Acquisition Offers That Drive Retention: What’s Working - and Why Testing Matters

Summary

Podcast Summary: Marketing Operators – Episode 70 Title: Acquisition Offers That Drive Retention: What’s Working - and Why Testing Matters
Release Date: July 29, 2025
Hosts: Connor Rowland, Cody Plofker, Connor MacDonald

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1. Introduction

In Episode 70 of Marketing Operators, hosts Connor Rowland, Cody Plofker, and Connor MacDonald delve into the effectiveness of various acquisition offers in driving customer retention. The discussion centers around innovative strategies beyond traditional discount codes, insights from the House Meta Report, and practical tests that demonstrate the impact of these strategies.

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2. Acquisition Offers and Incremental Retention

a. The Challenge with Default Popups

Connor Rowland initiates the discussion by highlighting the often-overlooked complexity of optimizing popup offers in e-commerce. He states, “Testing pop ups is surprisingly hard. It is such an influential touch point of the experience and like, I don't think people are thinking all that critically about it” (00:15).

Cody Plofker echoes this sentiment, expressing curiosity about the margin dilution caused by default discount popups. He remarks, “I've wondered how much margin has been diluted in e-commerce just by people having like default discounts on their pop up” (00:09).

b. Cash Back vs. Discount Codes

The conversation shifts to Connor Rowland’s experience with implementing cash back offers instead of traditional discount codes in popups. He shares compelling data from their tests:

• Option Selection: “41% of people who opted in selected cash back and then 20% selected credit back. So 38% of people didn't select anything” (05:06).
• Margin Efficiency: By offering cash back, they achieved a “cash equivalent was basically nine and a half percent, which is below that 10% discount code and we create a lot of additional value.” (05:06).
• Enhanced Engagement: The team saw a “39% increase in email engagement rate” (07:58) and improved email and SMS capture rates by 40% and 44%, respectively (05:06).
• Retention Improvement: Notably, they observed a “42% increase in repeat orders by people who opt into cashback” (09:41).

Cody adds, “My guess is 95% of brands have not tested their pop ups and actually tested offers” (12:29), emphasizing the untapped potential in optimizing popup offers.

c. Measuring Effectiveness

The hosts discuss the complexities of accurately measuring the impact of different offers. Connor Rowland explains their testing methodology:

“We did split test the pop ups. So we had two flows set up, we had two email flows set up, we had two SMS flows set up and then we split the traffic evenly” (17:37).

Cody highlights the importance of holistic testing beyond just opt-in rates, stressing the need to evaluate conversion rates and overall funnel performance.

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3. Insights from the House Meta Report

a. Overview of the Report

The discussion transitions to the House Meta Report, which analyzes Meta (formerly Facebook) campaign performance. The report focuses on Advantage Plus (ASC) versus manual campaign strategies through 100 high-impact experiments.

b. Key Findings

• Overall Effectiveness: “Meta works. It’s like a 19% lift across all of these high impact studies” (43:33).
• ASC vs. Manual Campaigns: Initially, Advantage Plus outperformed manual campaigns by “9% on an incremental ROAS basis” (43:33). However, over extended periods, manual campaigns outperformed ASC by “12%” (43:33).
• Mid-Funnel Optimization: Campaigns optimized for mid-funnel events (e.g., view content, add to cart) saw a “121% lift” (43:33) compared to lower funnel purchase-optimized campaigns. These mid-funnel campaigns also demonstrated a longer post-test window lift of “44% versus 26%” (43:33).

c. Actionable Insights

Cody interprets these findings, noting that while ASC provides initial boosts, manual campaigns may offer better long-term performance. He advises marketers to:

• Diversify Campaign Strategies: Incorporate mid-funnel optimizations to capture a broader audience and drive incremental returns.
• Focus on Creative and Offers: Since optimization events alone don’t guarantee incremental reach, enhancing creative diversity and offer attractiveness is crucial.
• Leverage Incrementality Testing: Use tools like Prescient for more accurate measurement, especially when scaling budgets for peak seasons like Q4.

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4. Bundle Builder Test

a. Implementation and Strategy

Connor Rowland shares their innovative approach to using a bundle builder within the acquisition funnel:

“We inserted these breaks in some of our collection pages where we have this little banner that's like, you know, build your own bundle, save up to X percent” (68:02).

b. Test Results

The test compared two variants over approximately 5,000 conversions:

• Conversion Rate Increase: “A 2.3% lift in conversion rate” (71:01).
• Average Order Value (AOV): “A 5.25% lift in AOV” (71:01).
• Revenue Per User: “A 6.7% to 7.7% lift in revenue per user” (71:01).

These improvements translated to significant revenue gains through paid media channels, validating the effectiveness of strategic bundle offering.

c. Future Plans

Building on the success, the team plans to:

• Optimize Offer Placement: Testing the bundle builder CTA further up the funnel.
• Enhance User Experience: Streamline the bundle builder to reduce complexity and better align with diverse customer preferences.

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5. Conclusion

The episode wraps up with the hosts reiterating the importance of testing and optimizing acquisition offers to drive retention and maximize revenue. They emphasize moving beyond standard discount strategies to explore innovative offers like cash back and bundle builders, supported by data-driven insights from tools and reports like the House Meta Report.

Notable Quote: Cody Plofker encapsulates the episode's essence: “Sometimes it can be a GWP I guess it could be a free shipping, you know, code if you're thinking, if you're doing it correctly. I think Cashback is another interesting one. So we haven't really tested it but it's definitely stuff we've thought about.” (26:56)

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Key Takeaways

• Innovative Acquisition Offers: Moving beyond default discount codes to offer cash back and customizable bundles can lead to higher retention and increased revenue.
• Holistic Testing: Evaluate offers not just on opt-in rates but throughout the entire customer funnel, including conversion and retention metrics.
• Meta Campaign Strategies: While Advantage Plus offers initial performance boosts, manual campaigns may provide better long-term incremental returns. Mid-funnel optimizations can enhance overall campaign effectiveness.
• Strategic Bundle Building: Implementing a bundle builder within the acquisition funnel can significantly lift conversion rates, AOV, and revenue per user.

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For those interested in further details, consider listening to the full episode of Marketing Operators.

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Note: Times in brackets refer to the transcript timestamps for reference.

Transcript

[Connor Rowland]

We are going to talk about acquisition offers that drive incremental retention. We're going to talk about the House meta report as well as Connor Rowland's got a good test of the week for us at the end here.

[Cody]

I've wondered how much margin has been diluted in e commerce just by people having like default discounts on their pop up.

[Connor Rowland]

I think testing pop ups is surprisingly hard. It is such a influential touch point of the experience and like, I don't think people are thinking all that critically.

[Unknown Speaker]

About it if you're not at a scale where you can afford to pay 10 to 12 or whatever per month for a holdout testing tool. We're also probably aren't at a scale where you need to run those non purchase conversion campaigns.

[Connor Rowland]

We found a lot of success with cash back versus a discount code in our popups. All right, welcome back to another episode of Marketing Operators. It is episode 70. We are out of the 60s. I'm calling in from a new city. I've covered a lot of distance while going 70 for 70 on podcast. So I'm in Reno, Nevada today on my way to Tahoe. Have you guys done any wakeboarding before?

[Cody]

Love wakeboarding.

[Unknown Speaker]

Really? I've wakeboarded like once or twice. I'm more of a. More of a tubing guy.

[Connor Rowland]

A tubing guy?

[Unknown Speaker]

Tubing? You guys ever have you run tubing?

[Connor Rowland]

Of course.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah.

[Connor Rowland]

Where do you, where do you wakeboard, Cody?

[Cody]

I've done it a few times in the Bahamas and then we just got this like pontoon boat. We had like two boats, but we have like a pontoon boat which is just be for like drinks and like going super.

[Connor Rowland]

It's like a patio.

[Cody]

Super easy. Yeah. But apparently I found out we can wakeboard. I saw like my brother on Instagram when I wasn't out there when we can just like water skiing behind it and I'm like, hell yeah. So bought. Bought a wakeboard as well.

[Connor Rowland]

Dude.

[Cody]

Awesome. So you're in Tahoe right now.

[Connor Rowland]

I'm in Reno right now. Okay. So if you guys. I've been telling people this, this is such an annoying little anecdote, but you guys will get it. I wanted to bring my dog, so I needed to drive in. It's an eight hour drive from Salt Lake and we had to do this podcast this morning. So I. The best plan, which I feel pretty good about, is I drove last night to Reno, so stayed at the Hilton last night, podcast this morning. I'll be in Tahoe this afternoon. So everybody gets done what they need. I Hit another podcast episode. My dog makes it to Tahoe.

[Cody]

The dedication to the podcast.

[Connor Rowland]

Can you guys see him here? He doesn't.

[Unknown Speaker]

Wait, what dog is that?

[Connor Rowland]

It's Pig.

[Unknown Speaker]

Pig's first. First podcast appearance.

[Connor Rowland]

Pig's first podcast appearance.

[Unknown Speaker]

So what time did you get into Reno last night?

[Connor Rowland]

Like 10.

[Unknown Speaker]

Oh, that's not bad. Okay, so you, so you left during the day. I was hoping you didn't like drive through the night and then get up for this no. 7am PT podcast.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, cool. All right, look, we can get into it. I want to cover quite a bit today. We are going to talk about acquisition offers that drive incremental retention. I think that'll be fun. We're going to talk about the Meta house or the House meta report as well as Connor Rowland's got a good test of the week for us at the end here. But before we begin, I'd like to thank our sponsors, Motion Rich panel. After Self Prescient and House, I want to talk quickly about Motion's AI creative strategists. These AI agents are built by best in class DTC marketers including Barry Hot, Jess Bachman, Marella Crespi, Alex Cooper and many others. And what's unique is that you get to use agents to analyze your creative using real data from your meta ad account. Connor, have you played around with these at all?

[Unknown Speaker]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Our team's deep in there.

[Connor Rowland]

I wanted to pull up too. So for those listening, we'll, we'll talk through it quickly. One, I think the implementation beautiful. You could see our top performing ad creative. Last week what I pulled up was Jess's critique. This ads messaging played that progress ran took maybe two minutes and then this is what we got and I thought it was great. The good fast paced messaging, clean product demonstration, smart focus on magsafe, what we can push. And I thought this was, this was funny. You know me as a marketer, I'm very precious about our ad creator. But he's like Apple's must have accessory is presumptuous and lacks credibility. The smartest wallet you'll ever own is empty superlative marketing speak. I'm like, okay, Jess, he definitely, he's definitely roasting the ad and what I thought was really cool were some of the next steps. He says reframe around the actual problem. This solves the daily friction of wallet phone management. So the AI has generated what this ad is about and actually reframed what the problem could be. And I thought that was really powerful. Two, I ran Motions Trek this month's winning themes and you see exactly what we're talking about all the time. Durability that lasts a lifetime. Ditching the bulk for minimalist design. Lifetime offers create urgency and cultural partnerships that expand appeal. And I'm like, yeah, look, you basically get what we're trying to do as an advertising business. I think this is really helpful for creative strategy and giving the team actionable insights that we can work on every day.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, this is saving our team tons of time. Motion's also giving teams an AI adoption cheat code. It's not like they're just throwing this new technology at you and saying, go figure it out. And they are really giving teams what they need to utilize this and get the most value out of this. And last but not least, you do not need a Motion contract to use this. You can try these agents for free, test them out, see how they fit into your workflows, and start getting value out of them without even needing a Motion contract. So if you want to try out some of these AI agents, go try them@motion app.com.

[Connor Rowland]

The reason I want to talk about acquisition offers that drive incremental retention. There's a great Finance Operators episode this week with Dan Glazer from postscript and Sean Frank from Ridge talking about Fondue, which is postscript's cashback tool. The reason they talked about it on Finance Operators is there's a lot of, like, kind of nerdy financial benefits to using cashback versus discount codes. Discount codes. There's like a net negative cash flow or something. I was unfamiliar with the term. Dan brought it up a couple times. I wanted to talk about it because we found a lot of success with cash back versus a discount code in our popup. So we could talk through that. And then I know Connor Rollins experimented a little bit with, like, how does your popup offer and your retention efforts. How's it like a net positive? How are you. How are you driving more efficient acquisition but also driving incremental retention? So what I want to talk through is like, I've got a bunch of Fondue data here. Let me share my screen and we'll talk through it and then we'll kind of kick it off from there. This is. I put this together last year when we were like testing it initially. For those listening, I'll talk to all the data. For those watching, you're seeing a lot of very real Ridge data here. So for this period, we drove $1.5 million is 10,000 orders, AOV of 153. And then basically the There's a number of. I want to talk through three different types of wins here. The first one is kind of what I mentioned earlier where by offering a cash back option you get two options when using fondue or I'm sure there are other ways to do this as well, but you're either offering cash back via a Visa gift card or you're offering credit back. And in this case we were offering 20, 20% cash back or 30% credit back. So we are, we are incentivizing people to take the credit. And that's an important piece of this here. One easy win of this is that not everybody selects anything. So you're getting email and SMS opt ins which we'll talk about in just a second. But not everybody actually selects one of the benefits. They don't redeem the cash or the credit. So 38 of people didn't take either. And that's like what the finance operators episodes largely based around is like when you give discount codes it's, there's 100 usage, people are getting it, they're using it right there. There's a little bit of friction here. There's a selection, not everybody makes a selection, therefore you benefit. So what we saw here was 41% of people who of people who opted in selected cash back and then 20% selected credit back. So 38% of people didn't select anything. I applied an 80% margin. So our cash like equivalent was basically nine and a half percent. So that is below that 10% discount code and we create a lot of additional value. So we're saving a little bit there. But what becomes a little bit cooler is some of these two other points. One is that by messaging to 20% cash back or 30% credit back, we actually improved email captures by 40% and SMS captures by 44%. Like off the bat we are giving back less cash than offering the discount code but collecting 40% more email. So like easy win there. And then the other like win that I was surprised BY Is this 39% increase in email engagement rate. So people clicking through from emails went from 9% to 12%. So now all of a sudden we're capturing more emails, we're capturing more SMS of those emails and numbers that we captured. We are getting better engagement, we're driving more clicks. So it's just like kind of a win across the board here, which I was surprised by. So we're talking about both here. We're giving back less cash, we're driving better engagement, we're capturing more leads and Then the last one, which I think is really interesting because again 21% of people selected this 30, 30% credit back is that we actually saw an incremental improvement in retention. And this is kind of what I wanted to, to talk mostly about. You're seeing some of our retention numbers here. This is on a pretty short time frame. We go from a 12% repurchase rate to a 17% repurchase rate.

[Cody]

That's huge.

[Connor Rowland]

So a 42% increase in repeat orders by people who opt into cashback. It's massive. And this was the reason I was geeking out on it is because like you don't find a lot of wins like this. Things that. Okay, so I will give the caveat. We didn't, technically we didn't. We tested between a 10% off popup and a 20% cash back popup. We didn't hold out the popups. So we're not talking about purely incremental orders here. But you don't typically see wins between a functionally a lower discount, a higher opt in rate, better engagements and better ltv. So we like kind of stacked wins here I felt and it was a, a really unique way to put it. So that's what I thought was worth diving in around. And then it reminded me a little bit Connor, I think, well one, I'd be curious if either of you guys have any feedback or questions on some of this data. And then Connor, I know that you guys have tested similar sorts of things where you, your acquisition offer, your pop up offer is actually something someone will receive post purchase. So what do you guys think?

[Cody]

I got, I got, I got a few things. First of all, Alex Beller, if you're listening, not a sponsor of our pod. I know you're sponsor. The other ones we'll send you. Tell us where to send the invoice to for this wonderful sponsorship but just kidding, not a sponsored one. That's really cool. We're testing the Postscript Shopping Network which is kind of cool and does a similar thing. Does some auto opt in. I think just like two things I have experienced and one I've just thought of is I've wondered how much margin has been diluted in E commerce just by people having default discounts on their pop ups without. My guess is 95% of brands have not tested their pop ups and actually tested offers. And I don't know if you know, actual discount is essentially incremental and or as margin dilutive. So I love that you're testing it and I love that you're that there are other offers that are still attractive to people without necessarily just being like a discount from the get go. So I think a lot of things about this make sense and I think it's giving me a reason to test it. Yeah. One thing I think we've seen in the past before is like, again like the offer, I think that's where you're going with it. The offer and the acquisition offer can really bring in the right type of person. Like for us, difficult purchases do well, especially above a threshold. And like the biggest predictor for us outside of product mix of LTV and retention is AOV is first order aov. And I think if there are things you can do to boost AOV rather than just giving a discount while still keeping an attractive offer, it makes a lot of sense. But yeah, I think a lot of the mechanics just so the cash back or which is the, the whole people. It's like the whole Starbucks thing where people are paying upfront and giving you cash before they're doing, you know, orders. That's I think what they were talking about on, on fops. And then not everyone's going to redeem it and then it, it creates like a, an incentive or an open loop for people to come back. It's, it's pretty genius.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah. And it's a negative cash conversion cycle. That's what they said. It's come back to me now, since I'm home. Yeah. Connor, what do you think?

[Unknown Speaker]

Connor, what was your, what was your testing methodology when you were, was it like a, were you doing actually a true split during the same period of time or were you doing more of like a period over period test and then just looking at the different cohorts based on the, the, the offer you had running at that moment in time?

[Connor Rowland]

That's a good question. This was a, this was because kind of, to Cody's point also, I think testing pop ups is surprisingly hard. It is such a, it is such a influential touch point of the experience. And like, I don't think people are thinking all that critically about it. So I've complained in the past, I don't think it's all that easy to just do a holdout on the pop up because nobody really, nobody's incentivized to do that. We were using AMPED at the time and I could be wrong here but like they don't have a, hey, just don't show amp to 20% of people. They're really just focused on building out the analytics of better design and, and, and the analytics around actually showing people the pop up and not the analytics of not showing people the pop up.

[Cody]

Well, and then, and then the bigger, the bigger issue, and I'll get on a soapbox here is like, we don't just care about like if you're testing a postscript or whatever, you are like subscriber conversion rate. Because most times if people are testing a pop up, they're just testing like an a B test within Klaviyo or within postscript or something like that. I know they'll change like, right, like, like a retention person might, might change a delay instead of going 10 seconds or at 5 and they're like, oh, I doubled our, our email collection rate. But it's like, yeah, what did you do to the conversion rate?

[Connor Rowland]

Right.

[Cody]

And so I think you have to test those very holistically on like the whole funnel.

[Connor Rowland]

Totally. And that's what I mean. Like I, I don't know many marketers who have done holdouts on their pop ups because like there's a lot of people you could have, you could have an amazing email submit rate because it's really hard to get out of like, you know, the X buttons hidden or like you're forcing people through buttons or whatever and you're actually just driving down conversion rate that people are leaving.

[Unknown Speaker]

I actually think that's, that's an interesting point because I think the, we, we had to spend a lot of time thinking about how do we. Because I think a lot of marketers stop at opt in rate, right? They're like, oh, we just improved our opt in rate by, by 20% or 50% or whatever it is. But then they're not actually tracking that cohort and they haven't figured out a way to like actually understand how many those people are buying. What's their first order aov, what's their post first order lifetime value? And then there's the, and then there's the issue of time, right? If you're doing a period over period test, like, okay, the first test you ran, that cohort has had more time to mature than the second test you ran. So then you also have to control for like the amount of time, right? So like we look at, we, we capture most of our value in the first 90 days. So we were looking at, and this is just because of the, the timing we had from our last test was like, all right, what's the 60 day post first purchase window of time? So there's a lot of like, it took us some time to like actually figure out like how do we actually measure this stuff? And it is kind of complicated. You have to like figure out basically how to like segment out your cohorts and whatever like customer data platform you use. At least that's what, that's what we ended up doing. And it's kind of tricky actually. You have to like, you really sit down and think about like the most accurate way to measure these things. Because it's a lot more complicated than just like launching three ads in meta and like comparing the one day click row as.

[Cody]

If you know me, you know how cheap I am and how much I love saving money. This year is all about cutting costs and staying lean. You see me talk about it on Twitter. I cannot stand watching great DTC brands, even mediocre ones, get ripped off by SaaS vendors in 2020, 2025. So many of them are charging way too much over promising and under delivering. And so I can't stand to see it. So I don't want to see it happen to you. I absolutely won't have it happening to me. You've also seen that I'm all in on AI. And both those reasons are why I love Rich Panel so much. It's about half the price of the beautiful software that we used before, and it was built specifically with AI in mind. We made the switch to Rich Panel right before Black Friday last year and I almost regret not switching sooner. We had zero downside. The implementation was pretty immediate, which actually shocked me. I was a little worried about it, not going to lie, but it just went off without a hitch. We saved money. We leveled up our six at the same time. So here's our numbers. We cut our six team from 18 to 10 agents. Not before Black Friday, but since onboarding to Rich Panel, with our order volume staying the same or even going up, our CSAT has stayed rock solid at 4.2 out of 5. I'd like it a little bit better, but that's, that's stuff that we can do. AI is handling 70% of the tickets, which is awesome. So our ticket to order ratio has gone way down from about 40% to 14%. So we have fewer full timers. Our revenue employee has gone up. We don't need as many people to get back to people and able to be a little bit more strategic with where we allocate our resources. So if your current CF CX software needs more people, is more expensive than you want to pay, and has some janky AI solution, I highly recommend that you check out Rich Panel. Rich panel guarantees a 30% ticket reduction in the first 60 days or your money back again. It's super easy to switch. They take care of data migration, staff training, all that good stuff. So you can go live in under 14 days. So check out richpanel.com and tell them you heard about them from the marketing operators podcast.

[Connor Rowland]

So to answer your original question, Connor, we did split test the pop ups. So we had two flows set up, we had two email flows set up, we had two SMS flows set up and then we split the traffic evenly so we didn't have to in this case have to be concerned about like period over period reporting and the variables associated with that.

[Unknown Speaker]

Got it. Okay.

[Connor Rowland]

But I was, I was. Because my point here is partially that I think fondue is cool and like I was geeking out on the data but, but really just like marketers thinking more holistically about the value you can create with offers in your pop up. So it's been a long time, Connor, but, and I don't remember the exact details but how have you guys approached this? Like what, what has that pop up offer looked like that you saw?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah.

[Connor Rowland]

Also drive, you know, incremental revenue in the, in the customer life cycle.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. So I'll start, I'll start kind of, I'll, I'll start with what we're doing now and almost work backwards. Like we are now rolling out or we're going to test like the fondue cashback stuff based on like some of the conversations that we've had outside of, outside of this podcast. But it was cool to see the data here. So what we currently run is we run a second order offer. So it's basically saying hey, dependent on what you spend on your first order. And it's just like tiered like the more you spend on your first order, the more you get off your second order. So you can get like up to 75 off on your second order. That's our, that's our pop up offer. Before that we were running just a blanket and it wasn't really value added. And, and this is ultimately why we decided to test away from it is we were running this blanket like hey, opt in and you save up to 30 off on our best selling 12 piece set. We didn't really have to opt in to get that offer. Right. Like that is just the, that's just the, the evergreen price for bundling and the opt in rates were good on it but it didn't drive great lifetime value. And it was also a CS headache. Like we had tons hundreds and thousands of people Reaching out and saying, you know, this is kind of misleading. And we ultimately decided like data aside, first off, we believe we could test into a better performing offer. But we said like data aside, we can't have our very first touch point with our customer be a poor experience. And like it was pretty clear that all the CS tickets we were getting around, it was driving a pretty poor experience. So and I'm curious your guys take on this because I have like, you know, you kind of were stacking a bunch of really good data points on top of each other that all sort of told a very cohesive story. I'd say for the most part we've tested into a, a better performing offer. But there's one day like the opt in rate's not as, not nearly as good as it used to be. So I'm still like trying to wrap my head around that and improve that. But so yeah we went, we basically went from this, this, this 30% off offer to testing a variety of different second order offers. At, at the worst case scenario our reorder rate grew. This is, we're, we're looking 60 day post first order. So this has actually grown over time. We should probably do another, another dive here now that we're like you know, way, way further out than that. But we basically grew our reorder rate from anyone that opted into that 30% off offer and bought for the first time. The reorder rate was about 9.1% on our second order offer. That reorder rate grew from to 14% on the. We, we then also did a first order gift with purchase followed up by a second order offer. So same thing like gift with purchase that scaled up based on how much you spent on the first order. That reorder rate was, was 12%. And then the, the last major offer we tested last year was our sweepstakes and that reorder rate was 18%. Also saw way better like total lifetime revenue metrics on all of the second order offers. Like if you look at our first order gift with purchase offer, we grew that, that 60 day lifetime value by not almost $100 like 90 something dollars by rolling out the second order offer. So that, that was like a huge win for us is that all of these had a better like sweepstakes same thing had like a $64 better first order or sorry 60 day LTV. But the thing is is our opt in rate has been much worse on these. You know the 30% off offer has a way better opt in rate than like the second order. Offer. So that's the part that we're like, great. We've effectively driven stronger reorder rates, we've effectively effectively driven better lifetime revenue through the second order offer. So now it's just like how do we, how do we make that first touchpoint even more attractive and like get that opt in rate back to where it was with that 30% offer? That's the part that we're still trying to figure out.

[Connor Rowland]

So just to clarify it, you guys have a second order offer, someone purchases, you have a second offer to drive up repeat purchase rate, but you're not currently messaging that second order offer in the pop up.

[Unknown Speaker]

No, no, we are. That is, that is what we message in the pop up.

[Connor Rowland]

Okay, got it, got it. Yeah. And I think that's what's, I think that's what's interesting. Yeah. So you guys, you guys have a bit to work on one kind of related point that I was talking about with my this week because again, at least I don't think I see a lot of people doing this. Like we, we kind of stumbled our way into it frankly with the, the cashback offer. Because you can only get the offer post purchase essentially. That's like the whole point of it. But like really bringing up this like post purchase value that you offer and messaging it in a coherent and thoughtful way that's not confusing, that's not creating tickets. I think there's a lot of value there. Like we were just discussing kind of lower down the funnel when people are opting into sms. These people are just about to check out. Just get them to opt into SMS at a higher rate. If we incentivize that with our second order offer and just like how do you thoughtfully bring that up and like capture as much value from it as possible? They're going to get it regardless. But like can you get that higher SMS often?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, we, we took some of the, the learnings that we found related like option rates and lifetime revenue and we're trying to like basically we're trying to find the best of both worlds here. We know messaging that like 12 piece set discount is really attractive on that first order. We also know the second order offer is better reorder rates, better lifetime revenue. So we've kind of re, like we, we spent a solid three months like revamping our entire welcome flow in last year or not last year, excuse me, earlier this year, everything like from copy to content to how we actually message the offer and we took those learnings and we're again we didn't want that 30% to be super prominent in the popup because we knew that it was just kind of misleading but knowing that that was really attractive and you can see it through the option, right? The conversion rate on that offer, we've just made that a lot more prominent in the, in the welcome series. So now instead of saying like in the welcome series just having like reiterating the second order offer, we're saying hey, you know you can get 30 off on our best selling 12 piece set and you're gonna get this amount off on your next order that is dependent on how your. So we're taking those learnings and we're figuring out how to, how to put them in our welcome flow again. The big, the big like I don't want to call it question mark because it's not like we have terrible opt in rates by any means but we're just really trying to figure out like how do we improve our, our pop up option rates Evergreen. So maybe it's just like I don't know, we just need to figure out how to incentivize that that first order a little bit more and make it more exciting because right now it's like the second order is the part that's exciting but like we got to figure out that that first order piece a little bit more.

[Connor Rowland]

100%. Cody, how are you guys approaching like welcome offers right now?

[Cody]

So we've never wanted to, we never wanted to do a discount so like we just cared about margin and just like even if maybe you would make more, you know, contribution margin dollars like we just haven't wanted to be on sale and have a discount so we've never done it. So we've really just like what's weird is like our pop up has always been so I before that most of our email capture is going through quizzes because we have quizzes very prominently displayed in all of our paid social funnel. Like that's been the vast majority of our email acquisition and it's allowed us to really grow our list super quickly. So I don't think we've, we've probably neglected our pop ups and haven't done that much with it for that reason. But I think now that we have more bandwidth and we're working through it, we are trying to do so we have just. It's a little weird. I don't love it from a UX perspective. We just call out our free shipping threshold and it's essentially just free shipping on orders above but you don't have to subscribe to get it but people do. Would it perform better if we had a better offer or something that was specific to email and us sms probably. We just again like haven't really needed to optimize towards it. But I have been thinking about it because we have been testing our pop ups more and again we're testing copy and format and images but the offer is definitely going to be the bigger lever than all of those. And so trying to think of a kind of non margin dilutive, you know, brand forward offer. Right. Sometimes it can be a gwp I guess it could be a free shipping, you know, code if you're thinking, if you're doing it correctly. I think Cashback is another interesting one. So we haven't really tested it but it's definitely stuff we've thought about but, but we haven't done. But I think just again my, my thought is like I just don't get why everyone just does a standard 10% off. Like if you test it and it works for you, like fine. But I definitely would, would, would encourage people to test their pop up offer to much more than I do.

[Connor Rowland]

I mean if you think about it, if you think about the incremental impact of the 10% off pop up like who what? I just can't imagine there's that many consumers who wouldn't have converted if they didn't have the 10% off.

[Cody]

Exactly.

[Connor Rowland]

It just seems so like relatively insignificant. Dan from Postscript brings this up on the finance operators podcast. But like one of their theories around Cashback and why people don't select it to some degree is that people buying on Shopify are like some of the least price conscious consumers. Right? Like if, if you're price conscious you're going to Temu or Amazon or Target or whatever and it's like no, you're on, you're on bridge.com buying the expensive wallets and for that customer the, the, the incremental impact of a 10 discount code just seems really small. So I think we're probably in the relative early innings of brands like fully optimizing that.

[Unknown Speaker]

I don't, I don't know about you, you guys as a consumer but I'm like, I was buying these supplements yesterday and they're like like you know, opt in to, to get 10 off and I, and I did and it took them like 15, 20 minutes to, to send it to me. I'm like, I don't, like, I don't want this to like, I just want to get this like check this thing off on my list. I really wanted to order it and get it by a certain time. I'm like, screw it. Like, I'm just gonna go and buy this thing. It's like I'm the type of consumer where it's like, I just want it and if they, if they delay sending it to me, I'm like, I'm just gonna buy it. Like, I don't want to have to like wait to do this.

[Connor Rowland]

Oh, totally. I mean the, the people. Because I guess there's multiple ways of implementing it obviously, but like a lot of people. Yeah, to your point, a lot of people don't have. A lot of people would put the discount code in like the success screen of the pop up. So you don't theoretically have to leave. You could copy it right there. But yeah, some people send it via email. It's. That's horrendous customer experience. I've got to go leave the site now, wait a couple minutes to get the code so I can go back so I can save eight bucks or whatever. It's just like I find that I. Yeah, I would bet that that's actually like very likely a net negative on the business.

[Unknown Speaker]

I'd be curious to ask like a, like a super technical retention marketer like Jacob Sappington or Kelly Stymish from Homestead, because I've, I feel like it's been a while, but I'm, I feel like in the past I've heard retention marketers say that there's value in doing that for like email deliverability rates. Like to have someone opt in and then immediately go and open that first email. I've been told that that's like very good for your Klaviyo account health. But I totally agree with you. Also a dog customer experience.

[Connor Rowland]

Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, well, okay, I'm sure it does create some sort of value. Like I'm sure it does create some sort of value. But does that value offset some decline in conversion rate for sending 15%, 10% of people, like off your site? Yeah, I find that hard to believe.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, probably.

[Connor Rowland]

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[Cody]

Yeah, we have. In this economy. Got to.

[Connor Rowland]

Because I know we do this sometimes. I know hexclad does too. I see it, I see it all the time. But people's pop ups just reiterate the bundle savings.

[Cody]

That's a good idea. And is that like specific to PvP is like are they being segmented to like if somebody's on that PDP or just site wide?

[Connor Rowland]

I'm sure people are doing it all sorts of different ways. I've definitely seen it site wide. If you're running funnels to bundles, which I'm sure you guys do, then like that actually seems like a good consumer experience. You're just, I think you would just begin collecting emails and then they're gonna have the offer on the site when they land on the pdp. But that's just one, one thing to put in the mix is like it doesn't even have to be anything different to what you're currently offering. It's just around messaging and how you want to tee that up.

[Cody]

Yeah, I, we, we. And again it just hasn't been tested. Like there's so many variables in a funnel and I think we just like have tested bigger ones. But we, we haven't really. We've excluded a lot of our pop UPS on our landing pages because we, we've, you know, had the quiz. We're actually testing both on PDP and eventually landing pages. Like quizzes in the popups. Either we'll, we'll test one right now where. Because right now you go to a different page. We'll test one right now where it's like, it'll have a delay, but if you're on a miracle bomb pdp, it'll have essentially a pop up just to lead to the quiz. And then we'll have another one that actually has the quiz on it. And I could totally see if those do well testing them on landing pages. And I think like, you know, I know you mentioned like the Persona funnels with like, you know, a week or two ago. Like that's really one of our big focuses right now. I think we should do a whole podcast on that if you guys want. But like how do you tailor like. Yeah, like the pop up specific to, to the message of, you know, to the offer and the message of that to make it like a congruent experience I think is worthwhile if like the.

[Connor Rowland]

Traffic is there 1,000%. You know, one of my beliefs, and we haven't actioned this at Ridge at all is one, I think email pop ups should probably roll up into the E Comm team instead of the retention team. Like it should just be thought of as a part of the web experience. We brought that up before. And then I love the points around like using the pop up to like shape traffic. The two brands. I've seen this do really well. Fabletics does it in like a really crazy way. I don't even know if they have an email capture in their pop up, but they send you through a survey essentially and then, and then how you complete that survey, then they'll redirect you to like you'll click through any ad and then they ask you what offer you want to shop. You could select a different offer and then they'll send you that one. So, so they use this, this pop up to send you to exactly where you've expressed you would like to go. And then the other one that I really like is eight Sleep. And I don't know if they're running it anymore, but it was like a multi page pop up and it was just like really educational. And if you think about it like it was just a great qualifying touch point where like all of a sudden you're like pushing people through almost like the equivalent of a landing page in terms of what information you're getting. Across and then you can drive them like to wherever you want after that. And it could be lot, there could be logic baked into it. So I think we probably see a lot more of that happen over time as well.

[Cody]

Yeah, we've, we've tested and I think more people are coming around to this now. But I think like traditional like direct response marketers had it was like the shorter the funnel the better. And I heard like Ryan Doney talking about this. If you guys listen to like Scalability school, which is like really good podcast with Zach and Foxwell on them. But like we've always had more success with longer funnels and actually like requiring people to do a little bit more and like adding the quiz in there. But so we, we have always found better success with actually asking people a question rather than just giving email. And I, it seems to be much more common or like I've seen that on Gruen's pop ups and a lot of others to where now I'm like, all right, we ask people one question. We'll ask them like, you know, what's your main concern? Is it dark sort whatever it is. Like, I'm also like how do we, what happens if we ask two questions, three questions like yeah, it lengthens the pop up. But maybe first of all there is a lot of value in like you said, segmenting that traffic whether you could send them somewhere from there or to, for, for like email. Right. And having that feed email. But also does that help conversion rates? Like it's worth testing. So I, I, I love the call out on those.

[Unknown Speaker]

What's your, what's your methodology for like the cohort? I'm always curious like going back to what I said earlier about how it can be. It's takes more thought to measure the behavior of these cohorts and segment them based on pop up. So like, like I said, like we've basically, you know, we have them segmented in different klaviyo lists. We then take that klaviyo list, we, we upload it into our, our customer data platform which we use one called Decile and then we're basically measuring all of the revenue order reorder. All the things that I just mentioned earlier in the show are what are you, what are you using Connor to measure those cohorts and, and specifically their post opt in behavior.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, another pet peeve of mine is like I don't think there's any good way to do this currently. Like I don't love klaviyo analytics. I don't think CDPs are all that common for brands. We don't have a great solution to them. Well, we did in this case, I believe, and I'm sure this would work is like we would just build those seg. We would have the segments in Klaviyo during this period. Did you opt into the. The code pop up or did you opt into the cashback pop up? We'd export those segments and then you do get like initial order value versus lifetime value. And we could look at like and then same with orders. So that's how we would do the. That's how we did that analysis on a, on like a cohort basis.

[Unknown Speaker]

Is that you doing it or do. Do you have like, do you have an analytics team at. At Ridge that is handling a lot of your reporting? Like, I know Cody has, I think a pretty senior analytics person that I think Cody, you brief in a lot of these analytics reports too. Like, we don't have that. I. I want that. I think we're gonna head down that path at some point. I think we're actually long overdue for that. And we've have like, yeah, your guys has. Yeah, I mean we have like a lot of data driven marketers, which is great. But like those reports can take time. And like, I'm like, I don't want like myself and our marketers necessarily to be spending two hours pulling a report. I want them to brief in a report, keep working on the strategic work, then get that report back from an analyst and then have the insight. And it's just like a way more efficient use of time. So I was curious like what your team stacks is for that, Connor.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, it's also not, not particularly robust. We have a guy, I think he's in Uruguay who is just savage with Google sheets.

[Cody]

So.

[Connor Rowland]

And he would put it together. Yeah. So he does a lot. He would like, he would do a report like that. I don't know if he did that exact one. It very well could have been our director of retention. But we'll do a lot of kind of work with our intelligence testing. And I've talked about this before, like line item export basket analyses, things like that. So in that case, we would hand off a really big CSV file to him, tell him what we tested, what we want to look at, and then he would put together a report from there. And that's a pretty good solution, but like not perfect by any means.

[Unknown Speaker]

Got it, Got it. Do you. Do you feel like, is that a BPO partner that. That person in Uruguay? Bpo, like God was BPO stand for like the, like the hiring agencies. Like the offshore hiring business process.

[Cody]

Outsourcing.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yes.

[Connor Rowland]

Oh. Oh yeah. I mean he's someone that we hired. I like, I'm sure we found him on upwork or something.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. Okay, got it. We're like, we're about to go down that path and I think we're going to try to go the, the business partner process route first. We found so much good talent. Like some of our best designers have come through those, those agencies. So I'm curious what they're like data analyst pool looks like.

[Connor Rowland]

Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, ours was very home baked. Home baked hiring process. We didn't go through an agency. We should do it.

[Cody]

You can get really good engineering talent like everywhere, like all over.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. Okay.

[Connor Rowland]

Do like talent. I would say engineering like data analysis is great. We've got some great video editors. We should do a deeper, deeper dive. Episode on bvo Overseas hiring for. Yeah, yeah. For, for marketing talent.

[Cody]

Totally down.

[Unknown Speaker]

Connor, what's your, what's your like next? Or maybe, maybe you don't have one. Maybe because like for us like we're now going down this fondue cashback path because that's like the natural next iteration of this and we'll probably continue to like try to test into you know, optimizing opt in rate and, and by the way like to, to double click on sweeps real quick. You know that this is one of the data points that we liked the most that made us say it was like really how the, how all of our sweeps ads performed against to the rest of the ads in the account during that time. And then this data point looking at opt in rate, reorder rate and then that, that 60 day LTR, like those were probably 2 of the data points that we saw that made us say wow, this thing really, really did work really well. But what's, what's. Where are you guys at in your like evolution of your popup? Are you guys working on anything right now? Are you kind of keeping it with what you've optimized and tested into?

[Connor Rowland]

I like the cashback offer. I think as far as like pop ups, I'm by far the most interested in what Cody brought up around like shaping and qualifying the traffic. Yeah. Like at least in terms of priority list, it's not about like larger or different cashbacks or credit backs or things like that. I think the, the offer is technically good. I think as people get that offer we can better qualify them. And I think that'll, I think there's like a Lot of opportunity there. So that's where our focus focus is going to be.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, got it. And same same approach. Right. You'll just be, you'll just be basically cohorting based on, hey, we, we asked this person three qualifying questions. We, we didn't ask this person anything. And kind of the same approach. Keep them in their separate cohorts and measure them.

[Connor Rowland]

And in that case I would ex. I would expect to mostly see improvements in like conversion rate post. Not. Not. Yeah, yeah. Conversion rate post opt in instead of like, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't at least intuitively think we'd see much improvement in the ltv. Potentially. I mean potentially they're more qualified. They like the product more. They become more likely to repeat purchase. But I'm more interested in optimizing for that initial purchase.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Connor Rowland]

I am super excited to tell you about our newest sponsor, Revo. They are a retention platform for Shopify plus brands. They start with Signed in shopping via accounts and get into loyalty referrals, memberships, cashback and so much more. They're constantly launching new features. I personally am super excited about the future of signed in shopping for e commerce brands. And really accounts being the beachhead for just awesome loyalty and customer experiences and Revo playing a part in making it a better experience to be a customer of your brand. And Ridge isn't the only brand using Revo today. Hexclad, true classic, Dr. Squatch, Portland Leather Goods Princess Polly Kitsch Pit Viper and hundreds of more brands are using Repo on their Shopify plus accounts. That is like a billion dollars in gmv. That is a insane list of brands to be listing off. Stuart Chaney, Founder led. He's all over Twitter. He's hands on in Slack. Great team to work with. I also think they're kind of the next wave of SaaS. You'll see Stuart talking on Twitter about being incredibly AI oriented in their development and they're shipping better features faster than ever before. So excited to see what comes of Revo. I suggest you check it out@revo IO that's R I V O IO. All right, cool. I think we covered a lot. You guys want to talk houses? Meta report. So this is a bit of a meta episode, I would say. We anchored on finance operators and then Cody spent an hour and 50 minutes. I listened to it this morning talking about this meta report with Olivia, Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge and Mike. It was a great episode so I'd recommend it. We're gonna keep it tighter though. Maybe 20 minutes on, on.

[Cody]

I just had to be there to supervise. The CEO's talking about marketing, you know.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, totally. No, there's a lot of explanation going on. Okay, so maybe people are familiar. Maybe they've seen it floating around on Twitter. House released a new report analyzing Meta campaign performance across their platform. Really centered around ASC versus what they were calling manual. They had like a hundred what they called high impact exper experiments and then they evaluated those. So a couple of the things that stood out to me was one that meta works. It's like a 19% lift across all of these high impact studies, which is good. And we're all in business because metal works more or less. A couple of the other takeaways and then, and then Cody, I'd love to hear your thoughts on like what marketers can actually do and like how do you action on this data?

[Cody]

Well, did you like the part where I called out Sean and his tweet at the end about if Meta was incremental from like January?

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, totally, yeah, 100%. This is, I guess a little bit more definitive. But also, yeah, Sean said earlier, meta's incremental water's wet. Like we kind of, we kind of all know that it drives, it drives performance. He makes a point earlier. He says, look, we can complain about Meta not driving new customer revenue as efficiently as we'd like and he's like, but at ridge, we're spending $50 million a year there. So it's like we obviously see value in the platform. So main takeaway, meta works not going to be a surprise to most people. Second was they found ASC or Advantage plus outperformed these manual campaigns by 9% on an incremental row as basis. Or sorry, Advantage plus outperformed by 9% at the midpoint readout, but by the end of these tests, the manual campaigns were actually 12% better. So we see that flip there. And anecdotally I think we've seen a lot of similarities with that where Advantage plus maybe starts out hotter and more efficient, but over the longer period maybe not as incremental. So that was one of the takeaways I thought was interesting. And then the last one was around this mid funnel testing, which we've talked about a lot on the podcast, that is view content, add to cart, initiate checkouts, some sort of event in between, like pure awareness and purchase. They said tests were up 121%. I'd like to think a lot of those tests were driven by people on this podcast and people listening. They only saw 14 lower incremental ROAS versus lower funnel purchase optimized, which I thought was crazy. Then the other interesting ones but intuitively makes sense is that for these mid funnel optimizations they saw a higher omnichannel effect. So revenue being captured on retail channels, wholesale channels, Amazon, things like that, and a longer like post test window lift that it was 44% versus 26% for lower funnel. So when you're not optimizing for purchases, you're driving purchases in other channels and then you're driving slightly more purchases over a longer time perspective relative to the lower funnel purchase optimized. So those are my main takeaways. Thought it was really good. If you want the really deep dive, you've got the operators podcast from last week. But Cody, you're the incrementality champion. If you're a marketer right now, what are you doing with this data?

[Cody]

Yeah, I think on the whole not super surprising. Like we said, we know meta is incremental, we know it works. I was a little bit surprised that I guess the ASC versus manual stuff, ASC actually was slightly better reaching new customers but slightly less incremental overall. Was, was. But again like a lot of what we've heard, we've talked about probably to death on this podcast and on Twitter is like, you know, meta is not great at reaching new people, especially at scale. Right. So I, I think that, you know, the mid funnel stuff, you know, makes sense. I think Olivia's point was really interested in. Interesting. It's something I've actually been thinking a lot at since it's almost like it's not a net, it's not a net or a complete negative that meta is not great at reaching to new people. It's actually like her point was like, is the model so good at finding intent that it is kind of over delivering to maybe less incremental people? Because it's so good at finding intent and it's not like a complete net negative, but obviously it's not always good for what people want. I thought that was really interesting and I saw an ad. So I've been in market for something, I've been looking into buying something and essentially looking for a supplement and you know, researching it, Reddit, TikTok, obviously getting ads for it. I'm on Instagram this morning, I get an Instagram story ad. I swipe to the next one now from a different brand for the same supplement. I then swipe again, I get a third ad like these are all in a row, same, same thing, and then I get a fourth. So I have four ads all in a row. One story, four ads in a row. Competing brands, same thing. So, like, clearly Meta knows that I am very much in market and ready to purchase this thing, but that just can't be the best thing from an advertiser perspective, to be pitted against those four when somebody is so close to in market, you know, and so close to buying. Like, clearly Meta is great at understanding intent and probably better than any other channel in the world, 100%.

[Connor Rowland]

And that's. So what I talk about from Ridge's perspective is, like, we have more people searching for Ridge wallet every month in men's wallet. Like, there. There is very little intent for wallets outside of the ones that we generate. And one of the problems, one of the things that's difficult is, like, when we do generate interest or intent in, like, a new minimalist wallet, that we're then getting pitted against, like, four other advertisers for, like, anybody that's in market. And you hear that all the time where it's like, I'll hang out with a buddy and they're like, dude, I've gotten nothing but wallets since, like, I went wallet ad since I went to rich.com, which, yeah, it's just like, I think at the end of the day, it's just like, that's how you play the game, right? Like, like, that's like, ultimately we can. We can complain about the rules or the way that other people are playing, but at the end of the day, like, you just have to figure out how to win within these certain conditions, which I guess was one of my takeaways.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor Rowland]

So. So.

[Cody]

So your question. Right. And. And I think one statement before that is, like, a little disappointing to see the ASC on a net perform worse than manual, because it's clear it's going in that direction, so we'll have no choice, I guess. It's good to know, you know, Olivia saying, like, if you're all ASC performs better than if you're half and half. But eventually it's clear we're gonna have no choice but to go there. Hopefully Meta can fix any issues and it can continue to get better. But it's like, what do you do? Well, it's clear if you are not reaching new audiences again, we talked about this, you know, last episode or when it was just you and I, like, you've got to do things to break through new audiences, whether it's, you know, Eric said, and I love his term signal engineering. And like creating funnels to you know, specifically to get high intent but non purchase objectives. Whether it's, you know again doing the strategies we've talked about, whether it's creative diversity, like it's clear that like the way the game has to be played is slightly different and you can't just chuck everything in one ASC and expect it to work out. So I think you just have to test a lot like understand how the system optimizes what the drawbacks are which again are probably like these reach issues and then figure out how to like break through for your business.

[Connor Rowland]

One thing I will say and this was discussed a little bit but I, I had a seven hour drive to Reno last night and I spent about 40 minutes talking to our meta rep and one of the, you know, one of the issues with like digital marketing generally and, and this house test in particular is like over the course of these tests ASC and manual have changed significantly. So like this time last year ASC and non ASC campaigns had different like optimization engines basically but Meta made those the same. So, so that you said that, that at one point was like the big difference. There was like clearly a distinction between the two. Now they have the same optimization engine. So everything's ASC from that perspective and then what meta is considering, everything's ASC from that perspective, everything's using the same sort of optimization engine. Completely embracing ASC is like a state of the campaign now and for meta I.e. advantage audiences, advantage placements and advantage budget. So that's like, that's broad, that's all placements basically and that is really liquid budgets like cbo that is like that is fully embracing the ASC experience. But like even that is like that's very different than how we were testing it when we were testing it 10 months ago.

[Cody]

Yeah, that by the way I think you were doing because I actually wasn't clear on like the exact differences. I knew like the model, the model that is essentially trained on the same model. But I think I've like wondered what is the same. So it's essentially just giving all control to, to, to them versus giving a little bit more granularity.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, 100%. So yeah. Connor, what do you think?

[Unknown Speaker]

I, I have a question then based on all this, is this even more because you used it, it used to be like hey, if you're having net new visit rate issues or frequency issues it's like diversify a little bit away from ASC into more like business as usual campaigns and that generally would drive at least in our account, a higher net new visit rate, lower frequencies. So theoretically that's not the case anymore. Right. Like that doesn't become a solution for that if that's what your ASC is doing, if they're running off the same engine. So is this even more reason to run non purchase conversion campaigns now if you can't solve some of those things and in business as usual purchase conversion campaigns.

[Connor Rowland]

So I think partially like one of my takeaways, based on our experiences that we've discussed on the pod, based on our discussion with Eric Sufort last week when we were talking about signal engineering based on these house studies, it's like there are a lot of signals pointing to hey, yeah, start optimizing for other stuff driving people into marketing. The, the non purchase optimized campaigns were only, I forget what I said earlier, like 14% lower incremental ROAS, which is like, like not that different.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah.

[Connor Rowland]

Considering you're not even asking meta to drive purchases for you, you're asking them to, you know, get people to view PDPs or whatever. So I think that's a really strong takeaway. I do think you still have some controls, right. In terms of like the, the, the closest you're going to get to like quote unquote manual campaigns today is just like asserting more control over targeting, over placements, over things like that. So like theoretically you could probably drive more, a higher percent new visits, targeting different audiences, targeting certain placements. We talk about creative all the time, different creative. Like that's theoretically how you could do it. But like I said, a lot of people across the industry I think are pointing to these like mid funnel events being one way to do it as well.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, yeah. You know, for the longest time I was like you, you'd run these mid funnel tests and you'd get to the end of it and you just have no clue because the signal does not get picked up in Meta. I just think it's still really, really hard. Like sure, you can run the meta, you know, user based conversion lift study, but like I still would prefer to run a holdout test. And unless you're a brand that can afford a tool like that, it's still so hard to measure and then ultimately create some sort of multiplier between what you're seeing in platform during the test and what the actual readout was like, it's still just like, I feel like it's kind of shooting blind still to an extent. If you don't have some sort of holdout testing tool to really validate that the tactic is driving incremental orders at some point. So even it's, it's still just hard for brands that are you know, not at a, at a level of scale that where it makes sense for them to, to onboard like a house or, or another holdout testing tool.

[Connor Rowland]

I think what I would add to that also just as a caveat is it's so scale dependent also, right? It's so category to scale dependent. And I guess that's like, I think they say that in the report like ultimately people need to be developing bespoke strategies fit for their business and that's their what are they selling? Who are they selling it to, what scale are they selling it at? Which is like such an annoying answer because it's like, it's like the, the it depends for everything. But ultimately that, that's the main takeaway because like I said, I've seen some advertisers discuss optimizing for non purchase events or like them thinking that they need to and they're doing two or three million dollars a year and it's like that's not the case. You, you have, there's a lot of meat on the bone for you to scale your business with just purely purchase optimized events. Just focus on creative or offers or something other than optimization events.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yes, 100%. So you're basically saying like if you're not, if you're not at a scale where you can afford to, to you know, pay 10 to 12 or whatever per month for a holdout testing tool. We also probably aren't at a scale where you need to run those, those non purchase conversion campaigns because you shouldn't. If you're like a thirty million dollar brand or whatever. You probably aren't running into like reach issues through purchase conversion campaigns. Hopefully not unless you have like a very, very small TAM 100%.

[Cody]

We're about halfway done through the year. H1 is almost over. We're prepping for the second half of the year. We're also prepping for Q4 which is huge for us. And our budgets are going to be the highest then. And when our budgets are the highest we're going to need the most granularity and the most confidence knowing where we should spend our dollars. And that's why we turn to prescient. Prescient is an MMM. And most MMMs they use 60 year old regression models. They're not really built for D to C Prescient. You can get readouts really quickly if something is changing which again DTC is really volatile so you can't rely on an outdated M mmm that you're only gonna get one read out a quarter. One thing I love about pression so much, you're able to see the halo effect. So upper funnel spend, which is again is huge. We love to fill the funnel prior to a peak moment prior to Q4 holiday, something like that. We're really able to see the halo effect that has. Because sometimes you're not gonna see great attribution from YouTube campaign or from TV campaigns. Well, prescient plugs into all them and it can actually tell you your base plus your halo. So it's been really helpful for us to understand and actually have confidence to invest in some of these upper funnel channels that are harder to measure with other ways. So I love Prescient. I can't tell you all the technical stuff behind it, but I can tell you it gives me and my team more confidence. Know where we should put our budget, especially in some of these pesky upper funnel channels that are much harder to measure. And again, don't wait till Q4. It's going to be too late then. We're halfway through the year. But we've really got to all lock in for the rest of the year for Q4. There's a reason we use it. Hexclad, Hollow socks, coterie and 100 more leading brands so highly recommend checking it out. Go to prescientai.com operators to book a demo today. Well, last, last, last, like one bit I have on this. I think this is, I guess in addition, maybe it's related to this. And we've talked about again on bunchpads is like overall it's clear the direction is going this way where you just have to go into AI, whether it's PMAX or asc and like you just can't fight it. So like we have to learn how to do it. And I think Eric's talked about it. A lot of people have. But you do have to be mindful of the downsizing and like the net New Reach issue is another one. You know, we've also talked about like Meta being really good at like one buyer, one product. Like that is what we're finding as well. We're like, we have, we have tried to make Millennial creative and add it just to our business as usual asc and it just never got delivery. Where we just recently ran a test where we had a conversion lift and we put it in its own asc, but we actually did for the first time in years, like Age targeting and only allowed it to go to certain ones and force it there. And it was as incremental as our other stuff.

[Unknown Speaker]

Right.

[Cody]

And so Meta should have been delivering based on that creative more spend to those in our other, you know, campaigns. And again, it just, I just think the system gets so trained on a certain direction and system and I think what maybe used to help break it out of that was manual targeting was lookalike something and I just think because those are no longer like the signals or inputs. If you're a marketer, like be. Lean into AI, lean into asap, be a little weary of that and know the downsides and like fight to break out and test things as, as we've talked about.

[Connor Rowland]

So do you think in that case, if you'd set up the Millennial Creative ASC campaign and let it run, that Meta would have eventually figured out that this should serve to a younger demo?

[Cody]

I don't know, because we have, you know, millions of purchases to an older demo and so many less that I just, it feels like such an uphill battle that like, what I don't know right now is what is our strategy going forward? Like right now we're just going to scale this campaign, build creative for it, keep the age group. In the future, maybe we can just have the creative do the targeting and it can be a separate campaign with no age targeting and based on the creative, it'll deliver the way we want. But I just think right now it's like such an uphill battle that I don't think that would work. Maybe if our ad account again didn't have all of this data and it was like a fresher ad account. But like we're, we're. I don't know if you guys have done second ad accounts. Like, we're, we're going to test a lot of big swings and we'll do this, we'll test bid multipliers. Like, we're also like not opposed to testing a different ad account to see if there's, you know, data there at that level that maybe can help us reach a new audience profitably. That Meta is just stuck in its old ways?

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, yeah, it is really interesting. We have seen examples. We launched a product earlier this year called Dessert Warrior, which is like a donut themed wallet, is popular in the, the everyday carry community. And we, we saw like one of our initial insights was Meta started serving it to a younger audience. Now we then leaned into that where we like, we like broke it out further. We broke it out further and then Just ensured that we continued to serve that younger audience. And then for future launches we ended up doing some of that targeting ourselves early on. So then we did like a Mr. Doodle wallet a couple months later, saw a similar sort of behavior and we just front ran it with some targeting. So it is, it is a natural balance and I think that's ultimately where media buying is going, where it's like way less like day to day tactical and more like how are you just kind of setting things up in a way that generally align with who you want to be acquiring across what products. And then, and then really as you started the conversation with there's no avoiding giving Meta more control. I think that's best for everyone frankly. But there's still this like this light touch and guidance that I think can be really valuable.

[Cody]

Absolutely.

[Unknown Speaker]

I, I do think that you like this, this idea that like you're one ad away from unlocking your account. Like I, I really do think that is true especially at, at smaller scale and I think that there's this like, there's this like a ton of this local maximum. Like people find something that works and then they, and then they keep making the same stuff over and over and over again and they're not breaking out of that. Like I will never forget I used to work on this brand called Charx back in the day. They sold the, they still, they're still around and they're doing well but they sell these like these Turkish shoes that are, that are an expensive Turkish shoe and like we totally unlock the account with this like just your, the classic like review style, user generated content. But it was very much featuring younger people and, but it was an older demo buying. So for like a year and a half we really scaled this, this brand to like a solid mid six figure per month run rate off this ad. And then we kept, we really scaled that concept out and we, but then we ran into a wall and like we couldn't break through it. And then I really distinctly remember like we rolled out this really well done video, very similar structure to the video but now it was, it was featuring like a stylish, you know like mid 60 year old woman, very aspirational older, older woman that was more, more in line with her demo and like that single ad like totally broke them out of their rut and like all of a sudden they started growing again and it's just like it was literally just the talent we featured in the ad like broke them out of what the, that kind of younger UGC had trained the the ad account on like I, I love, I miss those days where it's like, you know, you're a smaller brand and like one ad can like really break you out of or like really enhance your growth rate again. But like I really think that's the case and like it's not just woo woo like that you hear on Twitter. Like that that really can be like a net new swing that you've never introduced. Your account can really break through any plateaus you're seeing often.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, I totally agree and I think I what the way that I would connect those and maybe you can correct me if you think I'm wrong here, Connor, but I think that there's reason to be skeptical that Meta might not serve that new ad.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah.

[Connor Rowland]

Like if it's too new or, or to too different of an audience that they still kind of an art to like making sure that you're getting enough signal there to explore whether it is the winning ad that you need.

[Unknown Speaker]

Totally. Yeah. I'm definitely not a, I am in no way a believer of the like let Meta decide approach where you drop a new ad in the and under an ad set with another 25 ads. And if it doesn't spend like it must not be a high performer. Like I, I don't think there's anything wrong with trying that first. But like if I spend time, money, energy producing a net new ad and Meta doesn't spend on it, I'm going to restructure that ad. So in a way that it, it definitely gets spent. Yeah.

[Connor Rowland]

Awesome. All right, any other points on Meta? Otherwise I'd love to hear about the, the bundle builder test you got, Connor.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. Yeah, let's do it. All right, so we've, we've actually built out our bundle builder a while ago. Like I'd say over, over probably a year and a half ago at this point. It, it, it's okay. It's not like the mo. The best experience in the world in my opinion. You can see it if you go to our website. We don't. It's like it's. We have a, A nav item that redirects to it. So, so really for us it's like how do we, how do we use this thing? Has been kind of the. What we've been trying to figure out because at the end of the day we've spent a lot of time like in my opinion in, in like 2022, 2023, almost like over curating bundles when at the end of the day like that's kind of A never ending like rabbit hole to go down because we're never going to curate the perfect bundle for someone, right? Like even our 12 piece set, someone's gonna want like a 10 quart pot instead of the 3 quart pot and like it's never going to be perfect. So all that to say we've been trying to figure out like what's the best way to use the bundle builder. And I think one of the ideas that came up in the last three months or four months was what if this just becomes like a secondary offer in our core acquisition funnel. So of course we want someone to come and buy the 12 piece set and that is what most people buy and that's what that, that's by design. We've like figured out that that has the best lifetime value and that, you know, same as you Cody, like generally the, the larger our first order AOV is, the better our overall lifetime value is. So it makes sense for us to optimize for these higher AOV orders. But at the end of the day I'm like, well not everyone's going to want that. So. But what we tested into is basically saying, well know, let's lead with these, these bundles that we know are the top performers. Let's like pepper in this secondary offer because at the end of the day I'd rather have someone buy something than nothing. And it's actually a really nice experience to say, hey, here's the 12 piece set. But then if you get deeper in the funnel and that's not what you want, we also have this opportunity where you can still save money by building your own bundle and you can curate exactly what you want. So basically what we tested was taking the, the bundle builder and putting it just having CTAs do it deeper in our funnel. So the first test, it was actually putting it on our collection page. And we've actually been finding more and more lately that going from ad to landing page to collection page is better than going from ad to landing page right to the 12 piece set page. So we basically just inserted these breaks in some of our collection pages where we have this little banner that's like, you know, build your own bundle, save up to X percent. And again the, the hypothesis was that like having a bundle builder option will lead to a wider appeal for more people and ultimately increase CVR. So we tested this, we got like almost 5000 conversions total between the two variants with bundle builder CTA without we saw a 2.3% lift in conversion rate, a actually a lift in AOV which was interesting at 5.25% lift in AOV and a 6.7 or 7.7% lift in revenue per user. So at, you know, and this is through our like core paid media funnel. So like that, that 7.7% lift actually has massive of revenue impacts when you look at like the, the scale of how much revenue we're driving through paid channels. So that was like honestly one of the first like really good uses we found of this bundle builder in like an acquisition paid media setting that we're really excited about. So yeah, we're excited to like keep optimizing the experience but also happy that we actually found a good way to use it in our, in our acquisition funnels. So now we're, we're kind of moving into like testing in a more strategic placements of the cta. So like, like what if we put it further up funnel? Like now it's on the landing page as a secondary call to action instead of on the collection page and gonna see if we can keep kind of strategically using that experience more. But it's all. Yeah, it's, I'm really happy with that because it really reduces the amount of like custom bundles we to make which is a headache. And yeah, we're hoping to keep testing.

[Cody]

Into that and what the.

[Connor Rowland]

So the test was the, the build your own bundle CTA at the bottom of the collections page.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. So the placement was actually, the placement was actually like mid page below the fold. So again we still want it, we didn't want it to distract from our HERO offer. So it's like the, the funnel is basically you see an ad now you go to like 5 reasons why cookware landing page. Then that redirects to our cookware collection page. At the top of that page above the fold is the 12 piece set and the six piece set and then like like the third or fourth row is that bundle builder CTA. So it's pretty, it's still pretty like deep in the funnel. Like it's not, it's very much a secondary offer which is, which is by design. We didn't want it to be too, too distracting too, too early in the funnel and like distract from the HERO sets.

[Connor Rowland]

You know I was, I was gonna say I think it's a fantastic test. It doesn't surprise me too much. I think there's a, there's a really interesting strategy around. Did you hold a sec? Like there's some sort of like secondary messaging that people are looking for at that point in the funnel. Right. Like they've they've hit the landing page, they've hit the collection space, they've scrolled past your main hero sets like they want some sort of different information. Build your own bundle seems ideal for us. We found a really big win with at the bottom of our wallet collections page. We actually say see how it works. And this was something we found like years ago. But like we just needed to do way more education around the product. People were seeing this like metal square, metal credit card shaped items on the page. They like didn't know what was going on. What they needed at that point was a little bit more education. And like we saw a similar sort of like it's not like you're going to get a 20 or 30% increase in revenue per visitor, but you can get a couple percentage points on like a massive amount of traffic by just thinking about what is that new piece of information or that new action that someone might want to take, you know.

[Unknown Speaker]

Lower in the funnel 100%. And I also like it because it, it's, it gets people into more of our products. Like Again, I'm right. 12 piece set is our, is our classic. You know, it's your classic pot size, it's your classic pan sizes that most people need but not everyone needs. So again like if you have a 10 inch panel ready that you like, chances are you're not going to want to buy our 12 piece set. You're not going to want to buy our six piece set. So my, I don't know this for sure, but my guess is that the people that are opting in for the bundle builder experience, they're actually building larger carts versus the version that didn't have that cta. But my assumption is that they're probably mixing and matching a lot of products that just aren't in those hero stats. And I'm assuming they already have them, which that would actually be like an interesting survey to send out or like an interesting market basket analysis to run is like all build your own bundle orders. What, what are they mainly consisting of? Or why did you not buy the set versus the bundle builder? And it's just like we have so many new products and it's a great way to get eyes on those.

[Connor Rowland]

And you guys ran this just like in terms of the setup of the test, were you like showing and hiding this CTA on the collections page via intelligence?

[Unknown Speaker]

We use convert for our, our zero testing. But yeah, exactly, it was just a 5050 split. Anyone that hit the collection page was either getting a show shown or hot or Hid on the, on the bundle builder cta.

[Connor Rowland]

Totally. Yeah. Because that is, that's the exact sort of thing that we would hand off to the analysts that I mentioned earlier down in Uruguay. We just give them the line item export and then typically those convert probably is something like this. Each line item has which segment they were in and then you can do like a basket analysis on each side and you'll probably find some weird stuff, like totally different units per transaction. Like probably some weird mix of products. Like we found a lot of really valuable information doing basket analyses and line item analysis for, you know, on site CR road tests.

[Unknown Speaker]

Totally. And like I think we'd probably find like we haven't put a ton of time and energy and thought into like how we merge. Like you'll basically, if you go to our build your own bundle page, what you'll see is like you kind of click through the different categories. Like we haven't actually thought that deep and hard about like, well, what should we show above the fold on the pans and what about on the pots or what about the knives? Like I feel like a basket analysis of this test would be like, wow, we are. People are buying the, you know, the 14 inch pan all the time. But it's all, it's in the fifth row on the, on this experience. Like we should move that up. Like I'm sure there's all sorts of insights to glean from that.

[Connor Rowland]

Totally. Well, cool. I think that is a great test of the week. All right, thanks again for listening to another episode of Marketing Operators. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel, aftercell, Prescient and Revo. Make sure to like subscribe, leave a review. If you've got questions, questions, hit the Marketing Operators hotline. We'll be answering those on future episodes and we'll see you again next week. Thank you.