EP.159/ ASHWORTH STRATEGY
Breaking the Acquisition Trap: Building a Sustainable E-commerce Business with Ashworth Strategy CEO Andy Seeley
Mariah discusses with Andy Seeley, CEO of Ashworth Strategy, the importance of a seamless post-purchase experience, noting that 84% of shoppers won't return after a bad shipping experience. Andy emphasizes the significance of product quality, community engagement, and ease of use in customer retention. He highlights the need for personalized communication and smooth processes to build brand loyalty. Andy also stresses the importance of continuous improvement and understanding customer needs to drive long-term success.
EP. 159
ANDY SEELEY
Introduction to Retention Chronicles and Malomo 0:00
Mariah Parsons introduces the podcast, Retention Chronicles, focused on customer retention strategies for e-commerce marketers.
Mariah highlights the importance of post-purchase experience, noting that 84% of shoppers won't return if they have a bad shipping experience.
She emphasizes the role of transactional shipping emails and SMS in turning them into powerful marketing tools through Malomo.
Mariah explains how Malomo helps brands cross-sell products, provide educational content, and keep customers informed about their orders.
Andy Seeley's Background and Career Journey 2:41
Mariah introduces Andy Seeley, CEO of Ashworth Strategy and Creatively Disruptive, and asks him to share his background.
Andy shares his journey from New Zealand to the United States, initially working in sports and sports science before transitioning to television and publishing.
He discusses his experience as a sales director for a TV station and his ownership of a publishing company, Getaway Reno Tahoe.
Andy explains how he and his business partner started Creatively Disruptive to help small businesses leverage digital marketing.
Formation of Ashworth Strategy and Creatively Disruptive 5:20
Andy elaborates on the formation of Ashworth Strategy and Creatively Disruptive, emphasizing their mission to support small business owners.
He differentiates between the two brands, explaining that Ashworth Strategy focuses on larger businesses, while Creatively Disruptive helps small businesses.
Andy highlights the importance of understanding the client's ultimate goals and not just focusing on increasing clicks or sales.
He shares an example of how they help clients set realistic financial goals and align their marketing strategies accordingly.
Customer Retention and Profitability 11:41
Mariah asks Andy about the importance of customer retention and how to measure profitability in retention strategies.
Andy explains that customer retention depends on the product and the quality of the product, using the example of expensive drones.
He emphasizes the role of content development, community engagement, and smooth user experience in building brand loyalty.
Andy discusses the importance of making it easy for customers to do business with the brand and the role of technology in enhancing the customer experience.
Building a Strong Brand and Community 25:24
Andy shares insights on how to build a strong brand and community, emphasizing the importance of delivering on promises.
He discusses the role of content development, user-generated content (UGC), and community interaction in engaging customers.
Andy highlights the importance of making the customer experience smooth and comfortable, reducing friction in the purchasing process.
He shares examples of successful brands that have built strong communities through content and community engagement.
The Role of Technology in Customer Retention 25:51
Mariah and Andy discuss the role of technology in enhancing customer retention, including the use of SMS and email marketing.
Andy emphasizes the importance of engaging and fun communication with customers, rather than just offering discounts.
He shares examples of how brands like Cameo use creative and engaging communication to retain customers.
Andy highlights the importance of capturing customer data and using it creatively to engage and retain customers.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways 33:38
Mariah summarizes the key takeaways from the conversation, emphasizing the importance of product quality, community engagement, and smooth user experience.
Andy reiterates the importance of constantly improving and challenging oneself to do better.
They discuss the role of technology in enhancing customer retention and the importance of aligning marketing strategies with the client's ultimate goals.
Mariah thanks Andy for joining the podcast and encourages listeners to subscribe and follow Retention Chronicles for more insights.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
customer retention, ecommerce marketing, post-purchase marketing, order tracking, transactional emails, customer experience, brand engagement, community building, product quality, customer loyalty, digital marketing, conversion optimization, customer acquisition, shipping experience, SMS marketing, content development
SPEAKERS
Mariah Parsons, Andy Seeley
Mariah Parsons 00:00
Music. Hello and welcome to retention Chronicles, the customer retention podcast for E commerce marketers, I am your host and fellow ecom marketer, Mariah Parsons. Tune in as I speak with DTC founders and operators about strategy that works and strategy that doesn't of course, we are able to have these conversations because of our podcast sponsor, Malomo. I have seen 1000s of brand operators power their order tracking with Malomo to make every single message count. As a consumer, I personally have come to expect that brands have a phenomenal post purchase experience, or else I'm not really shopping with them again. And a lot of consumers are this way. 84% of shoppers won't return if they have a bad shipping experience. And it feels so important for E commerce brands to have a good pre purchase experience. You're trying to get that acquisition. Your customers are coming through the door. They're coming through your website, it is a very personalized experience. You have pop ups that are timed Well, you have customer testimonials that are easing fears. You have well timed car abandonment, emails, all of that stuff. And then you purchase with a brand, and sometimes there's no communication, and it leaves you wondering. It leaves you mad, maybe scared that you fell for a scam or something like that. And so I think it is such a smart decision to have your transactional shipping emails and SMS not just be about only business. Malomo helps turn them into a powerful marketing tool. What does that look like? It means you can cross sell other products on that branded order tracking page. You can put educational content on that page. So if you have something that consumers will have to learn how to use for the first time, you can put that there. If you have recipes that they could you know, use your product for when they first get it. You can put that there, your social media, everything, frequently asked questions, whatever you want. You get the control back so that you're not sending your customers to a carrier tracking page, you're putting them right back on your website, and you're also keeping them informed about their order status while you do it. That's the beautiful thing about this platform, if you're ready to turn your order notifications into a marketing channel and join 1000s of E commerce brand operators in making their customers happier while also adding to your brand's profits. Visit go malomo.com that's G O M, a, l o m, o.com Hello everyone, and welcome back to retention Chronicles. I'm Mariah, and I'm joined here by Andy Seeley. He is the CEO of Ashworth strategy and creatively disruptive. So welcome Andy. Thank you for joining the show. As you know, we always like to start off our episodes with a little bit of background. So say hi to our listeners, and then tell us about how you got you know, how you you made your career up until this point, and what kind of drew you into the seat. Sure,
Andy Seeley 03:00
I'm a funny talker, which means I don't originally come from the United States. I came over to the US 25 years ago, from New Zealand, is where the accent comes from. And I was supposed to be going over to the United Kingdom, and I met a girl in the trip in between, but who's still still my life 25 years later, and as my wife and decided to stick around up until then, the trajectory was not going to be E commerce. I mean, 25 years ago, e commerce was a different beast, if anything, but I was actually in the trajectory of sports and sports science and coaching and so forth, that that's what my degree was in. But being in the United States, I ended up getting a job with a TV station. Was a sales director for a number of years for a television state station. Really got into the messaging and, you know, creative and the trying to figure out how to pull levers to make people do things. Loved it. Ended up owning a publishing company where we published magazines and we actually did video work and so forth. If anybody ever wants to look into it, it's called a the original one was getaway Reno Tahoe, because I was up in Tahoe back in those days, and there's still videos to this day. I'm from getaway Reno Tahoe on YouTube, and we had getaway San Diego and so forth. And, you know, so a lot of background in driving purchases to purchase through digital and different mediums. And then about 10 years ago, my business partner, who happens to be my cousin's husband, so I guess my cousin in law, was like, Hey, we should really be doing this online. And he was a really amazing web developer, like really good, especially at conversion optimization, right? So we're like, okay, let's give it a shot. I was getting a little bit sick of the publishing business at 2015 people weren't thinking top of mind, let's put something into a magazine. And you know, whilst I love the YouTube stuff, it wasn't really where I wanted to be, ultimately. So we started creatively Disrupt. Active. And our mission was to basically help small business owners, small business being one man bands to a couple of 100 employees, leverage digital marketing to drive business. And obviously we started doing anything and everything. We were like an unleashed agency, which is something I do highly recommend people avoid, is unleashed agencies. There are them still out there? You really want to try to find agencies that have some specificity to them. Hence why we've got ashwa strategy incredibly disruptive is two different brands that actually look after two different types of people. And our drive was that support of that small business owner that's staring at the ceiling at 3am in the morning wondering how they're going to get through the next month, or the next payroll, the next whatever. And because we remember doing that ourselves, and we're like, Look, if we can really deliver some real value in helping drive business and helping them even structure and look at how they run their businesses, because we do a little bit more, I think, than the average e comm agency. A lot of E comm agencies, I'm sure we might be wanting to talk about some strategies of how to do different things, but there's a lot of things that work, that are out there, and if you've got a good idea or a good plan of action to to what strategies to utilize can make a big can make a good difference, right? But a lot of agencies do that. So what we wanted to do and separate ourselves was to really get an understanding of what the people behind the company want, and we kind of like give them a little bit more support than just how do we get more clicks from Facebook through to your website that hopefully purchase but actually look at, okay, when we're doing this and we're scaling, are we doing it profitably? Why are we doing this? Why aren't we doing this? What are your ultimate goals? Like to the point where we'll say to you, Mariah, you might say, Hey, I've got this widget that I want to sell, and I want to make all this money. One of our questions is, why do you want to make this money? Well, how much is this money? And you will say, Well, I want to make half a million dollars a year. Okay, is that in sales, or is that in profit? And you might say, well, sales. And I'm like, Okay, well, how much profit are you looking for? Because why do it if there's no profit in it? Right? In fact, you can't do it for and a lot of agencies don't really care about that. If I'm honest with you, you probably know this. You've been around this business long enough there's a lot of agencies out there. They don't really care if you're profitable. They just want to make as much money out of you as possible. In fact, there are a lot of agencies that their goal. And I know I'm going, you asked the question of why I'm here, but now I'm going, No, this
Mariah Parsons 07:28
is what podcasts do, right? You just, you just start talking.
Andy Seeley 07:31
Yo, one of our main to bring it back to your original question, one of our main driving points of forming this company was to actually go, Okay, how do I make a difference in Mariah life? Like we really do that. That's why we don't we have a we have a very abnormal amount of cliente for this industry, and a lot of that is because our clients really understand that we're trying to do more than just keep them for that extra month so I can charge them an extra retainer, right? It's like, okay, there's got to be purpose with which we're doing things. And what is that purpose? And the purpose has got to be to the level of Mariah saying, there's this beautiful house that I want to buy in, bury Ridge, right? I would love that. Right? We know what bear Ridge is, right? There's this beautiful house that I want to buy in, bury ridge in the Chicago area, but I I need a million dollars down payment, and I need to be making probably $50,000 a month. How can you help me get there, right? And we'll say, Okay, well, you want to earn that. What is that house? And we find out, Oh, that house is a $5 million mansion. You got to put, you know, 20% down. That's why you may need the million dollars. And we start getting a little bit of an anchor as to why we're doing the things. Because a lot of people, I think, in the in the general business world, don't have any reason why they're doing a lot of the stuff. They're just like, I just want to score more points,
Mariah Parsons 08:49
or like to map it out. I feel like, like to get so granular of looking at the financial side of like, okay, you want to get to from A to B, or from A to B to C, and then what's like, sub A, sub B, sub c, of how do you actually get there? Exactly.
Andy Seeley 09:04
It's a little bit like, I always use the the analogy that, let's say me and you met up in LA, and I said, Hey, Mariah, I want you to take me somewhere. And you're like, well, where'd you want me to take you? And I was like, Well, I want to go somewhere really cool and, like, lots of bright lights and lots of fun stuff going on. We're in LA, and you're like, well, I could just take you down the road. There's some cool places. And I know I don't want it to be in LA. It's really hard for you to get me anywhere, especially where I want to be,
Mariah Parsons 09:29
right? Yeah, reading between the lines is not might write
Andy Seeley 09:32
down, but if I said to Mariah, I want to get to New York City, and all of a sudden, I know, you know, you could probably guesstimate how much gas you're going to need, how much cost, how much that's going to cost, the routes that you're going to take. You could look at the weather and go, Okay, how do we avoid bad things? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we can actually map out and we will get there. It might be a bit of a long journey. It would be interesting to see what happens during that journey, but there's a really good chance that we're going to get there right. Right? So, so we, we really based creatively disruptive and ashwa strategy around that, those founding principles of, hey, there's a lot of agencies out there that, know, kind of like, you know, about how to lower, you know, abandoned cart rates. There's a lot of agencies out there that, you know, work really hard to to up the the subscriptions to their mailing lists. And there's a lot of you know, and making sure that the optimizations right, and that the the landing pages are good, and all of that kind of stuff right. And that's kind of like, if you're if you find an agency that's decent at what they do and are not just like, useless, Yeah, unfortunately, there are some of what we differentiate aid ourselves from those guys who probably could do a really good job, is really drilling down into, what is it that Mariah wants? What does that mean we need to do? And then that helps us even have those discussions, which sometimes are difficult, about, well, how much money do we need to be spending on ad spend to get to where we need to be? What should your ad spend be based on the numbers that we're seeing? This is how we get exactly to where you want to be in this time frame. And I think that's probably why we have very low churn rate. That's why I think clients typically come on and stay on, because they see a partner, rather than just somebody who's trying to get more clicks through Facebook or Google and then trying to optimize those, those clicks, and then, you know, constantly coming back and asking for more money. You know, maybe we don't need more money to get to where we want. Maybe we're right on track. Maybe we do need, maybe you change your your goals, and we need to reevaluate the whole thing, because that changes the equation. We're constantly looking, how do we, how do we turn your goals into that algebra kind of equation where we fill in all the gaps and then we go, okay, well, now we know exactly where to go, yeah. And that's kind of, I guess that's from being in New Zealand learning about sports science all the way through to today, my journey and my evolution through what we're doing, yeah,
Mariah Parsons 11:52
yeah. It's interesting to think through, like, how to make sure that you're not just hitting sales metrics but profitability. And I would love to hear what you'd have to say about thinking about customer retention in that way, because I think a lot of brands are trying to make that map of, okay, how do you be? How do you take customer retention and make those specific points of, okay? I know I want to retain. Let's just call it for easy numbers like 50% of our business, and have them make repeat purchases. How do you walk back of like, okay, this technology is worth it because it contributes whatever 20% to reducing customer churn, then this, you know, event or whatever else you know, this VIP loyalty program is helping add an additional or reduce an additional 15% of churn. So I would love to like, it's, it's maybe more of a, I don't know if you've thought about customer retention in that way of how do you look at profitability with customer retention? But I think that would be something. I think there's a lot of different parts
Andy Seeley 13:01
to that that we could go through. I mean, customer retention depends on the product too. There's certain products that that's very hard to have any customer retention on, right? So if I'm selling a $1,200 drone, I might not be selling one of those every month to the same guy. Maybe, though, I might sell one every couple of years. Or maybe, maybe there's a referral program, or maybe it's like, hey, you know, if there's other products, there's things that we can work with, with where we're Hey, we might if a lot of guys that own expensive drones, often times, hang out with other guys that have expensive drones, right? And they go and, yeah, play with their toys and do the different things. Or they know people and how, how do you work through doing stuff? So, you know, there are things that you can do even with those kind of products that aren't consumables. When you come down to a consumable, it really does start, if I'm honest with you, when it comes to client retention, making sure your consumable is good, yes, agreed, making sure that it's consumable that people use and go, Well, I like this right then, it's easy. If it's a product, it's hard. It's really hard. And I recently actually had a client with a client, a conversation with a client that had a new product, and I literally said to them, the winning and losing on this product is that you actually can deliver on what you're saying, because we as a as a marketing company can get somebody to come in and buy it for the first time, the in buying it the second time is that they're happy with the product right now, We can work with our banners, and we can send email and text messages. We can do, you know, a lot of retargeting and so forth, utilizing the different platforms to kind of draw people back, but if they don't like the product, they're not going to come back. So, and some of that is, is building a brand like there's some real old school retention stuff that I think people forget about, because it gets so enraptured by the apps and the technology and the software that you can add to try to do different things, to make things happen. But the reality is, people still fall in love with brands. People still still that old 1960s admin mentality that I think marketers often times, in fact, definitely in this day and age, the. A lot of agencies out there that are technically very, very good, but they have no real understanding of the human brain and the excitement that comes with it. In fact, some of the most successful brands don't do a lot of Pay Per Click advertising and so forth, right? A lot of those most successful brands, they put all of their efforts into content development and building this exciting, fun thing that you want to be a part of, right? A good example was, was it the BB headphones or the beat the what is it? Oh, beats. Beats headphones. Back in the day, not a lot of advertising that they did when they started out, but it was all content. It was all about being cool. It was all about being part of a really cool community. And the headphones were okay. They weren't amazing headphones, but they were worn by some of the best rappers and artists out there, and it became a cool thing that people wanted to be about, be a part of, that's good old school marketing, right? People, oftentimes, when you're talking about retention, because there's two different things, I can introduce a lot of products first time up, utilizing technology, if I want somebody to buy every single time your product, they've gotta have a little bit of an affinity with you. So with saying that you know, thinking about your content development, thinking about kind of like some of your UGC that you might be putting out there, some of the interaction with your community, those are things that are very, very much under, I guess, appreciated by a lot of econ brands, where they'll they'll put all their effort into trying to get certain clicks on Google and Facebook and meta. I know it's Facebook and meta. It's the same thing, but and so forth, right? They'll put a lot of effort into looking at what their impression impressions are, looking at what their click through rates are, looking at all those metrics and demanding better metrics. The ROAs number still comes up to this day, even though we kind of aren't constantly telling people ROAs is that's not an accurate figure anymore. I mean, the most accurate figure that we use is me. Are right? Media efficiency rate, because that's I've spent this money, I made, I got this money, amount of money back. That's my media efficiency rate that cannot be algorithmically changed. Mariah got $10 put in the bank, and she spent $2 to get there. She has a five mer, right? It's an easy math, but what we find is to get those regular purchases. I mean, there's a transactional thing where we can deliver it, and there's a lot of really good ways to do it, utilizing SMS, really, if you're not SMS saying, really, if you're not emailing, even though a lot of people are thinking that email is dead, I think people have been talking about email being dead for 20 years. Yeah, always is relevant, and having that well put together and segmenting so you like talking to people the right way. So you'd spoke about VIPs. VIPs being people who have purchased multiple multiple times, and obviously you're showing a real interest that you might offer them different things, but that's all about building that brand and that love for you, that, hey, Mariah is my person, right? She's selling this product, and she's, you know, the Mariah brand. I want to be a part of the Mariah brand, because she recognizes me. And sometimes it can be as much as recognizing people, right? Yeah, and you can do that on mass scale, and you can make them feel recognized in a way, utilizing, you know, a lot of different platforms, a lot of different products that are out there. The other part of it is smooth of of use. So, you know, making sure, and everybody knows this, bringing down that friction, making sure that it's really easy to do business with you, whether it feels like a really comfortable experience to do business with you. To this day, there's still ecom, ecom brands that have cumbersome, difficult integrations and systems that people have to wrestle through to buy the product. If it's a really smooth, comfortable experience, and the product comes and I'd like and it feels as smooth and comfortable as the experience when I purchased it, there's a good chance that I'm going to be like, I like this. This is comfortable. I'm going to do it. It's easy, because we're all looking for ease and comfort, even though there's a lot of word, there's a lot of information out there that comfort and ease is actually unhealthy for us, that we actually are healthier for for struggling and making sure that we're working hard on stuff. But from an E com standpoint, we don't want to try to make people's heart race, yeah, which might make them healthier, yeah? You want to make it easy, right? We want to make it want to make sure that the optimization is run wide. We want to make sure that there's someone looking at the systems to make sure they're constantly operating correctly. We want people to be and this is, I guess, this is me selling on every body, maybe thinking about working with an agency if they find the right one, but you want an organization to be constantly alerted to what's going on with your ecosystem, especially if you start doing some real large numbers happens with your ecosystem starts falling apart. Well, there's a, you know, let's say there's a checkout error because some update happened on a Shopify app or whatever, right? And it's caused something to block up or something to not work quite correctly. If you're spending $20,000 a day on ad spend, and you're used to maybe 60 to $70,000 of sales going through, how much does that three hour period where it's down, or maybe a whole day, cost you? Cost you 60 grand, right? Right? Because you've still. Spending that money you have actually have a lost day. You might lose $20,000 that day because an app wasn't being on. You know, no one was on top of that, so,
Mariah Parsons 20:10
or the agency too, like, if they're not on top of it, then, and that
Andy Seeley 20:14
is what you should expect from your agency, is there's it's easy to put alerts. It's easy to put things out there to make sure that that that is being looked at and monitored, and if it's not being done, that would be a reason for me to really question if you're working with the right organization. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 20:27
and this, I see that a lot on the SaaS side of things, for sure, of apps that are trying to make it easier for a checkout experience, or a, you know, order tracking experience, or an email experience, or whatever, whatever part of the customer experience it is that it is focused in, how will this make the consumer feel? And is easy for the brand to set up and monitor, and, you know, all of that trustworthiness. And then I flip into the consumer side, yeah, yeah, product
Andy Seeley 20:57
is part of that, right? So your product, you know, helps that that that shipping and that checkout experience be better. And there's a lot of stuff that's out there that should be looked at. And, you know, from a going back to that question of retention, I mean, there's 1000 things that we could talk about. There's a lot of technical things that we can talk about. But really, the main thing that I see day after day is, one, the quality of the product. Two, are you building a relationship with your community? And three, are you making it easy for them to do business with you? If you're not doing those things, the other ones don't matter. You're kind of like, that's probably 85% of the win. And then there's 15% which is a technical kind of like, let's buy this app or change that app, or whatever. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 21:40
I like that breakdown a lot. I think it helps, especially, like, I know you all work with, specifically small businesses, to really try and help, I guess, make sense of everything that there is to do. And so I think not focusing on, you know, there's all these different things, there's all these different ways, like, these are the core things maybe to think about, and then adding on things that can help you with those three core things, of, you know, having a good product, engaging the community and like a seamless customer experience, I think that'll help you know our audience, those in our audience who are small business, you know, just themselves, are up to that couple of 100. That portion of our audience that I know is is in the thick of things, creating their business running it all maybe, if they're not sure how to look at retention, looking at like, okay, what are we doing? Is the product good? Are we engaging our community? And what's the customer experience looking like? I always like when it's there's those takeaways of like, doesn't
Andy Seeley 22:33
it? It feels like, Well, yeah, duh. Well, of course. But I cannot emphasize, you know, we have a multi, I should be careful. We have a multi, multi, multi million dollar client that does millions and millions of dollars of revenue right. And they struggle with that client, I guess, engagement or that, that, that that community involvement, they struggle with that right. And they're constantly asking, you know, how do we improve this? Or, how do we improve that? And we, we remind them, well, we're going to try doing these things which are technical by nature, but you really need to address this community in this kind of like your your your brand messaging and connection with its purchases, right? If you don't have a good one, it's it's tough. They don't have a bad one, they just don't have a great one, right? Yeah, and I, I just had a meeting with my with my team, and I was like, Hey, I'm 90% happy with how the company is operating, but never better, never stops. And that 10% is that we must do better, right? And this comes back from my sports days. I come from New Zealand. Some of you may or may not know much about sports in New Zealand, but New Zealand has a rugby team called the All Blacks, which is, you know, a rugby team, and it's known as the most dominant sports franchise in the world, because they for 100 years, they have, like a 85% win record, and their motto for 100 years is better never stops. So you might beat a team by 50 points, but you let them score 10 points on you, they'll go into the sheds going they scored 10 points on us. How do we make sure that the next game that we go out, that they don't score 10 points on us? And there needs to be that kind of attitude with the stuff, because the reality is, the technology changes so regularly. If me and you talk very technically, and we can, if we want, there's sort of certain things that we can talk about, the technology and even the use of different platforms, changes so quickly that that kind of like gets out of date, really, really fast, right? The thing that's evergreen, the other three things that we just spoke about, those are for always. The thing, how easy do you make it for somebody to do business with you? Right? Which can be technical, but that's the focus, right? Making it super, super easy for somebody to do business with you. What engagement and love are you drawing into your company from your purchases, where they're like, man, Maria's company is the only company I'm ever going to buy this stuff from, because we love those guys, right? And then what was the first good product? Good product? Making sure that it's something that somebody wants, right, and making sure that the product is a decent product. And I do the same thing with my company. We want to be a good product. We want to make sure we're delivering right. We want to make sure that if a company comes to us, that we deliver and we put up guarantees, and there's all sorts of things that we put in there to make sure that they can see that we are a really legit organization. Somebody who engages with us and does business with us, they're going to be well taken care of. But then the second part is we really do engage with our clients. I mean, I go to congresses, I go to conferences. I'm a speaker at many congresses and conferences. I do these kind of things. We've got a whole content development strategy that we run out with a whole bunch of information. We give a we don't hold any cards to our chest. We share the cards and say, Hey, here's what we're learning, here's what we're getting, here's what we know, here's you know. This might help you. That builds that community involvement. And then we make it super, super easy, utilizing AI, utilizing different products and services to make it really easy for you to engage with us. And that drives our business forward in a very, very, very competitive market, yeah,
Mariah Parsons 26:02
yeah. And I think it's, I think it's interesting that you bring up like, well, or I think about like platforms specifically, when I'm thinking about like engaging community, a lot of people look at social, right? Like, it's a, it's a naturally, you know, advantageous avenue to engage people on, because that's what those platforms are supposed to be for us, right? So, um, I think a lot of brands, like posting is maybe table stakes, but then like actually responding to people's comments, even, like on your ads, if you're going, if you're paying, you know, you have paid ads surface, I feel like that's like a level of like a tactically, if you're not doing that, then like engaging with people replying on other people's videos like that aren't your own, that are in your space, or influencers or something like that, where it's like, you can get that ball rolling, and people click on your profile because you have a funny comment. And then people are like, Oh, what do you do? And then then they like, discover you that way and all that stuff.
Andy Seeley 26:56
Think about who's your who's your favorite celebrity? Oh,
Mariah Parsons 27:00
favorite celebrity, I mean Taylor Swift, for sure. So
Andy Seeley 27:04
let's say Taylor Swift posted something and you made a comment on her video, and
Mariah Parsons 27:08
then she liked it. Yeah. I mean, how would that make you feel? I take the week of work off and just, and just go on vacation.
Andy Seeley 27:16
Like, thumbs up. Mariah,
Mariah Parsons 27:18
love that. Yeah, you're, you're,
Andy Seeley 27:21
that is going to cause you to be so much more attached to her for so much longer. Now, obviously it's Taylor Swift. She's got million, you know, 10s of millions of I'm
Mariah Parsons 27:29
holding out hope, right? We're manifesting it on this episode, but
Andy Seeley 27:33
the reality is, it's very much the same with our brands, right, especially if we're putting good content out there, and we're so forth, and a lot of people do put a lot of effort into making sure that there's really good content. But if all you're doing is putting content out there, and there's never any, like you said, engagement with the comment section, right? And like you said, even better engagement in other people's comment section, and positive, like uplifting, brand appropriate ways, you're kind of like, almost like a you're like a TV station at that point, there's no it's just a one way drive of information. There's no interaction. People get attached to organizations that show an interest in them. So if Mariah responded, she's showing an interest, that's why you'll take the week off. Yeah, right, because wow, Mariah acknowledged me. She probably still doesn't know who you are, but you feel it right, yeah? And like, there is real value in that, and I think it's very especially in the income space, especially selling stuff totally missed, and you want to build a rock star, evangelistic fan base that comes back and purchases every single day, that's what you kind of need to do. And the funny thing is, with with the different systems and different ways to operate your your systems. It's actually pretty easy, easier than ever, to actually be able to do that. You don't need to log into all the different platforms, Tiktok, Facebook, Instagram, all the others that are out there, even the smaller ones, which there's still value in and and kind of manage them all individually. Just there's a lot of software systems now that you can actually just manage it all from one place, and it's simple and easy, and it makes a big difference. But from an E com standpoint, often times, thus, the focus is so much on my row as how much did I make per click that was spent, or the money that was spent on my ad spend, that the rest of it is missed and the rest of it is where the money is, like I always say, too, especially consumables. Let's say someone's selling a product that's $20 right? We sell it on Facebook. You're going to be lucky to make any money out of that. We're like, we're going to, we're going to sell that thing for you for 40 bucks. It's going to be a point five row as right? But that's the introduction cost, right? Yeah. Hopefully, if we got the rest of it going, we've got a really good email marketing follow up system. We've got a really good SMS system running for you, really good customer retention. Retention, really good, you know, and shipping aspect to it, and then that social media engagement and that and that, that kind of like community engagement, and that person comes back and purchases and purchases, and you spent that $40 to get. Get that person into your system, but then that person spends $20 every every day for the rest of their life. It's 10s of 1000s of dollars, okay,
Mariah Parsons 30:06
yeah, the acquisition costs are just way higher. So that's why, like, customer retention. That's why we're here on this podcast talking about it, right? Because it's it that is like, you have to get, you have to probably spend more to get someone through the door, but then you retain them, and then you really like, that's where it does
Andy Seeley 30:23
amaze me, though, how many e com brands are so focused on the getting through the door that they're not thinking about the retention. Yeah, and that's
Mariah Parsons 30:31
what we're trying to change. Andy, that's what we're doing here right now. And I'm going to just
Andy Seeley 30:35
share this with anybody that's listening to really understand what Maria are talking about. The only brands on e com that I know make a lot of money are the ones that get the retention right? No one that I know are successful when they just have one off sales. Yeah.
Mariah Parsons 30:48
I mean, I feel like it's like, the one one hit wonder right where? It's like, you hear something and you're like, Oh, where did that go? They're not around. They're not around anymore. They can't be. Some of
Andy Seeley 30:57
that retention comes down to making sure you're capturing the data, capturing their information, utilizing their data and information. And the data and information might be as simple as their name, address and phone number, but then utilizing what can we do with that and in creative ways to actually engage with them. I mean, every single day, I get a whole bunch of text on my phone from products that I purchase, because I'm a sucker when it comes to purchasing stuff online. And I lot of stuff online, and I get text all the time, and there's some that get me to look and there's others that I never look at because they they interact with you in an engaging, fun way. And I need to be engaged with an engaging, fun way, not just buy this 25% off that doesn't get me right. I'm not, and I think most of the market and correct me if I'm wrong, you know, maybe you feel differently, but I'm more engaged with a funny, interesting line or something that they send out there than 25% off. Granted, sometimes, if it's something I might want, thinking about purchasing that 25% might get me, but the reality is, I'm much more likely. A really good example of this is cameo. You know, Cameo, like the software or cameo is a, is a site that you go to and you can get, like, celebrities, right? Liberties, celebrity messages, yes, yeah. Video, a little, a little funny story. My wife is a big Seinfeld fan, and there's a, there's a character on there. I can't remember his name off the top of my head. He was like an adventure. He was Elaine's boss on Seinfeld. He was Elaine's boss in the publishing field, and he was like, this adventure, and he'd tell all these crazy stories anyway. I was like, I don't know I somehow I got onto cameo. I was looking and I found him. I was like, I'm going to get him to read a message for my wife on her on Mother's Day. And he read this. He did this amazing thing, and it was wonderful. It's so much fun. Now I've got loads of other things that I purchase. I purchased all sorts of stuff, but that cameo to this day keeps getting me to kind of check in, because they kind of like funny and cheeky and kind of interesting, how they kind of try to re engage me, and they're thoughtful, and I think they understand the kind of people that might get that ands and kind of blah, blah, blah, but you've gotta be thinking about that. So whilst the SMS is really important, and we could talk about all the technical things of building flows and confirmations and all sorts of stuff to really get the most out of it, the reality is, if you if the message that comes through is not engaging and you don't really understand your community,
Mariah Parsons 33:20
it doesn't really matter. Yeah, agreed, agreed, agreed, agreed. I have had so much fun talking to you. Andy, this has been great, as I always feel on these podcast episodes. We just start to scratch the surface, but I really like those three takeaways that brands I know can digest and like, really look back at what they're doing and see, like, Okay, can I put what we're doing into one of these three buckets? If I can't, is, is it paying off in a way that we're going to continue to continue to do it, or do we need to, you know, reassess and revamp
Andy Seeley 33:45
never stops. Whilst when you think, Okay, I'm doing that, be looking at and go, How do I make this better? That's where I would, I would put a lot of my brain power and thoughts, the rest of it, that other 15% it's going to be churning and tuning and tuning. Just want people who can effectively make sure that it's operating correctly, a little bit like a little bit like a mechanic on your car. But those three things constantly challenge yourself. How do we do it better? I just scored 50 points and one, but they scored 10 points against us. How do we do this again? But, but not have 10 points scored against us. Have that mentality. I'm winning. But how do I win bigger? How do I do better? How do I really make my community easier to do business with me, more engaged and more loving of my brand? And how do I make sure that my product is really top notch? You do those things, you will win.
Mariah Parsons 34:32
Yeah, I love that. That's a perfect way to round out this episode. Thank you so much for making the time and joining me on retention Chronicles. It's been a
Andy Seeley 34:38
blast having a year great and it's creatively disruptive. And ash risk strategy,
Mariah Parsons 34:43
yes, we love it. Full circle moment, great. Thanks, Andy, thank you for listening to today's episode. These conversations bring so much knowledge to the table, and I'm so grateful for that. So if you haven't already, please subscribe, follow us on social media and tell us who our next guest should be on our website. Let's give another shout out to our day one sponsor, Malomo. As you know, Malomo is an order tracking platform that enables Shopify brands to take control of their transactional email and SMS through branded order tracking pages. That means you can ditch those boring, all white carrier pages, you know the ones I'm talking about. Everyone has seen an ugly tracking page in their life, and you can swap it with a page that matches your brand. Customers like you and I obsessively check order tracking an average of 4.6 times per order. That's why leading Shopify brands are turning that engagement into customer loyalty and revenue through branded order tracking. Learn more about how to get ahead of shipping issues. Brand your order tracking experience and reconvert customers while they wait for their package to arrive with Malomo. Visit go malomo.com that's G O M, a, l o m, o.com you.
