Attendees
Ben Fitzpatrick, Nital Shah
Transcript
Nital Shah:
Nital Shah: a lot of agencies around 65 70% of agencies but we also happen have some global brands we work with and…
Ben Fitzpatrick:
Nital Shah: mostly because of our email as a retail service we managed to attract a lot of brands just come and…
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yeah.
Nital Shah: leverage us for $200 $300 email template and from there easy entry we happen to expand into their larger marketing ecosystem to support them on marketing operation that’s…
Ben Fitzpatrick: Nice. Yeah.
Nital Shah: where we have some really good brands we work globally so I’m sure that entire conversation will
Nital Shah:
Nital Shah: be helpful to a lot of audience really appreciate your time with that.
Ben Fitzpatrick: right, let’s do it.
Nital Shah: Okay, perfect. So recording is start. I’m just going to introduce you and then we’ll get started. Right. Hello everyone.
Ben Fitzpatrick: right.
Nital Shah: Good morning. Today we have a pleasure speaking with Benpetric the chief strategy officer at Web Profit is a leading goto agency for DDC and commerce marketing. based out of Australia but now serving not just Australian brands but some amazing global brands. Ben has been instrumental in driving growth for brands like Logitech, LG, Shark bringing over a decade of experience in commerce and DTC space.
Nital Shah: His work has led winning campaigns, right, including bringing success to some amazing global brands and his approach about turning datadriven strategy into real impactful results which is kind of a DNA at web profit. So we are very excited to hear your strategy around scaling high growth brands and…
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Awesome.
Nital Shah: balancing customer acquisition and long-term value as well while optimizing complex multi- channelannel campaigns. So without further ado, let’s start with questions. Ben, welcome on board first of all.
Ben Fitzpatrick: I’m really excited to be here. Thanks so much.
Nital Shah: Okay, let’s get started.
Nital Shah:
Nital Shah: Thinking about strategic foundation and…
Nital Shah: ROI as a chief strategy officer at work profit right you have worked closely with clients aligning that strategic direction with datadriven decisions so you help us share a stepbystep approach for businesses looking to unify their data for smarter and…
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Mhm.
Nital Shah: faster decision Okay.
Ben Fitzpatrick: I mean, I think, any of these types of questions always depend on where the business is in their phase of growth, the way that you can unify data when you’re early phase growth is very different from when you’re scaling and spending $100,000 a month on meta and, looking for the insights that are going to, feed that next level of scale. so I think it’s important to kind of call that out from the start that there’s some principles that can work across the board, but you’re never going to get one-sizefits-all solutions for most of the questions really that we’ll probably talk through today.
Ben Fitzpatrick: One thing that I think is just the biggest change that I’ve seen probably on the data and analytics side in digital and performance marketing in my career has been the movement away from an analytics platform to an attribution platform. And I think this is one of the areas where the transition to G4 just accelerated it massively because everybody hates G4. It’s just been a nightmare for all of us to navigate and it’s all also just in the process made a lot of people question the data that we’ve relied on So in the mix within that there have been a lot of new attribution platforms that have come into play that now we rely on for our single source of truth and I think that is one of the first areas that I would start with is just having a place that you can turn to as your single source of truth for attribution across all your marketing.
Ben Fitzpatrick: So we often work with triple oil the business but there’s a whole bunch of them that are pretty strong so that’s one thing where you can be looking at meta clavio hubsp that’s more on the commerce side but you can also be looking on the customer acquisition side for a place to unify and say this is how each of my marketing channels is performing against each other. if you’re looking in platform in meta and you’re looking in platform in Google Ads and you’re looking in platform in Clavio or HubSpot or wherever, they’re all going to tell you the best version of the data that they have, so that’s the one thing. So if you have this, then you can be in a position to make good decisions about marketing.
Ben Fitzpatrick: and I think it’s one of the areas for marketing leaders that I think can be missed in terms of how important it is to be able to make daytoday good decisions within marketing because that’s the easiest way to be efficient is to make the best decision first, And so if you have data in front of you that is powerful that actually gives you clarity on the performance between what you’re doing or down to a granular whatever the case may be then you can make those better decisions within whatever strategy you’re working in.
Ben Fitzpatrick: So I think it’s not always where everyone starts is just like I need a single source of truth data platform place if you’re still scal at startup you could do this in a spreadsheet right like there’s and you can look at marketing efficiency ratio and you can just look at your data and live in it and understand the dynamics of it as you start to grow you want to get onto a platform that does this and…
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: leverages AI and can give you insights and all of those pieces. So, I guess I would say there’s a lot more into that question, but that is where I would definitely start. and then you’re setting yourself up for success.
Nital Shah: No, great.
Nital Shah: and like you mentioned conceptually following that lens of having that single source of truth and all your attribution being tracked at one place even…
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yes. Yes.
Nital Shah: if you’re not at a scale to use attribution platform even starting with Google sheet as simple as that but conceptually start looking at your marketing activities bringing that single source of truth view so that all your future strategy and…
Ben Fitzpatrick: 100%. Yeah.
Nital Shah: growth strategy shall be aligned
Nital Shah: towards what’s been working and what’s been attributing to your business. Amazing.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Because I mean I think it’s really like every commerce business in particular, but I think probably all businesses should have an idea of a marketing efficiency ratio. your overall revenue over your marketing investment. that’s something that is a really important metric to understand because there’s no such thing as correct attribution. that isn’t like there’s never going to be a case that we actually understand how much any of our marketing channels specifically have driven because that’s not how this works. So, one thing that we’ve noticed just as an example is we run a lot of meta ads and we run, really big meta ad campaigns for some of our scaling clients and we’ve started to see the brand impact on running meta ads at that scale is dramatic.
Ben Fitzpatrick: And so we’re talking about, yes, we’re a salesdriven business, but we also ran a campaign that had close to a half billion impressions that had, 8 million clicks, right? Scale this all down for different businesses.
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: But the point is you can look at search trends and you can see the brand grow,…
Nital Shah: Yeah. No,…
Ben Fitzpatrick: So there’s no attribution for that. The only way you can be looking at that is if you look at the overall business growth against the marketing investment and understand that dynamic. Of course, you need to be optimizing within it. And that’s where having that attribution helps you to make good decisions. But trying to understand attribution as one thing that tells you a clear answer is going to lead to the wrong decisions in and of itself.
Nital Shah: cert I think I’ve also noticed on a strategy
Nital Shah:
Nital Shah: led pro podcast right you have explored customer value optimization with leaders like Valentine Ragu I would love to know how do you measure the ROI of customer value optimization initiatives it’s still relatively very new to me personally as well so would love to know across multiple channels for commerce brand
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yes. Yeah.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Nital Shah: how do you actually measure the ROI And how should an managing client account attribution growth overs cov CVO sorry I’m still fumbling it up because it’s a relatively new term so…
Ben Fitzpatrick: Mhm. Yeah.
Nital Shah: how do you see the affords while providing each channel’s impact and measuring ROI of customer value optimization
Nital Shah: Yeah.
Ben Fitzpatrick: So, first I would just say I mean Valentine’s is a legend.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Anybody out there, I highly recommend follow Valentine Radu on LinkedIn. I’ve been connected with him for a number of years now. He’s taught me so much about marketing in general. So, I’ll just put that plug in. He’s also genuinely one of the nice people in the world. so you won’t go wrong by connecting with Valentine. he’s also a pioneer of this area of marketing customer value optimization which is something that web profits has strategically invested in building our capability around for I guess three four years. and so the idea behind customer values optimization fundamentally is that for a business once you’ve reached a certain level of scale the opportunity for growth lies as much or more within your customer base as it does within new customer acquisition.
Ben Fitzpatrick: and taking the strategic and data-driven and algorithm and performance marketing mindset towards growing through your customers will drive significant revenue upside like that’s the kind of fundamental insight that I think took rad Valentine down not him exclusively but to build out a lot of these processes now he has built out a very formal CBO process
Ben Fitzpatrick: which is something his business is omnic convert they have a tool called reveal you can install free on Shopify and get a whole bunch of insights about your customers any commerce business can do that and it’ll give you what’s called RFM segmentation and that’s the kind of fundamental principle of CBO and RFM is recency frequency and monetary value so how recently did someone buy how often have they purchased from you and how much have they spent and you score based on those three principles. The most recent purchasers that have the most frequent, that have purchased the most are your whales. Those are your absolute, best customers. And you want to know as much as you can about them in order to, them, grow more through them, stuff like at its core, that’s what CVO is about.
Ben Fitzpatrick: And also to say, let’s find out who are the tire kickers, people that buy our least expensive product that we have the worst margin on that never buy again and let’s not waste too much of our marketing spend on that and everything in between. That’s kind of what CVO is about. our journey on CVO has definitely taught me that the principle of it and the implementation of it are two very different things. because when you think about CVO conceptually, you can start to think about these different audiences and it gets really interesting. you got these audiences of best customers and people that could be your best customers and everything in between and you can think of how you would implement different email sequences and promotions and all this stuff to these and integrate that with your ads and all of that. And then you get to actually trying to do it and you sell a product.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Say we work with Ninja Kitchen a lot. so they sell homeware. So we sold someone an air fryer. We could put them into one of these CVO sequences or we could go try to sell them a blender, a grill, a bigger air fryer. I mean or we could actually just look at the products and run really good like category and product based marketing. So the second we CVO leads us into an idea of segmentation that will immediately come up against all the other ways you want to segment your marketing. and this is where the implementation of it gets really complicated but also where you can take the kind of nuggets within it and then start to apply it in.
Ben Fitzpatrick: So you can say, I’m not going to implement the whole CVO framework, but I’m going to do specific stuff based on the biggest opportunities that it shows me. So I know I have a set of customers that have bought twice, and if I get someone to buy three times,…
Nital Shah: Yes.
Ben Fitzpatrick: they’re going to be loyal to me for a long time. Let me give them a really strong offer to just get them to make that third purchase. That would be like a CVO insight that could drive real actionable revenue growth. and so I think that’s been the interesting part of our journey on it. I think we started with the idea that we were going to build out a CVO service that comes in and just executes on customer value optimization within businesses. And what it’s really come in to become is we come in and we deliver customer life cycle marketing, email marketing, and then a lot of times we’re consulting and working to find those opportunities so that we can go in and go all in on those pieces that we explore.
Ben Fitzpatrick: So, if I could say, it’s like a marketer’s dream. It’s so much fun. It’s all about finding a way to deliver more and better value to your customers so that they purchase more of your products.
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: So, it’s just like win marketing. the customer gets more value, they’re happier, we’re selling to the right customers more often, we’re succeeding, they’re getting more value. It’s just like it is actually kind of what I think we’re all trying to do here. so yeah,…
Nital Shah: Yeah. No.
Ben Fitzpatrick: it’s good.
Nital Shah: Amazing. basically it’s like you go further down beyond So, life cycle marketing is all about nurturing and looking at the entire life cycle.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yes. Yeah.
Nital Shah: This is not just looking from a veneua lens. It’s also looking from specific behavioral aspects and customer value perspective and then defining that entire life cycle based on who’s more potential to your brand,…
Nital Shah: who’s more engaged and inclined to your brand and who’s more loyal to your brand and driving that behavior and segments based on that which is very interesting.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I smile here…
Ben Fitzpatrick: because we built CVO within our customer life cycle team and honestly we only came to the insight that you’ve just had about a month and a half ago that actually it shouldn’t be in customer life cycle.
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: actually a strategy service that should be informing customer life cycle alongside other areas of and so anyway that glad you picked up on that. It took me a long time to get to that understanding of it and…
Nital Shah: No, no,…
Nital Shah: I think Amazing.
Ben Fitzpatrick: but it’s really important in terms of how you get the value out of it for sure. Yeah.
Nital Shah: What initial steps Ben would you recommend to streamline the tech stack to improve operational efficiency?
Nital Shah:
Nital Shah: I have been speaking with lot of agency folks and lot of marketers around the globe and from last at least a year and a half or two I’m hearing more than ever before la introducing new tech stacks right bringing new tools to enhance their overall operational marketing and…
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yes. Yeah,…
Nital Shah: revenue operations ecosystem would love to know What are your recommendations and suggestions on streamlining that because it has also been relatively chaotic market now and…
Ben Fitzpatrick: that’s for sure.
Nital Shah: very difficult to choose which tech S texts to pick for what
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yeah. first of all, I would just recognize this is extraordinarily hard right now because there’s a lot of change in the technology. and so we’re all kind of working with stuff that we’re not yet experts to some degree. so we need to just understand that. I hate the advice I’m going to give right now. I hate it. but it’s advice that I think has paid off. It was from our co-founder Alex Clanthis. he gave it to me directly and he said when you can work with a billion-dollar company you’re not going to go wrong working with Claio or…
Nital Shah: Yes.
Ben Fitzpatrick: working with Shopify or working with HubSpot and we’re seeing it right now the smaller companies are coming out with these incredible tools and then the bigger companies just integrate it right into the platform six months later and I mean it sucks. I hate it. I don’t like giving this advice, but if I’m making decisions around where we’re going to invest, that’s often a principle that we’re going to follow. and then we’ll make exceptions. And the exceptions are the exciting part because these are the places where you’re saying we’re going to make a strategic decision to go take a chance on a platform that may give us a real,…
Nital Shah: Mhm.
Ben Fitzpatrick: a real opportunity. for example, there’s a loyalty platform that we’re piloting right now called Rise. AI. so it’s like a tokenbased loyalty program. It’s very different from other programs that we’ve worked with. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in it, but also part of being good at what we do is also being able to systematically test out new tools in order to validate whether they,…
Nital Shah: I can stop. Yeah.
Ben Fitzpatrick: are worthwhile kind of building to our tech stack. So, I know I gave that advice, about the work with the billion-dollar company. You won’t always be able to do that, There always will be other, tools that you’re going to need. you like if I look at I work with a tool called Super Metrics. every single day of my career for the last eight years, I’ve used Super Metrics, I love this tool more than anything else in marketing. And I would always build that into my tech stack,
Ben Fitzpatrick:
Ben Fitzpatrick: There’s always going to be those types of businesses or of tools that you need. but if you’re going to be investing heavily, if this is going to be at the center of what you do, taking a chance on that new CRM that just launched, three months ago and has some big bold claims, that there’s a lot of risk involved in that.
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: So, I guess I know that’s the advice I would give. I just don’t like it. yeah.
Nital Shah: No, no,…
Nital Shah: but it’s a bitter truth and I think you mostly get positive outcome if you follow that. So I hear you all.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yeah.
Nital Shah: Another very interesting u and always debatable topic is omni channel and bringing your message consistency. so…
Nital Shah: what are the top tip for maintaining cohesive message across multiple channel like email, social, paid ads and…
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yeah.
Nital Shah: I’m sure at web profit when you guys work majorly with commerce and DTC brands this becomes more challenging than any other industry because the consumer behavior is now distributed across so many different platforms.
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yeah.
Nital Shah: and you get a purges after so many different touch points.
Nital Shah: How do you maintain that and what are the tips and suggestions you have to keep that consistent
Ben Fitzpatrick: I mean, I think the first thing I would say is that I’m a performance marketer. And so, the level to which I care is going to be driven a lot more by the brand than by myself. because the first and foremost, what I’m trying to do is grow businesses. And yeah, I definitely want consistency between our marketing, but I also want to move fast and break things. and I know 90% there and faster is going to perform better than perfect and a month later.
Ben Fitzpatrick: so I believe in this because I also know how important brand is but things are changing in this area a lot look at the type of creative that performs right now it’s very hard to take that type of creative and necessarily even recreate it on other platforms in a way that would be consistent right so this is where I’m like the consistency in some areas is the messaging piece the opportunity there for me is much more about passing learnings between channels to iterate and get better.
Ben Fitzpatrick: And I think this is where, so at Web Profits, we’ve recently developed a new analytics platform measuring meta ads performance in order for us to actually dig down into the detail of all of the different elements of our messaging to know in real time what’s performing so that we can actually use those insights across all of our other marketing and…
Nital Shah: Just
Ben Fitzpatrick: then iterate quickly within meta. So I think for me that’s where when I’m allowed to I’m much more focused there than on the consistency side. Now that being said, my clients want a consistent message, a consistent brand, and this is important to them for all other reasons that are outside of my area of expertise. And one thing that I have found that actually is just really simple and effective is to do an overall especially if we’re running if we’re talking about one promotion or a product launch or a campaign or this is how we’re going to run our product ads through the year or our carousel or whatever the case may be is to buy into an overarching design direction. So just say here we’re going to this is our Black Friday sale.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Here’s the overall design direction that’s going to inform everything that we do across email across our ads across ideally our point of sale in store if you’re a retail brand all of those different pieces and have all the conversations about that first right the worst thing you can do is get into the point where you’re developing all the assets and then be getting the feedback about I don’t really like the way that the background of this one is against the text or what, all these types of things. Have those conversations first. Get everyone on the same page that you can then just deliver within that framework. it’s not always possible, but when it is, I think that’s probably the simplest way that we’ve been able to do it.
Ben Fitzpatrick: And then I guess if you’re working across multiple agencies one agency needs to be accountable or unless you have the capability house to project manage effectively on the brand side yourself one agency needs to be accountable for delivery of kind of the whole framework otherwise you’ll just be all over the place.
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: And we’ve all been there. so yeah.
Nital Shah: Okay. No,…
Nital Shah: great advice and great insight. The next one I would love to know things around balancing customer acquisition and retention, right? you often talk on LinkedIn about importance of getting the basics right like balancing customer acquisition with delivering the real value to your existing customer as well.
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah.
Nital Shah: So in your experience scaling brands at web profit,…
Nital Shah: how do you keep the balance between acquisition and retention and what’s your approach ensuring life cycle marketing stays strong even when your focus is on fast growth? because in again my few recent interaction with current global economic situation right a tighter budget businesses been conservative on their spend in marketing lot more focus and…
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yeah.
Nital Shah: importance is now these days about retention and nurture of your existing customer base not just focus on acquisition
Nital Shah:
Nital Shah: while acquisition is still important for fast growing business.
Nital Shah: In your experience, what are your suggestions on balancing these two?
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I mean I think again this probably goes to…
Ben Fitzpatrick: where you are in your growth is a big driver of the answer to the question. I would say though it’s not just like a linear you focus on retention the more you grow.
Nital Shah: Yeah. True.
Ben Fitzpatrick: The first thing you focus on is that, So, actually having product market fit, actually having something that people want to buy, that there’s a demand in market for that when they get your product they’re happy and they’re leaving good reviews. That’s the table stakes here, if you don’t have anything that we’ve talked about today does not matter, you need a great product that people want that you can communicate well to the market and that you can also deliver a good experience around. So that’s actually the foundation of everything we’re talking about. Once you have that, then you can go do good marketing,
Nital Shah: acquisition.
Ben Fitzpatrick: And then you can start to focus on and then your problem is 100% and customer acquisition is, we say this to every business. If you’re in commerce primarily, customer acquisition is going to be through Meta. if your customer acquisition lead genen type business, your customer acquisition is probably going to be through Google primarily, your growth channel. So you should be 80% focused on getting that right so you will be heavily indexed towards the customer acquisition side there’s a tipping point and I don’t think it’s just a revenue number for every business because what that tipping point in terms of when you start to look at retention in a different way it’s going to look different for a mattress company that has an eight-year life cycle versus
Nital Shah: Yes.
Ben Fitzpatrick: a supplement company that has a month life cycle right but there’s a point where customer acquisition is bringing you to a point where you have enough customers that actually an increase in so you can but this is great you can look at this number you can look at the data you can model it this is also going back to…
Nital Shah: This is
Ben Fitzpatrick: what we were talking about with CVO Valentine Radu and Omni Convert have a model and a spreadsheet that any business can build out basically And what this is is basically taking your average order value, your conversion rate, your customers, all the different metrics that actually are levers for growth and using those to say if we increase your average order value by 10%. How much more revenue do you get? And if the answer to that is $1,000 more revenue, then that’s probably not going to be something that you’re ready to go all in on because it’s not going to have the big impact.
Ben Fitzpatrick: But when a 10% increase in your average order value is all of a sudden driving 50 60 70 $80,000 a month more revenue through your business,…
Nital Shah: That’s
Ben Fitzpatrick: then you can see okay let’s look what can we do there and then you can get your retention rate a little bit lower or a little bit higher and then all of a sudden that has incremental real growth right and so it’s about being able to model those numbers because if you understand those dynamics then it’ll become very clear when retention becomes a place that has a lot of upside. And it’s all going to be about, if you’re on the acquisition side, what are the metrics that you can impact to drive growth? My cost per click, my conversion rate, and I mean, basically, it’s your cost per click and your conversion rate fundamentally. when you’re on the retention side,…
Nital Shah: and overall TV like the lifetime value. Yeah.
Ben Fitzpatrick: it’s average order value, its return rate, its retention rate. and to some degree conversion rate as Exactly. And overall all the metrics that go into lifetime value. Exactly. And so when you model this and every commerce business can model this the numbers are all just topline numbers that you have. It just becomes very clear retention now is something that investing here will have a big upside for us and you’re never going to stop investing in acquisition, that’s an engine. And if you’re not feeding that engine, then you’ll slowly decline. that I think that’s just kind of the reality of commerce at least. and probably dig businesses that are rely on digital for growth.
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah.
Nital Shah: So in your experience scaling brands at web profit,…
Nital Shah: how do you keep the balance between acquisition and retention and what’s your approach ensuring life cycle marketing stays strong even when your focus is on fast growth? because in again my few recent interaction with current global economic situation right a tighter budget businesses been conservative on their spend in marketing lot more focus and…
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yeah.
Nital Shah: importance is now these days about retention and nurture of your existing customer base not just focus on acquisition
Nital Shah:
Nital Shah: while acquisition is still important for fast growing business.
Nital Shah: In your experience, what are your suggestions on balancing these two?
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I mean I think again this probably goes to…
Ben Fitzpatrick: where you are in your growth is a big driver of the answer to the question. I would say though it’s not just like a linear you focus on retention the more you grow.
Nital Shah: Yeah. True.
Ben Fitzpatrick: The first thing you focus on is that, So, actually having product market fit, actually having something that people want to buy, that there’s a demand in market for that when they get your product they’re happy and they’re leaving good reviews. That’s the table stakes here, if you don’t have anything that we’ve talked about today does not matter, you need a great product that people want that you can communicate well to the market and that you can also deliver a good experience around. So that’s actually the foundation of everything we’re talking about. Once you have that, then you can go do good marketing,
Nital Shah: acquisition.
Ben Fitzpatrick: And then you can start to focus on and then your problem is 100% and customer acquisition is, we say this to every business. If you’re in commerce primarily, customer acquisition is going to be through Meta. if your customer acquisition lead genen type business, your customer acquisition is probably going to be through Google primarily, your growth channel. So you should be 80% focused on getting that right so you will be heavily indexed towards the customer acquisition side there’s a tipping point and I don’t think it’s just a revenue number for every business because what that tipping point in terms of when you start to look at retention in a different way it’s going to look different for a mattress company that has an eight-year life cycle versus
Nital Shah: Yes.
Ben Fitzpatrick: a supplement company that has a month life cycle right but there’s a point where customer acquisition is bringing you to a point where you have enough customers that actually an increase in so you can but this is great you can look at this number you can look at the data you can model it this is also going back to…
Nital Shah: This is
Ben Fitzpatrick: what we were talking about with CVO Valentine Radu and Omni Convert have a model and a spreadsheet that any business can build out basically And what this is is basically taking your average order value, your conversion rate, your customers, all the different metrics that actually are levers for growth and using those to say if we increase your average order value by 10%. How much more revenue do you get? And if the answer to that is $1,000 more revenue, then that’s probably not going to be something that you’re ready to go all in on because it’s not going to have the big impact.
Ben Fitzpatrick: But when a 10% increase in your average order value is all of a sudden driving 50 60 70 $80,000 a month more revenue through your business,…
Nital Shah: That’s
Ben Fitzpatrick: then you can see okay let’s look what can we do there and then you can get your retention rate a little bit lower or a little bit higher and then all of a sudden that has incremental real growth right and so it’s about being able to model those numbers because if you understand those dynamics then it’ll become very clear when retention becomes a place that has a lot of upside. And it’s all going to be about, if you’re on the acquisition side, what are the metrics that you can impact to drive growth? My cost per click, my conversion rate, and I mean, basically, it’s your cost per click and your conversion rate fundamentally. when you’re on the retention side,…
Nital Shah: and overall TV like the lifetime value. Yeah.
Ben Fitzpatrick: it’s average order value, its return rate, its retention rate. and to some degree conversion rate as Exactly. And overall all the metrics that go into lifetime value. Exactly. And so when you model this and every commerce business can model this the numbers are all just topline numbers that you have. It just becomes very clear retention now is something that investing here will have a big upside for us and you’re never going to stop investing in acquisition, that’s an engine. And if you’re not feeding that engine, then you’ll slowly decline. that I think that’s just kind of the reality of commerce at least. and probably dig businesses that are rely on digital for growth.
Nital Shah: Yeah. …
Ben Fitzpatrick: but …
Nital Shah: I think it’s more about at different stages of the journey intents are different.
Ben Fitzpatrick: yeah. Yeah.
Nital Shah: Slightly there is a variations with the persona in the problem statement the need they hold.
Nital Shah:
Nital Shah: So I hear you out it’s very important to kind of not just look at that entire funnel as one funnel flare.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yes. Right.
Nital Shah: It’s about segmenting that as well based on …
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. I think that’s right.
Nital Shah: what you
Ben Fitzpatrick: I think that’s a way you could look at it every audience segment to some degree does have a funnel or a journey that they are on. and I think, the main thing is I guess one thing, and this might be a separate conversation, is like it’s weird within e-commerce to say this, but I try to really effectively separate marketing and sales. because the things that actually impact sales are a whole other set of factors from the things that impact marketing. and so, I guess I’m just on when I’m developing creative and what we’re looking to do there, I’m not necessarily saying I,…
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: I’m this creative needs to do everything, this need creative needs to achieve a very specific marketing goal that we have. and…
Nital Shah: Yep. Yes.
Ben Fitzpatrick: then we have a whole ecosystem that is involved in driving the sales side of that. And I think that’s also just kind of where a lot of times these funnel diagrams only have marketing channels in they only have Google, email in them and they’re not talking about kind of actually how the consumer is interacting with the website the reviews the broader marketing ecosystem.
Nital Shah: Very Very true. Okay. Then I think another one on attribution.
Nital Shah: We talked about it a while ago.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah, yeah.
Nital Shah:
Nital Shah: So in your LinkedIn podcast and overall even on your LinkedIn post as well you have shared insights on navigating complex customer journey and measuring campaign performance. How can our audience listening today improve their attribution model to capture their multi-touch and omni channel interaction? Are there any practical framework or…
Nital Shah: any suggestions for them to build more accurate customer attribution system?
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah, it’s hard.
Ben Fitzpatrick: I’ll start there. and I guess again it does depend on the ecosystem that you’re talking about. we have a number of clients that have TV ads,…
Nital Shah: Yep. Yes. Clear.
Ben Fitzpatrick: that they run and trying to build an attribution model that includes the TV ads. side note, I had a business this is about five years ago that what they decided to do was they actually set up their Google Analytics platform for five they actually were to upload the times that they ran their TV ads and then within analytics five minutes during and after any ad it would just get attributed to the TV. It’s a terrible approach that doesn’t make any sense when you think about it. But this is what people do to try to figure out how to do this type of attribution.
Ben Fitzpatrick: It’s really hard and I think the worst thing you can do is try to get it perfect because you’ll just run around in circles and not get anywhere. again, I mean, depends on it depends on if you are a direct to consumer brand, you’re not in retail, you’re not doing a big partnership play, you’re not doing TV, above the line, you should have a really clear visibility of pretty much everything impacting your growth. and that’s up to and including, what’s going on just, in, people are talking about with your brand, what’s being shared organically, all the different things that could be actually driving your growth. And you should be able to have a pretty good feel for it.
Ben Fitzpatrick: and not just feel for it, excuse me, data around, especially if you have an attribution tool, data that can showcase, where you’re having driving performance and how they’re working together. And that should help you to be able to make good decisions. Most businesses, it’s not that clean, especially once you re reach a certain point. maybe you’re going to wholesale a little bit through one store or another. maybe, all of a sudden your sales channels will start to get more complicated. and so as that happens, then you need to start first of all modeling. and I think modeling does not need to be we’re spending $100,000 on a consulting project with a mixed marketing model. all of these different pieces. Modeling can be just saying ballpark. We assume that probably in retail we’re getting a 0.5% conversion rate on traffic that’s going over there.
Ben Fitzpatrick: we can make some assumptions and let’s see if we can get within 10% of what the numbers would be because we can still make some good decisions with that kind of visibility. Right? So that’s where again trying to be perfect is going to hold you back. But having even just a ballpark idea of how the different channels work together can really help to help make the right decisions. And then I guess I would say sorry there’s one other thing sorry yes here it is trusting good marketing.
Nital Shah: Yeah.
Ben Fitzpatrick:
Ben Fitzpatrick: So there’s a lot of times when we know we don’t have visibility on the end result, So I worked in baby formula marketing for about seven years. we grew the business Bellamse organic from about 25 million to a$ one and a half billion dollar acquisition over a seven-year period. It’s one of the most incredible growth experiences that I’ve had in my career. And I got to lead all of the marketing, performance side on the agency side for it. And in baby formula, first of all, you actually can’t market baby formula. The World Health Organization has very clear guidelines.
Nital Shah: questions.
Ben Fitzpatrick: You can never talk about the products. Keep that aside. That’s a whole challenge of itself. But also, people don’t buy baby formula online. You buy baby formula at the grocery store. So, all the marketing that this brand, Belise Organic, It was literally all their growth was through digital. Eventually, they did a little bit of TV, but we grew the business through digital without visibility on the final sales channel because we knew 95% are going to go through retail. what we did everything that we could to find ways to connect the data, to find ways to create an attribution, but we also just had to trust in good marketing. And I think there’s a way that,…
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: we can kind of convince ourselves if we don’t have the data not to trust in what we know. If you’ve done something and…
Nital Shah: Mhm. Yeah.
Ben Fitzpatrick: it’s worked within a model where we do have the data and then you’re going into a model where you won’t have the data at the end, you still can trust in what And I think that’s also just like where we can kind of get unstuck a bit when we’re in these situations. so yeah that’s my best advice in a tough challenge.
Nital Shah: Yeah. No.
Nital Shah: So yeah. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. So, Ben, last question. you have been amazing, instrumental, giving great insight.
Ben Fitzpatrick: I probably have four minutes left just to Yeah.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Thanks. Yeah.
Nital Shah: Last question. Very specific to upcoming new commerce businesses who are looking to scale.
Nital Shah:
Nital Shah: So you guys have web profits growth playbook. but I can correlate those brands who has a good sizable budget. there are ways for them to reach up to the larger scales growing beyond 1 million a month.
Ben Fitzpatrick:
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yeah.
Nital Shah: Are there any specific strategy or quick ways for any upcoming brands who are willing to scale but with smaller budget? How they can leverage Web Profit’s growth marketing playbook but still get a good faster results?
Ben Fitzpatrick: 100%. So I think first and foremost what we talked about the product market fit if you’re not sure if you have a product that people are want to buy if you don’t have something that actually works yet that’s all that matters right so I wouldn’t say that you’re ready to even be talking about marketing okay so make sure you’re at that phase and then we’re talking about scaling and growing once you have that this is the way that I look at it and it is marketing and sales first of there’s the elements of sales in commerce that you just need to have there’s an approach to PDP, your product detail pages on your website that needs to be right. It needs to have reviews. It needs to have all these different elements. Get that right. You need to have certain email sequences set up. That could be your abandoned card sequence, your post-purchase flow. You need to have a welcome offer.
Ben Fitzpatrick: There’s all these fundamentals of commerce sales that you do not want to be thinking about while you’re trying to Get those fundamentals set up so that you can have all your focus on finding new customers and feeding them into something that is at least, 80% optimized for performance, So do that all Get the fundamentals And that does include having a way of measuring what we started with measuring and reporting on your performance that as you’re investing you have very clear idea of the impact that you’re having and once you have that spend all your time getting meta ads was how you will scale your business in commerce unless you have a really good idea that is unique to your business right and that does exist there are businesses that say there’s a whole community
Ben Fitzpatrick: out there that I could go find a way to get in with my products and I can scale up differently right and I love those opportunities and if you’re one of those businesses that right so this doesn’t preclude that but for most commerce businesses all of your potential customers on Meta that’s Facebook and Instagram they’re all there and it is the absolute best platform for generating demand for a product
Ben Fitzpatrick: across all of marketing I mean across but TV beyond anything meta ads is where you can generate demand for a product go out and find customers and get them interested in buying your product and getting that right is the whole game because if you can get that right and you can build something that you can actually just put more marketing investment into and it’s bringing more customers in then you’re growing then all of a sudden you’re unlocking that’s the whole next phase and then you’re unlocking all the conversations about retention and
Ben Fitzpatrick: all those other pieces. But that could be, …
Nital Shah: Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Fitzpatrick: some business you could spend two years there because it’s really hard, it’s very competitive. There’s a lot of businesses out there offering very similar things. So, this could be something you get right relatively quickly. It could be something that takes quite a long time, but if you haven’t gotten Meta, that’s kind of all that matters. There isn’t something else that you can go to. Somebody may come and say, “Hey, let’s go try Tik Tok. if you haven’t been able to get meta, right, then what makes you think you’re going to get a platform that’s even harder to scale, unless you have a product that’s specifically focused on an audience that’s there, so for me, it’s like keep things simple, focus as much as possible, get the fundamentals right, and then you need to just be focused on how you can get meta ads to perform.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Because if you get that right, then you have a machine,…
Nital Shah:
Ben Fitzpatrick: then you have this marketing acquisition machine that you can really work with to unlock a ton of other opportunities.
Nital Shah: Great, great,…
Nital Shah: Really appreciate your time today. A great insight.
Ben Fitzpatrick: Yeah, this has been great. It’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah.
Nital Shah: I’m sure it’s going to be instrumental to lot of commerce DDC brand who are willing to scale and grow in this tough competitive landscape. and I know digital is still a Attribution and many other aspects are still unclear to a lot of businesses who are willing to scale through that journey. great insights. Really appreciate your time. Thanks a lot. Have a good one and stay in touch.
Ben Fitzpatrick: You too. Thanks so much. This has been awesome and I’m looking forward to doing it again.
Nital Shah: Yep. Perfect. Thanks again.