Without going broke on paid ads
Customer acquisition costs are more expensive than ever, so how can small brands acquire their first customers without spending big on paid traffic? Our guest today has a practical approach to that problem most brands can implement today.
Val Geisler is the Customer Evangelist at Klaviyo. Prior to joining the Klaviyo team, Val was an email marketing consultant for B2B and B2C brands. Because she's obsessed with improving how brands and customers connect, Val loves digging into the best ways to use different channels to make lasting connections. And memes. Val loves a good meme, too.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
6/15/2021
Val Geisler: You have those big sales numbers in Black Friday. I think too many brands rely on just like, “Well, we’re just gonna run a bunch of ads for Black Friday and also everyone wants the Black Friday deals, and so they’re gonna come and that’s when we’ll get all of our new customers.” But-
Kurt Elster: They wait till the last minute. They go, “Uh oh.”
Val Geisler: Yes.
Kurt Elster: So, we should start now to acquire customers.
Val Geisler: Because-
Kurt Elster: And you have sane strategies to do that.
Val Geisler: Well, I hope they’re sane. I think working in eCommerce is pretty much not sane a lot of times. But yeah, there are absolutely ways to approach it and I actually was talking with a customer yesterday who is a CBD brand.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Val Geisler: And he was talking about customer acquisition without ads, because CBD-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They’re in what we call a sensitive industry.
Val Geisler: Yes.
Kurt Elster: It’s age restricted. It’s not legal in every state. Payment gateways get weird about it.
Val Geisler: Oh, yeah. He had issues even with what platform he built his website on because of payment gateways. So, he was saying there’s… He has had to do all these things that most brands aren’t doing, like he can’t run ads like all of his friends are doing that run brands. And it just made me think, man, there’s so much that we can learn from CBD brands and these brands in restricted industries about how they build their businesses because I’ve also talked to a lot of brand owners who are turning off their ads right now because there’s just so much uncertainty.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Val Geisler: Or reducing their ad spend drastically, or changing their approach to ads, because there’s changes coming and they don’t know what they are, and they don’t know how it’ll impact things, and why spend money on something that you don’t really know what is gonna happen from it? So, there’s this, “Okay, well, we turned off our ads. What are we gonna do now? How are we gonna go get new customers? How are we going to bring customers back when we don’t have… we aren’t able to follow them around the internet.”
Kurt Elster: And as you may have guessed, today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, I am joined by Val Geisler, who is Customer Evangelist at Klaviyo, but prior to doing that joined this show in the past as an email marketing consultant who is brilliant, and today we are gonna talk about new customer acquisition. Customer acquisition costs keep going up. It is getting harder and more expensive, at least so I’m told. I believe it. And so, we’re gonna talk about some options there, and also why this matters, why you should do this now, why you can’t wait until October and go, “Oh! Black Friday’s around the corner. Let’s get some customers.”
You should be working on this now. And so, it sounds like by talking to merchants doing the work in the field, Val, based on her own experience and in talking to merchants, has some ideas for us. Hello. Welcome.
Val Geisler: Hey. Thanks for having me back, Kurt.
Kurt Elster: My pleasure. Oh my gosh, you’re the coolest. You joined Klaviyo. What do you do there?
Val Geisler: I’m a Customer Evangelist, which means that I talk to our customers every single day and I collect their stories and then go tell their stories, both internally and externally. So, internally is my favorite, because I get to teach other people who work at Klaviyo about our customers. There’s a thing that happens when you work at a SaaS company that you think that your customers are spending their entire day in your SaaS product, and I’ve seen this at so many SaaS companies, because I used to consult for SaaS and everybody thinks their product is the most important thing in their customers’ lives, and it just isn’t.
So, that’s kind of my mission is like, one, uplift brands who don’t otherwise get an opportunity to be lifted up. You know what? We don’t need to highlight the big celebrity brands all the time. We don’t need to talk about every well-known brand. We need to lift up these amazing small brands that are doing incredible work and show them off. So, I do that with our team, and then also working on some initiatives to share those stories externally. I work with our content team, and our brand team, and I get to work really cross-functionally, which is my favorite way to work with people, is in collaboration.
Kurt Elster: So, you get to make new friends and then tell your coworkers about those new friends.
Val Geisler: Yeah. I get to make new friends and then find other new friends to tell about them and connect people, which has always been my favorite thing. Even as a consultant, it was one of my favorite things to do, was connect people who need to know each other.
Kurt Elster: That is… It is deeply rewarding when you introduce two people and then like a month later discover they’re doing something really cool, and you know like, “Wow, I sent an email and kicked that off.”
Val Geisler: Yeah. I think it’s actually, it’s one of the ways I grew my business, so maybe this is a thing that merchants can take away, too, is introducing people who need to know each other. In one way or another, there’s always if you have enough conversations with other people, you find out problems that they’re having and you know another person who has a solution to that problem, and with double opt-in on both sides… I want to put that caveat out there. Make sure both people are open to the introduction, but then making those introductions. If you do that once a week, you build your network. You become a person that people look to for that kind of connection. And people remember you and they remember what you do because you’ve helped them do what they do.
Kurt Elster: That is a brilliant piece of advice. So, I want to discuss these customer acquisition strategies, though. So, you mentioned that there’s uncertainty, and today, as of this recording, I was 14.5. I installed on my phone this morning, and so this is the uncertainty that we’re talking about. It’s a little weird because this episode will air several weeks from now when we’ll have a better picture, but what’s the fear?
Val Geisler: We’ll have slightly more certainty when this is airing. The fear is there are a lot of changes happening in data and privacy. For the better of the consumer, quite honestly. We can’t, as it’s very disheartening as marketers and as brands to say like, “You can’t just go follow people around the internet unless they say it’s okay to do so.” And that’s basically what the privacy changes are, is it’s kind of like GDPR in that, “Hey, don’t be a jerk with email.” This is kind of like, “Don’t be a jerk with ads. Don’t follow people who don’t want to be followed.”
You know, that’s a very oversimplification of the details of each change, but it’s essentially what we’re talking about, this like… You see a lot of articles about the cookieless future and lots of talk about cookies in general and how it’s playing into how we run ads. And the uncertainty comes from, well, what does that mean? What does it mean that we can’t follow people around anymore? I heard… Was it the Apple announcement? There was something like there used to be 400-some properties that you could target people through and now there’s gonna be like nine? So, it’s like reducing the number of ways that we can target audiences, reducing the number of touch points in various capacities, and then also because of that, it has the big brands benefit because they have cash to throw at however many ads they want to run, which then we saw this in Black Friday 2020, the big brands now on eCommerce, pushing that more, throw money at ads that they have to spend like crazy, and the small brands suffering because of that because they just don’t have the ad spend to have their ads seen as often as the big box stores.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Val Geisler: So, the same kind of thing is happening now with the data and privacy changes, is big brands still have the ad dollars to spend, they can increase their budget, it’s not a big deal to them. What’s an extra million?
Kurt Elster: And they’re flatly playing a longer game, too, because of that. Like they have so much… Well, straight, like as a business, they have privilege in this advertising space. Because they’re looking at longer term. They have a bigger budget to blow through. More discretionary money. Life is easier when you’re Walmart kind of thing.
Val Geisler: Yeah. Yeah. And the impact that it has on small businesses is that you are pushed to the back. I mean, it’s kind of like if you’re the short person at the concert and everyone around you is tall, you don’t see most of the concert, and that’s kind of what’s happening in ads. And so, brands are becoming less and less reliant on ads, and also not really filling that gap. Turning off ads and not having a plan for how you replace that, there’s always a plan for how you replace that budget. Okay, cool, we’re gonna take some budget away from ads. That means we can go spend it over here.
There’s always need for dollars, but what about the strategy? If ads was simply, “I’m just putting money into this budget and this machine is gonna do its thing,” then you probably didn’t have a strategy around your ads in the first place. But if you did have strategy, what is your strategy now? How are you bringing customers in? Whether it’s that you’ve completely turned off ads or you have reduced the amount of ad spend, because I’m seeing both.
And I’m not here to say like, “Ads are bad,” or, “Everyone should stop running ads,” or, “Cancel your contract with your ad agency.” I don’t. I think ads have a forever purpose. They’ve existed since the beginning of marketing, or maybe longer, so… I mean, we ran ads in World War I to get people to build machines and go to war, so the ads have existed forever, and they always will, and it’s a question of what ads will look like and how they… This shift from company focused to customer focus.
Kurt Elster: So, currently, it sounds like the landscape for merchants that you’re talking to is that they’re moving their resources away from PPC ads, but they still need a strategy. They still need to be able to acquire customers.
Val Geisler: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, how can a brand get customers if they’re not… if they haven’t budgeted for ads. Not that they don’t have the resources. If they’re saying, “Look, we’re just not putting our effort into that.” Into Facebook ads.
Val Geisler: Yeah. So, there’s a couple of ways. One is let’s consider that you’ve simply reduced your spend on ads. That means you’re still running ads and the ads that you’re running become even more important because they are less likely to be seen, but when they are seen, you want them to have some kind of impact. Reducing your spend often increases the overall cost of your ads, or your cost per customer acquired, so your CAC goes up when you reduce your ad spend in a lot of ways because your ad is viewed less. What is being asked in that ad becomes more important.
So, if you are still running ads, I think now is the time to consider what you’re running ads to. And historically, we’ve been able to point ads directly to a product, or maybe a product group, right? If you run multiple SKUs or have a large store. You could in the past push people directly to a product that they’ve looked at, something that is connected to a lookalike audience. You could push people to a category. That was fine when ads were easy to run and cheap.
Now, I think that the focus, again, it needs to go away from the company and toward the customer. So, unless your customer truly was like an abandoned cart, and in which case I think you should go email over ads, but that’s a different topic.
Kurt Elster: Or SMS.
Val Geisler: Or SMS. Email or SMS over ads.
Kurt Elster: I did get… Anecdotally, I was cruising a few sites, I was looking at thegoldshop.com, which sells like just the most gangster pendants you can come up with, but they have these really fun licenses to go with it, so you can get like just a blinged out Spiderman pendant, officially licensed from Marvel. It is one of the most fun stores I’ve seen. But here, okay, so I’m playing with this, added an item to cart, leave, an hour later I get a text message that’s like, “Hey, this is whoever, we saw you abandon your cart. Will you go ahead, or did you want me to check if I can get a discount for you?” That was how it was framed as a question-
Val Geisler: I like that.
Kurt Elster: To get my engagement.
Val Geisler: I like that.
Kurt Elster: And of course, I reply. If you get someone to reply, engagement goes way up. So, I replied, and I said, “Yes.” And then like a minute later, “Oh, I checked. I was able to get this discount for you.” And it was a discount code for like 10, 15% off, something to that effect. And I loved it. It was the best abandoned cart SMS experience I’ve had yet. So, it’s top of mind.
Val Geisler: I expect to see this bling on you very soon.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I did not actually purchase a pendant.
Val Geisler: I need Kurt Elster in some blinged out Spiderman something.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Just big Miami link chain and a Spiderman, just CZ pendant.
Val Geisler: Was there a Disney? Yeah. You need a Disney one to go really…
Kurt Elster: I’m sure. Yeah, I’m sure I could find one. Who’s got the license? I don’t know.
Val Geisler: Disney themselves. I actually got an SMS abandoned cart from Inkbox and it just said… It was like three hours after I had abandoned a cart there and said… They make temporary tattoos, but they’re like four-week temporary tattoos. Did this tattoo catch your eye? And it linked to exactly the tattoo that I was looking at.
Kurt Elster: That sounds like browse abandonment.
Val Geisler: Well, it was actually in my cart, though, so I think it was a truly cart abandoned. And then the next day they sent me, “Still deciding? In case you missed it, here’s a code for your purchase.” So, yeah, SMS, email, I think abandoned carts belong there and not in ads. As a consumer, this is the thing, like as a consumer everyone is like, “It’s kind of creepy to be followed around the internet by a product I was just looking at.” But then as marketers, we all just do that. We implement those ads all the time.
And it’s not that they don’t work, but it just doesn’t feel great. It’s kind of like the emails, the abandoned cart emails that the subject line like, “Saw you looking.” That’s creepy, you know?
Kurt Elster: It’s like yeah, it gets the open rate, but at what cost? It also makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Val Geisler: Yeah, like it’s very big brother, so I think that the intention for Facebook ads needs to go back to the customer and the relationship, like building the relationship should be first and foremost for you, not getting the sale. Because you get the sale when you build the relationship.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You can’t just like… Yeah, when it’s just an ad that pops out of nowhere, it’s like you’re walking down the street and some dude jumps out of an alleyway and is like, “Hey! You want to buy some t-shirts?” No. I definitely don’t.
Val Geisler: No. Even if you’re like walking to a t-shirt store. You know, you’re choosing that t-shirt store. It’s not just showing up in front of you. So, I-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Who’s the person who went, “You know what I really love? High pressure sales tactics.” And that’s what that is.
Val Geisler: It’s the third email from the cold email that you never asked for about the SEO on your website. It’s that. It’s the, “You know, I never asked you to evaluate my website.”
Kurt Elster: Greetings of the day, sir or madam.
Val Geisler: Yeah. Sir or madam. So, you know, ads have a place, and I think the best use of your ad dollars is to drive people to an opt-in. So, whether that’s SMS or email, getting them onto one of your lists, and that’s… At Klaviyo, we call it owned marketing, right? You own that channel.
Kurt Elster: I love that phrase.
Val Geisler: Yeah. I think it… Not enough people understand what it means, and so it gets kind of written off, but I’m hearing more and more people talk about owned marketing in one way or another. And it’s basically-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Here’s how I see it.
Val Geisler: Yeah. Tell me.
Kurt Elster: And you tell me if I’m right or wrong. Because I was at Klaviyo Boston. I heard owned marketing getting used for the first time and I was like, “I like this.” So, on Facebook, I’ve heard that lovingly called the traffic store. You are leasing your audience. You are leasing the traffic from Facebook. If they say, “Hey, we’re killing your page. We’re killing your group. We’re killing your ads.” Whatever it is, you now have lost that access. You were just leasing them the whole time. Versus owned marketing, if I have an email list in Klaviyo, they have opted into my list to communication with me. That is now portable. I own that list. I can export that list. I can put it into something else. That’s mine. I own that audience.
And then I could sync that to Facebook and access my custom audiences there, so that’s how I perceived that distinction, why it’s important.
Val Geisler: Yeah. I think I want to take it one step further and say first-person marketing versus owned, because I think then using the word owned has this connotation of like, “I own these people.” And that’s-
Kurt Elster: Generally, if I go, “I own you!” That’s not a great, positive-
Val Geisler: That’s not a good look. And so, instead of like own, and also, I’ve always had this thing about my list. They’re not a list. They are actual people. They’re our subscribers to a list. My list is not a group of people.
Kurt Elster: I agree with you, and I will challenge you. If you believe that, why do… I think we should stop using the phrase consumers. I hate it. I think it’s gross. You know what consumers are? I think of locusts. That’s what I think. We’re just a hoard of locusts descending on resources.
Val Geisler: Versus customer.
Kurt Elster: People, customer. I like that. Visitor.
Val Geisler: Visitor.
Kurt Elster: All of those are good. Disney calls them guests.
Val Geisler: Friend.
Kurt Elster: Right? Friend.
Val Geisler: Yeah. I like guests. I love places that use words like that that feel very welcoming and family. But yeah, owned marketing, first-person marketing is the ability to connect with those people directly no matter what happens to the platform, right? So, even Klaviyo, Klaviyo could not exist tomorrow. You could still have that CSV of every person who subscribed to your email list.
So, that is the most powerful channel. Not just because I work at Klaviyo and have been doing email for years, but I’ve been doing email for so long because I see the power of it, and I see my friends who run Facebook ads getting frustrated with not knowing attribution, not knowing the… You know, being held to court by customer, by their clients who are saying, “What is the ROI on what we’re investing in you running our ads? We’re paying you to run our ads and the return is just not there.” And it has nothing to do with that person’s skills in building ads and everything to do with the platform’s ability to serve those ads or how the algorithm works, like in email you’re not working against an algorithm other than maybe like the primary tab situation.
Kurt Elster: I was gonna say, yeah, like beyond just deliverability.
Val Geisler: Yeah. General deliverability, which also is like… It’s like telling the weather. You know, you’re like wrong 75% of the time. But there are some… It’s not all magic. Deliverability. So, there’s some-
Kurt Elster: I was gonna say, there’s stuff that is actively documented about deliverability. There are standards and practices here versus the algorithms for advertising networks are always closely guarded secrets.
Val Geisler: Closely guarded secrets and constantly changing.
Kurt Elster: It’s a black box.
Val Geisler: Yeah. That’s another reason I don’t work in Facebook ads, is because I don’t wanna have to learn a new interface every day.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I know. Business Manager drives me crazy.
Val Geisler: I’ve honestly never even looked at it because… I think I looked at it 10 years ago when I was running my business, and obviously it was a very different product then, but yeah, I just feel like having that ability to connect one to one with somebody, it’s they are coming to… They are inviting you into their house. You know, we’ve talked before about the dinner party strategy.
Kurt Elster: Remind me. I love it. I love this analogy. Because hold on, recapping a little bit, customer acquisition costs through performance marketing channel, so Facebook, Google ads, really, we’re talking about Facebook ads, that keeps going up. It keeps getting more expensive and it’s essentially getting less and less accessible to smaller brands. And so, they’re moving away from it for a myriad of reasons. And so, we have to have better ways to connect with people. But for Facebook ads, your advice is hey, focus on using it as a traffic acquisition channel, but just to get people onto your list so that you can move them from, “We lease them from Facebook,” to, “They are part of our first-person marketing effort.”
Val Geisler: Yes. Direct to that person.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Now, once I’ve gotten them there, this is where the dinner party strategy begins. I love the dinner party strategy!
Val Geisler: A dinner party is you’re inviting friends to your house for dinner, right? And this is why I’ve always loved email, and now SMS is in that mix, is this is a person, your customer, your potential customer is a person who has given you one or both pieces of very personal information, which is their email address and their phone number. Those two things are not given away very freely for most people, and it is an invitation to show up and interface with them.
When you invite someone to your house for a dinner party, you’re most likely, hopefully, not greeting them at the door with a fully plated meal and a fork in hand and saying, “Here you go,” but that’s what we’re doing when we stick a product in a Facebook ad, when the first email we send is a push to buy, when we’re approaching the relationship with nothing but the purchase in mind. That’s where we start to lose the connection to the people.
So, I have this whole dinner party strategy built out, and we did talk about it on the last episode, so I think of people wanna hear more about it, they can in depth go back to that episode and listen-
Kurt Elster: I will… That episode is entitled Getting Customers for Life Through Email from April 23rd, 2019, episode 223. I will put it in the show notes.
Val Geisler: But the intention is we are building relationships with customers over time and when you’re able to do that, when you’re pointing your Facebook ads to an email opt-in and then using email/SMS to drive relationship and to talk to people like people, and not just credit card numbers, then you build… You do. You build a customer for life.
When you follow them all over the internet with an ad, you build a customer for once and then hopefully your product is freaking great and that’s why they keep coming back. And I mean, in all cases hopefully your product is freaking great, but you can do a lot with an okay product and building relationship, because it’s easy to walk away from a product and try something new. We have a million choices. Even like I… I’ve been trying out different natural deodorants, like non-aluminum deodorants, and there’s a…
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The aluminum is the scary thing.
Val Geisler: Yeah, yeah. There’s a million options, even when you eliminate baking soda, which is apparently an irritant for me, but when-
Kurt Elster: Oh, no!
Val Geisler: Even when you take multiple ingredients out, there’s still a dozen options. So, I have all the options in the world for this very niche product, and it’s the companies that I’m building relationships with through my inbox that I stick with, because they treat me like a human.
Kurt Elster: Do you look for companies that align with your values? How much does that play into it? And do you hear merchants talking about like we want to tell our story; we want to share our values and find our tribe?
Val Geisler: I definitely do. I think I’m like a Gen X/millennial cusper, so I don’t have as deep of a need to have a company align with my values. In my case, it feels a little bit like it’s a really nice to have thing. If you are very clearly not aligned with my values, I’m most likely not going to be buying from you. But I know that there is a certain audience who that’s number one for. You have to align with my values or I’m going to go shop somewhere else. So, it really does depend on your customer.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. For me, it’s a bonus. Sustainability is my thing, but… I want the value, I want a reliable product, I want something good. And then if it’s got sustainability as part of the message, you get automatic bonus points. And then I’ll go for it. And then if you’re like, “Hey, for fun we dunk sea gulls in vats of oil.” Okay, I’m not gonna go with you. But you’re right, I’m similar. I am at the very top end of millennial.
Val Geisler: Yeah. It’s like if you very clearly don’t align, then no, I’m not spending my dollars with you, but yeah, for me it’s like female and minority-owned businesses are very important to me, and so… But if you aren’t female or minority owned, I am going to look into who’s on your team, and if I get emails from a woman on your team, or if I see faces that are not white men on your website, those kinds of things are indicators to me that maybe it’s okay. I might spend some money there. But I’m probably gonna look for a female or minority-owned business first.
Kurt Elster: Do you go to the about page? I’ve seen this behavior in screen recordings. People go like add to cart, they hit the cart, then they go to the about page.
Val Geisler: I do that.
Kurt Elster: They see who they’re buying from. And whether it’s the story or the team, one of the two, and then that’s why I always tell people like, “Hey, put the return policy on that about page for those folks.” Give them all that info up front.
Val Geisler: I like that.
Kurt Elster: So they can make their decision.
Val Geisler: I like that.
Kurt Elster: That’s a good CRO tip. So, that’s you. That’s you, add to cart, and then like, “All right, I’m gonna check this about page. See who I’m giving my credit card number to.”
Val Geisler: I do. I usually am looking for like, “What is the name of this brand all about?” Because it usually tells me. If it’s not clear up front, it usually tells me more about the brand and what they stand for. So, like that… Using that deodorant example, I recently purchased from Curie and learned, one, they’re a woman-owned business, and two, they named the brand after Marie Curie, because they believe in science. And so, you know, that felt like, “Oh, that’s really neat and that’s something special that I can also… I have two daughters, so that’s a cool story I get to tell my kids when they’re learning to read, and they read the labels on my products.”
And so, it feels like a thing that is bigger than deodorant, so it’s important to me. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely. Yeah, I love when I can share… I’ll try and figure out the story if I know it’s something my kids will be interested, and I’ll try and tell them the story. Because we’re really, desperately trying to normalize entrepreneurship for them.
Val Geisler: Yes.
Kurt Elster: I don’t want them to think about that as like, “Well, that’s some weird alternative option to a traditional… traditional employment.” I want them to view them all like, “Well, you can be a business owner, or you can be a doctor, or you could be a firefighter.” I just want it all on one normal, sane plane.
Val Geisler: Yeah. It’s all on the table. Being vice president of the United States and hopefully president of the United States is possible for my daughters because it’s all normal jobs that people have. To me, that’s important, and telling that story behind your brand… Well, knowing the Curie story gives me a connection personally. It gives me ways to connect with other people about the brand. And I wouldn’t know any of that if I didn’t get their welcome emails.
I wouldn’t know any of that if they just followed me around the internet with their deodorant and hoping that I pick one of the scents, you know? There’s not a lot of… They don’t have a huge product line, so their options are different scents, and if that’s what they’re delivering in ads, it’s not… That’s not compelling if it’s just an image and like a… This is the best aluminum-free deodorant. Because everybody says that, but why? What is the actual reason to buy your product? Everyone thinks theirs is the best. Yours might actually be the best. How is it actually the best? What are the scientific studies that have been done? How are you rating this? It’s like number one Chinese restaurant and there’s five of them in every town, you know?
So, like what is the actual story here?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, like who’s gonna be the best to tow my car, A-Plus towing or A-Plus-Plus towing? Who do I pick? Okay, so I get… I really, for new customers, I just want to drive them to an opt-in so that I can get them a welcome series that will introduce them to me, to the brand, to the story, our values, our competitive advantages, why we should buy. Really drive that messaging home.
Val Geisler: And do that-
Kurt Elster: What else? I have several follow-ups, but I want to unpack this.
Val Geisler: Well, I want to add to that and to do that now, we’re at the end of spring, beginning of summer-ish time right now if you’re listening right when this airs. Doing that now allows time for the relationship to grow, and if you play that little bit of longer game, those customers become customers now who then have a chance to try your product and then come holiday are buying your product for all of their friends and family, because they’ve tried it, you’ve built a relationship with them, they feel connected to you as a brand, and you don’t have that rush of, “We have these massive Q4 goals and so we just need to push product at people.”
You get the chance to build relationship, which ultimately helps you meet those Q4 goals.
Kurt Elster: Well, and then when you have that relationship, you can be much less reliant on discounting. That helps quite a bit to drive our profit and revenue goals. And if you… You’re saying hey, acquire the cold traffic now, and so you could build that relationship. Well, okay, ignoring the relationship part, you’re gonna pay a lot more for any traffic you drive the closer we get to Black Friday.
Val Geisler: Heck yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. All right, I’ve got… I drive them to the list; I get them into the welcome series. Is there anything else there?
Val Geisler: So, providing the opportunities to connect with you I think is really important. One, we’ve talked about deliverability and any chance that somebody is replying to you is increasing your deliverability. It’s also further establishing that relationship. And like your connection with that brand through SMS, getting a reply… You replying and whether that was automated or not, it feeling like a conversation changes how you think about that brand. You brought it up in this conversation. You might not have if you had been on the website, abandoned the cart, and they never talked to you again. You know?
Kurt Elster: You’re right. Because I thought it was like a fun, it’s such a fun catalog, and they’re doing some advanced marketing, but the thing I have shared and retold is that SMS story. This is probably the third time I’ve talked about it. So, 100%, you’re right. And it was because it was approached as like a customer service agent reached out was how it was framed, and it was totally believable. I loved it. And you’re right, it was just like the most basic and quick of human connection.
Val Geisler: Yeah. Some other basic things that you can do is let’s say that relationship goes to the point that the sale is accomplished. Simply a personal connection in the packaging. I ordered supplements the other day and got the… Well, first of all, they arrived within like three or four days, which was awesome. And just on the packing slip, there were no additional inserts. It was not even a special box. The only way I knew it was from the company was on the return address. On the packing slip, someone wrote a two-sentence like, “Hey, thanks for your first order with us. Hope you really enjoy these.” And they signed their name. And that was it. There was no ask of me. There was no super branding about anything. It was just a handwritten note in green pen, and it stood out.
And I’ve seen other people who order from that brand who also share images of that two sentences written on their packing slip. So, it’s obviously not unique to me. They didn’t choose me out of all customers to write a note to. They do it for everyone. But it has an impact because I’ve seen people share it on social media.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it still feels cool when you see that, and especially like when you make it look a little more low fidelity the way they did. That adds authenticity. All right, so tongue in cheek, but maybe not, what if you just got like lined paper ripped out of a spiral notebook, and then you wrote the note on that and folded it in there?
Val Geisler: I mean-
Kurt Elster: That would really give it the authenticity.
Val Geisler: It really feels like a small business then.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Good or bad?
Val Geisler: Yeah. I mean, I’ve ordered so many things from different brands of all sizes, and there’s everything from like super branded inserts, and packaging, and even the box inside the box, and like everything is well thought out, and then I’ve ordered from brands like this one, where they just wrote a note on the packing slip, and I’ve ordered from ones that have nothing but a packing slip, or sometimes even no packing slip.
And the experience is very different every time. The well-branded stuff is great, but I also… I don’t like to keep a lot of things, so I often throw those things away, and I feel bad throwing those things away.
Kurt Elster: Me too.
Val Geisler: I’m like, “Man…”
Kurt Elster: That’s where I’m at with it, like all this stuff is going in the garbage or the recycling within 90 seconds of me opening this.
Val Geisler: Yeah, and I feel bad on like two levels-
Kurt Elster: So, I’m like, “Oh, what a waste.”
Val Geisler: One, this is such a waste of paper for the planet, and we don’t need to be creating this kind of trash. And then two, this brand spent a lot of money and time developing these things and I love the brand, but I don’t need this stuff, so away it goes.
Kurt Elster: So, the optimization is the note goes on the packing slip.
Val Geisler: I mean, honestly, like if you-
Kurt Elster: I think we’ve cracked the code here.
Val Geisler: Especially if like sustainability is your thing, right?
Kurt Elster: But no, you gotta put the packing slip in for practicality, and then handwritten note on it, the whole thing just feels like authentic, and direct, and real, and it’s practical, and I like that.
Val Geisler: Yeah. It probably takes 15 extra seconds than stuffing a couple inserts in does, but you know, you compound those 15 seconds over time and the customer lifetime value, and how it has an impact, it’s one of those things like anything with email, it’s worth testing, right? So, test it on a few customers. See what it does, if people are responding on social media, if people are replying to your emails and saying like, “Thanks for that note on my packing slip. It really meant a lot to me.” Then you add it into more packages, and you change your processes based on the feedback from your customers.
I think that that’s like what… the most important thing that I want to impress on merchants is go from being company-focused to customer-focused. Stop worrying about putting your brand out there and start thinking about how do you connect with the customers that your brand can help.
Kurt Elster: Mindset shift. That’s good.
Val Geisler: Yeah. It’s massive, but it’s really important, you know? I know we’ve already talked about our kids, but I feel like there’s so much about business that you can learn from parenting, and you know, just trying to get your kid to listen is not going to work. But connecting with your kid about what’s going on for them and then impressing upon what you need to have happen and how you need their cooperation, that’s a totally different conversation and you’re much more likely to get the results you’re looking for.
You know, telling your kid, “Turn off the TV and come to dinner,” isn’t gonna end great, versus like, “I know you’re watching a show and I love when I’m sitting down and watching a show, and I want to keep doing that too. We need to eat dinner and we’re gonna have dinner as a family, so let’s turn it off right now, come eat dinner, and I know there’s five more minutes left, so instead of doing that right now, we’re gonna watch it after we eat dinner.” And there’s probably still gonna be some whining, but you’re gonna get more cooperation that way, and if you can take that mindset into running your business, instead of going from, “Go buy this thing,” and, “We’re the best and you need to buy it,” to, “We know you have options and here’s some stuff that is really important to us and we think it might be important to you too, and that’s why we think you should give us a try,” that’s a different conversation you’re having with your customers.
And you’re not asking them to change their habits for the rest of their life on a whim but you’re asking them to make a considered decision and try your product and see how it changes things for them. Because you know what your product can do.
Kurt Elster: I love that advice. I really do. Where you’re just like, “Hey, you are gonna treat them like a fellow human and then rationally make the case for your product.” Our message here is look for these easy wins that make you feel authentic and genuine, help you connect with people. And I think that’s one of the big advantages that a small brand has over a big brand. But that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow things that work from big brands, so what are some of the things big brands are doing that small brands can replicate?
Val Geisler: Well, one of the things that you pointed out earlier is that big brands have a longer game in mind, right? They can do the long play. And they can throw a little bit more budget at things and let opportunities play out. So, even when you don’t have a big budget, you can think about how do I build this long-term opportunity with my potential customers, and you can do it in a no budget way, right? Big brands might be throwing money at the problem to run ads longer, to build through a particular customer journey, and you can do it in non-money spending ways, like building out those email or SMS journeys, building out referral programs that actually have an impact. So, not the give 20, get 20 that everyone does, but think about what’s actually impactful for your customers and how you can roll that out. And you know, creating this groundswell of customers who really go to bat for you.
We talked earlier about CBD customers. There’s a new CBD brand called House of Wise, and they have an affiliate program that is the foundation for the way that they run their business. There are women who are House of Wise customers who join the affiliate program, join their little network that they have of affiliates, and you then get a link to share with all of your friends, the product, and to be able to talk about it, and they actually support their affiliates with… They do a weekly Wednesday night Zoom call and talk about different topics. They send emails to affiliates on a regular basis with, “Here’s how you can talk about this product. Here’s some of the things that other people are experiencing that maybe you haven’t experienced, but you can share that story.”
So, they don’t just have a referral or affiliate program. They actually support it. And that long game that big brands are playing can be done in different ways for smaller brands with… I mean, running an affiliate program, like having those custom links, obviously there’s a software involved there, but weekly Zooms and an email every week to your affiliates, that’s very low cost other than your time. So, it’s how can you replicate that kind of long game that big brands are doing in smaller ways and in low-cost ways. I think that’s the question to be asking and instead of looking at big brands and saying like, “Let’s copy those emails,” or what I heard a lot as an email marketing consultant was, “I want to do emails like Glossier. I want to be the next Equinox of whatever brand.”
It’s like Uber for whatever.
Kurt Elster: You have to put in the work, then.
Val Geisler: Yeah, right. Well, one, good luck, and two, they have entire teams of email people, and brand people, and so it’s an entirely different game that you’re playing, but you can look to those brands and say, “What are they doing that I can do in different ways?” It’s taking away the let’s just copy and paste and looking from a more investigative standpoint. What are they doing? How can I deconstruct that a bit and bring it into my brand? And is there a way that I can do this that doesn’t cost me as much money as they might be spending on it?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, exactly. You have to look at like, “Okay, what is their end? What is the strategy here? And what’s the tactic?” And try and implement that in your own business with your tools as opposed to like, “Well, we need to slavishly copy everything they do.” That’s not practical and it doesn’t particularly work well. Take what works and then apply it to your own business in whatever processes work for you.
Val Geisler: Right.
Kurt Elster: This House of Wise site is really nice. Wise, W-I-S-E. I put that in the show notes. But are there any other examples you like?
Val Geisler: Oh, of brands that are doing that kind of long game thing? Blume is another great one. B-L-U-M-E. They have a whole referral affiliate program built out. It’s actually called Blumetopia. So, and House of Wise calls it Wise Women. So, they’re not just creating, “Here’s your link that’s buried in your account dashboard,” but they’re creating movements. They’re creating groups of people. Community. By naming it, by bringing them together. I think Blume does like a… They’re a very Gen Z focused brand and they do like a private Instagram account that only members of Blumetopia can join, and then they do special stories and things like that for them.
Kurt Elster: That’s pretty cool. Private Instagram account. Wow.
Val Geisler: Right. And like the Wise Women Wednesdays, their Zoom thing for their affiliates, it’s always… I think it’s like 8:00 PM or something. It’s acknowledging the fact that most of the women that are customers are also parents. The founder is a parent of young kids. And so, it’s like this is an after-bedtime thing. It might even be at 9:00 PM Eastern, I’m not sure. But it’s like they are bringing the things that their customers need, that their affiliates need, whether it’s a private Instagram account, or connecting at 9:00 PM after the kids are in bed, it’s what their customers need and that’s what I think is really important, is knowing your customers really well so you can deliver on what they actually need, what matters to them.
Kurt Elster: All right, let’s… We’ve gone long, so let’s wrap it up. What do you want people to take away from this?
Val Geisler: I think the most important thing to do in marketing is to remember that there are human beings on the other side of what you do.
Kurt Elster: Not consumers? Not rabid locusts?
Val Geisler: Not consumers. No. Not leeches. And also, not robots or zombies, right? They are human beings who take into account a lot of different factors about why they make purchases and sometimes those things that are taken into account are not your product at all. So, making sure that you are connecting with customers in the exact same way you would if somebody came into your house for a dinner party, connecting with them, telling stories, sharing who you are, learning more about them, and knowing that all of that leads to the goal that you’re looking for, which in the case of eCommerce is a sale.
And that sale could come from that customer. It could also come from them talking about you to other people and other people becoming customers. You might not buy that bling chain with Spiderman on it, but someone listening to this is gonna go find that brand because that sounds so freakin’ rad to them, you know? And that’s what I think is most important, is you having that relationship, the examples we’ve given today, show building relationship creates customers. Not only in the immediate but in the long term.
Kurt Elster: 100%. This is fabulous advice. Really practical, which I love, and what’s so great about it is anyone can do what you’re suggesting with a little bit… They roll up their sleeves, a little bit of elbow grease, and be willing to fail a little bit, you could 100% do everything you suggested.
Val Geisler: Yeah, and at the bare minimum, you can test it. You can apply it to a segment of your audience and see how it goes. If you’re like, “Well, I’m just gonna… I wanna keep running things the way I’ve been running because so far it’s successful,” that’s fine. Take your most loyal customers and try something new on them and see what happens. Because most likely your most loyal customers are not going to be freaked out by something new. So, at the very bare minimum, test it, let it run for 60, 90 days, and then see what happens. I’m happy to be proven wrong but I don’t know that I will be.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah. I sincerely doubt it. Where can people go to learn more about you?
Val Geisler: I’m always on Twitter. And in fact, if anyone listening is a Klaviyo customer, I want to talk to you. I love talking to merchants and it’s my job to talk to Klaviyo customers, which is the most fun job in the whole world, so I can go through our database and reach out to people, but if you’re listening, you’re someone I want to talk to. So, come find me. I’m @lovevalgeisler on Twitter. My DMs are open. Come chat with me and we’ll set up a time so I can learn your story and share it with the world, both internally and externally.
Kurt Elster: Val, thank you so much. This has been enlightening and fantastic.
Val Geisler: Thank you as always, Kurt.