How To Increase Your Customer Retention: The Ultimate Guide | Brandon Amoroso

Matt Edmundson

00:00:07.360 - 00:03:22.290

Well, hello and welcome to the Ecommerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmondson. The E Commerce podcast is all about helping you deliver E commerce. Wow.

And to help us do just that, today I'm chatting with my very special guest, Brandon Amoroso from Electric, about how to increase your customer retention theultimate guide. Oh yes. But before Brendan and I jump into that, let me suggest a few other e commerce podcast episodes that I think you'll enjoy listening to.

Check out Maximizing the Lifetime Value of a Customer with Valentin Radu. That was a great episode. Valentin's such a top bloke.

And the other episode you should look at is Customer Value Optimization, the real silver bullet of E commerce with the legendary Will Larsing.

You can check out both of those episodes along with with our entire archives of episodes on our website for [email protected] I like to say this every week, Brandon. I'm always amazed by how many people check out past episodes, you know, going back years and looking at those stats.

So you can see all of those on the website. They're still there. You can still listen to them.

Now this episode is brought to you by the E Commerce Cohort, which helps you deliver e commerce wow to your customers. Now here's the question, right? How do you stay on top of things in a way that works for you and your e commerce business?

Because there's always so much to learn about e commerce given the rate and speed of change. Hence, we now have the E Commerce Cohort.

It is a lightweight membership group with guided monthly sprints that cycle through all the key areas of E commerce.

So if you're working by yourself, whether if you're working in a team, it's going to help you stay on top of what is going on in the market and how it applies for your business business. It gives you clear and actionable jobs to be done so you'll know what to work on and you'll get the support to get it done that you need.

So whether you're just starting out in e commerce or you may be like me, a bit of a dinosaur, someone who's been in E commerce for a really long time, a well established e commercer as we like to say.

I encourage you to definitely check out ecommerce cohort.com or you can email me directly mattecommercepodcast.net with any questions that you may have. Okay, so, so let's get into it.

Brandon is the founder and CEO of Electric, a drinks company that scales brands with profitable e Commerce models built from innovative proprietary methods.

Powered by the freedom and individuality of the Gen Z mindset, Electric has fueled over 35 in house specialists in a range of growth focused strategies including email, SMS marketing, SEO, content marketing, paid acquisition, web dying, web design and development, and basically a whole range of other things. So I'm excited to have this conversation with Brandon. Brandon, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

Thanks for joining me here on the E Commerce podcast.

Brandon Amoroso

00:03:22.930 - 00:03:24.210

Of course, thanks for having me.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:24.290 - 00:03:44.150

Oh no worries. Now you are hailing in from Miami, Florida right now, which is no doubt gonna have much more warmer weather than what I've got here in.

Well, at least it's sunny, sunny Liverpool here in the uk so. But you were mentioning you're off to Toronto fairly soon, so you're going to have colder climates very, very shortly, right?

Brandon Amoroso

00:03:44.710 - 00:03:50.630

Yes. Unfortunately though, I will only be there for about four nights so I won't have to deal with it for too long.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:53.110 - 00:04:05.270

Just keep telling yourself when it's cold you just like, it's only a few more nights to go. It's only a few more nights to go. I shall escape soon. Welcome to the show. Brennan, tell me about Electric and what it does. What does your company do?

Brandon Amoroso

00:04:06.070 - 00:04:56.030

Yeah, so we're a Shopify plus agency that specializes in retention marketing.

So say almost 90% of the time we're working with our clients on their email and SMS marketing, specifically the automations within their Klaviyo accounts, helping them understand how like segmentation and personalization of that can increase and improve retention and ltv. And then second is web design and development.

So really anything customer experience related from the moment that they begin that checkout process all the way through making their subsequent orders, that's where we step in and help brands navigate the Shopify ecosystem. All the tools that they should or should not be using and then deploying that across email and SMS and their website.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:56.670 - 00:05:06.830

Wow, there's a lot going on there. Is this your, how long has Electric been around? Is this a fairly new venture or has it been around a few years?

Brandon Amoroso

00:05:08.190 - 00:05:53.070

A couple of years. But I was freelancing in like 2017 and 2018 just for small Shopify businesses.

And then Electric officially launched about mid-2019 and then we were acquired back in April this year by a beverage technology company who was entering the Shopify space with their own tax and compliance app for alcohol merchants to be able to ship across the United States. So it was stylized as Shopify for Wine and that launched about six, seven weeks ago now.

So now we have the agency running, but then that's another sort of business unit that I'm focused on as well.

Matt Edmundson

00:05:53.470 - 00:06:07.310

Wow. So you're. You set up a business three years ago, you get it acquired this year by Drinks, I think it was.

Drinks.com bought out your agency but you're still involved. That's all part of the deal of the sale.

Brandon Amoroso

00:06:08.920 - 00:07:00.530

Yeah.

So from a day to day standpoint, I was already in the process of putting in sort of a VP and up level across the lecture so that I wasn't running around doing 10,000 things every day and could focus more on like the long term strategy. So I'd say more and more my time is being spent on the app and acceleration adoption of it within the Shopify ecosystem.

Doing events, putting together all the content and resources, building things out like the help desk, all the stuff that comes with being a Shopify plus certified app. So it's been fun because I've been learning a lot along the way and I still get to have the agency as well. So sort of the best of both.

Matt Edmundson

00:07:00.530 - 00:07:40.280

Worlds I was going to say. It's interesting because you.

We don't have many people on the show that have been bought out as recently as you have and you've gone from this sort of transition which starts life as a freelancer, to running an agency, quite a rapidly growing agency by the sounds of it, with the team size that you have to then being acquired. So now you're, I guess you're employed by drinks.com you know, you've sort of gone the full gamut of, of sort of statuses here, haven't you?

From freelancer to CEO to you know, working with within a larger organization. Have you found that whole transition.

Brandon Amoroso

00:07:42.040 - 00:08:38.460

There'S definitely pros and cons. I inherently just have an entrepreneurial spirit, I would say.

And so the nice thing about Drinks is that it is still sort of scrappy and has that startup mindset and being a part of the executive team there still allows me to have some autonomy and decision making sort of power that goes into it.

Though obviously it's not the same as it was with Electric because that was just 100% me and there wasn't necessarily as much red tape as you get when you start to get into larger in larger organizations.

But I don't think the transition has been, has been too difficult, especially because they were a client of ours and that's sort of how this whole thing came to be. So already comfortable, familiar with working with them.

Matt Edmundson

00:08:38.780 - 00:09:27.670

Yeah, I figured you must be if you'd sold to them. But it's interesting that actually the sale came to an existing client. Obviously they'd use your services and gone.

No, we, we want to bring this more full time in house. I've seen that actually quite a few times. Bigger companies, they'll go to agencies, they'll use agencies and then they'll end up buying the agency.

Which is quite an interesting strategy, I think, from corporations to do that. These days, customer retention is technically what we're talking about. So let's dig into that.

So how did you end up sort of getting involved in customer retention? So you talked about email and SMS and the segmentation and helping customers with that.

Was that something that was very intentional or was that something that was kind of accidental getting involved with?

Brandon Amoroso

00:09:28.710 - 00:11:17.200

I think a little bit of both. I never really enjoyed the paid media side of things. Everything from Facebook ads to TikTok ads.

Never was something that I could really get passionate about.

And then as I saw Klaviyo sort of continued to rise within the Shopify ecosystem, all the integrations amongst the various app providers as well, and how they all sort of came together in Klaviyo as the central hub of data on each customer, that was a lot more interesting to me.

The ability to create these personalized experiences at scale by leveraging various different tool sets to get data plugged into Klaviyo that you could then create it off of. So we actually stopped doing any thing to do with paid acquisition in 2021 and moved entirely into just retention.

And that was definitely a great transition for us because not only did it make our team more focused and you can't be an expert in anything or in everything, but it also was a lot easier in terms of the sales process with new potential clients because we have one very specific area that we focus on, customer retention. You come to us in order to increase ltv.

And we're not a traditional email and SMS agency in the sense that we're not just doing things within your Klaviyo account. We're making recommendations that are more holistic across that customer journey. It sort of fell into.

It definitely wasn't intentional to begin with, but as I started working more and more within the e commerce industry, saw how much opportunity there was there.

Matt Edmundson

00:11:17.520 - 00:11:22.560

Yeah. Okay. I have a big question for you. Is it Klaviyo or Klaviyo?

Brandon Amoroso

00:11:23.520 - 00:11:30.240

I think they want us to say Klaviyo, but I can't remember what it was.

Matt Edmundson

00:11:31.600 - 00:11:36.880

I just. I really should call them one day and ask them, listen, how am I Supposed to put, is it Klaviyo or Klaviyo?

Brandon Amoroso

00:11:36.960 - 00:11:43.340

There's a right way to say it. They've got T shirts with the phonetic spelling on it. Okay, yeah, but maybe they should just.

Matt Edmundson

00:11:43.340 - 00:12:00.100

Send me one of those. So Klaviyo or Klaviyo. You've mentioned that this is the platform that you use.

Is this, is this your sort of platform of choice for email marketing, especially around customer retention?

Brandon Amoroso

00:12:01.460 - 00:12:08.100

Yeah, we only use Klaviyo for email and SMS marketing with any brand that's on Shopify.

Matt Edmundson

00:12:10.010 - 00:12:13.850

And why Klaviyo? Why that particular product?

Brandon Amoroso

00:12:15.610 - 00:13:28.460

Because of the sort of the number in depth of integrations that it has with the rest of our app tech stack for our merchants. So everything from the customer service platform to the reviews platform to the loyalty platform, everything integrates with Klaviyo.

So we get that unified view of a customer. And then there's been a lot of investment amongst the various apps into making their Klaviyo integrations more robust.

So there's some specific features and functionality that only exists amongst like Recharge and Klaviyo for example, that you wouldn't get in any other email platform. So that is the main reason. And then for us it just makes sense to. It's not like we're a team of 100 people here.

It makes more sense to go all in on one platform and truly be experts within that versus saying oh yeah, we do email and SMS marketing across Klaviyo, mailchimp list track iterable and so on. It just doesn't. It would spread us too thin.

Matt Edmundson

00:13:28.540 - 00:14:59.530

Yeah, no, fair play. It's interesting.

I mean I've been around E commerce for a fair few years now and, and it's interesting to me that Klaviyo or Klaviyo seems to have sort of come out of nowhere.

I mean not recently, but there were definitely other contenders in the market when they came onto the market and they, I think they, it feels to me like they've revolutionized the whole industry a little bit. And so they seem to be. And I don't have any data to prove this. It's just pure what I, what I see good feel kind of thing.

They seem to be the market leader or at least one of the market leaders now in this whole email marketing side of things. And a lot of people talk about them very favorably. We in fact use Klaviyo ourselves for our own E commerce brands.

And so it's just, it's really interesting.

Sort of chart their story and especially because There were other companies around beforehand that maybe haven't done as well and so maybe they've just been faster at adapting. And one of the things like you say that I like about them is they do adapt with a whole bunch of other stuff through their APIs. So watch this.

But we should probably get someone from Klaviyo onto the podcast and talk to them about it. A little memo to self there. So this ultimate retention program of yours, Brandon, let's talk about that.

So over the last few years of doing all of this, you figured a few things out, it's fair to say, say. Right?

Brandon Amoroso

00:15:00.650 - 00:15:01.610

I would hope so.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:03.610 - 00:15:16.170

Yeah. Otherwise it's going to be a really short interview. I'm just saying. So what have you learned?

Just give me an overview of the sort of, this idea that you have.

Brandon Amoroso

00:15:17.850 - 00:17:26.590

Yeah, so you get sort of the basic framework of which to build your retention program when you get up and running with the Shopify store. But everything is sort of, you're getting the basics, you're not necessarily extending it.

And that starts all the way with, I mean Shopify, for example, provides the ability to send out an abandoned cart email. So if you're a brand that just is getting up and running, Shopify can support that for you.

But truly to extend that functionality, you're going to want to get up and running with Klaviyo, build out abandoned cart flows there, segment it based off of like what the cart size is. Is it a newer returning customer? Are they one shot buyer or subscription customer?

And so anything within E commerce can start out very simple and then become very complex quickly. And so it's all about sort of identifying what are the lowest hanging, sort of fruit optimizations and initiatives that we can push forward.

That's going to drive the most roi.

Because if you try to do everything all at once, you're going to end up doing everything sort of half baked and not, not really in a, in a strong, cohesive manner. So part of what we've been focused on is which of these things are the initiatives that we want to tackle first.

And so there's very specific sort of changes to a brand setup that we want to make day one, whether they're large or small, because we know they're going to have the most outsized return on investment versus other areas which are more of a nice to have or hey, you're a, you're a really large brand, you can invest and get to this point. So we are going to focus on this with you. Everything from like your campaign sending strategy could be based off of a couple of key segments.

But you can get as granular of your segmentation as you could even dream of based off of how much data is in Klaviyo. So sort of a walk before you run approach.

Matt Edmundson

00:17:28.590 - 00:18:13.700

I like that. I like the walk before you run.

And I laughed or I smiled when you said things in E commerce can start off relatively simple and become horrendously complicated quite quickly. And if I could just hear all over the globe as people were listening to the show, people just going, amen, Amen. Amen.

Because we've all been there, haven't we? Where things have just got horrendously complicated and unnecessarily so. So how do you stop that? How do you prevent Shiny Object syndrome?

How do you prevent the desire to change everything in an instant because you feel like everything needs to be changed because stuff just isn't working? How do you avoid going down that road?

Brandon Amoroso

00:18:15.220 - 00:19:46.160

Yes, the biggest thing for me is when you're doing anything, just making sure that you have documentation around it. And if you are going to be like implementing testing, for example, that you have a framework to log and analyze those test results moving forward.

So you're not just testing for the sake of testing. But I think the best example is we've been in a couple of Klaviyo accounts where it's just an absolute nightmare.

It's like there's like a hundred flows. They have been set up by like four or five different agencies. There's been in house people that are tweaking them as well.

No one really knows what customers are getting which emails and texts at what point of their journey. And there's no consistency in terms of branding across them.

And I think that spawns out of not having sort of documentation and basically a roadmap of this is what we built out in Klaviyo. This is like the last day that it was edited. This is what we're currently testing within the flow.

So it really comes down to just organization and managing that and having somebody like in house who's. Who's truly owning it.

Because if you just throw five different agencies at your Klaviyo account, then you're constantly going to be reinventing the wheel and you're not going to know if there's any incremental benefit or ROI to that, to that decision.

Matt Edmundson

00:19:47.520 - 00:21:49.870

Yeah, we had one agency looking after our Klaviyo email list. Klaviyo email, the whole thing. They were looking after Klaviyo.

And in April this year, I think it was April, April, May, we switched out agencies and we, we bought somebody else in. That could make a big difference because we, we just thought actually something's not right. It's not performing how we, how we think it could.

And so they made a whole bunch of changes. And so actually, in hindsight, what I wish we'd have done was exactly what you've just said, right?

Had the documentation from agency number one saying this is all the stuff. Because the confusion after doing that, bringing in that second agency has been quite stark.

And we, that we then integrate, on top of it, we integrated a new dashboard, right. A bit a bdi. So we, we, we integrated this new dashboard, which also beautifully integrates with Klaviyo.

And so we had the website and now we've got this dashboard talking to Klaviyo. Plus we've now on our second agency.

Well, we're still trying to unpick, I think, a whole bunch of the problems that came about as a result of doing that, because we didn't understand how stuff was all going to work together in terms of what other people had done and who was getting what and who wasn't getting stuck stuff. So it's been a really steep learning curve. A really steep learning curve.

But when you talk about, and I sit here in hindsight, right, Brandon going, we should have done what you've just suggested because it would have saved us a whole lot of pain. But if I'd sit, sat here and listened to you talk and had not gone through that, I'd have just gone. Something like that makes sense.

But documentation, that's not sexy, is it? That whole getting organized thing is just not sexy and so will probably become task number 806 on my to do list.

Brandon Amoroso

00:21:51.470 - 00:22:54.160

Yes, it is. It's not sexy, but it'll save you a lot of time in the long run. And it doesn't have to be complicated either. Just it's very, very simple.

It could be a spreadsheet just tracking what's been done and when. And if you are testing, what are you testing? What's the desired outcome?

There's actually an interesting thing I was reading about how if you don't write down your expected outcome from like a test that you're running, if whenever you get the results, even if they're not originally what you had expected, like human nature will rationalize whatever the actual result is if you don't have it written down, like, hey, this is what our hypothesis was.

And the reason why that's important is because if you just are constantly rationalizing Whatever the results are, there's no way to reflect on oh, what should we have done differently or tweak differently to improve, like ctr, for example. So that was something that I found pretty interesting as well.

Matt Edmundson

00:22:54.880 - 00:23:28.070

Yeah, that's a good point actually. That whole mapping expected outcomes because you're right, because it helps you.

If you're objective enough, it means you can analyze your thinking and to go actually, so we didn't achieve this outcome. It was either better or it was worse.

So what led me to believe that this was the expected outcome is actually quite an interesting question, isn't it? And why, why did I go down that road? Have you ever, ever read the book Black Box Thinking with is it Matthew said?

I think that's the guy that wrote the book.

Brandon Amoroso

00:23:28.150 - 00:23:34.410

I, I have not but I will. I'll add it to my list if you, you recommend it.

Matt Edmundson

00:23:34.890 - 00:24:38.940

Yeah, he's his whole. The whole premise of the book is how do you deal with failure. Right.

And, and he, he contrasts the airline industry and the medical industry in the states and how they, how they both deal with failure and how the medical industry really doesn't like failure and does everything to avoid it because of the million lawsuits that are going to come their way. Whereas the airline industry learns from it. Right.

And we now have some of the safest stats ever coming out of an industry that was notoriously unsafe. And it's because of how they deal with this. And I think the documenting of your hypothesis is a simple idea, isn't it?

It's like if I jot this down rather than just brushing over it because we don't like it when we're wrong, but analyzing it and going what can we learn from that? I think it's a really powerful idea. Super, super powerful.

So customer retention, what are some of the components then that we should be thinking about as e commerce entrepreneurs?

Brandon Amoroso

00:24:39.740 - 00:27:37.560

Yeah, I mean the easiest place to start is going to be your email and SMS flows. Those have the most outsized impact on customer retention.

Then from there there's some more, I would say sort of soft initiatives that you can push forward that don't have as necessarily of a direct correlation to. Oh like I can see how many people clicked on this, how much revenue was driven through it.

Like if you don't have a strong customer support team in place, then your customer retention is naturally going to suffer from that.

And something that we've been chatting through with Gorgias is how brands should be looking at customer service not only as like a retention hub, but somewhere that actually additional Revenue can be driven.

And so they're now rolling out analytics within the platform that allow us to track like, oh, this CS agent actually made $5,000 this month in additional revenue from their interaction with customers chatting in.

So that's, that's a really crucial component that I think a lot of brands have looked at as a cost center historically, which is definitely not the way that you should be approaching it today. Another thing is subscription programs.

They are beneficial obviously from a LTV standpoint, but not a tremendous fan of the companies that have like 40% off your first subscription order and then essentially set it up so that you have to become a subscription customer in order to be a customer of their brand. The way that we like to approach it is much more of a try before you subscribe approach. And so maybe the first order or the first two are one shot.

But then because of the email and SMS flows that we have set up, naturally that customer will get pushed into a subscription program for something that they actually like.

Because it's a lot easier to keep a customer as a one shot customer and then like transition them into subscription versus if they start out on a subscription and then they churn significantly more difficult to ever get them back as a customer.

I don't know if there's something to do with like just like the way the human brain works or something, but you, it's almost like you're canceling that relationship with that brand if you're unsubscribing from your subscription program. Whereas the one shot's much more transactional and so we much prefer that route.

And I'd say the last thing though, there's a bunch of other stuff, but one of the most impactful things that we do across all of our clients when we get started with them is move their transactional communications out of Shopify into Klaviyo.

Matt Edmundson

00:27:37.800 - 00:27:38.320

Okay.

Brandon Amoroso

00:27:38.320 - 00:28:56.730

Because about 15 to 20% of a brand's website traffic goes to that order tracking page. So we set up custom order tracking pages that have like product cross sells additional brand information.

If you're a one shot customer, we show you all the benefits of the subscription program.

If you're a subscription customer, we push you into the referral program and then we're also able to test and create personalized transactional journeys.

In Klaviyo, where these emails are getting 90% open rates, like 25% click through rates, it is such a higher engagement than you're going to see with your marketing communications. And so if you just leave them in Shopify, you have no idea what is happening with those customers.

You can't see the data, you can't do any testing, you can't make it personalized. So getting those over into Klaviyo has been a huge unlock for us.

And that is, I mean if you're a customer who just places an order of a brand for the first time, most of your experience with that brand is going to be the transactional journey. Your order confirmed, order out for shipping, order delivered and so on. So making sure that that is really set up for success branded.

The whole thing is very important.

Matt Edmundson

00:28:57.690 - 00:29:59.470

Yeah, it's a really interesting point and I want to just dig into this a little bit more because it's a bit of a, bit of a soapbox for me if I'm honest with you Brendan, in the sense that the most neglected emails are our transactional emails. Just about every e commerce business I've ever worked with and they're the most opened emails by clients.

I think I've read a stat, I don't know if it's still true, but the, your order is shipped email with the tracking information is open by sort of 60 to 70% of your people. That's a lot of opens and all they tend to be is just emails. Oh Matt, your order shipped. Here's a tracking number. Thanks. And that's it.

And usually that comes from the shipping company. I don't even send it out. And so that, that whole transactional email, getting them out of shopify into clay, you can do then so much more with them.

What sort of things have you found? Works really well with the transactional emails.

Brandon Amoroso

00:30:00.910 - 00:30:51.490

So simplest thing we do is just create a separate transactional journey for one shot customers and then create a different one for subscription customers because we want to be speaking to them differently. For the one shot customers we are promoting the subscription program, additional products that they should try.

Whereas on the subscription customer side of things, we're reinforcing some of the perks and benefits that they're getting for being a subscription customer just to continue to let them know that. But then they're a subscription customer so they're going to be more likely to refer a friend than somebody who's just purchased as a one shot order.

So then we promote the referral program pretty heavily. So that's just one basic example of how you can then personalize the transactional journey to make it a little bit more relevant for that customer.

Matt Edmundson

00:30:51.730 - 00:31:15.160

Yeah, no, brilliant, brilliant. Absolutely.

So you've, you've, you've got these different workflows for your One stops for your subscription and for your and you'll send them down these sort of different journeys you're dealing with them. What are the sort of forms of segmentation do you use? You mentioned earlier about you've got a flow around abandoned carts, right?

Brandon Amoroso

00:31:17.480 - 00:33:39.310

So I'd say the most complex abandoned cart flow that we've done is taking into account if it's a new versus returning customer. And then if it's a returning customer, is it a one shot customer or a subscription customer?

And then also taking into account what is the cart size as well. So you have a bunch of different branches going on in there within that flow.

And the reason why we're checking for is it a new versus returning customers because if it's a new customer then we are just going to communicate with them differently and maybe even have higher incentivization through the form of offers to get them to make that first purchase.

Or if you're a returning customer, we might reference whatever your previous order was or include information in there about certain profiles or characteristics that we have on that customer.

Then one shot versus subscription is important because if you're an active subscription customer and you abandon checkout, we're probably going to not be as aggressive in our communication with you because you're an absent, you're an active subscription customer. If you're not, then we will be. And then the cart size is important too because if you have $500 of product in your cart, maybe we give you a code.

Whereas if you only got $50 in it, you don't say anything. So that's just one example.

But you can continue sort of further down the rabbit hole there by I don't know, let's say you have like a quiz on your website or you have a review request process that asks people for their skin type since it's a skincare brand. You could then split out the flow based off of skin type and reference in there.

Like oh hey, you have dry skin so you should be also looking at these relevant products and you can sort of continue on down the path there. But it's really all about leveraging zero and first party data.

You can get a lot, a lot of the way there with first party data and then from there look at hey, what else would we need to make this more relevant for the customer? And that's typically where zero party data will come in in the form of like quizzes, reviews, post purchase surveys, stuff like that.

Matt Edmundson

00:33:40.830 - 00:34:38.390

Super powerful stuff. It's, it goes back to, I mean it sounds complex. Brandon, what you're talking about, but it really isn't.

And you're talking about actually just putting yourself in the shoes of your customer. If your customer is this type of customer, what sort of stuff do we want to give them?

If they're this type of customer, what's going to make sense for them? And let's give them that information rather than just doing this sort of blanket, one size fits all type thing. Email and sms.

You mentioned about SMS doing SMS stuff and have you found that there's a difference between email and SMS in terms of its. I know, I know a lot of people, for example, who will do email but won't do sms.

And so I'm kind of thinking what would be the reasons why I should start looking at something like sms? Is it too competitive yet? Is Jeremy in these sorts of questions? I wonder what you thought about that.

Brandon Amoroso

00:34:39.350 - 00:37:10.080

Yeah, I don't really, I don't see a reason why any brand would not do SMS marketing. It's a different communication channel for sure.

Like you can't treat it in the same way that you treat email marketing, otherwise you're going to end up with a lot of unsubscribes and you're also going to have to pay a lot because it's pay per text sent out versus email, which is not. I mean, if I have 100,000 contacts in my Klaviyo account, I can send them as many emails as I want. I'm not going to be charged on a usage basis.

Whereas there's carrier fees associated with text. So if it's an SMS or an mms, you're paying for that message to go out. So that just makes it a less frequent communication channel.

And you're also in somebody's text message inbox.

So it's much more personal and you need to treat it in, in a higher regard than you do email, where people are used to being on hundreds of email lists that they just sort of click through and it's not, it's just not the same. But SMS has an outsized return compared to email. I mean click through rates are, are significantly higher. The ROI is usually significantly higher.

So any brand that's, that's not doing it the easiest way to get started in a, in a way that wouldn't open it up.

The floodgates would be to basically create like a segment of your absolute best customers in Klaviyo, invite them to a VIP SMS subscriber list where you can send them like new product announcements and launches before you send them to the rest of your email list start to build some exclusivity around that channel in that way or I mean just add in a two step pop up on your website if you want it, open up to everyone and have email capture be on the first page and then the second screen would show that SMS lead capture.

And with some of our brands we incentivize SMS signup by saying, well if you give us your phone number then you're going to be entered for a chance to win something like a gift with your order. Or you can do an additional percentage off.

Maybe it's 10 for email, 15% for SMS, but pretty much across the board of any brand that we work with, the LTV of SMS subscribers is higher than that of email only subscribers.

Matt Edmundson

00:37:10.480 - 00:37:25.600

Okay, that's an important point, right? And I like your strategy there for getting the SMS subscribers. So what you mentioned, treat the SMS box differently to the inbox.

What sort of text messages work well in your opinion?

Brandon Amoroso

00:37:27.200 - 00:38:44.770

More like authentic, fun, cheeky personality from the brand than your standard like email marketing. Here's a bunch of pretty pictures and design which I would argue for email marketing.

Even some of the best performing emails are just like a simple text based email from the, from the founder.

But we've had a lot of success with like the founder taking a selfie at the warehouse and giving some cute like anecdotal story to their subscribers with sort of a link out to whatever product they were referencing and then making sure that you have people on the other end of that channel because it's a two way communication channel.

It's not, it's not like email where most customers are not going to reply to your marketing emails, but they definitely will reply to your text messaging campaigns.

So the worst thing I think a brand can do is have an auto response that goes out when somebody sends a text back to your brand with something along the lines of this inbox isn't monitored. Reach out to [email protected] and we'll be able to better assist you there.

That's a huge missed opportunity to create a relationship with the customer, service them like on demand and get them to purchase product.

Matt Edmundson

00:38:46.130 - 00:39:10.850

So what are some of the brands that you've seen do retention marketing?

Well, the reason I'm asking this Brandon, is as much as I hate all the email I get every day, I do subscribe to people's email list and SMS list deliberately just to see what they're doing so I can learn from them. Right. And so I'm kind of curious who should I look at so I could.

Brandon Amoroso

00:39:10.850 - 00:40:33.120

Be self serving and give you a client of ours. But we don't mind.

I'll go in a different direction with a apparel company that I buy like my workout goes from, it's called 10,000 and they have a like a loyalty program where because I purchased from them a certain amount of times and I think it was something like three months had passed and I had not gone back and made another purchase before but they just had a new like Colorway drop for one of their pairs of shorts.

When sending out that communication to me, they referenced the fact that I had a $30 credit as a part of their loyalty program that I would be able to redeem just right within checkout. So I was click the link took me right into like the shop pay flow and there I was spending $32 or whatever on a $62 pair of shorts.

But the they got me back onto the website, got me interacting with the brand again and we're able to personalize it because of the fact that I purchased that type of short before and they were referencing the loyalty program and dynamically pulling in like how much store credit I had left to make it more likely that I purchased or that I click through and actually make that purchase.

Matt Edmundson

00:40:34.000 - 00:41:11.300

Great, great, I like that.

I'll check them out now where due to the nature of when we record the E commerce podcast and when we air the E commerce podcast, they're two very different dates. So this episode will come out after Black Friday.

So I'm just curious in the closing minutes of the show, what are some of the tips maybe that brands should think about, marketeers listening should think about. They've gone through Black Friday, they've got a whole bunch of new clients top strategies here for keeping them and retaining them.

Brandon Amoroso

00:41:12.100 - 00:43:04.650

So if you don't ask and hopefully you did this, but if not, then you can still recover the information.

But something we like to do for Black Friday Cyber Monday is when people are checking out in that post purchase survey, the first question that we ask is like was this a gift or not? Because if it's a gift, well then we're going to communicate entirely different with that contact than we will.

If they say no, if it was a gift, why not surface them an offer to purchase for themselves right then and there, put them into a separate bucket within your email and SMS account to communicate with them differently and then you have the other side of the coin which is who's the recipient trying to get that information so that you can nurture that relationship with them. If it wasn't a gift. Well, then you're sort of within your standard retention flows if you didn't do that.

I mean, you could always just send out a campaign asking customers, hey, was your recent order a gift or not? And then based off of that response, then you can start to personalize things a little bit.

But I think the most powerful way I found to retain the Black Friday Cyber Monday customers is to sort of dig in and split your customers out based off of those that are heavily driven by incentive versus those that aren't.

And you can do that by looking at like aov, lifetime value, number of discount codes used, and then make sure that when you're sort of architecting and tailing your strategy of communication for December onwards that you're taking that into, into account. I think those are really the two, the two most powerful things.

Matt Edmundson

00:43:04.970 - 00:43:44.350

Yeah, no, very good. Very, very good. Thank you for that. Brandon.

Listen, question I like to ask all of our guests who have been on the podcast is you've just given the best keynote speech of your life. Let's assume it's to, you know, the E Commerce cohort guys because they sponsor the show, right?

So you're in a hotel room, they're all set there, you've done, you've delivered your keynote. Customer attention. They're all going wild. Yeah, well done, Brandon. Awesome. They're all going a bit crazy.

So you come on, you take your bow and you say, listen, all this is possible because of a person. A book, a film, a play, a podcast. Who, who do you thank at the end of that speech and why?

Brandon Amoroso

00:43:48.670 - 00:45:33.680

I'd say it'd probably have to be one of my, one of my mentors who helped me along the way with building Electric. Everything from the very non glamorous side of things like payroll and accounting and the contracts and all that.

Just horrible, horrible stuff that I hopefully will never have to do again through the more like organizational strategic side of things. Talking about things like institutionalizing process and procedure so that you can actually scale while not stifling innovation.

And I think that was, that's one of the more important things that I've, that I've learned is like process is extremely important. You can't have a 40 person company.

I'd say you can't even really have 20 person company without having like process guidelines, but making sure that it's sort of drilled into the organizational culture that just because we have these process guidelines doesn't mean this is like how you need to be doing it. There's nuance and we want to continue to improve.

And so if there's ways that this process should be changed for the better, that that that idea should be surfaced and brought through the organization. Because you see really, really large companies who, they have process guidelines and like, that's just the way it is.

And they're not getting changed no matter what, which can be really demotivating for a team, I think if they aren't able to sort of help, craft and shape whatever the organization is doing. I think that was a long winded way of saying probably one of my mentors along the way.

Matt Edmundson

00:45:34.480 - 00:45:35.920

And what's the name of your mentor?

Brandon Amoroso

00:45:37.620 - 00:45:38.420

It would be Zach.

Matt Edmundson

00:45:39.620 - 00:45:57.140

Zach. My son is called Zach, so I just think it's one of the coolest names in the world. So, Zach, if you're listening, thanks very much. Much appreciated.

Now, it's fair to say, Brandon, you are not new to the world of podcasting. You actually have your own podcast as well, don't you? Why don't you tell the good folks about that?

Brandon Amoroso

00:45:58.100 - 00:46:53.090

Yeah, so the podcast I have is called the D2Z podcast. It is a little bit E commerce focused, just because that's the industry that I'm in.

But really what it's more about is organizational sort of culture and entrepreneurship and how to take maybe a different approach than companies have done historically. And a lot of that is based out of sort of the Gen Z mindset and spirit around like autonomy and ownership and creativity.

And so we'll bring on a lot of founders from the software side of things, from the brand side to talk about growing from one person to five people to 10 to 20 to 50 to 100 and so on. And what are some of the challenges, things that they learned along the way.

So a little bit more about business growth as a whole and super tactical in the weeds on the E commerce side.

Matt Edmundson

00:46:53.580 - 00:46:55.580

Fantastic. Is it going well? You enjoying it?

Brandon Amoroso

00:46:56.220 - 00:47:10.700

Yeah, it's been great. I've learned a lot.

There's been some episodes where I really take a lot away for myself in terms of things that I might want to try within electric or drinks or even just personal day to day stuff for myself.

Matt Edmundson

00:47:11.180 - 00:47:51.310

Yeah, see, you're right. I'm the same way. I have a permanent notebook on my desk because I'm analog, right? So I'm conscious, constantly taking notes.

And so I've drafted a few questions down from our conversation. And tomorrow I always record the podcast the day before I go into the office.

So tomorrow I head into the office where we sit down with the teams and it's just like well, this is what I learned yesterday from my conversation with Brendan. So what are we going to do about that? So I totally get your point.

I don't know who benefits more, whether it's listeners or whether it's me in the these podcasts, but I really enjoy them. How do, how do people reach you? How do people get hold of you if they want to connect?

Brandon Amoroso

00:47:52.190 - 00:48:13.720

Yeah, so you always go on LinkedIn, says Brandon Amoroso.

Or my website, brandon Omaroso.com if you are interested in potentially working with the agency, then it's Electric marketing dot com, but it's a Q instead of a C at the end of electricity, which sort of have a little bit of that klaviyo klaviyo thing going on there.

Matt Edmundson

00:48:15.720 - 00:48:18.800

Because the domain name was available. Right? That's it. Yeah.

Brandon Amoroso

00:48:18.800 - 00:48:34.440

People never know how to say it, which actually has worked out well because then they remember it versus if it was just a simple name, then maybe it wouldn't be as sticky. But yeah, those would be the two best avenues. Happy to help chat through anything.

Matt Edmundson

00:48:34.760 - 00:49:01.420

Fantastic. Well, you can reach out to Brandon at those.

We will of course put all his links in in our show notes, which you can get for [email protected] or if you're on our email list, we will email those out direct to your inbox using the magic of customer retention marketing, as we've been learning about today. So, Brandon, thank you for joining me on the E Commerce podcast. Honestly, man, it's been an absolute blast.

Really, really appreciate you taking the time to join us today.

Brandon Amoroso

00:49:02.060 - 00:49:03.740

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me on.

Matt Edmundson

00:49:03.900 - 00:50:39.090

No problem. So there you have it. What a great conversation. Huge thanks again to Brandon for joining me today.

And of course, a big shout out to today's show sponsor, the E Commerce Cohort do head over to ecommerce cohort.com for more information about this new type of community that you can join now.

Be sure to follow the E Commerce Podcast wherever you get your podcast from because we have more great conversations lined up, just like today's one with Brennan. I don't want you to miss any of them. So make sure you subscribe. And in case no one has told you today, dear listener, you, my friend, are awesome.

Yes, you are absolutely awesome. It is a burden we just have to bear. Just the way it is. Just the way it is. Just something we've all got to do.

So the E Commerce Podcast is produced by Orion Media. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app. The team that makes this show possible is sad.

AF Baynon, Josh Catchpull, Estella Robin and the mighty Tim Johnson theme song has been written by Josh Edmondson and my good self.

And as I mentioned if you would like to read the transcript or show notes, head over to the website ecommercepodcast.net where coincidentally you can also sign up for our said newsletter. So all of that said, I think think that is it from me. That is it from Brandon. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been great to have you with us.

Have a fantastic week and I will see you next week. Bye for now.

Brandon Amoroso

00:50:53.740 - 00:50:53.980

It.