Chase Alderton: Welcome to Hit Subscribe, a podcast by Recharge, created to educate, inspire, and connect the subscription ecommerce space. We recently hosted ChargeX 2022, Recharge's annual user conference, focused on the future of ecommerce, where we were able to sit down with merchants, partners and industry veterans live on site, to hear their biggest learnings of 2022 and how they're strategizing for growth into the future. I'm your host, Chase Alderton, so let's get into it. Brandon, thank you for joining us.
Brandon Amoroso: Thank you for having me.
Chase Alderton: Tell us a little bit about yourself and ElectrIQ.
Brandon Amoroso: So I'm the Founder and CEO of ElectrIQ Marketing. We are a lifecycle marketing and retention agency, primarily focused on the Shopify ecosystem. We work with Klaviyo and Incentive primarily, to build out our email and SMS programs, and then we also have a large web design and development team. So those are really our two core focuses, and then we also have some complimentary services like SEO and content and organic social, but everything that we do is about creating best in class customer experiences because that, in turn, improves retention and increases LTV.
Chase Alderton: Spot on. So I know today that you're bringing kind of a unique idea that you want to talk through. So talk to me about it.
Brandon Amoroso: Yeah. So I mean, historically we've been seeing pretty low adoption rates for brands that we work with who utilize points based loyalty programs. And I think it's because, and there's a lot of reasons, I'm making assumptions on here, but there's so many Shopify stores that went and downloaded an app, and now they all have these points based programs. And most of them are half baked and they weren't thought through and they were just downloaded and the thought was somehow people are going to use it now, which doesn't check out. Second is what does 1,000 points actually mean? For one brand that could be very valuable, for another brand, 1,000 points could literally be worth a penny.
Chase Alderton: You could just 10X, or 100X and just make the points seem like they're really big.
Brandon Amoroso: Exactly. So there's a lot of customer confusion from the get go, like what am I actually even getting with this? And then third is friction, there's so much friction. You have to remember you have points, go into your account, redeem it, you get a voucher, then you have to make sure to apply it to your checkout. It's even worse if you're a subscription customer, because if I'm a subscription customer, just have it happen automatically. You're telling me I got 2,000 points now, so I get $20 off, why is it on me to go in, get the code, drop it into my recharge portal, just have it happen automatically.
Chase Alderton: Especially because you know there's a date and time, a very specific date and time when that charge is going to be run anyway. So having to remember to go in there, log into your portal, apply that and then hope that it still transfers through to that next order is exhausting.
Brandon Amoroso: Exactly. And for us, it's all about reducing friction for the customer, and then you also miss out on the surprise and delight aspect too with a points based program. So what we've been doing is building what I've been calling just manual loyalty programs. So in Klaviyo, in Recharge, we will basically set rules, so let's say we want to do it up to 12 orders or you could do the same for dollar amounts too, like customers over 250 are in this tier, customers over 500 are this, customers over 1,000 are this. But the triggers are you can just do it in Klaviyo. So as soon as order number two hits, include a free shirt. As soon as order number three hits, automatically take $5 off the order. As soon as order number six hits, you get a merch box. Order number 12, completely free.
Brandon Amoroso: So all of that can just be built in the back end, and then you can not only use that as promotional material for the customer on your subscription landing page or whatever it may be, but then you're constantly reinforcing it through every transactional email. So we have conditional blocks in our transactional emails where if it's order number two for you, it shows what you're getting in order number three. If it's order number three for you, it's reinforcing what you're going to get in order number four. And so the retention rates we've been seeing are just skyrocketing because customers don't have to do anything now, it's just, wow, of course I'm going to stay on for order number six, I have this coming automatically.
Chase Alderton: You just told me exactly what's going to be in the box and I definitely want it, so I'm absolutely staying retained.
Brandon Amoroso: Exactly.
Chase Alderton: Very interesting. And then all this stuff just plugs automatically into all the different features you use, so if you're including a free shirt, that just ports into your warehouse and you make sure that the next box you pack includes that shirt for it.
Brandon Amoroso: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And if there's any fringe cases, we can always utilize Shopify flow for order tagging or to bracket our customers, so that the 3PL knows what to do with that order. But I think for me, it's definitely been the way to go because there is so much friction, I find, with the points based programs and especially for, we have one company in particular who has a single hero product that you subscribe to it, and that's the main SKU. And so we have that program for that particular item, and so we can do things, like order number six, now as opposed to $40 every month, you're now at $35 a month forever, forever.
Chase Alderton: Just in perpetuity.
Brandon Amoroso: Right. And then as soon as you hit order number 12, it actually ships completely free. And we're able to do that because it's a single hero SKU that drives the majority of their business and revenue, and if you're a customer of theirs, you're a subscription customer for that product.
Chase Alderton: So you're not doing any sort of skipping or swapping or anything crazy on the back end with SKUs, you're literally just kind of discounting or adding or doing whatever it is, based on that one single SKU.
Brandon Amoroso: Yeah.
Chase Alderton: This will work across other SKUs though, if you're doing a subscription box, or if you're doing an item that changes month over month, it's still fairly easy to kind of move these things around.
Brandon Amoroso: Yeah. And there's different rewards that you can do as well, that work with companies that have a larger catalog, you just have to think about how can you make it work with your existing tech stack. You don't always have to just keep adding a bunch of different tools to try and make it work.
Chase Alderton: We're here at ChargeX, we're talking with a bunch of the agencies and partners who are here attending the event. On the main stage earlier, there were a lot of conversations about what to do with inventory, with all the issues going on. I see that this is probably a way that you could fold that in as well. If you have extra inventory, old boxes, new products, whatever it ends up being, this is a great way to fold something in like that as well, that feels surprise and delight to the customer, but to you, part of it is liquidating your inventory that you don't need anymore.
Brandon Amoroso: Right. And also just more product discovery, more brand adoption. It's never a bad thing for your customer to get additional product in other categories when they're not even paying for it. So you're just automatic. Especially if you're a company that has a bunch of different verticals, like we work with Soylent and they have very distinct product categories and a lot of their customers only shop one product category. So how do you get them trying other things? Because if they try other categories, AOVs going to go up, lifetime value is going to go up. So that product discovery is really important and crucial to embed within your loyalty program.
Chase Alderton: That data's really interesting that a lot of subscribers of Soylent only work on one product category. So you're saying they only do shakes or they only do powders or they only do bars or things that.
Brandon Amoroso: Exactly.
Chase Alderton: It's hard to get them going across. Which even though it's the same brand, seems like that's something that should be happening. So you put in a bar or you put in a trial of a protein pack or whatever it is.
Brandon Amoroso: Exactly.
Chase Alderton: And have them thinking, okay, this is something that I could end up doing, and then you broaden their horizons.
Brandon Amoroso: Yeah. And it's such a low cost too. I mean, you ordered the powder, okay, great, let's just throw one bar in there. Okay, worst case, you just don't like it and no harm, no foul. I mean, you're not paying for it. So I mean, for me, it seemed interesting, but then I started to think about how I consume from brands, and most of the time I'm not shopping the full collection, I go to a brand for a very specific thing. So it's an interesting use case.
Chase Alderton: Absolutely. Closing out here, give me a piece of advice to a brand who is trying to scale, and you're not allowed to use SMS in your description.
Brandon Amoroso: Not allowed to use SMS.
Chase Alderton: Not allowed to use SMS.
Brandon Amoroso: Oh goodness. It's going to sound a little fluffy, but just think about how you would want your experience to be of your brand, if you were a customer. I think people over complicate things, all of us, we're all consumers, so just think about the best brand experiences you've had and how you'd like to emulate that for your company. And a lot of the times it comes down to personalization and to personalize, you need to have data, so you need to have zero party data aggregation efforts in place. So just think about how personalization could better improve your customer journey, and then from there, go and figure out how to get the data.
Chase Alderton: Awesome. Brandon, thank you for joining us.
Brandon Amoroso: Thank you.
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Chase Alderton: Chelsea, thank you for joining us.
Chelsea Jones: Thanks for having me, Chase.
Chase Alderton: Tell us a little bit about yourself and Chelsea & Rachel.
Chelsea Jones: Yes. So I am grateful to be here, I'm a Co-Founder of Chelsea & Rachel Company, and we are a full service agency with strategy, leads into UX, UI design, leads into custom development work, a lot in subscription, for brands in the food, beverage, wellness and beauty space.
Chase Alderton: Amazing. And one of our top agency partners in the Recharge network, so we're very happy to have you.
Chelsea Jones: Thank you, it's great to be here.
Chase Alderton: So we are hanging out at ChargeX 2022, a lot of really interesting conversations happening, kind of blending the past and the future, everyone is kind of tired of the whole COVID conversation. So looking forward, trying to figure out how are merchants now and how are customers battling this idea of subscription fatigue? So I'll start there, what's your idea of battling subscription fatigue?
Chelsea Jones: Well, first off, I love looking forward, I'm chief visionary at the agency, but it really is so important when you look at subscription fatigue, is how would you deal with it as a user? I buy lots of subscriptions and I'm over so many of them. But what makes them over it is usually there's no more surprise and delight, there's no more interest of something different and new, it's just the same thing all the time, and it feels monotonous. So you really have to combat that by adding in new details, whether it's a different insert or it's a surprise little gift of some sort, or it's like, hey, did you know this? You want to make sure you're engaging with them just like a relationship.
Chelsea Jones: So I always like to even say that in terms of subscription ability needs to be like relationships, in the sense of this is your relationship with your customer, how are you actually engaging that within a product? Are you saying, how are you doing today, in a weird way that makes sense for you as a brand, but those little things go a long way and the details really matter.
Chase Alderton: Absolutely. I likened a subscription to a relationship yesterday, on an episode here. So I think the metaphors landing a little bit.
Chelsea Jones: Perfect.
Chase Alderton: That's very cool. I've always said that I think education is a big piece that people miss in subscriptions and in boxes. I think that's a really great piece for it. If you keep sending the same thing over and over again, there's an element that you can add in there of here's how to use this, or here's a creative way to make this different or here's something that's kind of unique and interesting. And your same metaphor, if you're taking your date out to the same restaurant every week, it's going to get boring, it's going to get old, you got to freshen things up a little bit.
Chelsea Jones: You do. And I think there's a balance, because you also have people that love routine and love the same concept. I had a grandfather that would go to the same little cafe and have his coffee and eggs every morning or something, you have nostalgia, which is important to kind of have on consistency, but then you have to have interest of what still engages you, what is going to be ... And we're in a post pandemic-ish age, where everybody is on screens all the time or has been, and just inundated with it. There's a stat that your phone won't be more than three feet away from you for the rest of your life. That's kind of crazy. Yeah, it's a lot.
Chelsea Jones: So if the only way to combat that is to play both sides of that, how do you have nostalgia of this is consistent, this is my product, it's good all the time, and add in the fun of the creativity, like a relationship, like hey, did you know about this? And I think it's really important as brands look ahead of this, that we also think larger of the impact of education. So you brought up education, that's so critical, but think in terms of giving a gift or think in terms of how can you pass this on or be generous, there's this component of just being good humans to good humans, in a brand set up that's really important.
Chase Alderton: I think you're spot on. So then let's kind of take that next step as prophets as we are, we'll try to predict the future here, so how do you kind of fold this stuff in as we move forward into the rest of 2022, the second half, is this a customer portal thing, is this just as simple as adding something into your box and then your products, what are some solutions?
Chelsea Jones: I think it's both, I think the best brands are the ones that look at their customer journey often and are always trying to figure out ways to improve it. White gloves service is important, there's a reason people will pay more for fancy cars versus not, or fancy hotels versus not. You have to think of it in the same way though as your brand. How are you really engaging and caring within your space, and what does that look like, and then delivering on that. So it really has to be twofold, you're sending a package to somebody on subscription, can you add a little surprise and delight thing, that makes it where, oh, I really do want to stay on this long term because this is something I look forward to, rather than, oh, this is just another thing that's hitting in my credit card.
Chase Alderton: So you said customer journey, customer experience, how often do those actually change? Is a brand, should they be looking at this thing every couple weeks, every couple months, every year or so? How quickly do you talk about the customers supposed to do XYZ, when they get to their next box, when they do the next thing, where are the lines there of how quickly you develop into the next thing?
Chelsea Jones: Yeah, it's such a great question. So honestly it's changed over time, the pandemic made it change much faster because everyone is on their screens all the time and figuring out stuff, and you had to up level your customer journey. I would say right now though, it's kind of leveled out, you do need to re-look at things. If you haven't looked at them often, then start in that three week cadence, if you have and you know kind of consistently, I would do a bimonthly changeover and re-look at things, especially as you're getting into different seasons. We have to remember as humans, we're dealing with seasons in nature, there's seasons in ecommerce as well. So if we don't adapt our user flow to that, then we'll be missing out.
Chase Alderton: So then seasons is another really interesting one, do you have to play a game of shipping based around seasons, or can you continue to work with your products and just kind of hope that they ... I feel like it's kind of a product question. Does product kind of blend seasons or do you need to blend seasons, or is there something that you're trying to ride out and make sure that everything works out smoothly?
Chelsea Jones: I think it's a case by case basis a little bit with each brand, because some are more seasonal than others, but I do think it's something that you have to be aware of. Shipping is always going to be a challenge within that, and we have to look at the components of what does that look like in terms of the seasons. So in food and beverage, if you have a product line let's say that has chocolate, it's harder in the summer on your shipping. So maybe you have to look at giving more lost cause to shipping at that point to keep your customer base, where in the winter it's not in the same scenario.
Chelsea Jones: But there's a lot of nuances in that, I think what's just really important for brands to think of, just as we as humans need to reset or have sleep or have different things, brands need to have some of that cadence too. Yes, you have an online D2C that can sell 24/7 and all of those pieces, but if you look at your sales, there's going to be spikes at different times of the day, just like there's going to be spikes in different seasons, and it's important to understand that and then put your foot on the gas when that time comes.
Chase Alderton: Putting your foot on the gas is such a good metaphor, that's what I was going to say, is there a time where you're supposed to kind of pull back, take a week or so and try to figure out what's our plan for the next three months, what's our plan for the next six months? Black Friday's coming up, obviously not immediately, but you need to start planning for those kind of things in April, May, June, to make sure you're ready for that. Are there moments where you're allowed to kind of pull your foot off the gas and then know that, okay, now it's time to go, let's put the foot back on the gas?
Chelsea Jones: Yeah. I always say you need to be looking ahead [inaudible 00:15:13], and the brands that have done this best with us have done that in that cadence. So if they know this might be a slower cadence or maybe they're waiting on some supply chain things or it's just a lower time in business sales in general, then you have to restructure and look ahead at that, so that you can make these pushes count. The beautiful thing with ecommerce is you can have sales skyrocket in a short amount of time if done properly, but you got to do the planning beforehand. And people think the planning sometimes is what they can skate by on, and really that's so important. Planning and strategy ahead of this is what makes the brands that really succeed successful, apparent to the ones that are just trying things and testing it out.
Chase Alderton: It's such a good point, I want to double down on it really quickly. We live in the social media world where you post something on social media, whatever it is, and everyone thinks, oh, you're an overnight success, but you don't see that six to 12 months prior that you were planning the strategy, figuring things out and AB testing. So when the time comes, it looks like it was an overnight success and it really has been strategy and planning all along, and I think that's where you're thriving at Chelsea & Rachel.
Chelsea Jones: Absolutely. And that's the key thing that we started from the beginning, we've been in business over seven years and when Rachel and I started it, and now we've grown to 30 staff members, it's based on that piece, strategy needs to be, and the planning needs to be what impacts UX, UI design and custom development. If you don't do that, then you're literally just jumping over something and you're going to cause more problems in the future. And I know every brand that's listening to this, if they have components, everyone has a story of some web or dev issue or problem and tech that's broken, but usually that has come from a poor pre-planning purpose. There's always going to be things that happen, but if you can plan ahead and have a strategy for the different scenarios, it makes it a lot easier.
Chase Alderton: Final question. We're talking a lot about second half of 2022, how do you see everything changing? Do you think supply chain is getting better, getting worse? What do you think some of the problems or some of the solutions are going to be in the second half of this year?
Chelsea Jones: Great question. I think there are some things that are getting worse, just based on needs, costs, inflation, all of that, is a lot in the economy and that impacts everything. But I also think there's a lot of opportunity, in every historical downturn, there has been so much opportunity, this is when people shine. I think it's also more opportunity for humans to shine on a leadership level, and an ability to actually take their brand to the next level and not let the pressures crush them. It's easy for anybody in a bull market or in all these things, to just sell. We saw this huge spike in subscription, you could put something online, sell it for during the pandemic.
Chase Alderton: It's just going to sell.
Chelsea Jones: It's just going to sell. But that's not the case now. That's a great run, we need to have the learnings for them. But the consistency factor is what's really important, and the subscriptions that are consistent in talking to their customers often and re-engaging with them, they are the ones that are winning and they're winning by significant numbers to back it.
Chase Alderton: Absolutely. I think it's a fantastic way to close, very optimistic. So thanks for joining us.
Chelsea Jones: Thank you, Chase.
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Chase Alderton: Marcus, thank you for joining.
Marcus Ohanesian: Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
Chase Alderton: Tell us a little bit about yourself and about Trellis.
Marcus Ohanesian: My name is Marcus Ohanesian, I work at Trellis as an account strategist. We are a full service digital agency, based out of Boston. Myself, I come from a design and project management background, also a drummer part-time or have been my whole life basically, and sandwich enthusiast, I love talking, making, eating sandwiches.
Chase Alderton: Sandwich enthusiast is a new one I haven't heard. That's good.
Marcus Ohanesian: Yeah. I feel like a lot of people here can connect with that, and I'd rather talk about sandwiches with a little ecommerce thrown in.
Chase Alderton: All right, we'll see what we can do. Well, I know today we want to talk personalization from a high level.
Marcus Ohanesian: Yeah.
Chase Alderton: So I'll give you the floor and maybe work in a sandwich reference or two, because now I'm hungry.
Marcus Ohanesian: I'm up for that challenge. All right. So yeah, there's been a lot of conversation here, specifically at this Recharge conference, about personalization and that user journey, and really the importance and the value of that versus a generalized approach. So tools like Rebuy or Octane. So Octane is a product quiz platform which helps kind of have more of a curated user experience. So implementation points could be a popup model on the homepage or could be an embed on an actual page, really asking a small set of questions, four or five questions, recommending a product at the end, offering a small discount code, capturing their email there, that ties directly into Klaviyo and then using Klaviyo segments to further segment and personalize that experience. So you're not sending out those general buckets of here's a product that we're offering, I'm generalizing intentionally because it applies across all brands. And then Rebuy on the front end, as far as PDP, Cart, Shopify plus checkout, really having that intelligent engine that's running in the background.
Chase Alderton: So we could dive into this and we could do so much content here, but I want to back up a little bit and just kind of take piece by piece a little bit.
Marcus Ohanesian: Yeah.
Chase Alderton: So there's a lot of ways to sell subscriptions obviously, you can sell any product at any time, seasonality comes into play, all that kind of stuff. But if you're talking about building a brand, which at ChargeX 2022, a lot of the conversations have been around building a brand, being personalized, you're really, really nailing everything here. So let's just go a little slower, Octane putting the quiz up on the front, what's the purpose here, trying to figure out if you're selling shirts, you usually wear long sleeve, you wear shorts sleeve, are there buttons, are there [inaudible 00:20:22]? Instead of just saying, here's all our shirt catalog, purchase something.
Marcus Ohanesian: Right. Think of it as a way, just like collections, you're grouping, you're categorizing, you're filtering pre done basically, in a way. So the objective of a quiz obviously, skincare brand's a great example, what's your skin type, are you dry, are you oily? That's a pretty topical one. And then on top of that, sports brands, so if I'm from Boston, do you like Boston Red Sox? Okay, so I'm not going to show you any Yankees things, right?
Chase Alderton: [inaudible 00:20:50] for me please.
Marcus Ohanesian: Right, exactly. So another example there. So really it's almost like you're talking to the user on the front end and asking them those set of questions, to really narrow down and dive into the specific product set.
Chase Alderton: Cool. So then once you have this product recommendation, ideally it's personalized, it's tailored to exactly what the customer wants, now you start talking about Klaviyo, [inaudible 00:21:13] things in the flow. So dig a little bit more into that.
Marcus Ohanesian: Yeah. So in Klaviyo and I'm definitely no Klaviyo expert, but at the basic high level you're pulling in these email addresses because you're giving them that 10% discount code or whatever may be. So thanking them for answering those five questions, because no one wants to sit there on the website, but it'll alleviate a few clicks. So they're in Klaviyo now, you have them segmented or tagged, however you want to kind of categorize it, and now you can target market specific content to them. So in those specific campaigns, I know that this person has chose Boston Celtics, so I'm not going to put Los Angeles Lakers or any other content that may not be applicable or products that may not be applicable to you in your-
Chase Alderton: You sell all those things, sell teams or whatever it is.
Marcus Ohanesian: Right. But now you can have smaller segmented and targeted campaigns, which will result in a higher conversion rate, because of that.
Chase Alderton: That's amazing. Okay, so now we've covered most of the front end. So you get onto the site, you do this quiz, found your perfect subscription, we're pulling into Klaviyo, so we're doing some of that kind of stuff. Now you mentioned Rebuy, so we're getting cross sells, upsells, things like that.
Marcus Ohanesian: Yeah. So I feel like that's definitely a huge missed opportunity with a lot of merchants that we've seen, and that's where we can provide value to our clients. And even if you're just on your own as a merchant, is having a more powerful engine like Rebuy in the background, gathering all this data, gathering the profiles and sort of building the profiles of your users here. A lot of merchants are like, we'll just use product tags and Shopify, and great, cool, but when you start to scale, it doesn't scale well.
Marcus Ohanesian: So we've had merchants start like that and it's worked very well. And then they're like, now we have 500,000 product SKUs, we can't manually adjust every product tag and stuff. And there's a lot of robust features in Rebuy, to do dynamic rules and all that sort of really nerdy stuff, if you really want to do a deep dive into it, but even at the most basic level, just setting it up and gathering data. So now you're letting data drive your decisions, versus your subjective thoughts of, well, I think this is what's working and we saw Gymshark do it three months ago and it's worked for them, or insert other reference competitor here.
Chase Alderton: Yeah. It's really interesting, and I don't think that support was brought up in that first dive. Support's another one, once you have all this data, and once you understand who your customers are, it's a lot easier to target exactly their frustrations or the issue, whatever it ends up being.
Marcus Ohanesian: Yep. So another plug would be gorgeous, they're super robust where all of the Shopify order number comes in, basically their whole profile comes in right in that little chat window, and of course it goes across the social media channels, so they're a more robust kind of touchpoint as well. But at the end of the day, this is going to sound high in the clouds and fluffy, but we're all humans, we're all people, there's people on the other side that are buying your products, so treat them like humans and have that humanistic approach, and it helps kind of drive that experience by kind of making their lives a little bit easier. So you're not asking what the order number is, or you're not asking what their favorite team may be and that type of thing, you have all of that data already for yourself, to kind of help leverage and it's better user experience overall.
Chase Alderton: Totally. So we put kind of the whole package together, totally understand that. Give me maybe a creative way or two that you can take personalization to a next level. Maybe it's an unboxing experience, maybe it's something pre or post purchase, something like that. What's creative use case [inaudible 00:24:34]?
Marcus Ohanesian: Yeah. You touched on a couple good points, and I think it's very situational and business specific. But mystery boxes are great, I think that's came up a few times here at the conference. So I'm sure a lot of merchants will be coming out with some mystery boxes soon.
Chase Alderton: Looking forward to seeing those.
Marcus Ohanesian: Yeah. But yeah, pre and post purchase, especially in your post purchase emails, I think there's a lot of, again, a missed opportunity there, even in your order confirmation emails, there's so many different transactional touchpoints that merchants just leave as the default. And maybe they're not aware that those could be customized and have a lot of the Rebuy implementations to do upsells and cross sells right in your email templates there. And it's super easy to integrate, and the Rebuy team is obviously there for support, and it's so easy to implement and it's very overlooked. So that's a really good point there.
Chase Alderton: This is one that I've been preaching about for years and it still confuses me why people don't take advantage of these. All of those touch points, all those transactional touch points, to be very clear, they're like, hey, your credit card's about to be charged for your next order, or hey, we have it packaged and it's about to be shipped, or hey, your package was delivered, all of those things. They don't need to be standard black and white, boring, just transactional emails. There's always value you can provide. So it doesn't matter what you're selling, let's do sandwiches, let's go back to the top. You're selling some sort of sandwich kit, and I don't know how you would do the shipping and all that, but maybe there's an educational piece of here's a brand new thing that we've seen from this cool chef and here's how you make this sandwich. Or here are the knives that some of the top chefs are using, maybe check these out on the site, on a different site or something like that. There are all those opportunities for education, for interaction, for personalization that are totally getting overlooked.
Marcus Ohanesian: Yeah. That's a great sweet spot to kind of hit, is there's a missed opportunity with the transactional emails and that's very overlooked, but there's a way to constantly be providing that value and having it be an upsell, cross sell kind of sales way, but not in an upfront, hey, here's some other products you'd like. Like you're saying, here's a link to the blog post with the recipe on it, for this sandwich, or here's how to make the spread you're going to put on your sandwich with this kit. So adding that contextual support, I guess, or even if it's sizing guides, pricing, sizing guides for apparel and things like that, we noticed you ordered this product, here's some other things that you may want to know about it, or here's how to assemble the product, some extra links. Basically just being overly helpful in a way, but kind of peppering in those potential upsells and cross cells.
Chase Alderton: I think you're absolutely spot on. A lot about what we talk about is kind of how to build your site and is kind of advice, but let's go strictly to advice, piece of advice that you give to a brand who is scaling, maybe go outside of personalization, let's do something creative.
Marcus Ohanesian: Yeah, that's a great question. And I want to kind of keep it general in high level, so it apply to a lot of merchants. I guess I'll go back to my point is we're all humans, stay humanistic, it's not transactional. And if you really want to have a scalable business and make it last for years and have your brand be recognized and memorable, most importantly, then make sure your customer service support team is on point with your brand, your mission, your values, to communicate that, and every message that they send, every transaction. So that could be in the language, in the tone of your branding, in the messaging from those transactional emails. So you're not using the default native base template, you're customizing that to have a little bit personality and making it your own and really owning who you are as a brand.
Marcus Ohanesian: And I think that goes a long way because more than ever, there's so many ecommerce websites out there, there's so many opportunities for someone to purchase on another competitor's website, so how do you set yourself apart? So keeping it real, I guess, is the high level way to say that.
Chase Alderton: So good. I love the advices that don't come back to build this thing, implement that piece. It's about being human.
Marcus Ohanesian: Exactly.
Chase Alderton: All right. Last question for you, favorite sandwich right now?
Marcus Ohanesian: Muffaletta. Do you know about the Muffaletta?
Chase Alderton: No, I don't even know what that is.
Marcus Ohanesian: So it's a New Orleans Italian sandwich, with an olive of tapenade. It was originated New Orleans, at least, couple places are starting to pop it up, but it's basically a bunch of cold cut meats and they make pimento and castelvetrano olives as a tapenade. So you get that little olive brininess to it, but it's on a nice fat seeded sesame seed bread.
Chase Alderton: Now everyone's hungry and now's time for lunch.
Marcus Ohanesian: Exactly. Thank you for having me, appreciate it.
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Chase Alderton: Galen, thank you for joining.
Galen King: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Chase Alderton: Tell us a little bit about yourself and about Lucid.
Galen King: So I started Lucid over 21 years ago, in New Zealand. It was my first and only year of college and I wasn't really feeling it, and so I was like, "I'm going to start a freelance agency." And yeah, freelanced until 2006, hired my first teammate then, and grew from there. Started working with Shopify in 2006, so it just stumbled across it, I think, through the Ruby on Rails community. And yeah, we sort of just have been part of the Shopify space since the very beginning, partners and Shopify partners, Shopify plus partners. We kind of been there through all of it and built themes for the theme store, apps for the app store, and now mostly more and more consultative kind of guidance, helping brands make better decisions, is kind of where we're sort of pivoting more and more. Still doing implementation for sure, but yeah, this is probably something that I'm sure we'll talk a bit more about, but the changes that are happening in the industry that are kind of leading to some of the changes that are happening for us at Lucid.
Chase Alderton: Yeah, absolutely. We've definitely been around the block, I'm excited to get your input on it. So let's talk kind of with your contextual history, you've been around, you've seen everything change over the course of 20 plus years, where do you see the industry moving next? There's obviously a lot of issues that are outside some people's control, obviously coming out of a pandemic, supply chain issues are always there, iOS issues, privacy, things like that. Where do you see we're going in the next six, 12, 18 months?
Galen King: Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about this at the moment, I think as everybody is really, and that's been something that I've been encouraged with this event, is there's kind of definitely a unity and I'm sure it's not intentional, with a lot of the speakers and the panelists and stuff, as we come out of the pandemic, and with the private, so everything you said really, there's some big changes coming. And I think that we're going to see two major things happen, we're going to see a significant realignment of growth or resetting in some ways, the hard reality in the next six to 12 months, for sure, I think where growth is not going to be as fast as it was. And because I think acquisition and retention is something that I've been hearing a lot of and I'm always really passionate about, but I think brands are going to be taking a lot more seriously.
Galen King: And as a result of the need for a stronger focus on acquisition and retention, is how brands need to be more nimble and have the tools to move faster with their website, so that they can tell their story, because story, absolutely, absolutely matters. And how can brands tell their story more freely and iterate more quickly, based on what's happening in the market, based on their marketing campaigns. And so, for us, certainly at Lucid, and I think we're going to see a rapid shift in the industry, is taking a more low code, no code approach to how we build websites and tooling, how we use platforms like Recharge.
Galen King: I think the days of, for let's say 80% of the brands out there, they really don't need a custom solution, they need a best practice, foundational solution that builds on all the things that we've done 1,000 times before, the industry's been doing for a decade or whatever, or exponential learnings. Brands tend to have a lot of strong opinions or the people leading the projects, but they don't necessarily know the problems that they're trying to solve. And so how can we get better tooling with tools like Recharge and other platforms that building a stack of kind of best practice, that they can tell their story, engage with their audiences, engage with their customers, retain and grow. And I think that by moving away from this idea that you kind of have to do everything from scratch and everything has to be unique, most of it doesn't have to be unique, the stuff that's unique is your story, your products, your mission and purpose, sustainability. I like that thread coming through a lot of things at the moment.
Galen King: And I think also I've been hearing, I liked the panel earlier talking about investment and how for most brands and tech companies, investment isn't probably going to be the answer.
Chase Alderton: It's not even recommended by the-
Galen King: Yeah, I liked that. I like that. But also I really like the concept and I think this is easily overlooked, is that we tend to have short memories, but we also don't think that far ahead. And so when there's a blip, we stumble and we give up or we just get disheartened, but we also don't plan far ahead. And I think as we come off this huge hump of the pandemic, where people have been drinking from the fire hose, certain people have, other people haven't, there's going to be a reality check. And so the brands that are building based on their passion for what they're doing, are going to be the ones that succeed as they ramp up back out of this kind of dip that we're probably going to suddenly see soon.
Chase Alderton: Right. Right. Lots of lessons to take from that, for sure. One of the panels, actually our opening keynote, we were showing the Apple stocks and the Amazon stocks, that they're exactly in the same place now that they were pre pandemic. So we've kind of had this amazing goal run for a couple years, but now we're right back at ground zero again, and a lot new lessons have been learned and a lot of ups and downs and trying to figure things out, like you said, drinking from the fire hose. But we're right back to the beginning now, and there's still a ton of opportunity, but you have to figure out, do we need to go custom, do we need to do everything super unique, or do we just tell our unique story? I think it's a tough conversation to have internally as a brand, but it's an important one.
Galen King: Yeah. And I think that two thoughts on that is that I like the ... so yeah, those graphs I saw as well, which it's remarkable, there's a huge mountain between 2020 and now. But what is easy to overlook is there's going to be, I've heard it, the term of the pandemic hangover, and I think that is going to take a while. So that the acquisition costs are way higher than they ever were, your cost of goods, your cost of logistics and fulfillment is higher. So there's actually a whole lot of things working against these brands as they try to come out this other side. So they've had this tremendous growth, they've probably built bigger teams during this time, and certainly for me as an agency founder, we've gone through some major changes.
Galen King: But I'm looking at other agencies have gotten so much bigger through the pandemic, there's going to be a hard reality because the work is going to be very different. And this is why I think for us, we are pivoting to being a smaller agency, focusing more on best practices and strategies to help brands move faster, without the technical debt of kind of custom solutions. And again, to what you said, tell your unique story, help them tell their unique story more freely.
Chase Alderton: So you think we're moving to a world where you don't necessarily need to hard sell everything, and why your brand is so super cool because of all this tech that you have, it's really more about here's what we stand for, here's our mission, like you said earlier, this is why we do what we do, what gets us out of bed in the morning. And then you have the tools in the background that are flexible enough for you to kind of manipulate around those corners, but still move fast enough to get the job done.
Galen King: Yeah, I exactly. I think the interface of the website more and more, why are we reinventing the wheel constantly? I think we're going to also, this is another shift I think I see happening really quickly, is that ecommerce sites are going to be less transactional even though of course they're going to continue growing, and of course, performance and CRO matters significantly. But I think what we're going to find is that consumers are shopping around based on price, but based on convenience and trust. And so the brand websites, we're already seeing it and it's going to happen more quickly, I think, is that they go to the websites of the individual brands to read up on it, to find out more about, to get excited because they are ultimately fans of the product.
Galen King: But they're probably not going to buy from them directly because brands historically have not been doing a great job of saying how quickly are we going to ship it out, and how quickly is it going to get to you? What happens, the return policies are often a little murky, they know exactly what they're going to get with Amazon, or they're going to buy it from Pinterest or Instagram or Facebook. But they are going to probably, more and more, they'll go and they'll read up on it and maybe they'll register their warranty or they'll join your loyalty club. And then if you can engage them enough to convince them to stay, to buying direct, I think people care more about buying direct, I certainly do, but I still find myself going to the site and going, oh, I need it in two days, I just don't know when it's going to get here. So I hate this, I'm going to buy it from Amazon.
Galen King: And I think that brands need to, they need to embrace, and again, the panelists were talking about this yesterday, friend or foe, and they're like, it's complicated. So it comes back though to what I was saying earlier about story does absolutely matter, and so the individual sites of the brands really matter, but they're going to become more about building long term, the long tail view of retention, you might not acquire them on the first sale. But if you do a good job, they love the unboxing experience, even if you got it from Amazon, they love the packaging, they might come back and buy from you the second time and become a loyal long term customer.
Chase Alderton: And this brings up such an interesting question that I love talking about and getting other people's opinions here, but where is the balance between making sure you're profitable on the first sale, or maybe second sale, or also leaning in and understanding that you are trying to build a sustainable brand for the future, for a long term relationship. And that if you are targeting customers or if you're getting customers that are just going to churn after a month or two or an order or two, if it's weekly, whatever it is, are those just not the right customers, and you need to just start marketing other places and finding other ways to do that. Where's the balance between that?
Galen King: That is a really good question, and obviously the answer is totally different if you're subscriptions or non subscriptions. And I think that by and large, I would probably go out on a limb and say, are your first customers profitable, they're probably, by and large for most brands, probably not. And I think that most brands underestimate or absolutely they underestimate the cost of acquisition because they don't have the data. This is a huge problem in the industry, there's not enough data that's easily accessible and easily interpretable of where your costs truly are. So most brands are not paying a lot of attention, even the cost of goods, let alone the cost of the traffic, the cost of paid media and logistics and shipping. So I don't think that most brands are fully aware of the cost at all, and the hidden cost of acquiring a first customer are significantly higher than they appear.
Galen King: So maybe that's the point, that those first customers are probably not going to make you a lot, and so it's even more important to have a strong story, great customer service, so that they come back. And if you don't have a product that you can sell over and over, that it's either repeatable or giftable, you've got a tough business.
Chase Alderton: I totally agree with you, giftable is another really interesting one. As everybody grows, you want to start doing gifts as well, it's just a totally different audience. Instead of targeting one customer, you're target the person who's buying it and the target-
Galen King: And that's huge potential for growth if you can figure out how to create a giftable aspect to your products, because then your customers become ambassadors and they give it to other people, who then give it to other people.
Chase Alderton: That's just the key though, if they can figure it out. That's always the tough part.
Galen King: Yep. Yep.
Chase Alderton: All right, closing question for you. What's a piece of advice you'd give to a brand who is scaling? Kind of figure out their product, they figure out their why, they understand, they're getting their cost of acquisitions in a good spot, retention's looking decent, what are some ways that they can kind of continue scaling and continue optimizing that brand?
Galen King: Yeah, that's easy, a short answer is the brands that are scaling should really focus on best practices and less whims and opinions of directing what needs to happen and going like, what are all the fundamentals? How are we doing? On a scale of one to five of there's a dozen or so fundamentals, do a kind of assessment and audit of your business of where are we at on those. You'll find you're probably at a two or three for most of those, and get all of your fundamentals up to three or four. And then ultimately if you're a five out of five on your fundamentals, you'll have a really successful business. But if you get hung up in the 1,000 small minutia, you will just be going around and around in circles doing busy work, and never really moving the needle. So yeah, fundamentals first.
Chase Alderton: Just saying build a strong foundation. You can paint the house whatever color you want, but you got to make sure the walls are going to stand up.
Galen King: Yep, for sure.
Chase Alderton: Awesome. Galen, thank you for your time. Really appreciate it.
Galen King: Thank you.
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Chase Alderton: Brian, thank you for joining.
Brian Becker: Hey, thanks for having me.
Chase Alderton: Tell us a little bit about yourself and about FlowCandy.
Brian Becker: Yeah. So my name is Brian Becker. My background's actually in design. I was a UI UX designer for a while. Based in New York city. I'm the co-founder of FlowCandy. We're a retention marketing agency. And our quick line is, you know all the money you spend on acquisition to get those customers? We help you keep them.
Chase Alderton: I love that.
Brian Becker: So love that's FlowCandy. Yep.
Chase Alderton: I love that.
Brian Becker: Yep.
Chase Alderton: So right on topic, we are hopping into attention today, one of my favorite topics. We're sitting in charge X 2022. There's been a lot of panel conversations about acquisition versus retention and VC funding and how to make all this stuff work. So let's hop right into retention. Give me your overview and we'll dig in from there.
Brian Becker: Yeah. So I think, I like to think about retention more as customer experience. It's just about creating, you know, that's becoming a main differentiator for so many brands now with all the problems they're having in terms of acquisition costs and being able to actually like find new customers and turn them into something... And then also competing with things like Amazon, where you have one day delivery. And honestly, when you look at the returns and things like that, it's a great experience. You call Amazon and they're like... They take it back in a second. No questions asked. They're like yeah, the money's refunded, send it back. Or sometimes they don't even make you send it back.
Chase Alderton: Sometimes you just keep the item.
Brian Becker: Yeah, they're just like, you can keep it and you're getting your money back. And so at the end of the day, that's a really good experience as a consumer.
Brian Becker: You know you can buy with no risk at that point. So retention in my mind is how do you create an incredible, incredible experience, but also work in that layer of brand, of personality, of giving somebody something to hold onto that they identify with your brand. And so how do we balance those things of giving somebody something they love about you, but also making sure that they get all the nuanced, high expectation things that customers are looking for now at the same time.
Chase Alderton: I'll ask a hard question. How do you balance those things?
Brian Becker: Yeah. That's great. Yeah. So the reality is that it's... You want to obviously automate as much as you can.
Chase Alderton: Sure.
Brian Becker: But then it's about finding those inflection points, I think, where people really might have a severe drop off and maybe adding in a sprinkle of the personal touch.
Chase Alderton: Sure.
Brian Becker: Whether that be reaching out at a point where, you know, like for instance, with recharge, you might have somebody that's canceling their subscription. Oh, no. Right? But it's a reality of a subscription business. And you can either decide to go the route that brands who will not be named might go where you have 67 clicks. I counted it one time, 67 clicks...
Chase Alderton: Just make it difficult...
Brian Becker: To cancel my subscription, which is, at some point you're trying to reduce churn, but you know, it doesn't really... Fine.
Brian Becker: Or you can go the opposite route of like making that a really seamless thing, but providing a somewhat individualized, personalized interaction at that point where you reach out to the customer, even after the cancellation and try to get them on the phone, have a customer service rep, call them, have a text go out that says, Hey, this is so and so from customer service, feel free to call me if you want to talk about why you're canceling your subscription, or if something is wrong, you want to change your... So being able to almost like a concierge service around how you're doing that. Yeah and so there's obviously quite a bit of balance there and that's something that we don't have like the turnkey solution for it yet. Nobody has a silver bullet for these kind of things.
Brian Becker: And so really that's something that I've been finding us advising a lot on is here are the things that we can do really well with automation. And we can even start the conversation with automation.
Brian Becker: The text can be a flow, subscription, cancellation trigger on Klaviyo, boom, get an SMS and an email out there and you're able to kind of start that conversation.
Chase Alderton: Table stakes, right?
Brian Becker: Yeah, exactly. That should be... Everybody should have that. But then you can look at, okay, what does the content of this message say? And am I opening the door for them to engage with the brand further? Because this is where you build a real retention program. Retention isn't made by doing an upsell or a cross sell or whatever, it's made by making a really great experience at a point that would otherwise be a pain for a customer because then they come back and they're just like, yeah, I don't need this right now and I cancel my subscription, but I'm going to suggest it to everyone else that ever wants to try the product. Unless they're canceling because they don't like your product, but then that's a totally different problem at the end of the day. So, you know, not much you can do about that, but...
Chase Alderton: Right, right, right. So I think this shouldn't be a controversial statement, but I'm curious to hear what you think about this. There's a lot of talk recently about how retention is not a post-purchase exclusive opportunity.
Brian Becker: Yeah.
Chase Alderton: Retension needs to start at the very beginning.
Brian Becker: Yeah.
Chase Alderton: Where probably even before acquisition, even before you acquire a customer, you need to be thinking about how you're going to keep them long term.
Brian Becker: Right, right. And so, I mean, that really draws back to the first thing that we were talking about, right? Where retention is customer experience.
Chase Alderton: Totally.
Brian Becker: Retention is brand building, retention is... Brand is your moat, right. If you look at it from the Silicon valley standpoint, right. And building a brand around a product, we can't just have products anymore. It's like a big theme has been we're moving away from transactional commerce. We're moving into personalized commerce. And so I think that is just a... It's a flat statement now. There is no arguing with it anymore. That the only way to compete, if you're not going, if you want to be more than a transactional brand, is to just have something that gives you an identifier. You want to make some, it's a marketing... It's marketing, right? It's all marketing at the end of the day.
Chase Alderton: Yep.
Brian Becker: You need something that set... That somebody's going to look at your product and buy it and they're not buying it because it solves their problem. They're buying it because it says something about who they are. It's no longer just I need toilet paper. It's like this is the toilet paper I buy. I only buy this.
Chase Alderton: What does the toilet paper do for the world.
Brian Becker: Right. [inaudible 00:05:41] Exactly.
Chase Alderton: Back to the building thing. How does that relationship continue?
Brian Becker: A hundred percent. And so as the more that you can come from a benefit driven... When you start to look at marketing and really dive in, you're not selling features, you're always selling benefits. And the benefits then tell a story about who the person is. And then you lead with the story. And so that is, that is retention. That's the beginning of retention because you're not creating a product, you're not creating a transaction. You're creating an identity for a person that is attached to a product.
Brian Becker: And then that's also kind of segues into why we're seeing so much community being, there's so much focus around building community around your brand.
Chase Alderton: Where it's going on right now. It's totally valid.
Brian Becker: Right because the people want to have some sort of association with... Because if it's an identity thing, that means that there are like-minded people around me that also feel that way. And whether community marketing is going to be like a huge thing or something like that, it's at least intrinsically involved in that kind of focus of retention in the brand building.
Chase Alderton: There's at least an element in there.
Brian Becker: A hundred percent.
Chase Alderton: We'll see how big this thing ends up getting, but there's at least an element in there for sure.
Brian Becker: Absolutely and it's worth something, at least noting, talking about having available and creating some sort of experience that even if it's just pushing to social, even if it's just trying to create a vibe, a Facebook group or following on Instagram and being able to put out reels regularly, that kind of gives you that feeling of having some association with the brand. There are... It's something that should be considered.
Chase Alderton: So let's dive into a couple actual examples. You mentioned touchpoints, we're talking through retention, acquisition, all these kind of things. What are a couple actual logistical ways that you can personalize these touchpoints and build retention? Is it an unboxing experience? Is it a handwritten notice, come up a couple times over the course of our conference this week, what are some things you can actually do to encourage retention?
Brian Becker: Yeah. So, I mean, I think that there are a lot of manual ways, obviously. So like I think writing notes and things like that are really possibly non-scalable, but very, very much they have the effect and it might be scalable to some point. I'm pretty sure there are services out there that do that. So, yeah, exactly. So you can kind of add those touches in there, but I think what is a more scalable approach and something that isn't used as frequently as I think it could be is that you have so much data at your disposal and people are using that for next purchase date and cross cells and things like that. But how do you make sure that every interaction you have with the customer is informed by their previous purchase habits and things like that?
Chase Alderton: That's good.
Brian Becker: Yeah. So use your data? It's like use your data for good. Don't bring it back and be the champion of your customer of someone who is actually helping them in because you are informed on who they are, you're informed on why they buy, what they buy and that kind of thing. You can kind of form a, you know, you can associate them with a persona that you have that is a customer of yours, and then try to treat them as that person that they actually are instead of just the data and, oh, this is the next time that they'll buy, and this is probably what they'll buy next.
Chase Alderton: That's a great point I want to double in, double down on actually.
Brian Becker: Sure.
Chase Alderton: You said using data to understand the next purchase based on their previous purchase.
Brian Becker: Yeah.
Chase Alderton: So let's say someone has purchased, let's say a protein powder. And you've done four months in a row and it's the same thing recurring over and over again. In that fifth box, you could be able to say, Hey, I know you've been ordering this four straight months. Do you want to try a new flavor? We're happy to switch things up. Or you do some sort of personal touch. You do, Hey, I see you're buying this thing it's meant for XYZ. How was it going? Are you working out, are you trying to lose weight? You know, what are your goals? How's everything working?
Brian Becker: Yeah.
Chase Alderton: There are ways to connect and create that community, which again, is retention upfront. I'm thinking that it's post-purchase or post cancels retention.
Brian Becker: Yeah. A hundred percent. I think that there are ways that you know your products best. So you brought up the aspect of looking at it from a workout perspective, when a protein powder and these kind of things, but you also, or supplements, I think are another really good where you know what the stacks are, you know what people are doing. If somebody's taking this, they might be taking this. And I think if you really want to create personalization, especially if it's somebody that's been to you, they're hitting higher levels of your LTV and that kind of thing. You might want to consider boxing it yourself and putting in a sample of what that next product is.
Chase Alderton: Absolutely.
Brian Becker: So what is... Somebody takes, I take vitamin D every day. Okay. It's great, kicks that seasonal depression, right. And it's needed in New York for sure. But I think something, if you know that somebody's taking vitamin D every day, it's something that's normally in that process. Maybe there's another, like maybe they want to do have a B12 or something like that. There's this other thing that you can suggest. And if you...
Chase Alderton: Easy link to the next one.
Brian Becker: Right. And there's sample sizes, those kind of try those other things where it's just like, Hey, we care about you so much. We have seen your purchased history. We can... It seems like you're a morning vitamin taker. Are you doing this? Even if you aren't, if you already are, give it to a friend. It's kind of that you're doubling down pretty much on they're either going to be introduced to a new product, or they're going to introduce somebody else to a product of yours.
Brian Becker: Exactly. Yeah. And so as much as you can take those, it is just about being scrappy, you know?
Chase Alderton: Yeah.
Brian Becker: We have a saying at FlowCandy where you just have to brute force it. Sometimes there are problems that you just have to brute force. It's another way of saying like being scrappy. This is a very... We're at an inflection point, right. We're seeing like this kind of whole I don't... Not to more buzzwordy, but like we're seeing a paradigm shift and how the world is going. And the only way that the brands that are going to get through this and are going to come out the other side with this massive dip that we're seeing from kind of the reopening of the world, they're going to be the ones that are willing to go that extra mile, try the new stuff out, find a way to mix the old with the new and then go, and all right, well, this isn't scalable, but it's scalable for the next three months for me to try and do this and retain these customers that I've gotten and possibly give me the runway to go the next six months after that.
Chase Alderton: And you just reevaluate every few months, every few weeks, whatever it ends up being.
Brian Becker: Exactly a constant reevaluation. Actually that's legitimate the only way that we work at FlowCandy, actually. We only do three months. It's like, you have to do a three month and then we'll reevaluate. If it works again, because you don't want to... No one strategy is an end all, is the catchall, or anything like that. And so if you're not constantly reevaluating how you're doing it on a cadence that is known and expectable, then you're not going to be able to adapt as the times change.
Chase Alderton: So I'm going to put you on the spot for our last question here.
Brian Becker: Sure.
Chase Alderton: Nothing retention based, but if you're giving advice to a brand, a subscription brand, who's scaling, who's getting off the ground. A solid piece of advice for them.
Brian Becker: Interesting. This is a good one. So not retention based.
Brian Becker: I would say, get really good yourself at creating content.
Chase Alderton: Interesting.
Brian Becker: I mentioned I'm a designer. I'm a... Like creative is kind of my background and you can do really cool stuff for free.
Chase Alderton: Totally.
Brian Becker: And that's an opportunity to get scrappy that I'm talking about. I don't even have TikTok to be honest, since we're on the retention side, I don't have to think about acquisition as much, but it's an easy to use app for a reason. There's a reason there are millions and millions and millions of Tik Toks because it's very easy to do. And so if you are trying to get scrappy about it, trying to grow your brand, trying to grow your subscriptions, be your own influencer. Like you can make that happen or you can at least make content that you can try to redistribute and distribute and distribute. And I think that's probably going to be your best bet, low cost and possibly high effect.
Chase Alderton: There's an argument to be made that that is retention based, but we'll let it slide.
Brian Becker: I guess so. I guess a little bit, but it could be seen as acquisition.
Chase Alderton: There we go.
Brian Becker: Yeah.
Chase Alderton: Brian Becker, thank you so much. Appreciate your time.
Brian Becker: Yeah, absolutely. Great chat.
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