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E040: How Product Positioning and Post-Purchase Upsells Supercharge CRO with Shane Rostad
01:13:10
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- [00:00]
Connor
All right, Shane Rosstad, welcome back to the show. I. I think once you've had two or more appearances, you're officially a friend of the pod. And I think we only have one friend of the pod so far. I think Dave Herman is the first friend of the pod. Shane Rostad is the second friend of the pod. Welcome. Congrats. That's exciting.
- [00:17]
Shane Rostad
Thanks. Happy to. Happy to be here. And thanks for having me back. I was hoping that I was going to be the first official friend of the pod, but I feel like Dave Herman is the right person to have that title.
- [00:27]
Connor
I was gonna say Dave's a solid. He's a solid option for that. He's a solid option.
- [00:32]
Cody
Yeah. We're assembling the Avengers over here. Maporas. Avengers.
- [00:35]
Dave
I think we could workshop the name a little bit. The friend of the pod doesn't quite seem so close. Right? Like, feels like you're almost like a. Like a member of the family at two episodes. We've got a lot of friends of the pod, I would say.
- [00:46]
Cody
So I can't do besties Taken.
- [00:49]
Dave
No. Yeah. Besties, besties. Not good. We could. We could do. We could do something else. You know, cousin.
- [00:55]
Shane Rostad
Call me a marketing operator, a moderator. I'll just take the title, you know, honor operator.
- [01:01]
Connor
Well, what I'll. What I'll say about Shane right now is Shane. Shane has this glow about him that happens from one of two things. It's either the I just got married glow, or I finally pivoted from doing marketing services to brand side. And. And you got. You got that brand glow to you right now.
- [01:18]
Shane Rostad
So I do. I feel like I'm just. I'm seeing the world from a totally different side, and I'm just like, oh, okay, it's nice over here. You know, it's sunshine and rainbows until something goes wrong with something. But it's usually, like, on the other side, when something goes wrong, you just kind of, like, walk away. You don't have to deal with it. It's like, oh, that's the brand's problem to deal with. But now being on the inside, when things go wrong, it's like, oh, this is now my problem.
- [01:40]
Connor
Yeah.
- [01:41]
Shane Rostad
With it.
- [01:41]
Connor
Yeah. The buck stops with you. Right. It's your money, your investment, your upside, your downside, all of it.
- [01:48]
Shane Rostad
Yeah. Yeah. But I should say being married is pretty awesome too, so. Really have gotten that done this year.
- [01:54]
Connor
Well, you had both recently. Yeah. I was gonna say you got both going for you. So you have this. You have this, like, compounding glow. To you from. From both things that are just like.
- [02:02]
Cody
Yeah, you're radiating phase of two different things.
- [02:04]
Connor
Yeah, right.
- [02:05]
Shane Rostad
Literally.
- [02:06]
Cody
Yeah.
- [02:16]
Connor
So when I took over as head of growth at Hexclad, one of our biggest priorities in 2023 was to grow our revenue, our top line revenue by scaling paid social, specifically through more creative testing. Everyone knows that as you spend more on Facebook ads using the same creative, the same landing page, the same offers, your efficiency gets worse. That is a nature of of scaling paid media. As you spend more, you reach more people.
- [02:46]
Dave
You.
- [02:46]
Connor
As you reach more people, quality of traffic degrades. One way to offset this is by enhancing the amount of creative that you're testing. And like I said, that was a huge strategy of ours in 2023. It continues to be this year and it's ultimately what let us spend over 50% more year over year while maintaining our one day click ROAS. We probably 2, 3, maybe even 4x our creative output in 2023 and that allowed us to scale our Facebook account efficiently. Now Motion allowed us to understand out of that enhanced creative output what was actually working the best. You know, shots on net is great, but in order to do it effectively, you still need to understand which of those shots on net are doing the best so you can scale it up effectively. In Motion let us understand what was working exactly while 3,4Xing our creative output and ultimately allowed us to scale our Facebook account very efficiently in 2023 compared to 2022. So if you're in the process of setting up your creative flywheel and you're about to really enhance the amount of creative testing that you're putting into your ad account. Then you also need a tool like Motion to understand which of those creative tests are working and which ones you should be spending more on and less on and doing more of and less of. So if that's you and that's the stage that your brand is at, then you need to be booking a demo today or creating a free account@motion app.com Motion offers a monthly subscription plan so you can dodge those annoying annual contracts. And if you mention the marketing operators podcast Emotion sales team, you can get 50% off your first month. All right, well, we got a fun episode outlined today. Before we get into it, we want to thank our sponsors Motion Rich panel Prescient. We also have a special segment on post purchase cross sells and upsells today sponsored by after sales. We're really excited to dig into it. Let's do it. So Cheyenne, last time you were on we were really talking about like CRO strategies, a lot of like mistakes that you see in CRO and how you would like not make those mistakes. Things have changed a lot since you were on the podcast. You launched a new brand in earlier mid November. So yeah, let's start with that. Like what's, what's up with the new brand launch? How are things going? How, how's the brand side life treating you?
- [04:59]
Shane Rostad
Brand side life is good for sure. It's nice to be on the other side of the house. But yeah, we launched. So the brand's name is Cheeky. It's a line of all natural body soap essentially. And it's kind of in the like all natural personal care hygiene space. And the first product in the line is an all natural bar soap, like a cold processed bar soap. And yeah, started building that brand like probably over a year ago with I guess the make. The big part of it of like why the launch was important is that I'm building the partnership in building the brand in partnership with a large content creator. His name's Charlie, or moist critical. He's a YouTuber and we've been friends for a little while and so we started kicking around the idea like a year and a half ago, just talking about making a brand and what we would do essentially. And yeah, after a long time of product development, figuring stuff out, we finally launched on November 15, so just over a month ago actually. So we have like the first month of being in existence just closed out and things are going really well. The launch kind of, we were hoping for it to do well. Obviously Charlie has a big audience, so we were kind of expecting there to be demand out of the gate, but we weren't exactly sure what the reception was going to be from his audience. The kind of part of the idea is he has a very gaming, heavy Internet, chronically online audience. And so the kind of idea is like, you know, a lot of those people, there's this meme of like gamers don't shower sort of thing. So kind of playing into that meme in that space. And so we were like, oh, maybe like gamers actually don't shower and don't care about their shower products. And so maybe this is just going to flop out of the gate or people are going to be like, why the hell are you selling me a bar of soap for $7? Like what's going on? But yeah, we launched, the reception's been awesome. I think the one thing, the milestone that we hit is we did like 10,000 orders. So off to a Pretty good start. And that was like 70% of the inventory we had purchased because we were like this could be. Best case scenario was like we could do 10,000 orders in a month and we hit that essentially. And yeah. So off to a really good start, really excited and like happy to be on this side of the fence.
- [07:12]
Connor
Dude. Unreal. So I got to start naturally with the growth levers here on what drove that. I have a lot of questions about this, but what, what drove that initial 10,000 orders? Is that, is that you leveraging your creator partners audience? I would imagine. Must have been like a big, a big component.
- [07:32]
Shane Rostad
Yeah. So basically we, we actually, what's funny is we had this kind of like there's a long story behind this, but we've seen obviously a lot of creator led brands launch recently. We have Feastables and you know, then Lunch Lee. Like there's just a lot of brands that are prime as an example and like are so hype driven and just like products flying off the shelves. But something for me, you know, knowing that essentially I wanted to build like a sustainable business essentially and didn't want to be at the whims of like the hype dying off and I started seeing prime just being like auctioned off at like the cheapest clearance possible. Them getting sued by their bottling, their bottling partner because they couldn't meet the, you know, requirements in terms of production because there was the demand kind of like skyrocketed, they tripled production, quadruple production over and over and over again. And then it just like hit a wall and now everybody has too much product. They can't keep producing at the rate they're expecting to. And I was like, of course. Great problem to have. Like, would I want to have a billion dollar brand in like a year and a half? Yeah, of course. But at the same time, that's not exactly what I think we were pushing for, even in the best case scenario. So we were like, let's not go super hard marketer out of the gate, like Mr. Beast with Feastables. Like, oh, if you buy a bar you could win a million dollars. And it's like, of course you're going to sell a lot of chocolate bars when one person's going to win a million dollars. We didn't want to have that happen, scale up production and then kind of die from having too much inventory or not being able to keep the demand. And so we decided, hey, let's do this as like simply as possible. And what that meant was just literally we recorded A video and posted it on Charlie's channel. And it's just one full dedicated video on his channel that generated pretty much all of the sales up until now. There's only one other thing that we're doing that has contributed to the sales growth. But in that video we just like very like Charlie talks about starting the brand and why he wanted to start it. And then we literally just show people how we make soap, essentially. We have like a little like soap making set up like R and D set up in the back of his like warehouse. It's pretty like, it's just like a little bit of a grungy vibe back there. But it's like, here's us going through the whole process of making a bar of soap because obviously as I've been in this, it was like, let me learn everything about it. And yeah, we literally just walked through the process. He talks about it before and after we recommend people go and buy it, explain the pricing and things like that. And it seemed to just resonate because people were like, oh, you like, you're selling me a product that you just showed me how I can go and make it myself. It felt like a very like honest, you know, look into, look behind the brand essentially. And I think that that really carried us in. It did. We almost sold out of inventory without even really doing any. Like, we didn't layer on any additional marketing tactics essentially like a sweepstakes or something like that. Like we, we could have done a lot of other things but we kind of like kept it a little bit low. So we just. Yeah, I think the reception, it's just like people like the product.
- [10:41]
Connor
So that's, that's awesome. And for you guys, like, I think the, I mean the most important is, is really understanding like what your LTV profile is going to look like over time. So now you have 10,000 people that just placed a first time order. Like you have such an amazing first and the last thing you want to have happen is like, oh shit, we just sold out and we can't re up three months until now. And now you're kind of like artificially like bottlenecking the ability for that, that cohort to like mature naturally over time. So I love that you guys are like, let's do one awesome top of funnel push. Just see what the hell happens. And now you can kind of like let that cohort mature over time. Is that like, is that the idea now is to kind of like use that to dial in cat goals and all that jazz?
- [11:25]
Shane Rostad
Yeah, we just wanted to see like, honestly, like the main thing was, hey, we have like a large, like Charlie's audience is large. Let's see kind of what we have there. So that way we set like a baseline, you know, we want to see like, what is the baseline sales on an ongoing basis. If we're going to do some continual kind of integration on his channel, what can we expect on a monthly basis? Because really the position we found ourselves in is that, hey, we sold a lot of product and now we have a small amount of inventory left. We could do another push. We could run a sale like Black Friday. I was like, I want to run, I want to have good sales numbers too. But like, what's the point of selling inventory at a discount when like it's going to sell out eventually before we get more anyway? So it was just kind of like, all right, we'll just keep the inventory, we'll let people repurchase, hopefully. See to your point, like, what is that repeat rate? And we might even still sell out a little too early. But that was ultimately the goal and the thought process of like, we can make a big splash. But also I know from working with a number of brands is that the success of the brand isn't going to be the launch moment. It's like, can we generate demand and create great products month in, month out for the next so many number of years? Essentially, we've got to be able to do so. Doing a big launch and getting a ton of hype might actually throw us off rather than help us going forward, you know?
- [12:46]
Connor
Totally. And are you doing, Is this a subscription play? Are you just doing one off, one time purchase for now or what's that? What is that? Because I'm curious if it is a subscription play. I guess first off, is it? And second, if so, did you get a bunch of subscribers right away or mainly one off purchases?
- [13:03]
Shane Rostad
Yeah. So unfortunately with the inventory constraint thing, we were like, we don't want to like kill ourselves with having a ton. I didn't want to like go in a subscription platform and be like, let's cancel all of these subscriptions. No. Yeah, like, that would have just been super painful. But so we, we will add subscription like once. We were planning to restock in January, but this kind of like goes into the whole like how CRO, like the thinking. CRO thinking applies to just like every step of running the brand essentially. Because initially it's like you have a problem ahead of you of like, hey, I have a product that's only $7, essentially not huge Gross margin. Like, how do we. What do we do here? And the thing that helps us is, obviously we have a large organic base of demand, so that kind of helps cure some of the gross margin concerns. But really the thing is, hey, we need to get people to buy more than one bar of soap. So, like, how do we do that? And that's why when we were launching, we're like, okay, we need to launch with. We didn't want to have too many at the launch, but really we need four really solid fragrances that we feel confident in. So that way we could sell them as a kit and be like, hey, try them all, essentially. So from, like, the beginning of the product development cycle, we were like, what is going to be our offer? And from the beginning, it was very clearly just going to be a starter pack. Like, hey, let's put these products together, like a minimum of four of them. And then we had a couple of accessories that went sideways. So that's a whole separate story. But we were thinking the whole time, like, what is that initial offer going to be? Because we can't sell a single bar soap. Like, we're going to lose money if someone buys one bar of soap. So if someone's like, oh, I only like because we've had people reach out to customer support. Like, I don't. I'm allergic to this other fragrance, which is like another learning. But, like, I only like lavender. And I'm like, okay, well, I can't just sell you one lavender bar soap for you to try out because we're just going to literally be lighting money on fire. And so we thought, let's increase the. Let's add four bars, which still isn't even that high of an aob. But then it was like, what accessories can we develop that we can then include in that bundle offer? So we started with a starter pack, which was just the four bars of soap. It was supposed to have accessories included in things, but like I said, that blew up. So that's kind of where we started things.
- [15:15]
Connor
So I want to. I want to like, double click on the. On the UI UX piece real quick, though, just so people can go check this out if they want. What is the creator's full name? If they want to go like, see that video?
- [15:26]
Shane Rostad
Penguin Z0. So goes by multiple names, but on YouTube, it's YouTube.com penguin Z0. Um, and then there's a. A video. It's. It's titled YouTuber Products. So if you type in Penguin Z0 and then YouTuber Products, you'll see the, the full launch video.
- [15:44]
Connor
Cool. Cool. Okay. I will say I'm looking at the site right now and the branding is gorgeous. The site is like simple and intuitive. I, I love the name of your, of your, of your variants like Lo Fi, Lavender Pulp, Francis Touch Grass. Like so good so on brand with the audience. So, so, yeah. So I mean offer makes a ton of sense, right? Like, especially with a subscription brand. Like I've had a lot of conversations in the last few months about all sorts of, you know, consumable brands and like them having their biggest unlocks through offer and of course they're doing all these other things as well. But like it's, it's always that offer, especially on a consumable that's like really going to, you know, crack the, like the LTV to cac you need. So, so offer is point number one. Like I like how you're, you have a minimum threshold. You're clearly pushing people into these 8 and 12 by 12 bar packs by having, you know, larger savings. Like we have a, we have a similar approach as well at hexcloud. Like we always have sets offers and usually have individual SKU offers and we just position the sets offers as like the way to save big, but also want something to get people in the door if they don't have the appetite for that. So I love how that's positioned for you.
- [16:54]
Shane Rostad
I would just say for like, because this I think is an important thing that when I talk to brands, I think a lot of people just like glance over. Like this isn't like, I think one of the important things to recognize when you're building a direct consumer store is like, this isn't a convenience store. Like, this isn't a physical store. Like you can force people to do things the way you want them to. Like when we were like with the 4, 8 and 12 pack, you can't buy a single bar of soap on our store. Like I know a lot of brands are like, we have bundle like for, for you. Like your pan is like a hundred something dollars. So like totally, yeah, it's great if someone's even buys just one. But like you can just force people to only buy sets like you, you're designing the experience. And I think a lot of people overlook that. Like, no, well I can't do that because other people don't do that. And it's like you can do whatever you want and whatever makes the most sense for your business. Like you can set very strict limitations of like we have the four pack and it's four, eight or 12. And you can only have like one out of every four bars. Be the like limited because one of the bars is limited edition. But we set like very strict limitations on what people can buy. And I think it ends up actually working out for us in the. Because we don't have any of those orders. Buying one or two bars of soap where we would lose money on both. Even if someone buys three bars of soap, we might still like, it's just way better if someone buys for. You know, like all the numbers make more sense when someone buys for. If someone buys 8, the numbers make even more sense essentially. So we might end up moving to a model where it's like 6, 9 or 12, you know. And I think just having those constraints is like a lot, I see a lot of brands like we couldn't do that because that's not how this, that's not how people in this category do things. Like in a conversation like that's not how people in my category sell their products. So if we have a buy, you know, volume based pricing sort of scheme like that wouldn't work. People would think it's weird and it's like, well you should try it. And also like what it, what works is what works for your business, you know. So it's just a point that I think is like often overlooked.
- [18:52]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, I remember I, I used to work on the goat foods brands for a while and that was one of the big, the big topics is like who the hell is buying? Like because their minimum size is one pound. Like it's a one pound tube. You can get the half pound tubes but only if you buy like a variety pack. And we shocked ourselves, right? Like we're like most people are coming in and spending 60 to $75. That was like on an order of, of like a set of licorice and these £1 tubes. Like yeah, you'd be, you'd be shocked at what you'll find. Like it is totally different than like someone going and buying you know, just a pack of licorice from the, from the store that they're going to eat in like you know, a 30 minute car ride. Um, it's, it's just like totally different behavior.
- [19:34]
Shane Rostad
And the alternative is that you can't acquire customers profitably. So like do the thing, you know, especially for like if you're a younger, if you're a newer brand or like you're not even if you're like a mid sized brand. Like if you're not acquiring customers, profitably with like the standard set. Like try different things. Like forcing people bundling is like the most is like the easiest version of doing that. But yeah, it's like I often see some people, it's like I can't acquire customers profitably and it's like. But so just like force people to only buy the, the SKU that is profitable for you. Like what, find which one works and just force people to buy that essentially. Like you have to find the one that they're willing to buy of course. But like, you know, don't just like sit there and be like, oh no, I can't sell my products the way that everybody else does.
- [20:18]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point.
- [20:23]
Cody
We've been talking about upper funnel channels a lot especially leading up into know peak moments and honestly it's been one of the biggest unlocks for us as a business is, you know, helping us reach net new customers and getting them into our funnel. But the challenge is historically the stuff is very difficult to measure. You're not going to see it, you know, in platform ros clicks. So one of our secret weapons this year has been pression AI. We onboarded with them about midway through the year and it's been a game changer and helping us to measure some of these very difficult to measure upper funnel channels like tv, like linear tv, like streaming. They've been able to move really quickly. The team's been great and actually get betas up with new channels that we've been testing. So it's been great. We've been loving it. We're able to, to see and forecast if we were able to scale and spend on some of these channels, you know what our incrementality would look like. Prescient has become a really important part of our marketing workflow. It's, it's one of the main tools that we use to set our budgets every month. And yes, it's become a really important, you know, part of our stack that, that we feel like we can't live without at this point. We love the unbiased cross channel measurement. It has also love the halo effects where we're able to actually see how it's impacting. You know we're just on D2C but I know brands that are on Amazon, they're, they're able to get halo effects to actually see how their upper funnel spend and their DTC spend is impacting Amazon. So it's just become a really big part of our workflow and I can't recommend it enough. We're Using it. Hexcloud is using it. Symbiotica Coterie and dozens more impressions blowing up from everyone I talk to. Can't say enough good things about it. If you want to try it to measure some of these upper funnel channels that, that we're talking about, go to pression AI.com operators to book a demo.
- [21:59]
Connor
What else were you thinking about when you were designing this website? So offer dialed sounds like you were really intentional about that. Like what else? Like from the homepage all the way through checkout, like what were the big things that you're like we need to check this box in order for this launch to, to do what we think it needs to do.
- [22:18]
Shane Rostad
Yeah. So I'll say one thing is that it's funny that even having resources you still end up being resource constrained. And I'm like, we could have better photography. We could have better. There's so many things we could do better. We don't have a post purchase upsell right now, which we're going to talk about later. But we didn't have something we could offer because our accessory kind of option blew up. But there's a lot of things that we left on the table still. So I think you don't have to be perfect essentially. But one of the other things is how do we position the product generally, like soap or body wash? Like it's all, it's a lot of it is the same. Like our product is fundamentally better than like your grocery store body wash. Like I believe that like cold process bar soap is the way that like soap should be made. And I think like the synthetic body washes that you buy at a grocery store are a worse product. And so we knew that. But like how do you message that there's a lot of people selling like Dr. Squatch is a massive brand. Like how do we break through the noise a little bit? And one of the things that we leaned into because it was a problem for Charlie in particular is like he has psoriasis and like he is typically he has like overly dry skin essentially, like to put it simply. And one of the things was, hey, typical body washes, just like their cleansers, they just like strip your skin of all the oils and and then they try to use synthetic ingredients to add it back. But we realized, hey, I have this problem where I get out of the shower and I need to throw a T shirt on because if I don't my skin, the air hitting my skin, it's just so dry and itchy that I'm uncomfortable using Lower quality products, essentially. And I was like, we want to go the opposite way. And so we specifically added additional moisturizing ingredients like jojoba oil, shea butter, vitamin E to the formula of the bar, which isn't necessarily something that nobody else does, but it's kind of one of those things.
- [24:12]
Cody
Yeah, Miracle Bomb's got a lot of those. This guy's just, like, knocking off Miracle Bomb over there.
- [24:16]
Shane Rostad
Yeah, exactly. I just took Miracle Bomb and I was like, what's the best part of this? And throw it in here. But it's like that Ogilvy. Like, it's funny, like, you could put the dots together, background backwards or whatever, but, like, it's kind of like that Ogilvy quote where he's talking about this beer brand, and they're like, we triple steam our barley or something. And the guy's like, everybody does that. And he's like, yeah, but nobody else is talking about it. And so, like, cold processed bar soap is more moisturizing because of the way it's made. It's just like, we leaned into that side of it and we realized, hey, this is our angle, our positioning. And so let's lean into the moisturizing side. And it turns out that a lot of people have, like, somewhat dry skin or they don't feel comfortable in their skin. And, like, it seems to resonate with people. But that was kind of our wedge of, like, what is our positioning to be a little bit different than everybody else. And we hit on that, like, it's the first. It says moisturizing body soap on the packaging. And it's like one of the key kind of selling points of the product. And the one thing we did on the site is we explicitly, if you go to usecheeky.com, you will see there's, like a. Why use cheeky? Because taking the, like, I love this, you guys, like, five reasons why sort of thing, I was like, let's just put big text that just lays out the three top reasons why you should use this product. Because, like, everybody does the five reasons why Landing pages. We're a new brand. It's all top of funnel, essentially. Like, let's just be very clear about it. And that copy maybe could be better, but we just, like, slammed it on there so that everybody would see it.
- [25:44]
Connor
I think it's abundantly clear. And I love how you're, like, you make a simple section a little more punchy with, like, the. The, you know, kind of distinction in the colors that you use. And, like, you highlight the most Important parts. Like, that's why I like the site. I think it's, it's like super simple, but it's like you, you fit. You figured out a way to kind of like give a very, very simple section. It's like own punchy flair, which is pretty cool. Okay, so offer product positioning and like usp. Like I see that everywhere on the homepage. I really like the social proof section you have at the bottom here. Like, I think launching with these videos is, is really clever.
- [26:25]
Shane Rostad
So that I think is. I think that social proof section is like, obviously we don't have reviews. And so it's like, what do we. And it was just like, all right, we don't have reviews, but like we could get a couple of friends to leave reviews before we launch. But that seems super inauthentic. Like we've had people order through the Shopify store so it would say verified, whatever. But I was like, that just feels, hey, yeah, those people bought before you. But today's the official launch just felt kind of weird. So like how do we hack that? And we literally, we had. The one advantage that we had is that the people in those videos are like, Charlie has multiple YouTube channels and it's like the characters from those other channels are like they work at the warehouse at like the, the office essentially. And so if people watch Charlie's content and especially his other channels, they would see those people. And those are the people coming to the site are people who know Charlie. So we were like, let's be somewhat like tongue in cheek and just be like, hey, these are unbiased reviews from real customers and it's just videos of people that like clearly most people know work at the warehouse. And maybe if some people don't, they like, some people might not pick up on it. But we're like, it kind of fills the gap of like you see a real person talking about the product and it's like a little bit of an inside joke. But it kind of helped to like, I think it helped to fill the gap, you know, of not having any reviews. It's just having some people talking about it and taking a. If you only have five reviews, taking it from a text based review into a video, it increases the fidelity of it and maybe the realness of it for customers. At least that's theoretical. But I think it does add it makes it punch a little bit more weight if it's in a video UGC style than it is just like a text based review, if that makes sense.
- [28:05]
Connor
Yeah, totally. And you do need to hear some.
- [28:09]
Shane Rostad
Yeah, yeah. Harder to fake, for sure.
- [28:11]
Connor
And you need something from the jump, right? Because the last thing you want to be is a new brand with, like, literally nothing from anyone on, like, supporting your product, on whether or not it works or not.
- [28:24]
Shane Rostad
The one thing I'll say is that it. It backfired on us a little bit because we had multiple. Like, our product is unisex. Like, Dr. Squatch is famously, like, we make products for men, like, very masculine. We wanted to be the, like, antithesis of that. Our audience is much more, like, you know, for lack of a better way to put it, not like hyper masculine, hyper feminine. It's a little bit more, like, fluid. There's a lot more unisex products. Like, it's not like. So there's just a little bit more of that. We didn't feel the need to be like, hey, we're making products for men. But the problem is those videos, it was all dudes, and there's no other pictures on the site of people. And so, like, a big L on our part is that there were multiple women who were like, I think this might be only for dudes. But, like, we never said only for dudes. But you go to the website, Charlie announces it. You go to the website, and there's five videos of dudes talking about the product. It's like, we made it pretty abundantly clear, at least in their mind, that it was a men's product. And so that was like, we had multiple review. We had people buy and then leave a review and be like, I think this might just be for guys. But, like, I want to try it anyway because I like Charlie, and I'm like, okay, we kind of. That's where we dropped the ball, clearly, because we didn't want. That's not how we wanted to position things. But it seems like it happened anyway.
- [29:38]
Dave
I want to kind of jump back for a second to product positioning. Does that work for you guys?
- [29:43]
Connor
Yeah, let's do it.
- [29:43]
Dave
Because I think that's. That's super interesting. I. One thing I love about what you're talking about, Shane, is you traditional, like, CRO services, background, right? But when launching a brand, you're talking about things. And I think. And I might be biased when people think CRO, they're like, you know, we always joke they're, like, testing the colors of the buttons, like, things like that. They're like, oh, yeah, let me strike through pricing or no strike through pricing. What you're talking about is CRO from, like, a very high level of Just like, yeah, functionally, why are people buying things? How are you articulating those? And like, what are the economics of the offer? That's what I love. Starting at a really high level. We're talking about this more because I think we're, we're in a phase where we need to do different types of product positioning. Right. Like, we're big enough now where we kind of, we kind of nailed the like bulky to slim wallet. We do really well with like the 40 plus crowd. We call them the everyday dad. So now we're talking about getting into like younger demos or more tech affluent demos. We have to figure out how to like reposition our product. And I'm curious, have you guys thought about that at all? I mean, obviously you're a month in, so you've got a really long Runway, but when it comes to building redundancy, appealing to new people, like maybe that women's funnel looks completely different. And do you have a process for like, how would you test different positioning, different offer to a different demo?
- [31:04]
Shane Rostad
Yeah. So I think generally speaking, like, I honestly, this is not. I know that this is probably the most important, like biggest unlock on the CRO side is like unlocking new demos that you can then go and position ads to and acquire new customers and like increase that, like increase the, essentially your tap in some ways of like your addressable market of people who might be interested in your offer. There's someone, I don't know if you know Kanika. Kanika Misra on Twitter, but she does CRO work and does like landing page work and things like that. And like, she's obsessed with this sort of stuff. And I was always like, dude, just do traditional CRO. It's so much easier. Like, why are you doing all this, like copy research and then rewriting a whole page? But like, that's the kind of work that you have to do is like go out and talk to, to the target demo, like survey, interview, talk to the target demo, understand their pain points, what they care about, what they don't care about, and then basically restructure an entire new landing page, only speaking to that demo. And it's like with. I feel like Zack Stuck's brand of like the socks is a good. It's just an easier example because it's like you have people that wear them that are hunters and you have people that wear them that are runners. And I think Zach, very explicitly, I think, I think he's talked about this before before. He very purposefully experimented with every one of those demos. Until he found the one where it was like, oh, this one just works. I think at your scale, you kind of have to identify those new demos and do the harder work of trying to convince people who are a little bit harder to convince. But for a lot of brands, it's like, let's identify the different demographics, let's come up with a list rank, order them based on what we think is, like, the largest or best market for us, and then just, like, design, essentially, landing pages that speak to specifically their concerns and then run ads that feature those people. So if you're selling hollow socks, you have ads of runners or runners talking about the products and then talking. Or the founder talking about how, man, these are so great for running. And then have them land on a landing page that talks to the benefits of running and then see, are you actually able to, like, profitably acquire customers using that messaging? It's like, you just have to, like, you almost have to, like, go full funnel and, like, change your messaging from time. Because if you send people that are talking about running to a page that then talks about hunting, because that's like, your core demo. To your point, like, Connor is like, if you have women and then you send them to the Ridge homepage, like, it's probably not speaking to them very much. And so you kind of need to, like, branch out into additional landing pages and find what works and then integrating that into one core experience. I don't know if it's possible essentially, like, I don't know if you maybe at a certain scale, like, you can have, like, a little, like, carousel that's like, oh, for runners and for this. But I don't think that generally works all that well or people actually see that. I think the more segmented, you just have to start getting more segmented, driving to landing pages, new creative images that speak to those people and, like, do the hard work of, like, talking to your customer. I know it's. It sounds silly, but, like, you have to go talk to your. Those customers and ask them what they like about your product and what they don't like.
- [34:14]
Dave
We. We've been talking about that a lot. Like, as you identify new demos and expand, you do need these experiences, like the homepages one or, like, certain email flows that are like, the average of all of these things. If I'm a hunter or a runner coming in and buying from Holo, like, I want kind of like, my Persona reflected to some degree on the homepage and through the emails, and I think there's an art to that, like, that.
- [34:36]
Shane Rostad
Is the hardest thing to do. I think, like the homepage are like getting your core pages to fit your, the entirety of your target audience. It's why I think it's way harder. Like, it's so much like you can get like for example, with, I think with Zach, and that's like, I don't know that much about his business, but like zero to like $20 million a year in selling stocks and focusing largely on hunting, you know, and then like unlocking the next stages of growth will be harder because you have to unlock those demos and then somehow make your brand as a whole feel like it's for all of these people. And that's the whole brand, like brand art thing. That is just really difficult to do.
- [35:17]
Dave
Yeah, I want to ask Cody about this. So I think you and I are in the same boat. Like you've said, one of your big 2025 goals is expanding into younger demos. So like, I was curious how, how you guys are approaching it.
- [35:29]
Cody
Yeah, no, for sure, it's, it's not easy. And I mean especially at, at our scale, like there's not that many brands that I think do it super well. I've, you know, watching some of the other ones in the industry and it's, it's challenging because you don't want to alienate your current base. And what I've said to my team repeatedly is like, we're going to take the conservative approach. I would rather do less and not alienate our current base. It's just like the decision we made versus, like, try to pull off this big rebrand and think it's going to land with this younger consumer and then end up pissing off our current base and making it feel like we're not for them. But yeah, I think, I think you have to. We're, we're very actively working on this right now and planning it. You have to somehow try to be all things to all people on your main site and on your brand. And then, but knowing you're not going to do it perfectly, you got to kind of go like 80, 20 rule there. And you know, like Shane said, try to appeal to the masses, try to get different demographics in there, maybe cater to, you know, your main one the most. But definitely like, you don't want to have a, you know, a 25 year old millennial land on your site and just see grandmas and be like, this is not for me, or vice versa. But then you've got to have these funnels. Like, you've got to have these, these Persona based funnels where you've got different listicles which is something we're working on right now or you've got different influencer funnels or you know, coming in from different sources. So yeah, definitely considering different customer journeys, different funnels. I think you can probably go a little bit crazy with the personalization. Like oh hey, if they came in through this or they said their age through this quiz only show a model of 25 year old people. Like we'll see how far we want to go with it. But yeah, like I do, I don't love the farmant tool but I do really like that messaging angle that they have which is like you shouldn't just have one site, you should have like all these different micro sites depending on the funnel and the customer journey. So absolutely agree with Shane there.
- [37:16]
Shane Rostad
What's hard is in managing that. Like this is where I think like, I think one thing we're going to talk about is like what should you be doing as like a small, medium and then large brand? And I think that there just becomes a point of like there's so much when you start going down that rabbit hole, it's like there's so much to keep in your head of like how the different pages connect and then you make one mistake with like your. If you go like full personalization, like if they click a UTM parameter, say this and then like it goes wrong, then like it just becomes so hard to manage all that that I think you really need like a larger, like it becomes. Then you need a larger team to manage it and you start going like is the juice worth the squeeze? Like there's so much.
- [37:53]
Cody
Oh for sure. You're sending out eight emails instead of one email every time now.
- [37:57]
Shane Rostad
Yeah, it's like I think that's like a mature brand problem I think that you get into and it takes a lot of work to solve.
- [38:07]
Connor
I. You're totally right. It is, it's really hard to solve when you're like scaling it in. Like when you're scaling it. But what's I think important to call out. And I know this is how, how Zach did it cause I was like kind of on the back end of him like getting into this process. Like he found a template, a structure of lander that worked for him. It was like, it was like listicles, like X reasons why. And all he did for each Persona, like whether it was a skier or a hunter or everyday use or whatever, like angle Persona problem solution you wanted to go after it was literally just updating like the Headline, like the imagery on the page and then like, most of the reasons even like, applied to like, whether or not you are a skier or a hunter. The actual like, reason number one through six, for the most part, if I remember correctly, was actually the same. So, yeah, like, the, the figuring out of like, well, okay, it's the hunter that's really performing best for us because, like, that has the best roas and we've gotten the most scale out of it. And like, when you do the comparative analytics, like, that's working best. Like, that doesn't have to be this insane. Like, oh, every angle we're going after, we're designing a totally net new experience. Like, in fact, it's almost better if that's not the case because then you're controlling more variables. Like, all right, the ad creatives all somewhat similar. The landing page is the exact same design. We're just plugging in the personalization piece. Like, if anything that is like giving you more confidence because then you can go out and say, okay, well, what if we showed a hunter, an advertorial? What if we made like more of like a hybrid shoppable page? And like, that's like more of a scale tactic. And now that's where you're getting into like some more of the nuance and complexity. But like, for you to just figure out like, what is the Persona that is going to like be the winner for us? Like, there are very low lift ways to do that and it should be like, again, it's all. You still have to build the initialisticle. Like, that's not necessarily like, I mean, you still have to do and like have like a good version of that. But like, once that's built, it shouldn't take a UX designer and dev to get every single variant built out. And I know that's how Zach went about it. Yeah, yeah. The whole point of the landing page is to speak to a very, very, very specific person. It's the product page that needs to convert that person. So like, if you do your job really well on that listicle or whatever page it is speaking to that demo, hopefully, like, you should be really more so focused on like offer positioning and like conversion oriented, like direct response tactics. Not necessarily. Like, I mean, you should continue the narrative where it makes sense, but like, you don't have to. Like, the, the product page isn't supposed to do like the heavy lifting on the narrative and, and like the language going to that demo. So like, I wouldn't even overthink it to that extent. If you're a brand out there that's like, we're trying to crack who our like ideal avatar is, who our ideal Persona is. Like, don't worry about, make it like, don't worry, even worry about customizing your core site. Just like use landing pages to be that intermediary that's going to do like the bulk of that heavy lifting when it comes to speaking to that person and what their unique problems are.
- [40:56]
Shane Rostad
Yeah. Do you guys think that the like, if you start building out these like landing pages and you get very specific for niche audiences? Like, I think, Connor, you were saying, like your main site should just. Does your main site just become more generic? Like, is all your selling done on the landing pages and then your main site when they land, it's like, feels like it's for everyone. For like how. Because I'm like bridging that gap, I think is the thing that a lot of people struggle with is like cool. We found this new Persona and like this new audience and the creative. And then the landing page match and then they go to the product page and like, you know, just using like wallets as an example is like, it's all women creative landing page and they land on the page and it's like a dude's wallet and it's like comparing to a dude's wallet and it's like, well, now I don't feel like this is for me, you know, like that, that bridging that gap feels like super hard to do.
- [41:42]
Connor
Yeah.
- [41:42]
Dave
And I think that's more art, art than science. I definitely, I think these like core experiences. I said homepage, I said some email flows, some email campaigns, like, you, you want to be able to, you want, you want your different key demos to be able to see some of themselves in those experiences. And I think some people do it better than others. I was going to say Rafa, the running brand, their homepage currently doesn't do it. But like I've seen it in the past. They speak really well to like the novice runner as well as like the professional runner who's like trying to do sub three hour New York marathons or whatever. For us, like as we nail women and as we nail tech, those are some of the key demos that we're talking about. Like our homepage needs to encompass those things and we're trying to do it across categories too. So then it's like we're getting like super, super fragmented. But really we just had this conversation today. We should be totally capable of doing that. I just think it's it's a process of refining. I don't think it's anything we're going to be like, you know, good arts, never finished, it's abandoned. Right. Like something, you know, whatever that quote is, like, that's kind of what it is. It's not going to be perfect, but we are going to try our best to ensure that we're speaking to the right people in these core experiences.
- [42:55]
Shane Rostad
Yeah. And then I think the question that follows from that is like, how do you actually know? This is like, really a question for me is like, hey, you're, you're doing this work and you're trying to create this homepage that integrates these things. Like, is conversion rate the metric that you should be met? Are you effectively doing that if your conversion rate on the page goes up? Because this is one of the dark sides of optimization is that it's always going to pull you. It's like with Facebook, it's going to go for the easiest to convert people. It's not going to try to reach into the bucket of hard. And so on your site, if you're majority, this guy, dude demographic. And then a test where you show women's stuff isn't going to convert better for the entirety of the audience, but it might convert better in that target demo, if that makes sense. So how do you actually evaluate if your homepage is moving you in the right direction or if you're just going deeper, entrenched into your niche?
- [43:59]
Cody
That's a good point. What's going to convert best today versus, like, what's going to be the best for the brand growing and you kind.
- [44:05]
Shane Rostad
Of have to take some Ls sometimes, but like, no, nobody gets paid to take Ls on CRO tests. You know, like, that's not a good outcome for anyone that's running an expert. Like, even on the marketing team, you're like, oh, this test, we, we added women's stuff to the homepage and like, it's performing well.
- [44:22]
Dave
If my, I would, I also wouldn't want like my CRO specialist recommending that. Right? Like, yeah, like they're, they're, they're doing a very specific job and me is like the brand owner, theoretically. I'm like, look, we really care over the next five years to be building a women's business. This is a requirement of the homepage. We want to be, you know, appealing to these people in some way. So I think that's where it splits. Like, yeah, the CRO guy should be like, no, let's do all USPs, all value, props, promos. Let's only speak to the key demo that is like the most optimal core global state of the homepage tomorrow when I ab test it. And then you just find some sort of balance in between.
- [44:58]
Connor
Oh, does that mean we go and create a custom experience on like the product page, for example, for every avatar we have funnels around. Like, not at first, but like in, in theory you could say, all right, like, we cracked this demo. Now I want to understand, like, does having that congruency live on through the product page or whatever page or the collection may be? Does that drive a lift? So maybe it's like, all right, for this demo, like, we are going to build a custom product page experience, we are going to split, test it. We are going to set up like utm, like campaign filters to like inform who gets that experience and then actually see, like, all right, we're only targeting like women interested in like these pastely colored wallets. We are going to split that traffic from that landing page between like the generic PDP and the customized pdp. And like, then at least you have like a, a launching off point to be like, all right, this drove a pretty big lift. And like, maybe it does. Even though it's gonna be a ton of work, like, maybe it does make sense to produce curated funnels for our top three avatars. Now that doesn't help the problem of like, well, what happens when they come like direct to site after they've seen a funnel? Like, that doesn't help there, but at least you know that what they're seeing from the ad campaign is at least gonna be. And maybe that's all that matters is like, that that first experience is what's congruent throughout. And maybe it doesn't matter if you do that. That's going to take care of, like, oh, if they come back, like, you've already planted that seed that this is like, for them and that's the experience.
- [46:18]
Dave
Can kind of be diluted over touch points, I think, to a certain degree. Like, if I am a hunter, I'm landing on the site, I'm spoken to as a hunter, and then I hit the homepage and it's maybe not explicitly hunter, but like, I get the feel like I've already got the context of what I know about this brand and then that more generalized homepage can still speak to me specifically with the prior knowledge that they have. So that's, that's at least how we think about it.
- [46:42]
Connor
Yeah. Okay, so, Shane, you just launched a new A new DTC brand from a like UI UX CRO perspective. Like launch brands. Like up until let's say like a $5 million top line revenue ceiling. Like what is the. There's obviously a million and one things you can focus on when it comes to CRO. So like the exercise of prioritizing is, is very important. So like what are you prioritizing from a CRO POV as a DTC launch brand?
- [47:12]
Shane Rostad
Yeah, I think to kind of keep it simple. Like there's just core things that you should focus on when you're a small brand. Like when you do 0 to 5 million essentially. Like once you're able to spend money on Facebook profitably and you're able to like continue to. And just using that as like most, how most brands are growing, you should be acquiring customers, you should have data coming in. I think the most important thing is to experiment with a lot of the things that we've been talking about, which is like who is the best demo or the largest, easiest to convert market that you have for your product. Like when you speak to specific value propositions, what's the thing that unlocks scale in your ad account essentially and that comes from speaking to different demos and having different offers. So we talked about with Cheeky, we have essentially the four pack. We could do an eight pack or a 12 pack and we could force people into that essentially and just try to see what actually works better. So have a page dedicated to, hey, this is the starter pack, but it has eight bars of soap. Or this is the starter pack, it has four bars of soap. Additionally layering in accessories of like, hey, we're going to add a shower, a shelf essentially like a shelf, a little spot for your bar, a tray for your bar soap and these like soap bags that are like a loofah. And like how do we do we do a little discount? Do we do, oh, you get the soap bags for free? Is it a free gift with this offer and what is that offer that makes sense for your actual unit economics and your current customer acquisition costs where you can continue to scale and figure out those two things. The perfect offer and the core demo can get you pretty far and break you into that next level of growth where you can just have consistent. I feel like this might be like more like zero to $3 million where you're trying to find that like audience where you can really scale your ad account and then you. That that's just the two things that I would focus on. There is like offer and who you're Actually talking to.
- [49:08]
Connor
I think, I think you, what's, what's interesting is like none of those tests. Maybe, maybe you could argue they, they could be. But like, from my perspective, if I were to go and start building out those tests, so it's like, let's unlock the avatars and let's unlock the offer. Neither of those would actually be built necessarily in like a post click CRO test. These are actually like full funnel, like especially the avatar. Right. It's like unique ad creative to unique landing pages to product page for like, let's say you're doing four different avatars. Like, these aren't, these aren't post click tests that you're, that you're emphasizing right now, are they?
- [49:41]
Shane Rostad
No. And like I, I'm not a meta, I'm not a media buyer. I'm like, you know, not my wheelhouse. But like, even I know, like you, you should see it in the, like, if something's working, like you kind of segment it down, you should see performance improve. If you're able to continue scaling budgets at the efficiency that you're hoping to get, then it's working. Essentially. I think that that's the cue. Like, oh, this is actually working. We're scaling our budgets and we're continuing to acquire more new customers using this offer. Okay, maybe we should do more of that offer and these other ones don't work as well. Let's drop those by the wayside. And where can we experiment now? I think post click. You're waiting so long because Facebook has this statistical engine that it's using to determine should I spend more money or can I acquire customers trying to target. Well, and if you're spending at good efficiency, that means that it's able to find customers for you and you can see it way more immediately. Facebook's way better at predicting the future based on the statistical outcome than you looking at your post click a B test result, if that makes sense. But that doesn't work. That's why when, then you hit a scale where you have multiple products, you're growing, you're driving a ton of traffic to your site, you have different channels. Essentially it starts to get a little bit more complicated where you might not see, if you launch one new ad set pointing to a specific landing page, you might not see the impact immediately and it might not be as significant. So you have to then, okay, like, you can't use that as the tool. You have to get a little bit more sophisticated.
- [51:16]
Connor
Yeah. And if you had to choose between optimizing the offer first or, or like finding your winning like Persona slash avatar like under your head. You got to do one before you do the other. What are you, what are you doing first?
- [51:31]
Shane Rostad
Well, I feel like offer just because like if you're selling something where you make no money, you're never going to make money. So like it doesn't, you know, you've got to have some, a product at a price that, where you can make money and then you can afford to spend money on Facebook because if you have like, you know, 90% landed costs, like you can never spend money on Facebook. So you've got to change your, you've got to figure something. And if we were selling one bar of soap or two bars or so we would have like, we would have 90% landed costs, you know what I mean? Or something crazy because of like how much it costs to get from here to there, et cetera. So like that's 90 never going to work. And so you just want to like exclude that as quickly as possible.
- [52:10]
Connor
Totally. Yeah. No, no point in like trying to optimize the actual marketing messaging if the, if the point of conversion is not dialed in.
- [52:17]
Shane Rostad
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
- [52:22]
Dave
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- [53:22]
Connor
So a super, super important part of optimizing your website and just CRO in general and driving the highest conversion rate possible in AOV and revenue per user is, is what are you doing on site after the initial order happens? This segment is actually sponsored by the, one of the most powerful tools, maybe the most powerful tool to power this experience. After sell. It's used by Ridge, it's used by hexclad, used by Jones Road Beauty to power all of our post purchase upsell in cross sells. Um, we've been super happy with their, with their SaaS tool. It's, it's driven a ton, a ton of of, of post purchase dollars in that same session. So Shane, I know you like to use After Style as your, as your tool of choice for all the things I just mentioned. Like what, what is it about After Sale that you find so powerful and able to produce, you know, great results for DTC brands?
- [54:15]
Shane Rostad
Yeah, I mean I'm typically when it comes to Shopify apps, I'm always looking for what is the lowest cost provider because a lot of them do the same things. And I was doing that for a while with post purchase offers and I was using a different tool that was way harder to set up essentially. And eventually the brand I was working with was like, what about this after sale thing that I keep hearing people talk about? And I was like, should we try that? And I was like, okay, let's give it a try. As soon as I got in, I was like, oh my God, this is so much easier to set up and configure like the whole mechanics of how it's set up because essentially if you've never used aftercell before, you can go in and you just create funnels where you just say, hey, here's funnel number one. And I want you to catch everyone that meets this criteria in this funnel. So if this person purchased this product, I want them in this funnel and then it'll. If that person doesn't fit that criteria, it goes to funnel number two and you could have different criteria, it goes to funnel number three. So you can get, you can be very specific and then get very broad as you go down and you can go super in depth and they make it really easy to manage along with a couple of other like really nice features. But it's like setting up that initial. Like if anybody has a brand that has more than one sku, if you're like a, I think with Zach and there's another brand, Dorsal Bracelets, where their offer is a little bit simpler, where it's like, oh, a random of this one thing we sell. It's almost like if Ridge was like, oh, a random Mystery wallet. It's like that might be easy to do and it's like great, you could send that to everyone when you're only selling wallets. And then as soon as you expand out you can't just have the one offer for everybody because you have more products. And I think that's where after sell really shines is allowing you to set up the different funnels. And then when you have that broad based like broad amount of SKUs, you can actually set up a B test for those different funnels to see like should we be offering them more of the same thing or should we be offering them something entirely net new and they make it really easy to kind of set that whole process up. So I've moved over to using Garcello and setting up funnels just because it makes my life so much easier. And the like ab testing features are just way better than anything else that's out there essentially. And so yeah I, what we do you talk about but I, it's definitely like my tool of choice.
- [56:32]
Connor
Yeah, I think we're hexcloud's a good example where like we have all sorts of for like entry products, right? Like 12 piece set, but also a 12 inch pan and maybe a hex mill and a knife set and an apron and like we have you know, very different cohorts coming in. So what we'll do and this is something we need to continue to optimize. But you can go in and say like hey, let's do a market basket analysis and show me like what's the next three most likely ordered products for someone buying a hex mill versus a 12 piece set. And then to Shane's point you have custom funnels to say like if you know, product equals this, like show them these offers which could be very different than you know, any other like first order profile. So you know, it's probably the same with Ridge where like you know, a ring and a pen in a wallet and luggage are like so different and have very different profiles. And like you know, you obviously want to be putting it on like a. There's. There's two approaches. You should either be thinking like okay organically like 12 piece set buyers are most likely to then buy a chicken fryer. Like thus I want to show them that product. Or you can try to like manipulate that data and be like oh, I actually think that Aiden chef's knife could be you know, higher up here on a 12 piece set first time order. Like maybe we should go try to like push Aiden chef's Knife a little harder here and see if we can like you know, increase the number of 12 piece set orders that also include an Aiden chef knife. So we've been, we've been like doing a little bit of that and are planning to do more of it as we build out our team even more in, in the new year.
- [58:00]
Cody
The other thing we're doing is network offers. Have you guys seen that?
- [58:02]
Dave
It's like rocket. I actually don't know what it looks like.
- [58:05]
Cody
Yeah, I think rocked. I think actually bought after sell so they integrated it and it's all in the same platform so same thing just you know another great way to make some additional revenue that you can give back to Zuckerberg right after it or you can pocket it. But essentially people can see, I forget if it's a pop up now or if it's like embedded on the post purchase page. So after they get. So it won't interfere with your post purchase upsells but after they get to confirmation page if people go, they can kind of see a little ad unit there and they click on you know, something for going to nike.com or something like that, you get paid for it and so you know, some extra, some, some post purchase money. Uh, but you know, this day and age got to do everything we can to improve, you know, margin per session revenue procession as much as possible. So just, just a little bit icing on the cake I'll call it. But yeah, it's been great. We've had it live for probably 6 months I think probably made an extra 100k or something like that for you know, pretty pretty much doing nothing. No extra fulfillment costs in there. So it's been great.
- [59:04]
Dave
I'm super bullish on. I, I don't know if I'm, I'd say I'm super bullish but I think agnostically monetizing like it could be site sessions or customers will become more popular in D2C. So like fundamentally I think network offers are really cool. It's like we, you've already in theory acquired a customer profitably, let's assume and now you can just tack on something else via like display ads or referral or affiliate or something like that. I think that becomes more popular. So yeah, I think it's, it's cool.
- [59:33]
Cody
Yeah, for sure. Totally agreed.
- [59:35]
Dave
Where we've been using it the most is actually to move through excess inventory. So we've got like someone, someone many years ago like put an extra zero on our forged ember key cases. So we have had just an Insane amount, just an insane amount of forged Denver key cases for years. So and so we're working with merchandising, we're working with planning. It's like okay, how do we want to like move through, through these forged ember key cases and obviously there's, there's some tools like we built more kits around them but that's like really cumbersome and like not all that productive. You can mark them down on the site which like we're currently doing during bfcm but you don't want to do that all the time. You want to be thoughtful about promoing. So then it's like what has been an incredibly effective way is just in that post purchase experience we're not selling matching key cases but it's the biggest discount we're going to get. We're getting a decent attachment rate. It's not the best attachment rate but we're getting this value of actually moving through inventory that we just do not want to have anymore. So that's where we've kind of landed on it. Now I'd love to next year continue to do that but, but also better optimize towards like actually aov, right? Like what, what is the from a profit perspective, what is the most optimal strategy we could, we could put into place. But regardless it's cool to have as a tool for either scenario I think.
- [60:54]
Connor
Yeah. Well one thing I, one thing I like about like post purchase that's very different than I think we might have talked about this Shane. Like you think about a pre purchase upsell or cross sell. Like you can't just roll out like a rebuy Widget and then 30 days later be like oh wow, like we drove $150,000 to this rebuy widget. Like it's working. Not necessarily like every time we roll out a new upsell experience we also like split test it like not know because it is a world where you actually hurt your overall conversion rate or and like your, your RPU actually goes down from that experience even though like the revenue driven from clicking that is like is like whatever it is now that's what I like about post purchase because like you can probably not like 100 but you can almost like look at the revenue driven and be like well that's just incremental. Like there's really, there's not a ton of downside because like the purchase already happened. Like you're not interrupting their purchase experience. Like they've already bought their 12 piece set. Now we're saying hey like you should come by the 7 quart chicken fryer and here's the offer on it. So like I'm curious Shane, if you think about it that way, maybe I'm wrong in thinking about it that way. Maybe it could like hurt the experience in a way that like is net negative. But like I think those are two distinctions to be made between like pre and post purchase. Like you know, offers direct response tactics.
- [62:13]
Shane Rostad
It kind of feels like the like the end like you're waiting in line at a store and it's like the little stuff on the side, like if that's marked down like that's fine. It's not like your core shopping experience. It's just like I'll throw something on at the end. And it does feel like you have more freedom to experiment with larger discounts and things like that. Obviously you have to be careful of like if you, you can get in the habit of like continually having like if you have that key case on like the back end essentially. But it's like someone, a product people continually buy then it's like okay, now I just know that it's there so I'm just going to go and buy and like you have the quantity selector. I'm just going to buy one thing and Then buy like 5 via the post purchase upsell or something. Like you can get into like weird things where you're you know, giving away like people start to recognize it. I think it's good to like cycle these things a little bit or especially not like show a highly discounted product when they already have that in their cart and they're like I already bought this and now you're showing it to me 60% off. Like that's really not great. You have to like cover all your bases there. But, but I think if you do then it's just like free territory to like to Connor's point, it's not meant to be. I guess it's not meant to be anything but it doesn't have to be just pure profit driven. It can be but one benefit moving inventory. The other that I've seen with consumable brands is like hey, people really love this product and when they use that product they get better results. And we believe sort of like we, we can cohort this out and see like LTV with people who have this product is higher. But it's like hey, here's our best selling product that's not like part of our core four like set of this is like a hair care brand, like maybe giving people a big discount if they've never purchased this product before is a great way to get it in their cart. So that way when they come back their next order will be larger because they'll probably have that product as well. In addition to the like shampoo and conditioner that like it's a mousse and so. But they always buy shampoo and conditioner. Like you can try to get them to do other things. Granted it's very hard to get people to try. Like getting people to. One of the things I found with after sell is getting people to buy more of something they're already buying is way easier. You will have higher revenue per user, higher profit per user if you're just like hey, this thing you already bought, you want another one for 30% off. Like a lot of people are going to take that deal, especially repeat customers. But you don't get any of the added benefits of like increasing like the potential future LTV of that customer or moving inventory that you have overstocked, things like that. So you don't necessarily have to just purely be profit driven, but you certainly can be.
- [64:47]
Dave
Yeah, we, the other one that's, that's not profit driven that we talk about is just product discovery as well. Like it's really easy to come to the site for a wallet as know for yourself or as a gift or something. You're a valuable person. You've, you've theoretically checked out at this point it's like okay, we have like we might, this might be our last opportunity to make sure that you know, we have carry ons and backpacks and wedding bands and things like that. So like it's just such valuable real estate. And that would be now again I'm like moving the goal posts a lot right like because it's really hard to measure that as well. But I'm like look, if every single customer walked away knowing that we had carry on, I'd feel good about that. And we know that that like that post purchase page experience feels elevated and feels like a good way to introduce someone to the product. We did a super low attachment rate trying to, trying to get 350 carry ons attached to a $70 wallet order. But there's a lot more value being created there.
- [65:39]
Shane Rostad
It's good real, it's good ad real estate essentially. Like that's a great, you know, catalog for your customers to show things off. We've done that with another brand. You get a lower repeat rate than just selling them more. But like showing with after sell again like the features of after sale like the offers that you can make, you can say, hey, I have four different accessories. I want to just show all four of them and tell them to pick one. Like they get a discount on one of them, they can only add one. But like it's been a great thing of like, hey, they finish and often if they don't buy this thing, you can have the downsell and it's like just downsell them into like hey, here's four different accessories. At 40% off, we have the margin to be able to do it and now they know we have towels and blah blah, blah, blah blah. Like you can maybe get the best of both worlds sometimes, but you probably will end up with that lower, you know, profit per user or revenue per user than just like being like, hey, you bought shampoo, just take more shampoo. Even though that might have downstream consequences you might not want.
- [66:36]
Connor
So where would you be focusing if you're a, if you're a brand, let's say, I mean let's, let's use you as an example and maybe use some hypotheticals that are not true. But like let's say you're a consumable brand and you are prioritizing. Like let's say revenue and like profit is your number one priority. Like where would you be starting when it comes to post per, like using a tool like after sell, like what should you're like what should be try, what should you be trying to like figure out and like optimize towards from the jump?
- [67:06]
Shane Rostad
Yeah, well what we will be doing for sure is essentially setting up like experimenting with hey, if they bought this soap, let's offer them to buy more at a slight discount. We don't want to do huge discounts, but let's just see, hey, if they bought the lavender soap, like when they buy their pack, we could see if they bought lavender. Let's offer them an increased amount of the lavender soap and kind of go that route to see if they're adding more because essentially if they decide that that's a better offer than something else, we could see much larger, you know, take rates, higher increases in AOB, etc. The other on the back of that is just accessories because I think accessories always have this like super positive effect on your really your unit economics because they just tend to be like higher, not super high potentially, but like higher margin. And so with a low margin product, if you can get one accessory added in all of a sudden like that order particularly looks a lot better and you can do much larger discounts on accessories. So the take rate on those might be higher. And it's like, oh, the accessories bundle. We might have two accessories put together and one offer I hope we can do in the future is we have multiple accessories. We don't just have two, we have three or four. And it's like, hey, if you haven't bought an accessory yet, what if you bought all the accessories at 30% off in one order? That's how you get different way of trying to get that Zach 10 pairs of socks kind of effect where you get a big increase in AOV for a lower take rate. Those are some of the things that I'll be looking at.
- [68:41]
Connor
Yeah.
- [68:41]
Shane Rostad
As we start rolling that out.
- [68:43]
Dave
I, I think accessories for brands is like super is still pretty like under explored because like the idea that if I'm buying eight bars of soap, you can give me all the accessories for 30% off, that could be margin accretive for you. Higher AOV, higher margin. And I'm likely converting at a higher rate because I'm getting this discount on the accessories. Like it is just this like win, win, win, potentially that I don't think brands like really strategic and it's a.
- [69:07]
Shane Rostad
Better experience for you when you're using the product because like the accessories, usually the only reason why they work as accessories is because when people use them, they get better results or they have better experience, you know.
- [69:17]
Dave
Yeah. Like I talk about, we have this. This doesn't happen so much anymore. But years ago we rolled out this coin trade product so you could hold coins. So it was exactly that. We could, it was high margin, we could sell it discounted. It would resolve like a friction point for customers. It'd be like, well, you know, where do I keep my coins? Okay, you got the coin tray that you're getting a 30% off. So we're getting that higher conversion rate so the users having a better experience. We're like, like that's, that's a win, win, win, win at this point.
- [69:42]
Shane Rostad
Yeah. And I think brands could do more to that. Like they could just be. I think there's a lot more room to explore accessories than people imagine. Like totally.
- [69:51]
Dave
I, yeah, I geek out on this hardcore. Because then we have like we're auditing this right now too, going into the new year because we have a lot of accessories. We have like two price points. We have a. It's basically sub $20 which is like the airtag cash strap or the coin tray. We have like larger accessories like the key case or the pen or the knives. And It'll be like 40, 50, $60. So we have a matrix of like, what are you essentially in market for? Like some sort of wallet. And then at what point are we trying to get you to attach what item? And that's like their PDP upsells, we get a bunch of cart upsells, we use after yourself for the in checkout upsell, you get post purchase. So you have all these touch points that you can kind of configure over time. And yeah, I think we'll sell a bunch of like tiny little metal items next year.
- [70:34]
Shane Rostad
Yeah, and it just all goes back to your ad account essentially. Because every time you increase aov, whether it's post purchase. My one thing with post purchase that a lot of people say is like, oh, it's free revenue. Like it's just, it's added on at the end and it's like that's just for anybody out there that don't, don't think that way. That's not how it works. Is that you're essentially all of a sudden you're aov. Like when you're actually looking at your doing your unit economics, you're seeing like your, your CAC to like your AOV and like evaluating that you're including the post purchase revenue when you're looking at your efficiency. So like if you make an extra dollar on the post purchase, you're and you're looking for like a 2 efficiency. Like you're going to spend an extra 50 cents on all your ads going forward. So like, it's not free revenue, but like, yeah, I think that there's a lot of value to unlock there. Even though a lot of people look at it as essentially what you're doing with every accessory is just increasing the amount you can spend. That 50 cents is still important because it's 50 cents more you stack on a few of those, you could end up significantly increasing the amount you could spend on Facebook, which we all know is the lever. The more you can spend to acquire a customer, the more you're probably going to grow. And that's what it all comes back to. I think that's like for CRO on your site generally. For me, it all comes back to how do we make our ad accounts more efficient? Essentially we want to be able to spend more. All of the efficiency. That's why your conversion rate never actually goes up because you just start spending more to acquire worse customers, essentially. And your conversion rate stays flat. But you're scaling, your budgets are going up, you're getting more new customers. But conversion rate's staying flat, but everything's working, working. That's, that's a good sign. Essentially, it's not about seeing the Shopify conversion rate going up. It's about seeing your budgets in Facebook go up.
- [72:17]
Connor
Totally. Yeah, I like that approach.
- [72:19]
Cody
No, you're, you're, you're totally right about that.
- [72:21]
Shane Rostad
Yeah.
- [72:21]
Cody
You don't actually see things trend to the bottom line because you're going to push hard.
- [72:24]
Shane Rostad
Extra so.
- [72:25]
Cody
Yeah, totally agree there.
- [72:26]
Connor
All right. And that is a wrap on our second episode with Shane Rostad on CRO, all things strategy tactics approach. Shane, I always feel like we, we have another four hours of content to get through, so I'll have to have you on for, for episode number three, which would put you as the number one friend of the pod. I'm gonna keep using that until we have a better term, but awesome episode. Appreciate you coming on a super insightful, super actionable thank you to our sponsors, Motion, Prescient and Rich panel. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to, like, subscribe and share. We're trying to get this podcast in the hands with as many tacticians as possible. Thank you much.