Sabina Gault (founder & CEO of Konnect) has done a wonderful job building relationships, starting her agency from scratch, and creating an award-winning company culture (and agency). She has also been part of a handful of exits along the way (Krave, Sweetleaf, Stubbs, One1 Brands).
In this episode, Sabina and Vasa Martinez, host of Exit Intent, talk about what's next in PR, how to hone in on your brand's target audience, and what kind of employee perks she offers (a lot!) to keep remote culture at a high.
Vasa: (00:01)
All right, everybody. Thank you for joining us. We got Sabina Gault from Konnect Agency here with us today. Sabina, welcome to the show.
Sabina: (00:08)
Hey, Vasa. Thanks for having me.
Vasa: (00:10)
Of course, of course. I'm glad to have another fellow agency owner on the podcast for the first time. You're the first.
Sabina: (00:17)
Oh, thank you. That makes me feel very special.
Vasa: (00:22)
Saved it just for you.
Sabina: (00:23)
I love it.
Vasa: (00:25)
I'm excited to chat with you about Konnect, the world of PR. Another agency owner, this one really, really makes me happy. Before we get into that, can you give our listeners a little bit of a background on you and how you got to Konnect and what started it, all that good stuff?
Sabina: (00:45)
Yeah, sure. The interesting thing is I think a lot of people have these amazing stories as business owners and they started off and did it on their own. They did it because nobody was doing it better. They invented a product. They came up with something that's really cool, or they started a new discipline that nobody was doing. I just don't have that story. I'm born and raised in Romania. The landscape prior to 1989 was the communist country. It's just a trickier sort of landscape than you would have here in America where everybody is typically running businesses or knows enough about entrepreneurship and knows enough about running a business and having high-powered jobs or really building those relationships. In Romania, that didn't come with the territory. There was no such stories of entrepreneurship.
Sabina: (01:45)
You get a job and that's your life. When I moved here almost 20 something years ago, it was just a very different world for me that I wasn't really trained in. I didn't have that kind of understanding of what it means to run a business, what it means to have your own business, what it means to start something from scratch. It was definitely kind of a whoa factor. I've never thought about this before. I didn't want to start a business. To this day, I didn't want to start a business. I always thought that it's the most horrible thing ever. This is the worst thing to do. That it's just really difficult, really hardcore, and it is. But I'm a really crappy employee. I got fired from my job. I was like, oh my God, what have I done? I was doing PR.
Sabina: (02:41)
I've been doing PR all my life. At that point, I had brought a bunch of clients to the agency and the clients were like, "Well, we want to go wherever you're going." I was like, "Well, I'm going nowhere. I'm going home. I don't know about you all, I'm going to go home." I was just about to pick up my stuff and go home. They were like, "Oh, we don't care. We want to be with you." I sort of found myself with clients and business, knock on wood, but it was super, super helpful because I took it easy and I didn't jump into it right away. I took a little bit here and a little bit there. I did my accounting and I learned how to do that. Then I started learning how to run the business and the back end of it. I did that for a while and then I started growing. It definitely was a progressive approach to it versus just a jump in and have this big idea and make it happen. It was more of a, oh crap. I'm here. What do I do now?
Vasa: (03:49)
Well, first and foremost, you mentioned that you don't have this amazing story for Konnect. I really do find that amazing. Coming from Romania and getting things going and building up a solid clientele and they want to follow you. I think I'm a big fan of that. It's somewhat similar to how GB started. I just started consulting after I got tired of being an employee. I just started consulting for a couple of brands that had a little steam and then incorporated GB. Then started building even more. Then started hiring people. I wasn't expecting it. Sure as hell it's hard, but it's something that's just so much more rewarding.
Sabina: (04:28)
Yeah. It definitely is. It's really hard. I think that if you look at it through the lens of, I'm going to look at only the very difficult parts and only the hard parts. I think that then it makes it easy because you're always going to like the good signs are going to take care of themselves, but the bad times never take care of themselves. How do you approach that I think as an entrepreneur, I never look at the good side. I never look at the exciting stuff. I always look up, oh my God, I'm always running it like we're about to enter a recession. My staff laughs at me so hard because I'm always like, "Oh my God, a recession is coming. It's around the corner." They're like, "Sabina, everything's fine. You need to calm yourself. Nothing's happening." But because of that, then I'm never surprised by the really bad stuff because you're likely to take in more strides.
Vasa: (05:28)
I think that it's no matter what, you and I are going to be absorbing all of the tough stuff and we try to make it as fun as possible for the staff. Speaking of that, you've won. What are you like 20 years in a row for best places to work? How do you keep that culture up after growing so fast or so thoughtfully but also pretty fast and hiring so many people? How did you do that?
Sabina: (05:58)
We definitely do a decent amount of perks. I think we've over the years gotten smarter about how do we really give people what really matters and how do we bring those services to the table that are actually going to bring value to people's lives. Because ping pong tables and beer tastings and tequila Sundays are really fun but then the same person still goes home. If they don't have a great salary and compensation package, and if they don't have amazing time off, and if when they're off they're being pinged 17 times a day, then that really doesn't matter because you're not really absorbing yourself with that tequila Sunday or tequila Monday. I think one of the things for us as an organization has always been really delving down into what matters to people. We have an amazing max for 401(k) and that is a big deal.
Sabina: (06:57)
Our team is investing in their future, is investing in their 401(k). We match 10%, so we match a significant amount. It's theirs, it's theirs to keep. There's no strings attached. We don't take it away if you leave. That's a big thing that our team loves. We, prior to COVID had a full-time therapist, which in an industry like ours is a really big deal because we deal with a lot of personalities all day, every day. It just really helped having somebody else to talk to and be a sound board, and our team really loved that. We think about our team because we have a large chunk of our team that are moms. We provide a lot of resources, amazing maternity leave, which we had just somebody come back from maternity leave. She was gone for almost six months. There's a lot of those perks that matter to people that are actually meaningful.
Sabina: (07:56)
When I say mat leave, I don't mean like, oh, you can go on for however long you want. It's more like, oh no, you go and we pay a ton of the months you're off full board. Those are things that matter to our team. I think we did when we were in an office, which now we're all in our homes, but as we were in an office, we did an office massages because again, everybody is super stressed out. Everybody's just massively working and sitting at a desk and none of that is comfortable. Getting that half an hour massage, 15, 20 minute massage is really nice once a week. You're like, okay, at least I get a 20 minutes to myself. I'm in a room. The lights are out. There's massage therapists that's just massaging me for 20 minutes. Those are things that just really matter to our team. Then, yeah, we do reimbursements and we do fitness reimbursement and gym reimbursement.
Sabina: (08:50)
We do cell phone reimbursement. Obviously, some of those are not happening right now because gyms are barely opening in California, but some of them are happening. I think it's a matter of picking what really matters to the team. When we saw that people didn't care about certain things but they cared about Summer Fridays. But they could care less if we gave them, I don't know, some extra day lunch thing. They were like, "Yeah, that's cool. But you know, we'd rather have our half Friday off." We started really implementing only the things that matter to the team. We do polls all the time. We use a tool called Officevibe. We use it. There's a random questionnaire that goes out to the team every single week that we have no control over. But then we get pure, honest, and truthful feedback all the time about everything we do and we react to them.
Vasa: (09:44)
Officevibe, I'm going to look into that. That seems amazing. A bunch of cool perks you got there. I can see why Konnect won so many awards. Sabina, my next question for you is we all see a lot of PR focusing in certain directions since COVID hit. What do you think that the trends are like tomorrow and in the future? What do you think is the way to breakthrough often, sometimes the noise for brands?
Sabina: (10:19)
I mean, it's hard. Let's make no mistake. It's always been hard. Now it's gotten that much harder. I think we went from old, old, old school back in the day propaganda to a more paid approach of this is brought to you by Marlboro. Then we went to a more free news, open forums, open letters to the editor. We went to brands being able to activate a lot more. There were a lot of places to activate on. There were a lot of newspapers. There were a lot of magazines. There was a lot of media out there that people were consuming on a regular basis. Then Facebook and Instagram came on and nobody consumed anything. Everybody just sits on their social networks all day and post selfies. That changed. Then we retargeted the bejesus out of people on Instagram and we retargeted everybody on Google. Then the app kind of is going away as well now. It's changing so fast.
Sabina: (11:29)
I would say there's a lot of industries that changed and there's a lot of industries that have changed over the years. But this one, man, has changed so much. What you were able to do even two years ago just doesn't have the same value anymore. I mean, influencers are changing as we speak. It's less about doing a quick and dirty deal and taking a photo with a product. It's more about, how do you involve this person in a long-term programming? We'll see how long that's going to last. Right? Because we just don't know. As we continue to evolve in channels, clubhouse is a thing, TikTok is a big thing. YouTube continues to grow. Where are the channels that somebody can and a brand can specifically activate and really be meaningful? I was on a call the other day with a client.
Sabina: (12:17)
I said, "Look, I think this is not about looking at what everybody else is doing. I think this is about looking at who our tribe is and how do we develop that tribe of consumers that are going to love what we do, and that are going to believe in us and they're going to be our advocates." That's where we have to go. If those consumers are on Facebook, then we got to go on Facebook. I get it that TikTok is cool, but if your consumer isn't there, then you're wasting your time and money. It's really about driving down. Where is our consumer? Where is our tribe? How do we build around that tribe? What mediums is that tribe really excited about? Is it Hulu? Is it Spotify? Is it traditional media? Is it a business community that we're trying to get to? Where are we going with this brand that is going to make the most sense?
Vasa: (13:10)
Yeah. One thing I see often is brands who are looking at what others are doing too much. When I was younger and I played sports, whether it was baseball or basketball, one of my older brothers that taught me a lot of it always said, don't look at other people's swings. It's going to mess with yours. Don't look at somebody else's jumpshot. It's going to mess with yours. I often find in what we do, people want to do so much of what the other is doing, but what we don't do is sit and really be self-aware for our brands. Is that the right place for us to be? Is that where our customers' attention is at? If not, hold on it for now. It's nice to have really focused on where your customer's attention is at. I find that startup brands that we work with, not today, but brands in general that we could work with are having a tougher time figuring out where that should be.
Sabina: (14:05)
Well, and it's that much harder, right? I mean, let's be honest. What we were able to do, think about Instagram four years ago, how much easier it was to get followers? How much easier it was to post content that was engaging and for people to actually engage with the content? Giveaway, people were excited, people actually wanted a giveaway. Now you do a giveaway and it's like crickets. You're giving away $200 on Amazon. People are like, [inaudible 00:14:30]. I don't want to follow another brand. Bye. I mean, it's just gotten so much harder. We're all fighting for the same five seconds of space. We're all fighting for the same two minutes of attention from a customer. The discovery phase has changed, especially with COVID. People are all discovering in the same places now. That's the big, massive change that we've seen.
Sabina: (15:00)
Discovery of a brand used to happen in so many places. People will travel, they discover a brand. People will get on a plane, they discover a brand in the snack box. People would go to the grocery store, they discover a brand. People would walk down the street and a brand would hand them a product. All of those moments of discovery are gone. None of that exist right now. Right now, you're stuck in your home at best. You're going possibly to the grocery store, but much less. Grocery store visits are down and much faster and you can't wait to get out of there. Right? There is no other element. You're not going to music festival to discover a brand. You're not going to a cool art show to discover a brand. You're not traveling. You're not doing any of that. Or the majority of the people aren't doing many of that.
Sabina: (15:51)
Discovery is all limited to .com really, or as we like to joke, the interwebs. CTV or connected television and connected online radio and digital. That's it. That's where you're discovering. You're not even driving somewhere as much to discover something on traditional radio or Sirius for that matter, unless you're listening to Sirius on your phone.
Vasa: (16:21)
I'm just waiting for Zoom to have breaks in between meetings for advertisements. I mean, it might not be a bad idea.
Sabina: (16:32)
That'd be amazing. We interrupt this programming real quick. We have a quick brand announcement. Do you want more jerky? We have a brand for you.
Vasa: (16:41)
I'm just waiting for that. Talking more about strategy. I've been part of two brand messaging and positioning meetings with you at the old office. That's one thing. I don't want to get into the granular tactics of how amazing that is. But for me, it's like Disneyland for starting a brand. How do you go into those? How do you think about that? How do you find brands' reasons for being? There's a lot of brands that want to be a lot to everyone. What I find is that you find a very magical way to really put the focus on certain aspects of a brand. How do you go into those meetings?
Sabina: (17:23)
The very polite answer is you do a lot of research and you try to think through what the other party is going to want and how you're going to need to position it in a way to actually drive to the results in a not politically correct way. You have to really corral everybody in your direction. I mean, we're going through this right now where particular brand is that, "We want to do this. We want to do that. We want to do all the things to all the people." I'm like, okay, but we're here now. We're not there where you want to be all the things to all the people. No, we're not yet Nike. No, we're not Lululemon yet. No, we're not Red Bull yet. I get it. We all want to be that, but we're not that right now.
Sabina: (18:14)
We have to focus on who we are today because by really extrapolating that, that essence of who we are today, that's what people are going to fall in love with today. We can't make them fall in love with the brand that we're going to be in 10 years or in five years. I think that this is the biggest challenge. We're dealing with this expansion and fast growth in so many areas. Right. I was watching the WeWork documentary last night on Hulu and it's good. I think they've done a really good job with it, where really they're saying, technology and the areas of technology have just provided everybody with this magical wish of a unicorn. Everybody wants to be a unicorn. Everybody wants to grow a company in two years, sell it for a hundred million dollars and go off into the sunset and be the richest person ever. It's like, that doesn't happen.
Sabina: (19:11)
The majority of the brands that we all see today has been around for 30, 40, 50, a hundred years. Yes, they're phenomenal brands. Yes, they do a great job, but we all forget, Red Bull didn't start yesterday. Red Bull started 30 plus years ago and they're 20 plus billion dollars worth of spend against the brand. It doesn't happen all night. I always give Kodiak Cakes as an example because people are like, "Oh my God, that plan just skyrocketed." I'm like, poor Joel has been literally selling out of a red wagon for 30 years. The guy didn't just start yesterday selling pancake mix and protein, he's literally been selling this for 30 years. Yeah, they're phenomenal brand now and they're being absolutely amazing, but it didn't take a minute. Back in the day, when all of these brands started, they created that the magical message that people wanted to love and fall in love with.
Sabina: (20:06)
Then, yeah, they iterated on it five, 10 years later and they iterated on it again, 10, 15 years later when their audience grew and they became global national whatever. But we all got to remember to look at where we are today and who the brand is today and what are the first circle of people that are going to really like us. We do this messaging exercise and we really force people to think who are the people that this is a given to? Who is our immediate tribe that will take this no matter what? If you're a plant-based product, no, I am not your... Or the guy that eats meat five times a week is not your demographic, not the tribe. He's not your tribe. You're going to have to pull a lot to convince that guy to stop eating meat five days a week.
Sabina: (20:57)
Me, I already eat plant-based every single day, at least one meal a day. I'm an easy target. You can target me with that and it's an easy thing. I'm an early adopter of technology. If you have technology, that's really cool. I'm always like, oh, this looks great. I'm also an appliance person. I really love appliances. They make me happy. I'm an easy target for that. But somebody that literally has one blender in their whole house, you're not going to try and get them to buy some new oven that cooks your meat in 20 seconds. Also, by the way, that person is plant-based. That's where we have to go to that super, super close niche, fall in love with that, and then move on to the next circle and who's that circle. Then move on to the next circle. It's all these concentrical circles and the messaging really has to start and to relay from that outwards. Everybody wants to sign to start at the last circle. Everybody's like, we want to be over there. I'm like, yeah, we all do.
Vasa: (21:58)
Again, none of these questions are meant for you to divulge any of the secret sauce, but how do you feel about brands that may go into launches maybe a little bit too targeted? They're not quite sure who that person is. Are you against pivoting once they realize like, oh, we might've been wrong. How often does that happen in your experience?
Sabina: (22:24)
I think it depends. I genuinely think that the majority of the brands are fairly... If they don't go massively targeted, again, there are certain categories that just people want to be super targeted with, but it's like, it's pizza. Come on. Nobody says anything bad about pizza, or it's candy. Nobody hates candy. Yes, people may not eat it every day, but nobody says, oh my God, I'm so upset with candy, no. Let's be honest, it's something that brings people joy. Everybody loves a good candy here and there. Even if you don't eat sugar, you're still going to like some candy at some points in time. There are certain categories that you really can be super loose about because you don't need to know whether your target is a mom of three children, annual household income of 125 plus. She lives in major metropolitan cities. Or if it's school-age kids that happen to love because you're putting some Disney character on your packaging.
Sabina: (23:30)
At the end of the day, it's a loose enough category. Now when you're trying something super niche and super targeted, trying to get super deep with it, that's where it's a little tricky. Like you're doing CBD supplements for pets. I mean, that is three degrees of weird, and not in a bad way, but in a, hey, we need to not only explain to people why CBD for pets works first. Then we need to explain that it's safe, so we need a third party validator for that. Then three, you need to actually convince people that they need to give the supplement all of these times of the day to this person. You have to pull so hard with that message to hit all of these three. Then yeah, you really got to go down and be like, okay, well maybe chances are that the parents, the pet parent is already using CBD themselves.
Sabina: (24:27)
Chances are that that is niche, but then the explanation process is that much less. You're not pulling this audience in three different circles that they're not comfortable with. Maybe that pet parent is already thinking about CBD for pets. Then it's like, okay, I already take CBD. I'm kind of not opposed to giving my pet CBD. If you just show me a doctor that's legit enough that talks enough about it, chances are I'm going to believe you and I'm going to buy it. I already give my pet supplements. That's one. I had a client who said that to me, and it was the coolest thing ever and I stole it from him. I told him I'm stealing it from him. He said, you can only be one degree of weird. You can't be three degrees of weird. You got to create a product, and you got to target that audience with that product. An audience that only goes one degree of weird.
Sabina: (25:24)
You can't have like, oh, we're going to infuse that with 17 routes that you've never heard about. Then we're also going to be using some new technology that you've never heard about. Then we're going to put it in a form that's totally weird and it requires you to open it and then shake it and then put it in a glass and then drink it with three straws. I mean, by the time you're trying to get an audience to vet in on that, it's just a long road.
Vasa: (25:54)
A lot of ways to lose there when you get more than one degree, what is it? One degree of weird?
Sabina: (26:02)
One degree of weird. One degree of weird.
Vasa: (26:03)
It reminds me of the four degrees of separation of Kevin Bacon or whatever that was.
Sabina: (26:06)
Kevin Bacon, yeah.
Vasa: (26:10)
All right, cool. I've got one more for you before we go into rapid fire. Rapid fire questions will be very mellow for you though. This podcast is called Exit Intent. I want to ask, you've been doing this for a while. What are some of your favorite exits that you've been a part of with brands that you've represented and how great was that feeling when you started working with them and then you see it happen?
Sabina: (26:35)
I mean, I think they're all very, very different. I think one of the most popular and really a darling is KRAVE. I always say John is one of the best marketers I've ever met in my life. He's phenomenal marketing brain, obviously economical, financial as well, but just a really, really amazing marketer that can really take a brand to the next level and then think through all the things that will make sense and that will take that brand and skyrocket it. I've now had the pleasure and the joy of working alongside of him for over a decade in various other brands. KRAVE, amongst many others, and we continue to work with KRAVE, but that's one where they did probably one of the notable first exits in the industry and the kind of better-for-you food and beverage industry.
Sabina: (27:34)
My first exit ever was actually with Sweet Leaf Tea. Both Clayton and David are still very, very dear friends. We continue to work together on many things, but that was the first thing. It was not a massive exit. It was a great exit. It was a great exit to Nestle Waters. That brand was just had so much excitement from fans, and then they had such a huge audience that people just love Sweet Leaf. There was like a whole very, very connected audience. One that took a decently long time was Stubb's Bar-B-Q. We exited to McCormick's on that. That was one that took a long time and a lot of iterations. It wasn't the sort of easy, quick and dirty way that people expect.
Sabina: (28:30)
It is just a very cool, very old school Americana brand. Christoph Stubblefield founded it and it's been around for 40 plus years. The Stubb's venue in Austin, one of the most well-known Austin venues for music. It's a live music outdoor space. On Sunday, brunch, we had a line around the corner with people waiting from brunch and just really, really cool, great ribs, great briskets. Really translating back and translating kind of the sauce business, that was really exciting. That took a long time. I mean, I personally was on that brand for many, many years. Scott who's the CEO and who helped kind of take the brand from Stubb into the next level was and is one of my best friends. He's an amazing human. That was a phenomenal kind of exit in the end.
Sabina: (29:27)
Recently we did one brand. We exited to Hershey, and that's another huge success because we basically changed everything. We changed the way the brand looked and felt and talked and marketed. The team there was amazing. The CMO there was one of my favorite people. I've had lots of work with Peter Burns there who's a phenomenal human and an awesome CEO and a great leader. So really seeing those people in action was just the most exciting thing. Seeing how you take a brand to that level and you really turn it around and move it from a very manly, very dude focus brand to like a very female, very athletic, very Lululemony kind of brand, and others. But those are the ones that just come to mind.
Vasa: (30:21)
I definitely could feel the Konnect effect when you took over. I didn't know you then, but I was at Quest when one started switching it up. I saw them kind of maybe a little more popular, more popular, more popular. Definitely felt that's likely when you probably took him on.
Sabina: (30:40)
I mean, it's probably five years or so, four and a half, five years.
Vasa: (30:44)
Yeah. That's right around the time. Right when I was leaving. Well, very cool. Let's jump into rapid fire. I'm going to do a different format on these. I'm going to name a category and you're going to respond with your top three brands in that category. Then full disclosure for any clients that are maybe listening to this, if your brand doesn't get listed, it's all good. It's all good.
Sabina: (31:11)
Something you have to think fast, you're like, oh.
Vasa: (31:14)
It's like the Oscars when somebody forgets to name somebody as a thank you. First category is beverage.
Sabina: (31:25)
That's a good one. Well, Zola, just because they're amazing right now and killing it. I think Body Armor has done a really great job. Probably I would say La Colombe, just because it's one of my favorite coffees.
Vasa: (31:40)
You know, I was just doing some research on Body Armor because I love that story and I miss Kobe. They have a trademark on super drink. I think that's one of the coolest things I didn't even know that they had. I feel like super drink is just a sick, sick thing to have.
Sabina: (31:57)
That is very cool.
Vasa: (32:00)
Next one is plant-based.
Sabina: (32:04)
I think it depends where. I would say obviously Beyond Meat comes to mind at the same place with what sort of an impossible, right. For that kind of burger category, Alpha is doing a great job with their nuggets and their chicken nuggets. I would say a good kind of old school but still very relevant, Gardein. They still do that orange chicken, it's my little guilty pleasure and it's really good. But then if you're looking at like milks, for example, I mean, what Califia has been able to do is just phenomenal. Oatly. I mean, I live on Oatly. I probably buy like seven cartons of Oatly and eight cartons of Barista every single week. They've done an amazing job.
Sabina: (32:59)
Newcomer on the market is a brand out of Sweden called Sproud. They're super exciting, kind of have a totally different packaging, different approach to kind of the milk. It's a pea protein. There's lots there. I think it depends on where you're looking. If you're looking at that alternative of, like RightRice has done a great job. Our good old friend, Keith, I think he's done such a great job with really taking plant to the next level. Banza has done it in pasta, he's done it in rice. I think it depends on where you're looking at.
Vasa: (33:36)
That risotto is ridiculous.
Sabina: (33:37)
I had it two nights ago with chicken and I texted him a photo. I was like, I ate the whole bag basically with chicken on top.
Vasa: (33:44)
It is so freaking good and so easy to cook. I know we're a little biased, but it is. I could not believe it.
Sabina: (33:52)
Yeah, it's amazing.
Vasa: (33:55)
I'm glad it made the list. Next one is, I said beverage at first broadly, but I want to go into a little bit more, I would say busy of categories, sparkling water.
Sabina: (34:11)
That's a tough one. That's a really tough one. Who has affiliations? I mean, I'm a Perrier Pellegrino kind of person. I do like the sparkling smartwater. I don't think there's really any difference. I mean, they all have good amount of bubbles. That's how I test my waters. There's a brand out of Italy that sells here that I'm blanking on the name right now. They do a really good job with their bubbles. They have a good amount of bubbles inside, but I mean, that's a hard one because affinity is so... When we worked with Nestle, we couldn't get any sparkling water or any bottled water unless it was a Nestle property. If we went to dinner, we couldn't order anything, which makes sense obviously. I lived on Acqua Panna for like a million years just because every time we'd go to dinner I order Acqua Panna. Then I got into the habit of ordering Acqua Panna and not sparkling obviously, but still. Then I was Perrier Pellegrino.
Vasa: (35:15)
Got it. I did not know that with some contracts, it can prohibit what you drink at a dinner table.
Sabina: (35:25)
I mean, you can't expense it then.
Vasa: (35:28)
I see.
Sabina: (35:28)
You can drink whatever you want but you can't expense a non-brand on brand.
Vasa: (35:33)
Got it. One of my faves. If you haven't tried it, I'm a big flavored water guy. Sanzo I think does a great job at bringing these traditional Asian flavors to life. They have a calamansi, got a lychee, and they've got a mango one. Super refreshing. I think he did a great job over there. That's one you should check out if you have it.
Sabina: (36:00)
I got to check it out.
Vasa: (36:01)
Super good. Cool. The last one I would say is, I don't think I have a last one. I think we did a decent job at running through those. Great answers. I'm stumped on that. I had fun with that. I'm still kind of thinking about that Nestle thing, but I'll get over it. That's good.
Sabina: (36:21)
So funny.
Vasa: (36:28)
That's it for our rapid fire. I just had such a pleasure chatting with you, Sabina. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for sharing.
Sabina: (36:37)
Always a pleasure. Thank you for having me on. It's just really good to have friendships and close relationships with people that do the same thing. It's awesome. Thank you for being an awesome human and a friend.
Vasa: (36:52)
You got it. Where can everyone find you, Sabina?
Sabina: (36:57)
The easiest is our info email, it comes to me, info@konnectagency.com. Instagram, Sabina Gault. LinkedIn, Sabina Gault. I'm probably better at reading DMs on Instagram than I am on my LinkedIn. I need to change that. But then the info comes to me and my EVP, Amanda.
Vasa: (37:20)
Awesomeness. Info@konnectagency with a K. For any of the listeners that want to reach out.
Sabina: (37:25)
Say hi.
Vasa: (37:27)
Have some fun chat with Sabina. Yeah, for sure. Well, thank you, Sabina. I had a blast. Really appreciate it. We'll chat soon.
Sabina: (37:33)
Sounds good. Thanks, Vasa.
Kelsey Hunter is the CEO of Paloma, a Shopify app that turns Facebook Messenger into your highest converting sales channel.
]]>Vasa (00:03):
All right, everybody. Thank you for joining us. We have Kelsey Hunter with us from Paloma. Paloma turns Facebook Messenger into your highest converting sales channel. Kelsey, thanks for joining us today.
Kelsey (00:12):
Yeah, thanks for having me Vasa. I love a glowing intro.
Vasa (00:16):
You got it, Kelsey. We always start our shows with a little bit more about our guests and how things got started with their current business. So can you tell us a little bit more about your resume and what got you into Paloma?
Kelsey (00:30):
Sure. So let's see where to start. I'll start back at the beginning, working retail in high school and college, which I think is relevant, and coming full circle here, I've spent most of my life selling things to people incidentally. But I studied design and tech in school. I started my career in digital advertising, working with big brands before getting the startup bug and moving into software. And on the software side, I worked on designing software for a couple of companies in New York, [inaudible 00:01:07], which is marketing software and buttoning, which is mobile commerce software. And so everything really ended up connecting together in a very natural way up until 2016 when Facebook Messenger opened up their API. And I was working on a project on the side where a Messenger bot seemed like actually a really great way to test it out and to validate an experiment that I was running, and to do that, I actually pretended to be a bot for about six weeks and then built some bots. So I've really taken the MVP to a new level on that one.
Vasa (01:49):
Wow. So did you have a bot name? Was it like Alexa or...
Kelsey (01:57):
Exley, E-X-L-E-Y. Yeah. It was basically tracking fitness and its impacts on your mood and other cognitive things. And I thought, "You know what, I want to know how people feel every day. And so I'm just going to ask them directly." And it worked really well. And what's funny is I was working on button at the time, which is all about contextually relevant commerce. And while having these conversations with people every day, I was like, Wait a minute, the two should be very connected. If we could talk directly to people, we don't need to make assumptions about what they should be buying or why they should be purchasing something. We don't have to tell people to buy things that don't make sense for them. We could just be talking to them directly asking them questions and guiding them to the right products. And so it very, very much a no brainer for me, but-
Vasa (02:56):
Did anybody ever catch you like, "Hey, this isn't a bot. This is a human."
Kelsey (03:01):
Oh my gosh, no. But the funniest thing that happened was... Let's see. This was insane. I was doing this outside of my full-time job and it was on a time schedule. And so I was working absolutely insane hours. I don't recommend doing that normally, but for short periods of time, I can extend. And I think I was messaging at night, like eight or 9:00 PM. And there were times where I fully fell asleep. So somebody would respond like 30 minutes later, an hour later, I'd wake up 20 minutes later and respond. And it was so funny because I'd get something wrong or I'd be delayed, and my customer would be like, "Oh, you're such a silly bot." Nobody just assumed that it was a person who was having trouble, always blamed it on the bot.
Vasa (03:53):
That's hilarious. Good old Exley. I find it a really interesting too, because based on your background in design, tech, digital software, those four things, I really feel like it came to a very cohesive, I guess, full-circle nature because when I work with you on with Paloma for one of our brands, it's nice that you guys are so hands-on in setting things up, it's relieving. So I do appreciate that.
Kelsey (04:25):
Yeah. I think people underestimate the amount of work it is to get a new sales channel to function well. It's like launching a website. There's the user experience to it. There's the content, the creative, there's so many different factors, and we know that it's a tough undertaking, but that there's so much opportunity when you can get it right. So we like being on the ground with that because not only do we then get to figure out what the best solution is, and our partners are great at letting us figure that out for them, which I appreciate, and I feel really fortunate to be able to do, but yeah, it's a lot of different types of skillsets. And fundamentally what we're excited about is taking all of those learnings and just injecting them back into software. And then so the next time a brand comes on in your category, it won't be as much work.
Vasa (05:25):
Yeah. Makes sense. What are some triggers for when people should have Facebook Messenger as another sales channel? Should startups right out the gate launch with them, or is there a certain threshold that you recommend?
Kelsey (05:42):
That's a great question. So the thing that gets us really excited about the space and the long-term opportunity here is it really is the next storefront channel. And what we mean by that, if you look at what a new is going to do today to start selling online, they're not even opening Shopify Store Friends. They're falling through DMs. They're opening up an Instagram page, they're saying DM me, live chatting with a customer, and then they're sharing PayPal links. And we're seeing this in the U.S. market, but globally it's been going on for a long time with WhatsApp and Messenger. And so in terms of when a business should be doing this, it's tough because I see the new businesses already using these channels and they don't have any infrastructure to support it. So that's what we're really excited to be developing towards, is basically being that for storefront solution, everything from inventory through order management for these channels.
Kelsey (06:42):
But if you're an existing brand and you've already got a presence and you've already got your Shopify Storefront, then there is a question of timing. It's like, do you have the resources to make sure you can give it enough of a commitment to really validate it? And that's where I'd say post seed, probably even closer to post series A, if you're a venture-backed D2C brand, is probably a good time to start testing to make sure that you've got the budget, you've got the bandwidth you can really give it a proper go for sure. But on the same side we work with brands in earlier stages nowadays, and frankly, launching with this can be even more effective. So I'd say start it as early as possible, but if you've already hit the ground running, you've already got a marketing team and things like that, then you might want to wait until you've now got the resources to actually give it a proper go.
Vasa (07:44):
Got it. Yeah. That makes sense. So post-seed, post series A, people already have some channels going. Everybody launches with email, SMS is almost becoming a necessity. How does Paloma communicate with those other channels? I know with SMS, the results are 30% better when you combine the two than just running email alone. How does Paloma fit into that for D2C brands?
Kelsey (08:11):
Yeah. So email and SMS are pretty different in that they're outbound marketing channels. You build the list, you push out to that list, and you can do the same thing with messenger, but you need to build the list first. So where we actually start with messenger is as an acquisition channel, and for that reason, I'd say in terms of how it fits within the mix, oftentimes it ends up expanding the audience in a way that you don't have access to one of those other channels. So we always want to be mindful of the other channels and we play really well with them, but fundamentally, sometimes it's just a totally different audience and that's something to take into consideration. But if you've already got those things up and running, it will make it easier to coordinate your content and your timelines and your opportunities for broadcast. We recently did analysis with a brand that has over 500,000 customers in Paloma, and there's only a 3% overlap with their email list. So there's some really interesting stuff going on there that is really quite different.
Vasa (09:23):
So opposed to email, when you're building the list on Messenger, what are some creative ways brands are leveraging that list. I'm a big fan of house file building lists, and real is not buying anything like that. But what are some creative ways people are leveraging?
Kelsey (09:43):
Yeah. There's some fun things when translating web to Messenger that you could do. We have some brands that do spin the wheels in Messenger. That lead gen tactic on site, that had a really big impression for the last year. I find stuff like that really fun. But then once you have the list, I think it's a lot about personalization. So one of the benefits of the Messenger conversations is that we get a ton of customer data and you can really use that to inform the way that you talk to customers. So whether you know their dietary preferences, or how often they work out, or if they have a cat or what color their living room is, anything you want to know, you can usually find out, and that can be tagged to the customer's profile.
Kelsey (10:33):
So in terms of continuing the conversation, you want it to just make sense for them. They've already told you so much about themselves. You really just want to lean into that. So I think that I think the best opportunities there and the most creative uses are actually leveraging that information. I think there's some really nice things that we saw brands doing in the earlier days of COVID where they were just really nicely acknowledging the state that everyone was in and everything going on, and just offering to talk to them. Things like that, that I think can be really interesting. But in terms of just broadly outbound pushes, I think those are just the themes that I see. There's nothing in particular. It's like a single broadcast that stands out though.
Vasa (11:27):
Awesome. What are some of the use cases? So aside from the remarketing. I'm on your website right now, and I've got a pop up that says continue as Vasa or continue as guest. Are there ways that someone logging in to their Facebook on your website can unlock other ways to win on their customer journey?
Kelsey (11:49):
Yeah. So basically with the way Messenger works, it is like a website. It's an alternative landing page. You could link customers to conversations the same way that you link to your website. So oftentimes our brands are driving traffic to Messenger acquisition funnels through shortlinks, through QR codes, through ads. There is an on-site chat plugin as well. So those are all really great entry points for how to build the list, but also acquire your customers. And some interesting things I've seen there, like QR codes and mailers, QR codes and in-person, in-store, I think there's a ton more opportunity there, especially with the way people are shopping now. On the URL side, you can place these URLs anywhere on the on-site chat plugin. That's something that I think is a little trickier for e-comm to adopt because of the fact that they usually have a CX on-site chat widget.
Kelsey (12:51):
But there's a lot of benefits having messenger as your onsite chat plugin. For one, you know who the customer is and you don't have to ask. So if you said you did continue as Vasa, if you did that, you're logged in with Facebook, we know who you are, and when you leave the website, we can keep messaging you. And that is fundamentally different than any other on-site chat plugin in a way that is just so low friction to the customer. So you could use that on-site plugin to help customers shop, to provide guided shopping on their site in a way that they're not going to get just browsing by themselves. We like to say about websites that people don't shop there, it's just where they check out. So who's helping them make purchase decisions? It's not the brand. It's all the third-party platforms out there, the TikTok videos, the influencers, talk via friends.
Kelsey (13:48):
So if you actually have an opportunity to help a customer make a purchase decision, you absolutely should. And onsite is great way to do that, coming from ads is a great way to do that, coming from QR codes. So use case-wise, talking about entry points, I think those are probably some of the more common things. But ads are the most popular. So the whole premise there is that if you drive ad traffic to your website, that most of that traffic is going to leave, and you're not going to know who they are. And most of them aren't going to convert conversion rates on site or the average 3%. So the alternative here is that you can run ad traffic to Messenger instead. And when the customer gets into Messenger, you actually get to help them make a purchase decision. You can ask them questions, you can guide them down to the right products, tell them why they should be making a purchase. And ultimately, that's how we see the best results here. Our conversion rates are typically two to 10x that of a website.
Vasa (14:52):
Love that. I want to save that to when we get to some benchmarks, but we will come back to that. One thing I do love about your onsite widget is, I'm a big fan of customer experience. And there's some customer support programs that aren't quite in realtime, and I feel like we lose out on a lot of opportunity there. I love how you said people don't shop there, they just check out. That's big to me. When we're community managing on paid social, let's say, we're literally asking customers what their zip codes are when they say, "Hey, where can I buy this in store?" And we'll give them literally the cross streets, and creating that frictionless journey, even if it's digital to retail, is huge to us.
Kelsey (15:41):
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I love that. You asked about when should people be doing this, and fundamentally businesses already have these channels. They default to being on? So it's just a matter of whether or not you're using them in supporting the customers there or not. Exactly to your point. If you can do that and meet them where they are immediately in a scalable way, why wouldn't you? That's a no brainer.
Vasa (16:09):
Yeah. I think it goes back to my service industry roots. You got to take orders. If you don't go to a table and greet them and go through the proper process, they're not going to order, they're going to walk out and you're going to get written up. That's how I view D2C. You just got to take the orders. So going back to benchmarks, what are some Paloma benchmarks?
Kelsey (16:38):
Sure. So most brand partners are driving ad traffic to our conversations to Messenger, and we're taking those customers down a shopping conversation, ideally to a product match, and then typically they're checking out on site. At the ad level, you've got your normal ads metrics that CPMs click through rates, but once the customer clicks on the ad and they are greeted in Messenger, if they respond to that first message, they're opting into messages with your business. So we track opt-in rate. It's the equivalent of a bounce rate or the opposite of a bounce rate. So opt-in rate is the first one. We typically see 30 to 50% opt-in rates depending on the business and product type, but 30% is our baseline goal there.
Kelsey (17:32):
So if you compare that to a bounce rate, there would be a 70% bounce rate, which is typically a bit better insight. After the customer opt in, then you've got completion rate. Completion rate is the customer finish the conversation with matched with product. Most of our experiences, there's some type of back and forth with the customer, and across the board, regardless of product type category, how many questions we ask, what questions we ask, we see 80% or higher completion rates. So there are situations where things will work better than others. And because we have that type of benchmark, we know how to fix it if it's not there. But 80% is pretty normal for completion. And then after the customer complete, do they click on product back to the site? For that, we usually see 50% or higher. And then from there you've got your normal things, like add to cart and purchase rate. So basically, top of funnel and very bottom of funnel, we'll just compare to click to site directly, but you also have access to all of this mid funnel data that you might not have access to for the website.
Vasa (18:43):
And what is all of this doing to CPAs and ROAS?
Kelsey (18:48):
Yeah. So first and foremost, conversion rate is the thing that we own because of the fact that it's like the website. We're giving you a destination for traffic, and it's going to convert at a higher rate than click to site. So ultimately, if the paid media is performing as efficiently as it normally does, and we double your conversion rates, your CPAS should be cut in half, your ROAs should be doubled. So we have partners like Joybird, for example, Facebook recently released... Actually two case studies of ROAS. One was for Lola, one was for Joybird, both of them with 3x conversion rates, and that's not abnormal. And so the returns were incrementally improved as well.
Vasa (19:34):
Very nice. Yeah. I'm a big fan of what we're doing with [inaudible 00:19:40] and Paloma and with paid social. One thing I want to ask for the audience, they may be wondering, what are the cons of going to Messenger versus a landing page, if any.
Kelsey (19:53):
Yeah. That's a great question. Cons. Wow. No one's ever asked me that. I think that there's always a better benefit to going to Messenger because you get to capture the customer info and, again, help them make the decision. But maybe if it's the best landing page in the world, I'm not sure what that one looks like. That's a tough question. I don't have a great answer. I don't think that there's a world where I think that that's better.
Vasa (20:27):
No worries. So where I'm going with that question was, is there ways to take optimal landing pages and apply that to Messenger? There's obviously a recipe to a really quality landing page that performs. Are there any ways to mimic that in Messenger?
Kelsey (20:48):
Absolutely. And we think of the Messenger conversation as a scaled sales person, which is also what a landing page is trying to do. They're all trying to do the same thing. But how you talk to people from a landing page is just different than how you talk to this one-to-one conversation. The landing page is inherently one-to-many. And see the brand talking to as many people as you can, hopefully in a pretty focused way, and hopefully it resonates with enough people. Within the Messenger conversation, you don't have to make any of those assumptions, but there are insights that inform your landing pages that we want to bring into Messenger too.
Kelsey (21:30):
Let's say, if you know that a lot of your customers like your products because they're on keto and [inaudible 00:21:39] based stack is really helpful for them, then you want to take that into Messenger. If you know that certain data points resonate well, that certain value props resonate well, we can flip those around and turn those into, again, conversation. So if you know that the fact that let's say there's zero carbs in your product is something that really hits with your customer base, then in a conversation you might say, "Great, are you doing low carb keto? How long have you been doing it?" You could even ask is as detailed as like, "What are your macro goals?" You could ask literally anything you want. And then you're going to be able to share the same data point back to the customer in a way that not only is getting the point across that you wanted to, but it feels more personal to them because they know how relevant it is to their experience. Does that make sense?
Vasa (22:34):
Yeah. No, 100%. And on the flip side of this, what are some common pitfalls that you want to advise listeners who are just being introduced to Paloma to stray away from?
Kelsey (22:49):
Sure. Across the board, the whole point is to talk one-to-one in a way that's personal to the customer. So as best as you can get to know them and make it about them and less about you is going to be useful. So for example, you don't typically want to ask a value prop question like, "Which of our value props do you care most about?" And maybe it's like ease of use, costs, et cetera. Customers don't like to answer that type of question. But if you turn it around and said like, "What would make your day 10 times easier?" "A keto snack that I don't have to think about." You can turn it around in a way that is about them. It's about their lifestyle. That's pretty important.
Kelsey (23:40):
Other things, fundamentally, just on a technical side, a lot of the early chat stuff there's some things on the chat side and on the media side that we've seen really, it can be hard to navigate fundamentally. The first wave of chat bots were all functionally not necessarily great, but on the media side, there's a lot of mistakes that are easy to make because there's frankly just not a lot of education out there. So for example, when you set up an ad that clicks to Messenger from Facebook, oftentimes people think it needs to be the message objective, but you can just have a purchase objective ad, click to Messenger instead. And that's actually a lot of people who've played around in the space don't know that. So that's one. And then when you do set those ads up, Facebook has some defaults they set in place that just don't make sense either. Like they'll default to having a CTA on the ad that's like, send message. But if your ad is like, "Hey, find your fit and get 15% off," a shop now or learn more is going to work better.
Vasa (24:49):
Yeah.
Kelsey (24:50):
So there's definitely a learning curve on how to operate things just fundamentally. But I think it's important and something we try to help with.
Vasa (25:02):
I love it. This is one question I should probably know the answer to because we work with you, but you see a lot of Messenger apps pop up on pages. Does Paloma offer that? Like when you clicked a brand's Facebook page, there was an automatic pop of the Messenger?
Kelsey (25:20):
Yeah. So that'll only happen if you have a super high response rate. If you aren't automating chat for your page and then you do implement it, it takes some time for Facebook to catch up to the fact that you have 100% less than one minute response time. Otherwise, Facebook won't won't allow that pop-up to happen. But yes, we do support that for brands. But fundamentally, if you're too slow to respond to messages, unfortunately Facebook won't encourage people to message you.
Vasa (25:53):
So it won't pop into an automation flow the way that click the Messenger does?
Kelsey (25:59):
No. No, it will. What I just mean by that is that the Messenger bubble won't pop up on a brand's Facebook page if Facebook thinks you're going to be slow to respond to the customer. So if you're just implementing Paloma or automation for the first time, you have to improve your response rate before Facebook will allow it to automatically pop up. But yes, for people who just message a page directly, yeah, automation there is totally feasible. A lot of our brands do that, where we start with an introduction for the customer. We'll say, "Hey. Thanks for reaching out. What can we help with?" And they can have the options to take a quiz, visit the site, talk to the support team, anything else like that?
Vasa (26:41):
So basically every brand needs to have an x lead before they can unlock Paloma.
Kelsey (26:51):
Today's friends are live chatting. And that's what I mean by, you already have the channel. It's already open by default. I guess you could ignore it if you wanted to, but to have a baseline experience for your customer there is, generally speaking, a good idea.
Vasa (27:10):
Yeah, for sure. There's just some brands that may or may not be too quick to respond.
Kelsey (27:17):
Yeah. Exactly.
Vasa (27:17):
It might be some people sleeping. So I want to ask a question that I haven't asked yet, one that I know the answer to personally is, how easy is it to get going with Paloma? For me, with R2R, I felt like you did all the heavy lifting and I was shocked. I was like, "Oh, sweet. I don't have to do anything too difficult here."
Kelsey (27:46):
Yeah. It's the dream. Yeah, we find that particularly with brands at that stage and size, no one knows what to do. And then we've been fortunate to do this with so many different types of brands and products, and not only do we have that expertise, but the software we've built is phenomenally easy to launch these things now that we know what to do with it. So fundamentally we had to get started. Most of our brands are, launching within one to two weeks, and that process is basically, "Hey, we want to learn about your business, your products, why people buy them, why don't they buy them? We'll take one of our template experiences that we know performs really well for your product category or customer type, and then we just basically match it up to your inventory and the customer type that you have."
Kelsey (28:38):
And so it's a pretty straightforward process. We try to launch really quickly because once you get something live, then it's all about testing and iterating, and that part is really crucial. And one of the benefits of Messenger fundamentally is that unlike a website, rotating in new things, testing new copy, testing new questions, the order of things, order products, the links that you link to, so easy to do, and so nimble in the channel. So we like to make it easy, like to launch people fast, and then the more we can learn the better
Vasa (29:14):
I hear you. Well, thanks for making it so easy on us. Let's transition into the rapid fire questions. I need to get some Sonic branding for rapid fire questions. It'll be like the-
Kelsey (29:27):
[crosstalk 00:29:27] sound effects, yeah.
Vasa (29:28):
Like the score from Sicario or something like that, all scary. So I guess my first question is going to be, what is one thing currently that Facebook does not have that if they did have it would make Paloma that much better?
Kelsey (29:45):
So the top of our minds always is Instagram DM API, which is in development. So, fortunately, that won't be a thing to worry about much longer, but that's a real game changer. I think that customers who directly messaged Facebook pages, usually it's a support request. But people who directly message an Instagram page, that's typically more of a shopping intent, and to be able to manage that experience and scale that for brands is going to be huge. So we're really, really excited about that, and fortunately, as a Facebook platform partner, we'll be one of the first on it.
Vasa (30:27):
I can't wait. At GB, we spend about 50 or 60 hours a week doing what we only hope that Plum is going to do soon. Yeah.
Kelsey (30:37):
That we will do soon. Can't wait.
Vasa (30:42):
Can't wait for that either. My next question is, what is your ideal tech stack if you were launching a D2C brand today?
Kelsey (30:52):
If I were launching a D2C brand today, Paloma would come first.
Vasa (31:01):
Of course.
Kelsey (31:02):
Of course. Of course. Just operationally, there's plenty of tools that I really like to use day to day, like Notion for example, and things that just make it easy to start getting content out there and talking to people. So, I'd probably go with a lot of the basics around email comms, Klaviyo, and then in terms of the actual storefront tech, if I were starting from day one, I would start with messaging first just because you get so much more insight about your customer. And then-
Vasa (31:38):
So you won't start with a website?
Kelsey (31:41):
No, I wouldn't. I wouldn't do that.
Vasa (31:42):
Wow.
Kelsey (31:44):
Yeah. That's the world that we're building towards. What new sellers are doing online is selling through those channels first without even having a website. If I were a D2C brand, that's what I would get so excited about. It's about direct to consumer, right? There's no more direct than literally talking to people. And as a person with a product and design background, that's why I got into this in the first place. I want as much information as I can then for the best way to sell to people. So yeah, that's probably a cop out answer, but I think that's the most exciting thing here for new businesses.
Vasa (32:26):
I love that answer. I'm going to be thinking about that probably for the rest of the day on how that would work. My mind is blown just thinking through that. So I like it.
Kelsey (32:42):
Yeah, it's becoming more common. There's a big brand that we launched recently that literally just launched their first product. They did launch web before Paloma, but only by like a week or two, and immediately we've outperformed, and they're learning so much more about their customers this way. So it's really exciting. I think it'd be a really fun time to start a D2C.
Vasa (33:06):
That's wild. It's literally that GIF of the dude wearing the glasses and his mind's blowing and it's like the clouds are coming out of his head. I have more questions on this one now because I didn't expect that. Would you potentially consider a prelaunch to Messenger? Some brands may gate or they password-protected website.
Kelsey (33:33):
Yeah. I love that idea. That's really fun. Messaging is just a really fun interface. I don't know if you are into games, but text-based games, I always found really enjoyable. So it's just the perfect channel for me, but I love that idea of, you could have some initial storytelling there. You can love some gatekeeping there. You have to enter a certain code. Everything's really easy to manipulate when it's all text based. Yeah, absolutely. And we'd encourage pre-launch for brands on the channel anyway, just because, again, of the lead gen opportunity too.
Vasa (34:15):
I love that I'm going to be noodling on this for the rest of the day. I'm not even kidding.
Kelsey (34:21):
Yeah. I've been down the rabbit holes on customer research too. You can ask people anything you want, and if you pre-launch, why not try to get all that data before you're even live and then have a direct channel to market to and in once the product launches. There's no reason not to do that.
Vasa (34:37):
Absolutely.
Kelsey (34:37):
Yeah.
Vasa (34:39):
All right. Last question of rapid fire is if you were starting a CPG brand today, who would you start it with?
Kelsey (34:48):
Who would I start it with? I started with Zach Podbela, my co-founder. I know that's probably a crop out too, but...
Vasa (34:58):
You're definitely not making any enemies today.
Kelsey (35:01):
No, I'm not. We get along so well. We have very similar communication styles. So, he just joined the team at the end of last summer. And so I did the solo founder thing for a number of years, and it's been such a game changer. So, we've had plenty of tough things to work through, but fundamentally, we just operate really well together, and I think trust is super important. So, yeah.
Vasa (35:33):
You don't need to fix anything that's not broken there. Well, here's the second part of that question now, what would you guys create?
Kelsey (35:43):
That's the fun question. I'll think about this for a minute, but when I think about if I were to start a CPG brand, what would it be? And I just started thinking about my favorite foods. They're not very CPG friendly. Like Buffalo wings, I don't think are a good idea. So I think that's a tough one to answer. There's already plenty of this out there, but Palomas are actually my favorite drink. So I'm really happy that those are packaged in cans now and I can just find them playful. But yeah, probably not the most funny answer.
Vasa (36:26):
Is that why Paloma is named Paloma?
Kelsey (36:29):
No, it's just a happy coincidence. Paloma means dove or pigeon, that's the same thing. But yeah, there's a messaging bird theme. Also, just a really charismatic name.
Vasa (36:41):
Got it. Well, very cool. Kelsey, where can everyone find you and Paloma if they're interested in chatting?
Kelsey (36:48):
All right. So our website, getpaloma.com, and you can message us on Facebook and me, I think I'm Kelsey A.H. on Twitter and LinkedIn, all the places. Feel free to DM me. I think those are probably all the hotspots.
Vasa (37:06):
I'm actually surprised you have a site now that we had this conversation. Pretty soon it's just going to be gone. Just leave Messenger.
Kelsey (37:12):
[crosstalk 00:37:12]. It was for a while. Yeah, it's pretty simple. We don't typically spend a ton of time there. Probably should spend more time on it, but we spend more time messaging. I like spending more of my time with my customers.
Vasa (37:30):
Same. Our website's pretty trash. I like yours though.
Kelsey (37:33):
Thank you. Thank you.
Vasa (37:36):
For sure. Well, Kelsey, it was a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for joining us. And that's going to be a wrap for us.
Kelsey (37:43):
Great. Thanks so much, Vasa. [inaudible 00:37:45].
]]>
Astronaut (00:07):
That one small step for brands, one giant leap for brandkind. This is Exit Intent.
Vasa (00:26):
All right, everybody. We've got Alex Lee, co-founder and CMO of Foodie Fit Meal Prep in Las Vegas with us today, Alex, how are you doing?
Alex (00:34):
I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me on, Vasa.
Vasa (00:37):
Thanks for joining. Alex, we go way, way back, but I want you to tell us a little bit more about you and your history and how you started Foodie Fit and where you're at, and anything exciting in between.
Alex (00:50):
Yeah. So I moved to Vegas about six years ago. I was a bartender, been a bartender, but before that, I did work for another meal prep company in California, and really liked that concept, I just didn't really believe in that brand so I went back to bartending to kind of start making more money. I don't think I was ready to grow up yet. But I also had some sales experience selling radio. And when I moved to Vegas, I reconnected with my best friend and business partner, Andrew. We kind of had this plan to open up something healthy in Las Vegas.
Alex (01:33):
At that time, when you look on Yelp, it was literally like John's Meal Prep. It would just be a phone number and it would just be this dude cooking food from his house and then just dropping off. So we knew there was definitely some opportunity in the market because there was so many cocktail servers and bartenders and industry people. And what a lot of people don't know is that we're hired as models. They hire you kind of as is on the picture so they kind of have to stay fit, or there is an opportunity to lose your job because of it. With all these off hours in a city that doesn't sleep, we wanted to get something faster than fast food so we thought of bringing meal prep over to Las Vegas.
Alex (02:23):
The one meal prep company we tried was called Ninja Fit Meals, which became our third business partner because his food was just amazing. We basically bought in. And now, six years later, it's Foodie Fit. When we first started, we're doing about 300 meals a week, just delivery. And now, five years later, we are at about 15,000 meals a week, two storefronts with a third one coming, so pretty excited. And I'm kind of excited for the future and just really blessed to be able to kind of get through this whole journey, including COVID.
Vasa (03:10):
Yeah, it must've been hard during COVID. One of the exciting things about this podcast for me is we work a lot with digital brands and we also support their growth in retail with all of the different digital communications that we leverage. So I really want to punch into this one because you have two storefronts now. You have a third storefront on the way, right?
Alex (03:40):
Right.
Vasa (03:41):
The cool part for me, and what I really want to dive into is how do you build an online community and call them to action online (direct to consumer) or in-store? How do you get somebody to see an ad and get them to come into the store and pick up some meals?
Alex (04:00):
Yes. I knew that there was some power in social media when we first started. I didn't know how much power we can leverage from it through Instagram, but I knew there was something behind it. And in the beginning, I started using influencers. Instead of looking at other meal prep models, I kind of looked at our own model and what we are, which is basically we wanted to be the best tasting meal prep company. We wanted our meal preps to be for everybody so why would I be sponsoring this off shredded, bodybuilder that only eats chicken with no salt and stuff like that when we wanted something with variety? So I actually started... My first tactic was to tap into the local food bloggers of social media. And I learned from a friend, you, that with social media marketing, there has to be an emotion, and the emotion was hunger. So, that's how I solved that problem, was through working with the food bloggers to kind of showcase the meal preps and stuff like that in a very different way.
Vasa (05:17):
So what did that look like for anybody listening who is kind of figuring out what it looks like to work with influencers aside from reach out to the bloggers or seeding them with product? How many were you sending per week or per month? Is there an ambassador program where people came in and got X amount in exchange for a blog?
Alex (05:40):
Yeah, I think the nice thing about Foodie Fit that's different from CPG is that our food can technically subsidize your grocery bill. You can eat our food every single day and never step foot in a grocery store ever again, really. That was kind of a big advantage on our end to comped meals for the food bloggers. Those guys aren't eating gooey pizzas every single day that's kind of what they're featuring, you know what I mean? That's kind of how we got our earned media originally.
Alex (06:17):
And then once we started really, really accelerating our customer base, I had to start learning kind of more of the classic agency style marketing through sponsored ads. And really, I just cast in a net in Vegas in the beginning because it's relatively cheap. As opposed to if it was a CPG and I was shipping all over the nation, I would have to be learning a lot more. So it was kind of more of a guess and check strategy. It's been working pretty well. And really going heavy on creatives. Keeping the creatives in-house was really, really important to me, and focusing on the beauty of the food, because our food is in the container.
Vasa (07:02):
How did you quantify the impact of working with an influencer and what does success look like for each one?
Alex (07:12):
Originally, it was followers. And because we had a storefront, it's kind of like we have a live visual survey of the customer coming in. So we have daily summaries and we would see just, "Oh my God, all these people came in from Drew with Unlock." I saw his post and it came right in. We actually got a bunch from just a small feature in 90 Day Fiance to this day. They're like, "Yeah, we're watching it and I didn't even know that was there and I drove right over."
Vasa (07:45):
Is that couple still together? Do they bond over Foodie Fit? HAHA
Alex (07:50):
I have no idea. But I had no idea that even traditional was making such a large impact, so I was like, "Okay. Maybe TV is making a comeback" especially with digital streaming. You can daypark some of your head creatives now and stuff. So, definitely looking into that in the later future. But as of now, social media has been doing very well for us because we do have online local delivery portal.
Vasa (08:20):
Got it. Were you using coupon codes to track other than influencer following? Because you can report on CPM based on their following but we know that only 10% of their following is going to see their content unless you white list or something.
Alex (08:32):
Right.
Vasa (08:32):
What was that measure of success? Did you have a coupon code for them to use [crosstalk 00:08:39]?
Alex (08:38):
Yes. Yes, we had a coupon code, but granted their engagement was probably sometimes like half of what a pizza place they would feature would do, but our check average is about a hundred dollars a person so I would need a much less conversions if you will, to see a success because our average reorder rate is about four times. Our lifetime value of a customer is about 500 bucks.
Alex (09:13):
So I don't need a lot to... If I get one or two here, three and four here, 10 to 15 there, huge successes.
Vasa (09:24):
So, you've got a loyal following purchasing four or five times, a hundred bucks a pop. How have you nurtured that? Aside from working from influencers to build that top funnel, what have you done to show the love to your community in Vegas?
Alex (09:40):
We work really close with the community. Any sort of charity thing, we always try to donate to. We were really big during COVID because COVID honestly kicked our butts pretty hard. I was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast about a chef in New York and he just said, "Well, we're not going to lay anybody off so let's just keep cooking. That's what we're good at." And I was like, "Same. Let's do it." So we dropped off almost 3000 meals throughout the whole city just to be like, "Okay, cool. If they need us, they need us. If they don't, then they don't."
Alex (10:21):
But during that time, I realized the biggest sales drop was from industry, hotels are closed. I really kind of just looked at the avatar, the consumer, "Okay. They have to be hourly based and they have to have, not really a 9:00 to 5:00, they're kind of on a schedule, like a week-to-week schedule. And we've kind of had... I was like, "Well, what industry have we not tapped into?" And that would be police officers and first responders, nurses because they were working overtime. Nothing has changed for them. If anything, I feel like they were making more money. So we did a lot of drop-offs to them. We've definitely seen a return from them even to this day. I mean, the [inaudible 00:11:04] is always top 10 for Metro PD and Las Vegas Medical.
Vasa (11:11):
Nice.
Alex (11:12):
Yeah.
Vasa (11:13):
And what about the folks who still might be out of work? Because I think Vegas opens up May 1st, right? Completely.
Alex (11:21):
Yes. That's the hopes. That's the hopes. It's looking like it too.
Vasa (11:27):
Got it. Nightlife might've dropped off a bit, but how have you been continuing to maintain that relationship as right now, they probably can't?
Alex (11:37):
Well, my business partner is probably going to kill me, but honestly, any industry person that was hurting and stuff like that, I was just giving them half off our food. I really can't give anyone a metric, give you a metric on the return for it. It just made me feel good. And I know that once the person goes back to work, they'll tell their friends and hopefully by then, they'll return the favor back. Because at that point, what was I going to do? 10% is not going to do anything for them.
Vasa (12:10):
That's really cool, man. That's really what I was getting at, is I know you personally. I know that you were doing a lot of great for the nightlife community that was laid off or furloughed, or just completely-
Alex (12:22):
Yeah.
Vasa (12:22):
... shut down. That's really cool. And I can see why people are coming back four or five times at a hundred dollars average order value. What other things are you doing online to drive people into store?
Alex (12:38):
Honestly, the in-store kind of sells itself. It's such a unique concept. And that one's a little bit more on the side of the guerilla marketing and through influencers. And then, we use the ads for more for the online portal, because we don't have the luxury of being able to connect with Shopify. So we have a custom built website that doesn't give us as much data, but then I see is the storefront gives us a ton of data because you're seeing them face to face. "How's it going? Welcome back. You've been here? No." And then old-school style, when we tally it up and then we ask them where they came from, it's always 50% is referral. So, I, at least know that our product is second to none, and there's definitely a demand for it and people enjoy it and they're seeing definitely health benefits through the food.
Vasa (13:39):
Is there a chance for someone who maybe sees a direct response ad for your online storefront to see that and say, "Hey, I know they deliver two or three times a week and I can get this right to my door, but I'm going to be right there on Windmill" or whatever the street is.
Alex (13:56):
Yes.
Vasa (13:56):
There's a chance that they could see that and come in and pick it up, right?
Alex (14:00):
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. There are definitely some sort of attribution model, but there isn't kind of a metric that I've been confident enough to share with someone like you yet. But it's definitely working. I mean, people know who we are. I mean, I remember five years ago, we're able to afford 12 hats and 12 shirts. I wore a shirt to the gym and I was so amped and nobody could care less. And now, sometimes when I wear a hat, when I go to the grocery store or whatever, they're like, "Foodie Fit. What is that? I've heard about friends eat it. I've been wondering about it." So I was like, I know that the awareness is there. We're doing something right. It's just now, I think we're at the stage of really trying to document the attribution process. And that's kind of we're about to launch a new website in the next two, three months, along with that third storefront so that's going to be a lot of work coming in the next few months. And with the industry opening up to, because this is going to be flying, I think.
Vasa (15:13):
Do you ever see people in the comments of an ad asking, "Where can I buy this?" Do you have any... Is there a store locator on your site like a lot of CPG brand has? A lot of our clients, they sell online and they're in Whole Foods nationwide, so if somebody clicks-
Alex (15:30):
Right.
Vasa (15:30):
... to that store locator, you know where they're available at near you and they get to choice. We call it multiple ways of winning. You can buy online, you can buy in-store, you could drive them to Amazon. You can give them a retail request form, all those sorts of things.
Alex (15:43):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Vasa (15:43):
Do you have any different guerrilla tactics like that for when you're community managing, or anybody on your team is to help guide them to a path to purchase?
Alex (15:53):
Yeah. We do have the store locators on our website. We've actually, thank God, the last few months been investing in SEO because we've been ranking top organics for years now, even for Meal Prep and for Foodie Fit. And little did I know that our paid ads manager told us that now, these national companies are starting to bid on our name. I was like, "Okay, we're starting to..."
Alex (16:26):
Now, we're almost kind of playing defense right now. But the fact of the matter is, if you look at a local meal prep versus the national meal prep company the difference is night and day. And I'm very, very, very heavy on customer obsession. And I always tell people, "Just treat them like your friend. They're only in here for about five minutes, make it the best five minutes of their day because they probably have back-to-back-to-back meetings like you and I did today."
Vasa (17:00):
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's great. I can tell you're building community first, and then that's what's kind of sustaining that lifetime value.
Alex (17:10):
Yeah.
Vasa (17:10):
And kind of cool, I've ordered to national meal prep companies before and it comes frozen and you got to microwave it.
Alex (17:17):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Vasa (17:19):
Definitely got to give props to your food, even if you next day eat it, to me, pretty dang delicious.
Alex (17:25):
Yeah.
Vasa (17:29):
[inaudible 00:17:29].
Alex (17:29):
Yeah, I flaunt it over to you before. I know you are probably my number one fan, but you're also my harshest critic. And the fact that you enjoy the food, really says something. And honestly, it gets me off. I'm a foodie and watching people be like, "That's so good." That's what I'm here for, honestly.
Vasa (17:51):
Yes. So talking about more national meal prep companies, are there any plans in the future to do that? Or are you really stoked on the regional or very local play?
Alex (18:07):
I actually feel like we haven't really scratched the surface with Las Vegas yet. Based on some of the data that we've kind of collected, I think we have an opportunity to grow two more stores. So four stores total at still the same sales velocity. I think once we get this website dialed and be able to get Klaviyo integrated, I think we'll be able to double our online sales as well before I think going outside into a new market. By that time, I think we'll have plenty of data and we'll have a very, very good idea digitally on how to capture out a state because I won't have the connections that I'll have in Las Vegas, that's for sure. So I need to do it right.
Vasa (19:06):
Yeah. What else are you doing? Because I ran the math as we've been chatting. 4900% growth in six years, from 300 meals a week to 15,000 meals a week. You're doing more than just influence or marketing and working with foodie bloggers. Given a great customer experience, big fan of Tony Hsieh and Zappos.
Alex (19:32):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Vasa (19:33):
Still too early to just bummed about what happened there.
Alex (19:35):
Absolutely.
Vasa (19:36):
You're doing more. You got to be, just to drive that sort of growth in meals. Are you doing any sort of SMS? Or what kind of automations do you have going on? And-
Alex (19:47):
Yeah, we actually just started doing SMS. It's kind of funny you mentioned that. We've actually been doing a higher offer online and getting less purchases because I think there's friction on the website, hence why we're going to overhaul the website. We're getting like a hundred redemptions for 5% off.
Vasa (20:13):
Nice.
Alex (20:13):
So, it's definitely offer driven. I'm a big fan of your podcast. I know that there should be a relationship built through the text message, but I think that, that part is covered through our storefront experience.
Vasa (20:34):
What's the breakdown of online versus storefront sales?
Alex (20:38):
Right now, it's about a 40/30/30 split. So 40% online and then 30/30 from both stores.
Vasa (20:51):
Got it. So still a pretty solid-
Alex (20:54):
Yeah. And then the numbers are pretty darn close. That's why I kind of want to open up another storefront just to see some different variables. You know what I mean? Because they're almost running side-by-side along with the rankings of the meals too. It's pretty crazy.
Vasa (21:17):
What does it look like when you open a new storefront? Does it have to be in a certain strategic geography so you're not cannibalizing sales from another store?
Alex (21:25):
Yeah, we try to... I actually landed on this one website called Placer.ai. It's a really fantastic site. It kind of gave me a little bit of a heat map. We were able to identify that the third store, even though the proximity is about, I think, eight or seven miles away from the Green Valley location based on the heat map, I compared them to the grocery stores that we're next to, there shouldn't be too much overlap. If anything, it should actually just add onto the business based on where the cars are going and stuff like that because it tracks your cellphones. As opposed to getting a census that was two years old, Placer.ai can update up to 30 days before.
Vasa (22:18):
That's interesting. I've never heard of Placer.ai. I'll put that link in the show notes after this-
Alex (22:23):
Yeah. Hopefully, they'll give me a discount because I can't afford their service.
Vasa (22:29):
You might have to swap a few meals for that.
Alex (22:33):
Yeah. But yeah, I also give them an avatar and I just really liked it. What my business partner always says is that we're kind of like the Trader Joe's model. We really try to maximize our cost per square foot. We try to be in a good area, but not in the center where we're paying ultra-premium pricing for the real estate. We're just on the outskirts of the nice area. So we're getting a very, very cost efficient, cost per square foot. It's like if we want to serve Beverly Hills, we'll be right outside of Beverly Hills, so we don't pay the Beverly Hills pricing.
Vasa (23:06):
Gotcha. Very cool. I want to segue into innovation for Foodie Fit.
Alex (23:14):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Vasa (23:15):
For me, innovation and CPG is limited edition flavors or new wine extensions or whatever that may be. But for Foodie Fit, it's much different because it's meals. It's meals and you switch them out in a very specific way. Can you talk us through your definition of innovation and how you roll it out?
Alex (23:37):
Yes. We are constantly innovating. We finally have a thousand square foot kitchen just dedicated towards innovation. Our model is, we actually have about... On average, from what I see from other meal prep website portals, we have about 10 to 20% less items, but we also rotate in three items in and three items out. The strategy with that is based on sales. Like, if nobody likes it, get rid of it. It also helps us with, for example, COVID, there was so much unavailability on proteins and whatnot so we really had to pivot, but because we were already doing rotation changes, all we were doing was just kind of swapping out the meals that we're going to put into the pipeline, but we ended up pushing this one up, if that makes sense, as opposed to now. And so, like blocking out half the menu, if that makes sense.
Vasa (24:37):
Yeah. How do you roll those out? Is it just on social? I've seen your IG stories where you do the gamifications of what meals are coming in, but do you send it out to email list and SMS list?
Alex (24:49):
Yep.
Vasa (24:49):
Or what does that look like?
Alex (24:52):
What we've been doing right now is just a Stack email blast. We have about a 35% open rate, which I know it doesn't matter in this day and age, but until we get Klaviyo in, we can start kind of really pocketing our consumers. But as of now, lumping them as a whole. Our new creative director has a pretty cool strategy, Jacob, he's really been trying to focus on the look and the feel of the food through social media and really trying to get more interactions and engagement and build a preview out. Because before that, we just didn't have enough... Our team wasn't big enough. It was hard enough just to launch it because you have to teach the kitchen how to make it. You have to whittle down the inventory for the items that are leaving and bringing in the new items, and also ensuring that if you made one of them, it tasted good. Would it taste good if you made a hundred of them?
Alex (25:55):
We've been doing this for three years now. We've kind of got it to a good science and I really want to give a shout out to my director, goody and my business partner, Andrew, for working through the night on the operation side, because it's not easy trying to make fresh food, because again, we have a big customer obsession, you know what I mean? Because we just always try to under promise and over deliver.
Vasa (26:22):
So it's every two weeks that you're rotating the meals?
Alex (26:30):
Yeah, three items in, three items out.
Vasa (26:32):
Now, are people... You have a very loyal community base.
Alex (26:36):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Vasa (26:37):
Do they just know that new meals are coming? How is it communicated to them?
Alex (26:41):
It's communicated through training through our front house. And then, the email blasts and social media kind of sort of drive the online sales people because the online sales have a higher or more consistent ordering structure, if you will. Like, I see the same names every Sunday. But if you go retail, there is less. There's about 2% overlap of the person that comes in on the Saturday versus the next Saturday or for the next week. It was kind of driving me nuts trying to figure it out. And I just realized where, "Well, it's like a 7/11" you know what I mean? You don't go in every single Monday. That's not part of your ritual [inaudible 00:27:25]. You kind of go whenever it's convenient for you to go, or when you want to go to Vons or Albertsons. You need to go there at some point, it just doesn't have to be today. If that makes sense.
Vasa (27:38):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Alex (27:39):
So what we've been doing is now, we've been trying to kind of give them a reminder, be like, "Hey, don't run out of food." Because looking at a lot of CPG models, I was looking at it all wrong. So I based it off of not when they reorder, I based the retargeting based on when the meals expire. If you buy a thousand meals today and the next person buys only two meals, those meals will be expired in five days anyways, so you got to re up. Maybe you have a family of 20, maybe you're bringing it to your whole high school. I don't know. But either way, there should be a re up. My goal is no overlap. Now, we're trying to just shrink the overlap and increasing the frequency. It's really kind of the main objective right now.
Vasa (28:35):
Alex, I got to say that I'm a big fan of people who build online communities and are able to win in brick and mortar. It's one of my favorite things and it excites me the most. So big props to you building your community and pretty much owning Meal Prep in Vegas.
Alex (28:52):
Yeah, I appreciate it. It's still a project and it's definitely not just me. It's myself and a team of 90 that really make this happen for this community. We're going to be providing for two elementary schools this year for a charity. I'm really excited for that. And coming up in August, we have our own school charity. Our idea was I wanted to be the first small business to be able to do things that the hotels were doing. Because I've seen the hotels, they'll go to Walmart and they just start putting stuff into the grocery shopping carts and stuff. And I was like, "I want to do that" but I'm not as big as the Wynn. We're not as big as the Wynn, but I'm sure if we get a couple of businesses together, collaboratively, we can make just as big of an impact than we have. And people love it.
Vasa (29:43):
Alex, I don't want to get to it yet, but let's [inaudible 00:29:49] it for when we tell everyone where we can find you to how we can support all of the charities that you're doing and the stuff in the elementary schools. Before we get to that, though, we do one of my favorite things, which is rapid fire questions.
Alex (30:06):
Yep.
Vasa (30:06):
One or two. The guests never knows what they are and most of the time, I just make them up as I go. My question to you is, you're starting a CPG company.
Alex (30:16):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Vasa (30:18):
Who are your co-founders? And it can't be me.
Alex (30:21):
Right.
Vasa (30:22):
You're starting a CPG company. So Foodie Fits making a productized product that'll be in retail.
Alex (30:30):
The Rock, I think would be one business partner. And I would probably tie that in with Elon Musk because I feel like he would just really elevate this to something that's going to really solve a problem, which is kind of the main theme of why we're in the health industry in the first place, right?
Vasa (30:54):
Would you call that pair of two people Rocket Fuel?
Alex (30:59):
Yeah, I think so.
Vasa (31:02):
Awesome. All right. We're going to leave it at one today. Alex, tell everyone where we can find you, where we can support the charities. Literally, anytime anybody goes to Vegas, all they have to do is search Foodie Fits, so where can we find you?
Alex (31:18):
You can go online at www.foodiefit.com. We would deliver only in Vegas. We have two locations, one in Green Valley, one in Summerlin. No need to list the addresses. Our Instagram handle, which is the most popular is @foodiefitmealprep.
Vasa (31:35):
And what about you?
Alex (31:40):
You can find me, @alexlee122. I don't really have a cool Instagram. I just post my dog and me bike riding and stuff, but you can reach me at alex@foodiefit.com. Yeah.
Vasa (31:56):
Awesome. Alex, thanks for coming on the show today. Really appreciate you. Congrats on that 4900% growth and-
Alex (32:05):
Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. It's a real honor.
]]>
Vasa: (00:02)
All right, everybody. Thanks for joining us. We've got serial entrepreneur and one of the founders of Mate Fertility and GO Ventures, Oliver Bogner with us today. Oliver, thanks for joining us.
Oliver: (00:12)
Thanks so much for having me.
Vasa: (00:15)
It's a pleasure. Oliver, tell us a little bit about your history in CPG, and I feel like you founded pretty much 47% of all brands in existence. So, tell us a little bit more about that.
Oliver: (00:28)
Yeah, well, you and I have known each other for a while now, back to my days as CEO of a Brandable. We definitely have built and scaled some really exciting things that I'm really proud of. It's a bit in the wild world of consumer packaged goods since 2015. Before that, I spent most of my career actually in reality television. So, I was part of the development team that helped launch shows like Catfish on MTV, created and executive produced like 300 hours of reality television spanning My Five Wives on TLC to The Boonies on National Geographic Channel, which I just saw is currently trending on Hulu. So, a whole crazy gamut of reality television shows sold that business to a subsidiary of Discovery Communications back in 2015, and then started my business Brandable at the time.
Oliver: (01:21)
And at Brandable, we scaled a number of consumer product brands, spanning personal care and food, which is why you and I crossed paths. We've since exited a number of those brands. And I left that business in 2019, started my own agency, GO Ventures with a number of other really, really awesome CPG folks. And then I'm also co-founder and CEO with my younger brother of another business called Mate Fertility.
Vasa: (01:51)
That's a lot, man. The resume's a few pages, huh?
Oliver: (01:56)
It's been an adventure. Life has been an adventure, so.
Vasa: (02:01)
Tell me about how you went from reality TV to CPG.
Oliver: (02:05)
Yeah. So, reality television is all about storytelling, right? So, if you look at, and it's storytelling in a very kind of direct sense, right? So reality television, there's a million different channels to watch. You've got to figure out how to capture someone's attention as their channel surfing. And you've got to figure out how to hold them. So, oddly, similar to consumer packaged goods, right? You have to like get someone's attention to buy a product when it's on the shelf or one of your many, many Facebook or Instagram ads that you're seeing. You've got to convince them to try the product and then you have to get them to repeat. So in television, it's all about storytelling. I kind of use this internally. We say, KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid. How do you tell a story to a customer? How do you tell a story to a viewer and really kind of clearly convey with that message or that product or that piece of content is.
Vasa: (03:04)
Yeah. We say something similar? It's KISF, Keep It Simple, Friend.
Oliver: (03:10)
I like that.
Vasa: (03:12)
But so in your past, you did something that fascinates me and you see it kind of a lot these days with Maxx Chewning and his Sour Strips and several others, I think, Heidi Somers has the Buffbunny Collection. I find it amazing that some of the more successful influencers are not doing brand partnerships, they're creating their own brands. Can you tell me more about how that was conceived in your mind and how you leveraged it to build your brands and exit?
Oliver: (03:43)
Yeah, so I think we were definitely one of the first players in the space when I started Brandable back in 2015, I kind of saw this trend happening and it came very organically to me and that these huge social media influencers had ginormous and dedicated audiences and that people were becoming well-known and well-respected not just for being famous, but also for like some sort of expertise. So, one of the more exciting brands that I created in my time as CEO and founder of Brandable was a brand called Craft City by Karina Garcia. And that turned into a monstrous kids crafting business for us. And a huge business across Target, Walmart, CVS, every major retailer in the country. And we took Karina Garcia, who is the number one, crafting DIY-er in the world on YouTube. And we built and scaled a tremendous crafting business with her really as our founder and visionary and face of the business.
Vasa: (04:50)
I love it. And how did you... So, you obviously you had to have had some sort of context or you had the strategy built out, but what I really love is not only did you take the influence and they have their own social proof built in, and she's the number one DIY craft influencer there is, and now she has her own products. How did you take that and bridge the gap between the online presence and drive trial and purchases in retail?
Oliver: (05:16)
Well, let's talk about social proof, right? Social proof is one of my favorite words. And I tell every brand I work with, I tell my teams across, GO, and I tell my team at Mate Fertility this every day, it's all about social proof, right? But the customer has to have a really good experience with you, right? No matter what you're selling, no matter what you're putting out at the universe, the end user has to have a great experience that has to generate buzz and momentum across press and people talking about you and influencers talking about you and reviews. And that's why I see this at GO like, we'll take a business that has a great Amazon presence, 10, 15,000 positive five star reviews and every retailer will immediately pick it up because that social proof is right there, right in front of you. That social proof is there.
Oliver: (06:07)
So, I don't know if I answered your question, but again, social proof is just a critical part. We saw that when it came to building the Craft City business with Karina Garcia, because who better to create a kid scrapping business than the number one crafting DIY-er in the world. It's the same thing. And this has been done time and time again. And some of the examples are kind of more relevant than others, but I have a cold email to Kylie Jenner's management team back in 2014 where I wanted to do a makeup line with her. So, obviously I didn't get that deal, but like, this has been done. People have executed it very, very, very well, and it's going to continue to happen.
Vasa: (06:53)
Yeah. I think that it's going to be way more prevalent in the very near future. There's a few small pockets. One that is interesting to me is the Maxx Chewning one and how well he's doing in Target. Exciting, very exciting to see these folks owning their own kind of communities and owning in that sort of way, but really leveraging it there.
Oliver: (07:16)
Well, it feels very authentic to the customers, right? So, like putting an influencer as a founder, as a face... This is their business, right? If we talked about this 10 years ago, we go, "Okay, celebrities are just creating content and on television shows and social media is becoming a thing." If you look at it today, their businesses, content, and community, and what are you going to do, sell them a t-shirt or you can actually sell them this kind of lifestyle that your brand plays a role in?
Vasa: (07:48)
Yeah, very cool too because even though it's candy and sugar, I believe, Maxx Chewning and those folks are IIFYM o, so as long as they could fit that in their daily macros, it's not like a cheat thing, so-
Oliver: (08:00)
I just think a pride in authorship is so important.
Vasa: (08:04)
Yeah.
Oliver: (08:04)
So, for us, when I was running Brandable, we always really wanted to align with influencers that have total pride in authorship. So, they really care about the product that we're putting out there. They genuinely want to be involved in a lot of the kind of key brand decisions. And I think that the more authentic and honest an influencer created brand can be, the more successful it'll become.
Vasa: (08:32)
Yeah. 100%. So, back at Quest, obviously I don't know if the audience knows, but I started my career at Quest Nutrition, my friend [Yoni 00:08:43], and Mike Curtis, they had this saying with influencers called, "If you show influencers love, they'll show you love in return. If you ask them for love, they'll ask you for money in return." So, I think enough brands kind of spoiled it for everyone where these influencers were like, "Yeah, I'm going to own my channels. And I'm going to bring this authenticity to an actual product." And it's good to see that happening.
Oliver: (09:05)
Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think that... I read some stat and I don't want to misquote the stat, but there's like an insane number of people on Instagram that have over a million followers right?
Vasa: (09:21)
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Oliver: (09:22)
So, I think the number is like, well over five million people have over a million followers on Instagram, right?
Vasa: (09:29)
Yeah.
Oliver: (09:31)
And I know where I heard the stat, but I don't know what the actual stat is. It was on the HBO Max documentary, the fake influencer one, where they-
Vasa: (09:38)
Oh, gosh.
Oliver: (09:39)
... they created three fake influencers and got them brand deals.
Vasa: (09:43)
I've got to watch that because fake influencers has been a very costly thing. Not only for me, personally, but in the past with several brands I've worked with and just in my network where there are some really cool tools right now. We used to use one last year called Klear, with a K. And what that would do is pull up basically every influencers house file, or what their distribution of followers are across different channels. And then it would also show you on a scale of like one to three, how many of them are real and what the distribution is across geographies. So, for me, one thing we look at when we're growing social, or, it's a little bit tougher these days based on the new algorithm, but is the distribution of the ratio of followers. We have one brand that started out with 18% US-based followers, and they can only ship to the United States. So, any followers outside of that aren't really potential customers at least for years.
Vasa: (10:42)
And what we did was basically the displacement of those followers, where now it's 93% US-based followers and who we're speaking to, and what we're posting has the opportunity to ultimately become a purchase. And I don't really look at huge numbers, I look at... Net-new for me is... Net-new US followers, if it's a US-based company, or if it ships globally, then everything's fair game, but there's still some bots out there that you got to be careful of.
Oliver: (11:10)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you live and breathe this world every day. And I'm a previous happy customer when you did a lot of consulting work for us over at Brandable, but I mean, no one knows how to build it kind of more engaged community than the you.
Vasa: (11:25)
Yeah. Appreciate that, man. Hey, so let's segue into the post-Brandable world. I am curious how GO Ventures and Mate Fertility came up. Tell me more about how that started.
Oliver: (11:39)
Yeah. So, GO Ventures was something that I founded with a number of other kind of ex-Brandable alumni. I left that business back in 2019 and quickly kind of reconnected with a lot of the sales team that was working for me at Brandable. And we just said, "Hey, there's a really unique opportunity here to better serve emerging brands." I actually initially set up GO Ventures to be my personal family office, to just invest in seed interesting brands. And then it kind of accidentally turned into another business. And now, it's 30 plus people, 50 plus clients, we did $200 million in sales last year. And we are servicing the who's who of emerging brands and helping them scale their businesses across Walmart, Target, and every major retailer in the United States.
Oliver: (12:29)
At GO Ventures, and it's exciting and it's growing. And we constantly have wins across the board. And we're really excited about at the momentum for our clients and a lot of our investments. And then the other side I'm full-time CEO of Mate Fertility, which is a business that I created inspired by my significant other's personal journey in the fertility space, founded it with my younger brother. And we're building up fertility clinics all across the country and trying to make infertility treatment a whole lot more accessible to a lot of people.
Vasa: (13:04)
That's amazing. One seems like a natural progression of working with the old sales team, and one seems like just a passion to work with your significant other. Question on GO Ventures, I love how you position it as almost a outsourced VP of sales, but you've got several of them. Has that been working for you? And to me, it's exciting you work with some great brands, you're crushing it on shelf. What sparked that?
Oliver: (13:34)
Yeah. So, GO Ventures, when I was CEO of Brandable, I saw firsthand how kind of not aligned the brand was with their specific broker, right? And we worked with a lot of great brokers when we were scaling Brandable to the heights that we were able to take it to. But the brokers weren't always aligned on our growth trajectory, right? So, maybe you'd have a Costco broker that would be focused only on what's right for Costco, where you'd have a Walmart broker that's focused only on what's right for Walmart, or you have a Whole Foods broker that's like telling you a whole bunch of other things. You have like an independent grocery broker, that's trying to do a million things. So, then you have a sales team that's trying to manage 10 different brokers with 10 completely different initiatives and different strategies.
Oliver: (14:26)
And then you're stuck with the brand to try to make decisions. So, we've really positioned GO Ventures for most of our clients, we run the entire country for them. We're their one broker partner. And we really sit as quarterback for what is the right sales strategy. So, if it's an emerging food brand, or if it's an emerging beauty brand, or we even work with publicly traded companies, we run the Coleman business a lot of the Coleman camping business. So, we have a wide range of clients, but if we take an emerging brand, which is really our favorite client to work with, we love working with an emerging brand that maybe has a ton of momentum direct to consumer, maybe they have some really exciting regional momentum at a Whole Foods, or maybe they just got kind of their commitment from a Wegmans or an H-E-B, and really kind of using that to set the right path for what the next one to three years looks like for them.
Oliver: (15:23)
So, if you're doing really productively and Erewhon, and you kill it on Amazon, maybe the next folks you should speak to are Whole Foods. And we can run that Whole Foods relationship. Maybe we should go kind of set a top to top with [Cahill 00:15:37] and build that Cahill relationship. Or if we want to go really big and it makes sense for the brand, let's go have a conversation with Walmart. And maybe Walmart's a year one player, maybe Walmart's a year two player, but for each brand, there's really a completely unique strategy that our team at GO Ventures can run. And that's because we have offices on the ground at every major retailer. So, we've got a big office in Bentonville, a team on the ground in Minneapolis, team on the ground in Boise. Austin, Texas, for Whole Foods, Chicago, for Walgreens and Ulta. So we're really servicing a wide range of retailers.
Vasa: (16:15)
Do you ever run into complications when you go into Walmart first in terms of pricing?
Oliver: (16:21)
I think every brand needs to think about Walmart day one. Ultimately, Walmart has in most categories, 30 plus market share. So, if you are going to be a brand selling products to Americans, you have to eventually have Walmart as a customer of yours. Unless you're going to go super premium, but if you're like a food or consumable, Walmart's going to be a place where you have to sell to eventually. So, I would always start with, even if you're not thinking about Walmart today, what is your Walmart pricing structure?
Vasa: (16:57)
Yeah.
Oliver: (16:57)
If we're going to go to Walmart in two years, how are we going to price it at Walmart? And then that's going to inform our pricing strategy that we take it to distributors that we take it to kind of regional grocery players, that we take it kind of to the rest of the universe.
Vasa: (17:11)
Amazing. And then obviously, I'm not in sales, marketing is my thing, but I do know that how you strategize your pack out in these different places, and learned, if you go in a big box, you'll probably go in or a club you're going to like an 18 pack. If you're a protein bar, not a two or a four pack, right? That's how you break it down and make it make sense.
Oliver: (17:31)
I think every brand... We tell every brand, even if you're not going to go into Walmart today, here's Walmart standard guide because you should be set up from an operational standpoint to eventually ship Walmart correctly.
Vasa: (17:42)
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Got it. And then Mate Fertility, seems very exciting to me. It seems very needed. What do you got going there and what does next year look like for you?
Oliver: (17:56)
Yeah, so, my brain and my energy, and one of my greatest takeaways from Brandable and one of the brands that I'm most proud of is the business we built with Queen V. And Queen V is a business that was founded by my significant other. She's an incredible entrepreneur. She's such a superstar. And she built Queen V from the ground up. And it was recently acquired by, by Reckitt Benckiser who own K-Y lube and Durex condoms and Lysol, and a number of other brands. So, really excited for that journey for her. She leading that business as global director of sexual wellness marketing inside of RB. So, both of us have really been in the women's health and wellness space for a long time. When she first kind of experienced her own infertility issues, and us as a couple started experiencing them, our eyes were kind of wide open by just how broken the fertility industry was. And how we could fix it with a much better solution.
Oliver: (19:01)
So, the problem with fertility today is roughly 20% of the population suffers from some sort of infertility issue and is going to require some sort of infertility treatment to start their own family that does include the LGBTQ population. And the unfortunate reality is only 1.7% of the population today gets any sort of care. And that's because there's only 460 fertility clinics that are completely concentrated in top five markets. So, what we're doing is we're trying to open a thousand fertility clinics in the next 10 years. And we're doing that by putting a fertility clinic in every city in America. We're opening up one of our first, fully branded fertility clinics in Oklahoma city later this month. And we're continuing to open up a new clinic every single quarter.
Vasa: (19:48)
Wow. That's amazing, man.
Oliver: (19:51)
Yeah, we're really excited about it. And not only is it available, so from a kind of parenthood should... The ability to become a parent should be determined by your neighborhood, right? That's something we really believe. And we believe in our mission of fertility for all. We mean it, we believe fertility care should be accessible to anyone that needs it. So, we're putting it in your neighborhood but, separately, our pricing is anywhere from 40 to 50% lower than the legacy fertility clinics, and that's really because kind of this old guard, fertility clinic. All these fertility clinic groups have been unfortunately rolled up by private equity firms over the last 10 years. And you know what happens when private equity kind of enters category and really gets aggressive, the price is going to go up. It's not going to go down.
Vasa: (20:44)
That's wild. That's wild. I want to go deeper into this one. Is there any direct consumer play for you with the Mate Fertility?
Oliver: (20:55)
100% down the road. Yeah, we do see a path where we are going to build a very meaningful brand in the women's health and wellness and fertility space. We're just right now, very, very focused on establishing kind of our foothold with a phenomenal customer experience throughout our chain of fertility clinics. But definitely, in the two to three-year horizon that follows we'll be making a play back into the world of health and wellness products.
Vasa: (21:28)
Incredible. You have an awesome history of making things happen, man. I look forward to watching this as it goes, not only GO Ventures, but also Mate Fertility. I think I want to transition into our rapid fire questions. What do you think?
Oliver: (21:43)
Cool. Let's do it.
Vasa: (21:45)
All right. I got a couple of prepared for you today. These are always a little secret until the show happens. First question, if you could pair any influencer with any product and launch a brand today, who and what would it be?
Oliver: (22:01)
That's a really good question. I mean, I honestly, I think if Michelle Obama wanted to come out with a beauty brand, it would really resonate with millions of Americans.
Vasa: (22:20)
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Oliver: (22:21)
I think that could be really cool. You just start Alicia Keys launch a haircare brand with Ulta. I mean, but Michelle Obama is like the ultimate influencer expert. I mean, she's had an incredible career and legacy. And I think if she were to say, "This is my positioning, this is the brand I want to build and focus." It could be beauty. She spent a lot of time in the White House focused on better nutrition for kids. Maybe it's a food brand. I think it would take a lot of market share very quickly.
Vasa: (23:03)
Great answer. Second question, three CPG brands you admire, challenger brands.
Oliver: (23:15)
Challenger brands, other good question. SmartSweets is on the top of my list. I think they absolutely have crushed it and will continue to crush it. The packaging is completely on point, they're in the right category. It needed to be disruptive. They have the right messaging. They're with the right retailers and I think that there's a long way for them to grow in terms of category expansion and kind of retailer expansion. So, that's one of my favorites. Another brand that I really admire and, of course, some of the challenger brands that I've been part of I admire but not non-brands that I'm not affiliated with.
Vasa: (24:03)
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Oliver: (24:08)
I really, really admire what Welly has done. Welly launched at Target it's from Eric Ryan, the founder of Method and Olly, and he just finds these really sleepy categories to build a very, very disruptive brand in. And that's exactly what Welly did. I mean, you can't pick a more boring category than first aid products and the execution was just tremendous. And, again, I think there's no end in sight. I think they just expanded some distribution across CVS. I don't think they're in Walmart yet. Unilever just acquired a majority stake of it. And I think they have a very long future ahead of them. And I love that brand because it's just a great, great category to play in it's big, big, big category, and you can really see how that could just be a billion dollar business in a couple of years.
Oliver: (25:06)
I'm trying to think of what else in the household cleaning space. We have a lot of household cleaning brands at GO Ventures. So, we love a lot of our clients in that category. I'm going to go after the beauty space for a second. I'm going to talk about [Kevin Gold's 00:25:26] brand, which is magnetic. I don't know if you've seen that.
Vasa: (25:30)
Mm-mm (negative).
Oliver: (25:31)
It's the Lashnetic brand. So, I'm going to give him a shout out. It's a really phenomenal positioning. It's just a really, really good positioning. And it is a magnetic eyelash product, right? And they just executed it perfectly. It's going into a category like eyelashes that has not been disrupted in a while. Right? You have like these very old guard, fake eyelash companies, and they just attacked it in the right way. So, Glamnetic's the brand, if anyone wants to look it up.
Vasa: (26:15)
Glamnetics?
Oliver: (26:15)
But it's just Glamnetic. It was just attacked in the right way. And magnetic eyelashes make sense, right? They figured out how to put like a magnetic pigment in the thing you put on your eye before you apply the eyelash. So, the eyelash sticks much more effectively than just traditional glue, right? So, that like slight tweak on an innovation. And I used to say this when I was in television, it's all about slicing the onion in kind of a different way that's like a story that customers can really clearly understand, right? The thing that every customer hates about putting eyelashes on is the glue's like a mess, right? This solves that.
Vasa: (26:56)
Wow.
Oliver: (26:57)
So, would that little piece of innovation, you can see how that can just really capture a lot of market share very quickly.
Vasa: (27:06)
Those are three good brands. Good shots.
Oliver: (27:09)
I don't know if anyone else has told you those brands, but-
Vasa: (27:11)
No, no, no. Those are good. I haven't asked that question before I asked that one specifically for you, because you have done a great job pairing influencers and building brands all the way through exit. Well, my last question is more of advice for the audience. A lot of startup founders listen to this, and when is the appropriate time for them once they're seeing success online to start building out retail?
Oliver: (27:35)
Immediately. I mean, if you have a unique way that you have sliced the onion, right, and it's resonating, we should talk to retailers immediately. You should reach out to my team at GO Ventures. They'll get back to you and set up kind of an introductory call. If you have figured out a unique way to slice the onion, you have to be the first one to tell the story to retailers because we live in a copycat world, right? And you probably see this pasta, every brand, it's like how do you decipher the difference between this brand and that brand because they all look the same. And they're all basically trying to tell you the same thing. So, it's like when it works and you know you've got a really, really good race horse there, you should engage with retail immediately because even if a Whole Foods or Target or a Walmart don't respond today, you really want to be the first person to tell the retailers this story from your point of view, as a brand founder versus if you wait and there's a copycat, someone's going to tell that story before you.
Vasa: (28:38)
Yeah. Good call. And the final one is how do we help these startup CPG founders? How do we reach you for GO Ventures? And how do we reach you even for Mate Fertility?
Oliver: (28:49)
Yeah, for sure. So, I'm always on LinkedIn (Oliver Bogner). You can always dab me on LinkedIn, messaged me on LinkedIn. If you're a startup brand and you want to talk to the GO Ventures team, we've got an exceptional business development team, and we've got a team of now about a dozen vice presidents of sales that will talk to the startup brand and figure out if it makes sense and what the potential retail strategy could be. So, you can reach us on our website teamgoventures.com.
Vasa: (29:18)
Got it. And, Oliver Bogner, B-O-G-N-E-R. For those of you listening, looking to send all over a DM on LinkedIn. Well, that wraps it up for me, Oliver. I had a blast chatting with you. I appreciate you being on the episode and thank you for your time.
Oliver: (29:37)
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Vasa: (29:40)
We'll see you next time.
This episode of Exit Intent features one of my friends and colleagues, Jed Rawson, founder & CEO of Pirawna. Jed's an Amazon first agency. GB is a dotcom first agency. This is going to be fun!
Vasa: (00:03)
All right, everybody, thank you for joining us. We've got Jed Rawson, founder and CEO of Pirawna, an Amazon performance marketing agency, with us. Jed, welcome to the show.
Jed: (00:13)
Hey, thanks for having me on, Vasa. Always great to catch up.
Vasa: (00:16)
Likewise, likewise. Jed, I've known you for five or six years, but everyone listening to this, it's going to be the first time, maybe second time talking to you. Let's tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your history and what you do on Amazon.
Jed: (00:29)
Yeah, no problem. I'm an entrepreneur. I manage Amazon for brands. I founded Pirawna five years ago. I've been doing Amazon for seven. You and I worked at Quest together and had a lot of fun there ramping their Amazon business. And we now manage Amazon for brands like Rip Curl, NuFACE, C4, the largest pre-workout brand on Amazon, and a lot of others. So thanks for having me on today and happy to talk Amazon.
Vasa: (00:57)
Jed, I've been seeing you post a ton about new Amazon features. I think you could post organically on Amazon almost like Instagram now. I personally don't know anything about it, so that's the first thing I want to jump into. There's a couple other features you've been talking about on your socials. So can you tell me and the audience a little bit about what those are?
Jed: (01:19)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the most noticeable things was that Amazon obviously had a new app icon update. So if you go look at your Amazon app on just the consumer side, it changed to kind of the brown cardboard box look and feel, which is interesting. Obviously, a lot of A/B testing went into that. So you know if Amazon is pushing that change, it's great.
Jed: (01:39)
From an advertising standpoint, you have a lot of new search features, so you can search by brand, you can search by size and by price, by diet, calories, nutritional facts. Some of that functionality has been there for a long time, but the way that they rolled it out is a little bit different.
Jed: (01:53)
And then for us, you've got DSP is rolling out for self-service. Video and search beta, which rolled out last year, is doing really, really well. We're seeing brands get a really good return on ad spend with video ads. So to me, I always kind of look at it and Amazon advertising is kind of like Google 15 years ago or Facebook five to eight years ago. They're still playing catch up. But I think video ads in the future are going to be a lot bigger of a deal. So that's one thing we're pushing pretty hard right now for the brands we work with.
Vasa: (02:24)
The app logo or the app icon, what do you think about it? Yay or nay?
Jed: (02:29)
I mean, come on guys, I have two sets of twins. I've got a set of five-year-old twins and a set of two-year-old twin girls. So my claim to fame is I have four girls five and under. I mean, we don't go to the store, we buy half our stuff on Amazon. And you're sitting there at the gateway of 50% of all e-commerce, and you make it a box? I mean, it makes sense. I get why they did it. But you couldn't come up with something more creative than cardboard?
Vasa: (02:56)
I'm into it.
Jed: (02:59)
I mean, I don't know why they didn't make the icon just a picture of Bezos's face and it says, "Got you."
Vasa: (03:05)
Yeah. No, I'm into it. I like the little fold in the tape. It makes me feel like I've got a delivery at the front door step. So I'll take it.
Jed: (03:16)
I mean, you know who I think is the best at that is Elon Musk and Twitter. I would like to see it be more like Elon Musk Twitter icons. Either a rocket ship or Blue Origin, or just a picture of Dogecoin. Right? Have some fun with it. But all joking aside, I think it's fine.
Vasa: (03:33)
When mine updated, it reminded me of October when Instagram had the retro icons that you can choose from. I thought that I had an old iOS going or something like that. But I'm into it. I'm not mad at it.
Vasa: (03:45)
Jed, I want to dive into some questions about Amazon. There are brands that focus heavily on Amazon. A lot of their ad spend is only on Amazon, or they're indexed heavily on Amazon and light on paid social, paid search. Obviously, you're going to talk about Amazon's the only way. But I know that there's businesses out there and their economics and their operations don't always allow for that. Can you tell me the pros and cons of spending all your ad spend on Amazon, none of your ad spend on Amazon, anything in between?
Jed: (04:22)
Yeah, great question. I mean, let's go to the two extremes first. Let's talk about if you spend all your advertising spend on Amazon. I'm the Amazon guy and we manage Amazon for a lot of brands. I think that smart CMOs and smart chief digital officers have taken those allocations up, because the principle, and we take a very principle-based approach to the marketplace, the principle is marketing capital flows where it's treated best. So people go to Google to look, they go to Facebook or Instagram to see their friends, and they go to Amazon to buy. So because there's a much higher intent to purchase, that traffic's inherently more valuable. Even still, I don't think the right allocation is ever 100% and zero, because there is value in those other platforms and you are going to capture audiences you wouldn't see otherwise. So for me, on the first extreme, if your Amazon marketing spend is 100% Amazon and zero everything else, then you are either brand new or you're leaving money on the table elsewhere.
Jed: (05:19)
Let's go to the other extreme and let's say that you're spending 0% on Amazon. I don't know any scenario for that, unless you're a car dealership and you're running radio ads and you're going to get taken over by Tesla, you just don't know it yet.
Vasa: (05:37)
Yeah, and the Goodyear blimp. Can't forget that.
Jed: (05:40)
Yeah, exactly. Right? You're hoping Tiger Woods makes his 97th comeback. But for the balance on the shades of gray in the middle, there's always a case to be made for the allocation for marketing spend. Again, I think that you want to make data-driven decisions. Typically, you can show a better ROI for Amazon, but I think as the Amazon guy, it's important to understand when Amazon should take its rightful place in your distribution strategy. Amazon is important, but it's never going to be the majority of your revenue.
Vasa: (06:13)
All right, so I've been on both sides of the coin with Amazon and strategy on how to break down your media spend. Are there any tricks or tactics that folks can use to mitigate the free shipping? Some people are on Amazon Prime, some people cannot be on Amazon Prime. And then when that happens on dot-com, free shipping is almost expected, so people are adding minimum order values for free shipping to unlock that. Is there any benefit, in terms of digital channel strategy, to making the offerings on Amazon different from those that are on dot-com?
Jed: (06:59)
There's a couple ways you compete with Amazon. One of those is exclusivity. Exclusive price points, exclusive bundles, exclusive options. I think that if you look at your segmentation strategy by channel, right, it's really great when you sell a two-pack at Target, right, and a three-pack on Amazon. Or you sell a five-ounce in Sephora and you sell an eight-ounce on Amazon.
Jed: (07:22)
We had a really interesting scenario where we had a coconut water client and Amazon was actually matching the price per ounce retail at Costco. Because we're trying to figure out why Amazon was price matching and discounting this item, and we eventually figured out that the algorithm was looking at the price per ounce at Costco and smart enough to figure out that it was a different bundle pack configuration. So some of those efficiencies, Amazon's figured out.
Jed: (07:50)
And then I've been on the other side where it's really frustrating where we had a client who Amazon was matching the two-pack price on Walmart to the one-pack price on Amazon. So algorithms aren't always the brightest. Common sense would tell you, "Hey, this is a one-pack. That's a two-pack. These are two totally different items." And it took a while to get that sorted out.
Jed: (08:13)
So I think the answer, you should have custom bundles by channel. And where you can't have custom bundles by channel, you want to have really tight control of your distribution. Know who you're selling to. And then for path-to-market distribution strategy, which is what most brands get wrong, launch e-commerce first, everything else second.
Vasa: (08:36)
I'm into that. Super into that. I want to go a little bit deeper into this one. What's the price point that folks should be at? What do you suggest? What's the sweet spot for bundles on Amazon compared to dot-com?
Jed: (08:52)
I love this answer. Amazon obviously gets the best rates on the planet and has a pretty competitive cost structure for shipping. So it depends on the category that you're in. The money price points in grocery or sports, nutrition, performance food, 10, 15, 20, 25 bucks. You get below 10 bucks, you're never going to make any money because the margins are just too thin on a single item. Even if you're selling...
Jed: (09:15)
We have a juice client and they sell fresh-pressed celery juice and other types of juices. They do 140 million a year at retail. They're massive, right? On Amazon, they're singles, right? You can sell a single bottle of juice for like five bucks and still not make any money.
Jed: (09:33)
So you get below $10, and just your margins become a real battle. Once you get above $25, you get more into Costco, club type purchasing. You just don't need that many two-packs of 36 ounces of ketchup, right? So you're just the different type of purchase. The sweet spot for grocery is 10 to 25 bucks. For other categories, it's different.
Jed: (09:56)
One that was really interesting that we got a lot into last year was air purifiers. We have a guy who does UV light air purifiers, and the money price points in UV light air purifiers, 100, 200, 300 bucks. Just you can be $88, you can be $98, but if you're not in that like $88 to 100 range, that price band was really tight. Again, there was a grouping at 150, but then it was basically 100, 200, 300 bucks. If you are not aggregating around those price points, you're going to miss out on a lot of demand.
Vasa: (10:34)
Yeah. What about gifting? An air purifier, typically, someone only needs one of them. This is just a super granular question. Is there a world where people sell two at once? One for you, one for a friend or one for a family member kind model.
Jed: (10:51)
I guess it depends on how good friends you are. I didn't get any air purifiers for Christmas last year, but I didn't ask for any either. There's certain things where a one-pack and a two-pack just don't make a lot of sense. Usually when you're getting into multiples, you're getting a multiple bundle strategy, you're getting into fast consumables.
Jed: (11:08)
There's a tool that I really like called SmartScout. It's brand new. It shows where traffic's coming from and where it's going to. I was looking at it today and literally on that very question. We were looking at... You can kind of visualize the ecosystem of products, so highly recommend it. My friend, Scott Needham, actually just developed it and rolled it out earlier this year.
Jed: (11:30)
But we were looking at the ecosystem for pet treats and we were looking at the one-packs versus the two-packs versus the three-packs, how well they sell, and then how much traffic was hitting those listings, and then how much traffic was actually bouncing and converting on to other products. So it's pretty cool to look at what people are looking at right before they buy, right after they buy. That shopping cart purchasing behavior will help drive some of your bundle and innovation strategy. But to me, start with price point first, and then how many units you're going to put into it second.
Vasa: (12:03)
Yeah. All right, let's move along here. Every time I talk to an Amazon marketer, we talk about conversion rates. And conversion rates for Amazon, I've seen 10X what they are on dot-com. Why is that? One. And the second part of that question is, "Is it partially because if you're on Amazon in the search bar, you typically know what you're looking for?"
Jed: (12:30)
I think it's different. I think the way that I would answer that question is first, it's important to understand that Amazon... If you read Amazon's 10-K filings, which not a lot of people do, but I think they should, Amazon spends four billion a quarter on customer loyalty. So the reason they convert at a really high rate is because I know that I can buy something on Amazon and if I hate it, I can return it no matter what, right? So that unparalleled customer service combined with how much they're willing to go negative to stand behind that promise to the customer, to me, the conversion rate starts with the four billion they spend every three months on customer retention and customer loyalty.
Jed: (13:09)
Then the reason the conversion rates are so high in Amazon is obviously because they put so much deflationary pressure on price. Amazon's a momentum model, whereas Google is a relevancy engine. So a lot of times, people are looking through a soda straw at the conversion rate, and what they're not realizing is that the logistics infrastructure, the algorithmic buy box price matching, the investments in customer loyalty and return anything anytime kind of policy, those all factor into the equation. And at the end of the day, it's really difficult to compete with Amazon when it comes to the amount of capital they're willing to invest to service the customer.
Vasa: (13:56)
Got you. All right, so let's go into a fantasy world here. I'm a startup founder of, let's call it, a beverage brand, a food brand. Food and beverage. We focus on food and beverage at GB.
Jed: (14:10)
Cool.
Vasa: (14:10)
Now-
Jed: (14:14)
Yeah, you guys crushed it. I've always admired your agency. One day, I want to be as sharp as you guys.
Vasa: (14:19)
No, you are. You could be an honorary member. We'll get you an email.
Jed: (14:23)
There we go.
Vasa: (14:24)
One thing that I struggle with on Amazon... Again, GB hires you everywhere we go. But the one part that's a struggle is customer data.
Vasa: (14:34)
Now, the way I think about customer data is obviously ethical, but we're able to leverage consumers who have shopped our site or that are going to shop this startup site, and we can remarket to them to support retail if we're both digital and retail. With Amazon, you don't quite get to do that. Are there any tactics or strategies for shoppers on Amazon for a brand, someone listening right now who's got however many customers on Amazon? How can they remarket to them and support retail, or is it game, set, and match, you only focus on Amazon and Amazon?
Jed: (15:09)
Two thoughts come to mind. The first is repeat purchase rate data, and then the second is a tool called ManageByStats. I'm going to start with the second.
Jed: (15:16)
The tool ManageByStats is pretty cool because I know people that have used it extensively and you can get a match rate off of that data that's 50, 55%. So you can get some insight and some understanding into who your customers are, about half of your customer base. I wish it was 100%. I wish Amazon shared all the data. Not that great. But what's great about that is you can start to create lookalike audiences on Facebook, use those on social. There's some guys that do that and do that really well. So the tool ManageByStats, it's got a lot of data. And a lot of that type of data that Amazon doesn't necessarily share directly, ManageByStats does a pretty good job of giving you some insights there. So I'd recommend people to check it out.
Jed: (15:59)
The first thing was repeat purchase rate. To me, there's some analytics that are important to us. One thing I learned from Ron Penna, the founder of Quest, and you probably learned this from him too, was he had a maniacal focus on repeat purchase rate by SKU. And if you didn't get over a 30 to 40% repeat purchase rate, then in food, you're just not going to make a lot of money.
Jed: (16:23)
We figured out how to calculate repeat purchase rate by SKU for Amazon. So in terms of customer data, the data is different and the data that you focus on, Amazon's a little more vaulty. You can't do some of the time of day segmenting that you can on Google, you can't do some of the lookalike audience stuff you can do on social. But they're slowly loosening up, and the analytics engine that they use is starting to give you more data. It's called ARA Premium. But in the last couple years, we've seen that data migrate from being a vendor-only side platform, and now they've opened that up and you can use it on the seller side too. I wouldn't say they're perfect, but I think they're realizing that if they want to continue to attract more marketing dollars, then they're going to have to give digital marketers more data to work with.
Vasa: (17:18)
I don't want to sound like I'm poo-pooing on Amazon at all. I will say that when you perform on Amazon, it's super helpful as qualitative data for retail support. If you're the number one toothpaste or the number one beverage or number one anything on Amazon in any category, it's always helpful for some buyer in retail to see and give that social proof. So big fan of that.
Vasa: (17:43)
We mentioned a few tools so far on this call, and I'm sure people are rewinding and trying to figure out what they are. Without giving up your secret sauce, Jed, aside from SmartScout and ManageByStats, you mentioned a third one right now. I didn't catch it. What are a couple tools that people can plug in today and help them out moving forward on their Amazon strategy, aside from calling Pirawna and saying, "Hey, give us the good stuff."?
Jed: (18:06)
Yeah, I mean, the most influential business book that I've read in the last 12 months is Principles by Ray Dalio. So I would say before you go to the tools, go read that book, because to me, you want to boil what you learned down into principles, and then use tools to support it.
Jed: (18:24)
The tool that I mentioned was ARA Premium, or Brand Analytics, as it's known now. That's a tool within Amazon that people really don't utilize, especially customer search term reports, the demographic analysis, breakdown by state.
Jed: (18:42)
We built our analytics engine off of Domo. So we built some custom KPIs and custom analytics. We built a custom dashboard for every client. But I think if you're not using a tool like Domo or Tableau to build out custom analytics and tying to the API, then you're just leaving insights on the table. And to me, data is only valuable insofar as you take action off of it. Like, "So what?" So you can see that your repeat purchase rate for that SKU is 8%. So what do you do about it? Right? That's where I think it really gets valuable.
Jed: (19:19)
A good example of this is we can calculate lifetime customer value on Amazon, and then we can also see repeat purchase rate by SKU by month. So we know that... A good example is we have someone that does a lot in cauliflower stuff and plays in the keto space. We know that January is the best month of the year for customer acquisition. But we also know, from the data, that we should ramp that two weeks before. So mid-December, we're aggressively ramping up our customer acquisition so that first week of January, we're not going head to head with every other keto brand spending out there. It doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but aggressively acquiring customers in the grocery category two weeks before everybody else, you're able to get a jump on things and get a better ROI and a better return on ad spend, and that's really what it's all about.
Vasa: (20:15)
Jed, you said a three letter acronym that... I call it the unicorn, and I say that if you ask 1,000 people how they calculate it, you're going to get 999 different answers. Lifetime value. I don't want to know your formula, I don't want you to give up your secret sauce, but lifetime value on Amazon. What are some ways people can think about that from top line sales to bottom line, to profit? Which way are you looking at it and which way's the best way?
Jed: (20:50)
Well, the short answer is... And there'll be one person that listens to this, rewinds it, figures this out. But on Seller Central, you can download the transaction report and then you can run a pivot table and deduplicate the data. That essentially tells you who your repeat purchasers are. The limitation is Amazon Seller Central will only go back two years. So you have to be archiving data beyond two years, or you're going to know it's limited to just the last couple of years. Which it still gives you valuable insight.
Jed: (21:24)
Most of the time when we calculate lifetime customer value, there's an asterisk of it's just the last three years, the last five years, the last two years. The way that it changes your marketing is if you know that a repeat customer is five times more valuable than a first-time customer.
Jed: (21:42)
For example, at Quest, we had people who somebody ran an ad eight years ago or seven years ago or five years ago, and they had come back and bought every other month, right, for five years and we'd made $8,000 or $10,000 off of them. If you understand the lifetime of that sort of value, then it allows you and enables you to spend more on your customer acquisition costs and spend more to acquire those repeat customers. When you have a strong repeat purchase rate, then you can spend more in marketing, ramp up revenue, then back off on the marketing, and coast on your repeat purchase rate to dial in the profitability.
Jed: (22:15)
And then my favorite KPI is marketing as a percent of sales. We call it MAPS. But marketing as a percent of sales is the scalable metric. It's a financial metric. It takes care of all the attribution issues you have with marketing platforms that try to take credit for sales that would have happened anyways. Does that make sense?
Vasa: (22:36)
It sure does. That's why I'm asking you all the good stuff, man.
Jed: (22:40)
Great questions.
Vasa: (22:41)
Thank you. I wrote notes on the LTV thing. I'm never going to use that, but I definitely want that for my notes, and I'm hoping somebody or people do go back and take your advice on that one.
Vasa: (22:54)
MAPS is definitely a very honest way of measuring ad spend. I definitely use that for paid social, paid search and by channel. It helps keep things honest, gives you a nice north star and something to work towards.
Vasa: (23:08)
I've got one more question before we get into the fun rapid-fire questions. That question is, "How do you track subscriptions on Amazon?" This is just an honest... I personally, it's not my thing. And I'm sure other people are wondering how they can increase their subscriptions on Amazon because it's a huge growth pillar on dot-com.
Jed: (23:32)
Yeah. We have someone who that's all they do in the pet space. We manage Amazon for BarkBox. BarkBox IPO-ed in December for 1.6 billion. They are intensely focused on their subscription rate, right? I can't say too much about it because I want to protect client confidentiality, but I can tell you that for subscriptions, Amazon doesn't do them as well as some of the other platforms. You have a lot more flexibility off Amazon than you do on Amazon, because Subscribe & Save is really your only option. You can push Subscribe & Save, and then Amazon will share some Subscribe & Save analytics.
Jed: (24:12)
The analysis that I learned at Quest that was really interesting was the Subscribe & Save penetration rate. Meaning you can figure out what percent of your audience is using Subscribe & Save, and is therefore, a repeat customer, right?
Jed: (24:29)
Now, the analytics are different on Vendor Central versus Seller Central. So without getting too deep into the details, it depends on what portal you're on, the type of data that's available to you. But a great pro tip, go talk to an AMG rep and they can give you additional insight into your Subscribe & Save metrics. Or go talk to your vendor manager. They can give you additional insight into your Subscribe & Save analytics. Or go talk to Strategic Account Services, which is an advisory support group on the seller side. They can give you additional Subscribe & Save metrics.
Vasa: (25:08)
Well, all right. I've got those notes down. I'm excited about this next part. Rapid-fire questions are my favorite because they're questions I don't share with you beforehand. But if you listen to past episodes, you might have clues as to what's on the way.
Jed: (25:27)
All right, let's go.
Vasa: (25:28)
All right, so the first question... I'm going to be making baseball-style cards for each person that's on the show that has all of their different features. In this case, your ideal tech stack. You could only name five, but what is your ideal tech stack for Amazon?
Jed: (25:45)
Teikametrics, Domo, SmartScout, Helium 10, and I like Jungle Scout. I like a second opinion on the data.
Vasa: (25:56)
That-
Jed: (25:59)
And I would probably throw in there if I could have a sixth, I would say FeedbackWhiz.
Vasa: (26:02)
Feedback. The tech on the Amazon side has some funny names. I'm used to the Shopify apps, ReCharge or all of these... Postscript. They're all pretty simple, but these ones are pretty funny. Helium 10 sounds nice. I don't know what that does, but I'll dive into that later. If you started a D-to-C food and beverage company today, who would your co-founder or co-founders be?
Jed: (26:34)
Who would my co-founders be?
Vasa: (26:36)
Yeah.
Jed: (26:37)
Well, my first one would be my wife, right? Because she's the real CEO, and I do exactly what she tells me to do because she's very good at strategy. Outside of that, I like to have partners I've worked with for years. So you and I have always talked about doing something together. I'm always down. For me, you want people that like to hustle and like to grind. I want to work with people that like to put in the time and get after it and be aggressive and have that cultural DNA.
Vasa: (27:09)
I'm going to send this episode to Miki once it's done and give her a timestamp.
Jed: (27:16)
You should, you should. She'll probably think of three things I could have improved off of it, but she's really, really kind in that way.
Vasa: (27:25)
Awesome. All right, I think that's going to wrap it up for rapid-fire questions. Two quick rapid-fires this time around. But Jed, I had a blast chatting with you about this. I can't wait to get it out. Before we jump though, where can folks find you that are looking for Amazon performance marketing?
Jed: (27:46)
Yeah, great question. They can always hit our website, pirawna.com, P-I-R-A-W-N-A. Nobody knows how to spell Pirawna. That was one of the things we realized when we were looking at Amazon related terms that we could use. So pirawna.com, P-I-R-A-W-N-A. And then we're on Instagram, right? Obviously on Twitter as well. And then you can always hit me up on LinkedIn, J-E-D R-A-W-S-O-N. I love LinkedIn. Pirawna's on LinkedIn as well. If you send me a direct message on LinkedIn, that's probably the best place for professional questions. Always happy to answer a question anytime for free and help the next guy out any way we can.
Vasa: (28:27)
Awesome. Jed Rawson, pirawna.com. Jed, it's been great. Thanks for your time. That's it for this episode of Exit Intent. Thanks, everybody.
Jed: (28:38)
Sounds great. We'll see you in the marketplace.
Vasa: (28:40)
All right, buddy.
If you're looking for the cliff notes, here are some actionable items from Episode 02 of Exit Intent that you can take away with you today.
The four pillars of post-purchase surveys are:
In order to improve response rate, you'll want to:
If you want to learn more, listen to the episode wherever podcasts are available or read the transcript below.
Vasa Martinez (00:01):
All right, guys. Thanks for tuning in. We've got Matt Bahr from EnquireLabs, a post-purchase survey solution, focusing on DTC brands with us today. Matt, welcome.
Matt Bahr (00:12):
Thanks, man. Appreciate you having me on.
Vasa Martinez (00:14):
Glad you're here. So I want to dive into a little bit about Enquire, but first I want to give our listeners a little bit of a background on you.
Matt Bahr (00:24):
Yeah, totally. So I've been in e-commerce for about a decade. The first six or so years were actually on the merchant side, helped start a headphone company here in New York called Master & Dynamic, and then in 2016, switched over to SAAS to actually solve some problems that I was having, being a merchant. We actually spent about two years in the same-day delivery space. Never really found product market fit there, but luckily, essentially spun that out to what EnquireLabs is today.
Vasa Martinez (00:54):
Very cool. I'm a big fan of your slogan direct from consumer insights. Can you dive a little bit deeper into that?
Matt Bahr (01:02):
Yeah, totally. We were going through a positioning exercise, call it six months ago and that's where we came up from direct from consumer. Really, it's a take on DTC, obviously, the vertical that everyone's really excited about now direct to consumer. Well, we realized that our product was doing was switching that so direct from consumer, like DFC is how we phrase it is the approach that we're taking, where a lot of other SAS companies within the DTC space are all about sending more emails or watching customers browse your site, you name it, and what we're doing with surveys is flipping that on its head. That's where that came from.
Matt Bahr (01:44):
You're going to hear us talk about it a lot more in 2021, but we want direct from consumer to be almost like a strategy or a tactic that brands implement just because it's so important. It has all these privacy implications really start to push forward for these merchants. Talking to your customers is going to be the only way that you can get this data from them.
Vasa Martinez (02:07):
Love it. Love it. Especially, we're going to be diving into iOS 14 a little bit later. Can't wait to dive into that.
Matt Bahr (02:13):
It's a lot to talk about.
Vasa Martinez (02:15):
Yes. It'd be a lot to unpack. We'll hopefully try to do it pretty concisely here. What's the importance of post-purchase surveys for those listening, who aren't using inquire?
Matt Bahr (02:27):
Yeah. Not to keep using the way we frame stuff, but we like to say it turns pixels into people. If you're a merchant right now showing on Shopify, on your e-commerce platform, orders are coming in, and there's not that much information you know about the customer. So you might get UTM parameters if they came in through there, maybe a referral source if they came from Google, but there's really no information about maybe it was the discovery element or who they purchased the gift for. So that's where post-purchase surveys come in. Pretty much right at the birth of your customer, they're so excited about the order that they just placed, let's start to engage with them. That's where we come in with our surveys.
Matt Bahr (03:12):
We live on order confirmation pages and there's a whole slew of benefits and how you can use the data that I'm sure we'll get into. But from very much just a high level, what we like to say is use post-purchase surveys to start collecting this feedback direct from consumer, obviously just to help you make better decisions whether that's in your from a marketing perspective or customer researchers, it's a whole slew of problems that can be solved by just engaging and talking to your customers this way.
Vasa Martinez (03:41):
Love it. What are people missing out on if they're not using post-purchase surveys right now?
Matt Bahr (03:49):
It's just the data. We like to say everyone who installs us, can get a survey running in a couple of minutes, and it's instantly this trough of data that they didn't have access to five minutes before. That's the exciting thing I think when people just first install us, and now they were maybe just looking at Google analytics or maybe just focused on their Facebook real ads, within Facebook's platform. Now it's this whole other data source that isn't self-reported from Facebook or doesn't have the fear of privacy blockers or whatever. You have to look at GA with a lens these days. It's direct from the people who matter most.
Matt Bahr (04:25):
So as far as missing out on, if you're investing any time into influencer marketing or podcasts or any of these harder to tract channels, one of the best ways to measure them, and this is just an example, is how did you hear about a survey? That's what the majority of our customers use. Just to pinpoint one problem these surveys could solve is attribution. So as far as what people are missing out on, that's the one that we launched the company around and it's really like, maybe you could be allocating your capital better than you are today and scaling your company a lot faster.
Vasa Martinez (04:59):
Yeah, I'll be honest. I use Enquire for Outer Aisle, and it's helped me identify a few pockets that we go deeper on for channels to test, and it's been a huge hit for us. What are some of the common pitfalls when people use Enquire? What advice would you give a startup founder right now in food and beverage, starting a D to C company? What's that common mistake that can be made, or what's the, maybe people just don't use the data for X, Y, or Z?
Matt Bahr (05:31):
Yeah. I think the first pitfall is, let's say you already have your survey set up, your post-purchase survey set up. The biggest pitfall we see is not optimizing the actual copy in the survey. So maybe it's just somebody launches the survey with four or five channels, and maybe those channels aren't even the ones that they're really focused on at any given moment. So that's only the one of the most common pitfalls we have is rewrite the survey question in your brand's tone, make sure the channels are optimized for where your customers are actually discovering you. That's the first pitfall. Another pitfall we see is, especially with attribution, is extrapolating to a hundred percent and relying a hundred percent on that data. Our average survey completion rate across all of the companies we work with is about 55%, and at that point you can really start to make some larger assumptions around the dataset, but for customers who have lower converting surveys, whether that's due to a pop-up or some other reason, it gets a little dicey if you're going to take a 25% sample size and then extrapolate that out to a hundred.
Matt Bahr (06:38):
That's one thing that we're trying to do a lot with education with our customers, and in our documentation, is trying to help people understand how to use survey data better. So those are two things we see. Then the last thing is not bringing the data into your marketing stack. So some customers in our dashboard helps you understand where people are coming from, helps you look at average order value, a whole slew of things, but you can also push your data to Klaviyo, or maybe you're really focused on looking at your data in Google analytics. These are the places, and this is where you get the most value when you combine call it survey data direct from consumers with all of this quantitative data. Those are the three things that we often see, and we try to coach our customers on.
Vasa Martinez (07:24):
Going back to my next questions will be about benchmarks to look for. You mentioned one in the last answer that 55% is the average response rate to the survey. For someone who is currently using Enquire or any other post-purchase survey, hopefully they'll switch to inquire after this, if they're at 25% or 30%, how do they get up to 55% or even higher, aside from optimizing copy?
Matt Bahr (07:52):
Yeah. There's a few things we look at. The easiest way is to remove the pop-up that's on your order confirmation page. That's usually the biggest factor, at least for us. So we load front and center. We're in line on Shopify's order confirmation page. If there's anything distracting the user right when that page loads, your survey response rate's going to go from 55 to 60, if not higher, right down to 30, and it's very consistent around 30%. That's the first thing that we recommend. Then the second thing is really just around load time. So if you have a bunch of different scripts loading, and there's just a lot going on behind the scenes, if we don't load instantly, then there's a little bit of a delay. Maybe a customer already saw the order was confirmed and they're already about to bounce.
Matt Bahr (08:36):
Those are the two things that we traditionally look at. As you mentioned, and I spoke about before optimizing the copy. We've seen customers go from 50 to 80 just by writing some really fun survey question copy. So there's a whole slew of methods. We don't expose any of this reporting now, but we capture survey load time, submit Delta, a whole slew of different metrics to help that we're eventually going to bring into reporting. But if anyone ever wants to do a deep dive on their survey conversion rate, we always can go in and look, your load time is 30% higher than the majority of our other customers. There's definitely ways that we can engineer it. That's where we're going with certain parts of the product, is how do we get that 50%-60% upwards of 80 to 90, just so brands can make very informed decisions with this data.
Vasa Martinez (09:25):
Got it. So about the load time, what if somebody wants to run a post-purchase survey, but also run post-purchase upsell? Is that a no-no or is there a way to win with both?
Matt Bahr (09:38):
Yeah, so with Shopify's recent, the update to their checkout API, you can do the upsells and it doesn't interfere with us. The upsell actually happens right after you click pay. It's on a completely different screen, and then the order confirmation page still loads, and that's where we live. So we actually have no negative effects to doing both. We actually integrate with CartHook's old checkout, which they exclusively did that. There's really nothing. The thing that we have to, and I'm always going to push for surveys, engage with your customers before you start telling them to recommend to a friend or buy from a competitor or not a competitor, but maybe someone else in a complimentary vertical. That's how we look at it, and it doesn't affect the survey completion rate at all.
Vasa Martinez (10:27):
So are you saying a referral program or a co-op commerce would probably be one of those scripts that interferes with your survey?
Matt Bahr (10:36):
Yeah, exactly.
Vasa Martinez (10:37):
Yeah.
Matt Bahr (10:38):
Yeah. We talk to our customers all the time about that. It's like, what's more important? We're going to push. We think that customers can get a much higher ROI out of increased customer engagement directly with a brand than trying to have the customer do something else that's not even related to what they just bought.
Vasa Martinez (10:57):
Got it. We talked about the pitfalls when using post-purchase surveys, we talked about the opportunity cost of not using it, but what is one or two actionable ways that someone could take the data aside from Klayvio that you mentioned, or a GA, what are some of the best ways to use these insights that someone who's starting up a brand right now can implement and be off to the races?
Matt Bahr (11:24):
Yeah. I guess this is a question about what kind of use cases. We're serving 120 to 150,000 surveys a day this time of year, and the majority of those are, how did you hear about us surveys, more so they're called attribution surveys. That's definitely the best. That's the use case that we built the initial product on. As far as how to use that, what we do there is we just help you uncover what's actually happening from a channel makeup.
Matt Bahr (11:54):
One of the more popular pages within our application is the responses tab, and in that responses tab, what we do is we show you the response and then we compare it to the referral source or the last click UTM parameters if they existed. What that does just from a marketer standpoint, in building mental models of how to make future decisions, it shows you where the customer discovered the brand, and then it also shows you what drove them. I show this demos all the time, because it's always discovered through an influencer, and then it's last click, like Google.
Matt Bahr (12:27):
So if someone's really only relying on call it observational data, what sources somebody came from, they're not going to get the whole picture. That's definitely the best, or most common use case. As far as where we're going with the product, we're seeing more and more customers use us for other ways. This is really just to understand information about your customers, who the order is for. For example, who is this order for? Or is this a gift? Is a very common one. We have customers who then use that. They understand gift giving. Someone in Q4 didn't realize all their customers were actually gifting, updated all their ad creative, updated their landing pages and saw their Facebook grow as skyrocket, because now they're actually talking to their customers in the way they should have been.
Matt Bahr (13:12):
And then another customer pushes a very similar question to Klaviyo and then all their flows are different based on gift givers or not. So there's a whole slew of different ways. Attribution is the core pillar, but as far as what you'll hear more and more from us about it's these four core pillars that we're moving into, attribution, obviously, is one. Conversion rate optimization, and that's questions like, how is your shopping experience? Or anything we could do to improve? To really maybe the add to cart button wasn't working, and you're not going to know that unless someone tells you. The third one's personalization. So that's more so on the line of, is this a gift? And the last one is just simple customer research, like asking questions that just helps everybody make better decisions throughout the organization and better understand their customers. Everyone's going to see a positive ROI on that. Those are the four pillars, but we're definitely still heavily weighted on the attribution side.
Vasa Martinez (14:09):
I'm going to dive deeper into that one. So of the four pillars, let's say someone's focusing on attribution, but they're planning for the holidays. How much in advance would you say they should switch over to the "is this a gift survey?" Summertime ball? Is that even accurate data or do they just do it as they go in Q4 around black Friday? What would you advise them?
Matt Bahr (14:33):
Yeah, it all depends. Honestly, we see customers really pick one or the other right now, but I think later in this conversation we were going to talk about just some new features. So just to dive into that while we're... Well, I bought it up, but we're about to roll something out called question streams. The one feature we've been asked for the most over the last two years is multi-question surveys, and that's bar none. We stopped even tracking feature requests, because it was just like 101. So with question streams, what we're doing is it's not just a multi question survey that lives post-purchase on one order, it's essentially a dynamic stream of questions that lives over a customer's journey and whether that's first purchase second purchase, third purchase. What that allows you to do is maybe first time this customer comes in, let's ask them, how did you hear about us? And is this a gift?
Matt Bahr (15:29):
Maybe we want to ask, this is a gift on every order, but we only want to ask, how do you hear about us on the first order they placed with our brand. Then maybe on the second order if they purchase a specific dress and they're tagged with X on Shopify, let's ask them this question. So that's where we're moving. So as far as to answer your question, I'm not really going to answer it, because by next holiday season it's not going to be a factor. It's just going to be ask both of them. That's definitely what we're most excited about for that sole reason of, if we need to collect two data points, how do we do that? So there's a lot going into the backend of building that, to support that, but it's going to have a whole slew of different toggles when it comes out.
Vasa Martinez (16:10):
I'm so excited for that. I've always wondered about, and for our repeat purchasers, I wonder if they're getting annoyed by seeing the same question. That's exciting. I'm stoked. All right. So everyone knows about the iOS 14, Apple, Facebook scrap. How can Enquire help?
Matt Bahr (16:31):
Yeah. We've been spending a lot of time on this. Even when we launched, we've always been in the camp that Facebook grades their own homework. It's essentially a platform that tells you what the ROI is on the platform.
Vasa Martinez (16:44):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Matt Bahr (16:46):
Obviously some pitfalls with that, we've already seen some attribution fraud from them. I think it was with Uber. So with that going into mind, tracking conversions is just going to get harder. It's just the way in which the consumer privacy is headed. I think that's a good thing. Where we come in is we help understand the greater distribution of channels and what's actually working. So Facebook's reporting a certain row ads, then you could check that essentially with our platform. So that that's how we're approaching it as far as the intricacies, just to go into it if anyone's listening and isn't super familiar.
Matt Bahr (17:29):
With iOS 14, what Apple's going to be doing essentially is prompting users if it's okay if a platform like Facebook can track them across websites. So Facebook's ability to measure a conversion is going to go down. So as far as our recommendation, it's obviously to get a post-purchase survey live, get it going, start collecting data as soon as possible. Then the second recommendation, we're actually just starting to have conversations with our friends at Elevar and Udacity. So Elevar is they have a product that allows you to very easily implement Google Tag Manager and server-side tracking. So server-side tracking is one way to get around the upcoming changes, and then we're also starting to partner with Udacity to kind of take our data, all of our data and all the e-commerce data, and then build very advanced models.
Matt Bahr (18:23):
That's how we're approaching it from a few different angles. I don't want to say that post-purchase surveys is the end-all. Who cares about the Facebook pixel? But essentially it's going to be as a merchant, you're going to have to find more of a focal point from a few different sources of data versus solely reloading your Facebook ad manager every day, and just looking at your real ads, because that number is probably going to be under-reporting or over-reporting on any given day based on the amount of people who've opted in knocked it out.
Vasa Martinez (18:55):
Yeah. I'm excited to see. I feel like it's bringing everyone back to square one and I think there's going to be a lot of evolution in different softwares to help with this. Personally I'm losing a little bit of hair figuring it out, but excited to hear about you.
Matt Bahr (19:11):
[crosstalk 00:19:11] I can imagine that.
Vasa Martinez (19:11):
They're so proactive about it. We talked a little bit about benchmarks that it would be in the conversion rate of the post-purchase surveys. Are there any other benchmarks that someone that maybe is just getting started with Enquire, or maybe they're looking into it because they're listening to this. Are there any other benchmarks that you should focus on as a company owner, as a marketer?
Matt Bahr (19:35):
Yeah. For us, it's obviously the completion rate from our product standpoint is one thing, but what's more important is understanding the call it health of your media mix. I think one thing that we're already seeing when we analyze more of the aggregate data set that we have, we're already seeing people start to diversify off of call it the Facebook and the Instagrams. So as far as benchmarks go, that's one thing that we to push is don't put all your eggs in one basket, especially as iOS 14 and all these and consumer privacy starts to become more and more popular. I'm not saying go spend money on a direct mail campaign or put a lot of money in Pinterest, but more assess, think about all your channels and think about how you can measure them.
Matt Bahr (20:19):
So I think, especially with influencers, for example, before post-purchase surveys, everyone was doing influencer marketing. As far as tracking it, it was very much just at first it was how many followers did we gain? It wasn't really attached to any dollar amount from a e-commerce side of things. Then maybe it moved into discount codes and there's really nothing capturing that halo effect. So as far as benchmarks go, it's not a one size fits all for a media mix for every company.
Matt Bahr (20:50):
There are definitely companies who rely solely on Facebook and they'll be fine doing it, but if you want to de-risk your brand and de-risk your growth strategy, just start to test other channels and make sure that 80% of my orders don't come through Facebook and Instagram. Let's get that lower. What we like to see is more of an even distribution, like word of mouth, call it around 20%, if not a little bit higher, Facebook around 30% to 40%, and then the rest is more or less a mix of influencers, non-branded search if you can figure that out, and other channels that aren't as easy to turn on as Facebook and Instagram are.
Vasa Martinez (21:32):
That's super helpful. Super helpful. Next question, we talked a little bit about new features. Are there any other features we should be looking forward to? And can you let us know?
Matt Bahr (21:48):
Yeah. The question streams is definitely the one we're most excited about, but as far as directionally where we're going, the survey is eventually going to move off the order confirmation page. We're only going to really live where we know who the customer is, and after that customer places an order, we can reach them via SMS or via email or in their account page. There's a whole slew of places that we could start to engage with the new question stream. That's something that's going to be coming. And then the other thing that's more near term is we're building some just really advanced reclassification functionality.
Matt Bahr (22:24):
So some customers have, and we've tried to get this down with optimizing the survey responses, but some consumers just really to write in the other field. So we're building some smart tech around reclassification. So allowing our customers, the merchants to build rules around if somebody types in the daily into the other response, we're going to automatically categorize that as podcasts as the first and then the daily as the response classification. So those are the things that are definitely on call it the six month horizon.
Vasa Martinez (22:59):
Those are some bad-ass roll-outs that are coming out. I'm excited for those. I'm surely going to implement them the second they're live. We're coming close to the end of this and we're going to do something fun and it's called rapid fire questions here. You're going to be the owner of a DTC company. You're just about to launch. With that in mind, are you ready for this?
Matt Bahr (23:27):
Yep.
Vasa Martinez (23:28):
All right. Ideal tech stack? You can only name five.
Matt Bahr (23:34):
Shopify as the e-commerce platform, obviously EnquireLabs. I'm not going to not say that. Klaviyo as your ESP, Junip for reviews. I like what they're doing there. Then probably either postscript or a sell-up tool. Yeah. It depends on what market. I think the DTC vertical is in, but either something like CartHook post-purchase, or PostScript for SMS.
Vasa Martinez (24:06):
We love PostScript.
Matt Bahr (24:09):
Yeah. Those guys are awesome.
Vasa Martinez (24:10):
The best. All right, next question. If you started a DTC food and beverage company today, who would your co-founder or co-founders be? Who's your team?
Matt Bahr (24:22):
That's a great-
Vasa Martinez (24:22):
Can't name anyone you've been in business with in the past though!
Matt Bahr (24:25):
That's a great question. Not even to name names, just the way the market's moving, I would look for more veteran players in the space. I feel like my background is obviously in e-commerce and direct to consumer, and if I were to look to compliment that it would be someone who understands the retail side of things. I think beverage is very hard to do solely direct to consumer. So having a more diverse channel makeup just from a retail, sales perspective would be super important. So, that would definitely be the first person that I would hire. The second person would be somebody on the branding side. I'd have to think about that. I'm just trying to think of where the biggest gaps in my skill set are, and it's really call it physical retail and distribution, and then on brand, just because those things are just so important these days.
Vasa Martinez (25:28):
Awesome. All right. We're going to take the DTC food and beverage founder hat off, and this is a little bit more catered towards what you do currently. I've been hearing a lot about zero party data. Can you tell one, me, and two, the listeners the difference between zero party and first party data?
Matt Bahr (25:48):
Yeah, totally. So zero party data, it's funny you say that. We literally just finished a white paper that's going to go out in the next week or two about zero party data for DTC merchants, but zero party data is essentially data that customers provide to you. We like to joke, zero party data really should be first party data. It's the customer's input to you. But with zero party data it's really data that's provided from forms or through surveys, or essentially the customers actively giving you the data. The difference between that and first party data, first party data is maybe your session data in GA. It's what are your customers are doing on your site. You're not renting that data, you're not buying it from anywhere else. You own that data.
Matt Bahr (26:34):
So that's the big difference between the two. Why we're pushing zero party data, ZPD, so much is because we're seeing all these issues now with whether it's customers having ad blockers or who knows? Let's just focus on Google analytics. How accurate is GA from your total traffic? I'm hearing more and more people being like, "Why doesn't GA match Shopify?" Well, Shopify is server side traffic, people actually loading your site, and Google analytics is a pixel loading. I think we're going to start to see the deterioration of even a little bit of first party data, which is interesting to us because in the DTC world, first party data is not a term that's used very often, which is funny because if you move into large-scale CPG and into the retail world, that's probably the most common word in any board meeting, is first party data. We need more first party data.
Matt Bahr (27:33):
I think that term, it's going to be a lot louder than it has been within the direct to consumer world, and I think with that, zero party data is definitely going to be the one that people would rather have zero party data, input direct from customers than just this is just a random user ID in a session. So I think that's where we're headed. We're definitely, obviously we operate a survey company, we're definitely very bullish on zero party data in the future.
Vasa Martinez (28:05):
Fantastic. Yeah. I've learned so much. Can't wait to start executing and I hope anybody listening has actionable items. Aside from that, my questions are done, but I want to let the listeners know, where can they find you? Where can they find Enquire? How do they learn more?
Matt Bahr (28:25):
Awesome. You can find me on Twitter. It's just @mattrbhar. My name within my middle initial R in between. You can email me direct at matt@enquirelabs.com. If you're a Shopify merchant, our app is in the Shopify app storage, just forward slash Enquire. Feel free to email me if you want a demo or if you just want to chat. Happy to talk more about surveys, zero party data, any of this stuff.
Vasa Martinez (28:51):
Amazing. It's been a pleasure, Matt. Learned a bunch. I'm excited for this to get out, and thanks for joining us on the Exit Intent podcast.
Matt Bahr (29:01):
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Had a lot of fun.
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With marketers seeing upwards of 97% open rates and 30%+ clickthrough on SMS commerce messaging, texting with your favorite brands is now verified as an essential conversion tactic. Our latest Exit Intent podcast spoke with Growthbuster Founder and Outer Aisle CMO Vasa Martinez to give us insight into the burgeoning category. Here are the questions we asked him:
Why is SMS making its way into tons of marketing and commerce conversations? (:34)
Short answer: It’s a very human channel.
Is the average person ready to text with their favorite brand? (2:10)
Short Answer: Yes, and 70% of people prefer to contact businesses via text. (Source)
What percentage of ecommerce revenue can SMS be attributed to? (3:03)
Short Answer: 10-20% if SMS is done right. (Source: growthbuster client data)
What are the similarities/differences between Email & SMS audience acquisition? (4:39)
Short Answer: Similarities in types of flows, differences in tone
What do you recommend for someone setting up an SMS service for the first time? (6:18)
Short Answer: Move slow, try messaging without promotions first. Use promotions to close.
What did you see from 2020’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday in relation to SMS? (8:29)
Short Answer: A shi*load of texts were sent and it worked.
Full transcript of our conversation can be found below.
Geoff: Welcome to Exit Intent, a growthbuster podcast, featuring the people and strategies focused on CPG growth toward investment and acquisition. I'm your host, Geoff Kutnick, Chief Content Officer here at growthbuster. And with us, we have Vasa Martinez, current CMO of Outer Aisle and began his marketing career at Quest Nutrition. Vasa let's get straight into it. Why do the letters SMS, seem to find their way into tons of current marketing conversations?
Vasa: Yeah, so I think the first answer is it's a very human channel. People are beginning to be more open to shopping via text. People are certainly open to communicating via text. I think it's a big homage to Dirty Lemon who began this years ago. I think 2016 with their automation and their proprietary API, but now people are really catching up to it in the e-commerce space. And it's been really fun to watch. The numbers don't lie. It's 97% open rate, 40% click through and it's just easy to do.
But as easy as it is, there's always a way to make things or do things the wrong way. And you have to be very conscientious of your messaging and it can't feel corporate. It has to feel as though a friend is texting a friend, so it's not too intrusive. I like to call SMS a very intimate marketing channel, not like romantic intimate, but intimate as in you're texting somebody. So how you think about when you're texting them, what you're saying is a very important thing.
Geoff: How much do you think that the average person is ready to text with their favorite brand? I know personally for myself, it started with a lot of shipping notifications and I wanted to be able to see those type of interactions and updates, but just based on the common denominator, would you say that the average American is ready to text?
Vasa: I think so. I think the numbers are, and don't quote me on this, but I think 70% of folks prefer to shop via text versus website. And that's a great thing as long as your website's dialed, you can have a link going to that. So yeah, I think people are ready and I think the number is only going to increase. I think this past Black Friday, Cyber Monday is a testament to that. I can imagine the number of total dollars sold via text, but I think the ship has already sailed and people are still jumping on board.
Geoff: For a brand listening right now that is trying to understand how much they could eventually attribute from SMS to e-commerce revenue, what are some of the numbers that you're seeing with the work that you've been involved in?
Vasa: I'm seeing between 10 and 20% of total revenue via SMS if done right. And one of the biggest things I would say is to really take it slow with your automations and your campaigns, and really be thoughtful in how you're acquiring these numbers. Obviously, there's some thought you need to put behind the legality of it with TCPA Compliance. So acquiring the numbers is one thing, how you go about flows or automations as well as campaigns, is another thing.
And then, it gets really tricky when you think about how text communicates with email. I don't think that they're interchangeable, I think that they're in addition to, but believe the number is that with both of these channels working in tandem, the overall results increased by 30%. So that's a huge thing to think about when getting set up is your automations, your automations or flows, your campaigns. How are you capturing these numbers? Are you being compliant? And then it comes down to creative and copy.
Geoff: Vasa, are there any major differences in relation to the common strategies that brands use when acquiring email addresses versus acquiring numbers and SMS? I mean, you mentioned compliance in your last statement. I'm just curious about, do you think about acquisition for SMS in a similar way? Is it vastly different to you?
Vasa: It's like that same, same, but different saying, they're both very similar. What I mean by that is with email, you're going to have a welcome series. You're going to have shopping cart abandonment. With SMS, you're going to have welcome series. You're going to have shopping cart abandonment, but there's a lot more layers to that than just those two foundational flows, depending on if you call it a campaign or a flow via Klaviyo or Postscript, who we use often with every one of our clients.
I think it's important to really think about what the timing is of those flows or automations for both series. Example, if somebody signs up on a flyout or a pop-up or modal, if your communications are going out at the same exact time, might not be the best bet, something to test. But I typically like playing with the timing of those automations, maybe 60 minutes or a day on a welcome series, test that out with the conditional splits for the first interaction via email. But I like to be a little bit quicker via text. Especially most people are shopping on their phone, they abandoned their cart, maybe, flip them a text in the next 30 minutes and test that out. Ultimately it comes down to testing and learning.
Geoff: For someone that's listening and signing up to an SMS service for the first time, they're setting up their first texting message to their potential clientele. What would you recommend or do you have a couple of things to consider when starting to execute SMS to start?
Vasa: Yeah. Moving slow is really moving fast when it comes to SMS, so slow down in order to speed up. And what I mean by that is we use Postscript, I'm a big fan of Postscript, how segmented you can get. There's 30-day free trial with Postscript, get your hands dirty there, figure things out, don't set anything live yet, but spend those 30 days thinking about things. That's exactly what I did with Outer Aisle. Thinking about some people do a promotional strategy to acquire emails and phone numbers. I would say, really go slow, get the foundational automation set up, think about the timing. And if you lean heavy into promotions on the front end, I would advise maybe trickling that back a little bit. And having that be something that is available in one of those automations or both. So if you have a three-part welcome series on email, I like to call it the cleanup batter as the third part of the email and the third text, have that discount come then.
But the first two communications are all about RTB, reasons to believe in a brand. And I like to talk about what are the features of benefits, why does this product exist? They obviously put their number in for a reason, and if they didn't convert, they want to know more. So it's our job to let them know more about the product and then come to a fully responsible decision about the product. So I leaned the first two about education. Third is maybe that discount, and then you'll have other parts where you acquire phone numbers or emails where maybe it's immediate, where you give them the discount. But you have to think about each different keyword when doing so.
Geoff: So, last question on the hot seat. But before we close, obviously 2020 Black Friday, Cyber Monday just passed, we're in a e-commerce environment because of what everyone's experiencing in the world like we've never seen before. Was there anything that you explicitly saw from this past year's Black Friday, Cyber Monday, that taught you anything?
Vasa: Yeah. That a lot of companies sent a shitload of texts and it worked and it's great to see, it's proof of concept. More people are going into SMS. And I think it's a great thing for e-commerce. It's exciting. It's fun watching what different brands are doing. It's fun seeing consumers being open to even being texted. I think 2021 is going to be even larger. I don't have any specific data points on text revenue, but I'm sure there's some case studies out there. I know Postscript just launched one. I haven't read that yet, but that's what I learned in Black Friday, Cyber Monday is like holy moly text is actually a part of the future.
Geoff: Well, Vasa, thanks for jumping on to Exit Intent. And for everyone listening, if you have a question about SMS, please send me a line. geoff@growthbuster.com. That's Geoff with a G, G-E-O-F-F @growthbuster.com. And we'll try to answer it on a future episode. Stay tuned for another part of our SMS series to come. Thanks again for listening to Exit Intent and Vasa thank you for joining, until next time.
Vasa: Thank you Geoff.
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