Personalising the Customer Journey to Increase Lifetime Value

Matt Edmundson (02:22)
Well, good evening and welcome to the E-Commerce Podcast Live recording with me, your host Matt Edmondson. That's right. We are recording E-Commerce Podcasts. We do this every week ⁓ live. So we live stream out the recording for want of a better expression. And so this is just me just telling you what's going to happen tonight as we record this. We've got an amazing guest called Matt Barnett who's going to be on the show in just a few short minutes.

We are going to get into the whole personalization thing. We are going to get into the whole lifetime value of a customer thing and ask all kinds of questions around that, which I'm really looking forward to. Now, just for those of you who are watching the live stream, those of you who are watching the video, I'm going to actually start the recording of the podcast in just a few seconds time. You're going to hear me play some music, which is the podcast introduction, and then I'll be back introducing the podcast, if that makes sense.

If you are watching this, if you are on the live stream, please do say hi in the comments. Let us know where you're watching from. And obviously, if you have any questions for Matt during the show, post them in the comments. And hopefully, I'm going to get a chance to ask him your questions, as well as all the questions I inevitably am going to have for Matt. He's such a cool guy. We're going to get on really well. You're going to enjoy tonight's podcast. There's no doubt about it.

So with that explanation in mind and without further ado, I'm looking for the right button on my keypad. There it is. We are gonna record ⁓ the e-commerce podcast. This is a live recording. Don't go anywhere. It all starts right now.

Matt Barnett (04:00)
Welcome to the e-commerce podcast with Matt Edmondson, a show that brings you regular interviews, tips and tools for building your business online.

Matt Edmundson (04:26)
Well, hello and welcome to the e-commerce podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmondson. And whether you are just starting out or if you're like me, you've been around e-commerce for a while. My goal with this podcast is simply to help you grow your e-commerce and digital businesses. Now, every week I get to talk to amazing people from the world of e-commerce and ask them all kinds of questions about what they know and importantly,

How is it going to help me and you develop our online businesses? I kind of try and have the conversation you would have if you got to sit down with them for 45 minutes or so, maybe over lunch or a pint in the pub or something like that. I'm really keen that we dig into their story and learn the principles that they know that can help us start and adapt and grow online. So if you enjoy this episode, I would appreciate it if you could like it.

If you're watching online, maybe subscribe to either our YouTube channel or our audio podcast, but also share it with your friends and colleagues. Now today we are asking the question, how do we increase the lifetime value of our customers? That is such a cool question to ask, right? Because a lot of the time as e-commerce entrepreneurs, we kind of spend

a lot of our energy and a lot of our money and a lot of our time and a lot of our resource on new customer acquisition, which is cool. But what about growing the value of the customers that we already have? Is that a good strategy to follow? And if it is, how do we do it? Well, that's what we're digging into tonight. That's the question that I get to put to Matt Barnett, who calls himself

the Popper Bear of Bonjoro. And Bonjoro is the world's first customer delight platform, which is there to help great teams build real relationships with their customers at scale. I want to know why he calls himself Popper Bear. We're going to get into that, right? We're going to ask him all these kinds of questions. We're going to talk about what it takes to build engagement and turn customers into friends. Matt has some amazing insight here. It's what his business is all about, right? So especially on how to personalize

customer journey and how that can naturally lead to repeat purchases and higher reviews. This is going to be an action-packed show, right? So Matt's here to share all of these amazing lessons with us. So make sure you grab your notebooks if you can. Now, if you're in a place where you can't actually take notes, but you would like to get the notes from tonight's show, then all you have to do is head on over to our website. They are available as show notes. They are available for free.

You can download them just head on over to ecommercepodcast.net forward slash 56 because this is episode number 56. So that's ecommercepodcast.net forward slash 56 now After that introduction and without further ado, let's bring on today's guest Let me press this button here Matt. Welcome to the show. It's great to have you

Matt Barnett (07:42)
Yeah, hey Matt, good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Matt Edmundson (07:44)
It's

great, it's great, yeah. Now, it's worth pointing out to ⁓ our viewers and our listeners that at the time of recording, I am in the UK and you are about as far away from me as you can possibly get without coming back on yourself, right?

Matt Barnett (08:00)
I am literally on the other side of the planet right now in Sydney, Australia.

Matt Edmundson (08:06)
Sydney, Australia. Now you don't sound Australian, you sound quintessentially British.

Matt Barnett (08:11)
I am from the UK. I grew up in the UK, did my time over there and eventually just got over the grey sky. I wanted to blue skies again so I moved over here 10 years ago. ⁓

Matt Edmundson (08:27)
Yeah rub it in white don't you? I like how you phrase that. just you know I did my time there like it was some kind of jail sentence.

Matt Barnett (08:34)
I mean, kinda was.

Matt Edmundson (08:39)
Yeah, and Sydney's a beautiful part of the world, man. I love that city. It's such a great city.

Matt Barnett (08:46)
It's a place, here's thing you learn when you get older, as I'm obviously doing with the white hairs creeping through, is that...

Matt Edmundson (08:52)
No,

no,

Matt Barnett (08:55)
Yeah, it's most shaving off. Nowhere's perfect. So like Sydney, Australia, beautiful place to live, beautiful place to bring up children. If you like your outdoors, like again, you know, winters are sunny, it's beautiful. But at the same point, you know, it says business, we're on the other side of the world with this little island in the middle of nowhere. And so like you have to like it for me as a business owner, you have to get out to remind yourself just how big the world is and everything's out there. Like here, it's easy to sit in this floating and go surfing every day. So

I think there's a balance. Again, Australia is beautiful place to live, like, Europe has amazing things in terms of creativity. Like Australia hasn't really invented culture yet because everyone just goes to the beach. ⁓

But yeah, there's balance to everything. you know, nowhere's nowhere's perfect for

Matt Edmundson (09:43)
No, no, no, but I do not think it's a bad deal to live in Sydney. I appreciate you've got a few things to deal with, but you were saying earlier before we came on air that it's like first thing in the morning for you, it's 19 degrees centigrade for you right now. And it's last thing at night here in Liverpool and it's seven degrees centigrade. So ⁓ the difference between the temperatures is stark. Let's just put it that way. And of course, for all our US listeners, they're going to be going centigrade.

What on earth is centigrade, right? So just Google it, it'll be fine. So now let's get into this. Let's get into the show. We're gonna be talking about customer journey. We're gonna be talking about lifetime values and all that sort of thing, right? But let's start off right off the top of the show, Matt. What is customer lifetime value and why should I care about?

Matt Barnett (10:37)
Yeah, so very simply, the customer lifetime value is how much revenue a customer will give you over the entire journey of spending with your company. So over their lifetime with your company. So let's say they come and buy a widget off you for $20. If they then go back in two months and buy another one for $20, another one for $20, and then you never see them again, their lifetime value is $60.

Matt Edmundson (11:00)
Yeah, okay. So it's the total turnover that they bring you each and every year. Do you measure lifetime value in terms of years? Do you measure it in terms of decades? How do you, I appreciate that's gonna be different for every business, but how does that work for you?

Matt Barnett (11:17)
No, So so lifetime value is actually over the entire lifetime, independent of how long they stay with you. So if they stay with you for one year or 10 years, there is a calculation behind this, like I can explain it, but it is the same. So it is how long your average customer, and you can break this out, boy, you have different tiers of customers, different lifetime values, but how long that customer stays on average and how much they spend over that time. So for instance, you might only sell $50 a year to a customer.

But if they stay with you for 20 years, that's a $1,000 lifetime value customer. And that's how that works out. Whereas if they only stay with you five years, the time doesn't matter. It's trying to work out how long they stay with you versus how much they spend and how much that equates to. I'll stop there because we're going to get digging deeper.

Matt Edmundson (12:06)
I

always think it's worth with these things, know, just defining terms right at the start because I think phrases like lifetime value, a lot of people have very different ideas and understanding by it. So we are talking about the actual value in turnover that a customer brings you over the entire time that they shop with you or they do transactions with you, they do business with you. So why is this important to the business?

Why should I think about lifetime value? Yeah, I mean it may be obvious, but let's talk about that for a second

Matt Barnett (12:41)
Yes. Number one thing is it helps define how much you can spend to acquire, acquire and keep a customer. So if you're looking at a basic view, if you're only looking at the first transaction, and again, let's go back to the $20 idea. If you know that a customer will spend $20 with you and of that $10 as profit, then you can go, we're willing to spend, I don't know, half that profit to get that customer. So $5, let's say. If you instead know that that customer is going to stay with you for 10 years, actually going to spend $1,000.

Suddenly, you can actually spend more than $5 on that customer. And obviously, there is a time that that will pay back over. And you need to factor this in. How much you're willing to spend will depend on the risk of your company and the maturity. But essentially, if you understand that customer is going to purchase again and again and again, it affects his equations significantly. So you know you can spend more.

And the numbers will back you up and say, you're going to get that money back and make more money. And therefore that allows you to compete. It allows you to invest in marketing. It allows you to invest in infrastructure and operations. essentially, if you understand that better, it allows you to build your business faster because again, you have a solid model and you understand where the revenue is going to come from down the

Matt Edmundson (13:51)
That's brilliant, that's really good. we wanna know lifetime values of a customer so we understand the value of getting that customer in with that and knowing how much we can spend on marketing acquiring that customer is such an important piece of information. And I liked your example there. So how has this worked for you as a business, right? So Bonjoro is this, I love this phrase, this delight, customer delight platform, right? How...

As you've been growing that business, and we know it's been growing rapidly, how has this been impacting how you think?

Matt Barnett (14:25)
Yeah, so we're a subscription model business. Now, as I'm sure all the listeners know, there's more and more subscription models coming into e-commerce. This is actually very relevant. And so what's interesting is you'll see terms from my industry, because we've lived in the lifetime value industry for years, is now starting to be reflected in e-commerce massively. And so this is a perfect time for this conversation. So with us, it's absolutely crucial. So we have to look at that and go, it's a competitive market.

How much can we invest in spend to get customers? And this is not just direct advertising. This is how much we spend on support and like extremely great levels of support. How much we spend on customer success? How much do we spend on technology and development? How much we spend on hiring new marketing team members and doing partnerships and paid sponsorships? All this comes down to this one number, which is lifetime value. So we tend to go a little bit deeper because we have different types of customers.

And this is also partly the maturity of our business. At the beginning, we have one number. We have different types of customers. We know that we have large companies, we have mid-sized companies, and we have individuals. So we segment those out and we look at a different lifetime value for each one. And they have a significantly different lifetime value. So our biggest customers, the lifetime value there is probably 10x what our smallest customers is. That's the range for us. so many of you will have this too.

$20 widgets, you might have $500 like widgets again. And so you might have this huge differentiation. If you can understand that, what you then need to do is to understand the types of customers that are coming into your funnel or coming into your shop and purchasing. If you can then understand which bucket they fit into at the top, again, you can actually apply different marketing spend, different spend to each type of customer. So for instance, we're not going to go spend $1,000 trying to get a customer who's worth over their lifetime $300. It ain't going to happen.

But if you have a customer who's worth $10,000 over a lifetime, we probably can go and sponsor events where that customer exists because we're specifically targeting that customer and we know it will pay back. So this is where you get a little bit more smarter around it. There's a few other things. One thing I mentioned, these terms are not used in e-commerce as much right now, but this is the calculation behind our lifetime value. So do think about this. And this lends up to subscription, but it does work ad hoc spend as well.

So the way you work it out is it's basically average lifetime value versus churn. And those two numbers, what would they mean? So sorry, excuse me. Average revenue per user or ARPU versus churn. Now ARPU is for us the average money a customer will spend every month. For you, can also do this as average revenue per user a year. So if they only buy once a year,

there's your average revenue per user per year. If they buy three times a year, then add that together, there's your average revenue per year. So if you're doing wine delivery and they buy three times a year, then it's plus plus plus. Churn is the rate at which you lose customers. And this comes out in a equation. If you're interested about this, I'm not going to go too deep here, but I would encourage you to dive deeper.

Your churn rate is if you have 100 customers, essentially at the end of the year, how many of those 100 customers are left as customers? so I think obviously if you have a subscription model, which some e-commerce companies do, it's very easy because you'll actually see how many subscribers you have. Yeah. If you don't have a subscription model, you can still work it out. So you can still know that all those hundred customers from our qualitative or quantitative data, know that of those 50 of them will come back and purchase again next year.

And so therefore your churn rate over that year is 50%. Okay. Now, if you take our poo and churn together, you basically get a calculation that gives you the lifetime value and it's an average. So it's saying essentially if they spend $100 and we have 50 left, the average, the lifetime value of the customer is, I think it works out to be about $500 because I'm not going go deep into the math because it'll get confusing.

But essentially it works out on average how long a customer will stay with you. So how much that customer will spend over time. And it will give you a number and it's pretty robust. it's quite a simple calculation. It is pretty robust though. And it will give you, know, $365 is your average user spend. And so yes, will get users who will spend $20, but you'll get ones who spend $1,000. obviously what the averages do is tell you, you're pretty certain spending within this bracket.

And then you apply some, I guess, some risk profiling. if you maybe average lifetime values, $350, maybe assume it's 200 for safety and start there to be cautious. then over time, this is also, again, stage of business. The older your business is, the better data you will have, hopefully, to understand and pull out these metrics. If you're a year old, like a lot of this is based on maths and it's predictive. If you're 10 years old, like you...

You know the numbers, like when you put the equations in, they will spit out like extremely precise numbers and that you can stick by. ⁓ My advice here is like do trust the math. If you want to look deeper into it, the terms you want to look at is average revenue per user churn and lifetime value. ⁓ It's quite simple. It's quite simple, but do go deeper on that.

Matt Edmundson (20:00)
Do go deeper. That's really, really cool. So you should know for your e-commerce business those numbers to give you this lifetime value. And do dig deep on it if you don't know it. So Matt, just once again, the average revenue ⁓ per user or per customer, the churn rate, and the lifetime value. Google those three terms together and you should be able to create a calculation which is gonna give you that information you need.

Matt Barnett (20:29)
Again, the key here is understanding when customers come back and repurchase. let's forget, if you have a subscription model in e-commerce, this is super easy. There's a million articles on it. Like you work the same as My Business Works. If you don't have that, what is the key thing here is understanding what customers come back and repurchase. If your repurchase rate is zero, then we're to talk about how to increase that because you want people coming back.

I'll talk about why that is and how much cheaper it is to do the new customer acquisition. But again, try looking at numbers and work out how many customers come back and purchase again and try and work out how many times they come back and purchase again.

Matt Edmundson (21:10)
Okay, so if we're if we're digging into this a little bit further, so let's take the what did you call it? Our poo the average revenue per and So if you if we look at that right and I'm sitting here going this is great now This is what my number is. Let's say it's 200 bucks or whatever I guess one of the questions I then need to think about once I figure this calculation And this is what I suppose we're gonna get into tonight, isn't it? How do I increase that?

What are some of the measures that I can do to increase that? And you just mentioned there why that's maybe better than advertising. So can we dig into that? What are maybe some of the strategies that we can use to increase the average revenue per customer, which ultimately increases our lifetime value?

Matt Barnett (21:59)
Yeah, so a couple of these you already know and you're already doing, it's basket size and ticket price, obviously. So if a customer spends $200, then that's a different revenue per user, or per customer, If they buy two products, they have one product, they're obviously spending more as well. The next part comes, is what I mentioned before, is how regularly they buy and do they return. Now, and there is the last part which I'll mention, which is not actually within the average revenue per customer calculation.

It sits outside of that, but the way that we think about customers, actually include it and we change the calculation, but we actually think about the viral factor of any one customer. so what I mean here is, if one customer buys off you, how many new customers do they refer to you? We'll circle back to this because this is actually quite a lot more complicated, but this comes into why you're doing reviews and why you're doing case studies and why you're doing

share things out and we're doing discount codes to get onto as well. And we'll talk about some examples from some very successful e-commons companies on this. So getting back to this, like obviously ticket, so number of items in a basket, the purchase size, won't talk too much about those because I think you understand that quite a lot. This is called e-commerce success. The return customer thing is really interesting. I think over time,

A lot of e-commerce companies were thinking in terms of single purchase. The ones that start to get bigger, once you start to grow, you start to notice customers coming back and you start to realize that there's value there, if not already. If you look at the stats, generally speaking, this number can, there's a range of this number. So the one that I seem to think kind of makes sense is it's about seven times cheaper to retain a customer than it is to go and get a new customer. Now the reason behind this,

Yeah, and the reason behind this, and you'll see it's quoted from like five to 20. The reason behind this is, you know, the high level, if you're spending on ads to get a new customer, have to you might have like $100 cac to get a new customer. Once you have a customer sending out emails to reengage them, or sending out things to reengage them is kind of almost free. Like it might cost you in terms of using a marketing agency or using or having a team member that does that some time cost. There's very literal, there's very little actual direct dollar cost related.

that's operational cost. But again, it's much more and if you've got an email marketing this grant to 100,000 people, the incremental cost of saying that to another customer is is negligible. but it's definitely nowhere near what the dollar amount you're spending to bring in new customers. Even if even if even if is blended through channels, so like paid CAC versus like, maybe you have a blog, maybe you have, you know, a community, maybe you have like, like other areas, there is a direct spend with that.

Matt Edmundson (24:35)
Well, yes.

Matt Barnett (24:55)
By the way, if you don't know what your cost acquisition for customers because you're early company, work this out. This is again, one of those crucial metrics. You need to know how much your average customer costs. And if you're a big company, learning like the thread I'll go through here is if you're a small company, averages overall, great. Just do that. It's simple. It's easy. As you get bigger, you do want to segment out your customer types and you want to have

each these metrics, each customer type. So again, with us, we have three customer types. That's kind of enough for us. You know, big, small. It's pretty simple. ⁓ You know, with you, the same thing you'll have, you know, like.

Matt Edmundson (25:33)
that

as well, yeah, the big, medium, small, I can get that.

Matt Barnett (25:37)
Yeah, so again, like if you say, again, you'll have different cat for each one, you'll have different lifetime values for each one. Understand that helps you just be more efficient with your spend again. Yeah. So ultimately, this is what this is about. So I mean, like ping me and we'll go ask me where you want to go next. And we'll dive into different, there's a few different things I've covered there.

Matt Edmundson (25:56)
Yeah, no, that's, mean, it's all great. So you said that seven times, it's an average figure, right? But pick whatever figure is gonna work for your industry, but it's a lot cheaper to persuade customers to buy from you again than it is to get new customers. Now you should obviously do your new customer acquisition and you should understand the cost of acquiring that customer, as you've said. So how do we...

If it's cheaper to get persuade customers to return to us again, what are some of the strategies that we can do to get customers to come back to buy from us again? Let's dig into that a little bit.

Matt Barnett (26:35)
Yeah, so there's the high level ones, which if you're not doing, you should be doing so re-engagement campaigns, marketing campaigns, new product campaigns, new pricing campaigns. essentially what you're doing here is when someone buys off you, you're going back out to that customer. And this might be a little bit more difficult if you're through, let's say Amazon Marketplace, because I think there's some challenges there around how you re-engage customers. So I've seen one thing you can do there is you can, so.

with Amazon specifically, for those who have that, you can offer them to sign up. So you can offer them to get them to sign up after purchase to a discount loyalty club or something like that. What you need is a customer's email. So to get around Amazon, there's ways to do this. And basically what you do is you have an extra little offer, is like, join our loyalty club here and future purchase will give you $5 off.

That's a good price to get the customer's email because then suddenly you can start to market them outside of the system. And if you can do that and you can't, win-win. So obviously like remarketing on a regular basis. So the balance is here and I won't get deep on this one because I think a lot of people understand this and there's a lot of education around this, but obviously understanding drip campaigns. So when someone purchases the first time, have a series of emails that go out over probably the first four weeks and then, you know, bring those down and, you know, email them.

certain times a year around deals, around certain things. If you can segment active in customers, so if people are avid readers, market to them more. If people are less avid readers, market to them less, like bounce here. I will chat a little bit around personalization though. And this is where I'll start to talk bit more about the video side. So I think one of the things that is changing in e-commerce is it's been a very transactional industry. And this is the same for my industry and software as well.

We've all gone off to scale. We've all said, look, scales what matters. And that has worked before everyone started doing it to an extent. And so we've all gone look, mass email campaigns, mass online messaging, messaging, bought something else. Yeah. And that stuff all has it has its place in it's great. Now the only thing I'm going to chat about, which is changing is looking at how you personalize the customer experience to the next level and how you bring the company and its values forward into that customer journey.

beyond just like your website and your messages and your products themselves. What we're seeing now is, I don't know whether this is just change because I mean, like this is accelerated by this year, but obviously as individuals, we're starting to probably feel a little bit less connection. Like humans are built to communicate. So with social creatures, means yeah. If you went back 20 years, you were going by your...

your consumables from your grocery and they would know your name and you go in and part of the reason you would turn to that person is because you would enjoy the experience as well. Now you still get that relationship. And you still have that in like offline commerce situations. So a good example here in Australia is this is a huge coffee nation. I'm not quite sure why, but everyone has their favorite barista. Everyone drinks coffee and this is like lattes and espressos and stuff. Everyone has like their own individual coffee shops they go to every single morning. And when they

the and ⁓

Matt Edmundson (30:15)
It's remarkable, yeah.

Matt Barnett (30:17)
It's crazy. But this is what makes a great brister. they have to be able to do the product, but there's lots of great bristers. so if you have it like an e-commerce company, it's very rare that you are without competition in today's market. And if you don't have it now, that's awesome, but it's probably going to come. So you have this. So then you have the experience that goes on top of that. That's the reason I get back to the same coffee shop every day. If I think about online, like where I go back to repurchasing, a lot of stuff like I'll do single purchase. I'm an avid gardener.

I go back to one company for all my seeds, which I buy online because that's the way the world today. Now I go back to them because they do an awesome job about remarketing and engaging me. So when I buy seeds off them, they'll always write handwritten notes and they know that I'm a repeat customer. And they're like, Hey Matt, thanks for coming back again. And I'll do these things. And it's not, I don't know if they're doing that by hand or if they got a machine to do it because you can get both things. But like I look at that I'm like, this company actually cares about me. And you know what? It's because the prices are similar, the industry is similar.

This is the thing that makes me want to get back to them because they remain top of mind to me. I enjoy the experience and it's a very small bit of enjoyment, but it's the same psychology of why I would go back to the barista, the same reasoning, the same thought process. So in e-commerce, I think what we're seeing is being effective is a shift back to that where you start to build a bit of a relationship with an e-commerce brand. Whereas traditionally we've always thought about e-commerce as like the product and the price.

It now becomes the price, the brand and the relationship. And so one thing, and this is where we play. you can take this with a grain of salt, but like we've seen e-commerce using technologies like ours, like tenfold over the last year. I think e-commerce has done amazingly. We've seen a lot of e-commerce launching subscription models where lifetime value is way more important. We've seen...

non-subscription model e-commerce companies start to think about lifetime value and how do you retain customers. And if you're thinking that way, then if you haven't thought about it yet, then building a relationship with those customers is a really good way to ⁓ compete in the service and drive up lifetime value. what we do, we have a system that plugs into Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, you name it, whatever you're for your web, for your e-commerce websites. When you have your purchase,

and you can decide if this is only your high purchases or all purchases. We can wait until a product has been delivered to a customer. We can wait 24 hours and then we can notify you or one of your team or one of your packers on the shop floor and say, hey, Mrs. Jones has got this product. Why don't you send a 20 second video through to her individually and say, hey, Mrs. Jones, this is Matt here from Customs and Service at X Brand.

So you received your product. I just want to make sure it's received in the way that you expected that it's everything you wanted. And if you have any questions or anything about it yet, please get back and let us know. By the way, our business grows on reviews. I'm including a TrustBite link on this video. If it is everything you expected, would you mind leaving us a good review? Yeah. Now, this is a video that someone is recording using this device on the shop floor. It takes 20 seconds.

And so the point is, and the way that our system works and the way we build these things is like, we literally like notify someone, they do the video, go back to work. Now it sounds like quite a lot of effort, but it's very like a video where we've seen e-commerce start to use this kind of, this kind of attitude, which is personalizing messaging towards a customer is that number one, it's like absolute unexpected customer service excellence, which you know, it's like.

Matt Edmundson (34:03)
It's remarkable and so I mean the simplicity of it is is is well, it's great but I'm just thinking if I'm if I'm a customer and I get my normal transactional email saying thanks, Matt You know his here's a list of your items. I get that from every man and his dog, right? This is what every this is the norm what I've never had from any e-commerce business ever is that video and the first time I get it I'm like

Do what mean? I'm blown away. So I'm loving this. think it's a great, simple idea. And I can see how it's going to have massive region impact.

Matt Barnett (34:41)
Exactly. so like, like, like customer service excellence is one of the areas like if you're not investing in that, like invest in that, I can promise you like as a business owner, it is one of the cheapest ways to get an ROI because so many companies fail at awesome customer service. And it's not that expensive. I think there's balances here, like there's loads of bots and automation stuff. My experience is like you need humans to I think I think this is one of the areas where you want human so we talk about like automation in our company. You know, we have, we have a saying where we say,

Like automate process, automate process never relationships. think certain things in a business automation is amazing. The reason it exists is to do the stuff that humans don't have to do so you can free up your time. So you can do the stuff that humans only can do a connection and relationship and building relationships with the customers is key. So customer service, like I don't care how you do it. If you can ever, if you're a global business and you can man live support chat 24 seven, and you can do this with hiring in Philippines, it's Africa and different countries and you can just rate very cost effectively.

Like most e-commons companies don't do that. And it's awesome. If someone has an issue and you're there to respond in seconds, like boom, like customer, like you will solve that and that customer will get to you. So back to the video thing. The point here, a video is one mechanism to do this. You can do it other ways. The point here is that the post-purchase experience is as important as the pre-purchase. Yeah. Yeah. So the reason why is a number of folds. So like,

Matt Edmundson (36:02)
experience.

Matt Barnett (36:09)
If somebody does have an issue with their product and you are so actively contacting their customer and reaching out and checking, that customer is not going to take social media and go, oh, this product is terrible. They're not going to come in ranting and angry. They're going to be like, oh, thanks. I do have a challenge. Would you mind helping me? And you're going to help them. And you're going to solve that issue. And that's going to stay between you and that customer. And this then starts to like, I'm going to give you rabbit holes here, but there's a thing that happens, which is

If you have an issue, if a customer has an issue and you fix it well, that customer is like five times more likely to become an advocate of your brand and repurchase than if you had normal customer who never had an issue in the first place. Yeah. It's like a weird psychology here because what it does is it gives you an excuse to show that you're a company that cares about customers and that you'll do great customer service and it'll stay up. Now, so that's one element here is that you start having happier customers come in the final, you can tackle problems earlier, you can turn them into advocates.

Secondly is, you we talk about the whole like at the end of video, you say, Hey, reviews mean a lot to us. Now, if you've done something like this, people are gonna be like, Oh my God, that's amazing. Do you think that review they are gonna leave? So A, are they more likely to leave a review? The answer is like, absolutely. And so in the customers that use us, we've talked to them. It's something like four to five times more likely to leave a review, like as a minimum, up to like 10 plus, like it's huge. Cause it's not that people don't want to leave reviews. It's just that they don't.

They get distracted. It's much harder to say no to a human being than it is to an automated email saying, leave review here. Like this is the fact, law reciprocation will kick in. But then also when they leave those reviews, do you think they're going to leave you a stellar review off the back of doing something like this? Even if they're slightly disgruntled, they're going to be like, look, even a bad review would be like, look, the product had an issue, but they reached out, they contacted me, we're going to it fixed. Honestly, awesome customer service, use this company.

Yeah. So you're proactively driving better reviews off the back of this anyway. like reviews, like so, you know, like, for example, we had a fashion store in Denmark, it's called Monk Store. kind of like, they went off to reviews pretty hard. And within like three months, they came from like nowhere to be like number one, like rated men's fashion store in the whole Denmark on like Trust Pilots. And what that does...

Matt Edmundson (38:32)
video things strategy that you talked about.

Matt Barnett (38:36)
Just using this, yeah, what that does, yeah, is ultimately for them, it like half their cack. So, cost acquisition of the customer. they were spending, I don't know numbers, but let's say you spend $100 trying to get a customer to pay the ads. If suddenly you find that half your customers are coming through review sites, then suddenly you don't have to pay as much, you don't have to buy as many. So, you can suddenly go and buy half the customers or you get double the customers. So, like the point here is that they created like a free, essentially a free channel. There is an operational cost, which is doing a 20 second video.

If someone's on shop floor, like they can do that while packing it. Like it's not, it's not hard to do. Um, you know, another.

Matt Edmundson (39:11)
Yeah, it's straightforward.

Matt Barnett (39:14)
straightforward. It's part of the process. I met a guy over here, I remember, before we ever did this. And when we fell into it, and he's he sells hills hoists and hanging dryers for clothes. Pretty boring industry. The guy has something like 100,000 reviews in Australia. He's the number one supplier of everything in Australia. He's like 10x like any competitor.

And the guys loaded and he felt like, it does not sell like the most exciting products. He's like, he's like, we used to get people to text videos from the shop for whenever we set up products. He's like, literally this, he's like, it was more, it's more manual and he's asking a number of prison stuff. He's like, we, we, we did this 10 years ago. He's like, don't tell anyone because like it's worked so well for us. Yeah. Yeah. And because ultimately it wasn't about the video. So this is not about the video. It's about customer service excellence is, is the key here and personalization and showing an individual that you care about them.

Yeah. Even if they don't, you know, even if they don't return because you asked maybe selling Hills hoists that people only buy once every 10 years, they're going to go and tell people about it. They all they're to go and review you and share publicly. So are they more exclusive for you? Like, absolutely. So you have to invest ahead to get this. It's not a big investment as you think. There are other ways beyond video, like the handwritten notes. I mentioned earlier from my seed company, the handwritten notes in packages.

I buy a lot online. think Australia has one of biggest, if not the biggest penetration of mobile device and mobile online purchasing in the world, I think, because it's such a big country and we're disparate. so my technology here is really integrated. We buy everything online. It's like one in 50, do anything personal when I get a message. But some of them do. it's weird. I bought a machete the other day.

It sounds crazy, I live on the brush. I live on the brush. So it's there for gardening again. I'm not some weirdo. Well, I am, but not in that way.

Matt Edmundson (41:20)
Just to clarify. Yeah, yeah, just to clarify.

Matt Barnett (41:25)
The guys that are machete, he put like mento sweets in there, a handwritten note. I'm like, this is machete. the guy's thinking, I'm like, I shed out because I always thought it was hilarious. I shed out as well as like, yeah, I got one as well like next day. You know, like, so it sounds silly and it sounds like a little thing, but this is something that again, could be operationalised because you shop for guys can do it. Those little touches have a bigger impact than you could possibly imagine.

Matt Edmundson (41:55)
They

do. Massive impact.

Matt Barnett (41:57)
Because because because not everyone does. I promise you like we'll have this conversation in two years time. Do it suddenly every is every e-commerce company something going to be like taking time with personalization with customers? No, no, they're not. Yeah, like they just won't. So it's like I think like you if you think it's going to happen, look at like any industry like the telecoms or anything else or like any other industry in the world. How many of them are awesome at customer service? Like very, very few. Yeah, like at all.

Matt Edmundson (42:11)
of people.

Matt Barnett (42:27)
So if you can invest in this, and again, as a business owner, we invest in this, I can tell you it's one of reasons we've grown so fast without a doubt. So to the extent that like one of our growth channels is customer service for us. That's how important it is that we cut in as a growth channel because we get referrals and we get new customers from it. Like as a business, 50 % of our customers come from referrals and we're four years in.

Matt Edmundson (42:51)
An extraordinary statistic right because for a lot of online businesses. They won't be experiencing that and it it it sounds if I'm sitting here Matt thinking Well, I I've run my own e-commerce businesses and I can attest to some of the things that you said you know and I can see the results of those working and And I'm sitting here thinking it sounds all remarkably simple but but there's got to be a catch because

Surely there's got to be a catch. Do you know what mean? It's almost too good to be true. I guess the value then is, for me as a business, in doing it makes a lot of sense. I guess the cost for me becomes consistency, right? Can I do this consistently rather than just try it for a day and go, I don't want to do that again.

Matt Barnett (43:45)
Yeah, so I think this is maybe a piece. So everyone's looking for growth hacks. know, I just didn't say everyone's saying like quick fixes.

My advice here and taste of the greatest soul is that there are very, few quick fixes. There's very few growth hacks. If someone's talking about growth hack, it's probably not a growth hack anymore because everyone's going to try it. that's like, like you can definitely be early adopters, know? So, so, so if you're, if you're, if if you're a virtual to ever like advertise on Facebook in those first years, you'd have gotten awesome like payback, like absolutely. like there are early things. So do keep your eyes open for new opportunities.

Matt Edmundson (44:23)
⁓ sorry about that. You carry on.

Matt Barnett (44:26)
Okay, but like, what this comes down to is operational consistency. And so this is one of the areas, it's a customer service excellence is not a quick hack. What it doesn't have to be is expensive and it doesn't have to be hard to continue, but you do need be smart around this. So I'll take the video example or the handwritten example. If every time someone ships out the way that like the Bundreux works is again, you

get triggers from your Shopify account or from whatever it is you're using it, that they ping someone and goes, Mrs. Jones, just receive package. It's been 24 hours. She ordered an XYZ and it's all there on the phone. They go, right, record. Hey, Mrs. Jones, I saw you received XYZ, blah, blah, blah, send. And they get a notification on a regular basis. I know that between one and two o'clock every day, they're going to go and do a few of videos. That's an operational piece that is because, again, the automation behind the system supports gave you this regularly that they don't have to think.

With anything you want to work operationally, take the thinking out of it. So they focus on the video. The same with having notes. They know that whenever they're build a system so that whenever they're packing up, it shows the customer, it shows some stuff about them, it shows their location and maybe some personalization data. And you can get this in different systems. So when they write a note, they could write that, they put it in, and then they go again, operationalizing. So you can test stuff. Once it works, you then operationalize it. Don't worry too much about that at the very start.

test stuff initially. Great customer support. like honestly, like if you have the funds, I would say just invest in that anyway. I think this is one where you can take the bet. You know, like if you sell globally, make sure you have support for Rainbow Seven. If you just sell in the States or just in the UK, make sure you're supported like quite late into the night. I think like having support online after 6 p.m. You know, e-commerce is value, especially if you're B2C because this is where people actually are online.

doing support requests and make sure that's covered, make sure it's covered well and you have capacity. Operationalize it, you know, in terms of funds, like do that in Philippines or do that in South Africa or do it somewhere else if that's a challenge. Again, like operationalize these things and invest in them. It has to be systems where you don't think, like I agree, and it has to be consistent and you have to do it over long term. So you go back to the Danish example with the men's fashion, they went off as pretty hard for a quarter. So for three months.

They did this consistently. They did not get some number one Trustpilot in a couple of days. They went after it consistently, consistently, consistently. And then ultimately then they look at it and go, turns out we're getting double the customers in. those reviews are, again, maybe, and this might be country dependent, but Trustpilot is obviously pretty big in Denmark. It matters quite a lot. It's really good driver of traffic.

I think for them it was a test originally. I think they thought too much about it. were like, let's test it see how it goes. then once it went, were like, let's go 100 % and do it. And they big volumes, so they hit it. You look at us and you think about this whole personalised video thing. It's crazy. I look at our biggest centres, it's e-commerce, hands down. We now have companies that hire people to do this. That's how much of an impact it makes.

We generally see that in higher ticket item spaces. So things like fashion, we also see it in places where they have subscription models. we've seen it in like coffee subscription models where the actual price per coffee is not that high, but they're sending them out every quarter for the next 10 years. know, like, want to describe, don't leave yet. And therefore it's worth finding a person to make sure they actually move customers from a single purchase to a subscription model to try and push them over that hurdle. with these things, yes, operationalize it.

Remember, you're doing it for results is the only other thing I'd say here is that what capacity you have do measure this stuff. If you send these videos to 100 customers and don't send to another 100, look at them and go, how many reviews do we get from this batch versus this batch? Can we see how much traffic we get from reviews? Is that a market that's going to work for us as well? So do measure that.

Matt Edmundson (48:32)
Yeah.

Such great advice. I really like this as an idea and I'm my brain is buzzing with a million possibilities all of a sudden you know that we could do and and use in our e-commerce businesses and I like the simplicity of the

Just doing a 20 second video and actually it doesn't have to it can be anybody you know you just you just do that video to send that video and it doesn't have to be polished it doesn't have to be perfect you can do it with a mobile phone and bam it's gone and the impact I like the idea of actually testing it and seeing what the actual increase in in the lifetime value of the customer is this this lot over here I am doing this and this lot over here I'm not doing it and seeing you know

What what sort of happens I guess? If I'm starting out in e-commerce Matt right so let's let's talk about the guys and gals listening who are new to e-commerce They're just about to start up their their e-commerce business, or they've just started up You know it's it's kind of a new thing and they're getting one or two customers in Is this a strategy that they should hit straight away? I think I know the answer, but let me ask the question. This is a strategy. They should hit straight away

or does it work better when you hit a certain size?

Matt Barnett (49:55)
If you're starting out, do this tomorrow. Having started a couple of businesses and having gone through that, not in e-commerce, it's the same thing. You start off with one customer. Go above and beyond those early customers because one thing you have right now is you actually do have some time and you do have that enthusiasm. Everyone's starting a business, I'm not saying we get jaded, but you definitely have a lot more enthusiasm at the beginning when it's you and it's your passion. Passion sells.

So if you're doing that, do everything you can to thank those customers. So I actually do, when I do buy from newer companies, because there's more and coming to e-commerce now, these are the ones that tend to do the personalization, like outside of video. These are the ones that tend to care. I bought something the other day. It wasn't working. The founder got back to me, and he's like, look, we're new company. And I was like, give me your review link, because this is next level service.

And the guy's like, we haven't set up reviews yet. I'm like, here's a link to set them up and then give me the link and I'll do it for you. But the guy who ran the business got on, he was like, I'm so sorry. I'm running the company. I'm here to help on the front line. was like, yeah, awesome. It's just, again, new companies, I love it because they inevitably do a better job of customer support or customer success anyway. I kind think, again, if you knew your Nimble,

you tend to just this bit is in your DNA to get better at, you need to try and retain that as you scale. So like a lot of us lose it. Like I think we have these three times at the beginning and as we scale, we get a little bit obsessed with scale. And so we start to strip humanity at some points that actually is really crucial to for the business to grow. So you start to try and place everything with with robots for for a bit or one of a better word. And again, like automate the processes.

But the parts where a human come in, AKA building relationships, AKA driving reviews, like making connections with customers, you need to make sure you keep humans on that, like in some capacity.

Matt Edmundson (52:00)
No, the human touch is so, so important. We've been talking a lot about how we do this in my e-commerce businesses around email because I ⁓ think email blasts and sequences are good, it's like with Apple now, if I take a case with Apple, right? I don't get their email blasts. I get an email from Dave, you know, who...

who works in the business department in the Liverpool store here. Hey Matt, how's it going? Just checking in, making sure everything's okay. And it's like, if I want to buy anything now, I don't even go on their website. I just email Dave. Dave sorts it all out for me and it's a beautiful thing, right? That's the relationship I now have with Dave. For me, Dave is Apple. Apple is Dave. And it's just a simple thing. This whole personalization, just showing customers that you care has a profound impact on your business.

I remember with Jersey, one of my companies, we changed our business model from a sort of a, we didn't have great customer service a few years ago. Let's just put it that way. And then we turned, we changed our model and we put a lot of time and energy into focusing on customer service. It became our main thing that we sort of targeted. It meant that prices weren't as cheap because we needed to put prices up to give us the cash to sort of sow into customer service.

And what I can tell you is the first year that we did that sales dropped off a little bit because our prices had gone up. But 12 months later, my sales were over 20 % more than they were before we started this process. Our overall sales had gone up by 20%. It was a massive increase. was the biggest single increase we'd had for a while, all because we focused in on customer service. It was a remarkable thing, you know.

Matt Barnett (53:52)
Like 100%. I like to say, and part of that is probably customers coming back or customers referring to the customers going this mass. So it is hard. It can be hard to measure this stuff, especially when you're first starting. You will have indicators, like call, talk to customers, like you'll hear this. You'll see on social media. You'll see people getting more involved and responding more in. Yeah, with personalization, like remember as well, there are different levels. So I mentioned earlier, the beginning about bringing the humanity back into the customer journey.

So it's about like one to one and that's like the ultimate level of personalization. Now there is another side which is bringing your people forward as part of the brand and doing this maybe like at a more scalable area. And this is things like the founders doing updates on their phone. Yeah. On new products that are coming out and stuff. Like, so like the example, coffee roaster I mentioned, like he will do updates and shoot these ads to customers, but he'll obviously make sure that he's always in like the roasting chamber or whatever it's called where they roast the stuff.

It's like, it's like people buy it from this artisan. And so that builds a brand like, oh, here's the guy behind it. And it's, and it's unedited footage on a phone, but it's, it's, it's super interesting. You know, you have companies that like, if you're a launching company and like, get on the shop floor, get into the packaging warehouse, show what you do. Like, like, this is stuff that's kind of cool. Yeah. Like if you're doing like a lifestyle business, um, like an adventure, like adventure equipment, do videos when you're out in like, like in the country using that.

to your customer base and they're like, wow, this company really lives and breathes this. Do that stuff so people start to understand that they connect not with necessarily like the Jersey, they connect with, or Apple, they connect with ⁓ like Matt or Ed, like Apple. So again, Apple's an awesome example here. mean, we started to get into the whole place of like culture and hiring correctly here, but it's Apple, you think about it, everyone was starting to go online with selling and Apple was like, yeah, we're gonna get offline and put up stores.

Matt Edmundson (55:48)
was crazy. Yeah.

Matt Barnett (55:50)
in a massive way. if you walk into an Apple store, as everyone knows, you walk in there and anyone you meet is an Apple person. They have an amazing training schedule for those people. It's the individuals you're connecting with. Yeah. So although like so the Apple brand to me is like Steve, but it's also Jenny and you know, Nigel and all those people that you meet on the shop floor. You know, love them or hate them because you they are they have a lot of energy.

that then becomes the Apple brand. And so at the heart of Apple, have two sides, but you have the technology side, but then you also have the individuals who are to help and get on board with you, there with an hour and try and figure out your issues. That's now part of the brand. Now as an online business, you can get that too. So people are like, oh, the brand is X, but the brand is also this amazing team of people, if I ever have any questions, can help me out or suggest other things or, know, again, like customers have an excellence like.

There's like mountains about how to do this, you know, like, if something comes in, you don't have the right products, them to competitors, get them the best result, and they'll still love you and come back down the line and like all this stuff. Like, it's not, I guess here's the thing. Like you said earlier, in theory, this is all quite simple. I actually do think it is simple. I think it's understanding that it's a growth. It's a, A, being savvy enough to understand that this is a growth lever because it's not like you have customer service the next day you make.

$10 more. it's like you said, like the first year you did this, you actually lost money, but you had the consistency and the probably the experience to know this will pay back and it did pay back the next year and would have kept paying back over time. So it is a harder one. It's not, it's not a quick fix. I'm going to tell you now that like it says growing a business 99.9 % of things you do that are successful and not quick fixes. If you look at successful businesses and successful people, they're not built on quick fixes. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to break all your, all your hearts and that one.

Matt Edmundson (57:42)
break all the illusions that we're under. There's no silver bullet often. It's just like, just get on, roll your sleeves up and get in,

Matt Barnett (57:49)
Consistency, consistency is more important than that. So it's hard, I get that. It is actually, like I think is easy as it sounds, if you have a great culture, if you have great people working for you and they like people, then it's easy. Yeah. Because it comes naturally.

Matt Edmundson (58:05)
That's great. That's great. That's proper powerful stuff now I want to I want to circle back to something you talked about earlier and that you said would pick up on having gone through that whole thing about the personalization and that's gonna help with our customer service it's gonna help with our repeat customers which helps with our Lifetime value, I mean bring it all back together. One of the things that you talked about that I just want to Come back to is this what you called the viral factor of any one customer

Matt Barnett (58:36)
Yeah, so you'll have heard this described, Jimmy, as like advocacy or advocates or super fans is a term that's taking off now as well. Essentially, so the idea here is

Your best growth lever, if you can do it, is to get a customer to send you another customer. Now, when this happens, any customer that comes through a referral is like five times more likely to buy off you. And they're five times more likely to buy faster. They're a better customer from the start off because they've come through a referral. So they're already pre-sold. The other thing is it's free, ultimately.

Like someone referring you a customer is free. Now, for those of you that know MPS, guess this this, this I explained it like there's a measure you can do with customers, which is like, how likely are you to recommend this to another to another person? Like you'll have seen this, you'll you'll got these, these new emails and scale up once 10. Yeah. And then this is basically trying to like measure like advocacy. Some people love MPS, some people don't say, but the point is like, you might have, so two different parts of idea. One is like,

If everyone says, if everyone gives you like a rating of one, like I'm not, I'm not willing to refer you to another person, like go fix that. Like go fix that with customer service, whatever you're doing, find out what the issue is, go fix that. Now let's say you've got a company where lots of people are saying, yes, I will refer you to another, to another customer. Like this is awesome. Yeah. Again, like this is the beginnings of this journey, but it's not the end because as we all know, even if all your, if all your customers said, like I would be willing to refer you to a friend of mine.

95 % of them will never do that. Yeah. And it's not that they wouldn't do it. It's the fact that like, you're not top of mind not thinking about it. Yeah, you know, they're they're not actively promoting it. Because we're all busy, we will get on with get on with lives, especially like in ecommerce where it has to be single purchase. So there's two parts is one is obviously generating an advocate someone who goes I would refer you to somebody else. And the second part is asking them to go and do exactly that. Not enough businesses ask about it. So

When I gave the example of at the end of the video saying, here's a link, reviews me in lots of ways, would you mind leaving us one? That's very obviously saying, hey, leave us a review here, please. And people go and do it. Here's a share icon. If you have it with the service, share this out. You'll get $5 off your next thing. That's it. Great companies do this. Naked Wines is good example for those in the UK, Australia, and the States.

they do a lot of stuff like in their packaging to try and you to share out. They did a lot of stuff around share about, I'm trying to drive advocates to get out. They obviously try and build the advocates and then they really try and use you and try and get you to share stuff and invite your friends. You've seen these things where it's like invite your friends and get a hundred dollars off. Like this stuff works for a reason. If you can, if you can number one, create advocates by having great service, having all the things we've talked about today, and then you can get mechanisms to use them.

So be this driving reviews, be this referring friends directly through discount vouchers or just the great service, know, like, like giving them reasons to come back in again and purchase again. It's free. It's free money as far as I'm concerned. It's free traffic with us as a business. So we have like 60,000 users, customers. We have got like, we still do 50 % of point over time. About 70 % of those have come through referrals.

So we paid zero money for like, like we, we, we've literally two months ago, started spending our first ever dollars on marketing. wow. I mean, sorry, like there's a, there's result for you. Yeah. now we're like, Ooh, we've never spent money. Let's try that on top. Yeah. So like, so with us, you know, people like, how do you grow? we're like, well, customer service excellence, giving people great experiences. And then like,

Matt Edmundson (1:02:23)
Yeah, yeah.

Matt Barnett (1:02:37)
giving them links to go and review it. So again, we actually motivate, we actually try and do it. But for us, it's highest converting channel. If you look at it, think it converts, anyone coming through reference converts it 34 times higher than any other traffic source we do. So it's much higher converting. It is also free. And we obviously combine this together. So if we see someone come through referral, like, we should spend more.

we should spend more time on these customers because we know that they're likely to anyway. And then the final part that comes out of it is if somebody's been referred in, and I couldn't tell you the science psychology behinds, that anyone referred in is also more likely to refer other people. I think because they've been referred in and then somebody stays in there and they're more likely to and do the same again, they almost feel like the urge to pass it on. ⁓ This is something very encouraging.

Matt Edmundson (1:03:16)
Okay.

Because

actually you're, I wonder if it's because you're cementing their beliefs. Do you know what mean? The sort of tribal beliefs. So I refer you to something and you try it and go, well, Matt was right. That's marvellous. So because you kind of, it's been proven to you, I wonder then if that's the psychology which says, okay, you now have to, you're now going to go refer somebody else rather than it just, you know, being your discovery. It's like you've been referred and it's been proven right. I don't know.

Matt Barnett (1:03:55)
Exactly. It's a psychological principle called consistency, which is where people tend to stay consistent along lines of thinking and so maybe that makes sense. Regardless, you tell the other industry and they're like, what? We don't get that many through. We're living proof that it could be done. The main reason we've done it is we've invested customer support.

We naturally send the video to everyone who ever comes into our funnel. So what we try to do is make sure we get our first impression. And we were different. We're different to a single purchase e-commerce business. We're not different. We're not different to a subscription e-commerce business. we really aren't. principles. We invested in us and we put money down at the beginning and it's payback for us. I don't think initially we understood what the payback would be. We didn't really have numbers. We kind of just did it because we thought it was the right thing to be honest.

because our culture happened to be that way. And now we're here living proof where I say like it's worked and I would never drop it. In fact, we're just doubling down investing more in it because it pays back so well. So two lessons there are like create advocates, create people who will actively refer you if you want to use NPS to test this and see how many would. It's a good baseline for where your company sits. Telcos get negative numbers.

because no one first them, know, great, great companies, you get above 70 80, like you're ⁓ you're banks, ⁓ so that's your measurement, try and get that up by doing things like personalization by doing better ways to engage people by like again, build it. We didn't talk about like building community, like build a community. Yeah, the most active communities I've seen are like ecommerce businesses often ⁓ to do that as well.

And then on the answer, and then the second part of that is like, build these advocates and then make sure you are utilizing them and you have to be proactive and you have to literally like, like, don't, don't be shy. Like ask them to get you more business. Yeah. And if, and if you've done the first part correctly, second part, they'd be like, yeah, of course. And I'd love to help out. Love to help out. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson (1:06:01)
You're a small family business and I really love your products. Why am I not gonna help you grow, right? Because I'm tied into your success a little bit there, so I'm totally gonna do that. But you're right, you've got to ask. It's the same principle with just about anything in e-commerce I've found. It's like people say to you all the time, how do I grow reviews? Do you ask for them? The first question, do you actually ask for review? No, well.

Okay, there's your first problem right there because people as much as they love you just until you ask them are just not going to do it because they've got so many other things to think about going on in their lives, right? It's not like it was 10-15 years ago where people will just happily write a review because you know, it was all very new and shiny but not anymore. So no, yeah, this principle of ask you have not because you ask not I think is the wisdom of the scripture isn't it? It's that kind of you've just got to go and ask.

Get out and ask. No, I love that. Listen, Matt, I feel like I could go all night picking your brains about a whole bunch of these things, but this has been fantastic. This is, it's been so unusual and good to talk about this, how you grow ⁓ this side of your business, investing customer excellence and this personalization aspect and how you automate process, but you don't automate relationships. And I think, you know, these are some amazing takeaways that we've got from you.

today sort of having this conversation. So really appreciate you being with us. How do people reach out to you? How do people connect with you if they want to know more, if they just want to have a chat, how do they do that?

Matt Barnett (1:07:35)
Yeah, so you find me on LinkedIn. If you go there and type in Papa Bear, there's like three of us. I'm the only guy in the bear suit. I don't know why the other guys aren't wearing bear suits, but there you go. So you'll find me there. Look, if you want to test out video stuff, like I would say, obviously in Bias, but do check out Bonduro. It's obviously completely free to use to get on board, test it out. You'll get a video from one of our teams around the world. So you'll hopefully get to experience as well. But with these things, you know, like

test them, just test like, like some businesses that it might work for, some of it might not work for give it a try. You kind of got nothing to lose. If it works, chat to us and we'll, we have lots of case studies on the site around e-commerce companies specifically around reviews, but also around shopping cart completions and like, and other areas to improve. So like doing this and then like think about lifetime value. Like this, this thing, if you're not, if you haven't heard that term before, you're not really quite across it. Like just,

Just do a bit of reading, get deeper into it. You'll see a lot of software companies talking about it. If you can start to think in this way and think about your business in way, you'll get the step ahead in a lot of e-commerce companies and competitors out there.

Matt Edmundson (1:08:46)
That's fantastic. That's great. ⁓ search for Papa Bear on LinkedIn, head over to Bonjoro and try the free trial. We'll definitely be having a conversation Matt because I can picture one of my companies already where we're going to be trying this and I'm keen to see what happens as a result. It's been absolutely fantastic. We will of course put the links to Matt.

in the show notes which you can get at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash 56. You'll be able to connect with him through those. Do reach out to him. He is pop about. I'm sure he won't bite and he'll be more than helpful. Listen, Matt, it's been an absolute privilege. Really, really appreciate you taking the time and getting up super early in Australia to talk to us because of the different time zones. Really, really fantastic. Thank you so, so much for joining us. It has been an absolute.

treat, absolute treat.

Matt Barnett (1:09:40)
No problem. I'll say the same for being here. I love the idea. You've woken me up for the day.

Matt Edmundson (1:09:48)
Brilliant, thanks Matt, appreciate it. wasn't Matt absolutely fantastic? You know what, I'm super grateful for that conversation because he is up early to have this conversation with us with the different time zones. And I just really appreciated his generosity in sharing information and giving us just a real simple ideas, you know, and I...

I like it when people ⁓ give something that's simple, know, something that I can go, well, I can do that. I can integrate that idea with my business, whether it was the video, whether it's the handwritten notes, all that sort of stuff. think I can totally attest to the value of investing in good customer service. So do check out bonjouro.com and have a look at what those guys are doing there because it is remarkable stuff. Do reach out and connect with Matt.

Because I'm sure he'd love to connect with you. You know what? Like I said at the start of the show my goal is just to find ways that we can you know the value the insights the principles that we can learn from our experts to grow our own e-commerce business and you've learned something really important today about the value of Doubling down on your customer service and really investing in increasing the lifetime value of your customer super super cool

So I hope you got some great stuff out of it. Now, if you did, I'm basically going to do what Matt said and I'm going to ask you, right, can you please leave us a review on iTunes ⁓ or on YouTube or Facebook or wherever it is you watch the show. We'd really appreciate your feedback, appreciate your comments, appreciating you rating the show. It helps us connect and grow and reach out to more people. So please do that. That is me asking you. Now you just go ahead and do that wherever you are right now. Just go ahead and do it. Be much appreciated.

⁓ Really, trust me. Now, as I said during the show, as I said at the start, all of the notes, links and transcripts to today's show are online and you can get them for free. That's our gift to you at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash 56. You don't even have to leave an email address. It's not a problem. But if you do leave us an email address, we will let you know when the next shows go out so you can stay connected with everything that's going on.

That's, I think, about everything from me. Thanks for listening. Make sure you come back next time. It's actually going to be in two weeks time. We're not doing a live ⁓ broadcast next week. This is me signing off for two weeks. Next week I'm going to have a bit of time off, some well-earned time off. So do join us in two weeks time as I get to chat with some more amazing guests and figure out some more amazing principles of how to grow our own online businesses.

people who are fabulous, just like Matt. So that's all from me. Thanks for watching. Thanks for being part of the show. Thanks for being part of the podcast. Have a great day wherever you are. And I wish you tremendous e-commerce success. Bye for now.

Matt Barnett (1:12:49)
You've been listening to the e-commerce podcast with Matt Edmondson. Join us next time for more interviews, tips and tools for building your business online.