Samir ElKamouny – Fetch & Funnel

2 | Hands Free with Kizik’s Brett Swensen

Samir ElKamouny — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 12:37:12 +0000

Your host, Samir ElKamouny, talks with Brett Swensen of Kizik.

When Kizik set out to revolutionize the footwear industry, their goal was to create something truly original and extraordinary and do it in a way only inventors can. Their drive for simplicity results in shoes that match exhilarating style with incredible functionality.

To learn more about Brett’s work, visit https://kizik.com/

If you’d like to be a guest on Ecom Growth Leaders, click HERE

The post 2 | Hands Free with Kizik’s Brett Swensen appeared first on Fetch & Funnel.

4 | Paleo Certified Snacks with Caveman Foods’ Damon Levy

Samir ElKamouny — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 11:37:10 +0000

Your host, Samir ElKamouny, talks with Damon Levy of Caveman Foods. It’s time to wipe out those artificial sweeteners and GMOs and sink your teeth into something that puts you back on top of the food chain. At Caveman Foods, they believe humans thrive when they fuel their bodies and lives with whole, paleo ingredients.

To learn more about Damon’s work, visit https://www.cavemanfoods.com/

If you’d like to be a guest on Ecom Growth Leaders, click HERE

– Thanks for tuning into the “Ecom Growth Leaders” podcast. This show is intended to highlight marketing, and conversion techniques taught by today’s leaders in the ECOM world. I’ll be interviewing the top marketers that are influencing the market, making an impact, scaling faster than their competitors, and doing good. I’m your host Samir ElKamouny, founder and CEO of Fetch and Funnel, a performance marketing agency specializing in omnichannel media buying, creative production, and conversion optimization. If you enjoy anything from today’s episode, I highly recommend checking out fetchfunnel.com, and sign up for our email newsletter, where I promise to only send you content you can learn from, and apply directly into your business to improve results and scale. At the end of each episode, my goal is to have you feeling inspired and fired up by learning from today’s top innovators, marketers and entrepreneurs. Let’s dig into another amazing story about a unique brand crushing it, and learn from their success and learnings. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of “Ecom Growth Leaders.” Today, we have a super exciting episode where we are going to be talking to Damon Levy at Caveman Foods. Welcome Damon. I’m super excited to have you on “Ecom Growth Leaders.”

– I’m very excited to be here, Samir.

– So, I’d love to just jump right in, and just have you tell a little bit more about our audience, about Caveman Foods and what you sell, and what the brand is all about.

– Yeah, Caveman is a really fun brand. It’s a brand that’s focused on paleo are kind of if you think about it, a little bit obvious, right? We’re built on the paleo concept. So that means you are avoiding grains, anything really processed, like, so, that for us means, like, soy, gluten, grains, dairy. We avoid things like peanuts and potatoes, pretty much the principles of the paleo diet. And then I think the thing that really sets us apart is that we have a really high bar in terms of how delicious our products have to be. I think pretty much everybody says that in the food industry, right? Nobody’s intentionally making things that don’t taste good, right?

– Yeah.

– But that’s essentially what customers feed back to us. So when we talk to customers, and especially customers who are, like, anybody who repeats. The number one reason by, like, a landslide is that we taste better than everything else they’ve tried, ’cause they all are trying. These are people who are, like, trying to find snack solutions, right? They want on the go snack solutions, and they’ve gone through the gamut of everything, and they can’t find anything that they really love, and we fill that need. And so we make everything from bars. Almond coconut is our most popular flavor, to meat snacks, to grain-free granola. We just launched keto bars, which are specifically for the ketogenic diet, which is super popular right now. We still follow the paleo diet while we make those, which is very difficult. It’s a tough combo to make the two of those. Yeah, that’s the gist of Caveman. We’ve been around about 10 years. Yeah, you can find us in some retail. We do direct consumer, Amazon, all that stuff.

– That’s awesome, yeah. And I saw all the positive reviews, and definitely saw some of those reviews where people sort of replaced some sweet that they were addicted to, or what-not for Caveman. So, yeah, props to you for accomplishing that. Definitely has the right flavor choices in order to make that happen.

– The most common one is people talking about this bar, this coconut almond bar. This was one of those time where you, like, we actually didn’t set out to make it like this. We were just trying to make chocolate almond coconut bar, but we get people literally saying this tastes like a healthy version of Almond Joy. And it’s kind of like, oh, so we’ve run with that. We could talk more about how we played with that, and advertising, but yeah, that’s really what our goal is, is really trying to help people to make healthier choices ’cause people still snack. People still want things that kind of kill their cravings, and feel indulgent, but the thing you kind of hear from people all the time is they don’t wanna feel guilty about what they snack on, so. I wouldn’t call that a mission ’cause that’s not really, like, our North Star, but that tends to be kind of what we’re trying to accomplish is trying to help people find snacks that they really enjoy, but don’t make them feel guilty afterwards.

– Hey, that’s awesome. And so what is your role at Caveman Foods?

– I run everything digital, so, I kind of have an all-encompassing digital role, so. I own the P&L, so I own everything from the website. It’s a small team and so, like, I build stuff on the website, and I run all of our advertising and marketing, and then I manage the operational side of fulfillment, and all that stuff, 3PLs, and Amazon, and all that stuff. We don’t really engage with, like, Instacart, or a lot of, like, digital stuff to support our retail. Most of what we do is either direct consumer, or Amazon from a marketing standpoint. And so that tends to be where I focus.

– Nice, and so I saw a very impressive marketing background. You’ve sort of been in the food, or wine industry for a while. I guess, how did you get into it, or what kind of drew you to Caveman? What got you to a little bit about your story, and what brought you there?

– Yeah, I think that the short answer is I tend to like to work on products that I enjoy and appreciate. I think that, like, the question I often ask myself before I look at roles or companies is, is this something I’d be excited to share with people I know? Yeah, I worked in wine for awhile. I’m super passionate about wine, and enjoyed that quite a bit, but when I was, this was about seven or eight years ago, at the time wine was just so resistant to moving into the digital world. And I was trying to do it really for, I was in wine for, like, six years. And it was clear that it was just gonna go down kicking and screaming.

– It still is.

– It still is, now at least it’s, like, now it’s accepted. It’s still kind of like it’s the stepbrother that is super successful. The stepbrother that started, like, a .com and has made billions. And so everybody now likes it, but doesn’t really like it, that’s probably how wine thinks about digital these days. I think there’s a lot more smart people in wine that work on digital. And so I think it’s a little bit more accepted, but at the time, like, I was moving from one role to another and I was like, I really wanna work in the digital side of marketing. The pace is just so much more, it’s so much more fun. You just can do so much more. And so I made that choice, and then I ended up going to a nonfood company, but then I wanted to get back to food, and found Lolli and Pops, which was a cool company, super passionate customer base. And then Caveman drew me in because similar stuff, really passionate customers, super high NPS, wasn’t being measured when I joined, but it was clear from all of the ways that people talked about it. And, yeah, I was drawn to it because, A, super smart people. B, products that I could get behind, and see products that customers loved.

– It makes your job a lot easier when you have happy customers, and people who are passionate about the product, right?

– Said like a marketing expert, yeah.

– Too good. So I’m curious, you said in charge of PNLs. All of these components of digital, a lot of pieces that you just laid out. I’m curious how you define success at Caveman, and sort of how is it measured in your sort of day to day?

– That’s a question it depends entirely for every single company based on their, what their, I think it depends on for that company where they are from in a capital standpoint, and a growth expectation standpoint, all those things. For us, we’re trying to figure out how to become, like, self-sustaining, and cashflow positive. I care about RoW ads on ads, and lifetime value of customers. I’m trying to figure out that equation that I think probably so many other digital marketers are trying to figure out is how do I acquire a customer in a way that’s gonna be most profitable for Caveman, ultimately, and then how do I manage that equation to scale it? Because as you know in the food world, that first transaction it’s very hard to make, to be profitable in that first transaction. People who are new to your brand, they’re not dropping 150, $200, like you might on clothing, or technology, or something like that. So you gotta be planning to get them to come back, and that’s the key part of what we do is like, how are we constantly trying to figure out how to increase our repeat customer percentages, and our lifetime value? And we started off in a good place. And so it’s more just like, how do you just keep dialing up a little bit?

– Makes sense, yeah. And super difficult hurdle, like you’re saying, right? Lower price point, but then also, if I’ve never tried this am I willing to buy a box, or am I willing to buy multiple products? Yeah, what gets me to push over the edge? So, yeah, I understand very difficult problem to solve.

– Before I joined Caveman, so this was probably four years ago, they tried a program where they did a trial pack, essentially. We’ve played with different ways to do that same thing, but it’s challenging because when you do sampling or trial packs, or stuff like that you just don’t get that high of a percentage of people to convert. And so you’ve gotta find this, but if you set your bar too high in terms of what people have to pay on their first transaction, you get a very low number of people interested. So you’ve gotta find that happy medium for new customers. Like how do you get them in with some skin in the game so that they’re real potential customers, but then how do you still, like, but then you still have to extract a lot more value from them if they don’t pay a lot in their first purchase.

– Yeah, makes sense, makes sense, but done correctly, sounds like what you are can get that loyal customer, which could be harder in other food industries, say coffee, or something like that can be very difficult.

– Yeah.

– Even wine, I think could probably be a difficult one.

– Actually, those three industries are all similar in the sense that they have lots of competition, and lots of switching, right? That’s what a lot of the food industry is so hard is that there’s not that much loyalty. And so you’ve gotta really have a great product in order to have a chance at it, so that’s good, we have that piece covered, but still, it’s still hard ’cause people are, they just like to try new stuff.

– Yeah, you have to be careful. Right, right, and you have to be careful, too, because, I mean, we were talking about this earlier, but being careful of not trying to please everybody at the same time as well because I’m sure you’ve got so many objections that you’re trying to handle, but if you go too far into one direction, price point, or whatever, then you miss out on going, yeah, going even deeper on a much better objection that if you handled could have just gotten you a lot more customers, right? Like, obviously, you’re going after paleo, obviously, you’re going after now keto and things like that, but, yeah, I’m sure there’s so many other components to that. So many other objections you’re trying to handle, yeah.

– Can’t be everything to everybody.

– Yeah.

– I mean, eventually, that’s what food brands want to be, but when you’re a nascent food brand, you can’t do that. Heinz Ketchup, they could do that. Pepsi and Coke, they can do that. Even they probably have targets, but if you’re a nascent food brand, I think that if I was advising, like, entrepreneurs, like, one of the key things you have to do, and a lot of them do this naturally because of, like, the way that they formulate the idea, or whatever it is, is you have to know who you’re going after, and what their mindset is, ’cause if you don’t have somebody in mind every time that you’re creating a product, or creating marketing you’re gonna often get lost.

– Yep, absolutely, great advice. So curious, too, like, what would you consider to be your biggest success so far? It could be more than one, or have you had any specific breakthroughs? Anything like that?

– Well, we’ve had things that have been really successful. Like, we’ve figured out that we can run, like, the best time of year for us to acquire customers is actually around Halloween. That’s been our best customer acquisition time, which is a little bit strange, like, obviously, you’d think that my going in assumption would’ve been that January, February, would be the best time ’cause that’s when people are thinking about diets, and stuff like that, but through just a little bit of luck, we tried some specific advertising, seasonal stuff that we did the first year I was with Caveman. And it just it was like, in digital marketing when you hit that, like, vein of gold, and you’re like, what’s going on here? Like, why did our cost of acquisition, why did our CAC drop by, like, 80% overnight? And so the challenge of that is we haven’t figured out how to replicate any other time of year. It’s that specific, like, Halloween timeframe. And so I don’t know, I think, like, listens to this, and has ideas for ways that we could replicate that. That’s been interesting, but really the thing that from a success standpoint, that’s helped us to just, like, I would say, just month after month improve, and just, like, the constant improvement, is constantly working on repeat and LTV because there are times when you hit challenges that make those things hard, that make repeat hard, like, maybe you discontinue a product. Maybe you have to change a formula for a product. Maybe you go out of stock for a couple months because of supply issues, and those things it’s like throwing obstacles in front of your LTV equation, right? And so I think that probably, like, the thing I’m most proud of for what we’ve done is just constantly improved repeat rates and LTVs to the point where LTV is probably, and LTV we can’t really look at a true LTV ’cause we don’t have enough historical data to look back at it, but trends to indicate that LTV is up, like, 30, 40% over the past couple years.

– Wow, which is huge.

– That’s not the type of, like, that CAGR growth is not the type of thing that you always would assume is super meaningful but it is. It’s really, it changes, like, the equation for everything.

– Oh yeah, absolutely. No, that’s 30, 40% that’s huge. Yeah, the Halloween thing, too, very interesting. I wonder if it’s like a FOMO type of situation, like with the kids, or something. You don’t wanna dig into the bag out of all those sweets, and instead primp it with something a little healthier.

– It’s really interesting ’cause like I told you, the audience for us is primarily older for most of the year. It’s mostly people who are over 50. That’s primarily who loves Caveman. And that makes a lot of sense ’cause those are the people who they grew up on unhealthy snacks, they ate unhealthy things. You think of your grandparents, like, they ate, like, all those packaged candy bars, and they’re being told now, like, they wanna live longer. They’re being told by the doctors, well, like, you’ve gotta stop eating all these things that are full of artificial stuff and way too much sugar. And so they’re looking for healthier snacks. And so it totally makes sense ’cause 20 somethings either just don’t care, or they’re religiously against sugar already. They don’t make sense. And people in their 30s tend to, like, follow, or have the discipline to follow much more strict diets. And so that tends to be our audience. And for Halloween, the audience still seems to be older, and I’m not sure why they’re buying it around Halloween, specifically. I don’t think that they’re giving it out, even though that’s part of our marketing. I think that they’re really just trying to find, like, they’re trying to kind of like, find a healthier alternative ’cause they have, like, the guilt of, like, having pocket-sized Snickers bars all over the place.

– Getting slammed with the Reese’s commercials all day long.

– Yeah, I mean, I can’t slam Reese’s ’cause I love Reese’s, but.

– Same, but you’re still getting hit with them really hard during that month.

– You know the marketing they did, which was, like, a couple years ago they did all that marketing, essentially, which is, like, when it gets down to it, like, what people really want at Halloween is Reese’s. It’s the candy that people actually want. Like it’s the one that kids want, the kids want to trade for. Yeah, there’s always the Snickers lover. There’s the Almond Joy lover, but, like, the vocal majority is the Reese’s Cup lover. That’s what kind of makes Justin’s, that brand so brilliant, right? There’s no competition. They’re like, we can make a pretty good tasting, like, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, that’s healthier ’cause it’s dark chocolate, and almond butter so it’s not peanut allergy. And it’s just kind of good. It’s one of those, like, well, duh, that was an obvious product idea.

– For sure, for sure.

– But I can have Reese’s Cups, even though they’re definitely not part of the paleo diet.

– Same, same. So, yeah, I mean, what are some of the biggest growth levers that you’ve pulled for the business lately, or over the years?

– So if I think about, like, growth levers for us, so, I guess that there’s I’m trying to think of a few different things that I would call out, so. One thing for us is really thinking about your spend based on when you can, when it makes sense to scale, and when it doesn’t. So, like, have your powder available when you know that there’s the best opportunity. So have to spend as much as possible in September, October for us. And then November, December tend to be really difficult for us to acquire customers. So don’t spend as much then. Then ramp back up in January, February. Even though it’s not a very cyclical business in terms of consumption, there’s like, cyclicalness, or whatever the right word is for that, around acquisition of customers, so, that’s something that’s been an important lever. We’ve tried a lot of different channels. We recently tried influencers, not successful for us, paid influencers, but we’ve done different sampling programs, and lead gen stuff. It’s never crushed for us, but it always works a little bit, so we do giveaways and we work with companies. There’s a lot of companies that are popping up that are doing different types of sampling, companies like Sampler. We’re working with one called Peekage right now. We’re gonna start working with one called Healthy-Finds, that are kind of like, that all get. The marketing insight for this is that customers who try our stuff are way more likely to purchase. Just because, again, because we taste better than they expect. And so anything we can do to get our product into people’s hands at as low cost as possible is worth it, so. That’s been something that we are constantly looking at. We find way more success on the Facebook side than the Google side. And then even within Facebook, Facebook works way more effectively than Instagram, or anything else. Again, that’s an audience thing, right? Older folks are not.

– Yeah, the older demos.

– Older demos are not living on Instagram. We’ve tested out TikTok and Snapchat and Pinterest, and none of them really convert for us. They’re all interesting, and, again, they might be good for top of funnel awareness, ultimately, but none of them have really converted as well as kind of the Facebook basic feed advertising. Those things have all been, like, worked for us. I think that these days, I think it’s really interesting, you and I were talking a little bit about, like, creative, and we’ve tried to explore a lot of different creative directions, and what we end up finding success is the stuff that resonates with our audience the most. And it’s, like, okay, and it doesn’t have to be super interesting. Like we’ve gone out and sourced really high-end video, and stuff that we’ve taken big risks there, and it hasn’t paid off because at the end of the day, that’s not really what draws the attention of our consumers. They want to be told very specifically that this is something that’s gonna solve their need from a snack perspective, and is not gonna make them feel guilty, and it’s gonna kill their cravings, like, it’s those insights. And it’s been a little bit challenging to convince our organization that that is the right direction always because, ’cause it’s not sexy, but sometimes that’s what works. So, yeah, from Halloween, like, advertising, and the creative around that was a super interesting story. We were working with a contractor at the time. And it’s, like, totally, like one of those, like very, like, she just went and she took stock art, and, like, photoshopped our bars into a bowl that had something else in it, or it was, like, an empty bowl. And if you look closely, it totally looks photoshopped, like she did it, and she gave it to me and she was like, it’s not done, what do you think? And I just put it up and it just started working. And she was like, well, it wasn’t finished. I was like, it works. And it was totally different than anything else that we had done. So sometimes those successes come out of nowhere. In retrospect you understand why, but, yeah. Seasonal content tends to work really well for us. That’s one of the interesting insights for us. I think at the end of the day the successes for us have really been, like, figuring out how to test things at as low a cost as possible. And so that we can figure out if they’re feasible or not. I forgot what the concept is called, but that essentially you should be able to test almost anything in digital for, like, $1,000.

– I like that.

– And so we try to do that, like how do we test something as close as possible to $1,000 to get an answer? And if we can do that then as a small company you should be able to still justify anything like that. And so that tends to be, like, the success for us is like, okay, the things that do work, like, sampling, we’ve been able to test it without having to spend a lot of money, and then we just keep doing it.

– Yeah, makes sense, so testing super important. Don’t be afraid to test things.

– Oh yeah.

– Don’t be afraid to break things. Throw it up even if it’s not perfect, right? Even if it’s not completely polished just test it out, but then if it’s working, don’t be afraid to continue using that thing. Like you said, it’s just some of those basic images that you’ve had for a long time that are crushing it versus the expensive videos that you had produced that were really crafted well, and tell a great story, but then also the spend. I think that’s a very interesting component, too, that a lot of e-commerce businesses lose sight of, right? ‘Cause we’re always thinking scale, scale scale, gotta spend more next month than I did the previous month, right? Gotta get more revenue than the previous month, but to your point, like, pretty much every e-commerce business has seasonality, right? Even Facebook has seasonality, right? And so can you even compete in the November and December auctions is an interesting conversation for a lot of brands these days, right?

– And part of that, one of the things that I think that we learned over time, is, like, planning a little bit of that seasonality into, like, how you do repeat as well, and how aggressive you are with your promotions on repeat. So, for example, December is a really tough time to acquire customers. There’s just so much, obvious, so much noise and all that stuff. And so we’re just much more aggressive from a promotional standpoint in December because we do still want to comp, like, as much revenue as possible. Like, everybody’s got a CEO, or a board, or, like, investor, that’s like, well, you can’t have a down month, right? But sometimes down months happen, and so I’m not saying that, but I’m saying, so you can think like, okay, well, like, I need to spend as much as possible in September, October, and fill that repeat customer funnel, because most people are gonna come back within 90 days. And so then I’ve got a lot more people to target in November, December. So I think that you think about that cycle. I think that it’s good to think about what your model looks like, and, like, plan out your lifetime value model, and think about it from a monthly standpoint. There’s some cool tools out there. We use this tool called Lifetimely, which is just like.

– Love Lifetimely, yeah.

– And I’ve talked to the guy who started it a few times, ’cause he’s so generous with his time, and it’s, like, such a good tool. Like when I was at Minted, which was a much bigger business digitally, it’s, like, nine figure business. Essentially, it was, like, our CFO sitting with our, like, head of analytics, like, running, like, these, like, lifetime value models, right? That I don’t think were more complex than this plugin for Shopify ’cause these were very smart people that were running that model. And so, yeah, I think you’re making a good point. And, sorry, I talk about it a lot, but I think that understanding that lifetime value, and thinking about, planning out your, like, what your revenue looks like is something that’s totally feasible even if you’re small.

– Yeah, no, and it’s super important because, yeah, a lot of even our clients, and a lot of brands that we’ve worked with, or I’ve spoken with don’t measure that, and it feels obvious for a brand like yours because it’s consumable, right? And it’s a low price point, all those types of things, but, like, it’s in every brand, right? Fashion, shoes, you name it, right? It’s like, yeah, that you can lose money on the front end. It’s a whole entire dollar shaped club model, right? Lose money on the front end to make a bunch of money after month four, or whatever it is. And then it’s just giving the right customer experience, et cetera, et cetera, in order to get them to come back and keep buying. And then to your point to keep ’em coming back, to keep ’em coming back, to keep ’em coming back.

– Yeah, I think our next big evolution on the repeat side, and the retention side is trying to figure out how do we get better at subscriptions?

– Yeah.

– Because we’ve done okay, but if we can build a subscription program, which, yeah, is a little bit more scaled, then there’s a lot more you can do with it. And if you can scale your subscription program to a little bit bigger, then there’s a lot of customization stuff you can do for the customers, like, you can do special runs of products, and things like that. And our scale right now doesn’t allow us to do very much. And so if we could figure out how to do that I’d be excited.

– Yeah, yep, I have, like, a skincare brand that I use, and it’s, like, those silly gifts that they throw in there every couple of months that keeps me coming back, like, what am I gonna get?

– I think there’s a company out there that does a pretty good job at this kind of stuff on the subscription side, but you have to have a little bit more scale to work with them. That’s one of those areas that maybe some companies could come in and innovate on. They’ll figure out how to serve brands that do subscriptions that have smaller scale. I think that I’ve talked to them and they’re like, yeah, if you’re under 2,000 it’s pretty hard to do stuff that’s very personalized and custom. So maybe one day there will be a company that comes in, and figures out how to help brands that are doing 500 subscriptions a month, or something like that.

– Yeah, here we are opening up new opportunities for other people to start businesses, love that.

– It’s definitely an opportunity out there. There’s obviously been a huge amount of evolution, and I’m forgetting the word right now, but, like, people breaking through the 3PL area, and companies coming in and doing, and trying to break that model, but I don’t think anybody’s really focused on the subscription side of it.

– Yeah, agreed. I mean, even just Shopify alone, right? There’s a million subscription services, but I’d say there’s only one that sort of matters out of them all, right?

– Yeah, there’s essentially what, there’s, like, two, there’s two apps that I don’t know, most of the entire market share for Shopify subscriptions. And we’re switching from one to the other right now.

– Interesting.

– And then there’s, like, one that’s more custom that’s not as plugged in and that’s pretty much it. And none of those three really help you do very much on the fulfillment side, which is really the way the place, I mean, think about it. Like you just said, Samir, like, the thing that wows you from that brand, that skincare brand is, like, the little things that they throw in there that you didn’t order. That’s the crazy thing. It’s like, if you could figure out how to do that that’s the thing that makes people even more loyal.

– Yep, yeah, absolutely. I mean, they make a good skincare product, too, but, yeah, it definitely was that silly T-shirt I got month three that I still wear, and it’s free marketing for them, and I know exactly what they’re doing, but I still fell right into their trap.

– That’s the thing that we have no way of doing that right now because I’m sure we could figure out how to write it into, like, do some something on the back end, but then, like, we work in 3PL where we can’t do, like, custom packing out. And so it would probably be impossible to figure out how to work with them on it, so. That integrated subscription software fulfillment is a nice space anyway, specifically.

– Yeah, no, absolutely. So, I mean, curious, like, as you’re talking about trying to get more subscription, and obviously we’ve talked about sort of the target demographic that you know that you have, are you paying close attention to store conversion rate, and is conversion and optimization a high priority for you in the business? Like, are you AB testing things? And what does that look like for you?

– That’s a great question, and it’s so interesting, like, you know when you, I don’t spend a lot of time on it, and it’s because our conversion rate is so high. We have such high conversion rates even from Facebook traffic. And maybe I should still be thinking about how do I make it better, but there’s a couple of things that, like, in this business that I’ve never spent a lot of time on because we’re so far beyond what I generally expect of, assume are, like, the benchmarks. So conversion rate we crush, like, any place that I’ve been before. And abandoned cart, we’ve never had an abandoned cart issue. We actually tried some ’cause there’s a company called Metrical, which I really like, which I’ve worked with in a prior company. And they were super helpful in terms of reversing our abandoned cart issues. And so when I moved to Caveman, I was like, we gotta work with them. And we tried and it was like, we just couldn’t get enough, like, lift in abandoned cart to make it worth it. Not because they weren’t doing a good job, but just ’cause, like, we didn’t have that much room. And so I don’t spend a ton of time thinking about CRO, not to say that there are things that we do that are about improving CRO, but I care a lot more, if I could get more traffic, I wouldn’t care if my conversion rate dropped a little bit. And so I live in more of the world where it’s hard to get attention. I think a lot more about how do I get traffic than I do about the conversion side of the equation. Not saying that that for us is the truth.

– Yep, and the back end, like you were talking about increasing lifetime value, increasing subscription. Yeah, it makes sense.

– I care more about, like, my things are all, like, how do I get traffic cheaper? And then how do I get people to repeat more?

– Yep, yep. So curious what excites you the most in the year ahead either in the ECOM industry, or within your own marketing?

– Well, I think that the disruption, like, around Facebook iOS opens opportunities. And so I’m kind of excited to see what that is. I’m guessing you’re probably in the same camp as I am, like, that attribution problem is still not solved. I don’t know if that’s gonna happen this year, but that’s definitely, like, an exciting thing that I’m hoping somebody is working on. And especially with, like, the issues with iOS. I think that if anybody can put together a better way of thinking about attribution for Shopify type businesses, and if you’re a huge business there’s a lot more you can do, but I think that that’s an interesting area. I think for us at Caveman, I think that we’re excited about these keto bars that we launched. We’re entering a state. Paleo is interesting because, like, I probably shouldn’t say this, but paleo is not on trend right now. It’s not the trendy diet right now. And so nobody’s writing about it. I don’t get press inquiries saying, oh, can you tell me about this paleo thing? And so I’m excited, we’re excited about keto because we didn’t leave our principles in terms of paleo. And I still think we made a really delicious product that meets the needs of a diet that’s maybe on the tail end of a trend, but it’s definitely still very popular. So I’m very excited about that. I’m excited we decided to bring our paid, like, our paid social and paid PPC stuff in-house. And I am strangely excited to do that just as from, like, the learning piece of it and just being in it. I haven’t been in, like, Facebook on like, even in the same depth as I am now for a long time. And so that’s kind of fun. And we’re doing really well right now. Maybe just because we’re spending more time than we have in the past. And so it’s kind of fun to see the success when you’re sitting there and you’re AB testing, and you’re tweaking little things. I’m hopeful that we figure out some new creative that works as you and I were talking, like, sometimes, like, sometimes you get a piece of creative that just doesn’t wanna lose in the Facebook algorithm. And so we’ve been working with a content person for a few months and she’s really good. She does a really great job of developing content as a freelancer. And, like, she’s gotten to know our brand very quickly. And so I’m excited that we might be able to, we’re actually very close to being able to do, to get profitable on the first transaction, which we talked a lot about how hard that was, how hard that is.

– Yeah.

– But we’re very close to being able to figure that out. And I don’t know if we can scale it, but I’m excited to get there, and then figure out if there’s ways to scale it.

– Yeah, that would be amazing.

– Yeah, obviously, that’s the ideal thing for a small brand because then you’re not capital constrained.

– Yeah, especially with the low price point too. Yeah, can be very difficult. I mean, unless it’s a super click baby, don’t need to think about it type of purchase, right? But for you, there’s a lot of things I’m thinking about, right? I’m gonna check the ingredients. I’m gonna see does it taste good? There’s a lot of objections that you have to handle, and then, yeah, and it’s still a low price point, right? Even if you buy a box it’s still a low price point.

– Exactly, so unless you’re a brand like Magic Spoon, which is just, like, kind of, like, perfect product, perfect timing that just kind of, like, that hit it in the right way. I think it’s really hard to do, so, yeah. And then we’ve got another product launching in a couple months that I’m excited about. We do a good amount of innovation here. And so that keeps it interesting as well.

– Super exciting. I’ve getting a bunch of awesome advice. Really great tips here. Curious, just on the last note, what advice would you give to other founders, other marketers out there that are trying to break through some of those, maybe those revenue marks, right? Maybe trying to break through the five million, the 20 million, whatever it is, what advice would you give them?

– I think that I mentioned it before, I’ll go back to it, ’cause I still think it’s the crux is like, figure out who is the customer, and how many of those people do you have to get in order to get to that revenue target you’re trying to reach? And does that seem reasonable? Like, just, like, do that sniff test, like, okay. And can I find them? Like, do I know how to find these people? Just that, like, basic, like, I grew up in like, I’m old from digital marketing and like, and when I started doing marketing, I was doing brand marketing, but it’s the same thing. It’s, like, okay, who are you targeting? Where do you find them? Like, what convinces them to try your product? And starting there is so important. And then I think that it’s important to try a lot of channels out. I think it’s important to just, if you can come up with a hypothesis for that channel, why it makes sense, I think you should try it, and try to figure out how to do it cheap ’cause you can always spend more and improve it, but figure out how to do it cheap. Yeah, like, if you want to do sampling how do you figure out how to do it as cheaply as possible? And then I think that, I mean, so my general advice is spending a ton of time with customers. I spend a lot of time, like, in, like, our customer support, like, software, like, we use Gorgias, like, probably a lot of people for, like, customer service. And I spend a ton of time in Gorgias. Like, I try not to respond to cases. I try to leave that to the team that’s working on that, but, like, reading what people are saying. I think it’s super valuable being close to that customer, understanding, like, it helps you to think about all different types of problems, like, whether it’s an acquisition problem, or a repeat problem. I don’t think it can be overrated.

– Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Yeah, I mean, even the abandoned cart surveys, the Facebook comments, all of those things can be gold mines, right? You can find just that couple of comments, you start to see some trends, all that stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s where, yeah, you can have your aha moment, and even, like, we were talking about earlier, right? Find out, yeah, what should you be trying to handle? What should you be ignoring? Because those aren’t your actual customers, right? Those are just the people that are loud.

– Yeah, yeah.

– And don’t wanna focus on them ’cause they’ve only bought one box, and never bought more than one box ever.

– So real funny, like, I think it’s funny, but I don’t know if everybody else will, but we ran this ad where the opening line, it was a video with our CEO and his opening line was cavemen may have been the healthiest people who ever walked this earth. And then he talked for another, like, 30 seconds after that. And we got so much engagement on that compared to our normal ads and posts. It was mostly, like, I’m guessing, like, 35 to 50-year-old men, like, just disagree, like just doing this social media disagreement thing, but these weren’t people who were gonna buy from us, but it was still interesting to see ’cause it also still got the Facebook algorithm excited because there was engagement. So they lowered our CPMs on it, right? So sometimes it was good, but the engagement, like, had to be, like, heavily policed because it was like, it wasn’t people who really were, like, interested in the brand. They just wanted to debate that one fact. And so, yeah, I think that stuff is interesting, but I’m also just excited to keep learning. I’d love to keep learning about new channels that might work. Like we’ve played with a lot of, like, alternative channels, like, wholesale channels, like, Faire, or Abound. Like, we have, like, this partnership with the company that, like, does I think that’s like the media company that’s, like, men’s health where they’re doing, like, an affiliate type of business, so, like, stuff like that, I’m always, like, curious to learn more about and try out because you never know if they’ll kind of be like the next little thing that adds 5% to your business.

– Yeah, makes sense. Well, Damon, I appreciate the time. I appreciate the advice. I urge everybody to check out Caveman Foods. It’s just cavemanfoods.com. Awesome product. Look forward to seeing the new stuff coming out as well. And the tease for the new stuff coming around in a couple of months.

– Yeah, I wasn’t trying to be that teasing, but, yeah, I talked a lot about being people who are mostly 50 over who love it, but everyone tends to love our products. And so if you’re a snacker, then you probably will like our stuff. It just happens that the people who are older tend to love their snacks a little bit more than people who are younger.

– That’s okay, I love my snacks.

– Right, exactly.

– I love that little taste of chocolate at night. I’m not gonna lie.

– I mean, everyone does. I think that older people just don’t give a damn as much, right?

– Got it.

– They’re not trying to impress anybody anymore. They’re like, you know what? I’m worth this little healthy candy bar.

– You got it.

– Thank you, Samir, it was nice to talk to you.

– Well, I appreciate it.

– Like, you have super insightful questions.

– You as well, thanks Damon, yeah. And, yeah, look forward to seeing the new products, and thanks again, appreciate it.

– That was great, have a good night.

– Samir ElKamouny here. Thank you so much for listening to “Ecom Growth Leaders” podcast. If you are a successful brand that is crushing it, and would like to be on this program, please visit go.ecomgrowthleaders.com/podcast-guest. If you got something out of this interview, please share this episode on social media. Just do a quick screenshot on your phone, and text it to a friend, or post it on social. “Ecom Growth Leaders” is sponsored by Fetch and Funnel, a performance marketing agency specializing in omnichannel media buying, creative production and conversion optimization. We’ve partnered with 100 plus brands, and generated over 500 million for clients using our trademarked fetch and funnel method. We have tons of content over at our blog, fetchfunnel.com/blog. And also some amazing eBooks like “How to Crush Your Competitors,” and “How to Produce High-Converting Creatives.” Thanks again for listening to “Ecom Growth Leaders.” We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. So to make sure you don’t miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show. And it means a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to our website, fetchfunnel.com, or follow us on social. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

The post 4 | Paleo Certified Snacks with Caveman Foods’ Damon Levy appeared first on Fetch & Funnel.

1 | The Performance Agency with Fetch & Funnel’s Samir ElKamouny

Samir ElKamouny — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 08:41:59 +0000

00:04
Thanks for tuning in to the Ecom Growth Leaders podcast. This show is intended to highlight marketing and conversion techniques taught by today’s leaders in the Ecom world.
00:16
I’ll be interviewing the top marketers that are influencing the market, making an impact, scaling faster than their competitors, and doing good. I’m your host, Samir El -Kamuni,
00:28
founder and CEO of Fetcham Fetch & Funnel, a performance marketing agency specializing in omnichannel media buying, creative production, and conversion optimization.
00:39
If you enjoy anything from today’s episode, I highly recommend checking out fetchfunnel .com and sign up for our email newsletter where I promise to only send you content you can learn from and apply directly into your business to improve results and scale.
00:55
At the end of each episode, my goal is to have you feeling inspired and fired up by learning from today’s top innovators, marketers, and entrepreneurs. Let’s dig into another amazing story about a unique brand crushing it and learn from their success in learnings.
01:17
Hey there, I’m Samiral Kamuni. I’m the founder and CEO of Fetch & Funnel, a performance -based marketing agency. I’m also the founder of this podcast, Ecom Growth Leaders.
01:28
I’ve been fortunate enough over the last decade -plus to work with hundreds of businesses, marketers, and entrepreneurs. At Fetch & Funnel, we’ve scaled hundreds of businesses and produced over 500 million in revenue for our clients.
01:43
I’ve been able to gain knowledge and experience. experience that has allowed me to consult with businesses, has allowed me to scale businesses, and given me the opportunity to build an amazing network of top marketers and entrepreneurs that are doing really awesome and unique things.
01:58
So I decided to start this podcast because of that opportunity. I wanted to have a platform and a place to share these stories and to talk about how these marketers are getting results.
02:10
what we’re doing at Fetcham funnel to get our clients results, feature brands that we’re working with, and also brands that I’ve had the opportunity to network with and feature these authority figures and thought leaders and just general awesome people that are doing really great and unique things.
02:27
We’ll talk about marketing techniques that are not being spoken about or taught and provide the community with more knowledge and learnings. from my experience and my network’s experience. I’m so excited because of my background,
02:40
my success and my network that it’s led me to want to start this podcast so that I can feature not only the knowledge and experience that I have, but the knowledge and experience of my team at Fetcham Funnel,
02:51
our clients and other marketers as well. I want to help other marketers and entrepreneurs. So, what is Ecom Growthly? Growth Leaders? What is this podcast about?
03:02
This is meant to be a podcast where I’ll be interviewing guests and featuring growth marketing and advertising techniques to benefit the community and benefit other marketers and entrepreneurs out there.
03:15
To help guide them, give them insights into other successful businesses, help encourage them, and just overall provide a knowledge share. I want to highlight and celebrate these bruises. teach other marketers from the experience and knowledge that the featured guests,
03:29
myself and my team have. I started Ecom Growth Leaders with that purpose in mind, just helping others, building a community of marketers and entrepreneurs to benefit and learn from one another and also just talking about some really cool brands.
03:45
It’s a very guest -driven show where I’ll be interviewing CEOs, founders for VPs of marketing, growth marketers, head of growth, head of conversion rate optimization, marketing managers, you name it,
03:56
all different titles, types of businesses, and sizes of companies. It’ll be mostly e -commerce businesses in the direct -to -consumer space, but we will still have some episodes where I’ll interview members of my team,
04:08
and we’ll talk about advertising techniques, creative strategies, conversion rate optimization, and much more. more. So who should listen to ecom growth leaders? Anybody out there trying to learn more in the marketing and advertising world?
04:22
You don’t have to be an entrepreneur or marketer, but that’s who we’re going to be mostly speaking to. That being said, I also want to be promoting social entrepreneurship as a whole as well. I believe that moving forward,
04:34
not only is your brand really important and how you brand your business, but as we’re all becoming more conscious consumers, socially driven brands will come out on top. And I want to highlight these socially driven brands,
04:47
brands that are doing good, trying to make the world a better place, and driven through social entrepreneurship. The intentions is to encourage other marketers out there that they can do really awesome things and encourage other entrepreneurs that they can be more socially driven.
05:02
But very tactical solutions. and strategies, talking about exactly what these brands are doing in order to get the results they’re getting, talking about how they’re able to scale, talking about the techniques, 05:13
the strategies, and growth hacking that they’ve put forth in their business in order to grow quickly and scale. And that’s really who we’ll be featuring. Brands that are crushing it, 05:24
brands that are doing really awesome things, and brands that are scaling really quickly, so that way we all get to learn from their experience and knowledge but also what didn’t work for them as well because there’s so much learning in there too.
05:38
I want you, the listener, to really gain a bunch of knowledge and insights in every single episode. Every episode is intended to have different techniques and strategies.
05:48
Some will be unique to the brand that can be applied to similar brands, some will be a bit more broad where you’ll be able to apply to any kind of business, not only e -commerce businesses.
05:59
So, even if you’re not in the e -com world, there’s gonna be a lot of knowledge and insights to gain from listening to e -com growth leaders. And I just wanna use the platform to create change and positive impact in the world.
06:12
I wanna help other marketers and business owners. I wanna encourage others to do more social entrepreneurship. entrepreneurship. Use the brand to make a difference. But how you can do that while profiting?
06:24
Because at the end of the day, we all need profit to continue growing our businesses. But you can still make a difference and profit doing that. So who would make a perfect guest for listeners to nominate if you’re interested in being featured on the podcast?
06:38
I’m really looking to celebrate guests on this podcast who are in the eCom world that are doing interesting… and amazing things in order to grow their businesses. You don’t need to be a massive nine -figure business to be featured on the podcast,
06:51
but you need to be doing unique marketing strategies, utilizing growth marketing techniques, or growing and scaling. I’m looking to celebrate guests that are humble and willing to educate and teach our community on what’s working for them and what hasn’t worked for them in the past.
07:41
If you want to present to my audience, this is a really big opportunity to be featured in front of this very exclusive and fast growing group. Check out my agency’s website, fetchfunnel .com,
07:52
where a performance -driven growth marketing agency that offers an advertising management, conversion rate optimization, and creative services. services. I thank you so much for listening to this episode.
08:04
I encourage you to listen to all the future episodes. There has already been so many amazing guests providing incredible insights and knowledge.
08:15
And we already have a bunch of episodes up and we have a bunch of amazing guests lined up that are gonna be providing incredible insights and knowledge. I don’t want you to miss out on any of them. you to miss any episodes,
08:26
so make sure to subscribe to this podcast and sign up for our email list so you can gain from this exclusive knowledge that we will be sharing. Thanks again, and I’ll see you on the next episode of eCom Growth Leaders.
08:45
Mooney here. Thank you so much for listening to Ecom Growth Leaders podcast. If you are a successful brand that is crushing it and would like to be on this program, please visit go .ecomgrowthleaders .com /podcast -guest.
09:01
If you got something out of this interview, please share this episode on social media. Let’s do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on social. Ecom Growth Leaders is sponsored by Fetchin Funnel.
09:14
a performance marketing agency specializing in omnichannel media buying, creative production, and conversion optimization. We’ve partnered with 100 + brands and generated over 500 million for clients using our trademarked Fetch & Funnel method,
09:31
tons of content at our blog, fetchfunnel .com /blog, and also some amazing eBooks, like how to crush your competitors. Competitors and How to Produce High -Converting Creative.
09:42
Thanks again for listening to Ecom Growth Leaders. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content, so to make sure you don’t miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up,
9:54
ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and it means a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to our website, fetchfunnel .com.
10:05
or follow us on social. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

The post 1 | The Performance Agency with Fetch & Funnel’s Samir ElKamouny appeared first on Fetch & Funnel.

5 | Awareness Socks with John’s Crazy Socks’ John and Mark Cronin

Samir ElKamouny — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 07:37:08 +0000

Your host, Samir, ElKamouny, talks with Mark and John Cronin. John’s Crazy Socks is a father-son venture inspired by co-founder John Lee Cronin, a young man with Down syndrome. John’s affinity for crazy socks, paired with his love of making people smile, made the mission clear: to spread happiness.

To learn more about this father-son duo, visit https://johnscrazysocks.com/

If you’d like to be a guest on Ecom Growth Leaders, click HERE.

– Thanks for tuning into the Ecom Growth Leaders podcast. This show is intended to highlight marketing and conversion techniques, taught by today’s leaders in the ECom World. I’ll be interviewing the top marketers that are influencing the market and making an impact, scaling faster than their competitors, and doing good. I’m your host Samir ElKamouny, Founder and CEO of Fetch & Funnel, a performance marketing agency specializing in omnichannel media buying, creative production, and conversion optimization. If you enjoy anything from today’s episode, I highly recommend checking out fetchfunnel.com and sign up for our email newsletter, where I promise to only send you content you can learn from and apply directly into your business to improve results and scale. At the end of each episode, my goal is to have you feeling inspired and fired up by learning from today’s top innovators, marketers and entrepreneurs. Let’s dig into another amazing story about a unique brand crushing it and learn from their success and learnings. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Ecom Growth Leaders. I’m super to introduce our next guests, and they are just doing an amazing thing. It’s an amazing social enterprise with an amazing mission, a father and son duo, crushing it. The world’s largest sock store. If you can’t find fun socks that makes you happy on John’s Crazy Socks, you’re not gonna find them anywhere else. John, Mark, super excited to have you guys here. Appreciate you taking the time. Would love to just start off by having you tell our audience more about John’s Crazy Socks and what you guys sell and what the brand is all about.

– Well Samir, first, thank you for having us.

– Thank you Samir, I really appreciate to be here.

– It’s always good to connect with people in Boston, right?

– Right, I love Boston.

– John’s Crazy Socks, we are a social enterprise. And what’s our purpose in life?

– Spreading happiness.

– Love it, and so, yeah, tell us a little bit about the brand. Just tell us more about what you guys are doing and what makes you so unique.

– Well, why don’t we share our origin story? Because origin stories give you your DNA, right? So we just celebrated our fifth anniversary. So gives your mind back and we’ll tell right in the beginning, right John?

– Yes dad.

– So our stories starts in a small log cabin in the woods.

– No.

– No. It starts in suburban long island, outside New York city. And where were you buddy?

– I went in a hunting house, I guess away from four.

– John was in his last year of high school. And here’s something know about John. He’s an entrepreneur, a dancer.

– A dancer.

– An athlete.

– Yep, I am-

– A lover,-

– A lover, and I am a Down syndrome.

– But he also has down syndrome. And if you are anywhere in the United States, if you have a disability, you can stay in the school system until you’re 21. And what’s very important about that is all your services and programs are right there in front of you. But once you turn 21 and it’s known as the 21 year old cliff, you’re on your own. So John, it’s his last year of school, trying to figure out what he’s going to do, right? And what were you looking at?

– I look at job, program and school. I don’t like the option I don’t like.

– And this is an unfortunate reality, is for many people with different abilities, the options aren’t very good. The unemployment rate of people disabilities is double the national average, but that doesn’t begin to tell the true story. Fewer than one in five people with a disability are employed, who just are an option. But John here, he’s a natural entrepreneur.

– Yes, I am.

– If he didn’t see a job he wanted, what were you gonna do?

– I would create one, I would make one.

– What’d you tell me?

– I said, I wanna go eat your penny with my dad, a nice father and son being together.

– Now, I’m real lucky. I’ve got three sons and this is one I could work with. So, okay, we’re gonna start this business here and a couple of ideas we weren’t gonna pursue.

– Right.

– But then right before Thanksgiving, you had your eureka moment.

– I did, I must tell Crazy Socks. Why socks? It’s fun, it’s covered for, it’s clear. I always let me be me.

– We used to drive around looking for these socks. So here’s what we figured. If John loved these socks this much surely other people would too. And we could find our truck.

– Absolutely.

– We went the lean startup route. We said, let’s don’t, we skewed the detailed business plan. We said, let’s get something up and running and see if there’s a response. So you already had the name.

– I got a name to our website.

– We built a website on the Shopify platform. We got some inventory, we’re bootstrapping. So you gotta make do with what you have. The only marketing we did was to set up a Facebook page and I would take out my cell phone and we made videos. And who was in those videos?

– I am, I took for a sock, socks, socks, more socks.

– And we noticed those videos started getting shared. And what day did we open?

– We opened on Friday, these September ninth, 2016.

– We didn’t know what to expect. We’re very fortunate. We had 42 orders the first day. Most of them were local. So what’d we do with those orders?

– I hope to be free.

– We got red boxes, but the socks in the box.

– Yeah, we did.

– Looked at it and said it needs something else. So what else did you put in?

– I put in a digging up for me and some 100 kisses.

– We loaded up with Hershey’s kisses, filled up the car and we’d drive around, John would knock on doors. We were out some nights till 10:30 at night, him knocking on doors.

– Just drive here with your socks.

– And how the customers respond?

– Our customers were upset and they took a fire, took pictures and share on social media, a wood against spread.

– We had customers watering again, just to get John to come back to their house.

– Right.

– So, but I think it’s important, because you could see the ingredients of the business there. And by testing it, you learn some things, so you know one?

– One, people learn about socks. Two, people learn about social media.

– Yeah, they related to John. They like the fact we pledged 5% of our earnings to the Special Olympics. They liked the personal some touch with the thank you note in the candy. Something that surprised us was many people had very emotional response because they knew somebody with Downy syndrome or maybe with autism in their family or relative. And then the other thing you learn is by doing and you learn some things too, we learned that this young man-

– And this is old man.

– This old man, we could sell socks. So that took us through the first month. And at the end of that month, we had shipped 450 through waters at 13,000 in revenue and said, we could do something here. So what we’ve done is gone on and create a social enterprise. Social mission and a business purpose all in one. And they feed off of each other.

– They’re indivisible. Samir, if all we were doing was selling socks, you would be talking to us, right? At the same time, if it was just a kind of cute story, doing something nice, you wouldn’t talk to us either. And what everything we do comes back to one purpose.

– A spreading happiness.

– And you’ve been around, you know companies that come up with their mission and statements and nobody pays any attention. This drives everything we do. Every decision, that’s the criteria by which we measured. And it’s really a simple way to live. Are we gonna make people happy? But we built it on five pillars.

– It is bring in hope, give it back, fun players, you can love, make it personal.

– And make it a great place to work. We’re gonna spread happiness, you gotta start here. Our colleagues gotta love working here. We gotta make it a place where they wanna be. and where it’s a mission worthy of their commitment. And everybody knows that their job is important. Making a personal connection with customers. It what starts with those thank you notes.

– Right.

– But it affects all of what we try to do. We’re focused on building connections and relationships. We’re focused on creating customer experiences and that’s from the way we answer the phones. It’s so when our happiness creatives, that’s our customer service, we don’t time phone calls, there’s no script. You’re actually having a human conversation. It’s our packaging and the way it looks and the ingredients with the thank you note and that candy and showing the picture of who packed the order, the fun products you can love you. We have to be a great e-commerce business. You’ve got to have a great website. You’ve gotta have great selection. We now have over 4,000 different sock choices, which makes John the owner of the world’s largest sock store.

– That’s right.

– You are a sock tycoon.

– You got great products. We have over 29,00 five star reviews and the service has to be great. We do same day shipping, an order comes in today, it’s going out today. One of the things we do we talk a one year guarantee. We give a lifetime guarantee on happiness. If at any point you’re not happy, let us know. You don’t have to spend anything back. We’re gonna refund your money. We’re gonna send you extra socks. Our folks know anybody can spend 200 hours without asking any customer. What are the results of that? How a refund rate is less than one half of 1% of our revenue. Customers are happy. We don’t fight with people. It’s what can we do to take care of you, right? Then there’s the giving back, which is baked into everything we do. It’s not, okay if we make a power of money, then you wanna write a check and give some away. So we started by pledging 5% of our earnings, for the Special Olympics.

– Right?

– And why the Special Olympics?

– I am a best of Olympic athlete.

– That he is, right?

– I am.

– Four sports, you even gave yourself a nickname in a Special Olympic.

– I did.

– What is it?

– Big sexy.

– Big sexy. But here’s what that’s led to, John has now donated over a hundred thousand dollars to the Special Olympics. No Special Olympic athlete has ever done that before. But we’ve gone on to create products that raise awareness and raise funds for causes. So what was the first awareness sock create?

– I first write it as downstage from Awareness Socks.

– We have Autism Awareness Sock-

– Yeah, it’s a policy, but we have Healthcare Suphero Sock to the final workers.

– We should tell folks about that, right? The pandemic comes in 2020, it was bad for our business. We’re down long island, it was very bad here. What could we do? Well, one of the things we did and we made socks.

– Right? So we made healthcare superhero socks to say thank you to the frontline COVID 19 workers. And those that raised over 50,000 dollars for the American Nurses Foundations COVID 19 fund. It’s not that $50,000 in the scheme of things is small, but it was a lot for us. And it’s what we can do.

– Yeah, it’s still amazing, yeah.

– But most of all, what we are doing is showing what’s possible. We showing what entrepreneurism can do. We’re showing the power of the social enterprise. And we’re showing that a young man who happens to have Down syndrome could have a dream. And it was possible to create a business, a business based on love and spreading happiness. And we’re showing what people with differing abilities can do. So we’ve been able to create 31 jobs. 22 of those are held by people with different abilities. And now we wanna show the world. So we create content all the time, videos and pictures and events that we hold. We host school tours and work groups.

– In group and I think it gets me.

– Pre pandemic we crisscross Canada to the US and Mexico. Now, we get to speak around the world. In the past year, we’ve spoke at three different conferences in India, all just to share the story and show a look what can happen. And part of that is I advocacy work. We’ve testified twice before the US Congress. We’ve spoken at the United Nations.

– Right.

– we’ve been very fortunate because we have a platform and people will listen to us because of the success of the business. But then that creates an obligation for us to take advantage of that and do something with it. So, you roll that up, you get John’s Crazy Socks. And that enables us to connect with customers, to grow a business and then to reach out and attract others.

– I love that. Yeah, giving back and yeah, keep spreading happiness, making customers happy, making employees happy, everything.

– It seems so simple, like you’ve heard the old line, the customer is always right. Nonsense. The customer can’t be dead wrong.

– True.

– But we’re not in the business of being right. We’re in the business of making customers happy. So, here’s the dilemma that unfortunately, a lot of companies face. You ship a product, we still use the post office for small packages, nobody beats them by delivering to the door the small packages. You track the package, it says it’s been delivered and the customer says, I don’t have it. What do you do? We send it again then we ask them to look. We’re not gonna fight with them. We could say, “well, we gave it to the post office, “fight with them.” That’s not gonna make you happy. Or you kind of get to create the world in which you wanna live. We have no excuses. We can’t blame it on the board. We can’t blame it on headquarters.

– Right?

– It’s what we all decide to do here. It’s not just us, we’ve had a great team. So here’s an example. A few months ago, a customer called up and wanted to place an order for socks over the phone. But let’s be clear, we don’t do phone orders. We only show online unless you called up and say, “Can I place an order on the phone?” Of course we’re gonna take care of you. And we joke, it frequently seems these are grandmothers from Indiana that this worldwide web is something new. And this particular woman didn’t wanna pay what a credit card, said, oh, maybe check. So where you took the order and she’s gonna mail the check and we made a mistake. We didn’t pull the order right away. We waited for the check to arrive. And when the check arrived, one of the socks that she ordered was out of stock. I happen over here this I say, okay, why didn’t we mail it right away? Why don’t we just send her the order? And got reasonable response? Well, we had to make sure we got the check first. Okay, so Samir, if in this conversation you said, “Mark, I’m gonna send you a check.” Would you send that check?

– I definitely would.

– So this wasn’t a random person. This is somebody we had a conversation with. I said, so why don’t we just do this? Somebody says, they’re going to mail us a check, let’s assume they will, let’s trust them. And we’ll send a package out. And one of our younger colleagues said, can we do that? What you do whatever and how we want to do. Of course, we can do that. And so, well, what if it’s really expensive? It’s over a hundred dollars. Who cares? Let’s trust folks. I went back and looked in five years. Nobody’s ever bounced a check. Now, understand we’re a real business, we need to make money. If you don’t mail us that check, well, John’s got two older brothers who were large.

– Oh yeah.

– Physically imposing and they’ll show up at your door. But in a start I trusted people. And isn’t that a better place to live? You don’t fight with customers. It’s what could we do for you? And it turns out the more fun things we do, the better it is for business. Some of this sounds too pride almost. What do you say are the keys to happiness?

– A key is gratitude and do for others.

– And in fact, the more we do for people, the better for you.

– Right.

– And it’s working.

– Love it, I love it. Yeah, absolutely love it. So, doing so many components, right? And the way that you’re looking at running the business is like you said, it feels unique. It doesn’t sound unique, but it is in this day and age, right? But I’m curious, sort of how you define success at the company and how is it measured? ‘Cause it feels like you have so many unique components to it. So many, almost like missions drawn into one. I’m so curious, just how you measure that success.

– It’s all interconnected. It’s all woven together. So we have to start by being able to talk and we talk all the time about what does it mean to be spreading happiness and we get by it. It can’t be John and I cook something up and we tell others what to do.

– Right?

– Everybody is on board. How do we measure success? There are multiple ways. But I was just going over our monthly reports. So here are some of the key indicators like everybody else. What it’s happening with revenue? People will vote with their dollars. We’re always measuring customer feedback. So what’s happening with our reviews, what’s happening with our net promoter score, what’s happening with our employment levels, and what’s happening with our donations. Those are the big things that we’re checking because that’s what we’re being committed to. I can share our overall strategy is drive the mission. The more we can drive our purpose, the more it raises our brand. And once we do that, then we can go and sell and we can sell everywhere. So we started by selling direct online. We have evolved into selling business to business and now we are committed where we’re finally starting to market that. And this year, one of our objectives, we’ve only had four, was to enter the wholesale market by the fourth quarter. We already have a commitment from Kohl’s. They’re gonna put us in 600 stores for the fourth quarter. Well, how did that happen? They came to us because they heard of the story and they were interested, how can we do business with you? We just got started with DAPOs ’cause they came to us. So, it’s the more you put that brand, the more recognition you’re gonna get. And it’s not some overnight thing and you can’t fake it. And here’s an example. It’s January of 2017, we’re just getting started. We’re learning firsthand. Nobody buys anything in January ’cause they spent all their money in the holidays. And that’s when we discover that people celebrate World Down Syndrome Day. What day is that?

– A day is March 21st, a World Down Syndrome Day.

– March 21st. ’cause ’cause you get Down syndrome by having an extra 21st chromosome, three 21st chromosome such March 21st. Anyway, we find out that people celebrate that day by wearing crazy socks. You would’ve thought we knew that ahead of time, but we’re not that smart. So we said great. At that point we’re only reselling other people’s socks. Let’s go and find a Down syndrome sock, a down syndrome theme sock that we could sell nonexistent, nobody made one. You said-

– I said, I wanna make one, I wanna create one.

– He said natural entrepreneur. He said, right, we’ll make one. So that’s what we did. Today, lots of different companies make day Down syndrome where their suck cause they what we had some success with it. But they don’t have John. They don’t have the commitment we have. They’re not out there supporting the National Down Syndrome society. They’re not out there like we put together a Down Syndrome Superbox which had 21 items in it from Down syndrome entrepreneurial businesses. Businesses run by person with down syndrome and we put that in a box. So we could introduce our customers to these other businesses. You can’t fake that, right? You gotta believe. And then who we are becomes manifest in everything we do. So when you ask, how do we measure that success? No one person could think of all these different things. You will all have to be committed and be looking to create to carry out this purpose. And then you will find a myriad of ways of doing it.

– I love that and a lot of businesses are, right, chasing the money, chasing the dollars, chasing the revenue, month on month growth, right. But to your point, it’s even yeah. With everything else you’re doing will almost drive that growth as it is, right? And then not only that, but your super important about how you treat your team members and how they’re treated and their happiness and all of those other components that gets ignored, right? Yeah, I mean, I know it wholeheartedly at veteran funnel super important to me how the team feels and all of those kinds of things and it’s yeah, it’s super important that it gets lost easily in this day and age, right? And even remote, gets even more difficult, in this day and age.

– You wanna make a difference and you wanna connect and it helps. It was a very difficult process and we really struggled at points, but it helps that we found the perfect strategic partner because they’ve been in business for 60, some odd years, making socks with the partner stores and for brand names. They know, you don’t do it overnight, we’re in it for the long haul. And we started this business. So John would have meaningful workers, whole life.

– Right. It’s not let’s set something up and sale would then go to Bimini, what do we gonna do laying on a beach in Bimini?

– I think John’s having too much fun. He wants to keep selling crazy socks.

– Well, that’s it, I mean, I’ll give you, there are a couple of great anecdotes with John, well, many. But here’s one of them, we had attended a Special Olympic fundraiser, in Manhattan. Then John had gotten up on the stage, we helped him raise some money and it was a young professional mixer who was at a hot club, a lot of wall street type. And we get home about three in the morning. And I say, “John, listen, “you haven’t had a day off an agent. “Why don’t you just sleep in tomorrow? “Take the day off.” Oh, okay. So I get up, I come down to the office. At about 10:30, who comes walking in, but John. Said, “what are you doing?” He’s, “I took an Uber to the office. “I got things to do today.” There you go. Right, or a time when much of what’s happened to us is fantastical. We’ve been so fortunate. So on this particular day, we started on Capitol Hill, meeting with some legislators. And at noon, John was given an award on behalf of the National Down Syndrome Society to chuck rumor, right?

– Right.

– We hope . We come up to New York because we’re speaking an event that night where they’re gonna honor us and we’re gonna help them raise some money. When we get a cab and we had been traveling in a lot. And so it’d been weeks since we really had a day off with the travel and stuff. And I’m worried about John, is it too much? Is he missing home getting overworked? We hop in a cab and he looks at me and says, “Dad, we have to talk.” Ooh, okay, what’s the matter? It’s too much, the trains and the planes and the hotels, it’s too much. Like, oh, are you missing home? Are you time, what is it? Goes, “No, I think we’re spending “too much money on all this.” Like, well, in many of these cases or most of these cases, somebody else is paying for our travel. He pauses, he looks at me and goes, “Oh, we should do more of it then.” Right bud.

– Yeah.

– But here’s another thing. So, nobody could plan for the pandemic. And for our particular business, it hurt, it was bad. We lost a lot of money because we’re very seasonal. And in the spring, a lot of our sales depend upon public events. Everything got wiped out. We had media appearances lined up, everything got wiped out. What do you do? Well when you know what your purpose is that allows you to have some resilience. So the first thing you do is, well, how do we adapt? So we move our tours online. What’s that do? We’ve had schools now from around the world come to visit our place. You move your speaking engagements online. But then you could also look and see, what else can we do? What new opportunities does it create? So some simple ones, we start selling mask. We listen to a lot of charities that had their in-person events wiped out. So we created a touch list and remote charity fundraising program. We have a mission to spread happiness, people are now locked up at home. So what do you do every Tuesday afternoon?

– Every Tuesday, I host a day party Every Tuesday at 3:00 PM Eastern Time.

– John hosts an online dance party. We’ve had a hundred people dancing on Zoom.

– Yeah.

– Every Tuesday afternoon. What better way to spread happiness? It gives you that resilience and flexibility to be able to withstand the pandemic.

– Yeah, I love that. Looking for unique ways to continue spread happiness, looking for unique ways to get the brand out there. Yeah, and I love it all. It’s all baked into just trying to make everybody happy, right? It’s not,-

– Of course. Here’s an example, our colleague, Christie, manages our social media and our push market, our email, and now SMS, I don’t sit here and tell Christie do this. I don’t dictate things, she’s the one that creates that. So, a little bit of who not how. You wanna get the right who’s doing things. But the only way to make it is ’cause she buys in. And then that drives what she does. And it’s really creative. And her and John are having a blast on TikTok.

– Yeah.

– And connecting with all sorts of people. Now we’ve done cross promotions with some big influencers. Just because they’re out there, they having fun and trying different things. But you can’t run that in a top down organization. It’s got to be, we get talented people that are buying in that want to share the purpose. And then we put ’em in a position to succeed, right? So in that sense, I’m at the bottom of the org chart. My job is to work for everybody else so that they can go and do a great job.

– That’s awesome, they’re gonna rally behind you.

– They’ve been very fortunate.

– That’s awesome. So curious, what would you consider to be your biggest success so far? It can be more than one, but yeah. Any specific breakthroughs or-

– Well, one to be in business for five years and people, we were very close to bankruptcy at one time ’cause we were under financed and I made some poor decisions where we got ahead of ourselves. Businesses don’t appreciate, but many people don’t appreciate how hard it is to keep doing it. More than half a businesses fail within five years, you do that.

– Yep.

– Another is that I think we have weathered some storms and we’re still here, sticking to our values are, and knowing what our values are and showing what we’re doing and it becomes, if you wanna crystallize it in moments, just fit at the capital before the house small business committee with my son and be able to share what we do and talk about the value, the business argument for hiring people with different abilities. How awesome is that?

– But that’s only possible to because we do everything else. It’s the best thing here is when we’re busy and the place is full and it’s full of activity and you see people like, and one of the things we do when we get a new employee, we have a check server ’cause so many of our colleagues have never had a job before. So we gather around and we give people their first paychecks. How awesome is that?

– Oh yeah and empowering and yeah.

– So we are so fortunate to be able to witness and see what we do. I mean, I’ll give you an example. I’m sorry, I don’t go on all day, you gotta stop me. Come without Thomas, all right? So Thomas is one of our stock ringers. His mother called us up in October of 17 saying, “I hear you hire people like my son. “I want you to give my son a job.” One of our colleagues said, “well, when we have an opening, “we’ll post it and check back.” She called every day ’cause that’s what moms will do. And I spoke to her and I said, “tell me about Thomas.” She’s, “Well, he’s a young man with autism “and he’s in his early 20s. “He’s in a very bad way, very depressed. “We have trouble getting to come out of his room. “Doesn’t wanna shower or shave. “Can’t get him to join any programs. “And he hasn’t spoken to his father in over six months.” Okay, sounds like a wonderful employee. When we had an opening, we called her up. We said, “Bring Thomas out.” Now our starting drop was at that point was $15 an hour as a sock wrangler. And to get that, if you get to know us, you’d find out John here is a very nice guy, I am not. You’re gonna work here, you gotta produce. So we’ll train you but to get that job, you have to pass the sock wrangler test. You have to pick six orders in 30 minutes or less and be accurate. Thomas passes that test like he was put on his earth to pick orders in a fulfillment shop. So where are we at today? On the days he works, Thomas is up at 6:30 in the morning, showered and shaved, and waiting for his father to drive him to work. And the young man who would’ve looked at you and wouldn’t talk, comes in and goes around and says good morning to everybody. How awesome. And I wanna be really clear, John and I, we did nothing. All we did was hire a good employee. We were willing to give them an opportunity and look what happens. So, we’ve met a lot of people. We’ve been fortunate to meet movie stars, TV stars, and elected officials and you became suck buddies with president Bush.

– Right.

– Right? But we got to meet Thomas and we have a lot of that here. How great.

– Yeah, and spreading that word is amazing too ’cause plenty of businesses can do the same. They don’t have to be in the mission driven, focused business, right? They still have those jobs to fill. They can still offer those opportunities to those individuals.

– Yes and we do this because we’re running a business. We’re doing it because it helps our business. And when it comes to marketing, it’s sharing the story. So that customers know that we have customers that come to us in one of two ways. They come to us ’cause they heard the story and that may have been through one of our charity partners or some event we’re in. When they come to us because we’re the world largest sock store. We have better choice than everybody else. We got great socks and great service. But if you come to us for those socks, then you find out the rest of the story and you fall in love. And if you come to us because you like the story you find out, oh my God, I can get whatever I want to, right? I can get socks forever.

– Right.

– Can wear a different pair of socks every single day, huh?

– Well, nobody bought, last year for the holidays, like I say, we get that fun. So, for the first time we put out a version of a holiday catalog. But two were the gifts in there, one was a complete sock draw and we had a whole bunch of people buy that. You’ll get 18 socks and a bunch of different things. So we’ll give you everything you need in socks. The other, which nobody got, but maybe this upcoming year they will, is socks for a year, 365 different pairs of socks picked out by John in a giant trunk.

– Love it. So curious, maybe tell us a couple of your biggest growth levers that you’ve been able to pull for the business. I know we’ve talked about a couple of them but, yeah, really curious about what those look like and why you feel like they were so successful.

– Right, it’s multichannel. We grew a lot on social media, particularly Facebook, now Facebook has evolved. Part of that is looking not to sell, but looking to engage, sharing what will connect with people and kind of empathy. And that will lead to sales, right? When you stop trying to sell you’ll get sales. So that was very important towards the organic growth through social media and that’s still important to us. Every marketer knows market here knows your email list may be the single most valuable thing you have, right? Because we have 240,000 Facebook followers, but we know they belong to Facebook. I can’t just bring them, contact them all. So we built our email list. People trust us when they give us that letter, their name and their email, and you have to treat it that way. So we are very careful, we don’t share with anybody else. We don’t take advantage of people. We only send emails to people that are gonna open their emails. So we’re sending it to about a third of the names on our list. We have over a quarter a million people on our list. We only send people that are gonna open. So one of our regular emails is John’s Friday note.

– Right.

– That’s not to sell. It’s just to connect and John shares what he’s doing. Well, shares something that’s happened to him, some advice or something.

– Right.

– And so you got a 35% open rate, Which, okay, you’re doing that. So email is very important to us. It accounts for about 28 to 30% of our revenue. We do some search ads and social ads, search ads are more successful than the social ads. And we do a lot that’s related to just pursuing the mission and doing things that leads then to media coverage and more social sharing, referrals and social sharing. So, we’ve been very fortunate. We’ve been on Fox and Friends a dozen times, CBS Evening News has done things on us and New York local WPIX and News 12 have us on frequently. Not because we are hawking a sale, but because there’s something that’s interesting going on that their viewers wanna see and they’ll help tell the story. And then they found out that John’s pretty good on the media, huh?

– My idea.

– So a lot of what we do, sharing exactly stuff going on. So for 2022, we laid out. We want to do 10 podcast guest appearances a month. We’re about to release our own podcast, the Spreading Happiness Podcast. We wanna make sure we’re doing at least four speaking engagements a month because that’s letting us get out there. And we’re so grateful. You had us on your show to tell the story and connect with more people and change some minds. And if we do that, oh, they’ll buy socks along the way. So, if I come back, you ask about levers. We’re pressing that social media leverage. We’re driving a lot through push media with moved into SMS. We’ve had much more successful with email than SMS. Yes, we do some digital advertising and it’s public appearances, speaking engagements and building on those.

– The multi-channel, looking at it from engagement perspective, not as just trying to use it to sell then telling the story, telling the mission, that was great. But then on the other hand, it’s just, yeah, it’s just getting people engaged, using the channels to continue that right. To get people interested and not only the story, but like you said, just what’s going on in John’s life. What’s going on in your lives. What’s going on inside the business. I mean, that’s something that so many brands lose these days on email, right? It’s sort of the old school way of running good email marketing was get to know, right. Get to know people, get to know the individual, get to know the brand, get to know what’s going on, don’t sell, you can have your sales, you can run your promotional emails and you gotta run those of course. But a minimum of one third of your emails should just be, getting to know the brand and getting to know what’s going on and getting an inside glimpse and all that kind of stuff, which does better selling, I would argue than sales emails and promotional emails and things like that.

– Yes, and then your customers care and they tell other people. When you wow them, they become your best sales people. They’re turning us on to other people. It’s last year, we struck up a relationship with the American Cancer Society to work with them on their goal together campaign to fight pediatric cancer. We did everything we could to work with them to promote that. We did visits to children’s hospitals, we made videos, none of that had anything to do with sales. But the more you do that, the more sales you’re gonna get and that’s not being cynical. That’s how you connect with people. So we don’t go in talking about, well, what are you gonna do for us? Or how are you gonna help us sell with what can we do? What can we do to make a difference? What can we do to have an impact? But then you get attention and people, if you’re going to sell the cheapest item, you will always have a market. Your people will always be willing to pay the least amount, but increasingly consumers are saying, wait a second, before I give you my money, who are you? How do you treat your employees? How do you treat the environment? How do you treat the community? What are you doing? And in general, if you have a social enterprise, if you’re a social entrepreneur. But more specifically a business like ours, we’ll be glad to tell you. And Hershey, so now the experience becomes, you’re not just buying socks, but employ people you’ll have can give back. When you see John and our colleagues running at a Special Olympic meet, you’re feeling good because you help do that.

– Yeah, that’s great. And then the role that creative and content is playing and the way that you’re using that and yeah, cross channel across different medias.

– And it has to run through everything you do. So, right, here’s an example. You black Friday and cyber Monday are real, right? We don’t talk about them. We have gratitude week ’cause that fits in with us and it starts the Tuesday before and before Thanksgiving and it runs through Thanksgiving. We have gratitude week because we’re gonna say thank you to our customers. And we give back every day in a different way, Thanksgiving, it may sound hokey, but it’s who we are. We run nothing on Thanksgiving. I mean, we don’t shut the website down, but we’re not sending you emails. We’re not running ads because it’s Thanksgiving. We run a 12 days of giving at Christmas where every day, every one of those days for we donate a dollar for every order to one of our charity partners. It’s gotta be in keeping with who you are or here’s one when it comes to products, here’s our guidelines. It’s gotta be fun. It’s gotta spread happiness and John’s gonna get-

– Right.

– So two or three years ago, somebody here ordered some socks that said, “Yo, bitch.” Now I can tell you those socks will sell. But we’re not set when those socks, that’s not who we are. We’re we had somebody recently, a consultant was bringing in somebody they claimed that they could scrape names and emails from Facebook and Instagram. And if you gave them a competitor, they’ll get all their names then you could do email campaigns and run social media campaigns. And I’m listening to this and I’m saying, okay. But the people whose names you’re getting, if I call up Facebook, they’re not gonna give ’em to me because those people didn’t get permission. And you’re asking to do this, like, yeah, but Mark, everybody does this and you’re gonna make this money and this and that. I’m like, well, we’re not. It’s not who we are. And a guy that did the introductions says, I told you he’s very moral. I’m not freaking moral, I’m just another slub coming along. But I can tell you if you wanna have trust, if you wanna have customers, you can’t do that. And that seems simple to me. And if you treat people right, they’ll stay around. They’ll be there. It’s not hard.

– Yep, yeah, sticking to the values and people know, I mean, they could sniff right through that stuff quickly, right? And I’m with you. I mean, it’s super important to, yeah,-

– We get asked, what’s the most important thing? Okay, gimme one bit, I don’t know what that is. But one thing I know, you have to know your purpose, right? It’s this Simon said I know your why. ’cause that’s gonna be your north star. And here are gonna to be times when it’s gonna be really hard and you are gonna get spun around, but you gotta know your north star and what it’s about. And you gotta know your values, ’cause your values are gonna keep you moving in the right direction. But it can’t be lip surface, It’s all spreading happiness. If you walk in here, there’s a big neon side of just spreading happiness. It lights up everything we do and it affects everything you do. You have to believe. You’re never gonna be happy if you save one thing and do something else. And then it affects everything you do. So we’re in the midst of moving. We’re gonna be moving the larger space, larger warehouse. We get the team together. Well, we’re gonna pick the colors we want and they’re gonna be fun, happy colors. And they’re gonna make you feel good when you walk in, it’s like a big trail, white, we’re gonna have big blue walls and green walls. And that’s a small thing, but it’s everything you do.

– Love it. John, what color wall are you gonna choose?

– Blue.

– Blue, you’re in your blue phase. You want Picasso.

– So I’m curious in closing to both of you, what excites you the most in the year ahead?

– More generally, it’s reaching more folks. We’re excited that we’ll be growing at B2B and the wholesale business, but we’re also gonna roll out. It’s one of our four key initiatives. A new program called JCS champions, we’ll start enrolling people in October. We are going to put people differing abilities into their own business. We’re going to give them a business in a box that will enable them to create a micro business. We’ll give them a stand, we’ll give them inventory and training. We’re gonna set them up. And once we start over a five year period we’re going to put 1000 people into business. We’re gonna light up this country and show what people with different abilities can do. We’re incredibly excited about that.

– That’s super exciting. I love that, that’s amazing. John, how about you? What’s got you most excited for this upcoming year.

– What do you wanna be doing?

– I wanna think about it.

– You wanna think about it? We’re dancing. We got that Jeep thing we may be doing of design the Jeep-

– Yeah, I wanna do the Jeep, yeah I do.

– You got lots of stuff cooking, more dance,

– Sport travel, I know.

– You wanna get the Memphis.

– Oh yeah, I really wanna go Memphis.

– Memphis and Nashville? I do gotta get down to Nashville go to the right auditorium. Sound good.

– You’ll be doing a bunch of dancing in Nashville.

– Yeah we are and we’re very excited. I’m particularly excited. It’s a small thing, but we just got invited to speak at a conference in, in Fargo, North Dakota. And this has me excited because that means I was waiting for North Dakota that I will have visited every one of the lower 48 states. I was waiting to get to North Dakota and now we’re gonna Fargo. Make it happy, it makes me happy, I’m excited.

– I’m very happy for you dad.

– Yeah.

– Hopefully it’s in a couple of months when it gets a little warmer.

– Well John, AKA, Big sexy, Mark, I really appreciate you guys, awesome what you’re doing? I encourage everybody to check out John’s Crazy Socks and at johnscrazysocks.com. If you don’t have an internet connection, I heard they may or may not take phone orders over the phone.

– Deliver it to your home if we’re traveling. If folks wanna get a hold of us, we’re on all the social media platforms. And if you wanna get a hold of us personally, reach out to us on email at service@johnscrazysocks.com. We’re always .

– And I’m looking forward to the Spreading Happiness podcast. I’m gonna look forward to that. I’m looking for that.

– Yeah. It’s sharing what’s going on with John, telling some jokes, updates on John’s love life, sharing some good news. It’ll put a smile on your face.

– Awesome. Well, thanks you guys, I really appreciate it. It’s been an honor meeting you.

– Thank you.

– Super excited for your success and to continue watching you guys grow.

– This is great.

– Appreciate it. Samir ELKamouny here. Thank you so much for listening to Ecom Growth Leaders podcast. If you are a successful brand that is crushing it and like to be on this program, please visit go.ecomgrowthleaders.com/podcast-guest. If you got something out of this interview, please share this episode on social media. Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on social. ECom Growth Leaders is sponsored by Fetch & Funnel, a performance marketing agency specializing in omnichannel media buying, creative product and conversion optimization. We’ve partnered with 100 plus brands and generated over 500 million for clients using our trademarked Fetch and Funnel method and tons of content at our blog fetchfunnel.com/blog. And also some amazing eBooks like how to crush your competitors and how to produce high converting creative. Thanks again for listening to ECom Growth Leaders. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. So to make sure you don’t miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up rating and reviews go a long way to help promote the show. And it means a lot to me and my team. Wanna know more, go to our website, fetchfunnel.com or follow us on social. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

The post 5 | Awareness Socks with John’s Crazy Socks’ John and Mark Cronin appeared first on Fetch & Funnel.

6 | Aging Beautifully with Look Fabulous Forever’s Janis Thomas

Samir ElKamouny — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 05:37:07 +0000

Your host, Samir ElKamouny, talks with Janis Thomas of Look Fabulous Forever. Look Fabulous Forever wanted to create products specifically formulated to enhance the beauty of older faces. They also wanted to celebrate age rather than promote anti-aging. With advanced marketing and CRO tactics, they’re one of the fastest-growing beauty brands.

To learn more about Janis’ work, visit https://www.lookfabulousforever.com/

If you’d like to be a guest on Ecom Growth Leaders, click HERE

– Thanks for tuning into the Ecom Growth Leaders podcast. This show is intended to highlight marketing and conversion techniques taught by today’s leaders in the ecom world. I’ll be interviewing the top marketers that are influencing the market, making an impact, scaling faster than their competitors, and doing good. I’m your host, Samir Elkamouny, Founder and CEO of Fetch & Funnel, a performance marketing agency specializing in omnichannel media buying, creative production, and conversion optimization. If you enjoy anything from today’s episode, I highly recommend checking out fetchfunnel.com, and sign up for our email newsletter, where I promise to only send you content you can learn from and apply directly into your business to improve results and scale. At the end of each episode, my goal is to have you feeling inspired and fired up by learning from today’s top innovators, marketers, and entrepreneurs. Let’s dig into another amazing story about a unique brand crushing it and learn from their success and learnings. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of Ecom Growth Leaders. I have Janis Thomas here with me from an amazing brand called Look Fabulous Forever. Janis, thank you so much for joining today.

– Thank you for having me Samir. I really appreciate it.

– Super excited to talk about the brand. Would love to just kind of start off by you telling our audience more about Look Fabulous Forever, and what you sell and what the brand is all about.

– So Look Fabulous Forever is a direct consumer beauty brand. We sell makeup and skincare for older women. But generally in the beauty industry, older women is anyone over about 30, but our audience are predominantly in their 60s, 70s, and even 80s, that they’re post menopausal and they have very different needs from their skincare makeup than mainstream audiences do. So our founder, Tricia Cusden, started the brand eight years ago, and she essentially said that if those products weren’t out there for her, then she was gonna formulate them herself, design them all, manufacture them all, set up her own website, her own YouTube channel, all of those things. She is to the most incredible woman. She is 74 now and still very heavily involved in the business every day.

– Love it, love it. So what is your role at Look Fabulous Forever?

– So I am the e-commerce and marketing director, and that means that I lead both marketing from a technology kind of point of view, as well as our e-commerce platform, merchandising, those kind of things, as well as our kind of traditional marketing efforts, predominantly digital being a DTC brand.

– And you have a very impressive resume. So I’m sort of curious how did you get into it and what brought you to Look Fabulous Forever, and yeah, just for other marketers out there looking to either make a switch or continue in a very interesting and an awesome path like you’ve taken.

– Yeah, so my career has been very diverse as you say. I spent a long time in media and entertainment, particularly developing one of the first streaming platforms, even before Netflix was doing streaming, a lot of time in subscription, which then led to me going to watch for Birchbox because essentially Birchbox found they could teach a subscription person about beauty, but it was harder to teach a beauty person about subscription. So from there I’ve been much more an e-com specialist, particularly scale up is my superpower that I’m not really into that kind of startup, kinda early stage, do you have product market fit. But once you’ve got product market fit, that’s my thing that I will accelerate and grow your business. And that’s the stuff that I know well.

– That’s a great superpower to have. So I’m curious how you define success at Look Fabulous Forever and how is it measured?

– Yeah. So for us it’s really that balance between growth and profitability. That yes, we wanna grow rapidly, but we are not necessarily kind of looking to take on right now like a massive amount of investment is like, well, let’s do that self-funded growth. How do we do that and accelerate at a point where we are kind of at least breaking even, and kind of go as fast as we can at that point. So yeah, it’s about revenue growth, but it’s also so about profitability as well.

– Got it. Great metrics to be going after. Of course most important for most, do you feel like there’s other like super important metrics that you’re paying close attention to as far as your what you’re doing with digital or even internally as the company is growing?

– Yeah. So personally I have like four key metrics, which are revenue and profitability, but conversion rate and new customer revenue. And more broadly within the business, we have, essentially we’ll call it four pillars of growth, which are around conversion rate, optimization, reaching new customers, developing new products and kind of expanding the skillset of the team, kind of growing the team, but not necessarily in terms of headcount, much more in terms of skills and ability and kind of really that continuous improvement mindset and culture.

– And so I’m curious kind of along those lines too, because I know you’re paying super close to conversion rate and would love to talk about that more in a few, but I’m curious as you’re paying close attention to that, do you need to pay close attention to lifetime value as well or is it just you’ve got such a great target demographic that once they test try the product, they love it so much that they sort of continue with it or what does that look like?

– Yeah. So we certainly have a very loyal customer base because our product is unique. And when our customers kind of discover us, it’s a joyful moment of, “Oh my God! “I feel seen and I belong and all of those things.” But I think for us, lifetime value is almost separate from conversion rates like recognizing what are the factors that drive lifetime value. So for example, our customers who buy both skincare and makeup from us, their lifetime value is about twice that of customers who only buy makeup from us. So getting makeup customers to buy their first skincare purchase is a key lifetime value trigger for example. So it’s understanding what drives lifetime value is often around product activation, category activation, and replishment.

– So interesting. So then is there one side of that, that you are always trying to get a first time customer to buy the makeup or the skincare and as more of a lead in type of product or I know you push packages as well, like your skincare essentials and things like that.

– Yeah. It’s very difficult to get first time customers to buy skincare. It’s much easier to tell the makeup story. The makeup story is immediately obvious. You can watch a YouTube video and you can understand how our blusher works. Like for example, our blusher is one of our key products. And if you wear a traditional powder blush, as you get older, it sits in the wrinkles in your skin, and it’s not very flattering. But if you use a cream blush, older skin is really absorbant. So what happens is you put it on the morning, you look in the mirror and you look absolutely fantastic. And then lunchtime it’s disappeared and you’re as pale as a ghost. And so our blusher formula goes on as a cream, so it doesn’t sit in your wrinkles, but then it sits on your skin as a powder so it doesn’t get absorbed so it maintains that vibrancy. So it’s much easier to tell those kind of stories about our makeup products and then take people on a journey to recognizing that we know what we are talking about, and this is the difference our skincare makes, but that’s something that you’re gonna see much more over time that you’re gonna be using it for a few weeks or a few months before you say, “Oh, wow, this is having a real difference to my skin.”

– Got it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Plus you’re doing a lot of really interesting things with, like you’ve got shot by tone where you can allow people to go after, look shot by their different skin tones. You’ve got your amazing color quiz, which yeah, I mean, it sort of speaks for itself. And then you’re spending a lot of time on education as well it sounds like where you’ve got the super successful YouTube channel, you’re forming communities, you’re doing all of these amazing things. I mean, how important of a role does sort of all of those things play? I know it feels a little obvious, but just our audience can really understand it, how much of a role do you think a lot of those different piece of content and personalization, all the things that you’re focusing on?

– Yeah. It’s really about that journey to purchase. And I think particularly our audience is gonna take, whatever it is, a standard I’ve heard this start of like 50 odd touch points on the journey to purchase bundled around. I’m sure for our audience it’s probably higher. And the thing that gets to through the door the first time is that content and particularly seeing Tricia and seeing, our customer sees herself reflected back and this is not some 30 year old trying to sell me anti-aging moisturizer. This is somebody who looks like me and sounds like me, and has the same challenges as I do. And then bringing them closer and closer on the journey to purchase as they get real value out of our brand, that that might be watching Tricia’s videos on YouTube, or that might be engaging with our social community or any of those things. It might even be here hearing Tricia talk about kind of what retirement communities should look like for example. Women come to our brand from all kinds of different places, but the first touch point is normally some kind of content. And then as they get to know us and trust us and believe that we know what we’re talking about, then they’re ready to make a purchase.

– Love that. You gave a little tidbit there too, which was an interesting one was creating engaging content that may or may not be anything that the brand has to do with, anything the product is, right? But it’s engaging content that your target audience is going to want to absorb and consume, right? I feel like that’s a little tenacious that you just kind of threw in there that I feel like is very interesting one.

– Yeah. And I think it is that. Having a brand that stands for something is easier to then kind of have those opinions on much wider issues, which then bring in a much wider audience that we have customers who don’t necessarily wear a lot of makeup. And I think that’s one of the most interesting things about our brand is. In 2020, lipstick sales dropped off a cliff. Why would you wear lipstick? For us, they went up. And part of that was that Trish’s message to our community is that we wear makeup for ourselves. We are not wearing it for the outside world. We are looking for, when I look in the mirror, I see myself and I see a confident older woman and those kind of things and that comes from makeup and you’re doing it for yourself rather than for other people. So that’s why our lipstick sales did really well in 2020.

– Look good, feel good, right? Love that. So curious, just what would you, I mean, you’re accomplishing a lot, you’re managing a lot, you’ve got a very important role at the company. Curious, what would you consider to be your biggest success so far? Could be more than one, but yeah. Any specific breakthroughs or…

– I think for me, it’s always nice to be right. And when I joined the company, the thing I said is we need to get our conversion rate up. That’s what’s holding us back from growing. Not just if we doubled our conversion, we would double our revenue obviously, but actually it would make new customer acquisition much more cost effective, and we would be able to scale faster. So it was like, this is the thing. And for me, my hypothesis was the things that we needed to do was to provide more personalized experiences. Because we were trying to do a kind of one size fits all, had the homepages like stuff with something for everyone. We said, “Look, if you’re a first time customer, “you need to understand how our products work, “what Tricia’s story is, why we exist.” And we really need to do that kind of storytelling piece. Whereas if you’re a returning visitor, you already know Tricia, you already know those things. You wanna get into product, you probably wanna get different types of product because you’re probably buying skincare from us as well as makeup. But if you’re a first time visitor, you’re more likely to buy makeup from us. And so all of these things and saying actually, do you know what? Let’s provide more personalized experiences, let’s provide more personalized advice, particularly as you mentioned the color quiz saying, how do I decide what color lipstick is going to suit me? And that’s really when you can’t go into a store and try it on the back of your hand, it’s really hard to tell and saying actually let’s develop something that looks at the data that our customers have. And so it’s things like, what colors dominate your wardrobe? Does gold or silver jewelry suit you better in your opinion? And things like what color do the veins in your wrist appear? That actually for a lot of people they’ll appear more kind of bluey or purpley and for other people that appear more kind of greenish and that’s actually a key indicator of the sort of colors that is going to suit you. So we take all that data from the customer and then we say to her, “Are you looking for a lipstick “because you’re going to the supermarket “or are you looking for a lipstick “because you’ve got like a fancy night out?” Then again, we’re gonna recommend something different. And kind of all of those things that say, do you know we’re recognizing each customer is different and needs a different experience and different recommendations and all of those things. And yeah, we have more than doubled up conversion rate as a result. So that’s really, really good news.

– Yeah. That’s amazing. Doubling your conversion. It’s very impressive. But we talked about a bunch of it really interesting things that you’ve been doing on the conversionary side, on the marketing side, a lot of success you’ve had prior to we were talking earlier. Curious, what are some of maybe the two or three of the biggest growth levers that you’ve you’ve pulled for the business?

– Yeah. I mean, I think for me I’m an absolute passionate advocate for paid social as a acquisition tool. And here in the UK, there’s a group that collects data from UK e-commerce retailers. And they have this stat that on average UK e-commerce retailers are generating less than 1% of their revenue from social. And I’m like, “What are you doing “that you’re not driving more revenue from social?” So that for me was a big thing. And I think joining the business. And we were social first business. Tricia’s YouTube channel is huge. We have thousands of subscribers, we have millions of views, all of these things. The Facebook channel’s been there from day one, but the business hadn’t necessarily cracked it and like coming in with that test and learn and particularly I’m a real advocate for that kind of full funnel marketing. And I think the industry is catching up to, I was out conferences four or five years ago, banging the drum for, you know what? It’s not just about bottom of funnel. You’ve gotta attract a pool of people who know your brand and are interested in it in order to be able to convert them. And that’s where like really rapid growth comes from is you’ve gotta fill the top of the funnel and convert the bottom of the funnel. And I think that’s the thing for be that I think businesses who are doing really well with paid social are doing that. They’re looking at like, how do you take people on that journey from the first time they’ve heard of your brand to the point that they’re gonna make the purchase and they’re making repeat purchase and all of those things.

– And paying close attention to probably where those touch points are and then what that customer journey looks like, because I’m sure someone coming from some organic YouTube videos first versus a Facebook account first and reading a blog article or getting some of your content or signing up for your $100 off or you’re win $100 and things like that must be very different customer journeys that then you probably are paying close attention to like, okay, like you said, how many touch points do I need to get in front of this person? How do I impact the conversion rate of each of those different people?

– Yeah. And I think as well, also still testing and having that hypothesis and being like, well, do you know what? this creative works really well over here, let’s just try it with that audience. And sometimes there’ve been things that have surprised us that you would say, “Oh, I didn’t think the customer “who had seen that particular video “would’ve then come in this particular route” but sometimes they do. And sort of trying not to be, there’s a phrase about if you go in to a conversation assuming that you’re right, then you’re not gonna change your mind. You’re not gonna learn anything.

– Yeah. Yep, yeah. Love to test. Don’t take… You can use assumptions to run tests. That’s totally fine. but don’t not test or try something completely random or unique because you have assumptions. I feel like that’s super key and love that. The full funnel, the multi-channel, not being afraid to test, paying close attention to conversion rate, trying to increase conversion rate, all very key things, which I’m super glad to hear and yeah, pushing to our audience so that they are paying close attention to those things. But of course some mistakes happen along the way. So I’m curious, maybe what are some mistakes that you have made and maybe some missteps that have happened, maybe from testing or assumptions or anything in between.

– I remember interviewing for a role a couple of years ago, and somebody said, “What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in your career?” And I was like, “I’ve never made any mistakes in my career.” And the thing is, is like, obviously I have done things that have not worked, but I really have this mindset of, do you know what? If you tried something and it didn’t work, you learned something. That’s massively valuable information. So I have this mindset that there’s no such thing as a mistake. Like for example, one of the things that we just A/B tested was this theory that says that rounded buttons perform better than buttons with square edges, because we have this kind of subliminal thing that sharp things, signify danger, and what have you. So I was like, “Oh, I’d be really interested “to test that particularly because our brand, “maybe those hard edges don’t feel like they fit “with our brand “so I’d be really interested to kind of A/B test that “and see what difference it makes.” What came back from that was that for desktop, it was kind of about even that both shapes kind of performed the same. But on mobile, the rounded edges performed worse. And so the hypothesis that I then kind of came out from there was because we were A/B testing it, essentially we were kind of filing off the edges. So what we were doing was we’re making the button just slightly smaller. So from a motor skills point of view, you were making it slightly harder to click on from a mobile perspective. And that is the theory of why that testing work. And actually we should be testing is bigger buttons first and then looking at the shape of the button. So technically, yeah, that was a mistake in the sense it didn’t work, but we’ve now got an even better, more valuable test to run as a result of it. So I don’t think there’s any such thing as mistakes. There’s only really, really valuable learnings. And I want to work in an environment where every day people think, “Well, let’s try it. “Let’s see. “Let’s know.”

– Yeah. No, absolutely. And that’s a key I think, right? If you’re not able to make, yeah, we should come up with a different name for it. But if you’re not able to come up with those mistakes, right? If you’re not able to test and then, I mean, that’s how we look at conversionary optimization at Fetch & Funnel, right? Is if the test didn’t result in a positive impact, whatever metric we were trying to improve, that’s totally okay because now we have data that exactly like you said, either that doesn’t work or maybe there’s a better optimization we could make or some learning from that. But love that you’re also saying, the differentiation as well that you need to be paying close attention to, desktop versus mobile. And I’m sure you have a large audience that is on tablets as well, which I feel like a lot of people don’t pay attention to as much anymore. They’re sort of like, “Well, the phones have gotten bigger. “iPad is such a small and amount of viewers.” But I feel like most of the family and women in my life that are of older age, if they’re retired, they’re pretty much surfing the web and doing everything on an iPad. They’re sort of like don’t want the computer because it feels clunky and it’s not as convenient for them. So yeah, makes it really interesting. Even more important to what you’re saying, because yeah, you’re gonna use your finger to interact with that. And it’s frustrating for anyone if you’re trying to click something and doesn’t work. Forget someone who’s older and is gonna have less patience or more patience. You never know. But yeah, love that. Love that you’re paying attention to that and know that’s awesome. So, I mean curious. I know you’re paying a ton of attention to conversion rate, I guess how are you looking at A/B testing or how are you doing that sort of how are you coming up with some of your tests and things like that? I love to talk about out CRO on the podcast and have anybody sort of learn from it and you have a very impressive skillset as it relates to that. So I’m curious what insights you could you have for a listener base?

– Yeah. So I joined the business not quite two years ago. And when I came in, I was like, “Do you know what? “There are a lot of things like personalization, “like the color quiz that I just think that we need to do.” Yeah, we could test it, but it’ll just delay us. And it feels like the right thing to do. So for about 18 months it was like, do you know what? This is the roadmap we need to improve our product landing pages, we need to improve our homepage experience, we need to do x, y, and z. We think that we need to do that. So it wasn’t until actually December just gone that we’re like, “Okay, now we’re ready to get into that subtle granularity “of what is the color of the button? “What’s the shape of the button? “What does it say? “What’s the font size, all of those things.” So it’s actually only now we’ve been getting into A/B testing and we’ve just got like this huge list of things that we want to try and we want to understand. And I think for us, it’s saying, do you know what? We can test this element of the product page, we can test this element of the homepage, we can do this element of the menu. And those kind of three things can run concurrently because they’re not actually kind of touching the same point and we can kind of accelerate our learnings. And I think we’ve been really surprised with the things that have worked really quickly were not necessarily top of our list of things that we thought that were gonna make a difference. Like one of the things that we just tested that did like really well in like days we could see that it was a winner was to do with kind of condensing some of the menu options that we display once you are in the basket and just actually kind of condensing it to kind of give more focus on the basket. And that was just like instantly like, yeah, you should do this. You should roll this out. And other things like the button shape is like, oh no, that didn’t work in the way that you thought it would. And that’s what I love about A/B testing. And I think, like I’ve always said, I love performance marketing because you could always drive more traffic from your marketing, better quality traffic, convert more of it and increase your lifetime value. And all four of those things have infinite potential. So just every day you get to try something new and something different and you learn something and you are a smarter, wiser person every day is just the most incredible thing and incredible place to work. And I love my career and I love the company I work for so I feel genuinely blessed.

– That’s awesome. And you are empowered to make those decisions, make those learnings, right? That we talked about, not mistakes which is great, right? That’s a lot of founders and marketers I feel like are penalized if it doesn’t have a positive impact, right? If that CRO test or A/B test doesn’t amount to more add to carts or more purchases. So that’s great to hear that you’re in a position where you’re like, “Hey, we’re 100%.”

– Yeah. And I think part of that is like having a lot of things on the go at the same time. Not having all your eggs in one basket, understanding what is the minimum viable product? What is the smallest version of this test that we can run that if you are continuously evolving, then it’s a less of a thing of, oh, let’s try this. It’s like, well, we’re testing stuff all the time and half of it works and half of it doesn’t, and one of the things that we just tested that didn’t work at all, and we were really surprised was online consultations. That there’s been huge within the beauty industry and so many brands are saying, “Oh, it’s worked so well for us.” And we just couldn’t get traction on it. And talking our customers they’re just like, “Yeah, I don’t wanna talk to someone over video. “I wanna talk to somebody in person.” And it’s like, well, fair enough. That’s our customer base and those kind of things. But I think just because we had, that wasn’t the only kind of card we’re playing. I’m always like, the thing about you just have so many bets in play that some of them are gonna come off and some of them don’t. And as long as you’re not spending stupid money on too many of them, then it’s worth it.

– Yeah, absolutely. Great advice. Love that. So curious what role is creative and content gonna play for the business in 2022.

– Yeah. I mean, for us, the both of those things are absolutely crucial that one of the things that we started doing when I joined the business is a quarterly customer survey. And one of the things that we ask now every quarter is basically, are there any products or techniques that you would like to see us demonstrate for you? And it’s just absolute gold. It tells us two things. One, it tells us what new content we should be creating. But it’s also hugely valuable for do you know what? People still wanna hear about eye makeup? People always wanna hear about our brow product. And as a marketer, often you think like, but I’ve talked about this. People must be sick of it. So actually having your customers reflect back, “No, we wanna hear more about that,” is just massively valuable. So that is huge. And just seeing what works and what doesn’t again, having so many bets in play. We had a video last year, tailored last year, and it was just like one of many, many videos that we produce that it’s just how to do your makeup in five minutes. We had over a million organic views on Facebook of that video.

– Wow!

– It’s insane. We have had over a million views on YouTube. It’s just the thing that actually if you create enough stuff, you’re gonna one day find the thing that resonates with your audience and resonates like beyond your audience. And that’s the great thing with the algorithms is when you find something that people love, they run with it. We were looking at our YouTube stats last month. And like over half of our views were from suggested videos that people watching other stuff and our videos were being suggested. And we’d never seen a stat like that before. But you just keep trying, you keep doing it and you find the thing that resonates and then you learn from it and you keep going.

– Yeah. And I feel like that organic content, the 80-20 rule happens so much. I mean, I used to work with Larry Kim, which his thing was finding those unicorn, right? Blog articles and things like that, right? Where it’s like that 20% of the contents, 80% of the views, 80% of the traffic. But like you said, it get that hit and then it just takes off and probably produces a great customer as well because the educational content is great. Obviously you’re gonna be using your makeup in that tutorial, going through all of that.

– And that long tail stuff is incredible as well. We’ve got webpages that we’ve like, okay, this is a specific issue like say hoodie eyes. I mean to be fair, hoodie eyes gets quite a lot of traffic. That we’ve got some pages like that, that get 100% conversion rate, Do you know what? we get like five visitors, but the people who visit that page are like, “Wow! “This is exactly what I want. “I’m gonna gonna buy.” So yeah, those high traffic things, those viral things, they’re amazing, but actually investing in the right thing in the long tail is also incredibly profitable.

– Love that. That’s amazing. So I’m curious because before when we were talking you let me know that you were in a very unique position when you first started where actually social was off and only almost all of your ads were off. And so you were in this really unique position to really find out what the impact of each channel was. And when you pulled those levers what happened. And so I’m sure you saw what that return was, what the track return in the platform was versus actually on the website. And so I’m curious sort of how you all that transition, but then now sort of post iOS updates, which I’m sure again, we were talking about, I’m assuming that a lot of your target audience is on iPads and a lot of iPhones and things like that. And you said you’re paying close attention to mobile. So yeah, I’m curious how iOS sort of affected the business, how you’ve sort of seen that conversion rate and the impact and the return and maybe how you’ve been able to pay close attention to that because you were in that unique position before knowing the positive impact social had and then sort of what it looks like that landscape now.

– Yeah. It’s been interesting times. And I think we were very, very lucky that we’d had that period of time where it was off and we can say, oh actually, do you know what? That’s incrementality. And my whole career working in paid social, you’ve always got like what does faith Facebook say? What does Google Analytics say? What does third party attribution models say? And they all say something different. So it’s about looking at a range of metrics and saying, “Where do I see a difference? “What did I change? ‘And what impact has that had?” So for example last summer we started advertising on YouTube. And YouTube is notorious that nobody clicks on a YouTube ad. I mean, why would you click on a YouTube ad? Because you’ve gone to YouTube to watch another video. You’re not gonna click on an ad. So we started running YouTube ads and we saw at the same time a big uptick in our YouTube channel views. And we saw a big uptick in our new customer revenue. So we were able to put together a hypothesis that said, do you know what? When we run ads on YouTube, we get more people searching for our brands on YouTube. They then watch our videos and then they go on to make a purchase. And that was a… We could see those data points. And I think in the best businesses that I’ve worked in at Look Fabulous Forever, at Birchbox was exactly the same. They had this democratization of data and that actually the availability of all the different data points and not people saying, “Oh, this is data. “You can’t see it. “I’m not gonna share it.” It means that you can see all these different impacts happening in different places and kind of follow them through. And I think, I mean, I’m lucky because I came from a math and stats background and I’ve always had this weird kind of hybrid why I got into marketing of math and stats and the arts. And I think that’s actually where particularly performance marketing is really exciting because it is about the numbers and being able to see patterns. But then at Birchbox they used to have this value they called grounded inspiration. And the idea is like, if you really know your data and your customer, you come up with the most brilliant ideas. And that’s what I think data does. It makes you think about, okay, what does that tell me? And what would I do creatively as a result of that information?

– Very interesting way to think about it. And yeah, love the democratization of data. Sharing that irrespective of anyone’s know-how or anything like that. I mean that’s awesome. So curious, what excites you the most in the year ahead, whether it’s in the ecom industry or within your own marketing?

– Yeah. Certainly at Look Fabulous Forever we’ve got some exciting tech products that I’ve got my eye on that I’m always like, “Can I drive incremental revenue by doing something better?” I’m working on search at the moment, particularly at the moment you can’t search content on our website, which is like a huge opportunity for us. So making that content search a delightful experience, it’s clearly a massive opportunity. But I think more widely in marketing what I really wanna see, and I dunno if it’s gonna be this year, but I really think and hope that it will come is just this fight at the moment between privacy and personalization. And it’s so politicized that whether it’s Apple or Facebook or what the kind of regulations say and customers are not educated enough about how to make a decision. And I feel like legislation isn’t fit for purposes. It is genuinely trying to help consumers, but it’s actually making it worse. Because we all just go on websites and just like, just make the cookie banner go away. It’s not in anyone’s interest. And I hope that we can start moving to something where we start to talk to consumers and say, “Look, you do have to understand this stuff “and make a decision. “That it’s not necessarily in your interest. “Do you really not want any kind “of targeted ads or personalization?” But let it be in your interest, let you know how to control your preferences and say no to… It’s like, “No, I don’t wanna see that company on Facebook.” How do I make sure that I don’t see them again and those kind of things. So I think there is a wider piece within the industry about educating the consumer so they can make informed decisions because legislation is not cutting it. It’s just annoying people.

– Yeah. They’re probably more uneducated on the subject than most, right? And I think that’s a very interesting one. I feel like every time I go to hang out with a friend or family member or whomever and I’ve seen them on an iPhone, I sort of asked them right away, “What did you click on Instagram? “Did you say to have it personalized or not?” None of them ever remember what they selected ever. I ask them if you were presented with this, which one would you choose? They always say, “Oh, I, I want it blocked.” I ask them how many things they’ve potentially purchased from Facebook or Instagram or anywhere, they say a lot. I said, “Were you upset about those purchases “or do you regret them?” “No.” And then I go, “Let me open your YouTube up really quickly.” And they open their YouTube and I’m like, “What about this video? “What about this video? “Do you wanna watch all these videos?” They’re like, “Yeah, absolutely.” I go, “Okay, let’s open YouTube “in an incognito tab really quickly. “Do you wanna watch any of these videos?” They’re like, “No, I’m not interested in that at all.” So it’s like my perfect example to show people, come on. I understand there should be privacy. We should have a lot of these things. They’re very important. I’m glad we’re paying attention to it and it is important. But at the end of the day, like you’re just a number on a server that no one’s paying most attention to.

– Yeah. Nobody really cares that much about what you’re doing. And do you know what? Staying safe online is really important. And certainly in the UK we’ve got huge scams, particularly around delivery messaging and people having their entire bank accounts wiped out. This stuff is important, but we are not educating people enough about how they actually make a decision. And it’s like Daniel Conman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” we are just thinking fast. We’re just like, “Just make it go away. “Just sort it.” We are not actually engaging the brain that says, what is this and what decisions should I make?

– Yep. Yeah, you got it. So curious, what advice would you give other marketers that are maybe trying to break some ceiling, 5 million, 10 million, 20 million revenue marks? What advice would you give them?

– Yeah. I mean, my number one thing is that full funnel thing. It’s so easy to say, I don’t have the money to invest in top of funnel. Just being like, I know that that bottom of a funnel, it drives revenue, I can see it. And it’s just about ring fencing. Even a small amount and just being like, “Do you know what? “I’m gonna say $10 a day I’m gonna try “whether it’s brand awareness or reach or traffic.” Try one of those top of funnel things and see what impact does that have. And it’s like for us, one of our top Facebook audiences is the people that we’ve been reaching with our top of funnel advertising. We put them in a pool and we retarget those people, not just the people who visited our website. That does incredibly well for us. And just thinking about what is the kind of the easiest version that I can do. As I always say to people who aren’t doing paid social, and then if they’re doing like Google shopping and other things, you’ve got a feed already. Just retarget the people who are visiting your website. Facebook have minimum row now. You don’t even have to say, “Oh, I’m gonna spend 100 pounds.” You can say, “Only give me customers “where you can generate five times more than I’m spending.” Why would you not? That’s free money.

– Yep. Yeah, you got it. And yeah, I feel like if you’re not running dynamic ads, you’re missing a big opportunity. And even testing that on top of funnel as well has been an interesting one that we’ve found. Some brands that we assume running catalog ads, top of funnel won’t do well. And then it does super well and then vice versa. Sometimes we think it’s going to do super well and it doesn’t do well.

– Yeah. I would say, do you know what? The top of funnel catalog ads are probably our number one revenue driver.

– Wow! Super interesting. I mean, in the feed, it’s clearly a product, right? And so you can skip it easier, but you can also pay attention to it. Like we see that in the fashion industry time and time again. You see a good looking person in a beautiful dress or outfit. You might skip past that faster than you may pay attention to. But if you see a pretty dress on a white background you’re like, “Oh, this is a product that’s being marketed to me.”

– And I think, I’ve always found with that kind of paid social stuff, you don’t want it to look too polished. That actually, do you know what? If it’s something that looks natural in your feet, like something a friend would’ve posted, you’re way more likely to engage with it than something that looks like an ad.

– Yep. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we’d be remiss not to talk about, before we hit record, we were kind of talking about what you’ve done sort of with COVID and building community and also love for you to kind of touch on the aspect of your target demographic and actually how important they are as a buying power. I would love for you to touch on those two points.

– Yeah. So when the UK went into first lockdown in 2020, Tricia realized that our audience were disproportionately affected, that most of our base are retired. So their entire lives revolved around whether it was family or grandchildren or charity work or meeting friends for lunch or coffee. All of that stuff just went away overnight and she felt incredibly isolated. And she recognized that our customer base probably did too. So she said, “Do you know what? “I’m gonna start a private Facebook group “and just invite our customers “and see if they would like to just come “and just hang out with other women “who are facing the same challenges as they are.” And it’s just been the most incredible thing that the outpouring of love every day is so life affirming that these are women who most of them would feel very uncomfortable posting a selfie on social media, but they know if they put something up that they will be surrounded by other women who knew how difficult it was for them to do it, there will be this massive outpouring of love. We’ve just run a competition actually. And it was around like self-esteem and kind of what boosts your self-esteem. And some of the stories that came out of those, women are saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever had any self-esteem>” And it’s just like, it’s heartbreaking, but to see the community kind of reach back and say, “You know what? “You absolutely have achieved incredible things “in your life “that you probably don’t recognize how valuable you are.” And it’s just beautiful. And I think that kind of ties in, as you touched onto the kind of wider ethos of the brand, that we don’t just wanna sell skincare and makeup that we want to help our customers understand how to look better, but also to make them feel empowered and that they do put make up on for themselves that this is part of who they are in the face that they project to the world. And Tricia really believes that. She wants to challenge those stereotypes of older women in society and representation and kind of all of those things. And the message that I would give to brands is if you just think that it’s all about millennials and Gen Z, you are really missing a trick that over 65s are the fastest growing market in e-commerce. They have huge levels of disposable income, all of these things that just think about what you could be saying to these people. And I believe passionately as a marketer that for many, many years brands have aspired to be exclusive. That’s been the highest kind of mark of a brand, if you are exclusive. Whereas now actually I think being inclusive and saying, do you know what? I wanna be a place where my customers feel like they belong, that they are welcome, that they are valued, that they are important. That’s gonna bring you much, much more brand loyalty than “Oh, it’s sold out. “Oh, you can’t come in” or all of those things that come with exclusivity. I know let’s be in inclusive to our customers, let’s be warm and welcoming and make them feel that they’re important because they are. They’re the reason we exist.

– I love that. And yeah, empowering all of those women, making a difference. I mean, you said it earlier, have a brand that stands for something. I love that. Love that inclusive, not exclusive component. I think you’re right, right? Brands want to seek out being a Louis Vuitton and being sold out. Lululemon sold out the second a new drop hits. But they definitely could be missing out on huge opportunities and building that community, empowering your audience, paying close attention to them. I mean, selfishly I’m sure in that community, in the Facebook group, you’re probably getting these lessons and learnings of how to speak to your customer that are worth 100 times more. Of course there’s a bunch of benefits that are happening in the community outside of that, but selfishly I’m sure that’s just such a huge opportunity for you to understand how should I talk with them? Maybe we’re talking about self-esteem in the wrong way, maybe we’re not talking about it in the right way. That’s so unique to find those opportunities to reword things. I love that.

– Yeah. Literally, the next week or so I’ve got like 10 hours of interviews with our private Facebook group community booked in because I’ve got a new business idea and I wanna know what they think about it. It’s like, well, do you know what? I’ve got the perfect audience. I’m gonna ask them, what do you think? Am I onto something? Am I wrong? Am I right? Just having that base to just ask the question is incredible.

– Yeah. And you’re gonna get responses that you would know ever get from a survey that you’d never… Even if you gave them a huge gift card in return. I mean, that’s gonna be gold. That’s amazing. Well Janis, I appreciate the time. I feel like you’ve given our audience a bunch of gold nuggets here. I guess in closing, any last things that you’d love to mention or touch on?

– I think it is just that thing around inclusion and just think about who your customer could be. And it so many benefits come back that if you think about accessibility, isn’t something that is a barrier and a kind of drain on us. It’s an opportunity for us that putting subtitles on video, it helps people who are watching with a sound off as well as people who are hard of hearing that if you are making your buttons bigger and easier to click on, yes that helps people with motor skills and issues around that. But it also helps someone who’s holding a baby and trying to navigate your website at the same time. That actually just being more inclusive is better for everyone and not just a specific group.

– Love that. And I encourage anybody who has an older face or has someone who’s got an older face in their life, check out Look Fabulous Forever. It’s lookfabulousforever.com. They’ve got international delivery. So definitely check them out no matter where you’re located. Janis, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

– Brilliant. Thank you so much for having me.

– Samir ElKamouny here. Thank you so much for listening to Ecom Growth Leaders podcast. If you are a successful brand that is crushing it and would like to be on this program, please visit go.ecomgrowthleaders.com/podcast-guest. If you got something out of this interview, please share this episode on social media. Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or posted on social. Ecom Growth Leaders is sponsored by Fetch & Funnel, a performance marketing agency specializing in omnichannel media buying, creative production and conversion optimization. We’ve partnered with 100+ brands and generated over 500 million for clients using our trademarked Fetch & Funnel method. There’s tons of content over at our blog, fetchfunnel.com/blog, and also some amazing eBooks like “How to Crush Your Competitors” and “How to Produce High Converting Creatives.” Thanks again for listening to Ecom Growth Leaders. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. So to make sure you don’t miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and it means a lot to me and my team. Wanna know more, go to our website, fetchfunnel.com or follow us on social. Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next time.

The post 6 | Aging Beautifully with Look Fabulous Forever’s Janis Thomas appeared first on Fetch & Funnel.

3 | Know Better Skin with Colorescience’s Margaux Vallino Reese

Samir ElKamouny — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 02:37:11 +0000

Your host, Samir ElKamouny, talks with Margaux Vallino Reese of Colorescience. Colorescience is the fastest growing professional skincare brand in the US, leading innovation in sun protection. We expand that innovation into a broad line of skincare and color correction products in a way that consumers love to wear every day.

To learn more about Margaux’s work, visit https://www.colorescience.com/

If you’d like to be a guest on Ecom Growth Leaders, click HERE

– Thanks for tuning into the Ecom Growth Leaders Podcast. This
show is intended to highlight marketing and conversion techniques taught by today’s leaders in the ecom world. I’ll be interviewing the top marketers that are influencing the market in making an impact, scaling faster than their competitors and doing good. I’m your host Samir ElKamouny, Founder and CEO of Fetch & Funnel, a performance marketing agency specializing in omnichannel media buying, creative production, and conversion optimization. If you enjoy anything from today’s episode, I highly recommend checking out fetcthfunnel.com and sign up for our email newsletter where I promise to only send you content you can learn from and apply directly into your business to improve results and scale. At the end of each episode, my goal is to have you feeling inspired and fired up by learning from today’s top innovators, marketers and entrepreneurs. Let’s dig into another amazing story about a unique brand, crushing it and learn from their success and learnings.

Hey everybody, welcome back to an awesome episode of Ecom Growth Leaders. Today I am super excited to bring you Margaux Reese, she is the Director of Digital Marketing and E-commerce at a very cool and innovative brand called Colorescience. Margaux, welcome to Ecom Growth Leaders, super excited to have you on the podcast.

– Thank you Samir, great to be here.

– So, would you love to start off by you telling our audience just more about Colorescience and what you sell and what the brand is all about.

– Of course, yeah. So, Colorescience is one of the fastest growing professional skincare brand in the United States. What is unique about us is that we started our partnership within dermatologists offices. So, we partner with dermatologists to develop our product and test them, and so we have this close partnership with those partners. And we sell our products through their offices, but also online on our own websites and on some online retailers such as Nordstrom’s Dermstore, and we’re also an Amazon beauty brand. We specialize in mineral sunscreen, so all of our sunscreens are iron oxide and titanium dioxide, so it’s all mineral not chemicals. So you’re not applying any chemicals on your skin that get absorbed into your system. And we also have a line of products, of treatment products in order to reverse the damages of the sun. So if you’re thinking about skin redness, or hyperpigmentation or dark circles, we have treatments that treat, but also immediately correct for these conditions.

– Awesome, yeah. I feel like it’s a very experiential type of brand. It’s something where like, seeing it on the website, reading a little bit about it, you still don’t fully understand it, I highly recommend everyone check out their youtube channel ’cause they’ve got great videos explaining some of the products and that was my aha moment, right? Where I saw sort of how some of the products work, what’s different about them versus sort of traditional or usually are buying off the shelf or brands that you’ve been using historically. And that was really where it hit me, I was like, whoa, okay, I need this SPF ’cause it’s so much better than what I’m using, doesn’t soak into my skin, so yeah, super, super cool. So would love to just kind of hear, oh, sorry, go for it.

– Sorry if I may add, where our flagship product is mineral sunscreen brush. So when you think about mineral sunscreen, you’re thinking about the lifeguards that have the white cast on their nose. And so we’ve managed to formulate it in a way that it is in a powder format, which is unique in the first place and which makes it very convenient for reapplication. It blends also into your skin tone, so you don’t end up with a white cast and you can apply it over makeup. Women love it for that reason, ’cause no one likes to apply all these sunscreen over makeup. So, really our goal is to educate customers on skincare prevention and sun safety for all and the importance of reapplying. So we remade our products in a format that’s easy to reapply. You can have one in your gym bag, in your car, in your handbag, anywhere is very convenient to use.

– Love that, yeah, love that. I’ve become a customer already, so yeah. Great, great brand, yeah. So I know you’ve been there a couple of years, your roles changed over the years, we’d love to just hear more about, the role that that you’re currently at and what that looks like right now.

– Yeah, so as the head of ecommerce, I handle everything related to the website and all sales that happens through the website, including our subscription program and the loyalty program. So when I say that we’re an omnichannel brand is that we sell through those different channels, including the dermatologist offices and met spas, which we call our professional channel. And then online retailers, like we’ve mentioned Nordstrom Dermstore or also on Amazon on our website. So my role is really handling everything that goes on through the website and making sure that we also develop our loyalty program to maintain the relationship of those customers that we’re acquiring.

– A lot of work it sounds like.

– What’s little better to you.

– Awesome, managing a lot of partnerships and yeah, that sounds awesome. So, I know you’ve had a lot of experience, you were even a consultant for a long time, I mean, I’m curious just for other marketers out there, looking for new gigs or looking for where to work or what their next move should be really curious just like how you got into it and what yeah, how you got to switch to Colorescience or what kind of made you make that switch.

– Yeah, so I started my career in marketing on the agency side and I was working on display advertising as well as SEOs. So understanding the media buying process was really helpful in the foundations. Then I moved to the organic side, and understanding that environment was also really formative and educational on understanding the whole digital ecosystem. We can have paid media strategy, but making sure that the organic strategy is also so on par. So, I did start within the agency world, and that was a tremendous experience it’s very fast paced, everyone goes a million miles an hour with a million different clients and I feel that this really taught me a lot in a short amount of time. Because you work on so many different clients and can do so many different tasks. And then I moved to the brand side where I first worked at kiddo bar Mexican restaurant chain and then moved over to FTD, a flower delivery company before arriving at Colorescience. And it’s completely a different environment of course, being on the brand side versus the agency side, but if I could give anyone an advice is really to experience both and see which one fits better for that time in their career.

– Yeah, great tip. As an agency, that’s part of our interview process even. When people are coming from brand side, like, are you sure you wanna do a agency life? Are you yeah, are you prepared for it? And vice versa, sometimes we believe agency life to go brand side, both have their pros and cons for different challenges. Yeah, yeah, but that’s awesome. So yeah, I mean, so.

– Oh, sorry, if I may add, I feel that on the agency side, you’re really able to become a subject matter expert within that field that you’re in and on the brand side, you can play with a lot of different channels. So it’s owning all of acquisition marketing so you’re not only focusing on paid social or on paid search, you’re really overseeing the whole ecosystem. And on the agency side, you become an expert about what is the media buying process and understanding how all of this works helps in building an overall media strategy.

– Agreed, yeah, you’ve already become a growth hacker in terms and so then therefore now you can, know better how to measure those omnichannel approaches, you’ve seen the creative approach from so many brands and things like that, know how to blend that, and take that over to what you’re doing now, so yeah, couldn’t agree more, that’s awesome. So, you’re doing partnerships, you’re managing your own channels, you’re in charge of the website, all this stuff. I’m super curious just how you define success at the company, obviously sales and growth and all those things are super important, but yeah. Curious how you’re finding success and how you’re measuring that these days.

– Yeah, so at Colorescience, we measure success by the number of lives that we’ve protected through skin cancer prevention and sun safety for all. Our motto is to do good, have fun, and make a difference. And we really incorporate that into everything we do in our journey against skincare prevention. But in terms of eCommerce metrics, we look at, of course we look at revenue, average order value, but also our new customer rate. Are we really able to introduce our brand to new customers? Also looking at loyalty signups, we see in the data that our loyalty members are so valuable, they’re more engaged, they purchase more, they buy more often and they really trust the brand. So how can we acquire more into our loyalty program? We also look at our repurchase rates. So looking at our existing customers, are we also within that loyalty components as well? Are we able to reengage them to have them purchase again? And we also look at return rates, if something is not working, we keep a close eye on our returns and understanding what is the reason? Is it the product that didn’t fit this person and why? And then making sure that we can adapt then acquisition and look alike audiences according to that.

– A lot of levers in between each one of those steps.

– Yes, indeed. It’s finding the right balance and I think also within targeting is making sure that we don’t end up in the rabbit hole of targeting so much that then our targets become obsolete. So opening up the targets a little bit more where we’ve become a bit too narrow.

– Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Curious, as you mentioned, you are focusing on average order value, you are focusing on retention, and you know that these customers become a customer for a long time. Does that impact, sort of that initial growth of customer acquisition? Because we know that this average person will stay with us for X amount of months or X amount of years or spend a lot more with us than that initial cart?

– Well, we test everything. We just test our way into all the implementations and the optimizations that we implement. We really never feel like our gut feeling, we listen to our gut feeling but we wanna test everything. For example, we implemented a shipping threshold earlier this year. We used to offer free shipping, but now we offer it with a minimum purchase order because we found there were some. Being a smaller company, when I first arrived at the company, we didn’t even have a fraud solution. And so our website was used for a lot of car testing. So, not only did we implement a fraud solution, but also implementing this shipping threshold and ensure that some customers that were trying to cheat the system couldn’t, but we also could offer a faster shipping experience for our loyal customers. So, we test everything.

– Love that, so, listen to your gut, test, test, test, but pay attention to the data. Super curious on that note, because shipping is always sort of a hot topic and I’m sure that, maybe that impacted, I’m assuming, I would love to hear from you sort of what it ended up happening, but I’m assuming getting rid of free shipping probably negatively impacted conversion rate a little bit, but maybe helped increase average order value because you sort of put that new threshold on there, or how did that end up yeah, working and do you feel like making that switch was beneficial?

– Yeah, so we did measure conversion rate, we measured AOV and also inquiries to our customer service team to see if we got any complaints from customer and monitoring our NPS score and reviews. So, we actually noticed that it didn’t impact conversion rate, but it did boost AOV by quite a bit. So that’s why we felt really confident in launching it, we tested it for several weeks to make sure that we were sure of the data, and thankfully it was really all positive. It wasn’t a leap of faith when we implemented this threshold.

– That’s awesome, that’s a very, very great point. So, paying very close attention to NPS scores, paying attention to customers, really good one, ’cause yeah, that’s who’s the most important at the end of the day, but yeah. Unbelievable it didn’t impact conversion rates that’s awesome, but only had the positive impact of increasing average order value win, win there. That’s awesome. So, would love to know just what you would consider to be your biggest success so far, could be more than one, and just if you’ve had any specific breakthroughs could be in the last year, couple years, yeah. I would love to hear more about that.

– Yeah, so, we’ve had a few, just earlier this week we launched a new product, the expansion of our total eye collection, which is one of our best selling products. We launched an eye cream for the nighttime, which helps fight dark circles, puffiness and also fine lines, and it’s quite revolutionary. I love this product, it’s one of my favorite and we launched it on Monday, so that was a big launch for us. And earlier this year also, this summer just before the summer, we launched a new version of our liquid mineral sunscreen of the facial collection called FLEX. What’s magical about this product is that, it’s the way that it’s formulated with, so, it comes out white. When you think about mineral sunscreen, it comes out white. But there’s encapsulated iron oxides with color in it, that blooms as you apply it and then matches your skin tone. So it comes in four different shades and this product really took off and has been our best seller since launch, so, that was a big success that we’re very happy with. And then in terms of an e-comm success that we’ve had is doing a migration to Shopify. We used to be on a custom platform and we decided that we needed a platform that was able to scale further. We’re a growth brand, we have really aggressive growth goal year over year, and we needed a platform that could also scale with us without requiring such heavy development resources and just time consuming of on the management of the site. So, we started this project at the beginning of 2020, and it was a very quick six months project where, so, we did everything expedited, migrated the platform and we launched in July last year and we’ve seen tremendous growth since moving to Shopify. Like I’ve mentioned we’re a growth brand, so, we continue to increase our traffic to our site every year. And we were also able to increase our conversion rate by over 20%. Which was really significant, especially when you think about getting an increased traffic to your site, not all the traffic has qualified so, you would expect conversion rate to decline and that wouldn’t necessarily be concerning. But seeing those traffic and conversion rate gains, especially on mobile was incredible. And since the migration we’ve also been able to implement a lot of enhancements, for example, adding other payment methods, letting customers save products as their favorites or adding a product recommendation quiz or also in adding package insurance. So all those plugins were very, I would say much quicker to implement on Shopify, thanks to all the plugins. Those are just for as a frame of reference, to implement payment option in installments with after pay. We worked on this for I think eight months on our custom site and we’re still not able to have it quite right, and on Shopify was the click of a button.

– Sounds about right. Yep, sounds about right, that’s yeah. That’s amazing that you have the increase in conversion rate, unbelievable. That’s very encouraging for I’m sure, anyone thinking about switching because it’s a very daunting task. And then yeah, like you said, even if the switching cost is high through development work and all sorts of things like that, the amount that you save, if all we’re talking about is dollars, forget all the other benefits is massive because any change you wanna make any, yeah. Anything like any customization takes hours and hours and hours, thousands and thousands of dollars, and to your point, speed is, right? Money loves speed, and so if it’s gonna take us eight months to put Afterpay and it still doesn’t work that doesn’t help the brand at all.

– Exactly, exactly. So we’ve been really happy with the flexibility that the platform provided. We’re able to manage the site, we don’t have to rely on our agency partner in order to update the content of a page. We can do everything ourselves and it’s made us a lot more efficient and allowed our agency partner to really focus on what’s gonna drive growth on enhancements that are really gonna drive growth.

– I love that, and so when you made the switch, ’cause I’m curious, ’cause I think a lot of brands are thinking about this or are nervous to do this, I’m curious, especially ’cause you said you had that positive impact on conversion rate. I’m curious on two things, one, when you made that switch was the website completely kept the same? Did you keep the same look and feel in all of those kinds of things or did you update that? ‘Cause I feel like that’s something a lot of people feel like, oh I’ve gotta make this new website, and sometimes that can negatively impact conversion rates. If that new look and feel or navigation hasn’t been tested. And then two, I’m also curious just what you feel like was the thing that allowed you to positively impact your conversion rate with the switch?

– Yeah, that’s a great question. So, to answer your first one about keeping the design on the website the same versus redesigning it with the migration, we decided to keep it exactly the same to do really a copy of our custom website on the website on the custom platform, not to introduce another variant that could impact the KPI lift or decline. If we’re seeing that the conversion rate was increasing, we wouldn’t have known if it was the new platform or if it was the design. So we decided to really take it one step at a time, just switch platform with the exact same design and then making enhancements, once we were sure that the new platform was stable and already performing better than the old one. And your second question about what drove the increase in conversion rate? I think it’s truly, I mean, Shopify excels on mobile, the mobile experience, especially the mobile checkout. I think that the mobile checkout had a big part in this lift. We had mirrored our custom checkout on Shopify, but of course the speed is not always there and you’re trying your best, but it’s difficult to replicate what Shopify is doing. And so, we get 80% percent of traffic from mobile. So, when you think about it, that’s 8/10 people visiting your site from a mobile device. So, our goal was really to increase our conversion rate on mobile, even by a couple of percentage points that would help us drive a tremendous amount of growth, given the traffic clips that we got.

– Love that, so, very important point conversion rate optimization tip 101, right? Just to introduce as least as variables as you can, to make sure that you know that it’s measurable and that change yeah, whether it had a positive or negative effect either way, you know it and then also pay attention to mobile. I would say 90% of our listener base, 90% of brands out there, majority of traffic is on mobile. If you’re paying for advertising, mobile traffic is sort of king there. And so yeah, very important to pay attention to that. Feel like a lot of us forget, right? And lose that point, right? ‘Cause we’re on our computers, we’re testing everything on our computers, we’re working on our computers. That’s what we look at our website and we forget. We had a client recently switch platforms, and when they made that switch, they didn’t even realize their checkout process on an autofill. If you autofilled anything, it didn’t work. it wouldn’t allow people to go to the next stage. and so that was like this big bug that didn’t even get noticed ’cause everyone was focused on the front end, not even going into the checkout process, so yeah. Very good point and things that everyone should be paying attention to and thinking about.

– And I think it also to your point, it takes a village to maintain a website. We tend to have our entire team really involved also in the website process and having them test on their own devices, we tell them don’t test from your desktop, we have this covered already, just really test from your tablet or from your mobile. And making sure that there’s no typos across the site, that all the content is accurate, but also the functionalities are working. So anytime that there’s an update to be made, I’m notified and we make the changes and at least it really feels like it’s an entire team effort.

– I love that, yep. I recently got the new Samsung Fold and both dimensions of the front and the inside are not traditional mobile at all. And so I’m obsessively checking all these websites all the time. So I’m like, do you have a responsive website that’s just gonna work, or is it just gonna get all jacked up? Because I have the weirdest dimension screen now. So, very good point to have multiple, as many people as you can test it out, ’cause everyone’s got a different phone or ear phone or operating system, you name it so yeah, love that. So we’d love to hear just what are maybe two or three of the biggest growth levers that you’ve pulled for the business. I know we talked about Shopify and the switch there and I know that’s a massive one, if there’s other things on that, feel free to touch on it, but yeah, would love to know just some of the biggest growth levers you’re pulling. I know you’re talking about a lot of things that you’re doing between the partnerships with retailers, subscription services, all those kinds of things, yeah. I’m curious and just kind of the results and why you think maybe they were so successful.

– Yeah, so a focus that we had earlier this year was really improve our loyalty program and encourage the engagement of our loyalty members. Drive the value of the program and making sure that they remain engaged throughout the year with our brand. So, we are in the process of redesigning the pages, it’s almost ready, the pages to manage customers accounts. So, that should be launching in the next month or so hopefully. And so, the goal here is we had redesigned it after launching on Shopify actually, no, sorry, just before launching on Shopify, we had redesigned the pages with information that we thought was helpful, that was a brainstorm within the marketing team and that’s it. But then few months later, we did working sessions with different team members that were not in marketing and seeing if they could navigate the account pages and realized that a lot of the intentions that we had did not translate in the design. Where our team members did not even know how to redeem points or how to look for coupons. And so we redesigned it in a way that would help them understand the program, how everything works. And so, we did some usability testing with the new design which seems to be translating our goals a lot better than the previous design, so, we have high hopes for this. It’s not a growth lever that we’ve already pulled, but that’s something that we have that’s coming in the next month. And then in terms of another growth factor is really product innovation. We have our research and development team and our product marketing team are really working hard to make sure that we understand what is out there in the market? And what are the gaps that we can fill given our uniqueness. Given the uniqueness of our products, and our expertise in sun prevention. So, we are also overall high quality premium skincare. So, we have some really exciting products coming next year that I can’t reveal any secret, but it’s gonna be really exciting.

– That sounds very exciting. So, I’m curious in the new product launch, and I know you did a recent product launch this month and are continuously innovating. Where do you make those decisions? How do you decide on sort of that next product or next line to be working on? I know you said some things are maybe clearer than others, ’cause it’s like, hey, we already have this line, it’s doing well, maybe we see some product advancement or some innovation we can make here, maybe that’s a little clearer, you know, are you a listening to customers? Are you looking at gaps in the marketplace? really curious. ‘Cause I think a lot of brands are always trying to figure out maybe the next product, but sometimes struggle with that. And I know you guys are launching lots of products innovating very fast, so yeah, would love to learn from that.

– Yeah, so I would say it’s all of the above. We look at what are the gaps in the marketplace? Places where we can insert our brand, but also listening to our customers, what do they want? If we have a winning line of skincare products that we see that some customers would like a product a little bit different. We take that into account and then make the decisions this way. We listen to what they have to say, not only developing new products, but also in addressing existing ones. We discovered that one of our products had a pump issue not a pump, but the brush activation issue where the powder was not coming out of the brush. So we’ve reworked that component to ensure that our customers feel heard that this was a concern they had, that was preventing them from purchasing again. So we are fixing the gaps, the roadblocks that they’re encountering.

– Love that, and how are you, I guess, paying attention to that information from customers? I know you mentioned NPS scores, but I feel like this sometimes is a hard one for brands as well, they’re not sure like, how do I find out a survey to my customers? Do I, yeah, I’m really curious just how you’re coming up with that.

– Yeah, so, we do look at our NPS score, but also the product reviews. Some customers are very helpful in actually describing what the problem is that they have with the product as well as the inquiries to our customer service team and on social as well. So we reason across all the platform where we have interaction with customers and when something is related to a product, we aggregate everything into one place and then review this as a team on a regular basis.

– I love that.

– And we also do some surveys. We send surveys to our tough customers, especially our loyalty members and asking them, what do they want? What would they like to see from our brand? A specific product line extension, or brand new product? We wanna hear what they would want that would make them shop with us even more, and really remain loyal to our brand and we act on that.

– That makes a lot of sense. And I love that you’re sharing it with the team. I feel like that can harness just a lot, right? A lot of ideas from other team members and someone who’s maybe not even a part of the marketing team or a part of the sales sorry, the product team or something like that, right? And maybe they have a great idea or some suggestion, I love that. I think that’s really important that maybe we probably keep those things hidden sometimes. Oh no, we gotta some bad reviews, I don’t wanna to tell anybody, but sometimes those reviews can be the very fruitful information that you needed to make a few adjustments, like you said, maybe adjustment to the brush or have you to really just make the product that much better or launch a new product or etcetera.

– Exactly, and it’s especially important I think, to have that team collaboration, particularly in this remote environment that we’re in. Where it’s very easy to work in silo and just stay in your lane. Like I mentioned at the start, small, but mighty team and everyone wears many different hats. So it’s really important to make sure that we have this same collaboration and get everyone’s input.

– Love that, yep, and it’s probably, more companies are going more and more remote and not going back, so yeah. Great tip to just, be covering that stuff, talking about that stuff as many interesting ways as we can collaborate together, very important.

– Exactly.

– So I’d love to know, I know we’re talking a lot about success and a lot of growth levers would love to also just hear about maybe some of the mistakes you’ve made along the way, maybe any missteps that have happened, maybe hard lessons learned, or landmines that you’ve had to step on, or yeah, just in general maybe. What kind of mistakes have been made and that our audience could benefit from hearing about?

– Yeah, I guess I can tell you the most recent one that was a couple weeks ago, where we launched an enhancements on the website and the mistake was not communicating clearly with all the stakeholders involved. We had worked on this project for several months, it was almost ready to go and we launched it without necessarily notifying all the teams, which left some of the teams scrambling in order to fix the last minute issue that they noticed. And we could have prevented that by just making sure everyone is aligned. Of course, when everyone is in an office, it’s easier to just pop in and say, are we good to go? And while being remote, like I’ve mentioned, it’s easier to be in silo and forget about those other team members that the project could impact. So, we’ve definitely learned from that built a new process around launching enhancements and making sure everyone is on board and aware when we have a clear ETA for launch, to prevent just having, creating some more stress for a team that is not necessary that we could prevent. And I think in terms of other mistakes, it’s not as silly mistakes, but more where something we tried that we didn’t really quite realize was not always going to work, was for one of our past sales last year, we noticed that some customers, a high volume of inquiries to our customer service team mentioning that the promo code was not applying for their order, and we had built it in a way that the promo code was applied automatically. So, in order so that they didn’t have to think about a promo code to copy, paste it, we really wanted to make it easy, and we noticed that some, of course, sometimes there’s one or 2% of customers for which something is not working. It’s either device or a browser, most of the time an issue. And so we really learned from that and in order to mitigate the complaints or the inquiries to our customer service team, we’ve then decided to communicate the promo code through the entire site experience even if they didn’t have to apply it, at least they saw it, and once they reached checkout, they confirmed that the promo code was applied and they got the discount that they were promised. So, that is something that we’ve then applied to our ongoing strategy and something that we continue to do for our future sales.

– Love that, great. Both of those are great suggestions. I think sometimes we lose sight of the the coupon code thing offering too many or only trying to offer it in one place, so we can track conversions from that, but then yeah. If it’s not easy or if it’s a complicated code for someone to remember to your point, a lot of customer service and queens are gonna come flying in, and yeah, I love that. That’s a great solution.

– Can you really add on that about the promo codes it’s really thinking about, again, the mobile experience. someone on mobile is not necessarily going to remember a promo code they saw on the homepage and they’re already five or six pages deep in your collection or product pages. And then they just wanted to start their checkout they don’t want to go back to the homepage to try to see how to copy the promo code from mobile, which is never easy. So, just thinking about making the user experience as easy and seamless as possible, maybe it’s a tap to copy your promo code, to then paste it on checkout, or just have applying the promo code right away, just making it easier and requiring less steps from users to ease the path to conversion.

– I love that, that is a common issue that we have on the advertising side, right? Especially coming from like a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad or something like that. There’s no way to copy and paste a coupon code from there, and you’re sort of reliant on them remembering and summer 10, sure, maybe that’s easy to remember, but if it’s a little bit more specific or maybe product specific, no one’s gonna remember. So probably another win for Shopify as well, easier implementation of applying coupon codes automatically and all those kinds of things, you can automatically add them to your URL and all sorts of things that may or may not have had that ability before on the custom site or had to have paid a lot of money in order to build that.

– Exactly.

– So I’m curious, so we know that, you made the switch to Shopify, it positively impacted your conversion rate, which is incredible. And it sounds like you’re paying very close attention to your store conversion rate, I’m curious. So, how high of a priority is CRO for your business? Are you AB testing things on the website? And I’m curious sort of what was maybe one thing that you’ve done, to lift up your conversion rate? Maybe more recently or since the Shopify migration?

– Yeah, so like I’ve mentioned, we’re always testing, so we always have some tests going on, whether it is the color of a button or do we show a product image versus a model image, do we feature our loyalty program on the homepage? Where on the homepage, is it the most impactful? So, we always test all of these enhancements and assumptions. We kind of make assumptions on the site and then build test around it and hypothesis. In terms of something that we’ve implemented that works really well was the product recommendation quiz. We launched it this summer and we had, I mean, first building those quizzes is already a giant undertaking on its own, just the whole mapping is a whole, whole beast. But we really noticed that customers that go through the quiz have a much higher AOV, much higher conversion rate, and some of that is self-selected. Because someone who’s going to go through your product recommender is already interested in buying and curious about what is right for them, but the lift that we saw is significant. The one challenge that we have with this quiz is having people go through the flow. So, we only saw that only a fraction of the traffic is going through it, so now we’re testing different techniques to see if we can have more increase the percentage of traffic that goes through the quiz in order to see if we can live the overall conversion rate.

– Love that, that’s one of the ultimate tools that you can have in your tool belt, right? You’re not only personalization for the individual, and product recommendation, which is super important, helping me make my decision and relieving me of any barriers or any confusion I may have on which product I should purchase, but then you’re also getting that first party data, right? That understanding of who is my audience? What is the age range? What are they looking for? What are the unique selling points or the barriers to entry that I should be focusing on? Very important and relevant data that you can utilize, across society, across advertising, across your creative, etc, to really just bring those points home, right? I think that’s super important data. That you can act on very quickly, maybe even adding those benefits to the product pages, if they weren’t already there, ’cause you’re realizing, oh wow, lots of people are worried about whatever it is. Bags under their eyes a very easy example, but anything like that, right? I feel like that’s really awesome.

– Yeah and absolutely. This has been really instrumental for our brand because our products are a little bit more complex. It’s, you’re not thinking about skincare that you can buy in a grocery store. It’s really professional skincare which is, it’s a premium skincare brand. It’s higher price point, but you also, you get what you pay for. So translating all the technology and the science that we put into our product is sometimes difficult to communicate on a product page or on a static banner. So, having this quiz really helps customer understand what are the true benefits of the product? What am I paying for essentially?

– Yep, and sometimes putting them through a few extra steps actually saves them a lot of time.

– As an end result, yeah. And I think a lot of us forget that sometimes as we just wanna navigate quickly and find the answer quickly, but actually this personalization tool can help me make my decision a lot easier. Alleviate any frustration of being overwhelmed by too many things that I don’t know if it’s the right fit for me or my age or my skin, etc.

– Exactly.

– So I’m curious, what excites you the most in the year ahead? 2022 is right around the corner, Q4s is here, so I’m really curious, just what excites you the most of the year ahead, either e-comm industry, or within your own marketing, or even within the brand.

– Yeah, so I think it’s this depreciation of the cookie is I don’t know that, I would call it exciting, but it’s something we’re getting ready for. Thankfully, Google gave us the gracious gift of delaying the depreciation of the cookie, so we have a little bit more time, but really, and we know that there’s no solution right now in order to ensure that we’ll have a great customer experience. So, I will say it’s adapting to those privacy updates and the depreciation of the cookie is what we’re gonna be focusing on next year and really capitalizing on retention. We have a lot of customer data making this data actionable and capitalizing on our existing customer that we’ve worked hard to acquire, making sure we continue to engage them. And that is through a loyalty program, a subscription program, and making sure that they continue coming back and are continuing to be happy with the experience they have with our brand.

– I love that, and that’s a lot easier when you know that you’re making a great product and you have something that people need, I mean, that retention piece is super important and that’s great. I mean, that’s a great place to focus and exciting difficult problem, but exciting problem to solve.

– Yeah, I would like that, that’s also why, I mean, I love digital marketing because it’s such a fluid environment. You always have to challenge the status quo, seeing what you can do better, it’s always moving. And even if we have those challenges, whether it be an algorithm update or a privacy update or no more cookies, it really keeps you on your toes and making sure that you stay on top of your game no matter what.

– That’s right, we internally sort of always say, we’re reinventing our entire business model every six months, even though we’re not, we’re not making that drastic of a change, but it feels that way sometimes. So I mean, you brought it up, the cookies are gonna disappear, right? And this is something is top of mind for all of us marketers, I’m curious. What challenges sort of will this pose for the business, and how are you thinking about overcoming these challenges, going into next year, like you said, trying to tackle these challenges?

– Yeah, so, well, the privacy update was already quite a hit that we saw that rolled out in May from Apple’s privacy update and the effect from that was gradual. So, we’re really starting to see it in our new customer rate acquisition that has been on a downward trend since May unfortunately. So, with that, we’ve been implementing some, what Facebook recommended, for example, the Facebook conversion API, or we also started testing Pinterest. so we’re diversifying our medium mix, making sure that the tagging process is really optimized that we don’t rely so much on cookies. And then, in terms of the cookie depreciation, I think no one has the answer, we don’t know how we’ll make sure that the advertising experience is optimized. How can we control frequency? How can we control that? We deliver duplicated reach. These are all questions that don’t have an answer yet, and I think it’s up to all marketers to test and learn our way into it, and certainly leverage the first party data that we own making it actionable and really capitalizing retention.

– Love that first party data, very important looks like you’re using attentive for even grabbing SMS now. So I’m sure that’s a big part of the strategy, just like you said, having the customer data and first party data so that you can, yeah. So we can at least try to own as much information and data as we can and measure as much as we can, yeah, love that.

– The reality is, that seeing those updates can be scary and it can be discouraging that when you were on a growth pass, that your growth is being slowed down or even starting to go downwards, but the reality is that we knew these updates were coming. I’m personally from France, so there’s GDPR. so privacy is really at the forefront and we knew that those updates were coming. I think we were lucky that it lasted as long as it did. We’re lucky that the IUS update did not hit us when our in-store sales were zero last year during the pandemic. So, we really capitalized on the opportunity to reach a large audience at a really efficient cost. And now this is the new normal that we have to adapt to and just shift the strategy accordingly.

– Great attitude to life as well, just be appreciative of what we’ve had we knew it was coming, like you said, we’ve had it longer than most so just be thankful for what we’ve had and all we can do is move on from here.

– Amen.

– So I’m curious what role is creative and content production gonna play for the business, for Q4 and also kind of going into 2022?

– Yeah, so I mean, creative is very important to us of course, I think that we’re leveraging a lot of partners to create different iteration of the creative that we want to test. I think this is something that we have a lot of opportunities to scale within Colorescience because our creative team serves a lot of different channels. And so being able to have channel specific content, we tried several months ago to test our Facebook and interest creative into TikTok and did not resonate at all, did not work at all. So, it doesn’t mean that the channel doesn’t work for us, it means that the creative strategy that we had was not adequate for that channel. And I think that people now navigate so much between channels. You don’t necessarily want to repeat the same message with the same creative so many times. There’s a point where you’re gonna get creative fatigue and your message is not gonna come across, so, having channel specific creative is very important, but with that also comes a significant investment. So, its seeing, does it make sense for your brand to invest in additional creative, really drive the growth that you’re expecting? But unfortunately it’s a fine line to balance. It’s do you want to invest with better creative, but taking a risk or a leap of faith? Or continuing this way would just one size fits all which we know, doesn’t necessarily work anymore.

– I love that, that makes a lot of sense. And I think few things that we’ve talked about sort of blend itself into that. Because as you’re talking about, it’s a great point. I think a lot of us lose site, or very easily say, hey, I’ve already created this Instagram story content so it’s very easy for me to upload into Snapchat or TikTok because it’s the same format. But to your point, what I wanna watch on Instagram stories may not be what I want, or expect to consume on TikTok or Snapchat. And so you can’t just say, oh, TikTok, doesn’t work for us because we tried the same ads that are working for us on Instagram stories and it’s not working, and that’s a great point. But then to your other point, now, I’m trying to make the decision of where to diversify, I’m trying to figure out, if I should go to Pinterest, or if I should go to Snapchat. I think that’s another really great point where if you’re able to get any of that, first party data, if you’re able to find out any of that information about your current customer, where you do have that quiz and you are pulling some of that data, or you are running customer surveys, you can find out. Hey, a large part of our audience is younger, and so, Snapchat and TikTok is where they are. And we could actually get better results there than Instagram stories potentially because lower CPMs. We just need to test enough creative to find out what is the winning creative to have success here. But not avoid it like you’re saying, maybe not stretch yourself too thin if it doesn’t make sense because we all know creating creative is always difficult and coming up with that takes time and resources. So, yeah, that’s a great tip to make sure that you’re leveraging what you have in your tool belt, but also making decisions appropriately based off of data. And as you said before, your gut. I feel like a lot of times we’re also not trusting our gut. We need to go with our gut at the same time.

– Absolutely, yes. Once your brain starts kicking in, don’t listen to that anymore. It’s really the gut feeling that happens within the first five seconds.

– Yeah, no, exactly. We trust our lungs to breathe for us and we trust our heart to beat for us, but sometimes we don’t trust our own mind, to tell us where to go, the next thing, so love that.

– And I would say to make sure that you leave enough time for testing. The examples that we have with TikTok, we only tried it for a month or two and then stopped it just because we were really focused on return on ad spend which when you’re testing a new channel, it’s not necessarily the right approach to have just because when you launch a new channel, efficiency is not quite there, the campaigns and the algorithm having that time to scale and to learn the performance. And maybe it is also that the product mix you’re pushing on one channel versus another needs to be different. Maybe the audience in Facebook is older and it will be more geared towards treatments that give really a youthful skin. Whereas a Snapchat or a TikTok, we could push lower price products where the consumer is younger and more price sensitive. So it’s making sure that you adapt your product to the right channel also and to the right audience.

– Very, very good suggestion absolutely, spot on. So, I know we’re in Q4, I’ve already appreciated all the time and wonderful things you’ve provided our audience maybe in just kind of a last ending, we’d love to just hear maybe any advice you’d give other marketers out there and other brands out there, sort of trying to break a ceiling that they’ve maybe, struggled to get through. Whether that’s, 1 million, 5 million, 10 million really curious as you’ve been able to grow and scale as you have. Yeah, would just love to, as an ending tip here, any advice you’d give them?

– I will say, test, test, test, test your way into everything. Not only leveraging the marketing team, but also people across the organization that don’t necessarily have this marketing eye because their input can be so valuable. And so making sure that you look at also, what are other brands doing? Not necessarily to copy, but to take what’s good and then apply it to your brand if applicable. And testing it of course, to see if it works for your brand. But I think testing is the best way. Whether it’s channel, whether it’s within CRO, making sure that everything is tested and that you also have the right measurements in place to be able to measure the effectiveness of it. If you have a KPI that you end up not being able to gather the data for, that’s not something that’s gonna be actionable. So making sure that your testing plan is really well laid out with what is the hypothesis? what is the test design and what are the KPIs that you’re going to measure? Making sure that all those measurements are actually coming through accurately.

– Very, very valuable insight. Testing, super important, but don’t just test for the sake of testing, pay attention, have those KPIs in line, Don’t be afraid to fail, and listen to your gut.

– Yes, there’s some tests that we’ve run that we were sure convinced that we even to bets that the one version was gonna win and it didn’t. And no matter how long I left it running, it just never won. So that just proves that, what we think will work, doesn’t always work. So, make sure you test it first.

– We’ve all been there, the prettier design does not always win.

– Yes, exactly.

– Well Margaux, I really appreciate the time, if anyone wants to reach out to you, or get in touch with you, is there a good channel or a good way for them to connect with you?

– Yeah, on LinkedIn, you can find me on LinkedIn, under Margaux Vallino Reese.

– Awesome, and I appreciate the time everyone check out Colorescience, it’s colorescience.com Awesome, awesome brand, doing super innovative things. Margaux again, I super appreciate the time and the valuable tips and tricks and hacks that you’ve given our audience. Good luck in the rest of Q4, and I wish you the most success going into 2022, and thank you so much for being on the podcast.

– Thank you so much, Samir, and take good care.

– You as well. Samir ElKamouny here, thank you so much for listening to eCom Growth Leaders Podcast. If you are a successful brand that is crushing it and would like to be on this program, please visit go.ecomgrowthleaders.com/podcast-guest. If you got something out of this interview, please share this episode on social media. Let’s do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on social. E-com growth leaders is sponsored by Fetch and Funnel, a performance marketing agency, specializing in omnichannel media buying, creative production and conversion optimization. We’ve partnered with 100 plus brands and generated over 500 million for clients using our trademarked Fetch and Funnel method. We have tons of content at our blog fetchfunnel.com/blog, and also some amazing eBooks like “How to Crush Your Competitors” and “How to Produce High Converting Creative”. Thanks again for listening to e-comm growth leaders, we are regularly putting out new episodes and content. So to make sure you don’t miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show, and it means a lot to me and my team. Wanna know more? Go to our website, fetchfunnel.com or follow us on social. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

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