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DTC Podcast
Bonus: Why You're Looking at the Wrong Data: Cohorts vs Averages with Lifetimely's Jason Prowd
00:34:02
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- [00:00]
Jason Proud
When anyone starts saying we know something, I'm like, I don't know if we know as much as we think we do. That kind of skepticism can help unearth some really interesting things. People will often say we have insights about our customer, and I always try and point out that it's not present, continuous. We learned that in the past it might have changed. You want your ideas to be challenged. Like, we had a fashion brand here in Australia I was talking to, and they were looking at their top sellers and they were like, okay, we know what sells well. And they also had assumptions about the value of customers over time and just kind of thought it didn't make much of a difference. But what they discovered was one of the items is kind of five or six on the list of volume led to a double, like twice the size. Ltv.
- [00:51]
Eric Dick
Jason, I wanted to welcome you to the DTC podcast. Excited to talk about data. And I'm curious. You've worked with a lot of e commerce teams. What's something that you think operators need to hear right, right now about how they're using data in their businesses?
- [01:05]
Jason Proud
Yeah, great question, Eric. Awesome to be here. More focus, less metrics, I think is the where I'd start. So I think we're in. We're drowning, like most of us are drowning in data. That isn't the issue. You don't need more data, you need more insights. And I think businesses go through different seasons, and in different seasons, you need to focus on different areas. And so I think that's a big thing for me at the moment. When I talk with customers, I ask them, like, what are you focused on now? And you'll often get a list of 10 things. You can't do 10 things simultaneously. You need to drill down to what are the one or two things. And I think my take is people find that a bit frustrating because they kind of want to move all of the things and that's okay. But my number one piece of advice would be have the hard conversation, focus on the number one thing you need to move now. That doesn't mean forget about all the other things. It just means for this week, this month, get focused on being focused.
- [02:00]
Eric Dick
100% agree. It's. It's funny in the D2C world, we've been collecting data on our subscribers since the first day we started the business. We had people kind of go through a survey, so we have all this data, but we've been in a bit of paralysis when it comes to how to make actionable choices based on this data. And I think that's a lot of brands maybe stumbling point as well as they have all the data. And then what you're saying is insights are basically where you can kind of tell a story with data and take action, right?
- [02:27]
Jason Proud
Yeah, for sure. I think there's this idea, I really like this phrase, be like data. And people talk a lot about being data led. And I always think that abdicates the responsibility of actually doing the work. You need to be like data. Data informed. Yeah, so. So data captures something that's happening in the world and then, yeah, you have to analyze it and tell yourself a story about, well, what does this mean I'm going to do differently. Right. The reason we're all looking at this stuff is you could. Anyone can run a business any way they want. Data helps you make choices about doing something differently. And I think that's the, that's the power, but also the danger. And I think the problem we have now is, you know, if we're having this conversation might have been not on a podc, maybe on a radio show. Fifty years ago our issue would have been not enough data. And now that we have the reverse issue.
- [03:10]
Eric Dick
Yeah, just drowning in it. So with all the different areas that people can focus on and look for insights, you know, amp as a suite of tools, covers a lot of different areas of the sort of E commerce journey. But where do you recommend business owners start when it comes to driving these valuable insights?
- [03:27]
Jason Proud
Yeah, for sure. I think it starts with what's your strategy? Although I would say by default. Default, I think there's probably too much attention on the top half of the funnel and not enough on the second half of the funnel. So I think acquisition, totally valid, gets a lot of attention. I would say by default. My starting position would be think about retention, think about subscriptions, think about average order values, all that kind of down the funnel. Repeat purchase is a spot where I would say gets under focused when I talk to people. And of course, like some brands, if you're growing, you're early, you might be focused more on acquisition. But I would say tilt towards thinking about how can you best optimize for the customers you've already spent money acquiring.
- [04:10]
Eric Dick
And it's only getting more expensive to acquire them. So it's. You have to not have a leaky bucket and you have to be maximizing the value.
- [04:18]
Jason Proud
Yeah, yeah, we all have leaky buckets. I think of it as like the challenge is you're carrying a bucket from one side of the room to the other. It's got Lots of holes in it. And the goal is fill the holes and make the distance between one side of the room and the other shorter. And so I think you need to start thinking about lifetime value. And that's. That's why a lot of people come to us. Right. Like, the reason Lifetimely was created in the first place was because we heard from brands that they were struggling to understand. Okay, We. We know how much it costs to acquire a customer for a order, but we know people order. Again, we want to understand what's the difference between one cohort and another, and are they actually as valuable as we think they are? And so digging into lifetime value kind of helps you get there. Yeah.
- [04:57]
Eric Dick
And then what sort of. This is another challenge we have as a newsletter is we. We keep cohort data on people performing and how they've performed, you know, week over week. And. But we, again, we don't. We're. Again, we don't have. Because we don't have as many products to sell. We're literally just trying to keep people engaged for as long as possible. But when it comes to that cohort data, what are some of the ways that people are using cohort data to pull levers to make more incremental revenue?
- [05:22]
Jason Proud
Yeah, for sure. I think there's some really fascinating ways from speaking to customers. I love speaking to customers and just hearing their stories about what they're doing differently. I think often cohort data in particular is used to do one of two things. So you either are validating your existing strategy, and I think actually that's. That's often maybe the less interesting thing because you know, kind of what you're looking for. I would say I like inverting things, and I see this from customers all the time where they. They're going and looking for cohorts they didn't expect or cohorts that are performing in ways they didn't expect. And so there was a wellness brand we're working with recently. They're female focused. They don't really have any attention spent at all on their male cohort. They have a small range of male products, and they went and used our data, and they were looking at different cohorts and different lifetime values, and they were shocked to kind of find this male cohort was. Had a lifetime value double that of their core audience. Small audience. Yeah, but it was a small audience that acquired organically. They hadn't invested a lot in it and allowed them to riff on some really interesting strategies. They started adding male sample products to their female orders as A way to kind of intro to more potential customers. They tested that and then they thought, okay, we can see that's working now. So they could analyze that and see that that was tracking. And then they use that to justify more upper funnel investment, which I thought was really cool. So I kind of think about it both ways around, like validate what you're doing. But also I think often there's gold you're missing and especially like go digging and looking for things you didn't expect to see, customers you didn't expect to see on the, on the roster or products that are selling in a way you didn't expect for good or for bad.
- [07:00]
Eric Dick
You don't know what you don't know. And I think that's, that's the really challenging thing is you, you bring a lot of your presuppos, maybe who your audience is or how they'll behave. And when you're able to really look at the data, you can find all this gold. But just cohorting, just as a term. You mentioned splitting your customers from your female customers. But there's also dozens of different ways you can cohort the data. Right. Whether it's like they came in during a sale period or they came in. Talk about what are all the dimensions that are the most valuable to even think about? Cohorts.
- [07:32]
Jason Proud
Yeah, it's a really good question. I think there's so many ways you can cut it. A few that I'd focus on are thinking about when you've had seasonality in your business that might have driven say high one time purchase rates. Like campaigning around sale events. Say like a Black Friday is a good example of that. Like that cohort might have. You've spent all the money. That might be an interesting cohort to look at for trying to drive repeat purchase. You could look at some behaviors of your better cohorts. So you probably have a sense of who are my VIP customers, who are the people we've been targeting. And you can take behavior patterns from them or what you're doing with them and apply them to other cohorts. I think that's interesting. I think looking at a combination of lifetime value and skew. So like what is the first order someone's making and how does that influence lifetime value over time? I think often, and I'm sure you've sort of seen this before, like I think often what we do and what brands do is say okay, to drive volume, I'll focus on my highest sellers. That makes sense. But I think the real trade you're Trying to make is volume versus value. And looking at that cohort analysis allows you to kind of say, okay, so I'm getting decent volume. These are my top 10 sellers, whatever they are. Most. Most businesses know that pretty well. I think the danger can be jumping to focusing on the top one or two, or maybe there's something at number five that's got a higher ltv and that can make a real difference. Like, do that. Make that decision 10 times in a row, and you create a lot of value.
- [09:01]
Eric Dick
So this is a terrible metaphor. We can take it out if it's wildly inappropriate. But it makes me think of the propaganda about marijuana in the 90s, about how it was a gateway drug. Right. It was the drug that got you into other drugs. Whereas if everyone started with, like, a heroic dose of mushrooms, that'd be less likely to advance, I think. Right. Even though it's maybe a more impactful experience, their lifetime value with drugs would be lower because they didn't have that entry experience that maybe you get with marijuana, if that makes sense.
- [09:28]
Jason Proud
Yeah, yeah. And again, like, I like that, you know, I come from the country that can't even have a discussion about marijuana. Sense of Canada is a very different place.
- [09:38]
Eric Dick
Yeah, that's right.
- [09:40]
Jason Proud
I think what's interesting there is that you want your ideas to be challenged. Like, the thing, and I see this from customers that I work with and people I enjoy chatting to is they're not looking at the data to validate a decision they already knew was brilliant. Like, that's. That's not helpful. What you want to do is, is look and say. I think what's often surprising is not that, like, people know the general case. People know different customers are worth different amounts and different products sell in different volumes. Like, that's not new to anyone. I think it's the nuance in the. The Delta. So we had a fashion brand here in Australia I was talking to, and they were looking at their top sellers, and they had a view on their business. Right. They know their business well. And they were like, okay, we know what sells well. And they also had assumptions about the value of customers over time and just kind of thought it didn't make much of a difference. But what they discovered was one of the items is kind of five or six on the list of volume led to a double, like, twice the size ltv. Right. So, like, that was super interesting. And they were spending about the same amount of money to acquire those customers. So that allowed them to say two things. One, why are people doing this? Let's go talk to those customers. So it can allow you to like inform ranging strategy and all that kind of good stuff as well. So you can use these insights to inform what else you develop in the future. But directly from the optimized growth angle, it allowed them to expand like their CAC caps, you know, because they're, they're like, okay, great. Like all things being equal, the cacti LTV ratio for this first order is half. We can invest more here strategically and grow the business more than we expected without having to, without having to find extra capital to do it. They've just reallocated effectively. And I think that's a really good cycle to get in that test, learn, reallocate. It doesn't require you to magic up new budget, it just requires you to allocate it differently.
- [11:36]
Eric Dick
And so important headed into Q4, you know, to have a track record, to know how much we call it stocking the pond on the agency side here we're on the acquisition side. So we're all about, you know, getting as many, you know, sales into that funnel so that you have as much remarketing to do, you know, through your own audiences. And I think that's something that brand owners struggle with, is knowing, knowing how much to invest at in what phase of the funnel and what time of the year in order to see the maximized returns in Q4 specifically.
- [12:04]
Jason Proud
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I like that.
- [12:06]
Eric Dick
So I'm just. So AMP is the, is the suite of tools that can kind of help marketers and advertisers, entrepreneurs. And then lifetimely is what we're talking about specific specifically right now, walk me through a little bit about what lifetimely is and how entrepreneurs use it.
- [12:20]
Jason Proud
Sure. So, you know, AMP helps commerce businesses. We work with kind of 40 odd thousand brands, drive incremental revenue. And we have two ways we do that. One way is analytics, which is lifetimely, and another way is through like on site optimization, which is through back in stock and upsell, which are both brilliant products as well. But lifetimely is analytics. So you have a question about your business, you want to understand what's happening in your business right across the stack. So lifetimely is used by people who work in performance, marketing and CRM and finance to kind of all have a common language to talk about how their business is performing and then ultimately just make better decisions. I think like, I think I'm in the business of partners partnering with brands, operators, entrepreneurs to help them thrive by making better decisions with their own business.
- [13:11]
Eric Dick
And then how does it. Because I think of a little bit like Google Analytics where you've got to, you know, you kind of have to tease the data out yourself. And I'm curious, like when you, when you hook this up to your store, does it surface these cohorts and these opportunities, or do you kind of have to know what you're looking for?
- [13:27]
Jason Proud
Yeah, we, we try and create smart defaults. So we know that every business is different and has kind of different types of questions they want to answ answer. But the way we've solved that is by having a good first use experience. So we've partnered with some of our best customers to create dashboards for different roles as an example. So we've spun up the particular metrics we've seen our best customers using and put them in one spot depending on your role. And we do the same thing with, we do the same thing with cohorts. We do the same thing across the board. So I kind of think of it as partly. It's like 80% baked. Yeah. So it's sort of a good default position and then you can customize it, calibrate it for your circumstance, which we find works pretty well. I think, you know, our job isn't to tell people how to run their business, it's to help illuminate things they otherwise wouldn't have seen or would have missed. And so we find that works, works pretty well. But it's certainly something I'm thinking about a lot as well. Like I want the product to get better at doing that, being a better partner. So that's where I spend kind of all my time thinking about and then.
- [14:30]
Eric Dick
Paint me a picture of what that 80% kind of looks and feels like to people who would be signing on to it.
- [14:36]
Jason Proud
Yeah, for sure. So plug in your core data sources, Shopify, Google Meta, it sucks in all that data, which is really cool. And then allows you to understand really a few things that are most popular. So the most popular things we see and the questions people want to answer is what cohorts are performing how over time. So there's lifetime value and there's a whole lot of breakdown and calibration you can do there daily dashboards. So help me understand for my role how my business is performing right now and focused on the right things. And then P and L. So daily live P and L to see how your business is tracking. We do a whole bunch of other things, Got attribution that we've built over the last six months as well. Lots to do there, but I would say they're the top three things people love. We also have buyer journeys. So you can see what happens over time. If someone buys X in the first order, do they then come back and buy Y? And that can help reveal things as well. So it's kind of those five things, but those three are kind of where most people get started and see a lot of, lot of value.
- [15:39]
Eric Dick
And then how do you think about testing these things? Because it's like you can make all these changes, you can make them make multiple changes at once and then you have no idea where you're at. So how do you, how do you think people about going about actually testing these, these changes to make sure that they're statistically relevant?
- [15:53]
Jason Proud
Yeah, I think that's, that's a really, really important question. I kind of find people, people kind of bifurcate. People either don't do any experimentation and just like, oh, we got it, it's fine. Which I don't think works like you should be experimenting or people are experimenting like way too much and not letting the experiments run. So I kind of think you need to get land somewhere in the middle, which is building the habit. The culture of testing and learning and picking a timeframe that works for your business. Like the problem is the pushback I get from people is they say either don't have time to test. And my answer to that is, but how do you know where to invest and how to make trade offs? So I don't think that's, I don't think that works. But then you can kind of go too far. And so I kind of like having one or two things for most businesses over a two to four week period that you're testing, letting it run for two to four weeks and then reviewing. And if you keep that cycle going, you think about that over a year, if you learn 50 to 100 things about your business, like that's awesome, you're going to be in a so much better spot than you were a year ago. I think often people get very, very excited and like, want to learn everything in a week. The problem is you just can't collect enough. Unless you have like crazy high amounts of volume, you're not going to be able to learn stuff in super short periods of periods of time.
- [17:12]
Eric Dick
One of the phrases that we talked about kind of going into this talk was about how averages can be deceptive. And this is something that comes across on the podcast with almost every person. We're talking about incremental revenue right now and figuring out what portion of your ad budget is actually Driving the results and minimizing the portion that isn't. So talk to me in your world about how you see averages being deceptive.
- [17:36]
Jason Proud
Sure. I think that headline numbers are super important to kind of track the performance of the portfolio. And they're often things you might need to report. If you have investors or board or boss, people want to hear one number. The problem is that you can't act on one number. Like if you're, let's say your LTV to CAC ratio or your dollar CAC or whatever number you pick is up or down. Like, what does that actually tell you? Like, you want metrics that allow you to take action, not just feel good or feel bad. And it's a good test. Like, if all that happens when you see a number go up is the team celebrates. And all that happens when it goes down is the team feels sad. That's great. Not very, not very actionable. And so the, the challenge, I think, for every business is every number is made up of a composite. Like everything in your business is a combination of 100 different things happening. So that don't look at, don't look at averages to try and make tactical decisions. Look at averages to track overall portfolio performance. And so we see people get a lot of value digging into. Okay, so what actually drove that change? And often it's surprising, right? Like you won't know, like maybe a number. The problem often is a number can be up or down for good or bad reasons, depending on what you discover when you dig a bit deeper. And I think it's that digging a bit deeper and maybe going 20% further than you do by default. I think most people kind of get the idea that I should go look at something beyond a headline number. It's just pushing it a bit further that you tend to get a lot of, a lot of value out of.
- [19:13]
Eric Dick
I think a lot of entrepreneurs, especially when they're starting Shopify, has made it so easy to almost paint by numbers in a way where it's like, okay, I need to set this up, I need to set this up. And it's like there's a lot of sort of out of the box setups that get made. Whereas I think a lot of the big wins in E commerce happen when you really focus on what is best for your brand, what's best for your customers, rather than doing something in a paint by numbers type way. What are some common assumptions or sort of set it and forget it flows that you think brands should maybe be questioning and looking into right now?
- [19:44]
Jason Proud
Yeah, I Think that's a really powerful point. I think it's awesome how Shopify have made it easier for everyone to get started. But that isn't the whole job done. Yeah. And I think that idea of calibrating, calibrating few contexts is important. I think a good rule of thumb that I like is one thing I'll talk about something I use with when I talk about product development. People will often say we have insights about our customer. And I always try and point out that like it's not present continuous, it's it. We learned that in the past, it might have changed. So I like the idea of just having a review on everything. Every assumption you're making in your business have some cycle to review it. So if that's every quarter, go back and have a look at, well, wait a second, we said this was a good strategy. Is it actually working? So the first step is like have a process so that you don't get into this habit of thinking, you know, things that absolutely were properly true, but maybe they were true three, six months ago, 12 months ago. That's that's problem kind of, that's spot one. And then I think tactically what you see is things working and people giving up on there being more value. I think a lot of attention in businesses goes to where things are going wrong. I'd start by focusing on some things that are working and saying, well, maybe they're working well, but couldn't they be 20, 30% better? I think retention strategies often look like that. There's not enough test and learn. A really good question I ask people often is, it's great. You have this subscription offer that's awesome. And people will have very positive response to that. They'll be like, it's working awesome in the business. And I ask them, how much have you played with it? How much have you played with the upfront discount, the cycle time, like how have you thought about that? And they're like, ah, it's working, like it's fine. And I'd say that's the kind of stuff where those assumptions can mean that you're leaving stuff on the table. I think if things are going really wrong in a business, people tend to focus on that super quickly because if you don't solve it, but you're out of business. Right. So I think it's those things where something's working. I don't think that justifies not testing out different tweaks. And I think it's that nuance of tweaking that can be really, really Valuable. But there's a couple of spots I'd start retention subscription. Like what those discount levels are.
- [21:59]
Eric Dick
Yeah, I think we, in our pre talk we talked a little bit about the podcast I did with Jordan Narducci, the Nard dog.
- [22:04]
Jason Proud
Yeah, that was a great, great conversation.
- [22:07]
Eric Dick
Yeah, yeah. Oh, he's, he's been in our orbit for years back when he worked at, at Kellogg. And it's really exciting to see, see what he's doing now with subscription. Talk a little bit about, about some of the decisions that go into maximizing people's. Because again, subscription is one of those things that, that people will just sort of set up out of the box and be like, okay, I offered the subscription, but talk to me a little bit. It's, it's such a high impact area for businesses that are able to pull it off. Talk to me about some of the levers that people have to pull within the subscription world for sure.
- [22:39]
Jason Proud
And I think it's absolutely true. Like everyone's got onto the idea that a subscriber is more valuable than someone who's not. I think again, it's like such a good example of. Push a bit further on the detail. So a really good example is a very, very common pattern is people offer upfront discount and then offer it into perpetuity. So 10% off, become a subscriber, 10% off for lifetime, 20% off, become a subscriber, 20% off for lifetime. Like that's a. If you think about discounts as a way of investing in acquisition or investing your margin in growing the business, perpetual discounts are an exceptionally expensive way to invest that margin. And so I guess like my starting point would be my default would absolutely not be a perpetual discount. The problem with that is humans like don't value things off into the future as much as they value things now. And so I play with the shape of the discount. I see companies that do really well do that. And by shape I mean do you offer a bigger upfront discount, for example, to help get people on to a subscription in the first place? And people often, and I know Jordan picked up on this as well, like under bake the upfront discount and then over baker the ongoing discount. Like a starting position for me would be first order discount. Probably what you're doing in your business, you could increase it and that will probably be positive. Obviously measure it and then that ongoing discount you can reduce. And then you can also think about ways and ways to invest a discount. So for example, if you're running a program at the Moment. That's a product I buy. I get a 20% discount into perpetuity. I'm already a loyal customer. I question whether that's, that's the, the best way to spend that money. They could probably offer me a 10% discount and give me some kind of loyalty bonus or samples that I might really enjoy as a loyal customer to that brand. But also might drive new acquisition. I might share it with my friends or it might drive new additions to a subscription. Particularly if you're like a multi, like a wellness product or something that works pretty well like that. We see a lot of brands got a company in Australia we work with that sells protein. Really successful business. It's grown really well. But most customers buy one thing from them. And so like their challenge is how do you expand a really loyal customer base to other items? And they're thinking about that with their subscription. I think that's really smart.
- [25:04]
Eric Dick
I forget which brand it was. It was a cosmetic brand that came on and said that they discovered that people love their products so much they were using spatulas to make sure they got every little bit out of the product and so on. Someone's like, like third order or something like that. They sent just like a, a little branded spatula or whatever for their product. And they found that the users who were sent that gift had like an exponentially larger ltv just because of that like surprise and delight kind of gesture.
- [25:32]
Jason Proud
Yeah, yeah. And I think you can, you can play with that, right? That's. I think that's a really good point because let's, let's play that out idea out a bit. So let's say instead of offering, we'll go with the 20% discount kind of option. You trial a model of 15% but you're happy you already budgeted the 20% so you're fine with that. And you take that 5% difference and invest that in surprise and delight ideas. Just like sending. Yeah, like sending that spoon or whatever happens to work in your context. The customer's not expecting it. Especially if you're selling a product that doesn't have a particularly high dollar value as an ongoing. Ongoing item. Like little surprise delights can be quite a cool way to do it. I'd also trial like bonus credits versus discounts. I think that's a really interesting idea as well. One, the data would say that offering you can offer more because people don't end up cashing them in. So that's kind of like a political policy. You can budget for it and you know, 50% of people are never going to use it. So you can get a lot more perceived value out of that where a discount you're paying straight out of the top line, whether they want it or not. Yeah, exactly. And so I think, I think that's well worth, that's a, like subscriptions to me is such a fertile spot for experimentation because there's so much value on offer. And it's interesting to me that the models look very similar across, across businesses. And the thing I'd say to folks is pick one or two experiments. It doesn't have to be super complicated. You don't have to make it difficult for yourself and just try it out with a cohort ab test it and see. And then the cool thing is with lifetimely or a product like it is, you can just track the results and you're like, okay, that worked. Like not every experiment is going to work for sure. But that habit of experiments leads to a lot of value creation over time.
- [27:24]
Eric Dick
And when you say cohort in that context, when you're testing it against a subscription program or certain discounts, are you talking about time based cohorts in that case? Or traffic organic versus meta or like when you talk about it, when you, when you have something static to test here, are you mainly talking about time based cohorts?
- [27:41]
Jason Proud
Yeah, I think so. Like I would, I would imagine running a particular campaign where you offer a different type of subscription offer, you track that through and you see the value over time. Now the challenge of course is you only discover things over time, over time. And everyone wants to move, everyone wants to move quickly. Right. So it's kind of why everyone gravitates to upper funnel measures of success because you can get results quickly. But it's worth, it's worth tagging and tracking and you could find out in a month or two. And I think the prize on offer for getting it right is worth, is worth the investment. My, my guess is there's a lot of value that people are kind of leaking out of their subscription model without kind of realizing it because they never, they kind of never see it. Right. Because you're either giving it up in a discount that's never getting, never getting booked or.
- [28:32]
Eric Dick
Yeah, we just. Our sister podcast, which maybe we can get you on, is the world's best email and retention podcast, lovingly known as Twitter Burp. It's with Jordan Gordon. It's great, but he just did put out an episode on flows versus campaigns and interesting actually, but, but I got the, the Kohl's notes on how flows are just generally going to be better because they're going to be triggered by something relevant to the user. They're going to go to a narrower, you know, usually you know, part of the, of your audience that has, that has asked for it or triggered it in some way versus campaigns which are just generally going to have less relevant relevance when you send them. What are your thoughts on the use of flows versus campaigns in the retention world?
- [29:12]
Jason Proud
Yeah, like behavior based triggers kind of make a lot more sense to me because it allows you to have a message that's more relevant when someone's performing an action. And so I mean I kind of think the only reason people are using time based is because they aren't able to use trigger based or haven't put in the time to develop it. I think everyone would if they could tailor communications to when people are either showing intent or not intent or that kind of thing. But yeah, I'm a big fan of like behavior based, behavior based triggers and using that as a way to think about it. I think also the challenge for a lot of people is it's operationally a bit stranger. I think campaigning has the benefit that you can schedule it and if you've got a team on the other side of that that has to support your business, it makes operationally a bit or it feels easier. Right. I think the challenge I would say is well, the job isn't making things easy, but I think the outcome you can deliver on a behavior based. A behavior based model is much, much more positive. I'd definitely start there as a default.
- [30:19]
Eric Dick
I'm still waiting for an E commerce brand to come along with segmentation based on first names. Like if I got an email saying this is the Today is the Eric's sale. Everyone in our audience named Eric gets a 20% discount today. Just, just test best cohorting based on people's first names. I think there's something there.
- [30:37]
Jason Proud
I feel like I've seen someone do that. I can't think of who it is. But yeah, I like that idea. Can you imagine we could riff on 10, 15 of these ideas that would be or even just riffing on different behavioral triggers. I used to work, not E commerce related, but I used to work with financial advisors and they spent a lot of time thinking about when is the right behavioral trigger to ask for a referral. And it's a really, really important thing for a financial advice firm because most of their business comes from referrals and like the industry writ large just kind of finger in the air like that was the model. It was just a finger in the air model. And we did all this research, a business I worked for, to help inform people on how to do that differently. And people were like, shocked at the results because they. The starting position was absolutely. We understand that referrals are important and asking for referrals are important. What do you. What are you saying? But the timing and the trigger, people didn't quite get the significance. And I think there's a lot of that happening in E commerce too, where people understand that repurchase and referrals are important. But, like, time and context matters and the outcome can be very like, the outcome can be very different. And I think that's why I'm such a believer in that. Build a culture of testing, learning, and build a culture that celebrates the experiment, not just the result, so that you can get more cool experiments done and happening.
- [32:03]
Eric Dick
And now is the time you need. There's all these different extensions to your revenue that brand owners need to be thinking about with margins getting squeezed. Right. So. And I'm sure that application is applicable for a lot of E commerce brands as well who want ambassadors or refer programs as well. Just being able to know when to ask that because momentum is so important. Like, if a brand, if I am not thinking about a brand, I have nothing to do with them. And they ask, you know, hey, do you want to become an ambassador? There's no chance. But if it's in the right purchase sequence, then there's. There can be that momentum that takes me through.
- [32:34]
Jason Proud
Yeah. And I think you only discover that by playing with those assumptions. You asked about assumptions before. It's like you could probably come up with, hey, maybe three or four different ideas here could work. I find often what people do is say, I kind of know this works. And to me, that's when my, like, spidey senses go off, is when. When anyone starts saying, we know something. I'm like, I don't know if we know as much as we think we do. And like, I think that kind of skepticism can help unearth some really interesting, interesting things.
- [33:05]
Eric Dick
I agree. In all areas of life in this day and age.
- [33:08]
Jason Proud
Very true.
- [33:09]
Eric Dick
Jason, I want to thank you so much for coming on the DTC podcast today. I suggest if you're in the audience and you want to know more about your audience and the triggers that can lead to higher revenue, you want to go to useamp.com maybe look up, Jason, you're a vet in this space. Where, where could people find you?
- [33:25]
Jason Proud
Yeah, find me on X or LinkedIn. Just search my name. Jason Proud. Always happy to have a chat. Talk e commerce, talk strategy, talk product. Really great conversation. Enjoyed it a lot.
- [33:36]
Eric Dick
Yeah, me too. Jason. See you again soon.
- [33:38]
Jason Proud
Awesome. Thanks. Eric.
- [33:46]
Eric Dick
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now @directtoconsumeralloneword.co. i'm Eric Dick, and this has been the D to C podcast. We'll see you next time.