Retention Revenue Planning with Anwar Abdul Jawad

Profit Fuels Growth

0:00You can't be as aggressive with your growth, with your ad spend, and top line as well, because you have to fund them. You have to create a profit up for sport. Forecasting is not guessing what is going to happen next month. Incorporating everything that's qualitative and everything that's quantitative. The point of the forecasting process is the exit on how we think we're going to get there, so that we have something to pivot against. The only thing that's going to force the ideation and tell us how much ideation we need is the idea that we have a certain gap to the goal that we set to deliver. And that's what quantifies for certain how extreme of an action to take.

0:38of our maybe claims to fame is the fact that we're very financially focused and you'll see that come through here. and we think it's this the most sort of helpful effective way for e-commerce brands is to have applying the numbers and make sure that there's no silos between those things. And I think there's actually a lot we can bring to retention conversation based on that fact alone. So, really today the talk is going to be about hitting the number.

1:05So, from a retention calendar to a revenue plan, and we're going to talk about some of those things. So, I encourage you to stop me along the way with any questions or thoughts that you have. These things are always most helpful when they're very discussion-based, as you have seen so far in as GBT does. So, good starting place to start. okay, cool. So,

Hitting the Number

1:22hitting a number, I wanted to talk about that concept for just a quick second as well before we get started. In my career what I've started to notice is some of the most effective operators that I've ever seen, whether it's on the brand side, private equity side, anything related to business in general, are the people who can give you a number and then hit it. They hold themselves to a number, they hit the number. That's an art that I think is it's sort of in in some sense simple, but in some sense very complex, and we're going to go through that through the lens of retention today.

1:55And maybe here here's a slide from our website, one of the metrics that I'm most proud of is the one here on the left-hand side. I was looking for some aggregated data about how low we do with that kind of thing. So, what you're seeing is that to the right we've got 33% year-over-year revenue growth across our client base. 42% year-over-year contribution margin growth. But really the one on the left is the one that catches my eye most and 3% forecast to target. So, this is just exemplifying that it's a metric that shows that we really that it's like we do what we say we're going to do. And we're going to walk through the importance of that, the importance of how it turns your the importance of how high-quality an operation it can turn your marketing operating system to in general including on the retention side. So, I'm going to go through that. I wanted

Why Trust Our Team

2:39to quickly set the stage by just saying why you should trust us and types of clients that we work with. We've been in the e-commerce game for a long time. Our CEO started the agency in 2012 and since that we partnered with some of the coolest, fastest-growing e-commerce brands in general and have become something of thought leaders in the space, but overall he he those are those are a couple reasons that we we think we're sort of like qualified to do this talk here today. okay. So, I'll

Diagnosing Retention Role

3:08start with this part. Dial up your listening and your role of retention. If you think about it this way, across a couple different business types, there's SaaS, there's agency and so on. So, much of your revenue is baked and so the role of retention there is to serve in in some sense there's there's less due because of the business model itself, but in some sense so much of your revenue is baked in of itself. You've got customers who you can rely on, depend on for contractual revenue that they have. E-commerce is not exactly the same situation in the sense there's a lot that's acquisition focused. We have to go out and hunt for new customers all the time.

3:44Now, we're not talking about SaaS levels, we're not talking about agency levels, but to some extent e-commerce businesses are going to sit on two spectrum of a lot of the revenue coming from retention versus not a lot of the revenue coming from retention. So, one of the first things that we do when we ingest a brand into our system in terms of data is we we run a diagnostic and give them a growth quotient score.

4:07So, this is score composed of 10 marketing and operating metrics that are used to assess the growth potential of a brand. And it produces a report that looks a little bit like this. So, GQ, growth quotient, you can think about it similar to IQ where we're saying a brand that's really sort of primed for growth has a higher score and then a a brand that scores lower they could have a little bit more difficulty growing.

4:31So, I'm going to skip I'm going to show you some of the the metrics that we run through. I refer you guys to ask questions about these if you don't run them for yourselves, but also generally take a look. I'll see what we can do a little bit as well. But, what we do is we benchmark them across what is the ideal for e-commerce down here in the middle as well as the average across our data set. And you can see that there's things like cost of delivery, operating expenses, cash conversion cycle, a lot of things that are really falling outside the scope of what we talk about here today.

LTV Benchmarks That Matter

5:03But, the two that I want to draw your attention to are these two right here. 60-day incremental revenue growth and one-year incremental revenue growth percent. There are a lot of different ways to talk about LTV. We heard Jimmy talk about repeat rate in the courts of value earlier today. for us, one of the most important things is to standardize that across time. So, when I say lifetime value, that word lifetime refers to a variable period of time. It could mean something different for you as for the next brand as for someone else. And so, it's really windowly defined terms that just align on what we mean across a certain set of time and to compare results in those ways. So, 60-day incremental revenue growth percent on that, so if if a benchmark here, what we consider ideal for e-commerce is if a customer spends a dollar with you on day one, they spend an additional 30 cents with you across the next 60 days.

5:57That's your cash multiplier. That's the instantaneous sort of additional revenue bump that you can get right away. The average already is at somewhere around 21%. So it's interesting if you run those numbers for yourselves and see how you can compare that data set, you'll get a sense of of where you sit and where we think is sort of ideal for priming you for growth. When you're at incremental revenue growth percent. Now, this is what really matters here. So we talked about the cash multiplier, we talked about the big incremental benefit here over the course of 60 days.

6:23But ultimately when we talk about lifetime value, not all products have sort of the the incentive or or desire to have a second purchase happen right away. So one-year incremental revenue growth percent is also something really interesting look at. I think beyond one year still interesting to look at. The only problem is that there's a lot of tension across cash flow that that creates and so if we're not always kind of around here to wait for for more than a year to realize revenue. But over the course of a year, that's what we for what we consider really ideal for e-commerce is somewhere around 100% increase mark, but the average already is closer to 50. So it's interesting that part of yourselves kind of around us as well, but what that means here is like if a customer is spending a dollar with us on day number one, across the next year how many additional dollars they spend with us?

7:06And our what we consider ideal for e-commerce is somewhere around an additional dollar over that year. Okay, so there's a lot of ways to win at e-commerce, but this helps maybe define where you sit along the spectrum and what the role of retention is in your mixing terminal. For a high LTV, if you have a higher than 90% increase in LTV over the course of a year, something like Missouri Star Quilt Co, Harden Soil, supplement brands, that kind of thing.

7:32You already know that your role is vital here. Segmentation, flows, cross-selling, upselling, these things all get a huge amount of your attention already because you know it's a huge part of how you've grow. It's a huge part of what makes your business what makes your business grow, what makes your business tick, right? What's really interesting though is like on the low LTV side there. So, think about brands like Blue Air Flux, Ridge. These are by no means small e-commerce brands. They're monster e-commerce brands. They produce a ton of profit all time. They're really, really good brands, but they have very bad LTV.

8:05So, what this does here is like it just breaks up about acquisition is so, so hard. It continues to be harder. I think Jimmy Hill and then his talk as well earlier on. So, your ideations for retention markers here on anything that can move the needle is so helpful. Without any amount of progress with any amount of progress here on LTV retention side, you can help unlock a significant amount of additional value for your acquisition team. That one's really helpful. So,

Retention Enables Aggressive CAC

8:31think about this as kind of an example of here's a Here's a brand where it started off as one of those things closer to the left end of the spectrum. And over the course of their their return as business, they realized the importance of increasing LTV. And so, through the compounding impact of a lot of the optimizations that some of the folks have talked about today, as well also moving progressively to categories within their business that have higher higher LTV, they moved to quite literally cash or sustain a good amount of the revenue coming from returning customer revenue to the point where now, if you look at the model that they operate on, this is first order, and what you see here is contribution margin on first order is negative on the order of a million dollars a month, and they still produce a profit.

9:20So, they're able to go into the negative on customer acquisition by a million dollars a month and still produce a profit. So, one of the very like simple illustrations we like to show of how it's helpful to have returning customer revenue is think about a typical brand where their OPEX like on a monthly basis, the salaries, the office, and any other fixed costs in the business are somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 grand. The returning customer revenue, that floor provides $500,000 of revenue that they know they're going to have.

9:50Cost of delivery, so this would be kind of the inverse of gross margin, what's their total product costs, but also variable expenses. So, anything associated with getting that product into the customer's hands is about 50%. That's pretty typical for e-commerce. We saw that in some of the venture marketing slides as well. So, for every dollar of revenue, it costs them about 50 cents. Contribution margin from returning customers is 250 grand. So, that means that they're even in neutral. They're making a profit, or at least not losing money, as long as they keep customer acquisition at break even or above it.

10:22So, that's huge, right? So, that kind of illustrates the importance of returning customer revenue to some of these e-commerce brands as it relates to this idea of producing a profit. If you have returning customer revenue and contribution margin from that, that does not produce contribution margin in excess of your op-ex, now you have to take a step back on customer acquisition. You can't be as aggressive with your growth, with your ad spend, and top line as well, because you have to fund that. You have to create a profit on first order.

Spend Efficiency Sandbox

10:50I want to show you one of these spending efficiency models. So, I'm sure you guys have all had those conversations at the outset of Bump, which is one of the most important questions that marketing teams ask themselves are basically what's the right spend level. So, I can spend a lot of money at a very high CAC. I can also spend a tiny amount of money at a very low CAC. And everything in between. But you all think to yourself like what's that sweet spot?

11:16And so, probably what this is is just a sandbox. A lot of folks who write these themselves success to be able to this shows you, based on your past data, here's your estimated spending efficiency curve, and here's without here's what your expected CAC looks like at different levels of spend. Now, the reason I bring this off to you is because I want you guys to pay attention to just this contribution margin column over here. And also the spending cap column. So, what we're saying here is that the ideal place this that's highlighted in green right now is the spend level and CAC that produces the most contribution margin over the course of the lifetime of that cohort.

11:53This is the right place to be. If you're this brand right here, you want to be sending $198,000 at a CAC of 102. Cuz that's the optimal place that produces the most profit for you. The only problem is that if we're in a negative cash situation on acquisition of $47,000 in that first month. >> Question for you. How do you define lifetime? Are we looking at 12 months? Are we looking at 24 months? Are we looking at >> Really good question. In this case, 2 years.

12:21>> Okay. And so then, obviously contribution margin goes negative. Do you have a place in chart or somewhere else where you show when the payback happens, what period of time that happens at? >> So, not exactly where we pay back to neutral, but kind of think of that lifetime CM box towards the right of over the course of that 2 years, what does that outcome look like for this cohort? So, over the course of that 2-year LTV, this cohort will produce $183,000 in contribution margin.

12:51Now, a part parcel of this is that the brand has to be able to sustain $47,000 in the negative on month one, right? With acquisition. So, when we talk about like the importance of retention marketing just to sort sort of set the stage on that part and the ability of retention teams to be able to help their acquisition counterparts, look how much more aggressive these folks are able to be as a result of being able to take a $50,000 hit to contribution margin on day one. So, they're able to scale out spend from 80K to 198K. They're able to take their allowable CAC up from $73 in this case up to 102. So, think about how this more revenue and customer acquisition that could help with and all those additional customers, they pay back in lifetime value. As you can see that here all the way on the right hand side. So, with this initial scenario where we're forced to break even on first order because of that constraint, once their returning customer revenue isn't that

13:43high, so we're forced to break even on first order, the contribution margin that we accrue through that lifetime of that cohort is 134K. So, we're missing out on additional $50,000 in lifetime profit from that cohort as a result of not being able to sort of like fund in the short term. So, it's just to help sort of like illustrate on the spectrum of these things what the role of retention is and when we define it, say like, "Okay, it's helpful to understand where you're playing in the spectrum." So, if you're on the left hand side and the brand needs to create a profit because they can't their house up on the brand, they can't go super negative on first order.

14:18well, in that case, it's really interesting to understand kind of the outsized impact that you can have early on if you do offer any amount of additional returning customer revenue there and how much more aggressive those folks are going to be able to be on the acquisition side. Cool. So, that's step one, diagnostic to roll for retention.

Forecasting and Execution

14:38Step two is forecasting and execution. So, we talked about the importance of hitting number. and this is where that kind of stuff happens. So, in the CTC world, forecasting, that happens for us across all these all the metrics of the the for retention program. So, you've got every single flow to the right hand side with an expectation of how much revenue those flows are going to produce. We've got every single campaign with an expectation of how much revenue those campaigns are going to produce.

15:06And there's a lot of thought that goes into this forecast. There's a lot of clay we're incorporating the marketing calendar, we're incorporating the historical, so any similar sales that happened, we're incorporating everything that's qualitative and everything that's quantitative. We're incorporating how many customers we've acquired recently, right? So we can understand, okay, what what is our forecast going to be? And more importantly, we got a plan of how we're going to get to a certain amount of revenue that we're responsible for.

15:32What's our plan to get there? It'll all be TBD. What I want to say about forecasts this year, that the message I hope to serve before today is that forecasting is not guessing what is going to happen next month. May forecasting get a little bit of flak when that's kind of the expectation or that's the understanding that some folks think we got away with. but but I but I hope to prove I hope to show that with these series of examples here, that's not really the goal.

15:58Guessing what's going to happen next month doesn't have any impact to the business. The point of forecasting rather is to say that I have a specific outcome that I'm committed to delivering. Whether I'm an employee of the brand, whether I'm agency side working for the brand as a client, whether I'm the brand itself. If it's a duty to shareholders, it's a duty to myself if I own the brand, whatever the case may be. There's a certain goal that I said I want to make happen.

16:21And if I do that, and I want the agency over that goal, I want the ability to shape that outcome. It's really important that I start off with a very specific plan of how I expect to get there. Now, what's a very likely to very likely to happen is that on day one, I realize that my plan is wrong. And that's okay. That's the point. It's not about accurate guessing. It's about understanding where I'm wrong so I can course correct. And obviously all the caveats here are on the fact that I want to have the the certain trajectory for myself to not overreact to a single bad day of performance or something like that.

16:53But at the same time, it's really important to kind of understand where I'm wrong so I can course correct.

Black Friday Pivot Example

16:58I'm going to pull up an example. So, here's a client over the course of Black Friday. I'm actually going to poke into style here so we can see them in a little bit more detail. This is November 28th. Big mess. Now, overall, let's just walk down sort of the hierarchy of metrics and understand where we're at. Contribution margin, minus 3% to goal. Not horrible, but there's more. Revenue, minus 12% to goal. Okay, I'm starting to feel a little bit worried here. So, I'm not losing my butt on profit here, so to speak, but I'm substantially behind on revenue.

17:32Ad spend, 18% behind goal, and then we're a little bit ahead on efficiency. Now, where am I substantially missing? Returning customer revenue. They didn't come back in the way that I needed them to. My new customer revenue is roughly flat to goal. I had more efficiency than I needed, but at the same time, I did it on less spend. What I really want to illustrate here is that this green bar, which shows my target, is the only thing that prompted my team to action.

18:01$289,000 is not a bad day of revenue. There's nothing in that data point, in and of itself, that would have us say, "There's a problem we need to go solve." But in the context of the expectation, we knew we missed, and so we knew we had to go make it up. We missed by quite a bit. The goal was $550,000 that day. So, what happened? We went to an ideation process. The offer on Black Friday was 30% off of a select collection. It was the Black Black Friday collection. There were some coveted items, but not everything.

18:31And so, we moved it to 30% off of a slightly more coveted collection and pivoted the offer. And you could see what happened over the course of the next 2 days, we made it up. So, where did we land? Contribution margin, I had a goal 13%. This got us sales right at target, minus 1%. Ad spend still a little bit soft, but I closed almost all of our returning customer revenue goal, and my new customer revenue remains ahead of goal.

18:59The thing that I want to go back to, though, is that this is what forced the ideation. The missed goal. And so, if you notice kind of where I landed on the month, net net, I landed where I needed to, but I didn't get there in the way that I thought. That's always going to happen. That's the point.

Flash Sale to Fix Acquisition

19:18I want to show another example here. So, April of last year, through the 27th of the month, let's walk down the hierarchy of metrics again. Minus 6% to contribution margin. I'm slightly losing on profit, but it's not a catastrophe. Revenue, it's getting a little bit worse, minus 10%. Not happy with that. Ad spend is where I need to be. I spent all the money I said I was going to spend, but I didn't get the revenue I needed for it.

19:47My efficiency, my MER is behind goal. My average cost of sale behind goal. Okay. I go down the level. Where am I missing? Returning customer revenue looks pretty close to goal. But on the new customer revenue side, I'm minus 14% to where I needed to be. I have an acquisition problem, and if I don't solve this, then I know that even if I don't have a problem this month, I have a problem next month and the month after that. Because as we know, it's the new customers of now that turn into the returning customers of later.

20:16So, this again forces an ideation process where we say, "Okay, we've got to do something that appeals to new customer revenue." I don't have a ton of contribution margin to play with, but I have some because I'm pretty close to goal. If I was down something like 30% to my contribution margin goal, I have to be very worried about margin, but I don't have a big margin problem right now. I have a revenue problem. So, again, we go into the ideation process, and here's what we come up with.

20:41The brand has pretty good margins. This is the waterfall chart of unit economics. you guys have done these for your brands, you've seen these, but but effectively, what we're saying is that this brand breaks even effectively have a cost of goods somewhere in the neighborhood of 35%. And so, they have decent gross margin, and they can actually hack a decent amount of sort of discount. And so, okay, we go back to the drawing board, the ideation process, and we come up with the idea of 60% off for 60 minutes. Believe it or not, they create a slim profit at 60% off. It's not a big profit, but it's a slim one.

21:17And the the idea is so noble. The flash sale is so noble that the the hypothesis here is that it's going to drive a disproportionate amount of customer acquisition market. And it's not actually going to disrupt anything that we're worried about with discount. So, for example, we're not going to see that much of a sale pullback. We're not going to see that much of an issue on that side. Don't worry, we're going to be able to create a contribution margin neutral at least revenue increase.

21:43So, we play it out. And over the course of that month, revenue skyrockets. I wanted to also say here we Here are part of the ideation process is the fact that we're looking at, okay, well, what's the right way to execute on this? We go There's delay times on Klaviyo sends, etc. And so, what we ended up doing is kind of teasing it and then mentioning that it's going to be at noon Pacific time the next day versus kind of just releasing it, but we do that, and here's what I also want to kind of highlight is that we were able to create the revenue, but if I switch to contribution margin, these were also high contribution margin baked. So, effectively, the revenue increase, even though the contribution margin was thin, the profitability on those orders was thin, the volume so far offset it that we still had higher contribution margin days and that net were related against my goal.

22:334% higher on contribution margin. I closed that revenue gap. I didn't have to spend all that much more. My new customer revenue gap started closing. It's not all the way there. It's still a problem. My returning customer revenue didn't have a problem to begin with, but but we're a little bit better off now. So, that's the second example of how we do look at the We got to where we needed to go, but it's not in the way we initially thought. And that's okay, and that's the point. The point of the forecasting process is the act theory on how we think we're going to get there so that we have something to pivot against because the only thing that's going to force the ideation we need and tell us how much ideation we need is the idea that we have a certain gap to the goal that we set to deliver.

23:14And that's what quantifies the sort of how extreme of an action to take. If this was a bigger one and we had a 30% gap to goal, it would have to be extreme. A 6-minute flash sale won't cut it. It would have to be something that's more drastic than that. If it was a 2% DBA civil like it is right now, well, I have the option to turn up the trolley and take something that's a little bit lighter. I don't have to discount all the way to 60% new flash sale like that, right?

23:37But it's all in the context of those stakes.

Daily Targets and Seasonality

23:41That was 2025. >> Yeah, two questions. So, the I see that you actually have daily targets. >> That's right. >> How you model that out? >> Yeah, it's really sus. So, everything starts with the qualitative. The reason that we don't necessarily believe in algorithmic forecasting and some of the tools that would give you a forecast based on just ingesting your data is because they won't know what you're going to do. All For us, all revenue is associated with actions. So, one of the first things that happen when we adjust the brain state into our system is that our growth track is our coffee engineers, which is my position and which is Jar- Jar Jar position over there as well.

24:22We'll go back historically and tag everything that you guys have done. All the emails sent, all the discounts, all the the site wide, all the influencer posts, etc. And that meant when we're doing marketing calendar planning for the upcoming month, when I tag those things, then the software understands how historically records reacted to those actions. So, I start with the calendar and I put in an expectation of what everything's going to happen based on the what what's going to happen revenue-wise with all the calendar events that I have, right, on marketing calendar itself cuz those qualitative things inform what the daily targets should be. In addition to that, there's slightly different expectation of revenue based on daily week.

24:59That's easy to model also just because we have all the data that we just and you can upload from Shopify as well. But the idea is that on average for a lot of brands, you'll see that weekend sales are consistently 10% higher than the average, something like that. So, that's what we get to see daily expectation. >> Mostly a function of colors and appropriate data model that you free, right? And then like what about like seasonality from brand to brand? Are you Are you looking at a historical battle on some of that that you can model it for ups and downs or seasonality or >> Yeah, that's right cuz historical seasonality of for the brands is actually more so than industry wide.

25:33And the reason for that is because for certain brands were believe it or not Black Friday is not as big to them and then they're seasoning is really strong in January, something like that. And so, it's really important to get to the data for the brand itself. what you guys will notice is that on some modeling that we showed here with acquisition, there's a separate expectation for each month in the year. And that accounts for the seasonality there because there's so many differences, right?

25:54On November, you could spend so much more without degree than you would on on home months like April or something like that. >> I have a question. >> Yeah. >> So, the 60% of the CC years, is this on the similar on a live priority working really well right in the thing, right? Now, in something like this where you would free you, you add as the RC or but how do you determine what's the next time to work something like that?

26:19So, if I ship it out for let's say a zero balance of let's do it next month or I sold again and see probably pause that. So, how do you go about navigating the next sign in to a goal like that? >> That's a really good question. So, there's not a clear answer. I think one of the core parts of my role I have to get good at, one of the core parts of Jar's role that he has to get good at is helping clients think through what they want out of their business.

26:42It starts off as a very philosophical question and then for very practical. There's a reality to comps, there's a reality to which people are going to want to do better year over year. And a lot of times that calendar and we're seeing the same exact things, is going to be happening on that on that sort of time scale. So, I'll give you an example with these guys. If you notice, some of the day around the six six minutes off that we looked at was from 2025.

27:04Okay, so this is May of 2023 April of 2025. So, the first is what happened in 2026? Well, we did the exact same thing, and what we found is that there's continued growth around that moment. And so now it's part of our permanent marketing calendar where every year we're going to have an anniversary down at the end of April. Why is the end of April? So, here's the other part of marketing calendar planning that you guys as retention marketers do really well, but you continue to step deeper on it because it's the most important thing.

27:28But it's the idea that across the course of the year, on average, you're going to have, for most e-commerce brands, two big peaks. One of them's going to be Black Friday, Cyber Monday towards Q4, and then one of them's going to be some national gifting moment that sort of works based on the product. So, for example, it could be International Women's Day, or it could be Mother's Day or Father's Day, something like that. But then you get this kind of summer of fall for most brands, and that's your opportunity to sort of bid for something like this, which is creating the artificial peak.

27:55Why is that so important? Well, as you all know, as you're about to do a cash outlay for something like Q4, you're using some of your worst months of cash to place some of the biggest POs that you have for for Q4. And it becomes really hard to make a brand make sure that they don't undersell that opportunity. And so that's where something like this exists. So, when you ask a question like, "Hey, like where on the calendar do you place this?" there's a lot of considerations. Some of them for me are, where are we seasonality-wise? How are you doing in comps year over year? Because it's really important that if we're going to expect April to grow, that I need to make sure that the same thing I'm doing this April, I'm doing something equivalent or better next next month or next year's spot. In this case that you're seeing here, it's the exact same offer. We did the six 60% off for 60 minutes. their origins took a tiny hit because of tariffs, but they weren't

28:44that affected. And so what ended up happening actually is that revenue increase substantially and we we still kind of see the power of that offer and we work for keeping the customer list because it's such a novel offer that lasts for such a small amount of time that it doesn't really impact purchasing outside of this period. So those are some of the considerations that I think for you and I talking.

Creating Midyear Peaks

29:04>> So the thing about peaking, right? I think this is a really good with conversation for you just a little bit more about it. You know, I think I've heard Taylor talk about this but you should have at least four peaks in a year. Basically each quarter you should at least have one event. What are some good events that you've seen work with your clients that they're artificially creating outside of just an anniversary? >> So that's a really good question. The two of the four peaks are going to happen around those moments that occur naturally. So Q4 is going to be relate key and then your early peak will be something that's a clear resting with brand and and we'll see that.

29:38During the summer once back to school, can you turn back to school into something that's effective for you? I think it's very category base. Simple Modern, those water bottles that they gear towards children. So they'd be tumblers normally but they'll gear them towards children during back to school. We have a lot of backpack clients. They'll do something around back to school and turn it into something that's even bigger than Q4 for them. So that's a really good one. Something like back to school.

30:00You also want something that's summer oriented. So this is an opportunity for an interesting limited edition product. We have a client called Riddle Oil that does a product called New Beach. It's a roll-on perfume that is a limited edition set that will sell for 30 days and create a artificial summer peak that helps them with some of those cash issues that we talked about during what otherwise would be a dry summer. And so the whole idea is like you because of the naturally commerce calendar, you will be gifted with two peaks. One towards the end of the year, one towards the end.

30:27And so your job as marketers is to create the middle two to help the brand with cash flow and so on. So it's a really good question. Those are those are a couple ideas that we see. >> So and you treat these basically like sales that are like basically like a Black Friday event. Basically you would lead up, pile on, pre-launch, and then really have a marketing moment and hold them for a short-term period. Or is that how you guys are thinking about it?

30:50>> I see sales do really well. I've seen limited edition products do really well. But to your point, the the the frenzy and the fanfare is kind of the whole point. Like you have to do a huge campaign around it to make it effective because almost by nature, the fact that these are dry months, there's not a lot of people coming to the website in a shopping mindset relative to something like Black Friday. Black Friday, our contender, you can do something very real. Put something up on your website, not advertise it, and probably it will still be a really big day because there's an inbuilt shopping mechanism.

31:17But with these, you have to work really hard. You have to create a marketing campaign. You have to message it very heavily. It has to be cohesive across the website, across all touch points, across all their attention marketing as well. and it has to be a frenzy that you create. You have to guess it's not something that exists on out Who's done the best job of this of all time? Amazon Prime. They created Prime Day.

31:34They just invented it in the middle of the year. Right? And then there's no reason to shop on Prime Day, but all of a sudden now it's like one of the biggest shopping holidays of all time. and that's about Friday. So, yes, it it takes a lot of marketing when there's not macro factors in your favor. >> And you're not you're not trying to compete with holidays, too, right? Like that's a big thing, I'm guessing, cuz holidays are natural sales days.

31:54>> Yeah. So, competing Competing is not necessarily something we we'd want to do in some sense, but I think the right way to think about holidays is what's happening on the ad platforms as far as the auction dynamics. There's a lot of people who are spending a lot of money on Memorial Day to show you that they're 30% off. So, if you don't do something to meet that moment, whether it's something like natural that occurs as a result of just like your like like a product release or something like that that you do, if you don't do something to meet that moment or a discount, you'll get fired than in the auction. You You just won't be able to compete effectively.

32:25Everyone's conversion rate is going to increase faster than yours. So, they'll be able to afford the higher CPMs, but you won't be able to afford the higher CPMs because you've got no mechanism on your website to increase conversion rates as well. So, it's really important that when everyone's spending, you do something or pull out of the auction. But, it's going to be really hard if you kind of stay in this like in-between where it's like you're trying to compete with your business as usual offer while everyone else is offering something to the market that's a lot more juicy.

32:55Cool.

Plot Pivot Profit Wrap Up

32:59Okay, so So, overall, what I wanted to sort of like quickly part here is based on what we've seen and how we've been able to be effective for our clients is that retention marketing is not just a calendar of sends. It's a commitment to driving a portion of revenue for the business that they're very dependent on you for. It's It's a huge It's the same portion of business that's hard to win. And so, we we talked about the important the importance of being the type person who can deliver the number that they say they will. If this is your responsibility, it's on you as an employee or brand owner or agency partner to deliver a certain number, then having a very thoughtful, clear, detailed forecast about how you expect to get there is one of the most useful tools that's going to help you accomplish that goal.

33:41I would still create the same level of rigor in forecast if no one else was looking. And the reason is is because it's not for them, it's not public-facing, it's for me. I need to understand exactly where I think every dollar of revenue is going to come from so that as soon as I miss, I know exactly why I missed and I can pivot. Because again, the only thing that sort of like forces the ideation to improve is the fact that you're off course and how much you're off course by.

34:04Otherwise, it's one of those things where you're doing a vibe check. Like, "Hey, do we feel like we're doing enough? No, let's try a little bit harder." And it's not super concrete. So, we we call it clock, pivot, profit and and that's how we feel about forecasting. And that's kind of like gets it. So, hopefully this is helpful.