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- [00:00]
Connor McDonald
All right, guys, we made it the hundredth episode of the Marketing Operators podcast. We're going to talk more about big rocks this year. Some of the big growth marketing projects that we're focused on, we went from
- [00:10]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
operating in absolute disarray to like, oh, it's marketing operations that gets us to the point of launching two or three of those level of campaigns or product launches every single week. It basically comes down to like, what are our working norms and what are the workflows and like, what are the underpinnings so that we can collectively get everything done that we need.
- [00:27]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
In the past, I've set KPIs. We thought about like, do we want to set a goal of like diversification goals and new channels? But I don't want to incentivize that because maybe that's not the best for your efficiency. If you're testing properly, you'll just allocate your media mix to where is the most efficient. Based on that, I think we could
- [00:40]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
probably test a little bit more, especially across different teams. So let's just call it more testing. More visibility into those tests and learnings. That happens at the channel level. That happens in the postmortems, that happens at end of quarter.
- [00:51]
Connor McDonald
Are there any other major level ups or major facelifts that you're trying to give to your marketing operations process this year outside of the postmortem?
- [00:58]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
There's a lot that's in the work. We are launching TikTok shop. We're looking for ahead of social as
- [01:03]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
far as I'm concerned. Concerned as it relates to marketing up right now. I just like to tighten the bolts on what we've got.
- [01:09]
Connor McDonald
All right, guys, we made it to the. The hundredth episode of the Marketing Operators podcast. I'm celebrating with a. A $9 cold brew from Blue Bottle this morning. I thought, I thought I would treat. I'm out in LA right now and I shocks me how the coffee is, but I thought it was worth celebrating today with this expensive cold brew. So episode 100, guys, it's been awesome.
- [01:30]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
I pulled out the. The marketing operator's mug that you said
- [01:33]
Connor McDonald
I saw that gave me.
- [01:34]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [01:35]
Connor McDonald
Nice, Nice, guys. Well, I just want to say I'm very grateful for both of you. It's been, it's been a lot of fun. I've learned a lot and from all the guests we've had on, it's been been quite the ride and I'm excited for the next hundred episodes.
- [01:48]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
That was way too thoughtful of a response.
- [01:50]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
This is a very Nice thing to say.
- [01:52]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah, yeah, no, it's been great. I'm excited to celebrate episode 1000 with you guys.
- [01:57]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
I want to know how many. So now that we're 100, Connor McDonald, how many have you done? What's the. The tally? Do you know? It's gotta be like 97. I feel like.
- [02:06]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah, I think it's. I think it's. I think it's 98. I think I've missed two.
- [02:10]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Impressive. Very impressive.
- [02:11]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
I. I brought this up a couple weeks ago, but yeah, I mean, it's fun. It's fun. I'll have to miss more because then I get to listen to you guys. I'm like, oh, yeah, I got some good. Some good marketing content to catch up on.
- [02:21]
Connor McDonald
Well, now I got. I got granola going on all these. Cody. Cody inspired me to finally download granola. So I got.
- [02:26]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
During the podcast.
- [02:28]
Connor McDonald
Yeah.
- [02:28]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah, okay. I've been using granola too, for just my meetings. I didn't.
- [02:31]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
I. Oh yeah. So I turned off. So like I was doing the CRO thing the other day and like just dumped in all the notes from Dylan. So yeah, high. Highly recommend it. I just always toss it on.
- [02:42]
Connor McDonald
Dude, granola is like so much better than. Than anything else. I mean, you don't really need. I've learned that because granola does the transcripts. Like, you don't really need the recording. You can just go to the transcript and control f and find anything you want. Um, I'm like, I don't know why I was using grain for so long and I had this like ad granola at the bottom of my list and I finally did it and it's like just night and day better than. Than anything else I've used.
- [03:09]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
You know, the other thing that I've been doing. Have you guys seen the. The Gemini summaries of meetings? Yeah, it will just like auto create. What I've like doing is I'll just add myself to way more meetings, attend none of them, and then just read the Gemini notes after. That's a great little workflow. It's like I feel like I'm getting probably 60, 70% of the meeting by reading through the. The doc for four minutes or whatever.
- [03:31]
Connor McDonald
Can you do that with granola?
- [03:33]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
You can do. We just do this. You can't add it, but you can do folders. And so like we just kind of did this because like, we would just be. We would be asking like, hey, can you send the notes? I'm not able to make the meeting. And so now it just automatically goes to a folder and then you can have it just like go to a channel after it if you wanted to. So it's like all of our growth team meetings will just go to that folder and anyone that would be able to be in those meetings can just go and check it. Yeah, totally agree.
- [03:57]
Connor McDonald
I got my little mark.
- [03:57]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Totally agree that like, yeah, you can get 70% of of the gist of the meeting by just reading it, which is great.
- [04:04]
Connor McDonald
So we're. So we're nerd nerding out on AI. Note takers. That's topic one of the episode. But let's get into it. We got some fun things to go through today. Before we do that, we want to thank the sponsors. Motion, Rich Panel, Pression after Cell and reo.
- [04:52]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
One thing that's become really obvious this year is creative strategy is changing. It is no longer just just about make better ads or make more ads. You have to have AI in your workflow. You have to understand all the right best practices today. And the leverage point is how you think about the creative.
- [05:06]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
And that's where a lot of teams are struggling. People are still learning creative strategy the same way they did years ago through trial and error, intuition. And there hasn't been a structured way to learn that role properly.
- [05:15]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
It's also super hard to find great creative strategists these days. It's still a new role and it's one that's extremely important. But there's a lot of self learning and so that's why the training in the space is so important. And Motion is a huge leader of that. And they're launching a new free course and community launching in March. This is going to be a new way that people can really master creative strategy.
- [05:33]
Connor McDonald
And what I really like that this is, this is all taught live. Things are changing so, so fast, so rapidly right now that courses that were recorded six or eight months ago, like those are all outdated by now. The course won't just be listening to people talk about ads, you will actually be hands on in this course. You're building concepts, you're actually making creative, you're testing it and you're ultimately learning how to make decisions when things don't work out the first time and the
- [05:56]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
instructor line is legit. There are creative experts from brands like Caraway, Comm, Harry's, Space Goods, Happy Mammoth and agency leaders and founders from Scaled Brands. They're teaching what they're doing right now, not what worked three years ago.
- [06:08]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
There'll also be some potential, I'm supposed to say internships at Least for Jones Road, I'm going to say job opportunities. You'll have the ability to sign up and learn more. But we will be interviewing a few candidates as part of this partnership with Motion, which I am so excited about. The course is live, it's free to register, seats are limited, and if creative performance is part of your job in 2026, then this is worth paying attention to. We'll drop the link in the show notes.
- [06:33]
Connor McDonald
All right, let's get into it. So we're going to talk more about some big rocks this year. Some of the big objectives, big growth, marketing projects that we're focused on. We got a bunch from all three of our brands that we're working on. So Connor, let's start with you. One of the, the first one in your list was big and bold marketing operations. So I think this is a good one to start with. Not too, not too different than marketing operators. So what you wrote here is building a scalable operating system for your marketing team that enables faster, more consistent execution through standardized processes, clear decision making and better cross channel coordination. So I want to start off with like, what, what have you done last year or just in previous years to like enable marketing operations. And because this is something I've also spent a lot of time thinking about and we've, you know, taken. It's one of those things where I feel like we've taken a few, like a bunch of steps forward, then a few steps backwards, then a few steps forward, a few steps backwards. And like over the course of three, four, five years we're definitely working more efficiently. But I still feel like there's a lot of areas to improve how we get the work done. So like, let's just start with like historically, like what, what have you done to enable marketing operations? And like what I, when I hear marketing operations, it's like getting the work done. Is that what you mean when you say totally? Yeah, yeah.
- [07:56]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
I mean.
- [07:57]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
So I've talked about this a bunch and it's always something that I kind of geek out on it. Like, it like triggers the like OCD part of my brain. It basically comes down to like, what are our working norms and what are the workflows and like what are the underpinnings so that we can collectively get everything done that we need. And that's because at Bridge we went from, and I talk about this all the time, launching very, very few things in 2019, 2020 to all of a sudden 2025. We were launching like two or three new things a week at times. Just insane velocity. And the team was basically the same headcount. We, we. I remember this vividly but it was end of 2019 where like we had to launch watches that doesn't even actually Track. Maybe it's 2021 or something. We had to launch watches. And honestly the one thing almost like broke the team completely. Like we were so we were so far from where we needed to be in terms of timelines and everybody's. We're scrambling the jets for like two weeks before the launch. The night before we're like finally buttoning everything up. So we went from like absolute operating in absolute disarray to like oh it's, it's marketing operations that gets us to the point of launching two or three of those level of campaigns or product launches every single week. And I'll just give you like a couple examples. What we have in place currently that I think is that I think has been the most beneficial one. We have everything on our go to market board. In notion we have a really kind of fine tuned task system. So when we build a tier one product launch we know that there are a certain amount of tasks that get associated with it. Those get built out, those get assigned to people. Those tasks have due dates set based on like we, we back into all the timeline. So if we do a tier one launch a year from now, we know we need to do the marketing summary six months from now, we need to do the channel strategies a week after that and then we're doing a shot list and then we're doing the shoot, then we're delivering the content. Then we have two weeks to develop all the emails and ads and landers and then we review it and then it goes like two weeks later and that's like basically how we're backing. It's a very fine tuned task system and it's flexible enough because we then meet around those things twice a week. So we have a channel manager meeting where we are reviewing basically all those different stage gates to make sure we're all aligned. If new things come up we can add those. And that's why I say it's like a flexible system. And then, and then we have another meeting where we're all getting together and we were all looking at the board and we, we talked through each of our different go to market review boards in Figma many episodes ago. But that's the way the system works now. The handful of things and then, and then I'm, I'm curious if you have any feedback or if you guys address any of these. Have any of these issues internally, but there's. Some of them are super funny. 1. Slack hygiene. I tweeted about this. Everybody's using more threads this year. I. Drives me crazy. People messaging in channels.
- [10:52]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Don't even get me started. First of all, I just. I actually love how much you geek out on, like, the operation stuff because it's. It's so not me. Like, where we're. We're going through similar things where, like, things are breaking in our process and. And as we grow, it's just like, it's just not working and it's hardly going to catch up on. But, like, I just can't do it. Like, somebody will tell me timelines, and my brain just doesn't. It's a different language. Like, it just doesn't compute.
- [11:15]
Connor McDonald
And.
- [11:15]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
And so, you know, I have to leave it to other people. But I love your obsession with it and I think it's awesome. But. But yeah, on the Slack stuff, dude, like, yeah, we like channels. Like, I. I hate when people do too much in DMS because it's like, well, they said this and it's like, let's just do it all one place. Like everyone say, and then. And then threads as well. Totally. What are your. Like, what. What are your guys, like, hygiene guidelines?
- [11:39]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
I mean, I mean, the main one is I would like to have more public conversations. I think there's a weird. There are some weird nuances to that one. Like, we have a channel for partnerships, for instance, where all of our partnership work was getting done in the DMs. And we had a public channel, and there were like 90 people in the public channel. And I'm like, I'm not surprised that people don't want to talk in front of 90 people. We got Sean in there, the CEO. Like, you just never, like, you never want to. The only time you want to be posting in there is when you're like, you know, something has been complete. You don't ever want to sound like you might not be on the same page. You don't have something done or you're looking for feedback, whatever. So I actually kicked out basically everybody from that channel. So, like, we'll try that. And I think that's one way. It's like, now it's a much more intimate group of eight. So public channel conversations is. Would be beneficial. And then the big thing is we have a lot of channels, and the default, I think, within Ridge should be to ignore most channels. And that's the importance of threads. If someone needs to know about A message, they should be tagged and then if you're having that conversation in a thread, then they're notified about all of those following messages. And they don't necessarily need to read every message that gets posted in you know, E Comm operations or whatever. So like just small things like that I think will, will help improve the way that we work overtime. The other one that I've got is like I really want to ramp up. We ran a lot of tests last year. We ran the most house tests, we ran the most intelligence test. I don't think we have as good cross department sharing of those learnings. So I, I'd like to get into a much better flow of like when a test gets completed, post it publicly in Slack. We don't have a great system right now for like documenting it in some big shared resource. We'll get there. I just want to get the wheels turning of like everybody get talking and posting and like we'll just collectively kind of brute force our way to getting on the same page a bit more. And then the ones that kind of like fall in line with that, this, this larger bucket of learnings, more postmortems after large campaigns we're okay at. And then end of quarter, end of year reports like just kind of big stuff to make sure that we are properly reflecting on what we've done, what we've learned, getting that shared out so that you know, we're developing institutional knowledge across the board that that's, those are all the things that I've got under like marketing operations improvement.
- [13:52]
Connor McDonald
Who.
- [13:53]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
I have so many questions because we're going through a lot of the same things. Who, who is responsible for these like on your team. So like if you have a campaign or if you have a launch and it's not like a, you know, it's not just like a pay social thing but it's like hey, we have this launch month later like here's the postmortem like who, who's responsible for that?
- [14:14]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
So right now that, that's what's going to become a part of the, the task system for our, for our like go to Market op. So we have a, a marketing project manager who owns all of the Go to Market board. When things get on there, creating all the tasks, holding people accountable for those due dates. When people complete things, that information gets added to the go to market board. So it becomes like the, the central single source of truth for everything that we need to know. And then really all it is is after the tier one campaigns we'll be creating a post mortem task. Then that will get fed into the channel manager meeting that we have every week. So it'll be like, hey, next Thursday, we want to make sure that our, you know, Q4 postmortem is done. And like, that's really it. And that's why I like the system right now. It feels like we're in a really good flow in terms, like, we have the mechanics, we have the momentum, and now it's just a matter of like tightening the bolts with things like that to get more value out of the system.
- [15:02]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
But it's like. So it's, it's more of like a channel level postmortem than it is of like one person owning it and being like. Like it's not like you or the VP of marketing being like, hey, guys, like, this is the launch. Here's how it did. Here's like, it's kind of more like piece by piece.
- [15:16]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah, totally. Okay, so that's a good question. What it's going to look like in the short term is a channel level postmortem. All the different directors on my team will be reporting in what worked, what didn't. It's become that, you know, we've done maybe 10 of them over the last couple years. They're fantastic to look back on. Right. It's just so nice. When we're preparing for Q4 next year, we can immediately go back and like jog our memory on the things that we, we learned or tried or want to improve on. I could see over time it evolving into a more formal thing where we're like reporting back and maybe, maybe it's getting shared to Sean or the product team or something like that. Right now it's almost like collective reflection and note taking for future planning. All right, this episode is brought to you by beloved sponsor Revo. What is Revo? They are a retention platform for Shopify plus customers. They do accounts, loyalty, referrals, membership, ca, back wallet passes, and so much more. Stuart Cheney is the founder. He's very public on Twitter, building best in class retention features, powered by AI, quicker and with higher quality than anybody else in the business. We are lucky to have them as a sponsor. Revo is working with some of the best brands in D2C, like Ridge, Hexclad, True Classic, Dr. Squatch, Portland Leather, Fenty Beauty, and hundreds more that are on Shopify plus and want to provide better experiences for their customers. I think retention is going to be a huge trend in 2026 and beyond all the effort that we put into incrementality and acquisition will eventually get diverted to retention so that we can continue driving incremental sales. And Revo as an account solution will play a big part in that. If you want to become a Revo customer, go to Revo IO and right now all Shopify plus brands get wallet passes 100% free on the platform. Tell the marketing operator sent you.
- [16:58]
Connor McDonald
So how, how important is. So like you have this. So what I'm hearing is you have a template. You start with the launch date and then everything backfills for the steps leading into that launch date. Which makes sense. Like that's kind of like what we've done slash what we're trying to work towards. And then you have a single person so you have, you have all the individual contributors that you know there's probably what 10, 15, maybe 20 plus people that have tasks in that broader go to market board. So there's a lot of stakeholders involved there. How like can you just speak to like how important is it from your perspective? And having that marketing op project manager that's really overseeing the entire. Like they're not an individual stakeholder on an individual task, but they're responsible for every task making sure it gets done. Like how, how important is that person in, in making this system work, work well and making sure that people are completing their tasks on time. Like is it possible to, to self manage this? And when I say self manage I mean like not have that person and just have just trust that every individual stakeholder is going to get their, their work done in the right amount of time. Or do you think it's like no, this doesn't work unless you have this project manager owning and overseeing it.
- [18:09]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
I think it depends on complexity. Like it. Well my mind goes to two places. One, complexity where if you have as much as we do it's just so much easier. You totally want someone in that position like making sure that all the tasks and the items are created and we're hitting deadlines and things like that. But if it's much simpler then you could theoret really do without it as long as someone else is like they could be spending a small portion of their time like kind of managing the system. The other thing is you really need buy in across the other teams to work within the system. And that's the other tricky thing where it's like there's been many times in the past where we have our anniversary sale coming up, we create that task but for whatever reason it's not like it's not as connected to the email team's workflow as it could be. So then all of a sudden that will throw you off. So you need as much as possible just buy in around the underlying system. How, what is like the itemized version of the deliverable. When is that created? How is that tracked? How are we viewing it collectively? Like when we are a group, how are we looking at all those things together? And then when you go to your email team meetings, how are you looking at a filtered view of everything that you need? That's everything that you need that's just email related. So that underlying system and the buy in of it makes it easier to do without a project manager. But we found it so incredibly impactful to have someone owning that.
- [19:23]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, agreed. And then what's, what's your. So you're using notion, right? You said is your.
- [19:28]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
We're in notion.
- [19:28]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Yeah.
- [19:29]
Connor McDonald
Cool. And then what's your role in. I, you know, because in the, in the past, for example, like when we've had a project that I've said, hey, you know, growth team, project manager, like I want you to own this and manage it and make sure it gets done. I'm, I'm really the one going in and saying, here are all the things that need to happen in order for this entire project to come together. Like, all right, we're making like a Yankees funnel for our partner for like our Yankees partnership. Like we're gonna do ads, landing page A media buy, reporting on it. Like, here's all the stepwise things that make that come to life and then passing that off to the project manager and saying, all right, you're, you're responsible for making sure this happens. You're also responsible for going to all the channel leads and making sure any additional tasks that they think should get added in here, get added in. So is that, is that what you're doing with this? Like, are you the one outlining all the steps that leads to a product getting launched in a market and then passing that off to the project manager? Or is there a different workflow happening?
- [20:30]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah, we're creating. The first thing that basically happens is creating the marketing summary. And then we have like a long, basically like a big spreadsheet of tasks and then either myself or the VP of marketing will put together the summary and then select the relevant tasks as much as possible. Like that, like in a perfect world you can map the priority of the campaign. Like whatever people call it tier one or a campaign A or B or whatever, as much as possible. Or in a perfect world, I Should say that maps really closely. Like hey, tier one campaigns get a dedicated landing page. Like you can, you can try to map it out like that. There's always sort of like adjustments and sort of like bespoke needs of any given campaign. So that happens at the summary level. That gets presented to all the channel managers. That's where all those tasks get created by the project manager. And then you're kind of, then the system kind of is able to carry it from there.
- [21:22]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, that makes sense. And so I just want to make sure we're, we're highlighting all. So you're trying to make some improvements on it this year. One is postmortems. You think you guys need to do a better job of like reporting on all these, these campaigns. Are there any other major level ups or major facelifts that you're trying to give to your marketing operations process this year outside of the postmortems?
- [21:44]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
The biggest, the biggest one is just like we're already testing a lot. I think we could probably test a little bit more especially across different teams. So let's just call it more testing, more visibility into those tests and learnings. And then that happens in different places. That happens at the channel level. That happens in the post mortems. That happens at end of quarter. That's probably the biggest step change. And one of the reasons for that is we actually very strategically or very purposefully reduce the amount of launches that we had this year. So we should be from a marketing perspective spending more time on improving evergreen efforts and strategies. That's why it's like that time should go somewhere I don't want. It's also really easy. I can see it happening is you have fewer things on the go to market board and instead of spending the same amount of time on those items that you would have last year, just more time gets spent on them. They just like, they kind of like fill the void when actually what we want to be doing is identifying brand new paid funnels that are completely disconnected from the, the go to market board. We should have more time to do things like that versus launching new products. So finding that balance. And I think that will come down the way that I would like to see that get supported. From a marketing ops perspective is this expectation and system around testing, sharing, reflecting, learning.
- [22:58]
Connor McDonald
Yeah.
- [22:59]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
What are, what are. I. I got a few questions. Yeah, I mean actually we're doing similar. Like we, we have a lot of launches planned so we're still catching up. But I think it's clear like we don't have Enough bandwidth for a lot of the Evergreen stuff. What, what are your expectations for testing? Like how many zero tests are you expecting to do a month? How many like House tests? I think, I think you guys really do a good job from what I saw of your intelligence wrapped of your top 1%, you know, testing.
- [23:22]
Connor McDonald
Yeah.
- [23:23]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
What are your expectations for velocity of testing?
- [23:27]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah, totally. I mean I am not great at have at putting like a number on it. The other thing as it relates to CRO and house, we ran like 50 house tests last year and I forget the number, but we were in the 100th percentile. That's what the intelligence rap told me. So like a ton of intelligence tests, a ton of House tests. So on both of those I'm not, I'm not all that interested in. I mean, I literally don't even think it's possible to like increase the amount of tests for those channels for them. It's really just, hey, let's make sure that we are documenting what we're learning and sharing that out so that everybody can benefit from that knowledge. And then so it's really things like the retention team where I would like to see more true tests getting created. I don't have a KPI for it other than it becomes a common discussion point for go to market items where we say, hey, we're launching this thing. Like what is a test that we could, you know, use in the circumstance? And then the constraints for that are it should be a test that we'll be able to use in the future. Like it should be a test that can become more of a best practice for future launches. Sometimes people will propose tests that are extremely specific to what we're launching. And it's like that doesn't have all that much future value. Sometimes it's extremely important. But what I'm more interested in is like let's test volume of emails. Is three or four or five emails better than one email if we're launching a new seasonal color story, something like that. So that when we go to launch the next seasonal color story, we can have a little bit more of a refined strategy.
- [24:52]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Yeah, yeah, I like volume of testing. Like I feel like it's one of those things. And again like 100% you have to have the right strategy. Like if you're testing not the right things, it doesn't matter. So you gotta have the right framework and stuff. But I like volume as a KPI for because like as we do our KPIs, we have like inputs and outcomes and like it's like, what can we control? And I remember, like, saw this, like, it was just like a meta analysis that like meta did with Harvard. And it was just like, you know, I forget the stat, but it was like teams that, that experiment X number of times per year have like 17% lower CAC than teams that don't. And that's like, like you zoom out over the course of a year. It's kind of like, duh, like, that's like just like one of the things that I think is in our control that like, just for like setting goals is just like, you know, there's a lot we can't control, but, like, we can do that. And like, that's what I want my team to do. So it's like, we should always have a house test live. We should always have, you know, totally. And struggle with the number. But I guess if you're like, you can think about if you have a house test live, and I think you guys are very aggressive with it. But if you have house test live, essentially every week, you're maybe testing three to four house tests per month, right? If you're aggressive with it and that's, you know, how many per year, same thing on zero. It depends on your traffic and whatever. But it's like 6 to 10. Zero tests per month. And like, that's high. And then like on your main retention flows, you have, you know, that's a little harder. But it's like, I do like that as a KPI, but again, it has to be done properly and thoughtfully as well.
- [26:12]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
100%. Yeah, I heard that at a meta event a couple years ago. It was one in 2023. But the guy from L, some guy from L Catterton, was just like, they only care about volume of tests. He's like trying to set a KPI around tests that you win or like, leading to a certain improvement is like so incredibly hard that the best teams are literally just testing more.
- [26:34]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
I agree, I agree. Well, and, and because, like, so in the past I've set KPIs or thought about like, do we want to set a. A goal of like, no more like diversification goals or new channels.
- [26:44]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
But I'm like, I don't want to
- [26:46]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
incentivize that because maybe that's not the best for your efficiency. And it's like, it's like, as long as we're like, if you're testing properly, you'll just allocate your media mix to where is the most efficient based on that
- [27:00]
Connor McDonald
and are you doing so for. For initiatives that are more like. Because the stuff that we PM at Hexclad is. Is first and foremost the cross functional stuff. Like I think that is the stuff that you need to have a project manager owning and like for like the growth operation specialists on my team like the, the initiatives she owns or does all of our like cross functional go to markets. Like you are responsible for making sure that our cocktail shaker gets launched and that everything in that list of tasks is completed. Like it's very, it's very cut and dry, very simple what she's responsible for. How about your like how about your initiatives that are just like in a single channel? Like are you also using an operations project managed for that stuff or is that more self managed?
- [27:49]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
So that's more self managed the way that it's shaking out right now. And again like we're. These things are happening within Ridge but like it feels like I want them to like take shape over the next couple months. So what we've decided is what's going to make it on the go. I'm going to answer your question in kind of a roundabout way. What's going to go on the go to market board in the future are cross departmental tests where we say hey I'll give you an example. I'm writing a summary now. What I'd really like to do, we do a post purchase upsell like like everybody does and check out from our beloved sponsor after sell. I would love to do. I spoke with someone a couple months ago and they do an eight hour delay on orders and then they actually spend a number of time with like email and SMS trying to get people to add to their orders. Not just on that thank you page but actually for like the six, seven, eight hours just following having the double dash. Right. I'd love to do that. Like the double dash method. Yeah, that's a. That's a multi channel. That would be a multi channel test. We need ops to be delaying the order and making sure that that's working with fulfill. We need the E Comm team to be handling what they need to do from an order or from an integration perspective if we're using order editing or something like that. And then we need the retention team actually knowing what's happening, being able to drive people to different pages. You probably need a dedicated landing page.
- [29:00]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Yeah, we need. So that's how that house involvement. How many sponsors can we get a house involvement. We got postscript, got to be involved.
- [29:07]
Connor McDonald
Yeah.
- [29:07]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
So people are signed in right there, you know. But it's true like like that is a great examp. That's the sort of thing that's extremely hard, at least from my experience at Ridge. Extremely hard to get to happen without more deliberate coordination. That's why it's on the go to market board. That's why our project manager is involved. That's why it becomes like an agenda item in our channel manager meetings. The flip side is if it's a single channel test, which there's so many of them, you know, subject line tests or a B test and post purchase flows or you know, testing new content or a new channel. Those are all single channel. Those are self managed. All I expect for my team to do is be sharing those and those happen now as we do those at extremely high rate. Like I mentioned. I just want those shared back more transparently. That's the expectation. That's upset right now.
- [29:55]
Connor McDonald
I love it. That's a good one. All right, should we move on from. From marketing opportunities? One more? Yeah.
- [30:01]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
All right. Wouldn't be a podcast in 2026 without asking about AI I know, obviously you're. Yeah. How are you? What part of that is being helped or facilitated by AI? I know, obviously you. You know, we've talked about your. Your loom in the past and kind of helping with that workflow. Yeah. What are you doing with it?
- [30:19]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Totally. I mean, okay, so maybe slightly embarrassingly, the way the marketing operations goal is shaping up right now. Let me double check. I don't think it has any. Anything AI related. Yeah, no, it's like we're going to get better at notion. We're going to do the learnings, we're going to be higher signal, we're going to do slack hygiene, we're going to continue operations, we're going to continue refining the system that we have in place. Where does AI fit in? Yeah, I don't know. I don't have a great answer for you. We do have within Ridge a goal of AI Everywhere. That's what Sean's called it. So like we do have actually who project management rolls up to because not we have a marketing project manager, but project manager is its own team within Ridge and they all roll up into our VP of internal operations. He is the main kind of lead for this AI Everywhere. So he'll probably find some cool ways to integrate it. They're always messing around with NA TO N and figuring out workflows and things like that. But as far as I'm concerned as it relates to marketing ops right now, I just like to tighten the bolts on what we've got. I'm not. I don't have any urgency around inserting AI into that process in the short term.
- [31:31]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Awesome.
- [31:32]
Connor McDonald
Cool.
- [31:34]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
A bad, bad answer for the podcast.
- [31:36]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
No, no, it's okay. We gotta be true and realistic.
- [31:38]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Dude, I should be. I should be bringing up Moltbot. I should be talking about, you know, everybody should be getting Mac Minis.
- [31:45]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
I should be.
- [31:46]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
I should be talking about like, you know, quadrupling my workforce with autonomous agents or something. But no, not the case right now.
- [31:54]
Connor McDonald
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- [34:02]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Everything is in motion and I'm doing everything I can to push it forward and it's just killing me how long things take to get set up. I don't know if you guys feel like this, especially as the business, this grows, but like it's just like, yeah, like none of it is launched yet and like I just, it's, it's killing me because I'm trying and it's not like we're not like moving. Like I don't think that they're, we're really doing that much to delay it because. Because we also want to do it correctly. So a few things. We are launching TikTok shop, signed with an agency. Been working very closely with like TikTok shop team. You know, they're like beauty leadership team. So super excited about it.
- [34:36]
Connor McDonald
You have to actually launch your shop. Like did you not have a shop?
- [34:39]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
And then so that's been like actually what it, what it is. So like obviously vetting the agency, but that was, was you know, pretty quick like aligning on like the actual strategy and whatever. Like that's the easy part. It's actually the logistics and, and as soon as we, you know, decided we were going to launch, they obviously hit everyone with the whole FBT thing. And so it's just been like that's a hang up. And then like getting you know, like all of the approvals that you have to get with your shop. So it's just taking longer than I
- [35:03]
Connor McDonald
want, you know, dude, the approvals on like we ran into, we're, we're good now. But like literally for six months last year it was just problem after problem after problem. We could not keep our Tick Tock Shop live for more than two weeks. And then Tick Tock would turn it off. My guys, I went to our Tick Tock reps. I'm like, we are trying to give you money. Like we are trying to drive revenue through Tick Tock Shop. And they kept turning it off because like some like, you know, naturally I think TikTok shop is similar to like Yelp where like the only the negative experiences get reviews and like you have like too many negative reviews. Like and then they would. And like look at our Shopify. We have like a hundred like we have over a hundred thousand five star reviews and they just kept turning it off. So I, I feel that pain, Cody. It took a while to get through it, but we're through it now.
- [35:51]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Yeah. So we'll probably launch. I mean we're in, we're in February. We'll probably launch by the end of this month. If not like March. March 1st is like ours but like just doing everything we can to just barrel it through and push it through. So that's number one. We are kicking off this like organic. You know, everyone tech will call it like the UGC program but like organic, you know, creators across multiple handles. Starting today we're working with an agency to do it. We'll eventually bring it in house but we're reaching out to like a hundred people. We kind of like vetted 100 creators and reaching out and starting that program. The goal is probably to bring on like 10 to 20 for the first, for the, for the first month. You know I talked about it before but big lesson I've learned before is just like dabbling too much with new launches and things. So it's like I don't want to start with three creators. Like I'd rather start with 20 and you know, and, and, and really give it a really fair shot. So that is going but has not happened yet. We're looking for like ahead of social. I don't, we don't do ahead of titles but like this is going to be the person who's kind of like oversee like all of like the like social strategy. Creator strategy. So that's like a really big role. We're, we're recruiting for. I don't know if you guys know J.T. barnett at all. He runs like a agency that normally like recruits creators, but he's also like recruiting so he's recruiting this for us and just like I think he just like totally gets like creator ecosystem. So that'll be a big one and like that'll obviously build out like our internal studio. But yeah, no, we're doing, we're doing a lot. There's a lot that it's just in works like we're doing this open casting for our, for a upcoming complexion product launch and like we'll have like a bunch of creators at it. We have a launch like that'll be a kind of like models and stuff as part of it and like turning really just like building out the studio we have internally. We have a launch later in the year with a creator as kind of like the face of it. So like excited about that. So, yeah, there's a lot that's in the works. It's just. Dude, I don't know. As business just takes longer, which is just killing me. I just want to get this stuff live and launched.
- [37:54]
Connor McDonald
I feel that. I feel that, like, that poke that it's taken too long. I think it's important to the. The context. I think even though it feels slow to us, we're all probably moving faster than most. Most brands of our.
- [38:07]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
And I'm like, calm about it now. Like, like, here I'm. I'm like, like I drive my team crazy with like, the, The. The speed I expect them to do. And actually like, we have like a shoutout channel just like shouted out two of them today just for like, just like pushing the. The TikTok shop stuff because it's just like, grunt work. It's like, not fun. Like, my systems guy has to upload like, like a hundred spreadsheets to get like, all of our like, ASIN or whatever the equivalent data would be into TikTok. It's just like, not fun stuff. And there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of blocking and tackling right now because, like, Even to Connor McDonald's point about this, like, cross department thing, it's like, it's a new channel. And when. When. When we thought we were gonna launch TikTok Shop, initially it was like, oh, you just integrate with Shopify and it's just boom. Totally. And now it's like, no, like the. It feels like the tariff situation where, like, no, like, it was sprung on everybody so quickly. Like the whole FBT thing, it was sprung on everybody so quickly. And. And no one really knows. And so like, the. We're waiting for the 3 PLs to get integrated and get the right labels set up. They're waiting to get to hear back from TikTok. TikTok is waiting to hear back from who knows what. Like, so my guess is it gets pushed back. But if the ccp. Yeah, essentially so. Yeah, yeah, just. But just. You just got to keep pushing it.
- [39:18]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Just.
- [39:19]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
I'm just. Just pushing it. So I'm excited about it. I'll have updates. I can't wait till. Till we do.
- [39:25]
Connor McDonald
Cody. I feel like going in our experience in the last year is like this absolute crawl towards getting there. And then like, once we got there, it felt like we hit this like one of those, like, speed strips in Mario Kart. And like, now we're getting like 500, a thousand videos, like hundreds and hundreds of videos. So it Just took us forever to get there. But once we finally, we hit like some level of tipping point and now we're good because now we're getting orders and now we're not running into those like, like automated oh, we're turning your shop off issues. So I think, I think you're going to get to a point where all of a sudden you're like, oh, wow, now we're, now we're like in tons of content and it's, and it's really humming.
- [40:02]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
I can't wait. I'm so excited.
- [40:03]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Are you guys, are you guys running GMV Max? Conor, like, what's the paid strategy for TikTok right now?
- [40:10]
Connor McDonald
There, there isn't much of one. It's mainly like, at least as far as TikTok Shop goes. It's like we're really trying to just like arbitrage TikTok Shop affiliate content.
- [40:22]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah. So I spoke. Okay, so I heard this stat the other day from someone. I, I've had a bunch of conversations around TikTok TikTok shop and I hadn't heard this and it totally took me off guard. But we also hired an agency to help come on and manage it. And they were like, yeah, 90% plus of your TikTok revenue should come from. We expect 90 of your TikTok shop revenue to come from GMV Max. So GMV Max is like loading up all the organic posts into like, like I don't really know the technical details, but it's almost like a different product. Within TikTok's paid offering, you have the, the standard Tik Tok Shop ads where I could drive people to ridge.com GMV Max is taking organic posts, promoting those, driving people to Tik Tok Shop. And then you get more benefits of, of getting organic views in this case. So they said 90% of our revenue should be coming from GMV Max. And I'm like, oh, that's just running ads. I'm like, I, I, and I, I, I even sort of corroborated it with another brand that I'd spoken to. They're very big brand. They said 70% plus of their TikTok shop revenue. They said it's really tricky attribution because there's so much stuff going on between the affiliates and organic and your paid ads and your GMV Max ads. But they said 70% plus is probably coming from GMV Max. So I hadn't thought about that in our strategy, but it made me feel better about the whole thing. We just need, we're going to get a couple hundred people creating content. The good content will promote a lot. We do that all the time. And we'll run ads essentially to our TikTok shop and drive revenue that way.
- [41:48]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
So.
- [41:48]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
So Cody, I'm curious, have you heard the same or like, how do you foresee your guys's TikTok shop program and the likes of affiliate support around it coming together?
- [41:57]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
I hadn't heard that. What I've heard is by the way, we should, we should because we're all like. And I know I'm probably, I don't know how old you are, but I know I'm like older than you guys. I feel like we should have a non. Uncon. And we should have like a, like a Gen Z maybe one of who actually, who actually knows TikTok shop to like, you know, because we're probably talking out of our, out of our ass. But, but I, I have heard that it's essentially essential. Like you can't really do it without it, right? Like, like you have to do it. So I don't know the percentage what. When I originally met with TikTok, it was like, you know, 99 or 97% of, of revenue was driven by creators. Right. It's like almost nothing from brand and like almost nothing from like your actual shop. Like no one's using it as like discovery of like shop and I think they're trying to grow that. But it was like it's, it's, it's obviously all creator and I don't know what percent is GMP max or whatever.
- [42:45]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah, yeah, I thought it was like exclusively creator. But what I'm learning now, which I totally believe, and frankly Square is much more for me, is that it's, it's a combination of the creator posting and then really the brand then promoting that via, via GMB Max. And I'm sure that that sort of revenue is attributed to the creator in the, in the, in the 95, 97% that you just mentioned from TikTok. So anyway, interesting. That's my small update. I was like, oh, I feel like that's going to dramatically shift how we, we think about our TikTok shop program.
- [43:14]
Connor McDonald
Are you guys. We're doing a lot of. We hired this agency, we were doing it internally and then we hired an agency that specializes in this. We're doing live Tick Tock Shop, like live Tick Tock Shop live events where like we'll do a live stream for like an hour and someone's like running through the product. We'll usually do it around some moment and we see really good, really good performance in that moment. Doing that. We'll do like flash sales during it. We also reach a ton of new accounts. So it's also like a top of funnel play for us and that's been really interesting. So now our Tick Tock Shop strategy is like part that and we're doing those like monthly and then it's, and then we're just seeding a ton with Tick Tock Shop affiliates. Are you guys doing any of the like the live stream shopping stuff yet?
- [43:59]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
No, not yet. That's perfect for you guys. I mean that's not, that's not that much different than Costco Roadshow though.
- [44:04]
Connor McDonald
Exactly, exactly. It's literally the same exact thing, just in a different medium.
- [44:08]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah, that's cool.
- [44:09]
Connor McDonald
And it's just long form. Like it's, it's like a cool long form way to kind of organically talk about these products that are super expensive. You know that you kind of sell it a little bit better than you can in a, you know, 45 second Facebook ad or Instagram ad.
- [44:23]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Yeah, it's really cool. Yeah. So here's our strategy right now that we're trying to flesh out. It's obviously very creator led. So like the, you know, the agency we're working with works with other brands and works with beauty brands. Like they're going to recommend, you know, creators L3 and above. We'll go 500 samples per product. We'll probably launch with two to three, you know, SKUs. I'm so curious to see what performs like. So we're going to take one of our Hero products and we'll do some. With Miracle Bomb we're going to try something that's a little different. Maybe something that's like a tier 2, but not like a Hero that we think could do better there. And then we'll do some type of a bundle. So I'm excited to see what does better and just we'll experiment which is great. And then, and TikTok had the strategy that I love is like they've had because I was like, hey, we don't really love to do much discounting. Like what else can we do is like exclusive and like, like and this is easy because we don't have any other channels but like launching a product on shop 2 weeks before D2C. I'm really curious to see how that would do and just like does it build up hype and anticipation for the launch? So that'll be something we probably try but I'm excited to be able to report back and see, you know, what, what we're finding going into it with, with you know, hypotheses. But, but an open mind.
- [45:32]
Connor McDonald
Sweet. All right, let's go back to one of Connor's. Connor, do you want to go through your partnerships one or your retention one.
- [45:39]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Okay, let's do, let's do retention as a product because I'm, I'm, I'm interested in your guys perspective here. Okay. So I've got, I'll read it out quickly. Retention as a product. Moving beyond generic email blasts to more scalable personalized experiences with better segmentation, automation and testing. Interesting. I'm reading. Do I have it right here. CMO of Meta, Alex Schultz. Click here. Doing some, some classic learning and it's really a fantastic book. I would, I would if you guys have some time. I think it's very fun. But one thing he talks about and it makes sense, right? Alex is the CMO at Meta. And then he was like head of growth for a long time of WhatsApp up, Instagram and, and the Facebook app. And so he talks about the, he talks about product marketing and he's like the, that's the marketing that's integrated into your product. Push notifications. It really is what like I think retention is for an E comm brand. For them it's a, it's a, it's a marriage of push notifications and then the product itself on site merchandising and things like that are all things that he would consider product marketing. But this idea that like he mentions product marketing as people you may know, people you may know, like revolutionize the growth of the Facebook app because all of a sudden this small little feature that they could embed within the page or I don't know if they ever do push notifications around it, but you could just as easily see them pinging you with like, hey, do you know, do you know Connor Rowling? And it's like, oh yeah, I do. And now I'm engaged with the app and now I'm growing more friends and it was just, just like really meaningful
- [47:11]
Connor McDonald
impact on the growth.
- [47:12]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
So I've been thinking about this idea of product marketing. How do we automate more of our marketing based on who we know someone is and what they've been doing? The other interesting data point that I have is we did an analysis of cross category buying in a single order. So we have, you know, we have wallets, we have rings, we have luggage, we have tech power banks, phone cases, things like that. What we see right now is that there is essentially zero cross category buying. Whenever anybody checks out out that 97% of an order is coming from a single category at any given time. Very few people are buying a luggage and a wallet at the same time. What I find interesting about that is it really goes to show that we are acquiring completely different people when we're acquiring those, those, those different orders. And because of that we should have far more like automated systems speaking to each of those. And we have semblances of this because intuitively it makes sense. Like we have a welcome series for prospects of each of those categories and we have post purchase flows for each of those categories, but they're not nearly as personalized as they could be. And I actually think we can take that many more steps forward to say, hey, we know that you are a. We somehow figure out or we categorize you as a prospect of luggage. So now you're in the luggage welcome series. You purchase luggage, you get the post purchase. But even saying, hey, how do we get this luggage customer now? How do we push them to become a wedding band prospect? We have no, we have no system like that now. We have welcome series, we have post purchase flows. They go back to the site and for some reason sign up again via a ring pop up. So they become a ring prospect. They're, they're functionally moving over. We have no automated systems to do that. So what I would like to be doing is establishing more like on site triggers and more behavioral, you know, behavior on site that we can then build retention experiences, some kind of like event capture.
- [49:11]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Like hey, if they, like are you thinking if they clicked into these pages as well or viewed them or what do you have in mind?
- [49:18]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah, exactly. Like that would be a great one, right? If anybody at any time checks out luggage, they become in market for luggage. And then we could theoretically treat that person different if they're already a customer or if they're still a prospect. And then we should, we could have flows built out around that and then just thinking about it from a scalable perspective using more of the. I forget what they're called in klaviyo, but like the dynamic elements and things like that, we're just, how do we move away from our effort going to weekly campaigns or you know, updating flows for different sale periods or product launches or whatever and instead go to like a system of automations that support all the different types of prospects and customers that we have and supports how they are shopping between categories over time because that's the only time that we're seeing it, it's not happening at the order level. That's kind of my vision for the program. And I guess the last thing that I would say because McCoy said this from Portland Leather Goods on our podcast last year is at some point retention becomes like the most important thing within Ridge. I don't think it's this year but like I'd like to be laying more of the groundwork because I think it's probably 2027 where all of a sudden we say hey, we have, we're acquiring millions of customers a year. Acquiring more of them is getting harder and harder. Like let's make sure we have the systems to continue extracting value from these people. All right, so I've got some interesting numbers to share from Ridge from our beloved sponsor Ridge Panel. We switched our support stack at Ridge to ridge panel about 15 months ago and our cost per ticket has dropped over 70%. That means same team, same volume and over $500,000 in annual savings. CSATs have not changed. We've been sitting at 96% week after week. So the automations did not come at the cost of customer experience. Our last platform talked a lot about AI but nothing was really changing under the hood. Good Rich Panel is genuinely AI first. They came in, they rebuilt our workflows and we were live in under two weeks with basically no lift on our side. And they're about to roll out a returns portal which for us is huge because if they can do the same thing for returns as they did for customer service that would be sick. If you want to cut down your support costs now and save on returns platform with an AI first platform talk to rich panel, go to richpanel.com demo tell them Connor from Marketing Operator sent you and they'll take good care of you.
- [51:27]
Connor McDonald
Thank you. That's interesting. I Cody to your point about like some sort like using some sort of events to fill these life cycle marketing flows that was actually how we set ours up. I mean a couple years ago as we were building out our non cookware post purchase automations where basically the the the filter the trigger was has bought before and has visited any one of these pages. So for knives for example it's like you have bought and if you visited a knife collection page or any knife product page we are then going to put you in a knife automation. It sounded good in theory. What we ultimately found out was like the volume just wasn't as as high as we wanted it to be and like at that I think what the decision that we made was assuming open rate and click rate are really good which is obviously a signal of like engagement from the audience. Like we just need to be optimizing for volume because we believe and so far it hasn't let us led us astray is like if we can get more of our customers through more of these post purchase lifecycle marketing flows on these product categories when they are ready to buy it we're gonna, we're gonna see that we're gonna get more, more volume out of repeat buyers. Like that has held true. So we actually like went back a little bit on that because we wanted to prioritize volume and but now the, the trade off is that we don't really have like a super sensical way of, of like funneling people into these automations. So like we have a ton of like the way that we have our post purchase we love. We have a very robust post purchase lifecycle marketing web right now and it starts off with like a general post purchase cross sell flow where you're going to get awareness of all of our categories and then it goes into the product specific but it's all step wise. It's like all right, you're getting the general one first then totally then hex mills. So I'm trying to find that balance of like how do we, what's the middle ground between where we started where it was too segmented and volume wasn't there but now it's like volumes there but it's not as segmented. That's the, that's the balance we're trying to find at in like trying to. I know Klaviyo is building some functionality around this. We use a tool called Revamp that also builds a functionality. Like I think someone's going to build a really awesome tool where it's just like hey, based on all the data points we have we think person A is, is the most likely to buy knives. We're going to put them in knives and now we have instead of stepwise flows we have. They're all happening at the same time. It's just a matter of which one you go into and that's like some sort of technology tool is gonna be the driver of that. So like how are you thinking about that Connor? Like how are you thinking about why would we put someone in luggage versus rings versus tech? Like are you, do you have any like kind of triggers in mind right now that would drive that?
- [54:10]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Well I've, I've actually a question for you first. Are you guys Doing any sort of identity resolution. Like are you using an Elevar cookie enrichment?
- [54:18]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, yeah. Which definitely. I mean that, that certainly helps the volume. Right like that right there. And we, we, we ran tests on this when we first rolled out Elevar of like hey like pre purchase. Like here's everyone that we track just with our like klaviyo and then here's everyone we also tracked with Elevar and like it was a no brainer to do it.
- [54:40]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah, 100%. You're probably sending three times as many the like behavior behaviorally triggered flows. Yeah, no, my, my idea is actually similar to what you described. What you said you guys have moved away from is like yeah, depending on what people are viewing then they're getting pushed into those flows because you do have. Okay, we have the same like post purchase flow where it's like you get a note from the founder, you hear about what the wallet experience is going to be like. Then we'll talk about luggage and we'll talk about power banks, whatever. The problem with that is just one, people are dropping off throughout.
- [55:12]
Connor McDonald
Right.
- [55:13]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
So the people are getting less eng. Like just naturally within any flow. I think people are get engaging at a lower and lower rate over time. And then you also have least right now we have nothing set up for like three months later if someone views that product. So I think maybe it's some combination of the two where you're getting the volume and almost like discoverability of like someone who just purchased a wallet knowing that we also sell luggage. But then you also have those behavioral flow set up later on so that when that person becomes in market next summer when they're planning for their holiday trip that we actually are sending them relevant messages because right now we have like no mechanics in place to actually do that.
- [55:46]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, I'll let you know. We're. That's our next like phase of revamp is trying to see how we can leverage it in, in post purchase because we tested revamp which is basically just like dynamic content in the subject lines and dynamic product recommendations and like we tested it versus our static pre purchase life cycle and we saw huge lifts in revenue per user. So now I'm really excited about bringing it into post purchase and I don't necessarily want them to, I just want to use their, their segmentation functionality. It's like hey, just tell me who's the most relevant for knives and we'll put them into this beautiful really informational nice flow that we've. We have a four email sequence Like I don't want to replace that. I just want to like what's the segmentation of getting somebody is what we're trying to figure out dude, 100%.
- [56:32]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
And like this.
- [56:33]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
No, no, no, no. Go ahead, go ahead.
- [56:35]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
I was going to say, I know I, I mean I've spoken to other brands that do this way better because like Ridge has just been such an acquisition oriented brand that it's like yeah we have, we have your standard abandoned cart, you know, browse abandonment, we have post purchase, we have welcome series, we have a sunset flow, things like that, like the basics. But what you're describing Connor is what I'm excited about where there, I think there's so much more nuance to create over time and at least theoretically it also compounds over time where it's like we can send one campaign email that does well and it's great and we got 10 cents per send or whatever. But like what I'm actually way more excited about at this point is how do we identify by sending a relevant high value message even if it's just to a few hundred people. But we can do that every single day. We can find more and more ways in order to do that and we can find more and more triggers to push people into those relevant automations. And then you think about supporting that from a on site personalization with like signed in shopping, with sms, with email. All of a sudden you can just build like a really robust sort of system. That's the vision. So I think we'll start fleshing that out this year. That is why it's an initiative.
- [57:37]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
This is revamp AI. Is that what it is? Okay, cool. I gotta check that out. I have a question. And then got got one small thing that Connor have you seen because I'm curious. Obviously such a different business when you do get a cross category shopper LTV on those like if somebody's doing it naturally are they, are they much higher?
- [57:56]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Totally, yeah. And I mean we see, we see a lot of interesting like our, the ltv unlike a wallet customer is like more than doubled over the last few years which is great but like it started at a very small number. It's not that great, it's like a couple more dollars or whatever. But we see, we see much higher value from someone like a luggage customer which is interesting and that's like I
- [58:19]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
think is it easier to go take them and then, and then try to cross sell them into a wallet or vice versa or it's like whatever you got to do both.
- [58:31]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Yeah, like Luggage for they're. They're all different basically. But luggage for instance there's a nice ecosystem we have have carry ons and check ins and duffel bags and backpacks. There's just a lot more reasons to come back and even, even if you're not shopping cross category in your second order there's a lot more reasons for a travel customer to come back and place a second travel order. And then also the wallet is a great sort of. I don't know if it's considered a downsell right. But like very solid wallet as a customer you'll get a great deal on it as like as I've talked about a bunch of times men are never really thinking about their wallet. Like we literally have a good product for those people people. So that's a much easier sell than trying to get a 95 wallet cost customer to buy up into a 300 piece of luggage.
- [59:12]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Yeah, exactly. Are you. I think you should be thinking about it not just like post per like but actually on site as well with merchandising I again and it's different because it's not a consumable but like what we find is people that are first purchase cross category shopping are you know much higher value. So like we'll do a lot of kits right. And so like we, we know the people that buy a kit is usually a more valuable customer to us and it's again it's different. It's a consumable but, but we're doing you know we're, we're doing a lot of even like sampling like obviously it's not something you do but I would also think about it like even from an upselling perspective on, on site or like a you know I know you guys have some kind of kits and stuff like obviously you can't. I don't, I don't know if you can bundle a wallet into a luggage but I would just think about it even, even on a acquisition as well.
- [59:54]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Totally. Yeah. And for you guys that makes sense like if you get Miracle Bomb and the, the SPF moisturizer there's now two things that someone can repurchase if they like them. You've like, you've doubled the chances that they found something that they like.
- [60:07]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Yeah. A little, little different. One thing we're doing similar. I really want to check out revamp. That seems cool. We're redoing our quiz which I'm really excited about. So we're going to build it custom. Okay. But, but thinking I think and now I'm Actually curious to check out revamp because of this but like very trying to think very specifically about obviously like trying to improve the UX on a quiz and make it like really, really excellent, which I'm really excited about because it's not currently but, but from a just a data collection standpoint like what, what do we want to be able to collect to you know, tailor that journey? And then also one of the things we're really thinking about is is what's a predictor of high ltv. Like there's a, you know, I don't want to name any names. There's somebody I know who has like a, a fitness app and, and they essentially like don't optimize for purchases, they optimize for a quiz answer. And they've just found that to correlate really well with high ltv. So where my data analyst right now is going through and we're looking through it's like what is either currently correlated to a really good customer because from a signal engineering perspective you can do that. Like right now we're optimizing for quick completions on some of our ads, but could it be like more specific to get the right signal and just from just general data collection as well? So that's something I'm really curious to see anything that we can find. But I think that's something that's been been that's been really cool. One the one way we're segmenting as well is we've we started using outer signal. I think we talked about it on the pod but like it's just the data like Connor R. I know you guys use it well. Have you seen like their new analytics as part of the Persona stuff?
- [61:39]
Connor McDonald
I've seen that. Are you saying when they're like saying hey here's a Persona we've uncovered and in your Shopify data and X percent of your customers fall into this Persona.
- [61:51]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
I might have a beta access like a version but where now it has like product affinity and so it'll be like hey, this Persona over indexes in this product or under indexes in this product and then like this Persona, this is the LTV and the repeat rate by Persona. So it's, it's been so cool and we're, we'll kind of, we're testing kicking off more segmented flows that way where you know, if somebody is a, a busy mom versus if they're a, a you know, professional executive, like we're going to talk to them very differently and even being able to recommend and UPSELL different products to them. So that's, that's definitely a big focus. It's just these like big Persona funnel journeys.
- [62:33]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, that's really cool.
- [62:35]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
So Cody, for both. I'm curious, the Outer Signal Persona data or the quiz data? And maybe the quiz data is a better example. Like where is that information getting written down to so that you can use it for segmenting?
- [62:48]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Like technically? Yeah, Data warehouse, we're building this custom. I think right now we're using an app and it goes to Klaviyo. There's an integration with the app that goes to Klaviyo and then Klaviyo is hooked up to our data warehouse. But hopefully it's all in a data warehouse that we can then do. But that's over my head.
- [63:07]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Got it, Got it. No, totally. I was just curious. I think that's another interesting part of all of this as we get. Because we're, we're all like on similar tracks here in terms of, of wanting to get more first party data around our customers. And I don't know what the long term solve is for where that data lives. It could be a data warehouse or some sort of CDP or something like that. Because you also need it. Like I, in a perfect world, you have the ability to segment that data across other channels. So like if you write it right to Klaviyo, can you use that data in postscript? If you write it down, we write some things down to the Shopify profile and then you can kind of use it a lot of different places. I think that's kind of an interesting lightweight sort of enriched CRM in a way. Because that's another like, or even if I want to be triggering stuff for, you know, post pilot or whatever. If I want, if I get a high LTV person, outer signal comes in, I get a lead outer signal says, hey, this person's actually your perfect Persona. We think they'll have a really high ltv. How am I then using that information to trigger a post pilot flow so I can make sure that I convert them? That feels like a really important piece of this that like I don't have a clear view on.
- [64:13]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Yeah, it's over my head. Even, even PDQ I know is a, a, a sponsor of an upcoming episode. So they do some stuff on site and like we've talked them about doing like, you know, like, like a predictive ltv. And so like if, if for whatever, I don't know how they're doing it, but if somebody's a predicted ltv, like do we want to in, in cart like discount shipping on the first order just because we're like hey, let's take a little bit less margin on this person because we know they're going to be good or something like that. Or we're also, yeah like we're trying to segment so not, not just use the quiz answers in retention flows but also on site. And so are we able to do upsells and merchandise things differently based on quiz answers or what they said? I just don't know like from what I've talked to and I don't know if you guys have any experience like aggressive personalization on site. Can you can just go such, down such a far rabbit hole and then it's like there's a lot of maintenance. I don't know if you guys are doing any of it, but that's been my hesitation in the past.
- [65:13]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, we're not doing a ton of it. We used to do it more in the past where we would run like offers to certain segments and like we would use UTMs to trigger a unique web experience. We're not doing it as much anymore. Again, I think like what my advice would be to brands as they're building out, like get all the information and all the product pushes in your cross sell flows that, that are serving your business objectives. And and I, I really think the place to start is always optimizing for volume with the assumption that your open rate and your click rates are really good. Obviously if you're getting really good volume through these flows but your open rates suck and your engagement sucks, well then you're, there's something wrong with the audience. But that's been like we're, you know, that's, that's where we've trended and it's worked well for us. And I think generally people probably segment too much too early. Especially in these cross sell flows where like it's like oh wow, we only sent, we only put a thousand people through this flow in a single month. Well that's probably not, not what you want. Like if you could get 10,000 people through there and you're still getting good engagement, like you just opened up that segment so much and if the engagement's there, it's clearly relevant. Even though you're not doing a ton of like quote unquote like segmenting or technical segmenting. Totally.
- [66:26]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
I think that's great advice. I totally agree. Optimizing for volume, that's definitely like the far right curve ninja wojack approach.
- [66:35]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Yeah, no, I agree.
- [66:39]
Connor McDonald
Operators, quick gut check here Q1 is when everyone realizes the same thing at once. Traffic gets more expensive, growth slows down. So the question isn't how do I drive more demand, it's how do I make more money from the demand I already have? That is exactly why we use After Sell by Rocked. Most brands think upsells are about being aggressive, but they really aren't. They are about timing. And the best time to upsell someone is when they're already in buying mode, which is when it's right after someone buys. So after sell it lets you put the right offer at the right moment with one click. There's no reentering payment info. There's no extra checkout steps. Brands using after sales see around a 30% lift in AOV. And when you're running real volume, that adds up fast. But here's the part most people miss. It's not just upsells that after sell ads, once you're live, you unlock the entire Rocked monetization suite. Rock thanks monetizes your thank you page with premium non competing offers. Think Disney plus hello Fresh and brands are seeing 30 cents to 50 cents in pure profit per order. Rock Pay plus as a clean wallet placement at checkout and kicks back another 10 cents to 15 cents in profit per order without hurting conversion. And in some cases it actually improves conversion. No inventory, no new ads, no operational lift, just margin. This isn't growth hacking, it's just found money. If Q1 is about tightening margins and getting paid more for the traffic you already earned, go to aftercell.com operators activate rock thanks or rock pay plus and you'll get the full after sales suite free for a year or an extended 60 day trial for post purchase upsells. You know one of the. I think the highlight of our influencer program in the last three years has been and has been product seeding. We have a very successful product seating program. We've gotten tons of social impressions, great CPMs, really good, good hit rate on seating. You know started off with a line growth with Josh and had a lot of success there. Then we brought it in house and we've continued to fine tune this program and it's been really great, especially on Instagram and TikTok. But one of the rocks I have for my influence routine there is to go attack YouTube. More specifically organic YouTube. We do a lot on paid YouTube. That's been a really successful channel. We're scaling there but I'm, I'm trying to wrap my head around organic YouTube and how we can become more relevant there and get more, just ultimately get more impressions there. So, so I'm curious, I have a question for you guys because there's kind of2, there's two paths I'm thinking about which is a, let's go take X dollars from our yearly influencer budget and say, hey, this is, this is for organic YouTube. Like, let's go pay creators to get integrated in their content so we're getting more impressions in YouTube. The other parallel path is product seating. Like, I'm, I'm curious, can we get some of the same success we've had on Instagram and TikTok as on YouTube just purely through pro our product seating flow? I'm assuming it's probably going to need to be a combination of both, but I wanted to maybe. Connor, I'll start with you because I know you guys have done a lot of organic YouTube. Like what, what do you think will work best here? Is it paid deals? Is it product seating? Am I, am I wrong in thinking that like product seating can work on YouTube? Like, what's your experience?
- [69:39]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
Been there.
- [69:42]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
My gut is I think you should pay creator. Like if you haven't done much paid YouTube and native integrations, I would for sure try it. I would move the influencer budget which must be going to, you know, Instagram or TikTok creator somebody else. I would totally try that on YouTube. Fantastic ad space, super deep integrations. People have opted in to watching content from their favorite creators. You get a 90 second integrated ad rate. It's just like even if it's coming at a 20, 30, 40 cpm, I think that's like, that's good for you guys in particular at the AOVs and everything. So then I would also say if you sign like the, the advantage that you have at hexclad and being like a cookware company is if you, if you sponsor creators who then like you, it will become organic impressions over time.
- [70:28]
Connor McDonald
Right?
- [70:28]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
And we didn't hit it. One of my other focuses for this year is partnerships, organic social affiliates. Like, I would just love to have of rather than like hard integrations on more posts. I would just love to have like presence and visibility in more like for us, like men's content. How do we get in more automotive content or sports content? For us that might be like T shirts or things like that. But if you're just sponsoring, hey, I'm gonna go out sponsor 40 YouTubers, you'll probably have eight of them. Just use your cookware for the rest
- [70:54]
Connor McDonald
of the year, right?
- [70:56]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
And, and just again, like I Go back to like almost brute forcing it up front and being like, just pay to get in seating probably works also. But like, I think the, the 8020 here is going after the biggest people paying to get in the videos and then knowing that some of that will just become sort of a latent attention and impressions over time.
- [71:15]
Connor McDonald
And you're saying because like if you, let's go. Say you sign an organic deal with a person who has 500,000 subs, they're a cook and you do. You pay them for a single integrated like product review, but then just naturally they're making cooking content. If they like your product, you're just going to start showing up in their videos after that, even though that's technically part of it. Yeah, I agree with that. I fully think that's probably what would happen.
- [71:39]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Like we. And we. I mean we have just so many examples of this and the only reason we don't have more is because the wallet is such not a visible product.
- [71:48]
Connor McDonald
Right.
- [71:48]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Like we had one last year, Pat McAfee, the, the old Colt punter and the news at Barstool. And now he's on espn. We sponsored him a bunch of times. He's been using his Ridge wallet now for years. And then it came up on college game day. He'd forgotten his wallet at one of the other coaches coaches offices. So he was given back his wallet and it was like a ridge wall on college game day. So it's like we, we are there. Like we've, we've sponsored people, we've given them product, they like the product, they use it. That occasionally turns into organic impressions. And I just think for something as visual as cooking content, like you'll just get infinitely more of that with cookware.
- [72:22]
Connor McDonald
Yep, totally. That's really good advice. I like that. Yeah, that's what I think I'll do this this quarter with, with our influencer team is have them own a key result of like, you need to go activate with this many creators on YouTube organic, give them a budget range, but really have like the number of creators activated and then track over time like how many of these people are. Is our product showing up?
- [72:42]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Totally.
- [72:43]
Connor McDonald
Second time, third time, fourth time. Because if it's not showing up, like that's the. I know YouTube has a longer tail, but I am going to have a. It's like it's going to be hard for me to invest in, you know, a fifth. Let's say it's a $50,000 activation. It's an integration. It's a 30 cpm but then like, that's it. And we don't see a ton of revenue from these because it's like upper funnel. It's just gonna be hard for. Unless we're getting that person. Then our product showing up in like a. More of a seating way over and over again that it's gonna be hard for me. So I'm gonna have to see like, what is that repeat rate on, on these deals?
- [73:17]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
You'll have to try it too, because I, I think you might be surprised by the revenue you can drive from the integration itself too. It's ad space. It's such a deep integration.
- [73:26]
Cody (Jones Road Beauty)
This is like my lesson. And Connor McConnell, let me know if you disagree. Like when we first launched and tried YouTube, right, we just, I think two things. We didn't have a strong measurement strategy in place and we, we dabbled too much. And so like transmit. We went out with like 50k a month budget. That was what we were like recommended. And it just wasn't enough because you, you can test depending on the size. Like you can only test a handful of creators and you're just not going to know in the beginning. And then, and so it's just not enough to see a big impact. We didn't really know how we were going to measure it, you know, and because you're, you'll see good revenue, but it's not going to all be clicked. So there's some multiplier in there. So you have to be comfortable with that. And then we, we, we essentially cut it after two months. And I think any new channel out, any new channel, that's not a like a algorithmic thing. Like we really are trying to give it like a six, like for three months, but like ideally six months and just like be much more committed to like showing up there. Like, I was, I was listening to Samir from Colin and Samir on Open Residency, that podcast Sean was on today. And like, you know, he's talking about like, you know, their deals with Shopify and stuff like that. And like, you're not just buying revenue on a thing. Like you're buying association and things like that. Like, and again, I know it's not just a brand play, but like it does live somewhere in the middle. And so I do think you will get totally, will get clear revenue. It's not like you're gonna get any, but it's probably not gonna look great from a CFO perspective in the beginning from like a last click and then it just kind of does take time. And then the other thing with YouTube is it just takes time so those views will continue to stack up. So just, it's just you just gotta make sure everyone has the buy in and is committed to a little bit of a longer, longer haul on it. Connor, what do you think on that?
- [75:11]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
No, yeah, I think, I think that's totally right. It also differs by category. It will be difficult to measure especially since you guys spend a lot on YouTube. Like yeah, $50,000 a month budget. Like I did like post purchase I think would would be nice early on. Like we get that's how we measure. A lot of our podcast advertising are actually views served on YouTube and we do a lot of that analysis via our post purchase service way. But one of the things that helps there is we'll spend like $2 million on that this year. So it's like we're at the volume where we can get some signal around stuff like that. But I really do think it's totally worth you guys trying. Connor. Like I think there's a lot of wins to be had there.
- [75:50]
Connor McDonald
Sweet. Are you guys using. Are you getting usage then in those integrations for paid?
- [75:56]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
Some of them, but not all of them.
- [75:57]
Connor McDonald
Not all. Okay, got it. Cool. No, I got. That's it. That's a lot of good stuff to think about out. Appreciate the feedback. All right, let's wrap there.
- [76:08]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
That's episode 100 our our centurion episode
- [76:11]
Connor McDonald
I looked up earlier.
- [76:12]
Marketing Operations Lead at Ridge
I could probably use that word.
- [76:13]
Connor McDonald
Hell yeah. All right, that's a wrap on episode 100 of the Marketing operators spent this episode talking about some of the big strategic objectives for Jones Road, Beauty Ridge and Hex Clad. So it's a very awesome, jam packed strategic episode. Make sure to like subscribe, leave a comment and share with all of your marketing friends. And as always, thank you to the sponsors, Motion Ridge Panel, Prussian After Sell and Revo. Hope you enjoyed.