Speaker 1: 0:00

It doesn't matter what kind of e-commerce brand you're building. You still need a rock-solid way to grow and scale your company like clockwork. Welcome to 7 Figures and Beyond an e-commerce marketing podcast for D2C brand owners and marketers, looking for best practices that include proven strategies and tactics to grow an e-commerce brand to 7 figures and beyond, Bringing 18-plus years of marketing experience as an e-commerce brand owner and e-commerce agency owner, please welcome your host, Greg.

Speaker 2: 0:27

Shuey. Hey everyone, welcome to episode 32 of the Seven Figures and Beyond podcast. Oh yeah, there's a hand wave right there. Hope everyone's crushing it today.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Today is actually my first impromptu podcast that I literally decided to do yesterday, like last minute my guest this week he got sick. He canceled on me, so I reached out to my buddy, john, to see if he wanted to jam today and, lucky for me, he said yes and that is why he is here. John's built a pretty rad company called FormToro and they are really paving the way to help brands collect and analyze what I refer to as pre-purchase customer data, to help guide and inform marketing strategy for direct-to-consumer brands. That, and he also has some pretty strong opinions and they're accurate opinions about the industry in general and shares them freely on LinkedIn. So if you are not following him, pause this, stop what you're doing, go follow him, and I'll make sure to include his LinkedIn URL in the show notes.

Speaker 2: 1:35

So, john, thank you for taking some time this afternoon to chat with us. Greg, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure, heck, yeah, man. So before we jump in, would you take just a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you have gotten to where you are today.

Speaker 3: 1:53

Yeah, so my story begins a long time ago.

Speaker 2: 1:57

it almost seems ancient now In a galaxy far, far away. There you go.

Speaker 3: 2:02

And so it's so funny because a lot, of, a lot of people that that find me on LinkedIn don't realize I've been like in marketing for almost 20 years now, in just different formats. So my my journey started as like an intern for a marketing agency back in the day, like when social media wasn't even popping off because Facebook barely existed. So like back those days it was more traditional marketing of a brand building, strategy, event and print. Really it was like a lot of print media and stuff like that.

Speaker 3: 2:31

Fast forward a bunch of years. I got swept up in the social media marketing when I was back in school, going to law school, actually during like 2009 and 2011. And ended up partnering up with some people through some internships and finding out about, about like how different professions were trying to leverage social media in different ways, and it kind of got to the point of realizing that it was booming at such a rate that people could specialize in one specific network, which was pretty crazy to watch, because in the past you did a little bit of everything and you kind of functioned as more PR and marketing rather than just marketing. But now social media came about, so we'll fast forward again. And then my swap went from working in startups to ending up working for a company called LifeX that was in the smart home space. So we were selling Wi-Fi connected, color changing smart bulbs and they started on Kickstarter, their D2C, but they were backed by Sequoia, so they had a little bit of budget behind them in order to make some good stuff happen.

Speaker 3: 3:31

And I came on board, kind of as a favor to a buddy that was a CFO at the time over there, to kind of help out with some marketing stuff because they were without a marketing person and then ended up launching Gen 2, gen 3, gen 4 of their products and really went back from sales into marketing and figuring out hey, what are people doing and how does this work? Fun fact about this, though LEDs that are color changing do not photograph well. So you are absolutely done when it comes to creating content if you do not have a full army of people touching up stuff and post purchase, post process. So we had a hell of a time getting content created that looked good, which means yours truly went back to old traditional models, which was a lot of partnership marketing, learning how to run that gamut. Figure out how you could get social working we had a great reddit subreddit at the time and build a community around a brand, while always focusing on, like that, customer experience, because it was product app experience and there was firmware on the lights themselves, so you had to have the entire teams working together in order to build out experiences that were worthwhile.

Speaker 3: 4:40

They sold, and I went back into the world of consulting before doing another product launch for another consumer hardware product, and we were doing the same playbook. We were running Facebook ads to a landing page, to a sign up to a survey in the emails and we started looking at the numbers and seeing where the drop offs happened. And then we took a look at the problem and I left one day from the office and I said I'm going to go solve something. And that was kind of like the birth of ForumTour, which became could we collect data on the fly during that high intent portion of signing up in order to better understand and build a go-to-market strategy? And that's me here today, four years later, of doing ForumTour and studying data and data analytics to better understand how to build marketing strategies for brands.

Speaker 2: 5:30

I don't remember us talking about how long you've been doing that for four years, that's pretty awesome.

Speaker 3: 5:36

We were doing zero party data before that technically. So I used to run customer support and we used to run type form into Zapier, into Zendesk, so we would have choose your own adventure to understand where the drop off points for people and where people are running into problems. So we would take all that data and then change our own customer journeys with an app and support docs in order to solve for that. So I think at its height we were having, we had 1200 tickets coming in a week for a team of four and we had an 85% self-solve rate simply because of like clearly articulating what steps to take, and I think we we might've set the record for a company of our size. We had zero new support tickets every single working day for over a year. What?

Speaker 2: 6:28

Yep, that's insane Zero Wow.

Speaker 3: 6:34

That's awesome.

Speaker 2: 6:35

I love that. I love data. You're a data guy. You're a lawyer who loves data. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 6:44

There's logic, it's all logic. I think that's what a lot of people miss is that there's a logical reason why things happen, and a lot of times we assume we misassume Marketing. It's a correlation and causation are usually interchanged incorrectly and no one trains you to think logically through what might be causing something. And we're so bad in marketing because you hear the narratives of oh, more signup sequels, more revenue. No, that's not exactly true. You know, there's all these little things that people just uh take for granted. Like 30 of your revenue should be emails. Like why, right, what is contributing to that? We are so bad in marketing where we like just glob onto these little catchphrases that were created by SaaS platforms to sell you their services and that's what you end up with.

Speaker 2: 7:38

I like to and this may upset some people I like to say that we're maybe a little borderline lazy and we just take things at face value.

Speaker 3: 7:48

If you give me one KPI at a time, I can influence the holy 11 shit out of it. You tell me I got to play with all the KPIs together in order to build like a journey that works for everyone. That's where it gets a lot harder, because then you got to go like three levels deeper to figure out how they're all interacting with each other.

Speaker 2: 8:05

Yep, it's wild. It's wild, so let's jump right in. Man. I mean, I know that you're a huge advocate of customer journey and really digging in and understanding that and using that as a way to build strategy and then kind of take a brand to the next level. So what's your take on the customer journey? Maybe you can walk us through that and why you think it's critical for brands to understand and then to act on.

Speaker 3: 8:37

It's been so bastardized and I hate to say this, but it's SaaS apps that have absolutely made it miserable.

Speaker 3: 8:46

Sure, and I mean, I see misattribution happening all over the place, and my most recent pet peeve is the amount of people that are doing cross-sells and up-sells in shopping carts and I can't actually tell what's in my cart. There's just too much stuff trying to be up sold within the individual cart so it becomes like I don't, I don't even know what's in my cart anymore. Everyone's just trying to like get me to buy more stuff and it it just doesn't make any sense. I think everyone's uh, like there's so much pressure on the customer journey in general and everyone says, oh, I'm all about the customer journey, and then you look at what they oh, I'm all about the customer journey, and then you look at what they actually do or what they ask and you realize that they're actually all about the company journey and none of that other stuff matters. The one I've been picking on recently has been people forcing people into their email to go get their coupon code.

Speaker 2: 9:39

Oh yeah, you post about that a lot.

Speaker 3: 9:42

It's the silliest thing in the world, because and I won't throw names out there, but there are certain SaaS companies that have this in their official documents to suggest that all their agency partners do not include the coupon code within the pop-up itself so that they can increase deliverability. Really, what they're trying to do is take acquisition dollars and be able to attribute them to that welcome flow instead. Yeah, and it sucks because, like they don't, they don't care, and most of these platforms don't even have a subscription to conversion rate within them, so you don't know how something's performing unless you download a bunch of uh data points into a spreadsheet and run your own calculation. It's nuts. But the customer journey in my ideal sense.

Speaker 3: 10:30

I get to a website. I take a look around. Everything's clear and well laid out. That menu is spectacular. There's no need to go through a quiz to find a couple of products that I'm looking for. I just know where to go.

Speaker 3: 10:41

I get there to that product page. I see the product pictures. They're up close, they're brilliant. I go down. There's a nice little description. There's no trademarked new material weirdness. That's there. They tell me what it's actually made of. I see a video of someone actually interacting with the product, with up close, you know, b-roll over that, explaining why they made it that certain way, what the difference is that they have in most garments, etc. Get down, explain those a little bit in more detail. That are broken down into words. And then I see reviews and faqs around, like the buying stuff what's your warranty? Um, sizing, how does that work? And like detail, like real, real detail. Not. This is going to fit you more or less this way. If it doesn't fit, we got you covered, you know, etc. This is our to fit you more or less this way. If it doesn't fit, we got you covered, you know, et cetera. This is our process. You're going to, we're shipping like one or two days. Well, everything's just clearly laid out. Then I'll spend some time there.

Speaker 2: 11:31

Show me an offer.

Speaker 3: 11:32

If I close the first one, show me that offer again. Auto, apply that shit to my car and let me check out with Apple. Pay no-transcript and not trying to be like overly branded or do too many things with the visuals, just make stuff that's functional and works 100%.

Speaker 2: 12:15

Yeah, I think most stores go in one of two directions, right. They do it really well or they just don't put in the effort whatsoever.

Speaker 3: 12:24

I look at this. You got a phone in your pocket. I got a phone in my pocket. If I own a store, I got my best sellers. I have them all around my house anyway. Right, I'm designing this shit. Take out the phone, film a video. It doesn't have to, it's got 4K on it. Go get a tripod or you know. Just set it up and just start talking to the camera. Does it need to be perfect? No, are you going to be better than 99% of the stores out there? Yes, the barrier is so low to like just be better, and I talked to so many stores and I was asked the same things. It's like that's your best seller.

Speaker 3: 13:03

Why is it just have a description and then go to reviews, like what happened to the video and what happened to all the other stuff that you could just add? Would you just show me if I met you in person? Would you just show me pictures and then like, bring out reviews? No, you would explain it to me. You'd be like this is why we made it. You give me some backstory to it. You'd like show me around it. We can't do that online.

Speaker 2: 13:31

There's nothing stopping you from doing it via your camera and a tripod. Please spend the 10 minutes taking a rough cut. You're going to be fine, and that it literally takes 10 minutes to do the video. Build out the FAQs, build out the product description. It's 10 minutes. Do a few each week.

Speaker 3: 13:41

But you know how lazy we are. We're so lazy that we have meta fields in Shopify to move the same description across all of our products. It sucks, and I'm not going to lie, it does suck. But if you have you have like a hundred skews, odds are 20 of them are driving all your revenue. Yep, build out 20 templates. It's going to suck for like approximately two days, but then you're going to be done. And then, once you're done, you've got 20 products, 10 minutes of pop, you got like four hours less than four hours of total film that you have to do, and then you've got two days of whatever you're literally done in shit less than a week and you've got everything completely done. You just don't do anything else during that week and it is fully set up and your conversion rate is going to skyrocket just because you're doing something that not everyone else is doing, and your conversion rate is going to skyrocket just because you're doing something that not everyone else is doing 100%.

Speaker 2: 14:28

Love it so much, Sweet man. Well, you know, the main reason that I wanted to have you on is because I wanted to talk primarily about one of the features that you just launched on platform, which you've dubbed as frictionless forms.

Speaker 3: 14:43

We trademarked that three years ago and honestly I think we weren't quite there to use it in our things until the other day. So I mean a little bit of foreshadowing on making that happen, that's amazing.

Speaker 2: 14:55

So I'm sure you're going to pull customer journey into this. But can you share what led to this change and why brands should be thinking this way and moving this direction so it's really ironic because it's what everyone says.

Speaker 3: 15:11

You know, uh, if you ask people that had carriages what they wanted, they'd say faster horses, yep. And we started to get requests, uh, of the normal feature that already exists. People started to be like, hey, can I have a button that adds a coupon code if they click on it, etc. And cetera. And I was like, yeah, sure, but that doesn't make any sense. Why aren't we just auto-adding it behind the scenes so no one ever has to worry about doing that extra action? And then we started really looking into why things existed the way they existed, and pop-ups, for the most part part, are dominated by people that have an incentive to not be customer friendly. They want your email, they want your SMS because they make all their money off sending that stuff. And then, whether it's an in-house person or an agency.

Speaker 2: 15:59

they're looking at that number and reporting that back to marketing leaders and that's how they show their value.

Speaker 3: 16:05

It's not even that KPI, though. It's the KPI of your ESP or your SMS sender, because they want as many profiles in there as possible so they can charge per thing sent out. They have zero incentive to let people drop off or to allow people to transact on site, because then they lose out on that revenue that's attributable to the thing. It's a fundamental conflict of interest between those that are using that data to communicate and those that are providing the data, because everyone is inherently selfish about what they want to get out of things. Sure, as a company, we don't do the sending of the emails, we don't do the sending of the SMS, so we have no stake in this. It doesn't matter to us. Which causes us to rethink what that journey should look like Ideally. If I come to your site and I do this all the time I always go to sites that I track a lot of golf brands, so I sign up for their newsletters, and so it's two steps. The first step is email. I don't mind ever providing that. Then I get to SMS, and I noticed that I never provide SMS and that I would never know or be notified if I was sent a code, and it always made me feel like I had to submit both to do it, but then they just give it to me anyway. So that's kind of misleading and fraudulent. So we looked at this and we said leading and fraudulent. So we looked at this and we said well, if 50% of people are dropping off on that second step and you go to a blank screen, that sucks. You're forcing me to leave the website to check and see if maybe I got an email. I signed up for a discount because I wanted to use it and now you've just taken it away from me.

Speaker 3: 17:46

So the whole notion behind this was okay, well, what if we changed the behavior of the close button? And we got a lot of pushback on this internally. I posted on Reddit and I got absolutely skewered on this, but I was like you know what it's terrible UX UI to do that. But you know what this is surprise and delight and the benefit far outweighs the downside of messing with someone's ability to close something out. And we built so much logic into this. It only happens on certain steps, after certain actions are taken. We back-tested all of this stuff so it started as like oh, wouldn't it be cool? Turned into oh, my god, there's so much logic behind this to make this work right, but when it works, it becomes magic, because even if you x out, it just tells you that it's automatically applied. And the kicker to this, though, for me, is how many times have you gotten a coupon code and then you have to wait till checkout to apply it to see what your total is?

Speaker 3: 18:49

and then you go back to the store and you say is there anything else I want? Because now I'm below the free shipping threshold or something else like that, because it's all done on purpose. Now it's because it's auto applied. It shows in the cart as you shop, so you get that running total with the discount. And if there's anything I've learned about shopping online is I'm never going to pay full price but waiting to get to that last step. If you don't have a coupon code in there, or let's say, you go through a pop-up and you dismiss the SMS step, you don't have anything in there, where do you go? It's either your inbox or you're going to Google. Usually it's Google before your inbox. Because you don't know if you were sent anything. I'm clicking.

Speaker 2: 19:25

Google usually is Google before you're in box, you don't know if you were sent anything and you're looking for clicking my honey app or my racket to nap.

Speaker 3: 19:30

Yeah, but that's what we do, right? We? We by default our journey as customers to look for a better deal If we're shopping online. We're all fighting this notion of, oh, we shouldn't, don't leave it on the site. You know all this other stuff. It's like do you guys not realize that this is the internet and people are just going to go look for a code somewhere else and that there's a 90% chance that one of them is generic and valid somewhere? And if you're on affiliate platforms, for sure you know those are the first 10 links on any page because they outrank everything else. We're fighting over like minuscule margin and this is just in the post today where the question was oh, that's going to kill margin. I was like price, that margin in 50% are going to check out without just let it happen. Just adjust to the normal buyer journey. That is today, where everyone wants to feel like a winner. Make everyone feel like a winner.

Speaker 2: 20:21

I mean, what's the alternative? Right, I go to Google or I click my honey app, it picks up a coupon code that probably came from an influencer. Now you're compensating the influencer and you are just getting hammered.

Speaker 3: 20:33

I mean. So this is the debate and this was another debate token. There's a lot of these people that are coming out with ways to universal IDs and all this other stuff to track people across in order to like minimize the amount of margin we're giving up through pop-ups across. In order to like minimize the amount of margin we're giving up through pop-ups greg. Everyone signs up multiple times, using different email addresses, using incognito windows, using everything else. This is not a problem we're solving. If you try solving this problem and you're actually successful doing, you're adding more friction to someone that was ready to buy a second time. Take the margin hit. We send out so many sales like every 90 days, etc. The other like this is actually this I will talk about this part too, because what we notice is that when everyone got obsessed with the margin they were getting from pop-ups, we saw cash back pop up.

Speaker 3: 21:21

I love the concept of cash back.

Speaker 3: 21:23

Two years ago when we were running it.

Speaker 3: 21:25

I hated the concept of cash back a year and 11 months ago after we stopped running it, because the liabilities on the books are absolutely crazy when you're giving this stuff out, and then the cheat sheet to doing that and the way that our friends at Fondue now PostScript did it is that they withhold that cash back until after your return period, which could be 30 or 60 days.

Speaker 3: 21:48

But when you look at the data that repeat purchase rate for the highest intent people happens in that first 30 to 60 days. Flip side of that is you're giving someone literal cash so they can wait to your next sale and then they can double dip on that discount. So the discount you gave up or you decide not to give up on the first one gets absolutely smashed and there's nothing you can do to protect against it, because you cannot exclude gift cards from being used as cash during a checkout. So we're huge fans of short-sighted little statistics when we should be looking at long-term impacts across everything. My newsletter had that and I called out Jordan West a little bit on this with his data that he had running.

Speaker 2: 22:31

I got a good laugh about that one this weekend.

Speaker 3: 22:34

But I mean, this is the thing. Is a lot of people that are claiming that you should do X, y and Z for your client actually do not understand the larger implications of doing X, y and Z for the business, because it makes their individual stats look amazing, but they're skewed and flawed every single time. For the most part, if you see a spike in something working, you have to ask what the down river effect of that's going to be, and we're so bad as marketers for doing this because everyone likes flashy, like quick wins, instead of consistent business building through real logic and understanding of how variables interact.

Speaker 2: 23:18

Yeah, it's wild, that's wild. So how? How has this? I mean, I'm sure you've rolled it out to clients, or are you just using it on your own brands?

Speaker 3: 23:27

We are rolling out to clients currently. How's it being accepted? It's a mix. People didn't realize they had this big of a problem. Now, for us, our forms are pretty well convert, but a lot of people I don't think want to admit that people are dropping off at that rate on certain steps. We've run internal tests with some of our clients about the impact of collecting SMS during signup and we found it to be net. It's a negative, but long-term because you get it up front. There's less friction of collecting it up front and it turns out to be a positive. If they go on and purchase, it's nothing more than a marker of intent though, so they're willing to take the hit. The hit's about 10% revenue by asking for SMS on signup. This is hopefully going to negate that quite a lot. With the restructuring of the logic around that, we expect it to kind of negate what the drop that they're taking, so it becomes a net positive. This is one of the few features that we've rolled out where people are like I don't even need a b test this.

Speaker 2: 24:29

This is better, like because people can put it up done they can just relate.

Speaker 3: 24:32

they can relate to like the fact that they've been through this process before and the frustration and the friction that went along with having to go check another app or do something else and none of that matters. I'm I'm sure I'm gonna upset a lot of other pop-up makers and force them to change maybe, or a lot of ESPs that aren't going to get the, not the kudos on the welcome series, but at the end of the day, your job is to make people money. It's not to like pad your stats and figure it out Right, but we're seeing good results. So we tested for a while beforehand and we saw an increase of between 15 and 20% subscription to conversion rate, which was great. I just like watching people. I've even had people write in a customer support. They've been like oh, I forgot to add my coupon code. I've taken a screenshot. I've been like we got you, it's already in there.

Speaker 3: 25:21

But that's the other thing that's been coming back. So some of our clients have older clientele. They always forget to put it in. But then for customer service you always add it by default to the order. You don't mess with that. You say go on and use it on your next purchase. You're passing forward that value to the next purchase. Now you don't got to worry about it. It's automatically added in those long strings too, because every one of our clients a lot of them use unique codes for the honey problem and everything else. It's just easier and better for attribution to like. Long-term there's no need to copy and paste that string anymore and they're like whoa, wait what we can use uniques? Plus, there's no string involved. So people can't mess up a zero and an O anymore.

Speaker 3: 26:05

Cause a lot of people don't put in monospace for their coupon codes. I don't know why yet, but like there's all these little things that you would hear about but marketing teams wouldn't hear about it because they don't run customer support. Yeah, they don't talk to each other and unless you run your own thing and you're running both you start seeing some of these problems that frequently come up. And there's so many little things like this. That's just. It's just a better experience if you can figure it out.

Speaker 2: 26:31

Yeah, that's awesome, that's so great. It out yeah, that's awesome, that's so great. All right, I know we're kind of coming up on time here. I do have kind of one question for you.

Speaker 3: 26:42

Okay.

Speaker 2: 26:42

And it comes back to metrics. All right, I threw out a couple of metrics and you're like hang on, but this. So, when it comes to subscription rates, when it comes to getting people to opt in and turning them into customers, what, in your opinion, are the most important metrics that a brand should be monitoring?

Speaker 3: 27:06

That's a great question. So take it a step back. What influences your initial metrics? It's audience back. What influences your initial metrics? It's audience, and it's the quality of the audience that's going to be determinative of whether or not people are going to sign that purchase, etc. And I think for the longest time we've completely forgot that it all comes up to is the audience quality or not. And how am I driving that audience? If you're driving everyone through SEO, like for your brand, right, and everyone's coming in through SEO and they're coming in for specific truck parts and they got that nailed down, you're going to have a high quality audience. You should have an incredibly- Great conversion rates.

Speaker 3: 27:45

Yeah, and you should have an incredibly high opt-in rate, incredibly high. You should be juicing that for as much data points as you can to improve your SEO on that flip side. That's the way that works. Now, what really bothers me is that there's been certain narratives that have existed within our own space of SaaS where everyone's like opt-in rates, all that matters. Sure, if I get 1,000 people to opt-in and 100 convert, that's a 10% conversion rate. That's not bad. But I did good stuff. My list is fat. I'm paying for every single email I send out. Let's do a calculation how much that's costing me. Sweet, but I don't know anything about these people, so I don't know what differentiates a high quality person from a low quality person. Sweet, okay, all right, that's something I guess. Subscription to conversion rate how many people are signing up and actually purchasing something? Okay, that also counts for something. How much are they spending if they sign up? Are they buying like one or is like the AOV creeping up Like how do we figure that out?

Speaker 3: 28:43

I had that conversation with someone the other day and they're like oh, aov doesn't matter in signup rates. I was like I don't know what you're looking at. It plays a role. I like to know what that number is, because if that number is super low on one of my forms, then I got to figure out where's that form hitting someone in the journey, and do I need to be eliminating that form entirely and waiting until they're deeper into the journey, or does the offer change for that person if they're coming in? And we've messed around with this. If you're running paid ads or Facebook ads, et cetera, sometimes it's better not to give the standard offer but to have that reposition them to unlocking an offer that's only available for that channel. You sacrifice margin, but you're not giving it away via coupon code, and you can kind of change that journey.

Speaker 3: 29:27

For me, though, it's the bottleneck of looking at all of these in a silo or in a vacuum is what gets people in trouble, because if you're running an A-B test and I love it, klaviyo is a great partner I love everyone that does this in their forums. It's them, sendlane, everyone that's ever got pop-ups in their forums. They always do their A-B test based on opt-in rate, and that's how they pick their winner. Yet they never naturalize the amount of views relevant to other statistics, and we have no idea what source of traffic those individuals came from, broken down to figure out. Now there are certain ways that you can get to it, but it's like an absolute bitch to look at and try to figure out. But, like when I'm looking at something and I really want to test an offer, it's one Facebook ad, one campaign, one ad set, one ad to one landing page and then I will run my A-B test on that because it's clean, and then I'll naturalize the numbers at the end, based on the percentage signup rate, percentage subscription to conversion rate and number of orders. So I can naturalize all the numbers across.

Speaker 3: 30:36

Because when you work with really large stores that are doing an absolute lot, you can't run a standard A-B test. The same way, you have to run it across all the different variables to figure out hey, this is giving you more revenue, but honestly, over time this is probably going to be better for you. You. And then the crazy stuff that happens and we've toyed with this. We're not there yet with it. But then you start figuring out what's the version, what's the that person that converted, what data path did they have? What data points do you have to that? How does, how do those data points relate to sales and products purchased first and second time in between, because then you become predictive and you've shifted from oh, my opt-in rate was 10% to my quality of audience via opt-in was 5.6% and they have a likelihood of repurchasing in the first 90 days of 75%. I want to find more people like that. Yes, we do. We're not there yet, and that's the problem is like.

Speaker 3: 31:35

I think where we're at right now is can I get a higher opt-in rate? Yeah, change the offer. Yeah, you know, the highest opt-in rate we got was 40% and we gave away a $10 gift card for anyone that signed up and checked out with that gift card. You know why we stopped running that offer. We were attracting a lot of people that just wanted free stuff, and this is the comment that I had on the giveaways Giveaways are never going to be a good thing, and anyone that says gift with purchase I didn't come there to buy the gift.

Speaker 3: 32:08

I know it might give you better results for right now, but it's always a percentage. It's always less than Black Friday and more than a bundle. That's how I do this stuff all the time, because Black Friday you're going to go deeper and no one's going to use that A bundle is already available to everyone. So you're signing up and you're kind of fooling someone. That doesn't leave a good taste in people's mouths. But if you hit that sweet spot, more often than not that's going to be your highest quality customer, because they're incentivized to spend more. Anyone that says cash off or $10 off your order or $50 or more. I am not incentivized to spend more than $50. My biggest benefit is spending $50 and then capping it. We're artificially setting up our own psychological blocks under the guise of AB testing stuff, which I don't think most marketers actually understand, and it drives me nuts.

Speaker 2: 32:58

No for sure. Yeah, those, those are some great insights and suggestions. Um, before we wrap up, like you have any predictions for the rest of this year and into next year in terms of customer journey forms like what's the landscape going to look like?

Speaker 3: 33:16

Yeah, I've seen what a lot of people are doing and I think some of it's pretty interesting. Forms are going to replace welcome series. I already know that's going to happen because we're already working on it. So the old model was collect an email, do a welcome series, collect a little bit of data about those people and then hope to put them on like a drip campaign with something good With forms and data collection. When someone's going through a form, they're going to give parts of data and then we can just logic map on the back end. That drops them on a contextual landing page at the end with an offer and I think that's going to 100% replace the need for like a welcome series. And I think that's going to 100% replace the need for a welcome series Because, statistically speaking, most people purchase within the first five hours anyway of signing up. So if we can figure that out for on page and, as you can see, if you got autoly coupon codes straight dismissal plus logic mapping, there's no need for anyone to ever go to their inbox for a welcome series to make a purchase. If we can reduce all that friction, conversion rates are going to skyrocket, as long as the quality content, like videos on those pages, et cetera. So that's my prediction for where forums are going to adjust to.

Speaker 3: 34:32

Everyone's been talking about oh, I want to personalize pages based on that. No, you don't. There's only so many variables that you want to focus on. This came up in a call the other day. They were like oh, I want to personalize everything. I was like you have six variables. It takes two hours to build those pages. Please just go build those pages. I'm not doing the extra work, but that's what's going to happen at forms.

Speaker 3: 34:53

I think sales are going to continue to decline for people that are relying on paid. I think there's going to have to be a shift in the way that we approach paid generally. I'm watching it on LinkedIn and you can see people start to talk about more not more advanced features, but more gimmicky features as a means of trying to like pull out this bad situation. But I'm not gonna lie. I've had a lot of our own clients reach out to me recently like my sales are down, like I can't. I can't fix this and we're not an expensive product, but for them it's too much in the scheme of things, because they they're just not in that place to make it happen, and it's happened in the last couple of weeks, and I've reached out and been like I have a feature for you. I think it might help you a little bit.

Speaker 3: 35:41

If it doesn't help you, we got some really big problems to work on, but that's one of these things where, until we can stop looking for silver bullets and until we can reframe how we go to market and always be going to market and treating every day as a launch day, we're all going to run into problems. Yep, because every day is a launch day. Every day is a chance to launch your products into a new audience. It's just a matter of figuring out who those audiences are and where they hang out. And we're so bad at doing that. We're so bad because we like UGC and we like all the same stuff everyone else is doing and we like copying what all our people are doing.

Speaker 3: 36:24

But we also glorify very large companies that brag about success and we have no idea what their internal stats actually look like. And this is my biggest point of caution to anyone that's an e-commerce marketer or anyone else looking at this Just because a company says they're having super success and has a ton of revenue does not mean they're making money, profit or anything else, and that is the hardest part for people to understand. But we're so bad at it because we want the case studies with all these big brands and I could I could see a case study of like could you imagine seeing like Casper, like having Casper as a client back in the day I'm sure someone watching this had them as a as a client, right and like oh, we did all this stuff and Casper made so much money and then they went public and then you fast forward three years and you're like they were never profitable.

Speaker 3: 37:14

They were losing a ton of money. Your agency made more money than they made per customer, but that's what's going to end up happening in this next cycle. We already see it happening. The last thing I'll say in terms of what's happening, timo and Sheena are real and we're not giving them the credit they deserve, and I do strongly believe that, because they're sourcing from the same places that everyone is sourcing their goods from and, at the end of the day, they can do volume that all these small brands can't. So you're going to pay different amounts in terms of margin over the raw cost of the good and that increase in margin that they have. They're gapping up to spend and compete with you on social media. It is a losing battle.

Speaker 3: 38:00

It's, honestly, it's very much a losing battle. That's all I got.

Speaker 2: 38:05

That's all you got, mic drop. I love it. Thanks, man. I appreciate you taking some time. You're a busy, busy man. Oh, I always enjoy the conversation, conversation.

Speaker 3: 38:15

It's the tough ones that we have to have, though, and I know I wish that we heard more of them more than anything else. I just wish that we didn't sugarcoat everything as being hunky-dory all the time and rah-rah-ing stuff, and I wish that we questioned more things and that we asked for the raw data in every case study that you see, because you can spot like it might sound really great, but a lot of founders, specifically in like the smb space and e-commerce, they're not finance people, right, they're not. They don't have the requisite experience with marketing. Necessarily, they don't. They don't understand the way all this stuff works. Yeah, and a lot of them.

Speaker 3: 38:52

I was talking to someone the other day. They don't understand the way all this stuff works. Yeah, and a lot of them. I was talking to someone the other day. They don't have experience with retail. They don't understand what that's like. They don't understand that you have to like half fund offers from your retailers and that you are responsible for all the stuff that comes back and you have to eat it. Right, like, and and I think that was the, that was the big like claim, and, and I think that was the that was the big like claim, like oh, just do wholesale to offset your paid.

Speaker 2: 39:17

It's not the answer. No, not so much it's you got, you got it.

Speaker 3: 39:20

You got to clean up your own house first before you can figure out how to do it for everyone else awesome, I love it.

Speaker 2: 39:26

That's good closing, so, uh, thank you. Thank you so much, man thank you Thanks for having me, you're so welcome.