Episode 100! The Big Rocks We’re Focusing on for 2026 Growth

Alright guys, we made it. The 100th episode of the Marketing Operator's podcast. We're going to talk more about the rocks this year, some of the big growth marketing projects that we're focused on. We went from operating an 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 from that we need?" We have set KPIs without a, "Do we want to set a goal of like, diversification goals or 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 it's the most efficient based on that. I think we'd 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 post mortems, that happens at the end of quarter. 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 post mortem? There's a lot that's in the work. We are launching TikTok shop. We're looking for a head of social. As far as I'm concerned, as it relates to marketing up right now, I'd just like to tighten the bolt-on what we've got. All right guys, we made it to the 100th episode of the Marketing Operators podcast. I'm celebrating with a $9 cold brew from BlueBottle this morning. I thought I would treat-- I'm out in LA right now and I shocks me out of the coffee as well. I thought it was worth celebrating today with this expensive cold brew. So episode 100-- It's been awesome. I pulled out the marketing operator's mug that you saw that gave me. I saw that. I saw that. Nice guys. Why does it want to say I'm very grateful for both of you. It's been a lot of fun. I've learned a lot. And from all we guessed, we've had on. It's been quite the ride and I'm excited for the next 100 episodes. Those way too thoughtful of a response. This is a very nice thing to say. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's been great. I'm excited to celebrate episode 1,000 with you guys. I want to know how many-- so now we're 100 Conor McDonald. How many have you done? What's the tally do you know? It's got to be like 97 I feel like. Yeah, I think it's-- I think it's-- I think it's 98. I think I've missed two. Impressive. Very impressive. I brought this up a couple of 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. Well, now I got granola going on all these Cody inspired me. I finally found out granola. So I got-- You're wearing the podcast? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I've been using granola too for just my meetings. Oh, yeah. So I turned out-- So I was doing the Sierra Roe thing the other day and I was just dumped in all the notes from Dylan. So yeah. Highly recommended. I just always toss it on. Your granola is like so much better than anything else. I mean, you don't really need-- I've learned that because granola does the transcripts. You don't really need the recording. You can just go to the transcript and control app and find anything you want. 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 anything else I've used. You know, the other thing that I've been doing-- have you seen the Gemini summaries of meetings? Yeah. I was 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 work. I feel like I'm getting probably 60, 70% of the meeting by reading through the doc for four minutes or whatever. Can you do that with granola? You can do-- I know you can't add it, but you can do folders. And so we just kind of did this because we would be asking, "Hey, can you send the notes?" I'm not going to make the meeting. And so now it just automatically goes to a folder and then you can have it just 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. Yeah, I got my little mark. Totally agree that you can guess 70% of the gist of the meeting by just reading it, which is great. So we're nerd now 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 think the sponsors, motion, rich panel, pression, aftersell, and revo. [Music] One thing that's become really obvious is here is creative strategy is changing. It is no longer just about make better ads or even make more ads. You have to have AI and your workflow. You have to understand all the right best practices today. And the leverage point is how you think about the creative. 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. It's also super hard to find great creative strategies 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 in community launching in March. This is going to be a new way that people can really master creative strategy. And what I really like is that 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. So your 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 instructor lineup is legit. There are creative experts from brands like Caraway, Calm, Harry, Space Goods, Happy Mammoth, and agency leaders and founders from scaled brands. They're teaching what they're doing right now. Not will work three years ago. There 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. If creative performance is part of your job in 2026, then this is worth paying attention to. We'll drop the link in the shoutouts. 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 were focused on. We got a bunch from all three of our brands that we're working on. So let's start with you. One of 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 different than marketing operator. 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 have you done last year or just in previous years to like enable marketing operations. Because this is something I've also spent a lot of time thinking about. And we've taken it's one of those things where I feel like we've taken a bunch of steps forward, then a few steps backwards, then a few steps forward, and 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 let's just start with like historically, what have you done to enable marketing operations? And like what I hear marketing operations, it's like getting the work done. Is that what you mean when you say totally? Yeah, I mean, so I've talked about this a bunch and it's always something that I kind of geek out on it like it triggers the like OCD part of my brain. It basically comes into 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 Ridge, we went from, and I was talking 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, 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. So we were so far from where we needed to be in terms of timelines and everybody's were scrambling the jets for like two weeks before the launch the night before we're like only buttoning everything up. So we went from like absolute, operating an 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. And I'll just give you like a couple of examples. What we have in place currently that I think is that I think has been the most beneficial one. We've 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 certain amount of tasks that get associated with it. Those get built out those get assigned to people those tasks have due date set based on like we we back into all the timeline. So if we were 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 and 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 life two weeks later. And that's like basically how we're backing it. So it's a very fine-tune 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 we have another meeting where we're all getting together and we're all looking at the board. And 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 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. One Slack hygiene. I tweeted about this. Everybody using more threads this year. It drives me crazy. People messaging in channels. Don't even get me started. First of all, I actually love how much you geek out on, like the operation stuff because it's so not me. Like, we're going through similar things. We're like, things are breaking in our process. And as we grow, it's just not working. And it's hard thing to catch up on. But 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. And so I have to leave it to other people. But I love your obsession with it. And I think it's awesome. But yeah, on the Slack stuff, dude, like, yeah. We, like, channels. Like, 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 in one place, like everyone say, and then threads as well, totally. What are your-- what are your guys like hygiene guidelines? 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 they were like 90 people on the other 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. 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 never 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, well, 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 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 much channels. And that's the importance of threads. If someone needs to know about a message, it should be tagged. And then if you're having that conversation in the 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 e-com operations or whatever. So just small things like that, I think, will help improve the way that we work over time. 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 intelligent tests. I don't think we have as good cross department sharing of those learnings. So I'd like to get into a much better flow of like, when a test gets completed, post it publicly, and 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 one to kind of like fall in line with that, this larger bucket of learnings, more post mortems after large campaigns. We're OK 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's, those are all the things that I've got under like marketing operations improvement. Who I have so many questions got, because we're going through a lot of the same things. 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, 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 post mortem, who's responsible for that? So right now, that's what's going to become a part of the task system for our, for like go to market. So we have a marketing project manager who is 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 central single source of truth for everything that we need to know. And then really all it is is after the tier one campaigns will 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 Q4 post mortem is done. And like that's really it. And that's why I like this 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 this system. But it's like, so it's more of like a channel level post mortem then 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. Yeah, totally. Okay, so that's a good question. What it's going to look like in the short term is a channel level post mortem. All the different directors on my team will be reporting and what worked, what didn't. It's become that, you know, we've done maybe 10 of them over the last couple of 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 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 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, Rebo. What is Rebo? They are a retention platform for Shopify plus customers. They do accounts, loyalty, referrals, membership, cashback, wallet passes and so much more. Stuart Cheney's 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. Rebo is working with some of the best brands and D to C 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 Rebo as an account solution will play a big part in that. If you want to become a Rebo 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. So 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 back fills for the steps leading into that launch date, which makes sense. 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 all the individual contributors that, you know, there's probably what 10, 15, maybe 20 plus people that have tasks and that broader go to market boards. There are a lot of stakeholders involved there. How, like can you speak to like how important is it from your perspective and having that marketing up 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 important is that person in making this system work well and making sure that people are completing their tasks on time? Like is it possible to self manage this, and why 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? 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 than you could theoretically 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 it 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 knew that's, everything that you knew 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. Yeah, agreed. And then what's, so you're using Notion, right? You said it is your, We're in Notion, yeah. Cool. And then what's your role in, you know, because 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 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. We're making like a Yankees funnel for our partner, for like our Yankees partnership. Like we're going to do ads, landing page, a media buy, reporting on it. Like here's all the stuff. step wise things that make that come to life. And then passing that off to the project manager and saying, all right, 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 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? - Yeah, 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, I'd like that, 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 try to map it out like that. There's always sort of like adjustments and sort of like a spoke 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. - Yeah, that makes sense. And so I just want to make sure we're highlighting all the, so you're trying to make some improvements on it this year. One is post mortems. You think you guys need to do a better job of like reporting on all 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 post mortems? - 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. And then that happens in different places. 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 have 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. - Hell space. - When actually what we want to be doing is identifying what brand new paid funnels that are completely disconnected from the go-to-market board, we should have more time to do things like that versus launching new products. - Yeah. - So finding that balance, and I think that will come down, the way that I would like to see that gets supported from a marketing-ups perspective, is this expectation and system around testing, sharing, reflecting, learning? - Yeah. - What are, what are, I got a few questions. Yeah, I mean, actually we're doing similar. We have a lot of launches planned, so we're still catching up, but I think it's clear, we don't have enough bandwidth for a lot of the evergreen stuff. What are your expectations for testing? How many CRO tests are you expecting to do a month? How many house tests? I think you guys really do a good job from what I saw of your IntelliGems wrapped of your top 1%, you know, testing what are your expectations for velocity of testing? - Yeah, totally. I mean, I am not great 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 IntelliGems were told me. So like a ton of IntelliGems has a ton of house tests. So on both of those, 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 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 one we go to launch the next seasonal color story, we can have a little bit more of a refined strategy. - 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 got to have the right framework and stuff. But I like volume as a KPI for, 'cause like as we do our KPI, as we have like inputs and outcomes, then like it's like what can we control? And I remember like, I saw this like, it was just like a meta analysis that like meta did with Harvard. And so it's like, you know, I forget the stat, but it was like teams that experiment X number of times per year have like 17% lower cat than teams that don't. And it's 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, 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 since 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 six 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. - 100%. Yeah. I heard that at a meta event a couple of years ago, it was one in 2023, but the guy from El, some guy from Elcaderton was just like, they only care about volume of tests. He's like, trying to set a KPI around test that you win or like leading to a certain improvement is like so incredibly hard that the best teams are literally just testing more. - I agree. Well, and because like, so in the past, I've set KPI's without my like, do we want to set a goal of like no more like diverse signification goals or new channels? But I'm like, I don't want to incentivize that 'cause 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 it's the most efficient based on that. - And are you doing so for initiatives that are more like, 'cause of the stuff that we PM at Hexclad is first and foremost, the cross-functional stuff. Like, I think that is the stuff that you need to have a project manager owning in like, for like the growth operation, especially as I'm my team, like the initiative she owns or just 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 you are like, how about your initiatives that are just like, in a single channel? Like, are you also using an operations project manage for that stuff or is that more self-managed? - So that's more self-managed. The way that it's shaking out right now, and again, like where 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 gonna make it on the good, I'm gonna answer your question and kind of around about way. What's gonna 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 everybody does and check out from our beloved sponsor aftersell. 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 a double dash, right? I'd love to do that, like the double dash method. Yeah, 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-com 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. - Yeah, we need it. - That's how that's how it's involved. How many sponsors can we get? How's involvement? We got post-script, we've got to be involved. - Yeah, so people are signed in, people are right there, you know? But it's true, like that is a great example of, 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 only go to market board. That's why our project manager's involved. That's why it becomes like in a gender item and 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 AB 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 from my team to do is be sharing those, and those happen now. We do those at extremely high rate, like I mentioned. I just want to share it back more transparently. That's the expectation that's the upside right now. - I love it, that's the old one. All right, so we move on from marketing cash one more. Yeah, all right wouldn't be a Podcast in 2026 asking about AI. I know obviously you're yeah, how are you? What part of that is being helped or facilitated by AI? No, 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? 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 gonna get better at notion. We're gonna do the learnings. We're gonna be higher signal We're gonna do slack hygiene. We're gonna continue operations We're gonna continue refining the the system that we have in place. Um, 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 as what Sean's called it So like we do have actually who project management rolls up to because it's 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 the main kind of lead for this AI everywhere So don't probably find some cool ways to integrate it They're always messing around with N8N and figuring out workflows and things like that But as far as I'm concerned as a release from marketing up for right now I just like to tighten the bolt on what we've got. I'm not I don't have any Urgency around inserting AI into that process in the short term awesome cool A bad bad answer for the podcast. No, it's okay. We got a true and real I do that. I should be I should be bringing a Bolt bot. I should be talking about you know, everybody should be getting Mac minis Um, I should be I should be talking about like you know quadrupling my workforce with autonomous agents or something But no, not the case right now If you're still making budget decisions based on platform dashboards, you're not optimizing your gambling This episode is brought to by press an AI the measurement and forecasting platform built for scaling omnichannel brands Because here's the problem Attribution tells a story that's convenient, but not always the story that's true your best campaigns They don't just drive direct conversions. They create ripple effects. 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And yeah, just I could just give us like a state of the union on where you're at with this becoming creator obsessed rock 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 a business this great But like it's just like yeah, like none of it is launch yet And like I just it's killing me because I'm trying and it's not like we're not like moving it Like I don't think that they'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. I've been working very closely with like TikTok shop team You know, they're like beauty leadership team. So super excited about it. You have to actually launch your shop Like did you not have a shop in the new like actually what it what it is So like obviously vetting the agency, but that was you know pretty quick Like aligning on like 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're gonna 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 that I want you know to the approvals on like we ran into work We're good now, but like literally for six months last year. It was just problem after problem after problem after problem We could not keep our TikTok shop live for more than two weeks and then TikTok would turn it off like I I want to our TikTok grab some like we are trying to give you money like we are trying to drive revenue through TikTok shop And they 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 shop If I was like a hundred like we have a hundred 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 or through it now. 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 our ours, but like just doing everything We can just barrel through and push it through So that's number one. We are kicking off this like organic, you know Everyone's tackle call it the UGC program, but like organic, you know, creators cross 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 we've added a hundred 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've 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 really give it a really fair shot so That is going but has not happened yet We're looking for like a head of social. I don't we don't do head of titles But like this is going to be the person who's kind of like oversee like all of lately like social strategy creator of strategy. So That's like a really big role where we're recruiting for I don't know if you guys know JT Barnett at all He runs like a agency That normally like for crutch creators, but he's also like recruiting so he's recruiting this for us and I just like I think he just like totally gets like creator ecosystem So that'll be a big one and like that obviously build out like our internal studio But yeah, now we're doing we're doing a lot. There's a there's a lot that it's just saying 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 up 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 this is the work So it's just dude under now as business great. It just takes longer, which is just killing me I just want to get the stuff live and launched I feel that I feel that like that poke that it's taken too long. I think it's important to The context I think even though it feels slow to us. We're all probably moving faster than most most brands Of our time. I'm like how about it now like like here. I'm like Like I drive my team crazy with like the speed I expect them to do it actually like we have like a shout out channel Just like shout it out to them today just for like just like pushing the the TikTok shot stuff because it's just like right work It's like not fun like my systems guy has to upload like 100 spreadsheets to get like all of our like acit and or whatever The equivalent data would be to talk like it's just like not fun stuff and there's a lot of like there's a lot of Blockling and tackling right now because like even to Connor MacDonald's point about this like cross department thing It's like it's a new channel and when when when we thought we're gonna launch a touch-hop and initially It was like oh you just integrate with Shopify and it's just boom. Oh to live and now it's like no like the it feels like the tariff situation We're like no like it was strung on everybody so quickly like the whole FBT thing It was strung on everybody so quickly and and no one really knows and so like the We're waiting for the 3PL is to get integrated and get the right labels that 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 Yeah, yeah, just but just you just got to keep pushing it just I'm just just pushing it So I'm excited about it. I'll have updates. I can't wait till we do Koda feel like going in in our experience in the last year was 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 and Mario Kart and like now We're getting like 500 a thousand video like hundreds and hundreds of videos So it just took us forever to get there but then 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 returning your shop off issues So I think I think you're gonna 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 content and it's really hum- - I can't wait, I'm so excited. - Are you guys running GMB Max Connor? Like what's the paid strategy for TikTok right now? - 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 do this like arbitrage TikTok shop affiliate content. - Yeah. - So I heard the stat the other day from someone. I've had a bunch of conversations around 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 GMB Max. So GMB Max is like loading up all the organic posts into 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 standard TikTok shop ads where I could drive people to ridge.com. GMB Max is taking organic posts, promoting those, driving people to TikTok shop and then you get more benefits of getting organic views in this case. So they said 90% of our revenue should be coming from GMB Max and I'm like, oh, that's just running ads. I'm like, and I even sort of corroborated it with another brand that it's bugging you. They're very big beauty 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 on organic and your paid ads and your GMB Max ads. But they said 70% plus is probably coming from GMB 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 gonna 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. So Cody, I'm curious, have you heard the same or like how do you foresee your guys' TikTok shop program and the like, so affiliate support around it coming together? I hadn't heard that. What I've heard is, but we should, we should, 'cause we're all like, and I don't know, I don't know how well you're, 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 them. - I did absolutely. - Absolutely. - Who actually knows TikTok shop to like, you know, 'cause we were probably talking out of our, out of our ass, but 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 have originally met with TikTok, it was like, you know, 99 or 97% 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 obviously all creator and I don't know what percentage GMP max or whatever. - Yeah. Yeah, I thought it was like exclusively creator, but what I'm learning now, which I totally believe in, frankly, square as much more for me, is that it's a combination of the creator posting and then really the brand then promoting that via GMP max. And I'm sure that that sort of revenue is attributed to the creator in the 95, 97% that you just mentioned from TikTok. - Sure. - Anyway, that's my small update. I was like, oh, I feel like that's gonna dramatically shift how we think about our TikTok shop program. - We're doing a lot of, we hired this agency. If we're doing it internally, then we hired an agency that specializes in this. We're doing live TikTok shop events. We're like, we'll do a live stream for like an hour and someone's like running through the product. We usually do it around some moment and we see really good, really good performance in that moment doing that. We'll do like flash shells 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 TikTok shop strategy is like part of that and we're doing those like monthly, and then we're just seeding a ton with TikTok shop affiliates. Are you guys doing any of the live stream shopping stuff yet? - No, not yet. - That's perfect for you guys. I mean, that's not that much different than Costco road show. - Exactly, exactly. It's literally the same exact thing just in a different medium. - Yeah, that's cool. - And it's just long form, it's like a cool long form way to kind of organically talk about these products that are super expensive. That you can sell it a little bit better than you can in a 45 second Facebook ad or Instagram ad. - 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 issues we were working with works with other brands and more subcutaneous brands, like they're gonna recommend, you know, creators L3 and above will go 500 samples per product will probably launch with two to three, you know, skews. I'm so curious to see what performs. Like, so we're gonna take one of our hero products and we'll do some miracle bomb. We're gonna try something that's a little different. Maybe something that's like a tier two, 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 TikTok had the strategy that I love is like, they've had, 'cause I was like, hey, we don't really love to do much discounting. Like what else can we do? It's like exclusive and like, and this is easy because we don't have any other channels, but like launching a product on shop two weeks before D to C. 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 we're finding going into it with, you know, hypotheses, but it'll open mind. - Sweet. All right, let's go back to one of Connor's, Connor, do you wanna go through your partnerships one or your retention one? - Okay, let's do retention as a product, 'cause I'm interested in your guys' perspective here. Okay, so I've got, I'll read it out quick, the retention as a product, moving beyond generic email blasts to more scalable personalized experiences with better segmentation, automation and testing. I'm reading, do I have it right here? CMO of meta, Alex Schultz, click here, doing some classic learning. And it's really a fantastic book. I would, if you guys have some time, I think is 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, Instagram and the Facebook app. And so he talks about product marketing, and he's like, that's the marketing that's integrated into your product, push notifications. It really is what, like, I think retention is for an e-commerce brand. For them, it's a marriage of push notifications and then the product itself on site merchandising and things like that, or 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 would do push notifications around it, but you could just as easily see them pinging you with like, hey, do you know, 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 like really meaningful impact on the growth. 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, fun cases, things like that. What we see right now is that there is essentially zero cross category buying whenever anybody checks out. That 97% of an order is coming from a single category 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 semblance 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 and 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 even know automated systems to do that. So what I would like to be doing is establishing more like onsite triggers and more behavioral, you know, behavior onsite that we can then build retention experiences around. Some kind of like event capture like, hey, if they, like, are you thinking they've they clicked into these pages as well or viewed them or what do you have in mind? 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 differently 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 clay, clay, but like the dynamic elements and things like that were 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 the prospects and customers that we have, and support how they are shopping. between categories over time, 'cause 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, 'cause 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 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 particular has dropped over 70%. That means same team, same volume, and over $500,000 in annual savings. Seasets have not changed. We've been sitting at 96% week after weeks of 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. Ridge 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 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 Ridge Panel. Go to richpanel.com/demo, tell them Conor from Marketing Operator, sent you, and they'll take good care of you. Thank you. That's interesting. I coated to your point about some sort, like using some sort of events to fill these lifecycle marketing flows. That was actually how we set ours up. I mean, a couple of years ago, as we were building out our non-cookware post-purchase automations, where basically the filter, the trigger was, has bought before and has visited any one of these pages. So for knives, for example, it was 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 high as we wanted it to be. And like at that, I think 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 in so far as it let us, let us, Australia 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 see that we're gonna get more volume out of repeat buyers. Like that has held true. So we actually like went back a little bit on that 'cause we wanted to prioritize the volume. And but now the tradeoff is that, we don't really have like a super sensical way of like funneling people into these automations. So like we have a ton of, like the way that we have our post-purchase, we have a very robust post-purchase lifecycle marketing web right now. And it starts off with a general post-purchase cross-self flow where you're gonna get awareness of all of our categories. And then it goes into the product specific, but it's all step wise. It's like, are you getting the general on first, then hex-mills? - Totally. - So I'm trying to find that balance of like, 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 balance we're trying to find that in like trying to, I know Clavio is building some functionality around this. We use a tool called revamp that also builds a functionality. Like I think someone's gonna build a really awesome tool where it's just like, hey, based on all the data points we have, we think Person A is the most likely to buy knives. So we're gonna put them in knives. And now we have instead of step wise flows, we have, they're all happening at the same time. Which is 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 do that? - Well, I have actually a question for you first. Are you guys doing any sort of identity resolution? Like are you using L of R cookie and Richmond? - Yep, or use L of R. - Yeah. - Okay. - Definitely how, that certainly helps the volume, right? Like that right there. And we ran tests on this when we first rolled out L of R of like, hey, like pre-purchase. Like here's everyone that we tracked just with our like, Klavio and then here's everyone we also tracked with L of R and like it was a no-brainer to do it. - Yeah, 100%. You're probably sending three times as many as the like behaviorally triggered flows. Yeah, no, my idea is actually similar to what you described. What you said you guys have moved away from is like, it 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 gonna 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, right? So the people are getting less engaged, like just naturally within any flow. I think people are engaging at a lower and lower rate over time. And then you also have, at 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. - Yeah, right. Yeah, let's you know that's our next phase of revamp is trying to see how we can leverage it in post purchase. So we tested revamp, which is basically just like dynamic content in the subject lines and dynamic product recommendations. - Yeah. - We tested it versus our static pre-purchase lifecycle and we saw huge lifts and 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 segmentation functionality. It's like, hey, I just tell me who's the most relevant for knives and we'll put them into this beautiful really informational knives flow that we've got, 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 something in there so we're trying to figure out? - We did 100%. - What percent? - And like this, no, no, no, no, no, go ahead. - I was gonna say, I know, I mean, I've feel some other brands that do this way better. Cause like, Ridge has just been such an acquisition oriented brand that it's like, yeah, we have, we have your standard abandoned car, 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, Connors, 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 cent or whatever. But like, what I'm actually way more excited about at this point is how do we identify sending a relevant high value message, even if it's just to a few hundred people who 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, obviously, 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. - This is revamped that AI, is that what it is? - Okay, cool. I gotta check that out. I have a question and then got one smolting that Connors. Have you seen, because I'm curious, that was such a bit different business, when you do get a cross category shopper, LTV on those, like if somebody's doing it naturally, are they much higher? - Totally. - Yeah. And I mean, we see a lot of interesting, like the LTV on like 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. (laughs) It's actually not that great. It's like a couple more dollars or whatever. But we see much higher value from someone, like a luggage customer, which is interesting. - Yeah, like, and that's like, is it easier to go take them and then try to cross sell them into a wallet or vice versa, or it's like whatever you gotta do both. - Yeah. Like luggage for, they're all different basically, but luggage for instance, there's a nice ecosystem. We have carry-ons and check-ins and duffel bags and back-packs, there's just a lot more reasons to come back. And 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 in place of 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 I've talked about a bunch of times, men are never really thinking about their wallet. Like we'd literally have a good product for those people. So that's a much easier sell than trying to get a $95 wallet customer to buy up into a $300 piece of luggage. - Yeah, exactly. Are you, I think you should be thinking about it not just like post-part, but actually onsite 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 purchased, cross category shopping are, you know, much higher values. So like we'll do a lot of kits, right? And so like we know that people that buy a kit is usually a more valuable customer. So I said it's, again, it's different. It's a consumable, but we're doing, you know, we're doing a lot of even like sampling, like I'm saying 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 know, if you can bundle a wallet into a luggage, but I would just think about it even on a acquisition as well. - Totally. And for you guys, that makes sense. Like if you get Miracle Bomb and the SBA, the FMOSTRIZER, there's now two things that someone can repurchase if they like 'em. You've doubled the chances that they found something that they liked. - Yeah, a little different. - One thing we're doing similar, I really wanna check out revamp, I think, too. We're redoing our quiz, which I'm really excited about. So we're gonna build it custom. - Okay. - But thinking, I think, and now I'm actually curious to check out revamp because of this, but like, 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, 'cause it's not currently. But from just a data collection standpoint, like, what do we wanna be able to collect to tailor that journey? And then also one of the things we're really thinking about is what's a predictor of high LTV? Like, there's, you know, I wanna know, I wanna know, you know, somebody I know of, like, a fitness app, 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? 'Cause, from a signal engineering perspective, you can do that. Like, right now we're optimizing for code relations on some of our ads, but could it be quit, like, more specific to get the right signal? And just from a general data collection as well. So that's something I'm really curious to see anything we can find. But I think that's something that's been really cool. One way we're segmenting as well, is we start using outer signal. I think we've talked about it on the pod, but like, it's just the data. Like Connor, I know you guys used it a while. Have you seen like their new analytics as part of the persona stuff? - 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% of your customers fall into this persona? - I might have a beta access to 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 been so cool and we're kind of, we're testing kicking off more segmented flows that way, where if somebody is a busy mom versus if they're a professional executive, like we're gonna talk to them very differently and even being able to recommend and upsell different products to them. So that's definitely a big focus. It's just these big persona funnel journeys. - Yeah, that's really cool. - 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? - Like technically. - Yeah. - Data warehouse, we're building this custom I think right now we're using an app and it goes to Clavio. There's an integration with the app, it goes to Clavio and then Clavio 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. - I got it, got it. No, totally. I was just curious. I think that's another interesting part of all of this as we get, 'cause we're all like on similar tracks here in terms 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 CBP or something like that. Because you also need it, like in a perfect world, you have the ability to segment that data across other channels. So like if you write it right to Clavio, can you use that data in Post-Grip? 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, like wait, sort of enrich CRM in a way. 'Cause it'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 of it. - Yeah, that's over in my head. Even PDQ, I know is a sponsor of an open-up episode. So they do some stuff on site. And like we've talked about it doing like, you know, like a predictive LTV. And so like, 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 cart, like discount shipping on the first order just 'cause we're like, "Hey, let's take a little bit less margin on this person 'cause we know they're gonna be good or something like that." Or we're also, yeah, like, we're trying to segment. So 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 and you can just go 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. That's been a little bit. - Time hesitation in the past. - Yeah, we're not doing a ton of it. We used to do it more in the past where we'd run like offers to certain segments and like we would use UTM 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-so flows that are exerting your business objectives. And 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 rate suck and your engagement sucks, well then there's something wrong with the audience, but that's been like where, that's where we've trended and it's worked well for us. That I think generally people probably segment too much, too early, especially in these cross-so 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 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 at the engagements there, it's clearly relevant, even though you're not doing a ton of like quote unquote, like segmenting or technical segmenting. - Totally. - I think that's great advice, I totally agree. Optimization for volume, that's definitely like the far right curve. Ninja wo jack approach. - Yeah, nah, I agree. - Operators, quick gut check here. Q1 is when everyone realizes the same thing at once. Traffic, it's more expensive, growth flows 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 AfterSell by Rocked. Most brands think UpSell's 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 AfterSell, 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 AfterSell, 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 UpSell's that AfterSell adds. Once you're live, you unlock the entire rocked monetization suite. Rocked 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. Rocked 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 AfterSell.com/operators, activate rocked thanks or rocked pay plus. And you'll get the full AfterSell 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, has been product seeding. We were very successful product seeding program. We've gotten tons of social impressions. Great CPMs, really good hit rate on seeding. Started off with a line growth with Josh and had a lot of success there that we brought it in house when 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 influencer team 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 trying to wrap my head around organic YouTube and how we can become more relevant there and just ultimately get more impressions there. So I'm curious, I have a question for you guys because there's kind of two, 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 contents or getting more impressions in YouTube. The other parallel path is product seating. Like I'm curious, can we get some of the same success we've had on Instagram and TikTok as on YouTube just purely through our product seating flow. I'm assuming it's probably gonna need to be a combination of both, but I wanted to maybe con or I'll start with you 'cause I know you guys have done a lot of organic YouTube. Like what do you think will work best here? Is it paid deals? Is it product seating? Am I wrong in thinking that like product seating can work on YouTube? Like what's your experience been there? My guy 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 Instagram or TikTok creators, somebody else, I would totally try that on YouTube. Fantastic ad space, super deep and easy. integrations people 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 advantage that you have at hex cloud and being like a cookware company is if you sponsor creators who then like you, it will become organic impressions over time. Right. And we didn't hit it. One of my other focuses for this year is partnership, organic social affiliates. I would just love to have rather than like hard integrations on more posts. I would just love to have like present and visibility and more like for us like men's content. How do we get in more automotive content or sports content? For us, I might be like t-shirts or things like that. But if you're just sponsoring, hey, I'm going to go out sponsor 40 YouTubers. You'll probably have eight of them. Just use your cookware for the rest of the year. Right. And just again, like I go back to like almost brute forcing it up front and being like just pay to get in them. Seating probably works also, but like I think the 80, 20 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. 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 not a part of it. Yeah, I agree with that. I fully think that's probably what would happen. Like we, I mean, we have just so many examples of this. And the only reason we don't have more because the wall is such not a visible product, right? Someone last year, Pat McAfee, the, the old cult punter and the New Zealand bar stool and there's on ESPN. We sponsored him a bunch of times. He's been using his Ridge Wall now for years. And then it came up on college game day. He'd forgotten his wallet at one of the other coaches, his, 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 turned 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. 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, are our products showing up the second time, third time, fourth time? Because if it's not showing up like that's the, I know YouTube is 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 going to be hard from, unless we're getting that person and our product showing up in like a more of a seating way over and over again, that it's going to be hard for me. So I'm going to have to see like, what is that repeat rate on, on these deals? We'll have to try it too because I think you might be surprised by the revenue you can drive from the integration itself too. It's just, it's such good ad space. It's such a deep integration. This is like my lesson in Connor, we kind of let me know if you just read it. 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, we went out with like 50 K month budget. So 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 outs, any new channel that's not a, like, algorithmic thing, we really are trying to give it like a six, like 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, um, some mere from calling it some mere on, uh, open residency that podcast. I was on today. Um, and like, you know, he's talking about like, you know, their deals with shop, the finance of 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. I do think you will get, we'll get clear revenue. It's not like you're going to get any, but it's probably not going to look great from a CFO perspective and, and the beginning from like a last click. And then it just kind of does take time. I mean, then the other thing with YouTube, it just takes time. So those views will continue to stack up. Um, yeah. It's just, it's just, you just got to 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? No, yeah. I think, I think that's totally right. It also differs by category. Um, it will be difficult to measure, especially since you guys spend a lot on YouTube. Like yeah, $50,000 a month budget. Like I had to post purchase, I think would, would be nice early on. Like we get, that's how we measure a lot of our podcasts advertising are actually views served on YouTube. And we do a lot of that analysis via our post purchase survey. But one of the things that helps us, 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. Yeah. I think there's a lot of wins to be had there. Sweet. Are you guys using, um, are you getting usage then in those integrations for paid? Some of them, but not all of them. Not all. Okay. Got it. Cool. No, I got that's it. That's a lot of good stuff to think about. Appreciate the feedback. All right. All right. Let's wrap there. That's episode 100 are centurion episode. I look at earlier. I could properly use that word. Hell yeah. All right. That's a wrap on episode 100 of the marketing operators, uh, 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 pack strategic episode. Make sure to like, subscribe, leave a comment and share with all of your marketing friends. And as always, thank you to sponsors, motion, rich panel, pressure, aftersell and revo. Hope you enjoyed.