadily scale the business.
  
  
• Why manually tracking key metrics helps develop invaluable business intuition before automating reports.
  
  
• Doubling down on 1-2 acquisition channels that work rather than chasing every new trend.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction to Henson Shaving

(08:55) Reducing Irritation + Secondary Benefits

(14:56) First Order Profitability and Low Acquisition Costs

(24:41) Why The Philosophy of No Promos, No Discounts

(29:46) Understanding Cash Flow 

(38:28) Inventory Management

(41:06) The Power of Focus

(45:20) Focusing Your Acquisition Channels

(49:26) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Ashly Knox (LinkedIn)
• Henson Shaving
• Ezra Firestone (LinkedIn)
• Boom by Cindy Joseph
• Sean Frank (LinkedIn)
• Ridge
• Taylor Holiday (LinkedIn)

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

‍

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more. 

---

Transcript:

Ashly:

I've just seen it often enough to say that operators will take a win, a quick win, and then the temptation is to exploit that win as much as possible instead of sort of backing away from it and going, why did we get those results? And are we happy with that as an ongoing part of our strategy or not?

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and my guest today is Ashly Knox of Henson's Razors. And what I'm really excited about here is this is a company that does no promos, no discounts, no email popups, they're not on Amazon. They essentially have one product. They're doing eight figures online. They're extremely profitable. And so we're going to show you how, talk about the operational philosophy and what's working right now for hints and razors. And so with that, Ashly, welcome to the show and how's it going? Thanks,

Ashly:

Brett. Yeah, going great. Thanks for having me.

Brett:

Yeah, thanks for coming on, man. And such a great story. As you and I were prepping and we were kind of talking about the hints and razor story, I was like, man, this is unique. This is definitely unique to the space of razors because talk about a space that's a little gimmicky, right? Let's pack 15 razors on this little shaver, and so if this brand's got four, we need five and then let's go six or whatever. And then let's do extreme discounts or discounts on the front end to hook you on a subscription on the backend. Let's charge you a dollar for some kind of club that we got going on type of thing. And you guys really came in and said, no, not going to do any of that. Just simple, great product, fair price, no gimmicks. And so let's dive into that a little bit. First of all, what was the genesis of this? Because I think if you were to sit down and talk to some e-commerce experts and you were to ask, Hey, what category should I get in? I'd like to build an eight figure E-commerce brand. Razors would probably not be at the top of that list. So how did you get going here?

Ashly:

Yeah, so it's sort of a little bit of a bizarre story because Henson is this weird mix of aerospace machinists and digital marketers, e-commerce guys, operators. And so back in the pandemic, actually the aerospace machinists are one of our co-founders. They mix parts for satellites, parts for Mars rovers, legitimately hard to make very in demand aerospace parts, legitimately and sort of just through a series of circumstances during the pandemic where a lot of those projects got either paused or shut down, they had to pivot. And so one of the machinists over there was like, I think we could make a safety eraser. And so they did. And when they did it and it was actually good, they came over to us and okay, well here, what do you think? And could you sell it? And we're like, well, we can sell anything. Sure. And we really just thought, honestly spoken

Brett:

A true marketer, can we do it? Yes.

Ashly:

How many is tbd, right? We honestly thought it would be a little side project. We'll spin up a Shopify store, we'll put it online, we'll help these guys out and we'll see what happens. And then it just took off. So that's sort of the genesis, but then leading into your intro there, because we had this product that was well made and sort of functional. Again, remember this wasn't like a bunch of MBA guys getting together saying what business model should be attacked? This was aerospace machinists looking at cutting forces and angles and going, how do I make this tool as efficient as I can? So that was the genesis of the product. So then for us as marketers, we said, well, how do we build our brand and marketing effort around that, which I think other brands do, but sometimes it's very often the other way.

It's sort of like business approach. How do I get ebitda? How do I get high lifetime value? It's all the things that e-commerce operators want to get, and those are the driving forces, not product necessarily. For us, it was entirely about the product. So since the product was well made efficient, lasts a lifetime, uses 10 cent blades, we're like, we don't want to do subscriptions or clubs or any of that stuff. We just want to sell it on its merit, which means no recurring revenue for us because you buy it once, use it forever. We don't even make the blades. We don't really make money on them. They're 10 cents. We don't sell any other products currently. So our business model is actually terrible. It's garbage. You wouldn't want to do it the way we're doing if you had your choice, right? Because that razor razor blade model is highly profitable.

You sell the handle no money or very low profit, you sell the consumable part of high profit, and that's how you get your high LTV and your profit over time. That's what all the big guys do. What if you go to a jug store and look at the razor aisle? That's what you're looking at, the razor razor blade model. And we just said, well, they're already there. They're already doing that. Our product doesn't really need that kind of bells and whistles. Let's just see if we can sell it as it is and see if we can get that to be a profitable business and we can. So now that we can, we're like, okay, there's an interesting sort of lesson here, which is what if you just sort of focus on a really streamlined, doing something as a very simple sort of effort, putting all of your eggs in the let's make that thing profitable. And then from there, from that sort of profitable foundation, then you can start to expand things. Because trust me, we would love higher lifetime value. We would love all the things that all those other models have more intrinsically, but now we have the upside of trying to build on them in a way that has a really strong base, if that makes sense.

Brett:

Yeah, it totally makes sense. And yeah, there's nothing wrong with the model that those bigger razor companies have. In fact, I think if you looked at purely the math and purely the business model, you would probably favor one of those models. But you have a superior product literally designed by aerospace engineers. And so you've got to lean into that. And it turns out as you try to sell this and sell this the way that you have, it resonated with people. The marketplace was hungry for a product like this. And it's interesting, mention a company, they're out of business now. So think it's okay if I mention them where they came out with 99 cent razor. So this is not Dollar Shave Club, this is 99 cent Razor Club. I'm like, come on. Really? No innovation there. That's just let's be more gimmicky than the last. But you guys said no, it's going to be simple, straightforward, awesome. Razor, let's go. So as you were launching this, when did you understand, man, we've got product market fit here, this product and the way we're structuring the message, this is resonating. I'd

Ashly:

Say it happens pretty quick. Probably within the first eight to 12 months we're like, oh boys, there's actually a market here. People like this. As soon as we started to get enough feedback, I think probably the switch for us was when we started to realize that we were actually winning cartridge users. There's lots of safety reasons around for over a hundred, the actual fundamental design isn't necessarily that's new. How we make it is very innovative, and the devil's in the details for sure, but safety raisers has been around forever. We're not the first safety raiser by any stretch. So early on we were selling to people that already had familiarity with safety raisers. As we started to win more and more people coming from the drugstore, sort of multi-blade cartridge razors and saying they much preferred ours. We're like, okay, we're onto something. Because now this market, our total addressable market isn't just that group that had familiarity with safety razors, it's everyone. And that happened within the first year. So that was when, okay, holy crap, we're onto something

Brett:

Super interesting. So talk about the difference here in the quality. And we were just talking before we hit record. I got served one of your ads on meta recently. It was brilliant. But explain to people that are like, well, why should I trade in my four or five razor setup here to go with something like the instrument?

Ashly:

Yeah, I mean fundamentally, so there's a couple of things that we know to be true. One is that two thirds of men still expect irritation when they shave. That's a really high number for a category that's been around as long as shaving has. That's a really high number of bad outcomes. I actually can't really think of any other product category that's that well used that has that many bad outcomes, right? Yeah.

Brett:

60% of you will use this product, you'll feel horrible afterwards. You'll have bumps, you'll have whatever.

Ashly:

But we're guys, we just keep using it idiots. So because that's true, fundamentally, if irritation is something you would like less of, you need to use a single blade just full stop, less blades, less friction. It's fundamental, not pitching hens in here. Just go and get a safety razor single blade better for your skin. So that's one thing specifically for us, it really has to do with how we support the blade. Something to get too boring here, but think of anything you would use to cut. You're cutting carrots at home, you're sawing a piece or whatever it is, you would never want to cut anything with a blade that's not supported. Well, you wouldn't want the blade moving, vibrating, flexing, bending. You wouldn't have as much control, just fundamentally wouldn't have as much control. And that's what these aerospace machinists really identified when they were making their first design for the razor was they're not holding the blade well enough.

And remember their whole job is doing very specific cuts on titanium, really hard metals that have to be within 12 microns of tolerance, very difficult things to do so they understand cutting action blade support, all these things as good as anyone on earth. So that was sort of the consistent flaw. Multi blades, other safety razors, disposable razors, none of them support the blade well enough to hold it rigid. Their design and then the manufacturing execution of that design is what lets us do that, which means you just have less of those less collateral damage when you shave, right? You want to cut the hair and not your skin. In a perfect world that's much easier to control when you have a blade that's not going to move.

Brett:

Interesting. And so as you listen to customers, hear from customers, what are the main selling points? What are people either buying it for originally or what are they most delighted with after the fact? I'm assuming it's a combination of what you just said, but curious there

Ashly:

Definitely people are hoping to have less irritation. It's still our number one reason why people buy it. What's interesting though is in the data that we have on this is there's a few benefits that people really like once they own it, but aren't necessarily big reasons to buy, which is a little unique. I'm not sure I've really seen that before. So two examples would be one, the sustainability piece. There's no plastic in our blades or a razor. The blades are recyclable. Our packaging has no plastic. There's just no plastic anywhere involved in anything we do. And I think there are certainly some people that might buy for that reason, they like it, but really they're buying it for the precision or the lack of irritation. But then once they own it, they're happy that they're not polluting. The other one is the cost. So we're $70 us to buy a raiser.

I understand that's more than the $9 raiser you might buy at the store because the blades of 10 cents, instead of say $3 for a cartridge, they're 30 times less. The consumable part is 30 times less. So over time you're spending less. And that's sort of a tricky thing to pitch people on when there's the dollar shaves and there's all these perceived to be cheap options out there, even though they add up over time, it's not really how people's brains work. Totally. So that cost of ownership, while some people go, oh, that's neat. It's really once they own it, they're like, okay, wait, I just bought my razor. I bought a pack of a hundred blades, which we sell on our site for $10, right? A hundred blades that'll last you three, four years. So once they have that at home and they try it and then they're like, okay, I'm now two years in and I still haven't spent anything else.

I'm now three years in and I still haven't spent another cent. Then they're like, okay, this is great. Because a lot of people used to go into Costco getting those big sheets of cart razors for 40 or 50 bucks and going, oh, that sucked, but oh, well, they just don't have to do that anymore. So yes, there's that upfront cost, but then once they own it, so that's just kind of a weird dynamic I've seen where the sustainability and the cost of ownership when you own the product, people can't stop raving about that, but it's not totally why they buy it, which is sort of a unique scenario.

Brett:

I think it's really important to note that those are kind of secondary benefits. They're meaningful and people will likely talk about them. And I'm sure your power users, your most passionate customers, they're telling their friends and they're talking about the long-term cost savings. But that is secondary, right? I'm not thinking like, okay, I would like to save. I'm budgeting out my razors for the next three years. I'd really like to save a little bit here. That's not enough to get me to switch, but less irritation or understanding that every time I shave, I've got bumps, I've got nicks, I've got scratches, I'm bleeding. This is enough, is enough. That's really where you win people over. And so that makes sense and I think that's really important for everybody to kind of outline what are my primary benefits, what's the real reason someone will switch, may not be the reason they stay, but it's the reason they switch.

So really important to call out. Well, let's kind of dive in. We walked through your operating tenants, and I love these. I think these are, there's lessons packed in here, and so we're just going to kind of go through this and have a dialogue on it. But I know one of your operating tenants, and this lines up with my buddy Sean Frank from Ridge, is first order profitability. Now, I think it's probably obvious why you guys do this, but talk a little bit about that. Why first order profitability and how does that impact what you do?

Ashly:

So for us, it's a bit of a necessity for sure. When you sell one product that people are going to use forever, you have to, if you want to make money and we do, then you have to make money on that first transaction. We sort of don't have any other option currently, but what that does, so that requirement really forces a very pragmatic approach to everything that we do because we don't have any get out of jail cards to play. And this is what we see in e-commerce all the time where they're like they're do some acquisition channel that maybe they haven't cracked or maybe they haven't totally solved and it's got a really high acquisition cost. Yeah, but maybe we'll make up for that later. Or there's just a lot of the fundamentals of an approach for us don't, as you mentioned off the top, we don't really email our customers almost at all. If you buy a razor, we'll give you tips on how to use it and take care of it, but we don't really email them because why we have nothing else to sell them. And so you can imagine every day we get pitched dozens of email vendors being like, why aren't you emailing your customers? And I go, what would we tell them? They have the thing that we sell.

But that lens allows us to really focus. We really, really focus. And the thing, when I talk to other and look at the landscape, I'll look at companies that are, I don't mean to necessarily compare revenue, but just in this context might be doing a 10th of our revenue and they have three times the employees and are working on six times the marketing efforts. And I'm just like, you're too small to be that diverse. You have to really focus on making something work, whether that's an acquisition channel or a product or whatever it is, a campaign. You have to focus on making it work. And that doesn't mean you can't test things, but that's all you're doing is testing. You focus on the things that work, you grow them as best as you can, and then you test, you just dabble, you dabble, dabble, dabble, dabble.

It's weird because at Henson, I feel like we're obviously doing really well and we're successful and we're pleased with the macro results. Those little tests that we do, most of them fail, but because we didn't have any real risk associated with, we're not hiring a headcount, we're not spending huge budgets. We know that the core parts of the business are finely tuned machines that are very reliable sources of revenue and profit that we can count on and rely on. And so those tests are only that, and most of them fail unfortunately, but the ones that work, we then nurture into new pillars of the business. So for us, day to day, it actually feels like we're failing all the time, but in reality, we're winning because we focused on the things we're good at.

Brett:

Absolutely, and listen, as we look at this, and I've run a traffic agency now for 14 years and done marketing forever, and there is something real about a CAC LTV ratio, your customer acquisition costs compared to LTV and let's just say for the sake of argument that my average order value is $60 and I know with quite a bit of certainty that I can get someone to purchase three times in the first six months that they're a customer. So maybe I would spend all of the first purchase on customer acquisition. Maybe I would even go in the hole a little bit. And we've worked with some businesses, worked with some brands that do that, that they've got their backend dialed in. They know that once they make a sale, then they've got email followups and they know they've get a certain percentage of people to buy.

So the math works, and you said this, I love the way you framed it, the get out of jail free card that does create or can create someone to become lazy and to say, it's okay. It's okay that this wasn't profitable. We'll make up for it on the back end. That's kind of like everybody's, every agency's favorite pitch or every marketing person. It's like, no, no. Okay, so we lost a lot of money upfront, but we're going to make it all up in the back. You guys don't have the luxury of that. And so you have to hold every dollar accountable upfront, and I think that creates a bit of clarity. It creates a bit of focus. It allows you to say, okay, yes, we're still going to test. You can never really survive and grow a business if you're not testing, but you're going to test in limited quantities so that you can remain first order profitable. So I love that focus and I love that puts on and also think there's this approach that like, hey, constraints lead to creativity, guardrails actually lead to creativity. They don't inhibit it. So any additional thoughts there? Yeah,

Ashly:

I think maybe just the one thing I would build on in that example you talked about there is if you do have a good C to LT V ratio, and there's plenty of businesses that would, and there's certainly different products that lend themselves nack to that, right? I was talking to someone the other day that sells baby food. Well, for the duration that that kid is a baby, they're probably going to be a high use customer. So it's not a forever LTV, but it's a fairly predictable one in that window. And they should exploit that for sure. They should. I'm not opposed to it. The caution is if your fundamentals are bad and if you're leaning on it too much, let's just say that you get a little, like you were saying, almost lazy or something there, or you take your eye off the ball all a little bit and you start to live with that inflated CAC because you're like, I know I have the LTV.

If that happens too long, then all of a sudden you're like, okay, well my ratio's not as good as it was, and then what you do, it's like, well, we have to drive our LTV back up because now our CACs higher, let's make the LTV higher. So we get back to that ratio and now you're doing, here's the reality of e-commerce. The tactics you do to drive a higher LTV are sort of the unpleasant ones very often. They're spamming, they're emailing, they're getting in front of it, it's discounts, it's offers, it's bundling. It's all the sort of trickery that you might do to try to convince enough people to participate in whatever that mechanic is. And then if you end up doing that too long, the thing that I am very wary of is what's your ultimate experience you're delivering at that point? How happy are your customers At that point?

I get the spreadsheets might work and maybe the math is still there, but now you're, you're committed to the hamster wheel of, because I have such a high cac because I took my eye off the ball there and relied on my LTV, but then that went up, so then I had to get that up. Now I'm over here. Now you're on the hamster wheel and good luck at mass. And then you see these brands and even as a consumer, I see it all the time. I'm like, man, the acquisition thing, the ad, the whatever, I liked them bringing me in, but boy, I don't love the experience now that I'm in.

I don't know how many customers love the brute force approach to marketing. I don't think anyone does. I get that the math works because so long as enough people convert on low cost channels, you kind of keep doing it, and that's just never been our approach. We're like, we want actual loyalty. We want be, and we're in a category where that's prevalent, so we're like, let's be different. Let's really focus. So for us, it means focusing always on low acquisition. If we can never take our eye off that ball one, we have to now, but imagine a world where we come out with other products down the road and we could sell them other things, that becomes a benefit for us, not a driver. Absolutely. It becomes something we get to benefit from versus a thing that's driving our focus. LTV would be something we would enjoy having a higher wolf of course, but LTV being high isn't a gun to my head, if that makes sense.

Brett:

Yeah, I really love it. I love the focus and I think it is served you well, and I wish more companies had a more rigid focus on customer acquisition costs. Even those with good. So let's talk about you do no promos, no discounts, no real offers and things like that. This is really important, and I'm not saying you can't run sales. We have clients on varying degrees of the spectrum. Longtime client as a Firestone boom by Cindy Joseph. They would do one sale a year around the holidays, was like a 10% discount. It wasn't major, but they just want to do something for their customers around the holidays. Other than that, nothing. This is our price. It's a great offer. This three six replace your makeup bags type thing's, just a great offer. Newer client we're working with now where they've kind of come to us and they said, Hey, we really can't close deals unless we're running a discount. So it's an awesome product, but they've kind of gotten on this discount hamster wheel, this discount spiral where they've got a discount right now or else it's not working. We've got several ideas we're about to execute for them, which I think will actually help quite a bit. But why the philosophy of no promos, no discounts, no, and how has that worked for you?

Ashly:

Yeah, it's two parts, right? It's the one which we talked about. It's the slippery slope. The hamster wheel. Once you start, are you committed to it and how do you backtrack from it? It's easier to not have to deal with that if you never do it. So that's definitely one of them. The other one is just sort of back to our sort of first principles company is that we're trying to, we really are, in this case as marketers trying to, my job is to show the product's merit, show the product's competence because it's a good product. So that's why a lot of our videos are more explanatory or informative because the average person doesn't really know much about shaving. If we're going to say less irritation, we're going to tell you why instead of just say it.

So it's really because that we want to just have it at a fair price kind of forever and not let it be about anything else. So will we ever do a discount at some point? I don't know. We always reserve the right to try to think about that in the future, but we've never discounted the razor ever. We actually just this month, because I was listening to the Ridge guys talk about how well they do it on Father's Day and we don't, so we did a little free shipping. We actually chart us. Another thing we do, we charge for shipping.

We're so gimmick list, we actually were offering free shipping just for Father's Day as one of those little tests I'm referencing doesn't seem to be moving the needle. So that's just another thing for us. Yeah, another thing for us to say, it's almost like if gimmicks move the needle for you, gimmicks, that might be a little harsh if sales discounts move the needle in some cases, for sure they were. I get, especially if it's a commodity type thing. So it would vary by category or by store. I understand the variables, but as an operator you want to really look at that carefully and the temptation would be is, Ooh, sales are up, let's go. Or it's like, why did sales go up so much?

Are we not off? Are we not convincing the value of the product at the price we'd like to listen for well enough and should we go back and focus on that first? Knowing discounts are always a lever we could pull later. I think that's where people, again, I'm not trying to overgeneralize, I've just seen it often enough to say that operators will take a win, a quick win, and then the temptation is to exploit that win as much as possible instead of backing away from it and going, why did we get those results and are we happy with that as an ongoing part of our strategy or not? I know there's plenty of brands that are having very thoughtful conversations like that. I see a lot that just sort of grab a win and go grab a win and go, and then again, eight months from now you're like, how did we get here? It's like, well, that's the path you chose.

Brett:

Yep. It was one step at a time. I took Brazilian jiujitsu for a little while and it didn't stick. It wasn't my sport, but I really enjoyed parts of it. I remember kind of rolling with some guys and then I would be like, well, how did I end up here? And they're like, well, you made a series of about eight mistakes in a row. I'm like, alright, you're going to need to show me. I have no idea what I just did, but I think the same thing happens in business. How did I end up here? Well, it was not just one thing, but it was several things that kind of led to this spot. I do have a thought related to your email list. Have you ever used the email list to get your customers to buy another razor as a gift? So leading up to Father's Day, Hey, you don't need another one, right? You're set these things last forever, but buy dad one. Have you thought about that? Just curious

Ashly:

A little bit. Yeah, we've dabbled. I think we often send an email on Black Friday usually with no offer or no update just to say Hi, you haven't heard from us. Merry Christmas, whatever. We did one early this week actually for Father's Day. We did exactly that. Hey, friendly reminder, this could make a really nice gift. You get a 36 hour spike for sure. It's like, again, we probably make things too hard on ourselves, but we really resist the temptation because while that spike looks nice for 36 hours of, Hey, look at all this basically free revenue, SEMA costs essentially nothing. It's just a 36 hour spike. It doesn't really change our business at the macro level at all. We sort of are able to see it for what it is and we will strategically it when it makes sense to, but the idea of doing that every two weeks being like, what about a gift now how about now? It's not worth to me, it doesn't seem like it's worth it. I'd rather just do a good job convincing more people that they should try a

Brett:

Razor. Totally makes sense. It's national teacher's day. You want to buy a razor for your teacher, right?

Not really. Probably not. Yeah. Awesome. So one of the next tenets you talk about is understanding cashflow. I love this topic. I think there's definitely a trend in our industry, more people talking about finance and marketing going together. Sean Frank talks about it. My buddy Taylor holiday talks about it quite a bit, but I know this has to do with your cash conversion cycle. How do we turn cash into sales and sales into cash type of thing. So are we turning cash into inventory, inventory into sales sales, into cash? What is your take and how does your company look at this understanding cashflow?

Ashly:

It's probably the topic we discuss as much as anything else as operators. I think most certainly marketing gets a lot of airtime. The cashflow gets almost as much and I think we've actually learned a good amount. It's probably the place, if I look at my growth as an operator over the last three years, that's one of the areas where there's been the most. Certainly we sort of understand some of the,

Brett:

You're more of a marketer by trade is your background more and marketing. We generally don't focus as much on the finance. We like the marketing metrics like the creative side, but really nerding out on finance. Not typically what a marketer does,

Ashly:

But it's so critical. Absolutely. Here's an example where because it's tied to marketing it necessarily is, so definitely there's the cashflow in terms of how much product you order and relative and there's like you said, the negative cash cycle of having net 30 terms on an ad source where you get the money before you owe it, so you get to turn marketing effort into cash much faster than the cash cashs do those. I think most e-commerce operators are probably familiar with most of those dynamics, but there's other things at play too. I think we used to, because we're so acquisition cost sensitive, we used to look very narrowly at that. I'll give you an example. We do a lot of YouTube sponsorships, not the pre-roll stuff, like actually sponsoring the channel and the guy gets out guy,

Brett:

The creators directly

Ashly:

Sponsor creators directly and they'll do the little ad read, right? Lots of brands do it. We've had a lot of success there. We really like that approach just in general, but it has typically it's an net 30, not always, but typically it's an net 30 world. So ad the video goes live, it does whatever it does, and then 30 days later you owe a check and if it's ROI positive, you've probably earned more than enough money to cover the cost of the check, and so it's free, right? It's not actually free, but it's cashflow wise basically.

Brett:

Basically. Yeah.

Ashly:

But in that world, the thing that I love about YouTube specifically is that video keeps running, so I pay for Facebook

Brett:

Ads, it gets better over time, it often grows. That is the beauty of YouTube organic. So it's got this

Ashly:

Evergreen long tail, which means conversions keep coming in. So we've done this really big macro analysis on profit generated by YouTube channel over time. If there's a profit rate, I guess I don't know what the term would be, and a YouTube video starts, people who are listening instead of watching, I'll try to describe this properly. Basically you see this curve that goes up. You start at a negative number. If you assume the cost is incurred at the time the video goes live, and then it's actually owed later. You've got this negative for whatever it's costs, and then you just start to chip away at that, eventually get past break even, hopefully. And then you start going from there, and then if you repeat with that channel, the curve the next time around is steeper. If you repeat again, it's steeper, you repeat again, it's steeper.

Why? Because you're getting the leftovers from all the other ones that are adding onto it. So it's a compounding effect. Usually what we used to do is we would just look at like, did I hit my acquisition target within 30 days or something? If I did or I didn't, then I will or I won't repeat it because it has these compounding effects and if your business is at a point where you can possibly withstand the short-term impact to cash, then you get accelerated profit the more patient you are, if that makes sense. That's a dynamic that I don't think is discussed enough above, and certainly if you're at the early, early stage, you maybe don't have that luxury, but as you start to mature as a business and as cashflow is more stable, patience is actually profitable because the rate of profit can improve the longer you wait, as crazy as that sounds. So we've seen that dynamic a few different times and it's unlocking some really nice returns for us because we're looking at we're cashflow and marketing is the same analysis for us. We don't really separate them. We are always looking at them together and that's been something that's been very helpful for us. Yeah,

Brett:

Cashflow and margin, cashflow and finance, same discussion. I think maybe another way to look at that is kind of the contribution margin probably from those channels will be another way to discuss that. What else are you doing? What levers are you pulling? How are you looking at cashflow that would be useful to pass on to the audience?

Ashly:

So we do, it sounds lame to say that we do this in a spreadsheet, but I actually think everyone should do it in a spreadsheet at least to a point. Because your business is unique, your economics are always going to be unique. For us, we're lucky because we make the razors down the road, so we actually do monthly pos. We run out one or two big bulk a year, wait for it to get shipped from China. It's down the road. We just, were always making razors. So we've found a way that works for that where it has a very reasonable, we're basically buying razors every two weeks, which is sort of counterintuitive, but that means from a cashflow perspective, it's very stable for us.

But the spreadsheets are really great. We really, maybe another lesson within a lesson here is resist automation actually for a while until you have a level of intimacy and understanding that then you can automate. So we just automate literally six weeks ago, automated all of our cashflow and all of our internal financial reporting and stuff and how we calculate all that contribution, all that stuff that we just automated because it took us three and a half years to feel like we really understood it. I used to go and Shopify pull out the reports manually put, and it was like, why are you doing that? I want to be intimate with it. I want to know what a good day looks like and what a bad day looks like. I want to know, I want to be able to tag, okay, we had a big day on YouTube, we had a big day on Facebook, we had a wholesale order.

You sort of want to know how your business works and live at all those 30,000 scenarios that happen so you can see how that impacts cashflow, profit, all the things, inventory. So we've lived it and for sure made mistakes, but we've lived it. Now we can automate it. And so that would be something that if I was ever going to start a company again or advise a company or just talk on a podcast, I would say resist the temptation to optimize things until you feel like you really, really understand them good. Even if that means,

Brett:

Yeah, we talk about that a lot when we're managing Google ads or Amazon ads. There are great tools or scripts to run. There are things you can do to automate and limit manual work, but nothing really replaces you as a human getting into account, downloading a report, looking at things and doing that consistently because then you really know the numbers and you'll start to almost feel the numbers as well. You got to be analytical, but you'll start to kind of feel it. There's something off here, there's something, or there's something going really well here and I can just kind of feel it by looking inside the account or looking inside my dashboard that I'm manually updating. And so I really love that approach and especially in the beginning until you get intimate with the numbers, then it makes sense to automate. So it's fantastic. Then you touched on this a little bit, but we talked understanding our cashflow. What about inventory management? Anything else to kind of double click on or talk about there? Other than the fact that your manufacturer's down the road and you're kind of ordering every two weeks?

Ashly:

I think you have to just be cognizant of what phase you're in. I think sometimes that's why being reactive can, like you were saying earlier, that really good jitsu example or whatever where it's like, well, you made a series of mistakes that led to a thing. A lot of times the decisions you make in isolation or on their own are perfectly valid. They seem fine, but then they have these knock on effects you don't understand. So for us, last year we went through this big period of trying to ramp up capacity with razor production and den felt compelled to leverage that capacity and started to overorder product, and we had the cash to do it at the time, but then we ended up doing that, honestly, three months too many, not that dramatic, and that really just drained cash. The balance sheet was great. We had all the inventory, but it really drained cash.

Brett:

T and l is probably looking great, right? All that, but cash slow t and l were

Ashly:

Like, we're profitable, but where's all our money? Well, it's sitting on the shelf over there. But my point there is you sort of have to know what you're doing. And in hindsight, I think we were just trying to ramp capacity ramp sales. We're trying to do everything at once when you almost, it's almost, you'll get there faster by doing them in some sequential order. Like, okay, let's build cash and then build some inventory and then turn that inventory into cash, and then it makes more sense to do things sequentially is one of the things I've learned where you just have this desire to scale or go fast or do this or take advantage of the resources you have when actually what's almost always faster is going step one, step two, step three.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. What's interesting, I heard this quote from the military, and I don't think this always applies. Sometimes the military is kind of clunky, but I love this quote where they say, slow is smooth and smooth is fast, and that's kind of where this role is into play. We're like, no, no, no. We're hyper scaling. We're going fast and breaking things. So we're doing all this concurrently. Well, in the long run, that'll probably slow you down, not speed up.

Ashly:

I love that. Yeah. That's our motto here, without saying those exact words. Totally. The approach is do less, do it really well, and then in a year from now, you'll be in a better place. For sure. Yeah.

Brett:

Yeah. Awesome. Great segue to one of your other points you talked about as we were prepping, and that's focus, right? Keeping it simple. So what are we saying no to? And I think this is, again, you've got a marketing background. I'm a marketer. I love new ideas, I love new things. I love trying stuff. I love thinking about growth. I love thinking about adding services, stuff like that. But really saying no and focusing is one of the best unlocks to a healthy business and a business that scale. What's your philosophy? What's your approach and any examples of things you say no to?

Ashly:

Yeah, I actually think it's our superpower is our ability to say no. I think we say no all the time, and it's just so hard to do when there's so much opportunity out there. And if you look, every marketer's heads on a swivel with all the different trends that are out there and you hear, oh, well, this company A, B, C had success doing this. You really have to be able to internalize some success that some other company had and look at your business and see if you think you could replicate it or not. And we're pretty good at that. And so if we're like, no, I don't think we could do that because of X, Y, Z, whether it's, hey, we just don't have the talent to pull that off, or we don't, doesn't fit, or our price point would mean no, or just whatever.

There's a hundred reasons. Then you need to just ignore it and just go off of the things that you think ought to work and really harvest them back to the spreadsheets, become intimate with the things that work so that you can keep them working. We, we've never really done much on social. We're technically on TikTok, but I wouldn't say it's been a meaningful part of our business. We don't do email, we don't upsell anything. We don't do what most people do or a lot of companies have had success on, but we're very successful. So there's no buyer's remorse there. It doesn't mean we wouldn't get to them, but it would have to be like some fundamental light bulb would have to go off to say, oh, I know how we should do TikTok, and then we would do it in the absence of that conviction, we're not going to just put resource against something and we're not going to try.

That sounds weird. We're not going to overinvest in trying for the sake of it. We're going to take smart little tests and stuff, customers, Hey, come up with this. Hey, I love you to a different color. No, we're just, no, sorry. Not that we don't want you to be happy, but just because you say you want a red razor doesn't mean we're going to sell them at scale, right? So sorry. So we've just been really good at focusing, and I think it's served us well because again, nothing's in a vacuum, right? Okay, well, let's go and do, let's focus on organic social and do more of that and let's do 10 posts a week and let's really focus. Well, you're either going to have to hire a resource internal, external and manage that resource, which requires effort and cost or an internal resource is going to get shift priorities to do it, which means the other things they're working on, don't cap. Everything has a cost, everything has a cost, and we're just very wary of those costs. Not that we're not willing to invest in things that make sense. We spend a lot of money on a lot of things, but most of our money goes to things that we know work.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really great. And it is one of those things that we got to understand everything you say yes to. Those do stack up and often compound, and then eventually you're going to have to say no to something that you don't want to say no to. And so I love that you frame that as a superpower. Our superpower is saying no to stuff that we don't have conviction about and to stuff that we're not ready to fully exploit or leverage. And so I think that's really smart.

Ashly:

Any agency agencies listening to this thinking about prospecting us. Sorry.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, such a good point there for sure. So cool. So another thing that I think you've talked about, I've heard a few other leaders in the space talk about this, but you've kind of focused your acquisition channels, right? It's mostly been YouTube sponsorships and meta ads, correct. Have those kind of been the primary areas of focus or what has been your customer acquisition channels?

Ashly:

It's been those two for sure, and they've done all the heavy lifting. We have some wholesale business, we have some distributors here and there kind of all over the world, which does contribute some volume less so top line revenue, but definitely volume and profit for sure. But no, we're sort of a two channel company now, pragmatically, we sure we'd love to see TikTok go or we'd love to have some other channel contribute to that. But it's back to just back to that focus in deploying those resources. We know we can grow meta and YouTube because we sort of know the recipes there. It doesn't mean it's easy, it just means we sort of know how. It just takes time and effort. And so what's the trade off there? Well, if I took the time and effort away from there, which I know the formula to, and I go put it in TikTok, which I don't know the formula in our case, do we end up with two plus one equals one and a half? That's the thing that we guard against. So we're always doing the smart limited effort tests and other things and the hope of, but those are our channels. And I saw, actually there's, I should give them credit, but I don't remember their name, but there was a company that came up, I think it was, no, I don't want to get their name wrong. A company just actually came out with a report on the top a hundred brands for YouTube sponsorships, and we were number 57, I think. No

Brett:

Way.

Ashly:

Which I thought was neat because we wouldn't be number 57 on meta, I'm sure, but we are there. So we're sort of a big player in that space, relatively speaking because we've just focused on it.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that you've kind of identified, hey, here are two channels that fit our product. They fit our market. The guys and gals that are shaving, we can reach them in these markets. We understand how these work. On the YouTube side, it really fits both a marketing objective and the cashflow objective. And so in those cases, it's almost always worth it to say, how can we double or triple? Or maybe not even that. Maybe it's just like 10, 20, 30% improvement on those. How can we spend more and do better on those channels versus how do we spin up something brand new? And so I love that, and I've heard a few people say, and I believe this, you can get to low to mid eight figures likely with just one channel or maybe probably more likely to, you can achieve a lot of growth and a lot of profitability with a pretty simple traffic and customer acquisition strategy. Yeah, we did. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Love it. Love the story of Pinson Razors love what you guys have built. It's refreshing. I think it's also challenging to us as marketers and operators, how do we focus on some of the fundamentals? How do we say no to things? How can we be less gimmicky and more focused on value? And so really, really good stuff. Any closing thoughts or any asks for the audience? Or if not, where can people go and get an amazing razor?

Love it. Love it. Are you on the socials? Are you active on LinkedIn or D two C, Twitter or anything like that? I love it, man. Talk about a hamster wheel that can vary easily. And I know it because I'm living it right now. Kind of become a hamster wheel. It's fun too. I like it. But dang, it can be time consuming to get into both D two C, Twitter and LinkedIn. So kudos to you for that. Well, Ashly, this has been absolutely brilliant. Thank you for the time. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. If you've not left a review on this show, please do so. And if you listen to this and you're like, man, this is a perfect episode for so-and-so please share the podcast would mean the world to me. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.