Chat GPT Shopping, Striking a Balance with SMS & How We’d Build a Marketing Team from Day One

Summary

Marketing Operators — EP 80

“Chat GPT Shopping, Striking a Balance with SMS & How We’d Build a Marketing Team from Day One”
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Date: October 7, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Connor Rolain and Cody Plofker dive deep into three primary topics:

1. ChatGPT Shopping & the Shopify Integration: What does the rise of shopping via large language models mean for brands, and how should operators approach generative AI as a channel in their media mix?
2. Striking a Balance with SMS: Testing, data, and the counterintuitive lessons from incrementality-driven SMS strategies—how aggressive can brands get?
3. Drafting a Day-One Marketing Team: If you were launching a brand from scratch (with zero revenue), who are your first three key marketing hires and why?

Throughout, the conversation is grounded in direct experience, operator know-how, and clear-eyed experimentation, mixed with moments of humor and friendly banter.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. ChatGPT & LLM Shopping: Is This the Next Great Channel for Brands?

[10:22 - 26:48]

• Shopify's ChatGPT Integration:
  Cody introduces the recent rollout—a direct Shopify-ChatGPT integration—which may shape the 2026 e-commerce landscape.
• Cautious Excitement & "Shiny Object Syndrome":
  Both hosts are wary of over-indexing on emerging channels purely because they're new. Recent history (e.g., TikTok Shop, live shopping) is filled with channels that promised more than they delivered for most brands.
  • Connor: "I’m just super wary of these things that kind of come and go... I’m a huge AI proponent, so I don’t think it’s going to come and go. I just don’t know if it’s worth hiring an agency for it right now." [11:29]
  • Cody: "Being almost anti-new-channel is a discipline you need as a marketing operator in leadership." [12:41]
• Visibility & Optimization Challenges:
  It's still a black box. Right now, ChatGPT doesn’t offer the analytics (like Search Console or Google Trends) operators are used to—making optimization tricky.
  • Cody: "You have no visibility. You can't tell where things are trending, where you're ranking. It's hard to optimize against. Frankly, it's just kind of a black box." [18:01]
• Who Can Win on ChatGPT Shopping?
  • Larger, established brands (with "a ten year head start of seeding the internet") have an early advantage—if your product dominates search and social chatter, you'll be referenced more.
  • For smaller, niche offerings: there are growth-hacking opportunities in targeting long-tail product and benefit queries, and even "astroturfing" Reddit or manipulating cited sources.
    • Cody: "If you look at what these LLMs are referencing to generate answers, manipulating the articles that are influential in those answers is...really effective." [21:35]
• Is the Website Going Away?
  Both think digital storefronts aren’t going anywhere soon, even as transactional context shifts toward chat, mobile, and integrations: "[Shopify] will become more of a logistics and operations company...but there’s still value in having a digital storefront.” —Connor [23:47]

2. Striking a Balance with SMS: Frequency, Data, & Brand Approach

[27:02 - 38:37]

• How Many SMS Messages Should You Send?
  The wild story of a brand sending 23 messages in 30 days: is this aggressive or smart?
• Testing Wins Over Intuition:
  The data says: you can generally send more than you'd expect before hitting negative returns on unsubscribe rates or engagement.
  • Connor: "Every time we've tested, sending more performs better than sending less." [22:22]
  • Cody: "We had three segments—one message, three messages, six messages...as you send more messages the value of each one decreases, but it’s still very positive ROI." [31:26]
• Timing and Moment of Maximum Incrementality:
  It's often immediately post-purchase, not after the product is delivered, where follow-up messaging is most effective.
  • Cody: "Intuitively you would think…let them receive the product. But really, we continue to move that messaging up, and they’re just more likely to purchase." [30:30]
• Segmentation & Campaign Frequency:
  The optimal strategy may involve a “highly engaged period” right after first purchase, then pulling back for later high-conversion moments (like BFCM).
• Unsubscribes Are Sometimes Worth the Incremental Revenue:
  Strong performers justify higher frequency even if unsubscribes tick up slightly. Measurement tools like Subscriber LTV (SLTV) from Postscript help balance ROI.
  • Cody: "If you can generate an additional $0.41 per message, it’s almost always better than worrying about the 2% of people who are going to unsubscribe." [34:26]
• Order Notifications: Email vs SMS?
  Non-transactional notifications (order out for delivery, etc.) are often better suited for email to save SMS costs unless there’s a clear experience benefit.
  • "We just email…there's a good cost savings that we get. But, you know, Groons is probably choosing that—they think it’s a customer experience improvement.” —Connor [37:31]

3. Pro Tips: Post-Purchase Offers and Upsells

[38:37 - 44:43]

• Dynamic & Personalized Offers:
  Cody explains Ridge’s approach—targeting specific product upsells (e.g. power banks to travel shoppers) in the post-purchase window and experimenting with either open shopping discounts or targeted one-click upsells.
  • “For a travel customer we’ve seen a lot of success upselling power banks afterwards. Like those products are just very complementary…” —Cody [39:29]
• "Double Dash" Post-Purchase Trick:
  Some brands are delaying fulfillment up to 8 hours post-purchase to allow a time window for email/SMS one-click upsells—emulating DoorDash’s “add another item” behavior.
  • "They wouldn't send the order to fulfillment for eight hours…and then they had an entire little mousetrap built out trying to get someone to add in a very short amount of time." —Cody [41:57]
• Testing Shipping Offers as Upsells:
  Discounting shipping (e.g. priority shipping) is seen as more palatable than product discounting; personalization and urgency can drive additional cart value.

4. Personalization for Podcast/Influencer Traffic

[46:59 - 51:34]

• URL-Based Personalization:
  For podcast/creator sponsorships, Ridge has used messaging banners or full “VIP pages” (e.g. /mkbhd) to personalize the experience and reinforce offers—these convert notably better, but can be a maintenance headache at scale.
  • "If you could send them to a personalized page, it was beneficial. It just became a question mark of how beneficial was it over time." —Cody [48:56]
• Templatization & Dynamic Updates:
  The best solution balances personalization and back-end manageability,
  • “What I'd love to do in the future is build those pages more dynamically... so they’d all have the updated Father's Day messaging.” —Cody [49:48]

5. Attribution in Podcast Advertising

[51:53 - 58:11]

• Promo Codes Under-count, Vanity URLs are Better — But Both Have Issues:
  The team agrees most conversion tracking methods under-attribute podcast/creator sales if relying solely on codes. Link clicks and post-purchase surveys provide a better, multi-signal view.
  • Connor: "If the vanity URL conversions are true, if we were just looking at discount code usage, it's undercutting it by 90%." [53:50]
  • Cody: “I hate discount code as an attribution source…I think a lot of people never use codes.” [54:09]
• Be Cautious with Survey Extrapolation:
  Over-attribution is possible if you over-index on self-reported answers.
  • “The call to action is to fill out the post purchase survey. I think those people are doing it at such a higher rate than some random person... you end up over-attributing.” —Cody [55:07]
• Podcast Advertising Matures Over Time:
  Most shows will fall into a predictable "80/20" winner distribution. Results improve as you identify and double down on the best partners.
  • "20% of the creators drove 80% of the revenue... we've chosen winners that perform relatively reliably." —Cody [56:59]

6. Fantasy Draft: Building the Day-One Marketing Team

[60:09 - 69:16]

• Connor's Picks:
  1. Director of Growth (full-stack: buying, Lander optimization, retention, some creative acumen),
  2. Director/Manager of Influencer (for creator-led growth, partnerships, and supplying accounts with content),
  3. Designer/Editor (statics, web, and creative build).
  • “Director of Growth, who’s really leading creative... and then... influencer for seeding and paid distribution... and a designer, who does web, landing page, static design.” —Connor [63:22]
• Cody's Picks:
  1. Performance Creative Strategist (mainly for great content, not just media buying),
  2. Designer/Editor,
  3. Email/SMS Marketing (believing retention is more important, and that media buying is nearly commoditized)
  • “If I was starting a brand today, you have to build your site at some point... but I’d try to create great content.” —Cody [67:24]
  • "I just want fantastic content. So I'd try to solve that with, with number one..." —Cody [65:06]
• Key Shared Theme:
  In today’s landscape, content and creative matter more than spending on buying media; a ‘generalist’ mentality wins at the very earliest stages.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Platform Hype Cycles & AI:
  “As marketing operators, we have to be extremely disciplined in where we’re spending time... It’s easy to chase the shiny new thing.” —Cody (12:41)
• On SMS Frequency:
  “You can send more than you think without people off... We used to think you shouldn’t send an email right away because the product isn’t delivered, but actually people are most likely to buy right away.” —Connor (22:22)
• On Personalization & Influencer Traffic:
  “If you could send them to a personalized page, it was beneficial. It just became a question mark of how beneficial was it over time because all those pages just become outdated.” —Cody (48:56)
• On Attribution Challenges:
  “I hate discount code as a like attribution source... I think a lot of people never use codes.” —Cody (54:09)
• On Early-Stage Marketing Roles:
  "Performance creative strategist is who I’d hire first—there’s so little value in tactical media buying compared to just having really great content these days." —Cody (65:06)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [10:22] ChatGPT Shopping & Shopify Integration Overview
• [15:13] Should Smaller Brands Prioritize LLM/AI Shopping?
• [18:01] The Visibility Problem: SEO & Optimization Challenges with LLMs
• [27:02] SMS Strategy: Finding the Right Frequency & Balance
• [31:26] ROI Analysis on Welcome Series SMS: Diminishing Returns & Incrementality
• [38:37] Post-Purchase Offer Tactics: Dynamic & Personalized Approaches
• [46:59] Personalization for Podcast/Influencer Traffic
• [51:53] Podcast Attribution: Codes, URLs, and Surveys
• [60:09] The First Three Hires: Marketing Team Draft

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a master class in real-world experimentation and deliberate marketing operations. The hosts’ skepticism of hype, coupled with a relentless focus on testing and incrementality, makes for practical, actionable conversations. If you’re grappling with AI’s role in e-commerce, SMS channel management, or structuring your first growth hires, this is essential listening.

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For Further Engagement

• Let the hosts know your ideal day-one team: Tweet @marketingoperators or comment on YouTube.
• Feedback, debate, or questions? Slide into their DMs or join the discussion.

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Transcript

[Cody]

There's going to be a type of consumer that just discovers and shops products within ChatGPT. So you need to be there. I do think it'll have like more staying power. One of the problems right now with ChatGPT as a acquisition channel is you have like no visibility. Like you literally, you don't have a Google search console, you don't have a Google Trends. You can't tell where things are trending, where you're ranking. Like, it's hard to optimize against. Frankly, it's just kind of a black box.

[Connor]

Most people would think you shouldn't send an email right away because that people haven't gotten the product yet. People are actually going to be most likely to buy right away. That's actually probably your most incremental moment to try to, you know, get them. And every time we've tested, sending more performs better than sending less.

[Cody]

Yeah, intuitively you would think, hey, the person just purchased from you, let them receive the product. Let them like the product they're going to be most likely to purchase at that point. But really we continue to move that messaging up or we continue to for a long time. We can't move it up anymore. And every time we move it up, they're just more likely to purchase. We're just driving more performance at that point. You're starting a brand today from scratch. You have zero dollars in revenue. I'd like to know who your first three marketing hires are.

[Connor]

I'm going to go with a.

[Cody]

All right. We are back with another episode of marketing operators, episode 80. I. I broke my streak last week, but I'm excited to get back on the grindstone. 81 straight episodes from here and I'll, I'll break my previous record. Cody, thanks for having me.

[Connor]

Yeah, man, thanks for coming back. It's, you know, it's hard to get a hold of you sometimes. It's been, you know, got you for like three minutes in person at Beanstalk and you're in China, you know, just hard to get you scheduled. And now, and now Connor's not here. So it's like I feel like I'm the consistent one these days. Yeah, it's funny because usually I'm like the hard one and I miss the most.

[Cody]

I was thinking it's just going to get for, for, you know, a little, little inside baseball. The logistics of scheduling a CMO CEO and head of growth of nine figure brands going into Q4, not all that easy. You might be surprised. We've got other things to do than, than record Podcasts, you know, a couple times.

[Connor]

Sometimes I think about it, I'm like, oh, like, I feel like you guys are going to kill me. But I'm like, if we weren't busy, it probably wouldn't be a good podcast. We'd have to talk about.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. And I have a marketing operators episode to listen to that I wasn't a part of for the first time.

[Connor]

Dude, I think it was a good one. I feel like we just get better and better. But it was really fun because, like, I really hadn't chatted with Connor. I feel like I. I feel like we were on a few, like, guest episodes, but I really feel like I haven't chatted with him since, like, the meta summit. So it was, like, fun. So I'm excited. Excited for this as well. I think this is our. Our third ever chat individual, you and I. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Cody]

True, true, true. Well, cool. Stoked.

[Connor]

China.

[Cody]

Yeah, a little bit. Have you ever been?

[Connor]

I have been high school, so I haven't been, like, professionally been in high school. And it's. It's a crazy place. It was a lot of fun, but I know you're there for work, so I'm excited to hear what you guys did.

[Cody]

Yeah, I have a couple. I have a couple small takeaways. One, we flew in and out of Hong Kong because it's. It's easier to fly in there than straight into mainland China. There's just a ton of flights. Hong Kong, incredible cityscape. Like, topographically, one of my favorite places I've ever been. You know, it's like, it's nestled within, like, mountains, and then it's also on the ocean, so you're like, on the water. And then Hong Kong immediately just ascends up to a mountaintop. So you have this incredibly dense city. It's. It's the second densest metropolitan area, just behind, like, the center of Paris. I looked up a couple stats on my flight, which was, you know, 14 hours. I had plenty of time to, like, chat GPT stuff. Hong Kong's 40,000 people per square mile, and the center of Paris is like 50,000, like the, the mile in the center of Paris.

[Connor]

So.

[Cody]

And then, you know, Salt Lake city, Utah is 1900 per square mile. So we're. We're talking like 20 fold in terms of density. And it just being in this very interesting topographic location I thought was really cool. So that was. That was one that, like, blew me away. I, like, couldn't believe how interesting Hong Kong was as a city. Two, we got caught in the typhoon last week, so that threw off all of our plans. It was. Typhoon Ragasa was like the 20th biggest storm on record. We were supposed to go into mainland China, but the government shut down all the roads between all the cities. All the freeways, they shut down. So we were like, all right, we can't head in. Delayed that trip a little bit. So we had to spend some more time in Hong Kong. Fine, but a bit of a wrinkle. And then getting to mainland China. I've got one interesting thing, and then the other one's very obvious one is we came with, like, a list, and this was basically the purpose of the trip. At Ridge. We try to get a team going to China once a year. And, you know, forming business relationships is always important, but I think it's particularly important in the Chinese culture and particularly important when you have people around the world that you're, like, staking your business on, on both sides. Like, we need them to manufacture everything that we sell. They need us to honor our payments and things like that and continue showing up with orders. So we go and we. We've obviously been working with these manufacturers for months at this point, and we have, like, a relatively long list. We go to four different places in the span of like, 36 hours because it's all compressed down. So we're like in and out of these places. And when I was going into it, I was like, what are we going to get done? Like, how constructive can a meeting be if we're. If we're with our. Our power bank manufacturer for 40 minutes or something? I'm like, it seems like a really, like, really short trip for us to have traveled 14 hours for. But we have this list put together by our product owner.

[Connor]

If you shave off $0.10, $0.10 per unit, it's worth it.

[Cody]

Well, totally. No. And, and, and let me tell you. So we have. We have a list, like, per manufacturer of things that we're looking for better payment terms. We want them to keep up backup inventory. We want them to be more communicative when it comes to engineering things, like all sorts of stuff like that, apparently. And again, this isn't really my side of the business, so I'm unfamiliar with these conversations, but we've been having these conversations for a long time asking for payment terms, asking for things like this. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. We sit down in each of each of their office spaces and we say, hey, we'd like payment Terms like, all right, we could do it. And it. And it's. And it's that simple. And I mean, I do think from what I understand, us traveling all that way, showing face. We got a couple important lunches, we got an important dinner. We brought gifts. Like, just that whole, like cultural exchange and, and relationship building is just so instrumental in these types of relationships that, like, that's what it takes to get the equivalent. We didn't. We discussed the. The goal for certain cogs on items. So, like, I think it was also productive, maybe over the medium term of like actually dropping costs, but by and large, it was like we've kind of built up all the. All these requests that we had and then we just walked in and got them done in like a really efficient manner. So I had never been a part of a process like that. I was blown away. I was like, this is. This is a crazy. This is a crazy thing.

[Connor]

So when you. When you listen to the episode Connor. I did. Connor was like, do you know what kind of went for. I was like, well, like, normally I know ops and like CEOs go for like maybe Connor shooting content in the factories.

[Cody]

No, no, no, no. I went because our. Our chief product officer. So Sean's going. Our CEO, our chief product office just. Just about to have a baby, so he couldn't go. Our VP of product just broke his ankle like a month and a half ago, so he was out. So I was third on the depth chart.

[Connor]

So nice. I love that.

[Cody]

The VP broke his ankle and Sean was like, hey, do you want to go? And I'm like, yeah, is. It's the best time for me to go, like mid September. I wouldn't have been able to do it if it was any later. So, yeah, I was like, I sent.

[Connor]

That one from your guys team.

[Cody]

Just us.

[Connor]

Oh, cool.

[Cody]

Yeah. In the past, we've had different product people go, but for this trip, it was just us. I did send, you know, that meme of Big Bird just like sitting at the conference table.

[Connor]

Yeah. That's how I felt a little bit. You're just like, what do I do here?

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, I've never spoken with any of these people before. But regardless, very productive. Held it down. My second less exciting update is the Chinese food was absolutely fantastic.

[Connor]

That was going to be my next question. I was going to.

[Cody]

It was so good. Yeah, yeah. Everything we had was delicious. We went to Shenzhen, which is known for its roasted goose. That was. That was great. We had a Hunan meal that was much spicier. Than expected. But one of my big takeaways coming back is I just, I got to find a good Chinese spot nearby.

[Connor]

I think la. Moving to LA will help with that probably. Oh yeah, it is in Utah. But yeah, yeah, it'll be much better.

[Cody]

In la and I got that coming up.

[Connor]

Yeah. What? When's that?

[Cody]

Friday next week, dude.

[Connor]

Busy, busy, busy, dude.

[Cody]

Busy. Between beanstalk, between Napa for postscript Beanstalk in New York, China and then heading back to la. It'll be a. It'll have been a big like six weeks.

[Connor]

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Hopefully get some time to chill, to lock in. Everyone seems to be on that lock in grind right, right now.

[Cody]

100% dude. So cool. We've got a bit of an agenda but before we begin, I want to thank our sponsors. Motion Rich Panel Prescient After Sell Revo.

[Connor]

Foreign.

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Cody]

I've got a couple things in the docket here. One is OpenAI and the ChatGPT shopping and the Shopify integration. I feel like we should touch base on it. I think it'll probably be a huge discussion point over the next 14 months. It's probably the thing in 2026 I was thinking about again this morning. I think Applovin is an interesting comp in terms of narrative. Like I think as advertisers we're like constantly looking for one, we want to be early to platforms because there's typically arbitrage and that was definitely true of Apple Evan last Q4. But then two, we're all looking for ways to diversify outside of Google and meta and we're all, we're just clamoring for that and it's like, maybe that's applovin, maybe that's chatgpt. Honestly, there's like, the list is short in terms of like scalable channels.

[Connor]

Very short.

[Cody]

So cool. So ChatGPT rolled out a direct integration with Shopify, which is super exciting. We've had Harley on in the past who talked about as a platform they want to be wherever commerce is happening. They think it's happening more and more in chat interfaces. I'm curious if you have any like high level takes on the ChatGPT integration or how you guys at Jones Road are like scoping the opportunity of it in the maybe short and medium term.

[Connor]

I don't, I think this is like a sign I'm getting old because like I feel like I'm getting asked a lot like, what's your AI SEO strategy, you know, or GEO strategy? I'm like, oh, we're not doing anything. And like everyone's like, you need to be like you should be. And I feel like I'm just so focused on like current channel mixes, like, hey, how do we get TV performing better? How do we influencer performing better? Like how do we get meta performing better? That like, may, maybe, maybe I'm just getting old, but I also, I feel like maybe I should devote a little bit. I just, I, I think, I don't know. We've seen so many things come and go and people like hop on them and like move their whole business them. And I think like TikTok shop is one example. I know like brands can Crush it. On TikTok shop there's like mult like nine figure brands that are crushing it that like it's very sustainable and it's, it's, it's helping them outside of it. But there's also brands who have like pivoted there and are like now struggling, you know. So I, I just am super weary of these things that kind of come good. I don't, I don't. I'm like a huge AI proponent so I don't think it's going to come and go. I just don't know and haven't seen the evidence that like it's worth hiring an agency for it right now or doing it and maybe I'm completely wrong. There's probably somebody listening right now. It's like you're such an idiot and you're like you're completely wrong about that. But so I'm like paying attention but we're not doing anything yet. How about, how about you? What's your take?

[Cody]

Well I like, I like yours a lot. I think by the time this comes out our episode with McCoy the operator Titans with McCoy will have come out and one thing he said that like totally resonated with me and I feel the exact same way as being like almost anti new channel like you have to as like a, as a marketing operator within any organization particularly like leadership I think we have to be extremely disciplined in like where we're spending time and it's so easy to be like chasing the shiny new thing and you see a tweet or you get a slack or whatever you get a, you get a cold email of something that, that seems enticing and then you can spend a couple weeks like going down that rabbit hole and it not become anything. So I'm definitely I err on that side as well. What I'll also say is LLM shopping or ChatGPT shopping in particular feels like foundational platform opportunity than TikTok Shops. TikTok Shops is another great comp of something that a couple years ago and many brands found as a great alternative to Meta and Google. But it's under such particular conditions it seems it's like more or less any decent brand can show up and spend money on Facebook and Google. If you can't do that it's like you have a really, a really hard battle to win. But the people winning on TikTok shops are like they all look a little bit more Similar. They're going to be at, they're going to be at more similar price points, they're going to be running more similar offers, they're going to be targeting a more similar type of consumer. I think ChatGPT feels more like I was talking to someone yesterday, I said it feels more like an Amazon comp. There's going to be a type of consumer that just discovers and shops products within ChatGPT. So you need to be there. So I think it, I do think it'll have like more staying power. And then the last thing that I'll say and you and I are in an advantaged position here is that one reason I'm less interested in being like the fast mover as it relates to Geo, which is like generative and engine optimization is because I think as established brands we already have it in many ways. We are working with an agency now who's building a product to help with LLM visibility and it's like at least as it relates to wallets, like Ridge is number one. Like if you, if you were looking for wallets on an LLM, like Ridge isn't not coming up. And that's just because we have a 10 year head start of like seeding the Internet with like positive reviews and content and you know, presence of Ridge selling wallets. So I think for all those reasons we're also one, going to move slow. Two, I think there will still be a medium and long term opportunity that's very important. And then three, as a larger brand we have an advantage in it. So I guess we'll, we'll kind of see how it, how it shakes out. Would you have any different advice for smaller brands or is there anybody else? If you were like, if you were in a different position you might be considering it more as an opportunity, I think.

[Connor]

I don't know. I'm very open, like I agree with all of your takes and your senses. Very open to the possibility that I'm wrong and like that like right, you know, this is the most important thing we should be doing. And again like maybe not, not for now. It's not like hey, pull out of Meta and like go all in on it, you know, and spend 50k a day on it. Like but like it seems like they're going to be launching ads. It seems like maybe, maybe I'm like more excited about it then maybe I'm just an ad guy, I'm not like an SEO guy but like I just haven't seen the proof point that like okay, this is actually like A meaningful investment and something that, you know, we are doing. I'm. I'm just trying to find some GA stats now. I know in like three months ago, we talked about, you know, getting four purchases from it. I'm just curious to see if it's increased at all. Is this something you've looked at?

[Cody]

No, no. Here. I. I could quickly pull it up here, too. This is actually one of the few times I ever go into ga.

[Connor]

I was gonna say I. Like, I could find it so much quicker in old. Old one. Yeah. Like, last 38 days. We have 380 users.

[Cody]

Last 30 days.

[Connor]

Yeah. So it's like. I mean, maybe you could make the argument that it's because we're not optimizing it. But, like, you know, it's not like, oh, man, this is crushing it. Like, there's. There's something here. People are looking and finding us.

[Cody]

Like, yeah, we've had. We've had a thousand people in the last 30 days.

[Connor]

You're doing better than us.

[Cody]

40 conversions.

[Connor]

That's pretty good conversion rate.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. But then you hear other man. I'm trying to think, like, I've heard a couple other just anecdotes where it was like, there's some sort of supplement brand that figured out how to rank for the very particular type of benefit that they were providing. And ChatGPT became like a very powerful source. I do think that was way smaller. Today there's going to be like, some growth hacking opportunities where. Hey, if I can figure out these, like, long terms where. And. Okay, I'd love your thoughts on this because part of our strategy at Ridge. No, I don't even think this is a hot take. But, like, unless it can make a meaningful impact, it's almost best for us to not care about it.

[Connor]

Oh, you. Yeah, you said that. I think when we were planning like a channel expansion, like end of last year, you're like, I'm just not interested in a channel that we're going to spend $2,000 a day on.

[Cody]

Yeah. And I think fully optimizing in the short term, we could double our traffic and our conversions and, you know, we'd make like a couple thousand bucks. And it's like, oh, yeah, that's just right now, going into Q4 with everything else we're considering, like, that's just. They just cannot be a high priority.

[Connor]

I was thinking about that. I. You actually said that. And I think about it pretty often about, like, how you're not. And like, I've been thinking about that a lot too. Because I was actually thinking about Snapchat this morning just as I was listening to operators and Sean mentioned Snapchat as, you know something they're, I think they're probably talking about AI like the same topic. And I was like, yeah, like that would have been so dumb for me to try to get on Snapchat to reach a younger audience versus like if we can get meta working to reach a younger audience, like we can spend, I don't want to say unlimited but like you can spend you know, like pretty decent money per day, you know, six figures per week versus like way less on Snapchat. So it's like yeah, absolutely agree about that. And it's just all about like your, your leverage.

[Cody]

And that's what I think I saw it might have been Revo. Honestly Stuart at Revo mentioned that like they're finding more and more referrals coming from ChatGPT of like people looking for account tools or something. When you have these like more niche sort of products and services that are going to get discovered from very like long tail queries. It does make sense where it's like you may be better off trying to optimize it. But for someone like us. Here's the last point. Well, I'll make a couple more points here. One is we are working with an agency because I think step one, one of the problems right now with ChatGPT as a acquisition channel is you have like no visibility. Like you literally, you don't have a Google search console, you don't have a Google trends, you can't tell where things are trending, where you're ranking. Like it's hard to optimize against frankly, it's just kind of a black box. So I think there services popping up to provide that visibility. We're talking with people to do that now and that's where we're finding where like we technically have great generative engine optimization as it relates to wallets and there's probably some opportunity in rings. So we're going to do that short term. There are a couple things that I would be willing to invest in just to kind of plant the seeds in case it becomes important long term. I mentioned this on a podcast months ago. I'd been discussing this with a marketer at a really big B2B software company.

[Connor]

I guess what you're going to say, sure. Seeding Reddit.

[Cody]

No, I'm not gonna say seeding Reddit.

[Connor]

It was that. I don't know if that was you that mentioned it.

[Cody]

Well, it might have been me Because I have told you, when Sean and I started working together at our first job, we were like astroturfing Reddit for clients. We built a, we built a full subreddit. So it's like, it's come nice, it's come full circle, that we should have stayed down that path and we would've had a great agency business 10 years later.

[Connor]

Because I, I want to hear what you're gonna say, but I know people that are doing that, they're like, hey, if ChatGPT is just getting everything from Reddit, let's just like seed Redditor. I don't even know if they're Redditors or seed subreddits and just like get people talking about us on Reddit more.

[Cody]

Yeah, well, you know what we used to do, and I'm sure this is what it looks like. We used to use a service you could only pay in crypto. And again, this was 2017.

[Connor]

So we were so sketchy.

[Cody]

We were about, oh, dude, super sketchy. Yeah, we were buying $15 Ethereum so that we could pay for aged and high karma accounts on Reddit to post about the products. And then you pay for upvotes and then if you had good content from a, you know, reputable account, it would get posted. If you just had enough of that initial traction and that's paying for those initial upvotes, you're going to get visibility on the subreddit. And if it's good post, it would then take off organically. And we had a number of posts get like thousands of upvotes. And that was more or less what we did for like an entire subreddit to kind of like rank well for this brand's brand terms with like positive reviews and comments and anecdotes.

[Connor]

You're just way ahead of your time, apparently.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that was not all that fruitful back in 2017. It was like a very fun hacky thing to do, but wasn't worth our time back then. I was going to say I mentioned this on many Months ago, big B2B SaaS operator was telling me they'll look for queries that they might show up in. And then in ChatGPT you can see what articles were referenced to generate your answer. And then those articles are often different than what are ranking on the top 10 of Google search. So you can actually go out to them and they're not getting a lot of traffic or queries or AdSense or they don't know quite how valuable their article is. So you can actually pay or somehow negotiate getting better treatment in those articles and then that will ultimately influence the really good idea. Yeah, and that's like, I think that's what a lot of these agencies are going to do. The astroturfing of social content's probably easier, frankly. But like, if you look at what these LLMs are referencing to generate the answers, manipulating the articles that are influential in those answers is I think another like really will end up being effective.

[Connor]

Awesome. Cool. I like that. That's really smart.

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[Connor]

I agree on the Shopify piece. Like I think when we had Harley on he talked about it of like the future of it. I'm not worried about Shopify getting disrupted because a, like, like Harley and Toby just seem so on top of AI and and, and kind of, you know, where skating to where the puck is going. And I think they'll just become more of like a logistics and operations company. Like they won't just be like website development company. Like maybe you don't need that. But then it's like all right, like there's still this other huge piece of commerce that has to happen. Like maybe they become an ERP or something. But it's like still when you check out somebody's got to handle all of the, you know. And again I know they try to do logistics but like there's just so many other things that I think they can do besides the, besides like the actual storefront which I don't think is ever going to go away. Like do think it'll be an addition and like a lot of, a lot of checkouts might happen but I don't know, I think people still like it. I think I've actually always been a little really bearish on, on social shopping. Maybe that's why like I've been very bearish on, on live shopping. I never thought that was gonna take over here. And then I've been very bearish on social shopping and like again it's like growing but, but you know there's also been a lot of challenges with it and I, I, I, maybe I'm just you know, getting old again but I feel like people like websites and like there is value in having a digital storefront. It just it So I don't know if that's going to go away. Curious your take but I just think Shopify can have that and then they can also be, you know, have the checkout and have kind of like the back end piping of you know, LLM commerce.

[Cody]

Well, I absolutely agree Shopify is frankly well positioned to be just the backend commerce solution for wherever people are transacting. And the thing about that is like it' there's almost stronger network effects to that where it's like, I'm never going to move to big commerce if they don't have a YouTube integration, a chat chat, a chat GPT integration, a TikTok job. Right. Like, yeah, like if you are giving up one of those in order to switch platforms, your job becomes much harder. If you want to compete with Shopify, you need partnerships now with every big platform. Like, you're just so much more locked in at that point, but you are a much, much thinner layer of the stack, but an important one. Do I think the website's going away? It's becoming. It's going to become less important for sure. Like we, we were talking about this recently where I was told this was a millennial thing. If you need to make a big purchase, do you go on your laptop? Like, will you. Will you get off your phone and make the purchase on your laptop?

[Connor]

Yeah, dude, I'm. I'm a old parent. I'm a. I'm a boomer that way. Yeah. My wife will do everything on her phone and she, and she's like older than I am. She'll do like everything on her phone. Like she'll like work on and open up like Google Docs and stuff. I like can't do that. So, yeah, if it's like, if it's not like an impulse purchase or like a like an Amazon thing, I'm going computer later on.

[Cody]

Yeah. So I think there are some parallels there where it's like, there's still so many people who are like, they want to transact on a website. They actually want to go all the way to the fact they want to transact on the website on their big screen and. But eventually that probably we're eventually all making every purchase on mobile and at that point the true, like Jonesroadbeauty.com probably becomes less and less important over time. So it will wane for sure.

[Connor]

Makes sense.

[Cody]

All right, cool. Any Last points on ChatGPT or LLM shopping?

[Connor]

If you think I'm an idiot and you think I just like am getting old and need to be more on top of the slide in the DMS, comment on our YouTube. Let me know. We want to hear the feedback.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay. I want. So I've been trying to bring up this topic for a couple months now. Have you seen it?

[Connor]

This is the third agenda.

[Cody]

It's made it.

[Connor]

I looked, but I don't remember. I looked. I don't know where you're going with it.

[Cody]

So I want to talk about Naming conventions? No, although we're well overdue to discuss that. This is about the amount of texts in like a welcome series or a post purchase series. I bring it up because. And again, this was a while ago. Here, look, I'll share my screen so we can look at this quickly. All right, I'll pull this up. Elliot Kovak talking to friend of the pod, Connor Dalt. He said, I signed up for groons SMS on July 28 and have received 23 text messages since then. It's basically every single day and personally I'm going to be unsubscribing because it's annoying to me. With that says, with that said, what Groons is doing is not necessarily wrong at all. One of the most interesting challenges with our clients is finding the right balance for sms. Should we go very hard like Groons to drive that first conversion at all costs even when it means lots of unsubscribes? Or should we optimize for purchase aggressively in just the first five days and then pull back, keep people retained for more high conversion moments like bfcm? I think this is a super interesting question. I've also signed up for Gruins SMS and they do send a lot of text. So I'm curious, Cody, if you've talked about this with your team at all in terms of frequency and the balance between. Yeah, driving conversions, short term versus unsubscribes versus retaining subscribers over the long term.

[Connor]

Yeah, I'm just looking now because I got, I am not only am I a Groons subscriber, I'm a multiple grooms subscriber. I just got the immune one because you know, oh again, sick. I like it, it tastes really good. I really like it. But so I have gotten a lot of texts and they have a lot of, a lot of non transactional ones actually. And so I think there's two things. First of all, what is actually better for performance and I think that's going to vary but I can tell you what we've tested and what we found because I think there's a lot of counterintuitive stuff like I won't bear the lead, you can probably send a lot more than you think and it's probably, you know, more incremental than you think. And also timing like we talked about that on the podcast with Michael Epstein. But also like what's your just brand approach? Like there are brands like, you know, I think True Classic is probably pretty aggressive with their post purchase in our space like Il Maquillage will if you Take their quiz and don't buy. Like you're getting two emails every day until you die. Like, but they crush it, you know what I mean? And so you're either going to buy or you're going to unsubscribe. And obviously there's a lower incremental cost to that. But I think that's the distinction of are you approaching it from a brand perspective and you don't want to be spammy. And I think it's very easy for marketers and CX people to kind of insert their biases and egos and a lot of subjectivity. And again, like that's marketing and brand marketing sometimes, but it doesn't always correlate with data. So what we have found is you can send more than you think without people off. Um, you know, and I haven't been able to provide any value of these, like, very welcoming, educational, like, let me help you use this stuff better. Like it's very subjective, I think. And I always try to, you know, test incrementality, do things like that. We're not like hardcore doctor offers. Like, we're not putting like offers in them. But like we, we used to think, and I think you said this in a, in a text yesterday with Connor and Zach, like, you know, most people try to send, like most people would think you shouldn't send an email right away because that people haven't gotten the product yet. People are actually going to be most likely to buy right away. That's actually probably your most incremental moment to try to, you know, get them. And every time we've tested sending more performs better than sending less. I'm sure there's a point where it doesn't, but that's what we've seen.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. And just to add some more context to that last point, we were talking about our post purchase offers and I was saying, yeah, intuitively you would think, hey, the person just purchased from you, let them receive the product. Let them like the product they're going to be most likely to purchase at that point. But really we continue to move that messaging up or we continue to for a long time we can't move it up anymore. And every time we move it up, they're just more likely to purchase. We're just driving more performance at that point. I have, I have some data here. This is in our welcome series. So this is pre purchase. All right, you can see this. So we ran this, we ran this last year actually. But we were testing our welcome series and like the dimin. Because there's diminishing returns to additional messages. And that's kind of what you mean, where people don't realize where they're sitting in that diminishing cost curve basically.

[Connor]

And is this email or sms?

[Cody]

This is sms.

[Connor]

Cool. And there's. Yeah, there's more costs associated so probably the contribution margin probably diminishes quicker than an email for sure.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. SMS's are not free for, can get, can get very expensive very quickly. That's why I guess it's more top of mind for me. But even in this case, what our test was was we had three segments. We had people getting one message, three messages and six messages. And then we have earnings per message here, one message, a $94 earning per message, almost $2 just sending the one SMS. Fantastic. Incredible ROI, et cetera, et cetera. The earnings per message when you send three, it's a dollar 41. The earnings per message when you send six is 91 cents. So obviously as you send more messages the value of each one decreases and then you can look at earnings per flow and you can look at the, the delta earning per message. So when we go from one message and that, that's actually the one that I care about here, I think that's the better indicator is when you go from one to three messages. How valuable is message two and three? You know basically that the first one's worth a dollar 94. We did that in the, in the initial test. So what's the value of the. The next two? And in this case it was a dollar fifteen. An SMS costs, you know, less than a cent to cent. So it incredibly high ROI. And then what is the value of messages 4, 5 and 6 in the flow that's getting six messages, that actually drops off pretty quickly. You go from A$15 to $0.41 for messages 4, 5 and 6. But still very positive ROI at that point we should still feel very comfortable sending six messages. And if you're grooms, you could probably plot this out for much longer and they're still probably earning 15, 20 cents even at message 16, 17 and 18 or whatever.

[Connor]

Yeah, it diminishes, but it's still worth it. But it's still incrementally profitable.

[Cody]

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[Connor]

Are you, are you looking at like, like engagement unsubscribes as well?

[Cody]

We were looking at engagement on unsubscribes here. I don't have it in the, I don't have it in the sheet here. That's, that's obviously a factor, but if you can generate an additional 41 cents per message, it's like it's almost always going to be better than the like 2% of people who are going to be unsubscribing. And that's what, you know, we're both postgrip customers, but they have a, a metric that they called SLTV Subscriber ltv, which just balances all of that out. The, the incremental value per message weighted against the unsubscribe rate to make sure that you're just generating more LTV per subscriber. And it's like more or less this. And at this point subscribers or unsubscribes will be so low it's not going to make a meaningful impact against a 80x return or whatever a $0.41 earning earnings per message is.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I think that's really good analysis. I also like how you're like, you're not necessarily setting up an incrementality test, but you are really trying to measure incrementality and trying to see as we send more, what is the value that we're getting out of that compared to what we had before. And like when do we hit you Know a plateau where it doesn't make sense. So now you guys are sending six.

[Cody]

Yeah, so we're, we're sending six now and honestly in the future we should probably test sending more. We know as people sign up or as people just purchase we should be sending sooner and more often and right now we're stopping at 6. But really we could probably justify going to 12 or 15 or something like that.

[Connor]

And I think this is very different from campaigns actually because you're kind of segment because we know that people are most likely to purchase you know, within a certain time period after like their first purchase. You're kind of increasing frequency on already like a highly engaged segment. And where I have seen the difference with campaigns is like it is, you can, I think you can go higher on frequency of people that are very engaged which is similar. But I think we've seen, we've seen better performance segmenting our SMS campaigns. Much better. Right. You know you can probably make slightly less revenue or same amount of revenue for much less cost. Just being really thoughtful about your segmentation. So just like slight difference on strategy.

[Cody]

Yeah, I absolutely agree. And that's kind of what Elliot Kovak is getting at here when he says he's treating this like quote unquote highly engaged period as the first five days which I think is like probably too small or at least maybe Connor Dalt would make that argument. But then he goes and then pullback to keep more people on the list for high conversion moments like bfcm. And that's where I think you could correct me if I'm wrong here but campaigns over sending campaigns driving more unsubscribes because for us an SMS campaign might only get $0.04% or something $0.04 EPM and it's like oh yeah, if you're getting a 2 or 3 or 4% unsubscribe rate on a $0.04 EPM that that math is much trickier to do. Whether that is the best long term solution for your list is actually I think far more questionable especially if you're doing that frequently. Yeah, nail, nail people when you can be driving 20, 30, 40 cent per message earnings and then sit back and wait till you have the great product launch or the great sale or, or it's Black Friday or whatever and then you can re engage all those people without having gotten them to unsubscribe at any point. And that like kind of feels like it might be the best balance.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, agreed. I think you have to give it like a different strategy. One other note like and I think groons can do this because they're just like, they're just crushing it and so successful. They do a lot of like order, you know, your orders out for delivery, stuff like that and even a lot of like non transactional stuff which again maybe they find incrementality of it but like there is a cost to that. I've decided to not do that. And like we'll send people your orders out for delivery emails because there is a pretty significant cost to sms' like, like non transactional ones. Like we just email and I don't know if that makes any, any difference in revenue or user experience but obviously that's a, I think there's a good cost savings that we get. But you know grins is, is probably choosing that like they're okay with that cost because they think it's a customer experience improvement which is like a total fair decision.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I think lots of brands will make lots of different decisions. I err on your side where that is where I'd probably like to save costs if anything. I just like to be sending messages about our post purchase offer instead of telling like that's the exact time where the order's shipping and you can look out for delivery and things like that. That's when we actually have found it most advantageous to be sending the post purchase offer. So that's where I'd want to be spending time sending sm.

[Connor]

Yeah for sure. Do you want to talk through like post purchase offers at all or like upsells or you want to save that to another one? I feel like you guys are doing some cool stuff there.

[Cody]

We could talk about it. We could always do a deeper dive on it in the future. We were going back and forth with Zach, Stuck and Connor. I was saying one, it came to the point of how do you lift 30 day LTV? And actually that's. I know you can expand on this but that's been our almost exclusive focus as it's related to like very like if we're taking a more tactical approach to increasing LTV, we've only really ever focused at this like 7 to 14 day to 30 days. That is where we found someone most likely to repurchase. We've seen repurchase rates vary dramatically by category. Someone is basically twice as likely to repurchase within the first 30 days if they're a travel customer versus as a wallet customer. So we've honed in that offer and we do 40% off $100 plus and we, we try to Tee it up as much as possible as like hey, you've just decided to carry, you know, the best gear to use every day. We want you to have more of it. So here's like your welcome offer. We tie it to them. Creating an account from Revo. We have some light personalization on the site as someone signs in and begins to shop with their offer. So I think it's a. We try to make it as nice of an experience as possible. Because I don't love the idea of being like overly promotional immediately. Dak was asking about is that the same offer that we give someone in the post purchase upsell? And I was making the point. We actually have a way more dynamic approach to or way more personalized approach I should say for the post purchase upsell, depending on what you've just ordered. We're trying to push you into very specific products. So for a travel customer we've seen a lot of success upselling power banks afterwards. Like those products are just very complimentary and it's more pointed. Then if you're a travel customer you can decline or accept the, the post purchase upsell and then you're funneled into the 40% off $100 plus and you go shop whatever you want, power banks, backpacks, et cetera. But you when we. We haven't done that like open ended shopping offer in the post purchase up so we've really just focused on it being more or less like a one click experience. And as I described, kind of a continuation of that initial purchase versus you know, some sort of dedicated like LTV focus.

[Connor]

I think that's super interesting. And so whatever value you get from that post purchase offer, that's just like day zero revenue. You don't consider that like a LTV thing, right? That's just like your, I mean, yeah.

[Cody]

As soon as it's the second like like the post purchase upsell is. Is day zero revenue. That is like you're just editing the initial order so that person's only purchased once. Then you're getting the post purchase offer on day two and three and six and seven. Those would all be. That's like day one through 30 or whatever. Oh actually I have one other thing. I talked to a candidate when we were hiring for a role a couple months ago and I won't say the brand, but they were working on something. They were calling it the double dash post purchase offer.

[Connor]

I love it already. Yeah, totally.

[Cody]

I'm not a big doordash user so it took me a while to put that reference together. But on doordash when you order delivery from a restaurant they'll give you like 15 minutes to add an item on from anywhere else and they'll push you into like a big goal from 711 or something like that. And they took that approach and I forget how long they would delay the order but they actually wouldn't send the order to their fulfillment for like eight hours or something. It was like, it was like quite a while. And then, and then they like basically where we have a post purchase upsell where we're trying to get someone to add an additional item in like the five minutes after they purchase they were doing it for eight hours and they would add in email and SMS as an experience and then if someone purchased more it would just, they would just edit that order and then they would send it to fulfillment. I'm like that's a, that feels at least from ridges perspective unexplored. I think that's a super exciting thing.

[Connor]

Yeah, we do an hour, we, we have something that can delay it and we can do a one click upsell for an hour and because we don't like to do discounting like I'm trying to, I'm trying to get more aggressive with our offer but not you know, discount. So I think there's probably more that we can explore. But I love like that as well. I think that's really interesting and cool. It's like hey, you're already getting free shipping, might as well add this other thing. It's like at least it feels like there's some urgency in savings compared to having. It's not like the same as like a discount. I feel like for a discount probably they're going to take it in 10 minutes or not you know. But for if there's other things you're trying to throw in there one I'm excited about. So we use like PDQ for like our like checkout optimization shipping and we're, we're, we're hopefully going to be using them for post purchase upsell as well. And like this like order editing feature. I don't like discounting products. I'm totally happy to discount shipping. It's like one that I'm excited to test is like a priority shipping. It's like discount that as like a post purchase offer.

[Cody]

Okay. So if you, if you add another item we'll ship it with priority.

[Connor]

Oh that's a good, I didn't think about that. More of just like a standalone. Actually I like your idea better. It's just like hey you want to get it faster prior to shipping. Usually 15 bucks. We'll give it to you for eight.

[Cody]

Yeah. So when you guys delay the order for an hour, what are the touch points? Trying to get someone to add an item?

[Connor]

Mostly confirmation page. So like your post purchase upsell. I don't know if we're sending an email right now because I don't know if it makes sense. Within an hour I've wanted to. I just gotta check if we're doing not. Yeah, eight hours, you can definitely send an email.

[Cody]

Yeah. Okay. So. So we're. We're in a similar spot where it's really just like focus on that confirmation page. You also have an hour. You have people you know need to like correct their address or something like make small edits to the order. I think that's. We're actually going to implement that. We're going to make sure everything's checking out going into Q4. We have a call about it later today to make sure that just like light touch order edits can be made from Revo's account page. Yeah, the eight hours is crazy because they were adding an email and sms so they had like an entire little mousetrap built out trying to get someone to add it like in a very short amount of time. And honestly they were probably doing things like whether it's promoing the product or upgrading to priority. I think it's just like, it seems like really obvious. It's like as early as you can make that upsell the better. And it's like, yeah, if you can just do it for eight hours and just like get someone to add more items and you have the flexibility of driving them to maybe specific landing pages or whatever. Maybe there's some sort of exclusive bundle available to, to people in this. At this touch point. I just think it seemed like a really, really cool experience.

[Connor]

Yeah, I agree. I think that's really cool. Yeah, I'm excited to test some of the shipping stuff. I like your idea actually. Get, you know, add another product and get free shipping. But maybe it gets you over threshold. Like we. Yeah, and that's a cool thing. We might be able to personalize it. Let's say somebody was under threshold like the same way that we would, that we would show them, you know, hey, you're this far away from free shipping threshold, like free purchase. You could just do the same thing, post and then maybe like, like, like upgrade their shipping as well to give it like another one.

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Connor]

I have a. I have another personalization question for you. So we, we started in pod. I want to give you an update on how podcast is going because it's doing well. Do you guys do any, like, personalization for any, like, podcast influencer, like vanity URLs? Like, like, let's say I go, you know, ridge.com Cody, right? Or Rogan. We' Are you having any banners that come up that show offers? I don't even know if you're doing offers. Is that something you guys do in test?

[Cody]

So we've gone back and forth on this. We've become way less. I mean, years ago and this was like, this is not hard to set up. So if a brand, if this works with a brand does. If this works with the way that a brand does promos, and I would recommend it. Everybody always gets a vanity URL just because you get link tracking and things like that. We used to do 10% off codes for everybody. So MKBHD would get you 10% off or Rogan or whatever, Whatever. If you went through that link, we would do a light personalization at the top of the messaging bar that says use code MKBHD for 10% off. I think that's an extremely lightweight way to do it. It's probably worth doing. We don't do codes anymore, though, especially during, like, for us, during promo periods, we no longer use code. So like, that becomes less applicable and therefore we do less personalization. We went through a phase where we were building out what we'd call VIP pages. And there's a lot of good. Vessi does this well. Vessi does this well. They're probably one of my favorites off the top of my head here. We've slowed that down a little bit. Like, we've built out a number of VIP pages. You end up creating just a lot of surface area that's tough to update over time. I'm like, okay, you get the benefit of if you go to ridge.com PewDiePie, you'd land on a page that has PewDiePie's face holding the wallet, which is really cool. But over time, if that page is getting updated far less frequently with new products and what sale is going on, then is it actually a net benefit? I think is like, was a big question mark for us. So we've, we've kind of reeled that back in a lot. But those are the, the, the two best examples I have for you of, of on site personalization for partnerships.

[Connor]

Yeah, it makes sense. When you were testing it, did you see a, a, a, a lift? Like, is there a clear, like, hey, things convert better when you have that banner in there compared to not?

[Cody]

Uh, I don't know about the messaging banner. I think that's what one's pretty intuitive though. I'm like, why, why not just put that messaging at the top? We did also test the VIP pages and we did see this was years ago, so I don't remember the percentage lift, but we did see a meaningful lift of partnership traffic. If you could send them to a personalized page, it was beneficial. It just became a question mark of how beneficial was it over time because all those pages just become outdated. What I would love to do in the future is build those pages more dynamically. So, you know, like getting into like some, some Shopify stuff. We use Shogun. So what I'd want to do is use like global snippets across all the pages. So that way when we needed to launch the Father's Day sale, we could update our global snippets and it would publish across all of the our partnership VIP pages. So then they would all have the updated Father's Day messaging. That's ideal scenario. You get the personalized experience and you get the flexibility of those pages being up to date with the latest messaging. But that'll be something we do in the future.

[Connor]

I feel like the banner is like a lighter weight version of it where you don't get like the whole image and stuff, but you should be able to get that as well and just like even get like an image and like change their headline in there.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

Yeah, I think that should be available. I agree. It's. We're doing a lot of, we're testing, but we're doing a lot of paid social landers. And again, we have tons of templates built in out but like creator pages for partnership ads if they're above a certain tier. And right now we're just trying to see if we have a lift. But because, yeah, it takes duplicating the page and then editing.

[Cody]

Are you actively testing it?

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah. And so far so good. Yeah, so far. Likely worth it for. I think logistically we're never going to do it below a certain size. Maybe if they're like below a million, we're not going to. But above that, like, we're testing it and so far it looks pretty good.

[Cody]

Yeah, we've probably built out like 40 or 50 of them. And, and I totally agree. We would do it for the bigger ones. Like we did PewDiePie. We, we do MKBHD. We do ones like that. Again, if you were to go to those URL links right now, it would probably redirect to the homepage because we've like kind of sunset the strategy. But in the past we've done all these especially around those creators activations where like we know for two weeks, like not only is this personalized, but it has all the messaging that we want. And then we would do for like long term partners where, you know, fat electrician, we signed a deal this year for like 20 videos. And, and it's like he would get a VIP page if we think we're gonna. So it's not so much about subscriber count, but about like total expected views. And if you have a big long term engagement, then maybe that justifies a page.

[Connor]

Yeah, that makes sense. Like I, I think we'll, I'll see if I can get it ready in time. Like our biggest pod that we're gonna do for like this quarter is gonna be Mel Robbins. Like it would be nice to have, if you land on a panel URL, like use, use code mel for that. You know what I mean? Yeah. But yeah, it's just gotta be, is it worth the lift? And your, your. I love your aggressive templatization idea, but it's just like how do you have the templates where it's like, like as low lift as possible to spin these things up?

[Cody]

Yeah, in this case it's aggressively templatizing and then making sure the templates are more dynamic. That was, that was the mistake that we made in the past where it was like updating the 50 VIP pages is like basically impossible or like such a pain in the ass, it's not worth doing. Okay, so you guys are a couple weeks into podcasting. You're saying it's going well. Are you doing discount codes?

[Connor]

We are now. We're doing gift with purchase codes. We just don't like, we just don't discount. So it's just like our rule. So we'll try to find other things. So we're doing GWP codes. Here's what we're finding. So yeah, we're two weeks in. We're just over two weeks in. And we're using Podscribe, which is pixel using IP and stuff. We're at a 0.8 ROAS, which I don't. I'm curious how you feel about Podscribe and their attribution and how generous it is. But I feel like that is really strong for this initial test because a podcast is probably a longer term channel and we're just starting out so we don't know which type of shows are performing. So I'm, I'm pumped about it, but you can kind of kill my dream.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. So podscribe has incremental. So podscribe, it's been a while since I've thought about it, but it's, it's a podcast specific analytics tool. They largely focus on the audio platforms they have and then they like are matching the IPs so it's like actually from like a conceptual perspective. I like their approach to measurement. Like it seems better than anything else. We also when, when we onboarded, we started with podscribe this year again to do it previously. We'd been using, using previously. We've, we've almost only sponsored YouTube creators that like you do get quite a few link clicks. We used to use discount codes more. But as you move to podcasting and as we move away from discount codes, we needed podscribe to like have some sort of source of truth. So we do that and then we do the post purchase survey, which I think you guys are doing as well.

[Connor]

We are. So here's what we're seeing so far. Tell me how this compares. And again, we're pretty early. I'm just looking at like a few shows. Right. Promo and I, I don't think as many people are going to use a gift with purchase promo code compared to a discount.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

So I think it, you know, it's just kind of, we're doing above a 85 threshold. So even, even less. But like this one show that we spent 5K on, we have 19K promo code usage, you know, uses and 146 vanity URL conversions. So like huge delta. Like I was expecting like a 2 to 1 or something. Huge delta. Another show 16 to 1 20.

[Cody]

Wait, sorry. Just for, for those, you spend 5k, you said 15k in discount code uses and 149 conversions.

[Connor]

19 discount code uses. Oh, 19, yeah. And then 146 vanity URL conversions. So like the point being, if we were just looking at discount codes, if, if the vanity URL conversions are true, if we were just looking at discount code usage, it's, it's undercutting it by you know, 90% or something.

[Cody]

Yeah, I hate discount code as a like attribution source. I think it's like, I think a lot of people never use codes.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

And I might be biased. I, I Never. I like, I, I have like, like friends who have podcasts and I'll go to their subscribers pages and it's like it is in my very best interest to like save money and help my friends and I won't use a code.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

So yeah, I'm, I'm totally against that. I would, I weight the link clicks. I think those are super valuable. I would. Wait. Like post purchase responses I think are pretty good. But yeah, I'm not at all surprised to hear that people aren't actually using the codes.

[Connor]

Yeah, I've felt like this for kind of these channels. I have thought that codes are low. I felt like this again especially with gift with purchases. I feel like, like post purchase undercuts it. Like even if you multiply it by you know, whatever your completion rate is, like it's still, we're definitely seeing a lift and an uptick, which is great. POD Scribe looks significantly better. So I'm curious, you know, how the agency will think about that. How do you, yeah. Do you know how your post purchase compares to like your POD Scribe reported?

[Cody]

Yeah, we go back and forth. We do both. We have two columns and we say if something is above, above our target from POD Scribe or above our target from the post purchase, we'll kind of weight those and if it wins in both, then it's like we'll, we'll re up with that buy and then if it's one or the other, then we'll like kind of make a split decision from there. I actually feel at times and it will depend on the channel, it's just so dependent like attribution for partnerships generally is like just kind of a shoot. Like there's just no good way to do it. Because I also feel at times if you duplicate, if you're getting 40% of, of customers to answer your post purchase survey, so then you multiply everything by 2 1/2 x to get to 100%. I actually think you can end up over attributing to, to podcasts or youtubes because basically like, like and the, the ad reads will say this, they'll say like, tell Ridge we sent you. The call to action is to fill out the post purchase survey. I'm like, I think those people are doing it at such a higher rate than some random person coming from Snapchat. So all of a sudden if they're taking up a, A, a larger percentage of people who are, who are answering, then if you multiply it to get to 100%, you're going to end up over Attributing, So I don't love it either, but I just like it as a signal. Like, you want to see people coming through and saying where they came from. So. Okay, the. To backtrack a little bit. Podscribe point. A pod scribe does a normal ROAS number and an incremental roas number. Is that incremental?

[Connor]

No, I don't know how to find that.

[Cody]

All right, so your incremental is going to be even lower. Unfortunately, I had to break that.

[Connor]

No, of course. But I feel like point eight again. Two weeks in, brand new channel. It's a little bit more of a new audience reach and awareness channel. So two weeks in is probably going to mature and get better. And then again, we're. We're only going to get better at picking networks and shows.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. No, dude, podcasts can work for you guys for sure. I'm super bullish on the strategy. One thing that we've also seen in the past is we've seen creators, like, almost eerily fall into like the 8020 split.

[Connor]

I was gonna ask about that.

[Cody]

Like, yeah, yeah, I, I've done. I've. I think it's Q4, 20, 23. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on creators. I do this big assessment and it's like, yeah, 20% of the creators drove 80% of the revenue. And that's kind of the strategy, especially if you're just starting, starting. Like we, we have a much higher row as than 0.8, but we've been doing this for a really long time. Like, we know what works. We're re upping. A large percentage of our budget is podcasts that we're re upping with. It's the same with our creator program. So we've like, chosen winners that perform relatively reliably. And you guys, you guys will get there too, because if you have a 0.8, then you have multiple people at like 2x plus.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, but so the, the, the thing was with the 0.8, right, we have. Because you have a spend curve or like a revenue curve that. That's probably gonna materialize over like, you know, 30 days and it'll be, you know, pretty significant on the back half or pretty split. Right. All of our spend is coming now, so we have like 100k of spend that we never had before. Right? Yeah, you get to month three and you're kind of rolling over. And yes, even though there's a longer curve, like your revenue curve and your spend curve are at least like, had time to match up with Each other.

[Cody]

You're absolutely right.

[Connor]

I mean it's like so it's almost like a delayed attribution effect. So that's why, like let's, let's chat in two weeks. I'm pretty sure that's gonna be like well above a. I don't know if you're at a 2, but like it'll be a. Well above a 0.8, I think. Yeah, yeah.

[Cody]

All right, dude, we'll, we'll have to circle back.

[Connor]

Like, we just launched a new TV platform, right? First day after we had like a $700k and then second day we're 300. And then like in two days it'll be, you know, it'll be back to normal numbers.

[Cody]

You're refreshing hourly.

[Connor]

Yes. No, the opposite. It's like, let me not look at this for a week.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you're looking at the number go down. This sounds fun.

[Connor]

Two years ago we had a crazy Black Friday. We were actually one of the top selling brands and products on Shopify. It was really cool. Harley shouted us out on TV and everything, which was awesome, but it wasn't all good news. With unforeseen growth comes some challenges. And one of the challenges we had was we had a crazy backlog of CX tickets at one point, I'm embarrassed to say, we had a seven day average response time that lasted for longer than it should have. A big part of it was our CX software was just not scalable and couldn't keep up. We were using one of those old legacy slow players. There was no AI involved, there was no automation and just the UX was not great. And so when we came into Black Friday of last year, we knew we needed to prepare better, so we switched to rich panel. It was pretty close before Black Friday. Onboarding was really quick. Two weeks was all it took. They got all of our macros there, they got all of our tickets, they trained our team, they just took care of everything. We got the self service widget set up. I think now like 40% of people are actually getting responses just by the self service widget. And then we're using obviously a lot of the AI. They have this like social AI moderation tool that us and Ridge are big fans of. Our average response time is now within hours. We've gone from 18 people to 10. We're able to. Our CSAT is higher than it's ever been. And so last Black Friday, no backlog. All of our peak moments, we're able to, you know, without having to fully Ramp up our team or, like, go crazy with it. We're able to get back to people way better, provide a better customer experience, and Rich Panel is a huge part of that. So you want to get ready before peak season, before Q4 and Black Friday. Switch to Rich Panel. You'll save money on software. You won't need as many people, and you'll be able to just provide a better service for your customers. So go to richpanel.com demo and tell them Cody from marketing operator on you.

[Cody]

All right, I've got one more thing on the docket, and before we get into it, one of the things that inspired this that I'm super excited to buy is NBA basketball is back this week. Are you. Are you a Nets fan?

[Connor]

I'm, like. I'm, like, the worst sports fan. Where, like, my teams have been so bad for, like, a decade that, like, I'll watch whoever's good. I used to be a Nets fan. I used to be a Jets fan. My wife's an Eagles fan, so I watch the Eagles more than the jets now.

[Cody]

All right. Super, super fair. I have become an obsessive Utah Jazz fan fan over the last year and a half. Worst team in basketball. They're absolutely dreadful. I might like it might lose some of its luster of being a fan over the next three years, but I've been listening to more or less daily basketball all off season. I'm, like, way too obsessed with the Utah Jazz at this point, so I'm excited. NBA basketball's back. The thing that inspires this question is basically these NBA podcast hosts have to figure out what to talk about all off season when no basketball's being played. So everybody just does these, like, fake drafts all the time. Time there was one. This is actually really stupid. It technically wasn't a draft. It was a bracket competition of best moves. Best basketball moves of all time. They ranked like Hakeem Olajuwon's dream shake against, you know, Allen Iverson's crossover. Silly stuff. That leads me to my question for you. Marketing team draft. You're starting a brand today from scratch. You have $0 in revenue. I'd like to know who your first three marketing hires are.

[Connor]

Okay, I'm going to go with a director of growth.

[Cody]

And just give me. Yeah, give me. Just give me number one. So you're going director of growth. I'd love to hear what salary range and what are their responsibilities.

[Connor]

So let's say they're like, six figures. Like, this is a director of growth who can get their Hands dirty. Like, they're the media buyer for now. So, like, they're. They're a senior media buyer. They're getting their hands dirty into the account. Like, if you need to give them a VA to upload stuff, like, you can do that. But they are building Landers, optimizing Landers. They're running tests, they're running media like they are the growth department department.

[Cody]

And are you looking. Do they have creative skills?

[Connor]

I have my first two hires decided already. And so I haven't decided on creative yet. My second one is like a. And again, I don't know if it's director or manager of, of Influencer. So I would go creator led, Influencer led from the beginning. I would go a. For seating, for paid distribution. And then I'd obviously go heavy partnership ads. So I would start, I'd start getting really good at that from the beginning.

[Cody]

Okay, now we talk a lot about like, performance, creative strategist roles. Do you think this director of Influencer, those sorts of skills, like strategizing around content briefing to creators, doing that, or is it more like Influencer, where they're. They're doing outreach, they're negotiating deals, they understand culturally where social is going and who they want to be working with.

[Connor]

I think it's more that. But like a core KPI is like, supply the ad account with information. So, like, they don't need to know, like, hey, I'm going to run ASC versus abo. But they need to know, like, hey, this is what performs in our account. I think I would go again. Like, I don't have that much context. I'm going to go director growth, who's really leading, like, creative. Because I think, I think you can go and you don't need a creative strategist for the beginning if your director growth is good at it. And like, growth should be good at it. Like, they should know. They should be able to, you know, brief somebody to build status, right? In this scenario, do I have, like, freelancers, agencies, or like, I only have the resources I have internally?

[Cody]

Well, like, I imagine we get to make the rules here, but like, you know, you get a website to start, right? Like, you could have paid a freelancer or an agency to build your. Your site.

[Connor]

Because I'm like, so if, if I only have the resource I have internally, my third hire is some type of a designer. And they're just like a crowd, like designer, designer, editor, right? Because I think, I think, you know, what good is having a creative strategist if you don't have you know, the ability to edit stuff. And so if I can't have an agency for it, I would go, I go director growth, who also is your buyer, does landing page optimization, stuff like that. You know, head of, head of influencer. Gets all your creative and gets, you know, organic reach and then design, who does, you know, web landing page design, static design, stuff like that. That would be my team.

[Cody]

Okay.

[Connor]

All right.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, I think that's really good. So your answers, were there any of those that you were split on or is that pretty clear cut for you?

[Connor]

If I, if I could have like, you know, if I could hire like, like an agency for like, you know, a freelancer for static design, I'd almost be like, I want a marketing chief of staff. Like my third person would just be a generalist.

[Cody]

So no, no retention. Attention in top three. That's where, that's. If I had your top two, I, I'd be really tempted to go like email marketer.

[Connor]

Who are you retaining if you're a brand new brand and you don't have anyone?

[Cody]

The people who my director of growth have acquired.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I, I think your director of growth can do, do that for a while. That, that's what we did. Like, I had like, when Jones Road launched, like, I was the only like growth person and I had one associate and like, they were, they were, if I needed web stuff, they, they helped with that. If I needed, you know, they were kind of of like, you know, retention. I just don't know if you need a dedicated retention role. All right, what's your, what's your three.

[Cody]

Yeah, so, so your, your answers will have influenced mine, which kind of taints the, the, you know, purity of the draft here. I'm supposed to have come in. If this were a true NBA podcast, I would have come in with my answers before. They would have been well thought out. I have notes, et cetera. When I was thinking about it this morning, I think my first hire would be more like a performance creative strategist. I actually really like your influencer take. When you first said it, I said, that's crazy. Like, I'm like, day one you got an influencer person. But if you think about. Because, and that's. I'm just biased. I'm thinking like we have thought about influencer in a very particular way. But if you think about that role as being large and mid tier influencers and you're doing product seating and you're creating all that content with the purpose of supplying the ad account, I think you and I are addressing the same goal. I would do it. Number one. I'd want someone who's just like really good at getting great content. I think there's so, so little value today in like the media. The true, just tactical media buying aspect that I just want fantastic content. So I'd try to solve that with, with number one, I will say I didn't give you any rules. Your director of growth's carrying a lot of weight. I would also, I'd, I'd love a, a, a, a, a The silver bullet Director of growth who's doing, who's doing web retention and media buying.

[Connor]

But you probably did that for a while.

[Cody]

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I'd hire Conor McDonald for sure.

[Connor]

I did that for a while. I'm thinking Zack Stuck. Can I hire Zack Stuck? Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

[Cody]

No, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I'd go creative number one.

[Connor]

You know where you get the, the next step. Next time we do this and we have more time, it's like, hey, this person is 10 points, this person is 5. And you get like, you get like $20 that you can spend total.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, we should totally do that. I mean. Cause it's a big question if you're starting a, you're starting a brand today from square one. If we had the true constraints of starting a brand, I mean, it can be done under all types of conditions, I guess. I think a lot of people are working with extremely constrained budgets. Where one of my thoughts. Thoughts is I think I could get a, a very junior person in, in this like creative strategist role. And I think I could train them up very effectively. I think that person could become like disproportionately valuable relative to their cost very quickly. So that's one thing I would say I'd probably go. So I'd go performance creative number two will probably be some sort of designer editor. And then I, I'd probably like. My honest thought was I'd go email SMS in the.

[Connor]

So who's running your media? Who's building landers? Who's building ecommerce?

[Cody]

Um, I would, I wouldn't build that many landers. Like I would drive people to my site first and, and maybe I'm cheating a little bit here, but like, I would truly, if I was starting a brand today, like, you have to build your site at some point and, and having a web developer or a web designer as like number one, two, three is like not what you would do.

[Connor]

No, no. Yeah, you get agency for, for initial site build. You get for sure, for sure.

[Cody]

So I'd get why I'd have one 5 reasons page and like that's, that's what I would try to work with. And literally anybody could go in and like change copy or change images. I wouldn't be spending time iterating on that frankly. I would just try to create great content and then who would be running the media buying. Yeah, I guess that's true. I mean my point being I don't think it's that hard. Like I, I'd also treat that as like almost like bottom of the barrel. Like hey, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna set up purchase optimized campaigns with great content and great designed ads and that's where we're gonna run here. And we're gonna have the designer build statics and emails. So like the emails that we do capture, we'll be able to retain those people and message to them for a long time time. That's, that's kind of how I would do. I would like it's really just a matter of like prioritizing expertise and I would put ad account set up really, really low on.

[Connor]

Yeah. So you're going performance creative, which I totally agree with. Like that's a great hire and that makes so much sense. Designer editor, you need, if you have the creative strategist, you need them and then you're on retention third.

[Cody]

Yeah, I think so.

[Connor]

Okay. Okay. I just think you can get a growth person that you don't need the best in the world at anything. And I would go 60, 40 acquisition to retention focus. Right. Like get somebody who has more background there who can say set up klaviyo flow send emails. Like I don't think you have to have like the expert at retention. I also agree with you. You don't need like the, the media buyer. Media buyer expert. But I just think you probably want that person flex otherwise like who's running your media? Like I know it's easy but like someone's still gotta be in the ad account. That's your creative strategist. Is, is in the ad account.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In, in this scenario.

[Connor]

Well okay, so you think media buying is dead then?

[Cody]

For sure. And that's why I want to talk, we'll talk at the future about redefine the media buying role. I'm like this is a good teacher, dude, 100%. And you can imagine how fun it can be going a whole NBA off season not playing a game of basketball and just doing these like fun fantasy drafts all the time.

[Connor]

I like that. I like this topic. I think we should. We should do more. We should spice it up.

[Cody]

Yeah, for sure. Awesome. All right. You want to call that an episode?

[Connor]

Let's do it.

[Cody]

All right. All right. Thank you for listening to another episode of marketing operators. As always, like subscribe comments on YouTube, tweet @us. I want to hear your top three marketing marketing draft hires if you were starting a brand today. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel, Prescient, aftercell and Revo. We will see you next week.