Retention Strategy by Brand Archetype with Conor Sunderland

Introduction to Email as a CRO Channel

0:00We think of email as an LTV channel, but that's actually quite a an oversimplification. I was going to say wrong, but it's not wrong. It's just an oversimplification. What we have here is that if we have a high AOV, low frequency brand, I want you to think of it more as a CRO channel rather than an LTV channel. Guys, it's simple. Just release more products. Like, I know it's not so simple behind the scenes, but it's like you'll generally see there that they're not doing deep discounts post purchase either. if they are going to do a discount, what it'll often be, and we often do this as well. I I highly recommend you can see plain text email that you can do, just do it recurring once a month to anyone who hasn't purchased, who has purchased before, but not in the last 6 months. Just hit him with that once a month. We want you to come back. That's a great segment of your list. We'll get into it, cool, guys. So,

Understanding Brand Categories: High AOV vs. Low AOV

0:47I'll get sharing here in a second. I'll just give a little bit of background of what we're going to talk about. Shaq teed it up beautifully there. You know, you'll have different types of brands here. you guys probably people within this kind of kind of within this live stream who have your own brand or you're working with brands in completely different verticals. So I'm going to give two examples. I'm going to give you two kind of examples of how we've approached the approach far differently for brands who are on the completely different end of the spectrum. What I'm going to be calling these in terms of the archetypes is basically on the spectrum of what their AOV is like versus their order frequency. So, what I'm going to be calling this is like high AO ob, low LTB. Low LTV being, you know, basically LTB in terms of frequency. Think a furniture brand. Are you going to buy a second four-seater couch for your home?

1:29Most likely not. But you will buy complimentary products. If you're subscribed to Breeze, for example, or let's say even before you subscribe to Breeze, if you're purchasing from a brand like Breeze, you know, to push up, if you have have a great product experience, you're very very likely to come back just by the nature of the products, right? So, I'm going to get sharing here. I'm going to show you this a little bit and we will go from here.

1:47Share here. Share screen and boom. Okay, so I'll wait for this to come up. Okay, everyone can see this. This is me. This is my business partner who many people have told me is more handsome. We got some links here, but we'll get straight into it. Two Connors, you know. So, yeah, to be the the less handsome of the two Connors, it does sting. So, we'll go here, right? So, we have three broad

Examples of Brand Strategies

2:07categories, and I'm going to bring up some examples of these because I think examples are really really helpful for people to work backwards. you know from the examples rather than hearing principles to work backwards from two examples will be a lot easier to kind of see these principles in action. So we're going to put in three categories of brands here. Low AOV, high frequency. So think Breeze for example. Breeze is a fantastic example of this you know or let's say you take really you know any kind of darling of the space kind of inconsumable. You think of obby or you think of another brand as such. And we have high AOV low frequency for this you know think of you know think of Hexcloud right think of something like that. Are you most likely to are you likely to come back and buy you know you know a second product from Hexcloud? Well, maybe you would, but you know, just by the nature of the products, it's not exactly like collagen protein or

2:50something like that. And we have medium AOV, medium frequency here. Think apparel, think gadgets, think through a think gym shark or think ridge, right? For this kind of third category of brand, right? So, we're going to go through the three kind of ways that we're going to apply this here. We're going to go and take these two examples, which is going to be low AOV, high frequency, high AOV, low frequency. And for you guys, when you're starting to talk about this with clients in particular, you'll start to see that their face will just sort of light up because you're starting to go out of, you know, kind of giving a cookie cutter approach to giving something that's completely unique for them. I'm going to show you exactly how to do this across the board here. but yeah, this is the kind of thing where like if you're talking about this to your clients or, you know, if it is kind of a if you're, let's say, internal, you know, working at a brand, if you're able to bring this

3:32stuff up and kind of come in with these fresh ideas, it's just absolutely massive and it's going to be huge for you. So, high AOV, low frequency, people don't buy two couches, low AOV, high frequency, think CPG, mid-market, hybrid, apparel, gadgets. Once again, here we're thinking like a Hexcloud. Here we're thinking more like a breeze. And then here we are thinking more like Ridge, right? So, here I'm going to scroll on here to a furniture brand and how we approach this and then you can take this kind of exact strategy and kind of move into it and apply it for for yourself if you are working at a brand like this, if you own a brand like this or indeed if you have clients like

High AOV, Low Frequency Strategy

4:04this. So, what I want to tell you guys is that we think of email as an LTV channel, but that's actually quite an oversimplification. I was going to say wrong, but it's not wrong. It's just an oversimplification. What we have here is that if we have a high AOV, low frequency brand email, I want you to think of it more as a CRO channel rather than an LTV channel. So, what we're going to focus on here, this is why I have this bolded. I want you guys to really look at this. It's more of a CRO channel than an LTV channel. So, what we're going to look at here is we're going to treat offers like the plague.

4:33you know, any kind of signup offer that we're looking that we're looking to do, you know, or any you know, any even pre-purchase offers. We want to keep these two as minimal as possible. I'm going to show you an example of a client that doesn't have any offers. They don't they they're a furniture brand. So, if we're to do, let's say, a 10% offer here on these sales, you know, with that customer, if their average number of orders is, you know, 1.2, two, let's say, you know, just in general across the business because it's kind of low frequency. Well, we're basically taking what is that like an 8% haircut off the business. You know, assuming this like a lot of sales go through email or assuming, you know, they're first-time buyers, you know, all buy with with that discount, which isn't going to be the case, but it's just to say that I want you to look at that if you're in a high AOV example is you giving this offer is almost like taking a haircut off the

5:14entire business's net profit, right? We don't want to do that. So, what we're going to do here, we're going to focus on a couple of things. I'm going to show you the exact examples down here. You can kind of see little bit that teased on the left hand side. High margin list growth. So we want to go in this case we did a giveaway offer, right? So we just did enter to win it to to to enter into a giveaway. They select one person a month who wins a grand off of their order. Whereas you know with the volume this client is doing if we were to even do 5% we'd be giving tens of thousands away and it's just killing the business's margin. We use an AIA funnel.

5:44I'm sure we've talked about Aaliyah you know throughout this the talks today. Of course they are indeed sponsoring the event. We don't get paid by them. You know I say you none of us here get paid by them. you know, they should. Shan, if you're on this live stream, please pay me. But no, you know, we genuinely I just recommend it to the moon and back. It's a phenomenal software. No, no, none of us, you know, here, none of us here get get paid by AIA. It's just

Post-Purchase Strategies for High AOV Brands

6:03fantastic. I'm going to show you exactly why. The post-purchase strategy, we come into the post-purchase strategy and we know someone's not going to exactly buy two couches, right? We think someone could maybe buy furniture, example, an accent chair, or they could buy a coffee table or they could buy a foot stool, they could buy something kind of complimentary. We kind of know, hey, you know, in an average living room, is someone going to have space for a four-seater couch? It's going to be pretty rare, right? So, here the upsell strategy as well, we get pretty aggressive in pushing people into small items. I'm going to give you guys a shocking statistic here in just a second. but here, right, this is how the pop-up looks, right? So, they this comes up. This is through Aaliyah and the the brand blurred out here, but they win. They're they're in the UK, so they're kind of more over my neck of the woods here, but we enter them into this offer. So, a giveaway offer if framed

6:48like this, Aaliyah pop-ups, they pop up quick, they load quick, they're beautiful, they look really really nice. What's going to happen here is that we're looking at we come back to our principle of this being a CRO tool. So, we're not treating this as though, you know, we're we're we're very likely to get people to come back and make big repeat purchases. You know, if you were, you know, if you were Hexclad, for example, you know, I'm pretty sure they do a dollar amount offer with a certain cap. So, you have to spend a certain amount to get it. It comes out to like 5% or something like that. There's a good reason why Hexcloud of all people would do that just given the model of the business. So here what Aaliyah enables us to do and I would really recommend this to you guys using Aaliyah if you guys are a higher AOV brand is that Aaliyah the way I like to think about Aaliyah when you come onto here is once someone pops in their email you

7:29basically are able to give them like a welcome series on the website right so yeah Aaliyah are a sponsor oh yeah they're a sponsor of the event but they don't pay any of us individually sorry just got to confirm that Jack from the chat but no Aaliyah gives you you know this welcome series on the website and if you're in a high se high a ob category it just works extremely extremely well so yeah this is my for just could just completely recommend Aaliyah to the moon and back. Right. So, from here we're able to this converts at like 9.5%. Not not saying that this is going to happen on average cuz that is a very very high conversion rate. I think I just pulled in down here. You know, this converts at like 9.5%. You know, the the funnel is just absolutely smashing it. And yeah, like I I I just I just couldn't recommend this. Couldn't recommend this enough. When we come into the flows, guys, down here, the flows are meant to be really really long,

8:12right? So, for anyone here, just build these out for for for your brand. build out the skeletons, build out and kind of think think to yourself what kind of content you can put in here front and center and think that you almost need to have more shots on goal. You know, pull out these the welcome series browse abandoned abandoned checkout. You're kind of big big movers and realize that if you're not going to be running offers in these, you need to be running something that's going to have quite an effect on people. So, for that reason, you know, you want to be getting across like any kind of any kind of the the best content that you have. you know, getting across your brand story, getting across what makes you guys unique, getting across any kind of social proof that you guys have, getting across any risk reversal potentially. if anyone here is more so based in Europe, particularly if you're based in the UK, I always ask this to to to to to to

8:56people in the in the US, but I know Trust Pilot isn't as much of the isn't as such kind of a a makeorb breakak deal as it is kind of over over in Europe, but if you have a really good Trust Pilot rating, it's something you'd want to put in. So, like these flows, be thinking really strong list growth, no offer, and then a nice long set of flows here as well. When we get into post purchase, guys, if you have a small item that people potentially buy or, you know, if people come from purchasing a big item that's kind of, you know, above $1,000 or it's, you know, even above $500, that would be quite a high AOV in general. You know, post first order, we want to get pretty aggressive here with with wi-i with with getting people to upsell. We have actually found with this client in a high AOV case, once again, this is an ultra high AOV case and some well it's not golf simulators, but it's certainly, you know, decently high is

9:39that after like 90 days post acquisition for the customer, the likelihood of people coming back just is is far lower than it is with a consumables brand. It's far lower than it is kind of with, you know, a medium AOV, medium LTV type brand. So, we go pretty aggressive post purchase. you know, we're kind of not afraid to have, you know, sometimes daily emails like, you know, once we're, let's say, a week, you know, into someone having the product and so on and trying to get them to buy a complimentary product. We're not afraid to get aggressive there. And it's one thing that that I've kind of changed my mind on in the last year is actually that, you know, kind of, you know, you you want to you want to build community.

10:12You want to give people really really good content as we've been talking about, but you also want to, you know, not sacrifice today completely for an imaginary tomorrow. You know, you want to go and and be at least decently aggressive post purchase because, you know, in the first 30 days post acquisition, you can do a lot more than you think. You can drive up the value of people quite a lot on average. You can probably drive up customer value on average by like 20%, 25% even in the first 30 days if you know when to be aggressive. So, you know, it's not something where, hey, someone purchases, let's leave them dormant, let's leave them be for a couple of months even. You don't want to do that. You know, you can get a little bit aggressive here as well. So, for them, we don't do any offer here on the pop-up. Well, I guess we do that giveaway, but you know, it's cost them £1,000 a month where this could cost them, you know, tens of

10:52thousands, you know, if they were doing even a 5% offer. So, Aaliyah, this is my shameless plug for Aaliyah, even though they're they're they're, you know, not not getting not not not getting paid to to say that, but here basically with a high AOV, low LTV naturally kind of by by the nature of the products, want to focus on high margin list growth. Treat it more as a CRO channel than than an LTV channel. Long pre-purchase flows and then actually once someone buys a big item, we want to get pretty aggressive. if they're buying something small, we want to be trying to upsell them somewhat aggressively here as well. So for you guys, that's the that's kind of more so the play for a high AOV, low LTV brand. And yeah, we'll kind of move on to to to a second to a second example here. Any questions?

11:30Actually, before I go off that, we might come back to this at the end, but yeah, we can do that. Let's do it. Okay, so

Transition to CBD Client Example

11:35we're now going to move on to a CBD client example. We're going to This is closer to to Shack's world. Let me go on to present. I don't really There we go. So we don't we're getting more so to Sh world here with Breeze. And I think Breeze is a great example for you guys like looking at this in terms of a different archetype. You know what we want to do here with with CPG is that because we can bank a little bit more on the idea. Once again, we want to know our numbers here. Of course, I want to preface it by saying that if we give a slight offer here on the front end to get someone to join the list, it is not the end of the world. It's not the end of the world whatsoever. So, you know, you'll often see if you were looking at CPG brands, you'll often see like 10% discounts. You'll often see 15. I've seen 20s. you know sometimes you know even bigger brands doing 20% you know

12:14brands that I know are absolutely crushing but those would be brands that from years of running and from years of being you of operating at scale they definitely know their numbers really really well so they know that they can do that right so the preface here when I'm saying you know it's okay to do a bit of an offer here in the front end I'm saying know your numbers hopefully you know if you guys you haven't been if the business is a little bit younger or you know if it's this is for your clients that are a little bit younger definitely just know your numbers and still you know don't don't don't go go crazy on the front end here. So here what's different, right? So we're okay with giving an offer. This is completely different to the high AOV case. We're okay with giving an offer. What we're going to look to do is we're going to try and use that offer to drive a quick purchase on the front end. And actually, once someone signs up, our goal is going

12:53to be to get them to come back within a month. Our goal is going to be to get them to come back and make a full price purchase within a month. Ultimately, we want to get them onto our subscription program. you know, you'll see obviously that that that's a huge aspect of a lot of the big kind of CPG brands that we see crushing in the space. But now you're starting to see that, you know, we're trying to sell more of the same, right? So, this is I don't know if this is a hot take necessarily, but cross-selling compared to upselling basically it it it really doesn't happen nearly as often as upselling happens.

13:21So, what we're going to be doing here post purchase primarily on a CPG side is we're going to look to get them to buy more of the same. We're going to get to get to look going to look to to get people to buy more of the same item that they've already bought. So, this client is a little actually little bit of a higher AOV for for a CPG brand, but they do a $20 offer. This is crazy. $20 I think is actually too high, but it has this crazy optin rate. Shout out again, Aaliyah. Once again, not paid to to say this by Aaliyah. It just really is. It's just a standard for us now. It's just really, really fantastic. We still use long flows, but we start to get more aggressive towards the end. We really up the ante towards the end because we have more room to play with with using these offers. You know, we're trying to towards the end of our pre-purchase flows, if we have these split out by

13:59people who've never bought before. We have to get a little bit aggressive. You can up the discount even again towards the end. You know, really once you know your numbers, you can do this. You could go from a 10% to a time-sensitive 15% at the end. That could work for your brand or for your clients, right? Then what what's going to be different is we want to get people to buy full price within 30 days or at least drive a second or at least drive a slight, you know, small second purchase. Ultimately, we'd like to get them to subscribe, but we want to get someone to come back within 30 days.

14:23Once again, this isn't going to happen with, you know, a brand like Hexcloud, but it can certainly happen with a brand like Breeze. Once people have a good experience with the product, they're very likely to come back quickly, right? So, within the subscription program that we'll touch on is, you know, every sixth order, you know, we actually do with them. Every sixth order is free and they've really really strong, you know, retention rate on their subscription program. I know we would have had May man from from 100 Celsius would have been would have been talking about this very very knowledgeable on the topic of course, but you know, a lot of people, you know, it's it's a tough one to avoid. Obviously, this happens with a lot of brands, but a lot of people sign up to subscribe and then they might go right away. It's not ideal that some customers will do that, but it's just something we have to be have to be mindful of. Once subscribed, we're going to keep our communication to a minimum.

15:03So, I'm going to come down here as I'll talk a little bit about sales and how sales will work with a CBD brand or sorry with a CPG brand. But with here, right, we're able to sacrifice a little bit of margin on the front end and push people, you know, and try to push them into upselling with a little bit more of an aggressive post-purchase strategy, you know, wholesale that isn't just about trying to snipe and get people to buy something a little bit smaller.

15:24We're looking to get someone to buy something full price when they when when when they come on next, right? So here, Aaliyah, god damn, like how does Aaliyah do this? I actually did the math on this with Shopify data because I was like, Aaliyah, how are you? How are you doing this? Like, this is actually insane. Now, the offer is very strong, so this is not going to happen in most cases, but you can see here, you know, we're we're doing really really nicely on the Aaliyah form. I think you'll start to just see so much of this more around Twitter in general from a from a lot of brands. you know, people who go through that mini welcome series on the website is like 90% of people. And what we found, right, so from this point, like I I should have pulled in some of the upselling metrics. I'm sorry. you know, we have really really strong, you know, retention on on the subscription program. And what we've actually found with like a lot of these

16:06customers, even when we run things, you even when we run things such as sales or even if people come, you know, buying through like some slight discounts, their propensity to come back is actually really, really high. This, you know, branded really, really high quality products in general, but I'm going to show you even the effects of like their Black Friday sale and how many people came back in like just a short period. Black Friday just ended, you know, for them maybe three months ago or yeah, three months ago, nearly to the day. You'll see here people who purchased for the first time was about 14,000 over a third of them came back since. So actually when we were continuing on with like kind of this aggressive communication cadence, you know, when we had these aggressive, you know, post-purchase flows, we're trying to get people to buy again, we found like over 30% of these people acquired in Black Friday. So you might think, you know, a lot of the a lot of the talk on

16:48Twitter, I think Shaq would be a better man to speak about this than I would, you know, from from running Breeze and from from all of his experience in the space, but there's there can often be quite a difference in terms of the value of customers acquired during Black Friday or acquired with an offer versus not. So you'll often see, you know, when people are doing cohort analysis, you know, with their with their customers, you know, you'll see that when people who are acquired during Black Friday often turn out to have a lower value over the long term than people who weren't. So it's actually interesting to see here once people have a good product experience, it's actually as we can see from the from the numbers here can actually be quite okay to give a little bit of an offer be quite okay to give a little bit of an offer to acquire someone you know obviously there's going to be an even stronger offer during Black Friday than there will be on most

17:26people's pop-ups but with this with the with a lower AOV high kind of high high natural frequency case yeah I just want to say that like discounts aren't the end of the world you know I know like we we we sometimes treat them like the plague on Twitter and things like that not the end of the world so coming back here your business model is going to be completely unique to you this is a spectrum once Again, AOV and frequency.

17:46We'll just call it these two. You might have an AOV. Let's say you have a, you know, a lot. Let's say you're selling sads, for example, right? And your AOV

High AOV Strategies: Minimizing Margin Loss

17:54as a store is $3,000. You're going to have to approach things completely differently. You know, if you're looking if you're going to do a 10% off on your signup form, you could be taking $300 off of nearly every order that you bring through the business. It's it's such a huge haircut off of the business. You know, and the likelihood of you getting someone that they're going to buy a second, it's quite low. But if you have other complimentary products, they could potentially buy those. We want to give up the minimum margin possible that we that we can possibly do. You know, if

Tailoring Campaigns for Repeat Orders

18:17we're in that case where we have a super high AOV and then we want to snipe almost with our campaigns, we want to find people who've purchased and we want to see what they could potentially buy. We want to have, you know, you know, post-purchase flows that push them into complimentary products that don't try to get them to buy the same thing, you know, whereas if it's once again low AOV, high frequency, we want to get them to buy more of the same thing. Why do we want to do that? because there is no better indication of them, you know, being interested in one of our products than if they've spent their hard-earned money on it. So, you might have one product that deals with pain relief and another that deals with insomnia. People have bought the insomnia product. We want to push them more so into buying those products because we know categorically that they want those products or else they wouldn't have bought them, right? So, that is kind of the the main difference. And yeah, if

18:59you're able to to tailor how you do things on the list growth side of things on the on your your flows and then also on how you approach kind of, you know, approach repeat orders in general, you'll have far better results. So yeah,

Review and Recap of Key Points

19:10I'll open up the the floor here. I know it's quite a a run through. I feel like I went through somewhat quick. I know I speak very quickly, so I hope everyone's able to to to to listen through that even so. But yeah, that spect Yeah, you nailed it. What actually

Deep Dive into Three Broad Categories

19:22what I actually want you to do is can you go back up to the very first side the three broad categories one two and three because you had an incredible kind of like a a chart that I would like for you to kind of talk to a little bit more in depth because it it was summarized above but it's also really nice as because I have it on the side right here looking at it I was like whoa this is something cool to talk through so let's go grab that again and zoom in on that for me con let's grab this here so three broad categories I you know I'm also going going to write something in here. So, I'm going to think here. So, think I need you to zoom I need you to zoom in after this though because it's still small from my side. Like I'm if you're zooming in on the like the black itself, you know what I mean? Yes. Yes.

20:03Okay. Put this in here. Just give these little additions and then here we'll go just for everyone here. Think ridge, right? For these kinds of Oh, goodness. Goodness gracious. There we go. So, this is what we're going to think for for these brands, right? Let me come in here and zoom. Everyone tell me if they can see this a little bit clearer when I zoom in. Scroll down. No, that image itself. There we go. And now I will zoom in. Oh, goodness gracious. Why is this not It's okay. I I think it it's the it's the image itself. I'm going to have to pull I think I can pull it up and zoom in on my side. I think I can I can let me Oh, I think I got it. Let me do this and like open it in a new tab so I can grab this. Actually, I already beat you to it.

20:48Oh gosh. Goodness gracious. That's

Retention Strategies for Different AOVs

20:52talk me through fitting fitting retention strategy. It's like low AOB high frequency. You have this fast list growth first. Yeah. Utilize discounts and encourage. So this is like talk me through the hierarchy of importance. Are they in the higher your importance or is this just how you wrote it? I think here we're kind of talking more so like chronologically as they come into our CRM, right? So like here when we're talking through like someone coming in for fast list growth, what I mean by this is that you're able to offer offer a discount here with kind of a little bit more safety in the knowledge of knowing that people have a higher propensity to return. So if we're talking the higher AOV case, we don't want to hit that discount because it's actually going to do a lot more harm than it is good if we can grow the list without any sort of offer or with something very very high margin. You know, one of my favorites if you are going to do an offer and you guys are in

21:38a higher AOV case is let's say something like $100 off orders 2,000 and above. We're capping this so people can at max get 5% off. But if someone spends $3,000, it's a lower percentage. Someone spends $4,000, they're at 2.5%. you know, and it feels like a lot, too. Like 100 sounds like a lot. That's the thing. That's the thing. So, imagine if you guys were doing this, you know, for a brand with a $60 AOB and you're like, get $3 off. It's like, I don't really want $3 off. $3. Like I mean that's that's that's not really going to move the needle for me. But you know $100 does sound like quite a bit. You know you you see that there's sort of a a sticker not sticker shock but the opposite of sticker shock. You know kind of a a nice a kind of a a sticker surprise that you that you're quite happy with. So here you know you'll actually see guys like a lot of even like mature brands mature consumer

22:24package goods brands who would know their numbers to a tea and they'll be running even like 15%. Sometimes they go like a little bit higher even potentially because you know they'll they'll do you know as much as they possibly can to grow their email list. But you know that's and yeah and I'll speak to this too is like we we do not test the welcome offer enough. We are starting to do now which is also something I know we've talked about AI a lot and it's because it's working. It's because the people behind it really care

Optimizing List Growth and Welcome Offers

22:49about it. Right now we and I talked on the channel cuz that people that are coming to your list depending on the traffic source are acting very differently and very unique for LTV and speed of first purchase. What I mean by this is we were primarily spending heavily on meta. and then all of a sudden app started to become more of a channel that we're spending more on and then Google stopped spending as much as it was. So like we started seeing our normal customer makeup shift because we were acquiring heavily meta Google and app now it's apploving little bit of meta a little bit of Google and so we're like well we need to understand how many of these can we push through the welcome series first that means they're going to get to the purchase first and it's starting to see a lot of different things and the only way we're able to do this is like kind of tagging where the pop-up's going to come from within a on the f on the front end and so it's it's

23:38really interesting to see like as you're looking at where you identify as what your archetype is. You need to know like what is my actual testing sequence. So I think kind of like a cool presentation that we could probably do in the follow-up is cool. I identify as a low AOV. Here's your opt-in strategy and what the welcome flow looks like for each archetype. I think that would be a really dope presentation. I would love to do that. I'd love to do that because even as we move on to the second point there, it's going to be far different here for a low AOV brand. And you know with the aggressive long flows bit is it quite often you know something that that we love to do and I'd recommend a lot of you guys you know think about this strategy is that if you go in a tiny bit low on that front-end offer if you can kind of just if if you can go in there and still make it enticing but keep it a

24:20little bit lower. What you're able to do later on in a welcome series and also if you were to split your pre-purchase flows this is to say your site abandoned your browser abandoned your aband checkout and you were to split that by if someone's bought before or not. You can actually treat someone who's never bought before as though they're almost in the welcome series in some respect. In a sense, they sort of back they haven't ever purchased. So, what you can do is for a short period of time, you can just send that offer a little bit.

24:44Give them something to just sweeten the deal just to drive a little bit, you know, give those new customers a little bit a little bit more to push them over the line. I know we talk about treating our long-term customers a lot better. But you'll actually find if you split your flows out like that, even without giving offers or giving slight offers, your return guys, your guys who've been there before, they'll actually buy nearly at they'll buy they'll buy a lot a lot more readily than people who haven't ever purchased from you before.

25:05So actually, if you were trying to, you know, bring down discounts as a percentage of revenue, you'd actually kind of want to wait that more on the return customer side. You know, you want to use the use a little bit of the the the incentivizing really for people who haven't purchased before because they need that little little oomph over the line sometimes, just a tad. I appreciate the little note. I I'm I'm actually going to dig in to see how we because if they've already bought from me, I don't necessarily want to offer them another discount or at least not the deep discount on the abandoned car to browse abandonment at all. At all because they already tried it, right? like the only next push I want to do them is if they if they're coming to buy second, third, or fourth, or sorry, third, and fourth, I want them into subscription. So, I actually don't want them to come into that. So, that's a that's a good note on this one. Okay. It's it's crazy to

25:48see the difference in metrics on those two. Like, I mean, your your people who purchased from you before, they're just the it's almost like their trust is so much higher with you that even without an offer, you'll see like they convert at an even better rate. It's crazy. Talk

Effective Use of Discounts and Offers

25:59to me about the list growth on the high OB low frequency again because we won't have time to go into all four of them. So, I want the top two on each of them. The main meta here, of course, as we're saying, is we're looking at this as a CRO channel more so than an LTV channel. And that's almost the main distinction. We're trying to improve our website conversion rate here more than anything. So, with this, we have to view any offer, you know, as more likely, you know, let's say if a brand like, you know, let's let's take Breeze as the example again. Let's say our average number of orders per customer comes out to 2.4 or it comes out to 2.7 for argument sake. And then we have the average number of of orders for once again taking Hexcloud as this example of a little bit higher AOV or let's say certainly a brand that's selling saunas and you know cold plunges and sort of wellness kind of things for your home.

26:44Let's say their average number of orders comes out to 1.21 21, right? You're almost viewing any discount that you have there as almost taking it's like a haircut off the whole business in a sense, right? Like the propensity to come back is far lower. So, what I love are these high margin offers. These high these these these these offers that can strike the balance, you know, of conversion you know, with w with with with with high margins. So, if you guys are running a little bit more volume, if you're a more mature maybe an old a brand that's been around a little bit longer, you can run off of these giveaway offers and choose one person per month and they could win $1,000 back. You might think, "Wow, that's crazy. Like, I could be I could be giving them nearly the, you know, nearly the the the majority of what they've spent on their order." Well, if you're able to show that to your subscribers that you're picking these winners, you're giving up $1,000 there over the

27:29course of a month. But, you know, you might have been avoiding giving 5% off of, you know, $500,000 worth of orders. So, you actually saved yourself 24 grand, right? So, like right there, if you're not willing to do that, if you guys maybe don't have the level of volume where you're kind of able to just absorb that $1,000 in the course of a month, what I love I just love love love is when you take you take almost just an an order value amount that's maybe at AOV or even slightly above. If it can be rounded, that's fantastic. So, let's say it's $1,000, it's $2,000, and you take a dollar amount that is 5%. What you're going to do, you're going to say on orders at least, let's say $1,000 and above, you'll get $50. $50 sounds like a lot. Once again, Shaq and I gave the example of, you know, getting $3 off your $60 av $3 ain't going to really do much for me, but $50 off orders a th000 and above, you know, people people would

28:20sign up for that. What happens is if someone spends $2,000, they don't get a $100. you know, if we were to do 5% or it's definitely not $200. If we were to do 10, it's just $50 and it's stuck there and you you you know it's there and you know that you're not going to get a any sort of surprise with a massive deep discount that you're going to have to do because AOV is risen so much, you know. No, and once you train them to wait for the discount, we it's so difficult to get them off of this.

28:42All right, my last my last section, the medium I have two questions, too. So, give me the the nitty-gritty on the list

Medium AOV Strategies: Balancing Discounts and Novelty

28:47growth for the medium AOV, medium frequency. So, here like these kind of brands like you'll often see. So going into gadgets, accessories and apparel, fashion, these sorts of things, what we'll always see if you guys are are kind of if you're if you're subscribed to a lot of brands, the way these people generally drive LTV is through is through novelty. It's through new releases. It's through, you know, I think you know operationally this would be it be quite difficult to run have like I don't know a thousand SKs in your store. But what we want to do is we want to go for a moderate discount here.

29:16Here you basically take both of those two approaches we've had and you just go nice in the middle in the Goldilock zone, right? The the porridge is just warm enough. we go for something moderate. Think a 10% off offer. It's okay. We're we're we're we're nice and vanilla there. We're nice at industry standards, you know, right there. You know, that's that's okay. You know, we don't really want to push beyond that necessarily. You know, the way then that we're that we're going to move on from here. We wouldn't really go to a second, you know, an increased offer in any of the pre-purchase flows. We don't really want to go hitting that 15% level. You know, quite often the juice just isn't going to be worth the squeeze. And then really what we're doing post-purchase, you know, it sounds, you know, simple, harder to do in practice, but you'll often see with these brands, they're releasing things all the time. I think I think I I get emails from Ridge. I think they release a new product every

29:57week, it seems to me. I get email from from Represent. Maybe they're push into a little bit of a higher higher AOV there, but they release new products every week as well. Gym Shark release new products I think every Fortnite it seems to be for my emails. I know sounds pretty simple. I know it's like guys, it's simple. Just release more products. Like I know it's not so simple behind the scenes, but it's like you'll generally see there that they're not doing deep discounts post purchase either. If they are going to do a discount, what it'll often be, and we often do this as well, I highly recommend everyone doing this. I might send people a link after this as well.

30:26You can see plain text email that you can do, just do it recurring once once a month to anyone who hasn't purchased, who has purchased before, but not in the last six months. For a brand like this, you can consider someone like that dead in the water. They're almost just not going to come back. You can just give them an offer recurring. Just hit them with that once a month. we want you to come back. That's a great segment of your list where you can, you know, get their eyes on an offer and they can often come back. You can just do that in plain text and you can remix a couple of words each month and it can you it can just be an email that you have in your Claio say it's a template. You just do that on a monthly cadence. But yeah, for for those brands, you know, you don't really want to you don't want to be you you going on discount too often. you kind of be going as you've talked a

31:03lot about Shaq, you might be going for a sale maybe, you know, that you build up to once every three, four months kind of a thing with real, you know, intent behind it rather than just a kind of willy-nilly sort of sale. Spot on. I got

Advantages of Using Alia Over Klaviyo

31:13three for you. Main reason you recommend Aaliyah over Clavio's pop-up. What's the biggest advantage? Dude, you know what it is, man? Is like it's just it like the almost the way I see that learning completion thing is like a welcome series on the website. So, it's while I love it primarily for a higher AOV case because we're once again we see it as a C everyone here now we all see email as a CRO channel now for high AOV stores right you know they're without someone having to leave the website they're able to just they're almost able to go through the highlights of our welcome series be like oh hey look this is this is the brand story you know this is what we do these are the problems we solve here's you know any sort of I've seen people put in their pop-ups hey like for every order we donate something to to a certain cause or what have you and I think it just one, they load very quickly and look amazing. So, you get

31:57that you get a you like you'll see a nice increase in conversion rate just from people popping in their email there. But, it's how many of them go on to purchase is why I like it the most. And that's because people go through and they have to go through this this mini welcome series on the site. They understand they understand your brand far better, right? So, yeah, I just I don't think the biggest deal of time but but yeah, the c the congruency of the well-designed. So, we we use it too. We we were on Clavia, we were on AMP, we're on all of them, and right now we're on Leah. So, the design, the the full-sight takeover on mobile is is beautiful. The ease of double opt-in for email plus SMS and for whatever reason, kind of like you're talking about the the personalized welcome flow, the conversion from like opting in to purchase is shorter for us. And that's the thing that I measure. And right now, I'm doing like a pretty decent case

32:44study on understanding analysis of like unique welcome offers and flows per channel that the customer comes from because we spend so heavily on paid media. And I think that'll be a really cool finding. So I I'll be able to publish that when it's ready. But and now for for anyone that's not ready, like obviously Clavio comes with a pop-up and it's the costs are costs are are great, right? Like why pay extra unless you're going to be able to take the time to build the flows for it. And I think that's why a lot of the like I would say it's a prouser even though anybody can use it, but a pro user will spend the time to go really nitty-gritty on something like I'm I'm excited. I'm excited. Two I got one core question.

Giveaway Promotions: Maintaining Brand Value

33:18with a giveaway style promotion, is there a risk of cheapening the brand? If a business owner raises this concern, how can we effectively address it and demonstrate that giveaways can still align with the premium brand image? I have a comment after this, too. Yeah. Like I think here, you know, I think when you think of giveaway, I think of like those COVID, you know, like giveaway brands that popped up on Instagram kind of all the time and and that sort of a thing. I think like with that with the the brand I showcase there, they're very much like a luxury sort of style of brand and that's like a big reason of why they don't want to do any sort of any sort of discount. I kind of think for me personally, for my own perception of it on a popup, to me it's kind of like a non-issue. If it's an enter for a chance to win kind of thing, like it's it's we selected winner per month. For me, I kind of I think if

33:59you're framing it to them, you let's say if you're framing it to in this case, if it's if it's for your client or potentially if you're working in house for that brand, just from from me reading the reading the question is, you know, I think is to draw a distinction between, hey, this isn't like we're doing we're doing giveaway prizes all the time and we're like broadcasting this to everyone and like look how cheap this is. it's just, you know, we we have one winner per month and we'll we'll let people we'll let people know about that.

34:19But you're able to say, "Hey, look, I think this is going to be an offer that's going to convert really well." You can show them the math if it is actually if they're they're running at, you know, if they're a bigger a bigger brand and you're saying, "Hey, we think 400 grand could come through this pop-up." And if we do a 5% it leads to us taking off, you know, 20 grand off of that, you know, this is just one grand per month. We're saving $19,000 to the bottom line right there, you know. Good.

34:41We We It's very good. That was nice. I think about this two ways. So, Ridge does their Jeep giveaway and also diesel power diesel power gear guys were doing sweep stakes for entry for purchase. Doing a giveaway doesn't cheapen the brand if the perceived value and actual like nominal like the the actual dollar value of the giveaway is high. A car is very high. And why people do this is because you put it around peak moments that you actually don't have much to talk about because if you aren't launching a bunch of brand new products, you don't really have anything new to to say or talk for or get someone a reason to purchase or buy. The giveaway and the magnitude of the giveaway is important to put during times of a lull for your specific business. Ours we're learning that our lull is sometimes in like this August, September, end of summer play.

35:32Okay, cool. We need to make sure we plan something, an incentive for them to sign up or want to spend money to be entered to win. And there's legal reasons and ways to do that specifically there. Or actually, I actually have Van Oaks talking about this in Miami. How do you run a real giveaway around big gifts? And we'll record it for you guys that that can't be there in person. But this, as long as there's alignment with a giveaway and it's significant enough to your audience, it won't cheapen it. If anything, it'll actually raise the value and it'll be more more beneficial. And there's really nice write-offs for doing things like this. So, it is a benefit there. Connor, I appreciate you,

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

36:08brother. Thank you for staying up for me all the way abroad. And I I would have you on multiple times if I heard an Irish man talk about porridge on every single sweet. The the douls tones. The douls tones. Thanks so much for having me, Shaka. I appreciate it. Everyone else, thanks so much for for listening into to to the chat as well. I really really appreciate it.