The Shift Towards Messaging and SMS to Connect With Brands

 

Summary

In this roundtable discussion, representatives from Kustomer, REN Clean Skincare, BlendJet, and Digital Commerce 360 engage in a dialogue about the evolving landscape of customer service for online businesses. The participants emphasize the significance of viewing a website as a vital product that must excel in the competitive online market. They advocate for the use of post-purchase surveys as a means to glean insights into user experiences, particularly on mobile devices. The discussion also underscores the necessity for ongoing evaluation and prioritization of business strategies, with a focus on data-driven decision-making. A major theme is the exploitation of customer data to facilitate personalized experiences across multiple touchpoints, including CRM and SMS, as a strategy to boost conversions and customer engagement. Additionally, the adoption of a centralized communication system, such as Kustomer, is highlighted as essential for streamlining customer interactions across various channels and providing context and intelligence to customer communications.

Main Takeaways

1. Website as a Product: Recognize the importance of treating your website as a crucial product, ensuring it stands out in a highly competitive online space.
2. Leveraging Surveys for Insights: Utilize post-purchase surveys to gather valuable insights into user experience, especially on mobile devices.
3. Strategic Evaluation and Prioritization: Continuously evaluate and re-evaluate business strategies, focusing on data-driven decision-making and prioritization to allocate resources effectively.
4. Data-Driven Personalization: Harness customer data to offer personalized recommendations and experiences across various touchpoints, including CRM, SMS, and social media, to drive conversions and enhance customer engagement.
5. Centralized Communication System: Implement a centralized system for managing communications across channels, providing context and intelligence for customer interactions. Tools like Kustomer can be used to integrate and centralize communications.

Transcript

Hello. I’m Gretchen Saloys, senior editor at digital commerce three six state, and I’ll be your moderator for today’s ecommerce chat. Thanks for joining us. Today, we’re joined with Ryan Pamplin, co founder and CEO of Blunget, AJ Patel, Global Head of ecommerce at Ren Clean Skincare, and Gabe Larson, Vice President of Growth at Customer.

The way consumers like to communicate with brands is changing. They expect quick turnaround response time for their inquiries and younger consumers are using instantaneous communication channels like SMS and messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Today, we will be discussing how to meet your customers where they are by connecting through the messaging channels they use every day. First, before we get started, a few housekeeping notes, we’ll be taking questions at the end of the presentation, but you can ask them at any time using the chat box on the right side of your screen.

You can also use that box to let us know of any technical difficulties you’re having, and someone will help you. All of our attendees will be eligible for today’s Raffle for one of three Amazon gift cards, and a copy of Digital Commerce three sixty’s two thousand twenty two how to improve conversion rates report. We will announce the winners of today’s Raffle at the end of the ecommerce chat. So with that, let’s get started on with the q and a.

I’d like to get us going with the first question about Sumers are changing the way they communicate with brands and retailers.

What are some of the biggest shifts in messaging behavior that you’ve seen from customers in the last year or two that prompted you to make changes, pose this to Gabe or Ryan, whoever would like to kick it off.

Ryan, you’re first, man. I loved your intro, by the way. That was class ish.

I just need a smoothie, and it’s convenient. I don’t have time to eat right now.

It felt so bad for a little bit. But for that, you gotta go first. Alright. Alright. Well, you know, it’s great to be here with you guys. Everybody here is so, you know, accomplished and and has such great perspective. So we’re we’re a great company here.

I’m CEO of BlendJet, you know, number one selling brand of blender online, direct to consumer, now with lots of retail.

And, you know, we started in twenty seventeen launching June of twenty eighteen, And I think that’s about what now, about forty Internet years that’s passed since we launched.

Boy things have changed. But, you know, one thing that’s consistent is we started using Facebook messenger very early, and we still use it and it’s a great channel. Most people have a Facebook account, or in Instagram. And we get a ton of d m’s through Instagram that all gets piped into Zendesk. We have that sort of one to one communication with our customers through Instagram, which didn’t used to be possible. It is now, and that’s great.

And another thing that’s been great is that Facebook Messenger you know, channel. That’s always been on our website. It’s been consistent. People really like it. And to be able to re market to those customers too is super valuable.

Facebook Messenger marketing, return on ad spend is crazy. So that’s a nice channel for us. Of course, we have the phone. What we tend to do is callbacks so that way people don’t have to wait.

We’ve done that from the beginning. I think doing live, you know, support is is great if you can, but all that seem to work just fine and it’s a lot more efficient that way for customers and for our agents. We do have about fifty agents, so it’s it’s, you know, quite a lot of, you know, communication that’s happening back and forth. And, you know, SMS and email.

Email is classic. Right? Email is like, you know, almost as old as the Internet.

Email is about twenty percent of our revenue by the nine figure scale. So at least on the d to c portion of our business.

So that’s, you know, a pretty insane amount of of dollars generated. And that’s really about building the relationship with the customer. Right? We’re not just sort of saying, buy something, buy something, buy something, sell, sell, sell.

That’s maybe one fifth. Right? The other four bits are content. You know, you bought a blendjet, You want a delicious sort of, you know, chocolate fudge smoothie, a healthy chocolate fudge smoothie.

I don’t know about that part, but Certainly, you want the recipe, and the idea that we can create really, really high quality recipe content, send that out to you every day, build a relationship with you. Literally, every day across channels posting new content, investing thousands of dollars a day into that content, it pays dividends because people feel like, wow, you know, they’re inspiring me to buy one for my son, or they’re inspiring me to buy one for my friend, or for my mom, or whoever it might be, or, gee, you know, they have forty colors. They have these you know, amazing partnerships like Lisa Frank, I gotta have it.

So, you know, it’s about building that relationship long term and giving so much value that they feel like, you know what? I’m just gonna buy something else because they’re so good. Like, they give me so much for free. I feel like I kinda owe it to them, you know.

And then, of course, they come back and buy accessories and all that kind of stuff. So I think email continues to be big, but we’ve taken a lot of what works on email, which is beautiful HTML designs.

And then we’ve now poured that into SMS. And SMS as a channel has far exceeded my expectations. In the last year, it’s gone in last year, it’s gone from, you know, just a small little channel to getting close to the volume of dollars in email. So I’m very impressed and surprised by how these short little messages can work so well. I will say, though, the return on add spend, if you want to think of it that way, just the return on spend on email is much better than the spend on SMS, because it’s so expensive send SMS messages in comparison.

Oh, interesting. Wow, I like it. So you have seen Ryan if there’s can shifts though, I love that SMS. A big shift even over the last little bit.

I think that’s probably Gretchen. What I’d add to that is it you know, maybe three things I’d say on some changes I’m seeing in messaging. One is just the overall volume seems to be up. I don’t know if it it’s the pandemic.

Right? It’s not people maybe aren’t running in the the stores I mean, you obviously have brands like Ryan and others that are more direct to consumer, but I just feel like the messaging for the most part has been up. With that, with that up in messaging digital channels, they they’re coming alive. I mean, Ryan said it right SMS is interesting.

A lot of our clients are seeing the WhatsApp apps.

He mentioned Facebook.

So and I think the reason for that is and we’ve got some data back this, that people wanna communicate with businesses like they communicate with their friends.

And you you take a step back and you’re like, that sounds really obvious. Well, yeah. But I think I’m just I happen to be on WhatsApp. I happen to be on SMS a lot.

So why do I have, like, switch to email for a business? Like, Yeah. I’m gonna start to see that trend go down. So we’re seeing modern channels definitely pick up, I think, in more areas.

Than one. The other thing that I think when it comes to messaging and training is just this self-service concept.

And just the need for people or the desire for people, maybe I don’t wanna actually have to do it. I would prefer to interact with the chat bought. In some instances, I know that can be an I know that can be a disaster at times. But if I really just wanna know where’s my order, do I have to, like, call somebody.

Have them call me back. Wait for no. Let me just jump on. I haven’t seen it yet.

Have the thing look it up. Pass me something back and say, it’s should be there tomorrow or change your order, you can we ran out of size. It’s like, let me just do that. Let me just do that quickly.

Because I just I have so much going on in my life. At first, I just I can’t deal with so many customer services. So I love the idea of self-service, and I think those channels that lend themselves to that, and I love to see more of that. You’re seeing self-service bots in again, not just in web bots, but I’m seeing them in WhatsApp bot.

You know, WhatsApp conversations, and you got them in Ryan, you probably haven’t been some of their Facebook stuff. Right? So Again, it’s not just chat on the website. It’s how do we make people who want to, not everybody, self serve, given that ability.

So those would be three things I think are kinda interesting that we’re starting to see on the channel front, messaging front.

Age, I see you nodding your head a bunch, and our next question actually goes into messaging channels. And what are they using? Any surprises there? We mentioned face with Messenger, SMS, but I don’t know if you have anything to add to that near experience.

Yeah. No. Definitely.

Ren, we’ve we’ve also started to use our own and operated kind of platforms. We’ve started to use Human commerce is something which is kind of interesting.

So we partnered with a company called Humankind, and we’re able to offer virtual aesthetician appointments through our website via SMS.

So really trying to bring that in store experience through live through our website, and that’s something which has been really kind of game changing, and we’ve seen, you know, significantly higher AOB from that solution.

I would also say that traditional kind of communication methods have become really prevalent too. So, you know, your direct mail while you wouldn’t think that that would that would perform really well.

It’s also become a key part of kind of your communication strategy with the consumer.

Also, from an unboxing perspective, obviously, we’re we’re a skin care brand, you know, providing some of that educational content through that experience. We partner with a company called Boots, which uses reusable shippers, and we have a QR code on all of our shippers, which actually have more of an educational experience for the consumer. Oh, man. The QR code.

Is that you guys are doubling down and seeing wins on that. Isn’t that funny? I thought those are like, ten years ago, and all of a sudden they’re everywhere. Yeah.

Well, I’ll tell you. The QR code is is happening finally. And and actually, there’s one reason that the QR code is happening now. And it’s really thanks to all of our friends over at Apple.

They give it and they take it You know, you can’t track anybody, but if you want to scan a QR code with the native camera app, we got you covered.

And, you know, I think that’s it. Right? The fact that anybody can just take their phone, turn on the camera, point at in our case, we’re running linear TV ads on every major channel, and we have a QR code. And I have a graph that I put Indacity that pulls in the data every day to see how many QR code scans we’re getting. It’s hundreds.

Per day of smart radios? Off TV. That’s off TV, you’re saying? Off of TV by putting a little QR code in the bottom corner of the TV ad, and we’re doing the same thing with our welcome card too.

You know, we’ve got it right in there, so people can just scan when they first buy the product. Especially if you buy in retail, scanning that code, then we ask them, where did you buy it?

Maybe I’m addictive, but I’m literally like scanning five QR codes in my life a day. I don’t even know where they are, like garbage cans. I’m scanning them. I mean, it’s just like I’m scanning them everywhere.

I look. AJ, sorry. And I I don’t mean to jump in, Gretchen. These are just interesting for me to But would you also say that it’s it’s when you mentioned communication channels and direct mail, it’s like the traditional channels don’t seem to be dropped but some of the other channels are growing.

Therefore, we’re seeing like an overall increase. Is that fair to say? I I would say that’s that’s definitely a better thing to say.

You know, I think I think direct mail while we think it might be a dying channel at some point. You know, that that way Never dies. It always it’s your Yeah. There’s ways of smartly doing it too.

Right? Through programmatic and and things like that. You know, and and there’s various different partnerships which you can look and find out there, which are doing that. So there’s always a means of communicating with the consumer.

And the most important thing with kind of a shift in, you know, what we’ve seen in Facebook and meta and digital channels and and your lack of able to communicate with the consumer there. You know, some of these traditional channels have become more prevalent and become more important from a business strategy. You know, I thought for a while that some channels would die, but they just it’s like one of those bad they just never die. Like, phone just It never dies.

It just keeps it’s just steady yeti. Direct me at just it’s just steady yeti, you know. It’s like and then we just keep adding channels, which I think complicates it for businesses. Right?

It’s like, you know, I hear you guys talking, I’m like, oh my goodness, right? It’s like just more and more And in some ways, it’s great, but gotta be hard to manage, right? You just keep adding more ways to communicate, and that that that’s tough.

I think I think that you make a great point, Gabe, and, you know, AJ as well. I I think the big thing that you wanna do as a brand is try to create a centralized system where all of the communication channels come into that one system. And then you can tie that communication in with the other channels as well. So your agents kind of have that intelligence of, oh, we talked to you on Instagram today, but now you’ve left a phone message and I understand that the Instagram DM is related to this phone call. So it’s Then is is the tool that does that for us. And, you know, there’s a lot of a lot of people that like gorgeous and, you know, some of these other rich panel, some of these other things which are sort of, you know, the modern solutions.

But I’ll tell you, you know, Zendesk is is a behemoth, and the number of integrations they have, it’s pretty exceptional. Pretty much everything integrates there. So we really like having that centralized communication, and I think it’s not overwhelming because actually the agent doesn’t even know really what channel the person is communicating through. They just see the message, and they respond to the message. I mean, they can tell if they pay attention, but I don’t think the agents really care. They just care about making sure they’re solving the the question or the problem are the customers having?

Yeah. I I can’t I can’t agree more. And and to me, it almost feels like it’s table stakes now. I mean, that is a benefit of like a customer, right, a Zendesk, or whatever.

For a while there, I’m always amazed now when I to a company where chats and phone are disconnected or chat and DMs are disconnected and you’re just like, whoa. Like, it feels like that you’re on a different planet are you kidding? Like, you don’t have an integrated communication platform, that’s Wow. Are you from like the nineteen fifties? Like, do you have a car?

It just feels like it needs to be that table today. But I mean, I’m a little probably offensive in that jumping just but it’s so important because it it seems like it’s everywhere now. And the capability is certainly there. You gotta get on with it.

But I love that point, Ryan. I think that’s super important. Customer is a great platform by the way, which I I realized I should mention here is Oh, good. We’re good.

I I had to throw out a little a a little sales, but you’re right. I’ll good platforms. You’re you’re fine.

Yeah. I can’t believe you’d be pushing your own product here.

Who is this guy? Where did you find him? I love it. Oh, I’m sorry, Gretchen back to you.

Oh, oh, not at all. This is great. But tying into that whole, you know, user experience, the mobile experience, and the integration between holding it in the palm of your hand, And from a retailer perspective, the UX UI design strategy, you know, if you have a clunky design, people leave or they don’t wanna view it on their mobile or if they don’t want to download your app or they delete it. And so since shoppers are using messaging apps, and they’re typically doing so on their phones.

How do you integrate that so it’s an easy shift from one to another where they don’t feel like there’s many points contact where, you know, the potential to lose them. If they’re the more taps, the the more opportunity to lose the the customer’s attention. Right? I don’t know if AJ or Ryan wants to like, you know, your mobile experience as far as Yeah.

Yeah. I I I mean, I I when when we think about design now, everything we think about is mobile first. Right?

I I wouldn’t say we don’t care about desktop, but we don’t care about desktop as much. Right? Mhmm. Obviously, you need to think about your conversion funnel and how all those kind of consumer touch points are going to integrate well. But most consumers are experiencing from a DTC perspective.

The website on their handheld device. And so that’s super important to have that point of communication. To that point, You know, Ryan mentioned SMS has become a massively important channel for us. It’s become one of the one of the fastest growing channels, and we’re constantly looking grow and develop our customer database through SMS. So from a mobile experience, we start to think about how we can integrate SMS front and center when the consumer first enters our website. And then, Ryan, if you have anything to add to that.

Now I think I think you’re spot on. Literally, in my brain, what I was gonna say was your exact phrasing, which was, you know, mobile first.

You know, you gotta do mobile first. That’s it. It’s interesting because there is still a meaningful percentage of transactions that happen on desktop.

What’s happening in a lot of cases, our data shows is that people sort of discover on mobile and then complete transactions on desktop.

And a lot of times, it looks like you get a lot of type in traffic more so on desktop than on mobile. But that’s simply because people are just switching devices, and you’re not necessarily able to connect the dots.

There are some great platforms like Northbeam and Triple Whale, which are connecting the dots between some of those transactions and helping you to know, kinda understand where things are are happening and and connecting, you know, device crafts and things. But it’s challenging. Right? A lot of it is statistical analysis and and sort of making, you know, informed PhD level calculations that big brands like, you know, ran with the resources of know, your parent company certainly have. But for some of the middle market companies and and maybe even the smaller companies, you know, there’s tools now that are affordable that can do a lot of this work that normally you would need a data, scientist, or analyst on your team to do.

So I think that’s really interesting. And, you know, for us, we learned so much about the way that customers use our product.

And when I say our product, I mean, yes, our product, but I also mean our website. Right? Everything is a product, everything is an experience. If you’re not thinking that way, then that’s the first thing that you should do is reframe and realize that your website is a product that you make, and it better be one of the best products that you make user competing with literally a billion other websites on the Internet.

And if you’re at something really competitive like skin care, I mean, that is like the most competitive industry that I can imagine.

Although, I do kind of want one of your consultations, you know, So we have to look into that. Yeah. You need it. You need it.

Right? I know. Yeah. I have, like, you know, I want more of even kind of tone.

I don’t know if you have my color, but we’ll look into it.

Maybe for my wife’s. But I think for us, surveys are are such a big thing. Post purchase surveys, you can learn so much about your user experience. I’m gonna give you guys just a total gold nugget about user experience on on mobile and and just the way that we have learned.

Most people think that audio is turned off by default on mobile when you’re consuming video content, particularly through, let’s say, Facebook. That isn’t true for the purchasers. And here’s how we know. We do a post purchase serving on the thank you page, and we say, how did you hear about us?

You answer that question. And we have a follow-up. We say, you know, what’s your favorite color, what partnership should we do, or we say, you know, did you listen to the ad before you purchased with audio turned on.

And an overwhelming majority, eighty plus percent of people had audio turned on. So statistically, it’s true that most of the time audio is consumed or videos are consumed without audio on mobile, But in actuality, the people who are actually purchasing are turning on audio. Mhmm. So we started putting a little icon in the bottom corner of the website, or or of the video, I should say, telling people, hey, turn on sound, and the rate that people turned on audio went up and of course conversion rate went up too. So, you know, these are all little user experience things that you have to figure out that can make a profound difference in the bottom line and the economics of your business.

Sorry, Ryan, one thing people ask me, I’m curious what you would say to this, you know, data drives the customer experience so much, but it is a little do you need a PhD? Do you need a whole analytics team? I mean, do you use different software? Like, how do you pull But that’s a fascinating data point.

Number of users actually listening to video who are purchases or non purchasers, you know, like, how do you find this date? Who’s who’s watching? Well, I mean, I made up that data. Right?

I made up that question.

And I ran a survey with inquire Labs e n q u I r e. So I run surveys twenty four seven on my thank you page. You know, the thank you page is one of your most valuable places on your website. People are very, very engaged.

They’re ready to make more purchases. They’re also ready to tune in to your channels. So one of the things that we do on our thank you page is right at the top, we have the icons to follow us on Facebook, to follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and you know, the rate that people do that is hundreds of people per day becoming followers of us on those channels. Those are communication channels.

And they’re not one way communication channels. They’re two way channels. And another way that we communicate with customers all the time is comments on social media. Whether that’s a post that we make or a post that someone else makes.

It could be a review of our product. It could be a video about our product. It could be anything, a post that has the in the background, we will comment as the brand. We will engage in the voice of the brand, and we will have conversation that is more than surface level with a customer that can go many layers deep.

And I think I don’t see a lot of brands investing a lot of resources into communicating in the comment sections. And I think you’ve got to realize that’s where your customers are. And that’s where they see kind of, you know, the real brand. And, you know, you have a lot of brands that try to be funny on on Twitter, but the reality is, the majority of people are not on Twitter.

The majority of people are on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. So if you develop that brand persona and you go out and you really do engage with people, you know, they they will comment and say things like, oh my god. I’ve never seen a a bigger brand, you know, comment on social like this. They respond to every single comment.

It makes a big difference, because it just it’s authenticity. It makes people believe. It makes them think, wow, this brand is legit. And a lot of people say, wow, I’m buying just because of the comments.

Interesting.

Well, if we’re good with this, I’m kind of curious how this would tie into when you’re personalizing the conversation. I know you mentioned going into comments and communicating that way. But as far as some of the manual tasks that a retailer has to deal with when trying to personalize conversations with shoppers.

How does technology AI? How does that help retailers eliminate some of the manual tasks.

What kind of tech tools are helpful when communicating and personalizing those conversations with customers. Do you have any examples?

I don’t know, AJ, Ryan, as far I mean, you have, you know, people making appointments. I don’t know, they have questions, and you guys are figuring out how to personalize that without necessarily having to have an army of people responding.

Yeah. So so one of the ways that we found is really good to kind of get that first party data is through the utilization of the quiz. Right? It sounds very simple.

But it actually to to to Ryan’s point, getting that that information from the consumer really does help to steer the conversation.

And ultimately, we’re able to leverage a lot of that information when we are giving personalized recommendations to the consumers through that experience, for example, We also utilize that data through all different touch points. Right? So we’re able to leverage it across CRM, you know, across SMS, and and we have various different tools which we’ve employed on on the website, you know, some of them are more traditional. You have your nastas, you know, your ache or tasteies, etcetera.

To help really drive that personalization through all of the consumer touch points, you know, CRM, SMS, etcetera.

And also even through to Facebook, of course, and and meta, to, you know, definitely using dynamic product ads and and recommendations there really does help, you know, drive the business and and drive conversion.

To your bottom line too.

I would add that, in our case, you know, there’s a handful of things that we’re we’re doing. We do have an army. People.

And, you know, that’s that’s a big one. Right? They’re all based in the US. They’re all native English speakers.

They work all over the US, you know, which is great because you got a lot of different time zones covered.

You have a lot of great different personalities.

We break someone on, you know, there’s a writing test that’s really important. And I would say we’re very selective, and the majority of people cannot pass the writing test to the standards that we have as a brand. And I would say that we also have a really cool AI tool that’s real and deployed right now called Type Genie.

And it is a custom AI that is trained on all of the data of all customer service interactions ever.

And as our customer service agents are typing, it automatically types for them. And the way that Gmail does, if you guys have seen that, It does that, but with a specific area of expertise around our business and our product. And it’s always learning and always being retrained and it’s an incredible tool. We were an early adopter of it, and it really works, and it really saves.

Probably about thirty percent of time is saved versus before we had it. For social, we have a different tool we use, which type g inputs into Zendesk and plugs into various other customer service platforms, we use a corpus to sort of tie in all the social channels together you know, Instagram DMs, and and that stuff we put into Zendesk, but then comments go into a gore pulse. And, you know, sometimes we’re proactively commenting, sometimes we’re responding. But I think it’s generally a surprise to people, a surprise and delight when we comment, especially on YouTube.

We we tend to be pretty funny. So for example, we have an ASMR creative, which, you know, is award winning, and over a hundred million views across Facebook, Instagram, you know, TikTok, YouTube on that particular campaign, and it’s whispery. And people love it or they despise it.

We also run it on TV. And it’s it’s very funny because some people will respond and say, I hate this video. I don’t care if it’s the best blender in the world. It doesn’t matter.

I’m never buying it because I hate your ads, and then we’ll respond to, like, oh my god. We’re so sorry. Please accept our apology. We made an apology video just for you.

And then we’ll link to the apology video and say, you know, we’ll never give up hope that, you know, this will make things right. And, of course, the video is a Rick roll.

And, you know, people will go from being a hater to be to being like, wow. You guys you made me, like, fall on the floor laughing. Like, this is, like, ridiculous that you did this. And you know what?

You turned a hater into a fan. So I think there’s there’s really cool opportunities like that. To engage with people and not just delete bad comments. Like, if you get bad comments respond to them, and you’ll even see the community kind of step up and back you up as well.

You know, your other customers and fans, which is pretty cool.

Gretchen, I think the only thing is I listened to those two. The only thing I maybe had to add on personalization is I was I was shouting some reps the other day and watching them try to do their day to day activities.

And, I was amazed at how much they were kind of moving around, shifting around, tab to tab, system to system, etcetera, etcetera. And I had one person mention, you know, I was talking to them about how effective it was, and they used the word Frank and Stack, and I thought it was such a funny word. I’ve been using it lately, but like, well, it’s really hard to personalize when you have this Frankin stack, and I was like, can you define that for me? Well, you know, I got this system for my returns.

I got this system for hours. I got this system for responding we were feedback. I got this system for chat. I got this system for email.

You know what I this tab, tab, tab, tab, tab. I was like, and, you know, end of there’s no way you can personalize. There’s no way you can personalize when someone calls in and you’re like, give me five minutes to go into my return shipping project, and then I gotta go into this accounting system. Hold on one second.

I know nothing about you, then the chat wasn’t connected. Because Ryan and I were chatting before to the WhatsApp.

So I do think there’s just generally people have gotta take a step back and say, do we have a franken stack? If you do, it’s gonna be hard to personalize. You’ve got to find a way to empower the agents and I’m talking maybe to more macro level, but just empower the agents with that real time data so that when someone interacts, I know what happened on their shipping, I know what they blast bought, I know this person has done in the past, etcetera, except for that, just that does change the game, and it it does require sometimes, fundamentally, a way to look at your business. Oftentimes, we just stack things on, you know, check check check check, check, but we do need to have something that empowers those reps. To that There’s a point like a customer, maybe, for example, with a k? You know, I didn’t want to stay there.

But I think I’ve heard that tool’s great. I’m not sure, but I’ve heard it’s okay.

So tying into the whole Franklin stack concept, and I hear this from retailers all the time. They’re like how did we we’ve touched on this, but connecting the dots and and I you know, you bring in like a customer or something like that to help you kind of make sense of it all. Because now we have this wide range of data Now how do you make the how do you find the value in it? I don’t know in in your journeys of going through that, AJ, or Ryan, if you have any examples, any other examples, of how you’ve been able to kind of you know, when you have these ideas and and you wanna figure out what’s working, what’s not playing it off each other, How do you analyze that? How do you, like, put it all on one central area and really take a step back look at what you’re doing and and what you wanna invest more in what you wanna focus away from, how do you evaluate, and how often are you reevaluating you know, the ratios of, you know, focus, what’s working, what’s not?

I think it’s actually one of the most important jobs of CEO or or a leader within any organization prioritization for for he or she, you know, and and for the company as a whole. A lot of people just do things and just don’t really quantify the value of those things. They just kinda think, well, it I did it. It’s done. But you can’t really do that.

You know, sometimes things are so profound that they’re very obvious that they work. Other times, you know, you really need to create a methodology for measurement and testing, and you need to think of a strategy for Okay. We have SMS turned on, and it’s really expensive.

But it’s driving lots of revenue.

But would it actually if we turned it off, would revenue change?

So incrementality testing — Mhmm. — is is how we approach that. So, for example, I might take up a subset of my overall SMS customers, and I may take their customer profiles and only send them emails, which is much less expensive.

And let’s say I do that with five percent. So a five percent holdback where I just don’t send an SMS even though I normally would have. And then I compare that five percent to my ninety five percent that I did send a message to. So, essentially, take a thousand customers and, you know, about whatever number you want.

You take some percentage of customers and you you send them SMS plus email, and then the other only the email. And even though you have their SMS, you don’t send it to them. And then you look at their revenue per customer. And that’s a true incrementality test.

Right? And if the number is roughly the same for people that didn’t get the SMS, then, well, SMS isn’t doing anything. Right? Like, yeah, it’s working, but if you didn’t have it, email would have made you just as much money.

So I think those are the kinds of tests that you need to come up with, and and you could do that with any channel. Right? You don’t need special tools. You just need to think strategically about how to prove the value of these things.

I see a lot of platforms that claim a lot of return on ad spend. And if you add up all of the return on at spends, then, you know, we’re a two billion dollar a year company.

So, you know, I think you gotta understand methodology. I’m not gonna name names, but I’ll just say with a lot of the SMS and email providers, the default attribution windows are outrageously generous.

So first thing you need to do whenever you implement a new platform that’s trying to self report, you better get everything on an attribution model that you understand. So one click seven day, whatever it may be, seven day view, one day click, you know, you figure it out what works for you.

But you should really have a uniform methodology across the board. And a lot of the providers, like Intemptive, for example, which is who we use, They don’t have it in their dashboard, but you just tell them, hey, can you change, you know, the SMS attribution and they’ll change it for you? But it’s super important that you measure whether it’s in platform or you come up with your own methodology.

And to me, one of the best ways and the easiest ways to implement is in the surveys. If you don’t have a post purchase thank you page survey, asking people questions about their experience with you, how did you hear about us? Well, if you answer TV, I’m gonna then say, okay, what channel? And that’s actually we’re spending now as much on TV.

As we are on Facebook, not Facebook and Instagram combined, but just Facebook by itself or just Instagram by itself. That’s an insane amount of money that we’re spending every single week every single month, and the way we’re able to attribute ROIs, thanks to that survey to abstract leading the answer to how to understand ROI per channel, and then we’re increasing or decreasing budget every single week by channel. It’s not exclusive to TE. You could do this with anything.

And you could even ask people like, like, hear about us. And if they say SMS, then you could be like, you know, okay, like, was it, you know, a message that you initiated or we initiated or how did you sign up? I mean, you could kind of come up with anything you want to learn, it’s just the most valuable market research tool that I can possibly think of to talk directly to your own customers. And the response rate from the thank you page surveys, if you don’t have anything else distracting on your thank you page, it’s in the range of fifty to fifty five percent response rate.

And you can actually feed some of the questions, the answers to those questions back into Clavio or some of these other platforms, and now that’s in that person’s profile forever. So, you know, if AJ answered a question, and I said, you know, hey, do you have kids? And then he says, yes, I know forever that AJ has kids. It’s in my CRM, and I can now you know, anytime I want to send a campaign out, promoting, you know, a new special edition blendjet, you know, for people with kids, that’s, you know, a cartoon character.

I can send that to AJ along with everybody else who’s identified as having kids. This is a really powerful thing, not only for research, but later for use in targeting.

Ryan, I gotta ask one So so many people are always questioning TV, but you brought it up a couple times.

You feel like you found the ROL on that, and then you can do the targeting pretty well. I mean, it sounds like you Crack crack the correct the code. Killing killing it on TV.

You know, we take the best performing creatives from from Facebook and Instagram, which has continued to work for us, post iOS fifteen point four, fourteen point five, whatever. Whatever.

And and we we’ve taken the best performing creatives them down to thirties and cut them down to sixties. And, you know, we we do spot buying every week with a with an agency.

And, you know, we basically bid a a subset of the retail cost of that spot.

And, you know, if they accept our bids, then we get airtime. And if they don’t, then we don’t. So, you know, we’re buying like a direct response media buyer.

Would, and it’s extremely profitable for us.

Look, it’s really hard. It’s not easy. I’m the CEO of the company. We’re over a hundred people, and I’m personally, like, doing this.

You know, I don’t think there’s anyone else in the company that would have built an attribution model like I have, I wish there were. But we don’t have those, like, you know, PhD level, and I’m not a PhD level person. But I did build you know, some of the first software for measuring video ads on the Internet back in twenty eleven. And so I’ve I’ve thought about this kind of measurement survey based methodology for over a decade So for me, I’m just the biggest proponent of surveys because then I can do something like plug in those answers to an attribution model, which can calculate you know, every channel. And in fact, what’s very interesting is that you look at the attribution claimed by Facebook or Instagram, It actually lines up almost perfectly within give or take about twelve percent with my survey data.

Got it. Cool. Appreciate it. Interesting, man.

I wasn’t sure if you had anything to add to that? No. I I I was gonna say that that’s a really great answer. I was just curious as to how you guys have implemented a multi touch attribution modeling soft.

Solution with T. V. And and kind of more broadly. I mean, it’s it’s amazing to hear that you guys are doing that.

Very cool. I’m obviously from an analytics background. So I’m nerding out right now.

Well, we’ll have to connect and talk more about it. But but, yeah, I think you know, for us, multi touch attribution is is such an interesting one. So we’re we’re starting to use Northbeam for multi touch attribution.

I would say that, you know, the days where you could just get that from Google Analytics are are kinda gone.

So I think you’ve gotta use a a different solution now. The truth is I don’t know. Right? I don’t know from a multi touch perspective. I don’t know what’s working. All I can tell you is that every channel last touch is very profitable. And if every channel is profitable at last touch, then I’m not gonna go bankrupt.

Unless it’s really good because I was curious now, you know, the big macro question about the future. An ongoing trends or things that you’re seeing in your daily, whether it be surveys or AJ, however, Wren, is tracking responses from customers that you’re excited about going into Q4 twenty twenty two, whether it be the holiday season or into twenty twenty three.

What are you excited about? What are you investing your time and efforts into? Because you’re getting that ROI. You’re you’re seeing the a payoff on both sides?

Yeah. I mean, I mean, for us, really, heading into q four, well, I’ve told the team to really focus on is CRO.

Because at the end of the day, you can send a bunch of traffic to any website it’s not gonna convert, you’re never gonna make the return that you need. So we’re working on a lot of really CRO projects and on-site personalization.

We’re doing a ton of testing to your point, Ryan. I think that’s really important to do the incrementality testing to stand what the value is of of each individual channel which you’re making investments into to understand from a media mix per perspective, where we should lay our kind of dollars and where we should invest more money into.

You know, CTV is is is an area which we’re looking at. We haven’t done Reminent TV, which it sounds like you guys are doing, Ryan. That’s a really interesting Reminent TV Trump’s ROI of CTV every day for new customers, for new customer acquisition, for prospecting, the scale of of remnant TV compared to the scale of CTV and and the amount of competition, way less competition on remnant. And and way lower CPMs and just way more eyeballs.

Yeah. Definitely. And I I got I guess to add to I have a question around that. How do you guys think about kind of more targeting there.

Right? Because CTV, you can really just target an end consumer, you know, it’s a one to one kind of relationship versus remnant. You’re having to buy at the DMA level, or or you’re buying national broadcast. How are you guys making National broadcast.

Yeah. How are you guys making sure that We only buy national broadcasts. And at the end of the day, you know, it sounds complex. But the simple reality is we simply spend x dollars on, you know, lifetime or Fox News or CNN or really, you know, tons of different channels.

And I just look at my spend overall, and I look at my attributed you know, survey results, and then multiply times the response rate. And then I extrapolate to the whole audience size, and then I figure out that, okay, I made you know, five thousand dollars, and they spent one thousand dollars on this channel this week. And, you know, some channels, I’ll spend thirty thousand, and I’ll make a hundred thirty thousand. You know, I see return on ad spend consistently for certain channels in the five to six range on a regular basis, which is outrageous.

Compared to other marketing channels. But, you know, there’s just a lot of inefficiencies with TV. It is still a very manual process. Hey, AJ, I wanna buy some TV ads from your station.

Oh, cool. Well, I really like your products. I wanna give you a good deal, and, you know, I like your new ad with so and so. It’s really good.

Okay. Great. Thanks. Right?

Let’s have lunch soon. I mean, it’s old. It’s old school, and that inefficiency is you know, creates value and the opportunity for for value to be captured. You know, with markets that are hyper efficient, costs are optimal for the seller of the media, not for the buyer.

Understood. I’m curious, you know, going back toward the messaging and communication trends going forward, and we little bit touched on Twitter. But I’m curious as far as that being a different animal from Facebook, you know, changes in that that platform, how might that work for brands, or how are messaging platforms evolving to meet customer expectations, particularly among younger consumers that are expecting that. Maybe they don’t convert off Twitter, but they’re finding out about you about, you know, things like that. So I’m curious, you know, going forward, how does and and how does AI play in to that as well. So, I mean, whether you’re communicating on one, and then they come over to your site, and now they’re asking questions, and you have to make sure your chat bots are equipped with the technology needed to personalize that experience.

So I don’t know if you guys can, you know, touch on any examples or whether it be pain points or challenges or things that are pleasantly surprisingly easy or or helping your brand along? Yeah. I’d throw just one comment out and then I’ll let AJ Ryan say the smart stuff. But, yeah, I do just think, you you know, so many times companies will jump onto the train of different channels because they hear that popular, it’s good, or maybe it’s doing stuff. And we certainly are seeing, I think, channels start to move in different directions as they take on their own brand and own personality.

But I think the principle that companies have to remember is you guys just go where your customers are. Right? Like, if if if Twitter, you know, for these two, they may say that they don’t use Twitter. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use Twitter.

You know, maybe Twitter for your audience is right or maybe Instagram is right, but focus on the customer where your customers are, you should be. And I think that’s a key that a lot of brands sometimes get caught up in, and they start spreading themselves too thin. But find your customers, find where they are, and then double down on that. But you well, AJ, Brian, what’s the smarter thing?

Where are you guys seeing some of those things happen?

What I hear Gigg saying is, if your target market is crypto, bros, then you better be on Twitter.

Well, I didn’t wanna say it, but you probably hit it on the head.

Yeah. I I will say that WEND does not invest heavily on Twitter, if at all. And and, you know, we do have a social presence there.

But really, for us, you know, we’re we’re we’re catering towards a younger demographic.

So TikTok is really the channel where we’re we’re you know, doubling down our investments on and really pushing more, you know, and you can show kind of more of the efficacy of the products, and that’s really important for skin care itself.

So I think, you know, platforms where you can actually show, you know, the the benefit of the product and the value proposition of the product. Is really where you should be investing your dollars from a brand like ours perspective.

But it is, it’s fascinating to see how things kinda slow. We were talking about this the other day, Ryan, but I think Twitter used to be like maybe more of a de facto tool for just gonna say general customer service or customer inquiries, and I don’t know if it’s I don’t know if it’s there anymore, company wise, or maybe the, you know, you got introduction of different things like TikTok etcetera. So I think being able to watch that and recognize those trends, again, it’s if your customers are hitting you up on that, the crypto gen gentleman.

Probably need to be there, but if if not, then yeah, go go to those channels, but it’s fascinating to see some of the ways that the the ebbs and flows of those communication channels and where where consumers are and are not?

Twitter is trying to get into, you know, the shopping game with Twitter shopping recently pushed with this integration was shopped by, which, you know, obviously Facebook and and Instagram have had for years.

With Facebook shops. It’s not quite the same experience. There’s no on platform commerce happening on Twitter. It’s just sort pulling your product catalog and then, like, let you click off. And it only works on mobile, oddly, but I guess they’ve heard AJ’s comment, and they decided not to worry about desktop.

And, you know, it it’s a strange experience because, you you know, like, it’s very rarely used I I just don’t see a lot of d to c brands that are consumer facing, really crushing it on there with a few exceptions.

You know, Wendy’s, obviously, is the example that people love to jump to in in the fast food restaurants. And they they say things that, you know, I wouldn’t say, and and I don’t think Gabe or AJ would say, you know, as a brand. Right? I think they’d be a little bit too risky.

We are somewhere in in the middle. Right? We’re we’re not that conservative.

We do make funny comments. We will rick roll a a potential customer. Right? But we’re not gonna say some of the we’re not gonna get involved in some of the things that those guys will will use Jack and get involved in. But the question that someone really smartly asked recently, who was actually a former executive from Twitter We were having a conversation, and and he said, you know, they’re very successful on there, but does it translate into sales?

And that’s a great question. And I think for Oendes, it probably does because it’s readily available, and it’s top of mind for those people and Some of them probably support Wendy’s, whether they realize it or not, and he did think that it was and that they had proven that it was valuable.

And it lifted the sales incrementally.

And, you know, they used, like, a data scientist to figure it out and and took, like, six months, and they proved that, yes, a strong Twitter presence really does dramatically impact the brand in ways that can’t necessarily be tracked.

But finding that voice and and finding that audience on there, you know, there’s no point in finding the the great voice if there’s just not a sizable audience.

I think there is a factor of sort of credibility, like as a brand, like you should own your name on there and you should have something.

If Elon Musk would have gone through with the purchase or if the courts force him to, you know, maybe Twitter changes dramatically and maybe it becomes a platform that’s more relevant to as brands, you know, sort of need to be there because more people are there. Right now, it’s it’s it’s a platform that would love to see grow more, and, you know, we continue to experiment on there. And we just never get the kind of engagement that we do on other platforms. It just never has been the same level.

And I think it ultimately comes down to algorithm and audience.

And I think, you know, as those things continue to shift, then the opportunity becomes more viable.

Really quickly, AJ, you had mentioned TikTok in communicating there as well. And I believe, Ryan, you you touched on, you know, just communicating in the comments.

Going forward, how does that kind of parlay into the personalization, the instant messaging side of it How do you I mean, I could see how, you know, an Instagram and it being linked with Facebook anyways, and and you’re communicating that way if you’re using that vehicle. But if you’re on it, emerging more than emerging platform like TikTok, that retailers are starting to kind of see how they can kind of toy with the relationship with the customer and how far to go before it’s maybe too personal as per the Wendy’s example or maybe rick rolling and it’s, you know, in good fun. How do you I guess, segue that comment section and communicate with your customers, because I’ll see that on TikTok.

So a brand responded to somebody. I’m not engaging with that by actively liking or anything, but I’ve seen that. So how do you quantify the value in that and how does it end up on your website in your chat box, see if you have chatbot situation in your control, and now you’re getting that first party data.

Yeah. We we I I would say we haven’t honestly cracked that yet, but for for TikTok in particular. You know, right now, it’s just really our social teams manually going onto the solution and and responding to comments.

I’m sure there’ll be some sort of tech in the future, which will help kind of automate some of that process like like it is with Facebook and and meta platforms right now, but TikTok, you know, it it still is a very manual process. I don’t know, Ryan, if you guys have found a solution to to kind of automate some of that, but you know, it it is really our social team’s responding.

We do work with a company called Respondology, which is a really cool technology. It’s used by the NFL and a bunch of sports leagues, NHL teams, NBA teams, and we use it. And and that is it’s basically human moderation at scale on demand.

And they are working on a product that allows sort of responding in your brand voice, but it’s all humans.

So today, it’s primarily moderation.

Tomorrow, it’s responding, and they have thousands and thousands of people that work for them that you know, respond twenty four seven between all of them. And, you know, your comments get fed into this platform, We don’t intend to use them in our case for responding because we already do respond at scale.

And that’s, you know, very successful and the ROI is is really good. I I don’t know exactly what the ROI is of commenting. I think you have to put it in the bucket of brand advertising.

Mhmm. Certainly, it has a halo effect on the return on ad spend of our paid media on the social platforms.

But I would sort of throw it in the bucket with the budget for content creation on social. You know, what’s the ROI of that? I mean, I don’t really know.

I know it’s good.

But I don’t necessarily know exactly.

You know, if I take some of my organic content, like my recipe content, and then I throw it in an email, And then every Wednesday, I send an email to two million plus people, three million, I think, now, who are subscribed to the email list, and stay subscribed.

And I have a twenty five percent plus open rate, and then a lot of those people click, and then they make a purchase for another one bedroom accessory. I can tell you that those recipe videos make five figures a week. Just from that one email, not to mention, you know, whatever else is happening on social. And another thing that seems to happen with our content marketing the content marketing is designed to keep people engaged with the product and give them ideas to, you know, have something delicious and nutritious every day.

But at the same time, it’s also a tool. So if you see a great recipe for a cotton candy, you know, smoothie, which went viral on TikTok with millions of views, then, you know, you’re like, wow, this cotton candy smoothie looks really good, but also what is that thing? Like, that they’re using a blendjet. You know, So it’s a way to get people to discover, you know, as well with with content.

So Yeah. ROI on these platforms remains a mystery, but I think if you can add up kind of all of your spend on a monthly basis, And then, you know, look at it in contrast to your revenue, then you can sort of figure out that holistic return on ad spend.

For the whole business, and and that’s what we do. And, you know, as long as the spend is, you know, lower than all of your costs, then you’re doing a great job.

And if not, then, you know, the world is changing, and you probably should change with it. You know, this this time where you just bleed and raise more and more money until then a public market is your savior someday.

I don’t know. I think that time has come and gone. Maybe it will come back. I’m sure it will. But I think, you know, as a brand, d to c, or omnichannel, you you better be profitable, or you better have a path to profitability.

Because if you believe what some people think is gonna happen in the near term, you know, you wanna have a real business that can be sustained on its own without pumping money into, you know, sustained losses for growth.

You see things like Casper. Which had, you know, the opportunity to sell for almost a billion dollars at the end of last year, didn’t, and then sold for three hundred and change this year.

Why?

Well, they were growing at a great cost that was higher than the value they were getting from customers. And what’s the lifetime value of a customer? Well, I don’t know. I I personally don’t buy a mattress very frequently, you know.

So I think that’s kind of the challenge if you’re if you’re a Peloton or if you’re a Casper. It’s a lot easier to be a blend jet. All I need to do is, you know, find people to have a mouth. Right?

Targeting is very easy for me. I would argue that for for Ren, All you gotta do is find people with skin, which is most people.

And you probably are more targeting, you know, a specific graph of of people more frequently.

But, you know, I think when you have a broadly appealing product, it’s much easier to be successful, you know, on a mass channel like a TV.

I don’t have to get super targeted.

Before we wrap up, I just wanted to, you know, put to the group if there’s anything that we haven’t touched upon as as far as, you know, personalizing the conversation with the customer and, you know, the evolving ways in which, you know, you’re you’re talking to them. It’s not just email, phone people aren’t calling anymore if they can just chat somebody.

I don’t know if there’s anything else that, you know, before we wrap things up.

No. Great session. Very interesting. AJ and Ryan, I might be following up with you guys myself. A lot to earn. These are always Sometimes they’re I hope they’re interesting for the audience, and it’s interesting for me, fun session. Really appreciate it.

Yeah. Just text call, Instagram, d m, email, you know, TikTok, Facebook me. However, you know, whatever channel. Know, and I will personalize my response to you. Mhmm.

Yeah. No. Definitely. And I think I think I think, really, if you know, for for e commerce brands, it’s really about trying to bring an in store experience live on a website is is a way that you should really think about it. Especially now that COVID’s kind of coming to an end or close, hopefully, fingers crossed.

You know, you need to kind of have a reason why your consumers are coming back to the website.

In the future. So for an omnichannel business like ours, where we’re, you know, distributed in retail, as well as having a direct to consumer business, having kind of a USB or unique value proposition on your website is is really valuable going forward.

Great. Well, I wanna thank everyone, AJ Ryan gave for the discussion and to all of our audience for listening.

Just Before we go, the winners of today’s wrap up, I do have those names. It’s Julie Flan, Alex Pierre Travis, Kevin Denine, Our webinar team will be in touch with you regarding how to claim your gift and reports, and there will be a replay of this webinar available And after we conclude, you’ll see a pop up window on your screen asking you to provide feedback on today’s chat. If you can, please take a few moments to fill this out. Your feedback helps plan future webinar sessions and topics, and helps us understand what kinds of presentations work best. So also please keep an eye out for our weekly email to find out what other webinars we have planned, or visit digitalcommerce360 dot com to see our upcoming schedule or view our library of archived webinars.

Thanks, and have a great rest of your day.

Thanks so much. Thanks.