S16 E8: Your Retention Strategy Is Probably Broken

Here's something that should bother you. Two shoppers visit your site. One looks at a $30 product, the other one looks at a $200 product. They both abandon and most brands will send them the exact same email, which is insane. Instant fixes this. It watches what each shopper does on your site and builds the perfect follow-up around their behavior. The right product, the right message, the right offer, and the right timing. And for the operators who care about incrementality, this is the part that matters. And that lets you measure performance on the same attribution window you're already using inside Klavia. So if your team lives by a one-day click, you can see exactly what Instant is adding up on a one-day click view. And believe me when you see how much revenue, your standard email setup is still leaving untouched, you're going to want Instant Live today. Over 1,500 brands are live, including third love, liquid IV, and kind patches. And this month only, you can get 50% off your first 60 days at Instant.1/Sharma. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. All right, today's episode is with Joseph. I met him when I was working with festivals. And but Joseph was kind of the head of attention over at festivals, which is, you know, Mr. Beast's multi-hundred million dollar chocolate brand. Absolutely killing it, both digitally and in retail. Anyways, I met Joseph there. And today he works with a variety of brands, specifically a lot of the fast scaling, supplement, performance marketing brands. And, you know, those are a lot of times the brands that I like to go and look at as inspiration. I tend to find that those guys are, you know, it's usually like vice industries do something first. And then it gets to the underground drop shippers and app builders. And then it slowly gets its way to supplement brands that are, you know, good brands. And then it makes its way to kind of the general e-commerce world. So we were talking about a lot of things that, you know, have for a long time been tested in the kind of underground world, but it's always just been done in a way that was shady before. So, you know, now you're talking about brands with massive celebrities or just brands that are huge. And so they have a lot more things when it comes to compliance and what they're able to do and kind of where the, the guardrails are. So the reason I got Joseph on in the first place was I was just excited to chat with him and go deep on what he's doing from a retention standpoint. He's not just overlooking email and SMS, but he's thinking about subscription and how do you acquire customers that have the highest lifetime value from the get go? And what kind of offer are you getting them in so that, you know, you maximize lifetime value based on what they first get. So all those kinds of things, we went high level, we went super deep in the weeds. And overall it was just a great, it was super informative. I put one newsletter out already from the podcast. I'll probably put one or two more out. There's just a bunch of nuggets in here. So, you know, if you don't want to miss out on at least three to four nuggets, you'll be able to walk away with on the retention side of your business. Then I highly recommend you just keep listening to this episode. Anyways, give it a listen. Let me know what you think. Feel free to reach out to Joseph himself on Twitter. He's super responsive. Reach out to me on Twitter @Mrs Sharma. And yeah, I'll see you next week. All right, Joseph, welcome to Limited Supply. I'm absolutely stoked to have you here. There's not a lot of retention experts that I know in the industry and you're one of the greatest. So I'm excited to have you here and talk retention because we don't really talk much for attention stuff here. It's obviously a part of it. But, you know, I've always been on the growth side and the acquisition side of things. But yeah, I'm really excited to talk through a bunch of stuff today. Before we jump into it, give us a bragging intro of yourself. You know, how would you brag about yourself, not just introduce yourself? Yeah. So, I don't really like talking about myself too much. But, you know, I'll give this a try. I know. So, my last full time role was at Feastables. I was one of the first tires there on the E-Com side. They brought me in as head of retention and stayed it as head of retention for about a year before getting promoted to director of E-Com. Growth and retention stayed in that new role for about a year as well before leaving to kind of start this fractional retention business. We've got a chance to work with the biggest mushroom coffee company in the world. I'm an NDA, so I can't share their name. And then kind of, you know, one thing led to an accident got the opportunity to do the same for instant hydration. And I must recently I made so coming in, building retention systems from the ground up, bringing that retention leadership. And, you know, again, when we speak of retention, it's not like email marketing, right? I mean, I think that's like certainly a lever, but, you know, expands a lot more beyond that at this point. Yeah, I'm excited to talk more about like what you feel retention is. I've always said that, I guess, yeah, different point of view, but I've always said that retention, if good retention is done, you know, your brand is a top five thought and somebody's mind, or it might be something that gets brought up at the dinner table. But it's got to always be stuff that, you know, contributes to something. It's got to be a program design that's good enough that people remember it. I remember it 100%. I mean, I feel like we're seeing that like with grooms, right? Like, grooms in their accident. I mean, of course, they've had an insane growth story, but, you know, they don't, they don't get that type of growth without like the retention and like the LTV plays that they've made on the back end. Just like building a member of a brand, having the mind share. I know that's something you've talked about before. So yeah, I could not agree with more. Yeah. Like, what do you feel like falls under the category of retention? Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's different based on a category of brand, right? So the retention that I focus on, you know, is mostly in the supplement space. And, you know, for a supplement brand, you know, again, just going back to email. A lot of the campaigns you would send, right, are typically going to be sent to a, you know, a prospect list or a non customer group or maybe, you know, maybe one type of person customers, but I think we all know like in the space is like the more you email your active subscribers, you know, the more churn you're probably going to drive. So it's not to say you should never email them. Of course, it's just like being strategic about what kind of messages you want to send to them. What kind of value you want to add to like that customer journey. So I'll look at email as a retention tool in the context of like wind back flows, right? Optimizing your upcoming order flow. The upcoming order flows a huge driver for churn. But it can also be a huge driver for retention if you kind of flip the script where, you know, when people get an upcoming order email, most emails are like super transactional and they're like, you know, an order coming in three days, you're going to get charged $200, whatever it might be. And, you know, that's not something that too many people are going to read and be excited about. So we try to like flip that script and make it something that like, you know, your, you know, your next level of benefits are going to unlock in the next 30, 60, 90 days, whatever it might be. So we'll spend a lot of time there. And then of course, in the subscriber portal, there's huge opportunity for driving retention by just loading up the portal with content around again, like benefit messaging and, you know, making it easy for customers to manage this description without being too shady. So we spend a lot of time on cancel flows. A lot of time on like, you know, the first kind of 14 days, first 30 is on boarding. Your transactional emails, specifically like the shipping emails, like order confirmed, order shipped, orders on the move, order delivered. Those are like some of your highest open emails, right? Of probably like any account. A lot of brands will have those emails like still within Shopify, which is like a huge mistake because you can't really see the data. You can't really like change the design too much on those. So we'll, you know, bring those into Clavio and then like really overhaul them to make them again, not transactional. We want to make them like moments of like, you know, customer opens the email and then now they're more excited to explore the brand. I think a great example of this is if you go place in order for my superfoods, you'll see that, you know, you're instantly met with value, right? The one of the first emails you get is I think it's like a surprise and delight message. One of them, it's like you have a free gift coming on your next order that we're, you know, that we picked you to receive. Like that type of thing drives retention. You know, they also give you like access to a free call with a nutritionist or something like that or like a dietician. I don't know, something like that. That, you know, again, it's like as a customer, it's like you're going to love the brand not much more. You're going to remember them that much more because of that. They give you a free class pass membership for like a month, right? So it's like these are retention levers that you can pull by kind of, you know, again, we're hauling the onboarding experience. And then also, you know, again, maybe I'm just rambling Nick, but, um, no, this is a product insert. I feel like again, you know, I kind of post about the sound LinkedIn. A lot of brands will kind of just treat like a product insert as like something that, you know, it's like more of like a throw in, right? It's like, oh, we just kind of know we should be doing that as a brand and, you know, we're just going to write something nice from the founder to the customer and kind of like hope that that like moves the needle. But in most cases, there's like actually zero tracking and zero kind of like testing or accountability, with that channel. And it is most certainly an area that a lot of brands really should focus on, you know, think of brands like ultra, right? So like when you place an order from ultra, um, you're getting met with an insert that's like, there's different levels to ultra. Like if you want to feel ultra more, you know, you should probably take like two pouches or if you really want like the maximum effect, you want to take three pouches, right? And you know, there's another brand like Alice mushrooms that I posted about like their, they're, uh, they sell like these like, I don't know, after DZ, chocolates. And same guy thing, it's like you could take one a day consistently to just increase your libido. But if you want that extra boost and you're going to maybe you want to have like a good night, whatever it might be, you know, you take an extra one for that day. So again, it's like, you want to use the insert as like that moment that, you know, the customer is going to read it every single time. And so like what kind of content can we throw on to this that is going to drive the needle for attention? There's actually so much more I can go into, but I don't want to, I don't want to over, you know, I don't want to hire you. I jack your podcast here. - Well, before we jump to some other stuff on that, like so when you're talking about the product insert, right? Are you saying that it's better to use it from like a educational standpoint? Are you saying like actually what you put there should tie toward the product outcome, like the emotional outcome. So in that example, having a good night, you know, you're tying that to that versus talking about, you know, what are the ingredients in the thing? - Yeah, I just, I mean, I feel like a combination of both would be great, right? Like ideally you are double downing and maybe like, you know, further educating the customer on like the specific ingredients that might be part of your formula that, you know, again, might be moving the needle for these specific benefits. But at the same time, yes, just like painting that picture, framing, you know, for the customer, like, what you might feel down the line is like to me the most important part of all of this, of like how do we help the customer use the product better? Because in a lot of cases, there's just like basic level of product that education that a lot of, you know, customers don't know how to, you know, they don't know the importance of like daily consistency, right? So it's like, you want to reinforce the daily use of the product and then show how like, maybe you have some kind of trials or studies that you've done, whether it's like clinical or just like through consumer studies that show over 12 weeks of taking the product daily, you know, users found X, Y, and Z benefits, right? So now as a customer when I open it on my first order, I'm like, oh, okay, so this is the exact like output, this is exact like benefit that I'm looking to get. And, you know, they're just telling me, they're just giving me the blueprint, right, of how to actually achieve that. And so I think there's that. And then there's now also another level of all of this that is like purely retention play, where if you, if you go order from Marsmen, I think Marsmen has honestly one of the best product inserts I've ever seen. They also have given you a, like a, I don't know if it's like a 30, 60, 90 day habit tracker that's physical of course. And then of course they want you to fill out the habit tracker. But what's actually really cool is there's a message at the end of it that they essentially prompt you to take a photo, like a screenshot after 90 days when you've completed all the, you know, that daily check marks and then submit it and you will get a free month of Marsmen for doing that, right? But I assume they're not going to give you that unless you've actually completed three months worth of orders, right? So it's almost like pre baking in the retention. If you really want a free month, you want to get all this value, you got to stick with us, right? And try the product. And of course that's how you drive, you know, consistent usage, which is everything. Yeah, wow, that's amazing. Yeah, even just in that, you know, what you kind of talked about was you went over basically product inserts, those four emails post purchased between like, you know, placing the order and the order basically being unboxed. You talked about the inserts. How important do you also think like the actual packaging, branded tape, the unboxing, the feel of the box, all those things? How important do you think that is compared to, you know, for example, like there's so many times I'll talk to brands and they're like, no, we'll just put it in a mail or we already got the purchasing. Totally. Yeah. I would say like one of the best examples of packaging that I've, that I've really liked is I made, which is one of the clients that we work with. And you know, if you've ever ordered I made, it's just truly an incredible unboxing experience that, you know, I think it's, you know, I guess there's like different lenses to approach this from, right? Where it's like, if I'm looking at this from a retention lens, I do, of course, believe that a better unboxing experience is going to lead to higher retention, just because it creates a more memorable brand, which goes back to the point we were talking to at the start of this, of this podcast where it's like, you know, you open the I made box and there's like this really cool, there's like a pack of cards and like every card has like a different, sort of like education piece of the brand that, you know, I think is all obviously great for the customer to know. And there's like a really like powerful mission statement, like behind that, like on the actual like box, the inner flap. And so I think it's like when you can create unforgettable moments like this, obviously, you're going to just, you know, help drive the connection to the brand, but, you know, it's not something I can say we've ever like, EV tested, right? So it's like hard to put data behind like stronger retention with better unboxing, unboxing experiences, but even if like you don't want to go as far as like a crazy nice, you know, box, yes, a branded mailer couldn't go a long way. And I will just add from the perspective of like growth marketing or just like guerrilla marketing, you know, I live in a apartment building when I go to, you know, get my packages downstairs, you know, I, it's almost like free advertising when you have a really sick mailer or box. Yeah, I think about that all the time, especially in just around city seeing UPS and FedEx moving, you know, dollies full of boxes. You always see a sleep or chewy or Hello, fresh and you see it. And it's like literally a billboard. So it's like whatever the incremental cost is of doing that, it feels like, you know, it has to be worth it. If you can make a really cool branded, you know, box or mailer. So yeah, totally agreed. The other thing you mentioned was gifts. And specifically also gifts on a delay, which I think is really smart. Both in the rise and the Marsmen examples. How do you help? Like how do you advise brands to choose their gifts? Like for example, I always find it a fun little exercise to do. And, you know, back when I worked at Hint, that was one thing that I learned from Hint because the founder came from a direct marketing background. Like, you know, American Express and like those types of companies. And so they used to always do gifts with purchase, which would crush for promotions. Like promotional gifts with purchase with no extra discount goes such a long way. But, you know, it's always hard to find unique things that are unique to the brand. Versus things that just feel like, oh, they just went to Ali Baba and got something to throw in there. Yeah, I mean, sure. It's definitely, I feel like it comes up with every engagement we work on now. And, you know, the brands like what kind of gifts make the most sense? You know, we just launched a gifting program for IMAIT in the last few months and seeing nice success from that. But I think again, it kind of all comes down to like the intention of like why you want to throw these gifts in. Right? Is it to kind of fool the customer into thinking you're going to get something nice and then they don't? Right? Because that could totally backfire if you just have like a cheap throw in. Right? Totally. And you market this cool big gift or mystery gift, whatever it might be. And it's like a, you know, something that clearly worth a few dollars that they're never going to use. And so I think, you know, from the perspective of gifts, it's like, you know, what is additive to the customer experience based on the product they actually purchased? Right? So, you know, a brand that, you know, you and I both love Gray Matter. Right? We've talked about this brand quite a bit. We both do some work with them. Gray Matter is truly one of the best products I've ever, you know, tried in my entire life. Not the point or that's besides the point. But in their case, you know, they'll give you a for author and then the next month or maybe in future months, you'll get, you know, a shaker bottle. And, you know, these may sound like potentially basic gifts. But to be honest with you, if you just put that product into a glass of water and try mixing it with a spoon, you're going to get some clumping. You're going to get, you know, you know, it's not going to be the cleanest kind of product experience. That's not just just case for them. Obviously, it's probably the wider kind of, yeah, most probably. Right? So, you know, in their case, especially cold water, right? Especially cold water, which most people are not going to know about. Exactly. So for them, the shaker bottle, like 10 times out of 10, you shake it in that thing, it's fucking perfect, you know? And so, yeah, it's obviously conducive to a better customer experience. I would say, like, if you're going to think about gifts, you know, from the margin perspective, you don't want to exceed something that's more than like five, definitely no more than 10% of your gross margin. Because then you have to obviously see like an equal lift on retention. If you're going to use these gifts as retention play, to kind of justify the added cost. Otherwise, it's actually more of like a detrimental gift than a gift-driving retention for us. But as long as it's like sub five percent cogs and it's an additive product like that, you're doing something right. Yeah. Yeah. I've always been such a big proponent of building out a real offer that's, you know, a deal on the product. You know, the brand gets something a lot of times now that's basically the subscription piece of it. And then, you know, the customer gets basically the arbitrage perceived value of the gift, you know, by the tumbler for a dollar and nine cents and value it at $19 or something. And then one thing I also did at hint that everybody thought was silly, but I thought this is kind of a no-brainer was three months of class pass because I figured that's basically like $45 of value or whatever it was times three, you know, maybe $90 of value. For class pass, they're basically spending money on acquisition. So if I can give them a customer, the cogs of those three months, whatever their hard cost is, is basically their customer acquisition cost. So I wouldn't they do that. And we did it with postmates as well and it crushed because the, probably for the same reason, still working today. And today I see it with like, calm and other ship and some of the other kind of like more calming apps. But I wouldn't be surprised if brands also just start coming out with their own versions of fully digitally native. Oh, man. I could not agree more. I feel like the tech savvy brands out there with all the access to AI now, right? Like, you know, a calm partnership is going to cost you quite a bit of money. right? And so like you can't. Yeah, because now they're they're like the celebrity in that engagement as well. Exactly. Totally. So, you know, if you want to like, you know, do this on a budget, you can create your own version of this by, you know, cooking something up with, you know, some kind of AI tool. Like, I mean, Nick, you're the AI guy here. So I mean, you could probably talk about that. Yeah, yeah. I'm all in right now. I was going to say, what are some of the AI tools you're using? Cloud code, manness. Those are the two, honestly, that I use the most. You know, I've gone like deep into like vibe coding, like true software or anything like that yet. But from the perspective of like, you know, saving time by replicating or like building skills with, you know, again, manness or cloud code and then using the skill to replicate the output across different instances of like the same exact, you know, use case, like that's to me is like a fucking no brainer. And then obviously, manness would like, if you ever want to mark something up, whether it's a fucking even like an insert or an email or, you know, a landing page like, manness is insane. And like, that's my go to for that. But yeah, what about you? What have you been using? Yeah, definitely. A lot of manness. I've got behind me four Mac minis that are all set up as open claw systems. So, you know, everything from building websites for like, you know, the dock I shared with you, the art prep doc all the way to, you know, I made a app that is roast.nick.co is the domain. And you basically Apple pay five bucks and you put your website in and you get the same level of like a $5,000 agency audit for your site. So been building fun things like that. But also, I was at dinner with Cody from Jones Road this week. And we were just talking about some of the different things. And, you know, even building systems where you are like, he's doing a lot of stuff with CRO. So like, he's got a system where he's plugging in. He got the API from heat map, which has been installed on his site for a couple of years. So it has all the data just sitting there, right? Then he's got his ad performance. So it has that context. It's got probably his email stuff. So it has that context from like copy creative standpoint. And then he plugs in outer signal. He can get all of his customer personas and start really building personas there. And then he can have an engine that knows every test he's ever run on the site. And he's basically, you know, coming up with the new CRO test. And he's three for three right now doing this, which is crazy. But I just thought it's so sick. Like, you know, that's that's a really cool way to you're not just using one thing. You're kind of like taking, all right, outer signal API, heat map API, you know, man, or not man, but meta API. And you kind of put it all together. And then he's even deploying it just using the regular like Shopify. Yeah. I mean, clearly that's like the way to go. It just, you know, it takes like the time commitment. But like if you can put in the time, it's going to save you so much time on the road. And like he's doing that for CRO, but like you could literally do that across any function, you know, 100%. Have you come across generative emails a lot? You mean like with certain platforms or just in general? Yeah. In general, both. Yeah. I mean, I feel like we've seen some, I mean, I've seen some pop up in Twitter. And, you know, I mean, like, I won't even call out any names. I haven't seen any that like blew me away. But I would say like the way that we're using it across some brands is or brands that are like far more AI forward. We're using like cloud code to kind of like, we're using it as like a kind of like a first step for like mocking up all of our emails so that we can like build like the skeleton structure. And then just like pass that off to designers and like the copyrighters and then they just like fill in the gaps. The time it takes now to create emails is like, you know, not even anywhere close to where it used to be. And like you could batch create, you know, 50 emails within like 30 minutes now that are super solid emails going like literally sending these out to huge lists and they're performing well. I would say like from that perspective, it's definitely improving a lot. But like a one shot like click of a button and then just generating a perfect email for any brand. I haven't seen it. But I'm super excited for that day when it comes. Yeah, I feel like it's coming soon. Time for the retention tip of the week brought to you by instant. If you run an apparel brand, here's something most people get wrong. You treat returns like a cost center. But your returns flow is actually one of your highest leverage retention touch points. Think about it. A customer just returned something. That doesn't mean that they don't like your brand. It usually means the fit was off or the color was the right. So what do the best apparel brands do? They build a post return email flow that does three things. One, acknowledge the return with zero friction. Two, immediately recommend the right alternative based on what was returned. And maybe the reason maybe it's a different colorway, a different size, a different silhouette. And number three, include a small incentive to come back within 10 days. Brands that nail their conversions flow for returns. They see 30 to 40% of their returners convert into repeat purchasers. The ones that don't, those customers are gone. Their return was their last interaction with you and it was a bad one. If you need help building smart post purchase and post return flows, instant makes it super easy. Their AI powered retention engine generates personalized emails for every shopper automatically. Check them out at instant.1/sharma. Okay, I want to talk about what you think are the most important flows a brand can have, especially going into a life cycle where they're trying to have high retention. So consumable products or supplements. Where do you feel are the most important flows that a brand needs to have to launch? And then where should they try to get to? And then I also want to talk about like how you think about campaigns that are not just kind of, you know, just for sure. So I mean, most people will probably give the answer of like a welcome series. Just like, of course, of course, that's like what gets people in, but in most cases, only like one or two emails as part of the welcome series will ever convert a customer. And, you know, after that, it's like, you know, it's kind of tough. So as far as like on the retention end, the first thing is kind of like what we're talking about earlier, right? Where it's like the transactional shipping emails are such an unbelievably overlooked component to the email program that it's not a basic template in Clavio. Like you wouldn't even know to create it. You have to like use maybe like a wonderman or a Malomo, you know, to kind of ingest a lot of those properties from Shopify over to Clavio, but like those are hugely important for retention because again, we on the retention side, like it's our goal to of course, educate, but also prime the customer to be, you know, to be excited about saying what the brand to know like why it, you know, that the product's going to work for them. And so like we use these emails now, like we'll like push down a lot of the transactional content, like the shipping and like order details towards the bottom of these emails now. And we'll like front load them with like your journey over 12 weeks. And you know, also like for some brands, maybe there's like a difference in like intensity of flavor or like a fax that you might experience by using the product at different dosages or whatever or like different mixtures of like maybe water content. So we'll kind of like load up that educational content so that the very minute they actually receive their product, it gets delivered, they know so much about the product, they know so much about like what's ahead for them that, you know, it wouldn't even matter if we send them another email as part of like the post-burches onboarding flow, like they would already know like what to expect, what to look for, what to stay for I guess for that matter. So those are super important. And then of course, you know, something we're also exploring right now is like master classes. And what that like tactically means is like as a customer who kind of, you know, subscribe or like start surgery with the brand, we'll set up a really interactive onboarding flow or experience that we're doing in type form. That, you know, we're linking out to from like post-burches onboarding emails that basically is like a nice way because like if you think about an email, right, you know, not everybody's going to open the email and then not everybody's going to even read half the email, they probably just read like the hero section. So how much can you really fill up in that email? It's like there's not a lot to work with, right? And so we'll link out to this type form of experience where it's like, you're just, you know, you're keeping the user engaged by having them click buttons to, you know, get through to the next page to learn more and more and more about the brand. To understand the brand pillars and, you know, happy to even like plug in some type form like master classes into the show notes for people to get a look. And then I guess like after that experience of, you know, of course, like I said, upcoming order emails like wildly important for kind of what I said earlier, you don't want to make it transactional. You also want to segment that flow, which a lot of brands don't do by order cycle, so that you can, you know, control the content that people would experience and like get from month to month to month to month to month, three month, three to month, four and so on. Because again, like the different, you know, benefits of one might experience month to month to month, two might be different and, you know, we don't want to treat everybody the same there. We also, of course, on the wind back side, something we're exploring is, you know, most brands will probably just have like a generic 30 day wind backflow and whatnot. Again, I'm just going to focus most of this on subscription related wind backs because that's like where we spend most of our time. We are analyzing like what makes up like a top 10 or 20% customer. And then we are creating like a more structured like VIP flow for those customers that like if you really think about it, logic, Like, why would your best customers go down the most generic, like, windback experience, right? Because it's not really going to save them as well as it probably could have if you, like specifically address the customer as like, "Hey, Nick, I know you've been with us for the last four months. You know, you've been one of our best customers, you know, you're out in LA, blah, blah, blah, blah, and, you know, we just want a chance to like chat with you and figure out what went wrong. So then we're setting up, like, maybe a customer interview or leading to another survey. We just want to, like, learn more and connect to those customers before sampling them again into something else, which I think is like, you know, a really strong way to approach windbacks. But yeah, I would say, like, if you want to like narrow it down to the most important flows, you know, those are the ones that I would focus on primarily on the retention side. I'm curious, like, where, when you do these customer interviews, where do you store and how do you store a lot of that? Yeah, we, I mean, we record everything, right? And it's not, it's, of course, like, we send consensual, right? Like, we're, we'll first actually qualify them through like a mini survey. So we'll send out, you know, an email and help them fill out a few questions, make sure that they're the right kind of candidate to interview, make sure they're opting into being recorded. They're most are totally fine with it. And it's actually cool. You'll find that like, when you interview customers, especially customers that really like the brands, even if they canceled, a lot of them just like want more product, like, or they just want more kind of like gifts from the brand rather than like money, which is kind of funny because like, we'll offer like 25, 30, 50 bucks sometimes to take it on these calls. And they're just like, no, we just want more product. Kind of cool. But anyway, we're, we're saving all those transcripts with an auto AI or, you know, one of these other kind of no takers and, yeah, fireflies. I think fireflies actually the best truthfully because it has an MCP. Yeah, it just directly integrates with cloth. And then what we'll do is we'll match back the interview, the interview transcripts with what we're also finding in outer signal. And then we'll also throw on another layer of like customer reviews. And now you have like a really intelligent like data layer of like all this different customer info that's kind of plugged into one system. And then you can kind of create these like really strong ICP segments out of these. And by using or like by like understanding our ICPs, you can have more targeted like ads, more targeted landing pages, more targeted emails, more part targeted to host purchase onboarding like, I mean, let's go on, you know, and we're just seeing direct lifts and, you know, and how that's like helping. So, yeah. Wow. Dude, that's so cool. You think of a lot of things that I would never think of when it comes to like running a retention program. What are some interesting insights you found through customer interviews that maybe like change the game for, you know, maybe like, have you ever found insights that, you know, you implement something from that and it just totally changed the game. Oh, that's a good question, honestly. I mean, a lot of times like again, people are canceling like not because they didn't like the product, but you know, maybe they just like had way too much product. And we found that like some of the people we'd interview were literally just like kind of playing like a Santa roll to like literally dishing out all this product to their friends and family. And so like on on our end, we see somebody canceling or like, oh man, like something was went wrong. Of course, nothing really went wrong. But it's like, you can learn more about like the consumption patterns and like, you know, what customers really do you care about? Because like I said, again, like first wrong customer usually has want more products. It's hard to say like that we've implemented something that's like been a game changer. Like right now, we just kind of, you know, did this first experiment with one brand in the last like one or two months. So we're still kind of like piecing together the like the kind of follow throughs. But again, like the biggest fall through or like the biggest kind of learning from that experience was just like truly getting an understanding of the customer like ICPs. And by knowing the ICPs, we know exactly, we know exactly here's one thing actually. We've we've extracted quotes from those kind of like interviews. And now we're using those quotes across ads across the website across emails because now we know like how these kind of customers talk, right? So now you can like put the brand in the same state of mind or like you could basically like connected the customer a lot easier once you're speaking their language. So that is something directly we're doing right now. But, you know, more than anything, I mean, think like if you can scale something like this of like interviewing, you know, enough customers, like, you know, it's just going to create more connection with the brand. But then again, like just more pattern recognition of like what kind of customers you really want to bring in. Yeah, 100%. I don't know if you've seen how much the new like voice models also it's crazy or how good they've gotten. But like open AI just released a voice model that can basically hold a conversation and respond instantly with emotion and like tone of voice and everything. It's nuts. The crazy thing is like, I don't think customers will care that it's AI at a certain point. You know, not at all, especially not if they're going to get something at the end. Exactly. You know, yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then before we jump to the next thing, I'm curious, what are the like, how do you think about campaigns? So like, you know, I used to always, but last time I did email properly, personally, was when I was at hint. And we had this massive Excel sheet as a campaign calendar and had, you know, social, organic social paid social email website, you know, any sort of like field marketing PR stuff. And that's where we basically centered all of our like moments. And then emails were basically built off the back of that. But curious how you think about approaching campaigns and then coming up with like, what is the content? How do we make sure it's relevant versus just sending slots? So I'll preface by saying we don't manage campaigns for clients right now. But we will, however, you know, help drive kind of like the top level strategy for what we're looking for. And in working with some of these brands, like some of the, you know, brands like it's hydration and, you know, some others that I mentioned, we've done some analysis to find that the like, there is like an actual correlation between sending out emails, like sending out email campaigns to non-customers and then driving down CAC. So I think a lot of brands will like, they won't actually piece together the days that they send these campaigns out to their kind of like broader like non-customer list. And, you know, they're all kind of like in silo, like you have Facebook here, maybe you have Northbeam and like, Northbeam shows a blended CAC. But like, you know, what we would want to do is put it all into a Google sheet and be like, here's all the campaigns we sent last month. And then what, here's like the CAC on that specific day of the week, or just like literally by day, what was CAC. And then we would literally, we pulled this now across a variety of brands. And almost in any case, the days that we do send out a campaign, we'll see roughly a 10 to 11% drop in CAC on those days. That's not maybe like, I mean, take that as like anecdotal data, like that may not be the same for anybody listening to this show, but it's definitely interesting, right? And so then again, or then of course, that kind of like presents the case for like increasing volume, right? So it's like, if you are seeing, if you do this run this analysis and you find that you actually have lower CAC on these like campaign days, then it's like, okay, which days of the week actually have the most kind of impact on that CAC number? How like much substantial data do you have here? Is it like just in a one week, one week cohort, is it a month, is it several months? When I do this, we're looking back like 90 days, at least, right? To really put together these like these patterns to make sure that like what we're presenting here is true. But then again, like I said, it's just like a volume game. So it's like, then we're working with the email team to figure out like, you know, how do we get out more emails without it being, you know, destructive to the customer experience or like driving spam. We don't want to drive more unsubscribe all of that. And that can be handled. There is definitely a balance for everybody. But I'd say like, that's one of the biggest learning we found for sure on the campaign side. And then also just like being accountable to specific like top level KPIs and metrics on the email side, such as like orders by new customers orders by returning customers driven from email, right? So we're actually setting goals, right? Of like, you know, here's how many email attributed orders we need this month to reach our target for, you know, recurring orders driven from email for that month, because it all ladders up, of course. And so I think like adding accountability there where it's not just accountability of like revenue in a dashboard, because like that's, we all know at this point, like it's just attribution. So you're never really going to get the best data there. But if you have something like a triple well or a data like a North beam, then it's really easy. Like to see which platforms are driving those sales and, you know, setting like true goals and targets based on like the true kind of historical data. Do you have some brands that don't even send any campaigns? They just do. The best brands will send campaigns. So we do, I mean, we certainly have some that are like more resistant because it's like, I don't know. I mean, it's usually a bandwidth function or a function of like not having a good email team. But I would say like if you really want to do it right, you got to be sending out campaigns. Again, at least you're non-customers because you're just truly like holding yourself back and you're creating like a large dormant list. If you don't email them. So yeah. Do you advise any suppression for subscribers? Like I said, so like the majority of the weekly campaigns would not go to these subscribers, right? To the active subscribers. Got it. Okay. In most cases, we advise like only a handful of emails per month to ever send to these kind of people because it's like, again, what is really going to be additive if you think about it logically? Like if you're a brand that has one euro skew and maybe some supporting skews and you email the customer to go shop again, well, they really have product in hand. and right now. So it's like, you're just gonna potentially get an advance on the LTV, but at the expense of potentially like worse retention, 'cause now they're gonna have too much profit, they're probably gonna go churn, right? So yeah, now we wanna be careful there. - Yeah. So okay, so I'm curious now, I wanna talk metrics. I actually don't know what are the metrics to focus on, like when you're thinking about retention program as a whole, right? 'Cause like open rate has gotten skewed. I don't know if click rate is ever accurate. Like I know some of the metrics got funky basically. So I'm curious like what are the metrics to focus on and then I'm also just curious, how do you not land in the promo tab? 'Cause that's what everybody's curious. - So I'll give you an answer again, that's not like an email related answer 'cause like we don't really spend a lot of time like reporting on email stuff. The metrics that we look at from a retention perspective are true order retention. So if you go ask like 10 founders, what their retention is, a lot of them, or some number of them will probably tell you their subscriber retention, meaning like for their active subscription customers, what percent of them are still active at the end of every month. And a lot of brands don't know that there's actually distinction between subscriber retention and order retention by subscriber, right? So first things first is educating you or anywhere brand that's like order retention is a North Star metric that we're shooting for. Ideally looking at that on like a monthly kind of level where it's like what percent of your customers who order in this month are gonna be ordering next month. That's like wildly important as it relates to like your payback period, right? So that's like the North Star for us. And then secondly is like LTV of course. So like how does LTV change with the order retention improvement or the deltas there? 30, 16, 90, 120 day, three, four year LTVs, a lot of brands or a lot of investors care about 12 month and 24 month retention rates. As like it's obviously a really strong indicator, you have a good product and a good brand. And I think a lot of brands kind of neglect the longer term retention lens of all of the stuff. And they're maybe like more shortsighted of like, how do I force people into a second order with no redale email? You know, it's like you're probably gonna help recover some of that CAC faster, but like at the expense of like, you know, really destroying your customer relationship, you know, for the long term. So we're looking at those primarily and then we're also looking at churn rate based on like active churn and passive churn, right? What if you stay CEO recharge, you could find this kind of data and all of those kind of platforms? 'Cause like obviously, you know, the more you can drive down the churn rate, you know, of course in theory, then like the more you should increase your retention. Then we're also looking at churn rate by order cycle because typically the lower the order cycle, meaning like if you're on order one approaching order two, you're gonna have a lot higher churn rate, right? You know, in most cases brands maybe have like 50% retention month one or 40% or if they're really good, 60 or 70 or 80% but as they mature, reach like month four month five, the attrition rate really, really drops, really, really levels out, you're seeing sub 10% attrition month over month. Those people, you know, obviously have a lot lower churn rate so you don't need to focus on them as much. But yeah, for any kind of newer brand listening to this, your churn rate might be higher if you have like a smaller, you know, group of like active subscription customers, that's just kind of how it goes and like the bigger your list, the lower your active churn is probably gonna go. So we're looking at that, we're looking at positive rate, skip rate, you know, save rate across the cancel prevention flow, right? Cause like effectively the more you can drive up that save rate, the more you're saving a customer from canceling, even if they go to actually skip from that flow instead of cancel, we're still finding that, you know, there's not perfect retention for those skippers, but even if like 60% of them go on to place another order instead of canceling at that, you know, prior moment, it's still gonna be a win. So yeah, those are like the metrics we're looking at mostly. And then in Clavio, I don't really look at it as much, honestly. You know, open rate is, they're all like becoming sort of vanity metrics, but ideally you have like a strong ish click rate of like at least 0.5 to 1%. A lot of branches giving lower and out these days, not entirely sure why, but but as far or probably because a lot of the bots, they're like picking up now. And how to like skip the primary or skip the promotion and to the primary, you just want to use a platform. There's one called Maverick that we use that I really like. There's another one called like mail men, but there's like tools now out there that essentially what they do is they install like a text script at the very bottom or at the very top of your email that to the customer's eyes, they could never see any of this, but it essentially like tricks the inbox provider into thinking that it's like a like a privacy policy update email that it's like very transactional. And so we know because like they're reading the HTML version of the email, right? So like it's just like a script full of text that's all about that type of thing. They're going to think, oh, this needs to be in the primary tab, you know? Yeah, wow, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. All right, so if I'm a brand and you know, I've like had this brand for a while, maybe four or five years, it's not like a hyper grow thing, but it's been growing slow and steady. I've got some subscribers, you know, maybe a couple thousand subscribers, but I feel like my retention program is just dead, but I've got all these emails and, you know, I have a like some subscribers left. We're still running a little bit of Facebook ads. Like what do you recommend? How do you, you know, I don't have really a pop up thing going. I don't have any good, you know, camp flows or I don't have like, you know, I don't have anything that I'm pushing out to subscribers. Like how do you recommend I would re-energize? I mean, that's tough situation. So is the brand still growing or is it just been kind of like, you know, still growing, but like, you know, mostly flat, like maybe five, 10%. Okay. And then they have like a decent like subscriber race. You're talking about like email subscribers. Yeah, maybe like 40, yeah, 40,000 subs in total, or basically 40,000 emails, you know, and maybe like a thousand out of subs. I mean, there's not a lot of work with there, because like 40,000 emails, guys, not a lot in the grand scheme of things. Yeah. You know, I, I, I, I do you don't end up in that situation where you're not emailing those people for a while. Yeah. How do you, how do you prevent from becoming like a, have it just having a zombie. See, I mean, it just comes down to like, like, having bandwidth. Ultimately, I think it's like the biggest thing. So it's like, if you see that you are losing bandwidth or the team that you're working with is not good, and you're not getting the date you want, like, you don't want to mess around with this stuff, because like, the long you put it off, the harder it's going to be to like, pick back up the momentum, go in the right direction, you know, and like, it kind of essentially turns what would be an asset. Like an email list should be an asset for you. But if you have these people just sitting there for all this time, they're now essentially becoming more of like a liability. We're just like a depreciated asset at this point, you know, because they're not really going to be reliable. And in the case of like, if you want to go back to them and get them to order at some point, you know, it's kind of like fighting an uphill battle to be honest with you. Yeah. I'm curious like you work with so many of the fastest growing, I think also fastest moving. Like a lot of the brands you work with are usually the first to try things. You know, and you work with just real killers. And so I'm curious like, what kind of patterns do they have that you learn from or you admire? Or you would, I mean, I could just tell you like straight up from the brands at the top. The reason they're out the top, the reason get to the top, fasten anybody is literally just speed of execution. And the highest quality of like expectations for work, right? There's like, you know, you can't get to a level of success of reaching $100 million a year. If you don't try and test, you know, at the highest velocity that you can, right? So if you, you know, on the retention side, we almost approach it like zero, where it's like, what kind of tests can we implement and track like month over month, week over week that are leading to improvements in retention? And that further only compounds with the more growth that comes in. It can only increase the speed of which we're obviously like collecting the results of these tests. And then of course, now when they work, it is further than compounds that like you're now bringing in healthier new customer cohorts, right? And so I think like in working with these brands, there's just like a high level of like pressure and expectation to continue pushing the boundary because you don't get to the top without testing a ton of things and you don't stay at the top without, you know, you know, continuing that, right? And like I feel like everybody plays this game of like copying each other, you know, when you come, like you just see somebody doing it and you think it's like working. And it's just not the case. I could just tell you like there's, I mean, you know, there's probably better than I do. Like certainly there's elements you could take inspiration from from some of these big like idle brands, but you know, like a groom's buy box is like a perfect example, right? Like I tested the groom, the groom's buy box across a number of brands. And it's like not worked, right? So it's like maybe just works for their audience, not going to work for you. See you have to get creative and it really requires having the right people in house or like through kind of agencies to to give you that insight of like what might work. I mean, I think that's been the biggest thing. And then also just AI usage, like again, the brands at the top are really kind of instilling this like mindset of like, you know, you, whatever you think you are in terms of like how fast you are, how good you are, you are not using AI enough. And you know, you will loan for somebody who's maybe like 70% as good as you, but who knows how to use AI like 100 times better than you. They're going to beat you every single day of the week, right? So if you could compound that across an entire company across all, you know, employees, all of the contractors, whatever it might be of just people who are savages using AI the right way, then now you've like drastically increase your output. You've just, to basically increase the level of creativity and knowledge that now you have access to. Ruse is like the brands that are more agnostic or just are like, we'll get to it or we use it for chat related questions. If you're just using AI right now for chat, just like going to ask you a couple questions which I do here and there. It's not really gonna be nearly as useful as somebody who's given their AI a shit ton of context on the business and constantly feeds at that data. So it has that constant loop of like learning. Like the Cody example is fantastic. Like it's literally plugged into all of his channels. So it knows the heat map data, it knows the Google Analytics data. It knows like everything it would need to know to give you really solid output. So I think like that's how brands at the top, obviously even Jones wrote their huge now. You know, are approaching this type of, you know, are approaching their work. So yeah, fully agreed. I think your right speed of execution is something that I always see. And also like willingness to just try stuff. You know, even if it's not like on brand or you know, too polished or whatever, but just like going out and trying things and the way that algorithms work and the way that the speed at which you can have feedback loops. Like there's no reason to not test the whole volume of things and let them data decide, you know, what to really narrow down. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Cool. Wow, it's already been 45 minutes. Is there anything you want to finish on anything you want to make sure gets across or like, you know, as people are building out their retention businesses, maybe now starting to think about some of the things you mentioned that were really interesting, whether it's gifts on a delay, whether it's those four emails post purchase, whether it's, you know, the, you know, whatever it may be like anything that comes. Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately it's just like, you know, don't think of retention through a lens of like, you know, a single channel or two, like, retention is a very holistic function that touches so many different aspects of the business for that matter, probably every aspect. Like we didn't even talk about customer service, but like customer service is a huge, can be a huge lever or huge detriment to retention. We've seen it on both ends, right? So, you know, basically like, let's say the subscriber reaches out to your brand is like, I want to go cancel, right? The really friendly brands are like, okay, you're canceled, like just like that, right? And that compounds pretty significantly, when you look at the retention data or the churn data, you can see churn by like, admin, right? By like, basically like customer service agent or churn by user. And so ideally the distribution of like churn events, mostly comes from like a user churning on their own, rather than like a customer service agent, like canceling for them. The reason for that is we can first collect like a reason for cancellation over customer support and provide a treatment, right? Like, you know, respond back to the customer with empathy rather than just like a transactional related like macro. Like people hate when they know something's like a macro, you know? I get it sometimes and I'm just like super pissed off. Not to say that you should like have all of your agents like handwrite every single message, but it's like maybe there's parts of the message or even just the first line of the message that's like, you know, directly at that customer for that customer. And so we'll like collect the reason and then we'll give them sort of like a save offer through customer support. If they don't want it, then we're saying, okay, no worries, you can go cancel your subscription with our, you know, our self serve platform, our self serve portal. Here's a link to go log in and do the on your own. And now we know that they have to go log in and to go through the entire cancellation prevention experience. So there's still a percent that we're going to save them there. So just say like, as a very quick tip, the ground is subscription brand, you definitely want that to be more so your strategy than just like quickly canceling somebody. What else? Product, I mean, like I think goes without saying like, if you don't have a good product, even the most founders are very biased that their product's amazing. I'm not here to say it's not, or you know, your product's not good, but it's like, you know, just primary example, working at festivals when I was hired. I mean, they brought me in because retention was really bad, right? And retention for a chocolate brand will never be as high as retention for an AG one or an eye mate, right? 'Cause like that's like a daily supplement for so they could chocolate bar. So you have to first understand there's like ceilings to retention that, you know, some brands based on the category they're in will just never have the same retention and you just have to know that. But you can still reach the top level of that bar, right? Through like the right kind of work and the right strategy. So at festivals, we learn that like only 3% of our audience cared about better for your chocolate, right? And you know, that was probably the biggest unlock to our attention we've ever discovered where, you know, we led to a reformulation in the product where it was mostly now like milk chocolate base rather than like dark chocolate. And then we had like the full rebrand. And after doing that and putting in the time to do that, almost immediately the cohorts that were coming in were significantly higher in terms of retention and customer quality. We're seeing like over a hundred percent increase in retention across like the first few months after order, after their initial order. So products huge, don't discount that. And don't do these like shady tactics that, you know, force reveal people into a second order. If you want to, you can. I mean, you're definitely going to see higher retention on month two, but you typically see a significant drop off on, you know, month two to month three. So there's a lot better ways to do that stuff. But yeah, I mean, I guess that's kind of it. I don't want to, yeah, I don't want to. A lot of goals here, a lot of gold. Amazing. Well, thanks for coming on. How can people find you? Where can they email you or reach out if they want to, you know, they can visit the website, boringecom.com. We call it boring, you come just because like retention is typically far more boring than growth. But you know, it's the stuff that we love doing. You can find my LinkedIn, Joseph Seagull, find my Twitter, you comment, underscore, what is it, you come underscore Joseph. Yeah, find me chatting online, feel free to reach out and you know, have to have me to help. Amazing. Thanks. [BLANK_AUDIO]