"Ecommerce is stuck in an echo chamber. Exit the echo chamber."
Juliana Jackson, AKA The CLV Lady, Juliana is one of the principal architects of the Customer Value Optimization Category, a ground-breaking innovation framework for ecommerce companies that identifies the most important customers segments thanks to the RFM model, understanding behavioral patterns that need to be addressed in order to prioritize what matters to improve profitability and customer loyalty for ecommerce brands.
She also has some unconventional opinions about ecommerce and its echo chamber problem.
Kurt Elster: We’re gonna talk through this issue that apparently is a hot button issue. So, I am joined today by Juliana Jackson, AKA the Customer Lifetime Value, The CLV Lady, and chief evangelist at Omniconvert, and we are gonna talk through her controversial opinions on why revenue is not the be all, end all. So, tell us again. You were saying you have a controversial opinion about revenue and eCommerce.
Juliana Jackson: Yes. So, it’s just… I’m just gonna start the great example. Let’s take email marketing. Email marketing came up as a beautiful channel to build relationships with customers, and nurture them, and moving to retention, right? Well, years passed, a lot of years passed, and now people that are selling email marketing services, and people that are talking about email marketing nowadays are selling 40% increase to your revenue. Bam. And it’s like email has become a sales channel and a performance marketing channel, when email is not supposed to be that, right?
So, mostly what I’m trying to say is that-
Kurt Elster: What’s email supposed to be?
Juliana Jackson: So, email is a distribution channel in my opinion. It’s a nurturing channel. It’s where it’s your chance, post purchase, to build the relationship, and it’s your chance when you get subscribers to get them there to purchase from you. Because a lot of people that subscribe to a newsletter don’t subscribe… They’re not maybe ready to buy from you. They just saw something cool on the website, you know? They’re not there yet. But if you want to get people to be there yet, you have to go that extra mile. And you cannot go that extra mile with spin the wheels and all this bamboozling thing, and carousels, and-
Kurt Elster: Spin the wheel. Oh, spin the wheel.
Juliana Jackson: They’re still doing it, Kurt. They’re still doing it.
Kurt Elster: I know! Every time I see spin the wheel, I’m shocked. And then if I ever say anything about spin the wheel, people come out of the woodwork. And some people are like, “I made so much money from spin the wheel!” And others who are like, “This is trash. What are we doing?” And I don’t know what the right answer is. I really don’t.
Juliana Jackson: Well, I can give you an answer. So, I went, and I did some research, some customer research on people, and they were exiting the website when they were seeing the spin the wheel. So, I don’t want to name names, but we worked with a website that sells mattresses. So, we put some Hotjar, watched some user recordings, and did some exit popup surveys, so if you sell mattresses that are expensive, you kind of have a clientele, right? And when you put that spin the wheel on the website, yes, it will increase your conversion rate. People are very happy about conversion rates nowadays, which ties into the revenue, right?
But like the question at the end of the day is that if you get someone to buy from you again, but they don’t buy anymore, are you actually winning or are you actually losing money? And we did this customer research and basically we found out that spin the wheel actually kills the credibility of a brand, and all this gamification is very badly placed on a merchant’s website.
Sometimes it fits. If you’re selling… I don’t know, jamboree merch or something like that, it might be cool to put a spin the wheel. But if you’re selling high end products, yes, you might get-
Kurt Elster: Right. If there was a spin… Yeah, you would not expect a spin the wheel on a Louis Vuitton site.
Juliana Jackson: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Right? But a spin the wheel on someone selling like gaming tee shirts, okay. Unsurprising. So, I suppose context matters here.
Juliana Jackson: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But all right, zooming out, who are you, what do you do, and why do we care?
Juliana Jackson: Cool. So, I’m the Chief Evangelist for Omniconvert. This is a fancy name to call someone that gave up on their lives to preach customer lifetime value, and yeah, I’m a planter of seeds. I plant a lot of seeds in the eCommerce ecosystem. And every day I’m trying to get people to give a damn about their customers, and it’s working pretty good so far for me, but it’s also a very lonely space. And it’s funny, because I had a conversation with Nick on [inaudible 0:04:19.2] Slack about this. When I met him I was like, “Bro, I feel lonely.” Because-
Kurt Elster: Nick Disabato.
Juliana Jackson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: A frequent repeat guest.
Juliana Jackson: Yes. I love him. I love him. He’s amazing. And I was telling him I feel alone. I feel alone. And yeah, so this is what I do. I preach customer lifetime value. I preach… Actually, I talk a lot about customer support and onboarding, because I think customer support is not the cost center, it’s a revenue center if you know what to do with them. And why should you care? Because you should care about your customers and you should exit the echo chamber that eCommerce marketing is. And just go back to basics.
So, yeah, I’m a big fighter of the echo chamber.
Kurt Elster: There’s so much to unpack there. Okay, let’s go… Oh, man. I’ve got so many notes. Let’s go back. Let’s define… You talked about customer lifetime value, CLTV, and why that’s important. Let’s go back to that. Define that for me. Tell me what that is.
Juliana Jackson: So, you have to answer to yourself one question to understand customer lifetime value. To what extent is it worth for you as a Shopify merchant to invest in acquiring customers based on how much they spend in your store? So, customer lifetime value answers to that question. And it cannot exist with the acquisition cost. So, think of it like this: Do a ratio between how much you spend on acquiring customers and how much those customers spend on you over time, and if that ratio is good, like people are talking about 2 to 1 or 3 to 1, which are magic numbers, but if that ratio is bad, it means you are running your business into the ground. You know?
So, customer lifetime value is the best… It’s not a transactional metric. I know people are trying to convince you that it’s a transactional metric. It’s not. The main KPI for customer lifetime value is customer experience. In translation, means like if you get people to buy from you but your post-purchase experience is shit, they will never come and buy from you again.
And it has a transactional objective. Clearly, you have to be profitable, and you have to look at the revenue, gross margins, and you should look at the repeated revenue that comes from a customer. Yes. But eCommerce merchants, it’s not a transactional metric. It’s a customer experience related metric and it’s all in your hands to make it rain if you focus on customer experience. That’s the best way I explain it. I don’t want to put the fancy formulas in, because they don’t work. I tried. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, what’s the right way to look at this? What should we be doing? Instead of focusing on the quantified dollar value of customer lifetime value, what should I be doing instead? Save me from myself.
Juliana Jackson: So, the first thing you should do, you cannot talk about customer lifetime value without determining customer value. Right? So, just take a short stop there. You have to determine customer value. The best way I’ve found that you can determine it through doing RFM segmentation. Recency, frequency, and monetary value segmentation. It’s something that Drew Sanocki was talking about. I’m still subscribed to his newsletter that he doesn’t even do anymore. I met him on Twitter. He’s a cool guy.
Kurt Elster: He’s great.
Juliana Jackson: I love him.
Kurt Elster: I’ve been lucky to talk to Drew many times. We’re friends. I text him. And oh, that guy is so smart. He is one of my… In my head, he occupies a portfolio of heroes.
Juliana Jackson: He does in my head too. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: That’s meant to be a great compliment.
Juliana Jackson: Yes. He does in my head too. He was talking about these things like 10 years ago. I actually had a chat with him about this and he was talking about this 10 years ago. But going back, RFM segmentation means recency, frequency, and monetary value segmentation. So, this is a very old school type of methodology that came back, came out in the ‘50s or ‘60s, which a lot of new-age marketers thinks is old, but it’s not. Because sometimes basic is good, right?
So, going back to this, you have to segment your customers based on the recency that they buy, the frequency that they buy, and the monetary value that they buy. So, if you’re a merchant that has enough historical data for this to make sense, because it’s not gonna make sense for you if you have… I don’t know, 5,000 customers. If you have 5,000 customers, call them. Stop listening if you have 5,000 customers, this part. If you have more than 5,000 customers, segment them based on their transactional behavior. Recency, frequency, and monetary value.
Doing this, you will find out nine to 10 groups of people that share a common pattern in the way they buy from you. It’s like living in a building apartment, right? Everyone in that building has in common the fact that they’re living in the same building. But each family is different. So, if you want to do better email marketing, if you want to do better communication with people on all these channels, do that RFM segmentation. And then do an analysis on it.
So, this is quantitative data. This is a very hard word for me to say, just for the record. I have issues with that and it’s something I’m-
Kurt Elster: Well, it was perfect. You said quantitative. Nailed it.
Juliana Jackson: Yeah. So, RFM analysis is what separates the boys and the men, the women and the girls, the… I don’t know, Liverpool from Manchester. I’m a Liverpool fan and I’m very mad because we’re losing this season. But yeah, RFM analysis is where you score your customers, right? Based on these three things. So, technically it’s a score that goes from one to five, one being the lowest, five being the highest, and based on the score you will see different patterns in your group.
So, why should you care about this? It’s simple. Doing email marketing segmentation, right? Let’s talk about email marketing. It’s not enough for you to segment people and put them in a bucket and say that I’m just gonna feed all these people the same stuff, they’re gonna eat it. No, they won’t, because in that group of people, you will find 10 to 20 other types of behaviors that are very different than what the segment name does. So, what I advise you to do, find an RFM tool or find some data people that can do this in an Excel, and segment your customers based on this. And do this analysis, and then you’ll be very surprised to find out that you have buckets inside of buckets. It’s like on some Interstellar, you know, plot.
And these people have very different needs from you. So, it’s not smart to treat everybody the same, because customers are not created equal. So, you cannot expect someone to react to what you’re saying to them or react to your 20% discount messages if you don’t know exactly how they are behaving with your store. And once you do the segments of quantitative data, it’s very important to enrich this data with qualitative research. So, the second step, because I’m still tuned to your question to how you should go about it, enrich your data.
It’s great to have data. It’s great to have numbers to look at. It makes you look good if you have a lot of data to look at. But if you don’t do anything with it, if you don’t make sense of it, it’s not gonna help you move the needle, right? And everyone talks about moving the needle. Well, the only way you can do it is to mix quali with quanti. This is the way I’m cutting those words and it’s easy for me to say them.
Mix them together and do qualitative research and all the segments is gonna help you stop playing the guessing game and how people like to call it probability, significant probability. What’s the fancy word for guessing, Kurt?
Kurt Elster: Hypothesizing?
Juliana Jackson: Hypothesizing in significant probability. Someone told me that the other day on LinkedIn. So, I was asking, “Is that guessing?” So, instead of guessing, ask these people. You have these groups. Find your VIP groups, the ones that have the highest scores. Those are the people that matter. The ones that already took the decision. You have to find out why are your most loyal customers there with you for so long? You probably are screwing something up, but these people are still there with you, with your shop, buying and buying and buying.
So, it’s very important for you to call them. I like to promote the Jobs-To-be-Done methodology. Shouts to Bob Moesta. I like Jobs-To-be-Done. Yes, it takes time, but it’s so mind blowing. So, we have a customer from Canada. They’re called Hush Blankets. Hush.ca. So, they’re selling weighted blankets. So, when we started working with them, they were saying, “People are buying our blankets because they have anxiety issues.” And I was like, “Hm. Okay.” So, we did 100 hours of customer interviews over a month and we found out that people were buying their product because they were feeling lonely, and the blanket was making them feel safe and normal, and the second reason was that they were buying it because they wanted to help their family feel normal.
So, once you know things like this, you’re obviously gonna change your positioning. You’re gonna change your message to be better received by the market. So, hypotheses are good, but not hypothesizing is better, right? So, ask your customers.
Kurt Elster: You have to talk to your customers on the phone.
Juliana Jackson: Yes. Call them. Call them. You have your customer support team there. If you, the owner, you don’t have time for this, it’s cool. It’s hard to run a business. But you have customer support people. Install something and let them call these customers and talk to them, and it’s gonna be mind blowing, the reasons people are actually higher on your product, because people are not perusing the internet for your product, you know?
It’s funny, because sometimes you think like people are on their phone like this, “Oh, I just need right now… I don’t know, a cup from whatever.” And I’m just going straight for it. It doesn’t happen like that. People have their whole context and trade offs that they’re doing, and if more people are like me, when I’m about to buy something, I find a reason not to buy it. I’m trying to convince myself not to buy it. So, you know, I just go off, and on, and off, and that’s how it happens, like the customer journey, which is the third point of responding to your question, the customer journey is not like this.
It’s like this. It’s a mess. You cannot guess it from the start, so that’s why it’s important to talk to your customers and then map the customer journey. So, yeah, if you’re an eCommerce brand owner that’s listening to this, sign up to your own newsletter. Sign up. Buy your own product. And see how you are being treated by your own brand. And I think that’s a great example for you to see what are some gaps in the customer journey. And once you do those things, it’s gonna come natural to you to see what needs to be fixed, because sometimes it’s not even about tools and ads and data and all this crazy stuff. Sometimes it’s just about the most basic stuff, like discovering exactly what people are going through to buy from you.
Is it easy? Is the juice worth the squeeze? Are you annoying them? You know, it’s stuff like this that matters, and I feel like we just… We moved a lot in this industry in a very acquisition-focused way that we really forgot about these small things.
Kurt Elster: Nailing the basics is one of… has become one of my mantras. Because so few people put the cart before the horse. They don’t have the most basic stuff nailed in their business, the fundamentals, and then they’re already trying to move on to the advanced stuff. You have to walk before you can run. You need that foundation. So, when you’re doing those customer phone interviews, what are you trying to find out? What are the three things I want to walk away knowing after I’ve talked to 100 customers?
Juliana Jackson: Cool. So, the questionings are done on some CIA interviewing type of questioning. So, I know it sounds-
Kurt Elster: So, first we administer the truth serum.
Juliana Jackson: Exactly. So, it’s always gonna be random, but what you need to find out and what you need to leave after having one of these conversations that takes one hour to a half, is why did people choose you, why they did almost not choose you, because that’s a very important question, so what almost stopped those customers from buying from you, and also what is the job that they hired your product for? That’s the most important part. Why did they hire your product? Because it’s that stupid example, you don’t buy the hammer, you buy the hole in the wall that you put your picture with your family. But it’s real. It’s real.
People are buying something-
Kurt Elster: Absolutely.
Juliana Jackson: … for something. So, if you want to know and do better positioning, better advertising, better email marketing, better anything, you have to ask your customers and find out why they’re hiring your product. And just a very important part, you have to go past the surface of the why. Why? Why do they buy? Because a lot of brands are selling only product outcomes. They’re not selling the total outcome. They’re selling discounts, they’re selling features, they’re selling benefits and so on on their product pages. But they don’t sell the outcome. They don’t show you the person using that product. They show you… It’s super product centric. And it’s okay to have a good product description, but if you want to be there for the long run, show people the outcome of their journey.
I know this brand that’s selling a cross rope and I really like their brand, and I was telling them I don’t want to see a lady that looks great and is super fit jumping the ropes. I want to see someone like me that the pandemic wasn’t nice to. And you know, just give me something to work with. And actually, funny enough, a short story, that’s how the Snickers commercial, “You’re not you when you’re hungry,” came up, because-
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Juliana Jackson: Yeah. Bob Moesta was in the airport and I was at one of his webinars. Seminars, actually. Back when COVID wasn’t a thing and I met him in person. And he said that he was in the airport, and he was trying… They were thinking back then that they were fighting with Milky Way, so he saw someone buying a Snickers bar and went to the person and asked a lot of questions and found out that the person bought the Snickers bar because they had a two-hour flight. He needed something to eat real quick, and he doesn’t operate well on an empty stomach. So, he wasn’t buying the Snickers because it was something sweet like a candy. The job was to keep him satiated for two hours.
So, that’s how you’re not you when you’re hungry came up, and all of us, we’re making that joke right now. So, you as an eCommerce brand, if you ask these questions to your customers, who knows what you can come up with that can position you differently for the future?
Kurt Elster: So, once I’ve got… So, I interview my customers, I uncover the real whys behind why they’re buying, and I then use that to hold up the mirror in my marketing, to speak to that real outcome that goes beyond just the superficial features and early benefits.
Juliana Jackson: Yep.
Kurt Elster: And from there, well, what the heck do I do next? Because we talked about better onboarding and emails.
Juliana Jackson: So, of course you’re in this business to make money, right? You have to sustain a business. Once you have all this data combined, once you know, it’s very important for you to understand that relationship building is the way to go. So, a cool advice that I give people is this. When you have people subscribing to your newsletter, when you have people in your newsletter list or email list, or whatever they purchased, ask them why they subscribed or what do they want to see. I don’t think everyone wants to see everything that you have to say, right?
So, if you onboard people, I guess if you create like this type of journey that they can walk in, and you are there all the time, on their own terms, on their own preferred platforms, and on their own needs, it’s gonna be easier for you to obviously sell, because you have to sell, but sell smarter. Also, you don’t have to sell to everyone. Once you do the segmentation, you will find out that you have customers that you don’t need, because let’s be honest, not everyone is worth keeping in a customer database. It’s not. It’s a lot of customers are bad. And doing-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You want to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Juliana Jackson: Yeah. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: You want to separate the good customers from the bad. And yeah, at some point you have to say, “Buy or get off my list.” Not everyone is an ideal customer and that’s okay.
Juliana Jackson: Yeah. Exactly. You have to be okay with that and it’s also like a natural churn that happens every year. From 15 to 25%. And it’s cool. You don’t need those people. But once you have the good ones, just dedicate everything to keep those people happy. Customer experience is your product. You have to deliver a great experience on every touch point of their journey. They will come and buy from you, but you have to make it safe for them. You have to make it comfortable for them. That’s why people choose Amazon, because Amazon makes you feel comfortable. Do I-
Kurt Elster: Convenient.
Juliana Jackson: Yeah! Am I a fan of Amazon? No, I am not. I am not. But can I say something about how convenient they made it for you to do it? And the sad part is that most eCommerce brands, instead of copying the convenience and the security, they’re copying the whole sales mentality. Let’s sell, let’s sell. And I have a meme with, you know, [inaudible 0:22:10.6] when he’s like Scarface with the tommy gun and saying, “20% discounts! 30% discounts! 40% discounts!” It’s hilarious. But people don’t care about your discounts. It’s not a problem of money here, it’s a problem of value. So, you have to deliver value and those people are gonna stay. But just be honest. Give a clear shipping policy. Give a clear return policy. Don’t send them an email until they don’t get your product to sell another product. Don’t send them emails that they don’t want.
I think I’m sardonic or sadomasochistic. I’m signing up for newsletters to see what people do. Just out of curiosity. And I do exactly the things that I’m supposed to do to trigger an abandoned cart or something like that, because I’m curious what they’re gonna say. And you know, it’s like I sign up for your newsletter and you just drop products in your welcome series. Maybe I don’t want to see those products. We have to normalize taking out products from the welcome series.
Kurt Elster: So, what… Give me some more of the top mistakes that you see brands making. What drives you crazy about eCommerce?
Juliana Jackson: Oh, my God. You have a whole day? No, so I do a lot of client work, right? So, that’s why I’m so heated. So, everything I speak about right now, it’s not hearsay, it’s just client work that I do. And you know, this is what keeps me humble. So, why are you sending me the welcome series from no reply, or from hello@brand? Why don’t you send them to me from Jim at Customer Support? Or some customer support people, so if I can reply to you, and you invite me in a conversation, we can actually engage, and you might sell me something.
Why are you sending me products on the welcome series when you don’t know why am I there for? Why don’t you ask me, what do I want to see? Thank you so much for subscribing to my newsletter, Juliana. We’re excited to have you. This is our brand. This is our values, our community, but we want to know, who are you, Juliana? We want to know, what do you want? What are you doing on this website today? And stop. Take out those crazy popups on your page, like you get on a website and you’re just gonna be assaulted.
I swear, like I’m on assault. So, you get on the website. Here, of course, because it’s camera, and people don’t see me, but I gesticulate a lot. So, you have here that Joana from Brighton bought this pillow 25 seconds ago. Sign up to my newsletter for a 15% discount. Check out my new-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Then it’s like rewards, accessibility, wait! Don’t go! Sign up for our… Yeah, it’s just endless.
Juliana Jackson: And everything happens in like three minutes. Like if you’re-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s like the person who set the site up never actually looked at it.
Juliana Jackson: No. No. And it’s insane, because also, like the customer support team put that thing on the product page. Don’t let it pop first, because when people come to your website, on the phone, your customer support thing is gonna cover the whole screen and we’re gonna get mad and we’re gonna leave. So, I really suggest introducing the customer support pre-purchase. Introduce it on the product page. And let Jim from customer support ask you what’s your pain today and build habits. I’m a really big advocate of building habits in eCommerce. By allowing people to get friends with Jim and try to recreate that retail experience, and have someone to guide you in this journey, right?
So, if you start from the beginning with the person from your customer support, allow people to build a relationship, don’t sell to them right away, and just take them easy, and take them on their own terms. There’s so many things that can be done better than they are. I see a switch in the market, which makes me happy, and I see more eCommerce brand owners much more focused on building these relationships and exchanging value. It’s just that they don’t know how to start. eCommerce marketing is an echo chamber. I see people posting the dumbest advice on everywhere, on-
Kurt Elster: Well, tell me. What’s with the echo chamber. Tell me about it. Is it just the nature of social media and people just repeating each other?
Juliana Jackson: Yes. I just feel like we just got to a point where we’re just beating each other up for the smallest shit. And I think people are just Googling one line obvious marketing truths and posting them on LinkedIn and asking people to agree with them, and actually… I spoke at the Future of Marketing on Derrick’s event like a week or two ago, and I didn’t do a keynote. I actually did the manifesto and I told people, “This is a manifesto. This is not a keynote.” And I started with a 1984 Apple commercial when the chick throws the hammer. And I said to people, “Listen, you are hiring tools for every little job, but a fool with a tool is still a fool.”
You have to go back to basics. You have to stop digging each other out for the smallest thing. You see people, “Oh, I just blasted the revenue with 20% because I tweaked an email headline.” Who cares? Or, “My clickthrough rate is big. I have a big clickthrough rate!” So, my message is this, like marketing people, it’s great to use revenue to justify your effectiveness, but eCommerce brand owners, ask your marketing agencies to also see if they can prove your profitability as a brand, because it’s a very big difference between marketing effectiveness and business effectiveness.
So, the business effectiveness is not gonna be seen in the revenue. It’s gonna be seen in the ROI. It’s gonna be seen in the customer lifetime value. So, the echo chamber is just people that are just beating themselves up because… I don’t know. It’s just basic stuff. Increase your clickthrough rates. Change your headlines. Give them 20% discount. And if they don’t want it, give them 50% discount. If they don’t want it still, fuck it, give it for free! Just give it!
So, it has become crazy. This has become very, very crazy, and I just… Again, I’m talking about Drew. I wish Drew was here back on LinkedIn. I told him, because he’s only on Twitter. I actually met him on the second day he went back on Twitter after I don’t know how many years. And I was like, “Oh, shit. Drew Sanocki followed me.” And I was telling my husband. My husband, who he didn’t know, but I’m a stalker. I’ve been stalking you for a long time. And yeah, it’s like I wish more people like you, like him, like… I don’t know Ezra Firestone. You would be more active. Because LinkedIn has a lot of eCommerce brands that are on LinkedIn right now looking for advice, or on Clubhouse, which is another cesspool that I don’t want to talk about of eCommerce bad advice.
And I feel like people need-
Kurt Elster: I’ve heard that about Clubhouse.
Juliana Jackson: Oh my God. Oh my. I sound like Janice from Friends. Oh my God. It’s bad. It’s just some people that probably created an account in the beginning, where there was not too many folks there, and got a following, and now they’re gurus, and I was in this room… I’m also trolling for trouble sometimes I think. And I just went in a room and someone was saying that sales cures everything. And that was me, that was my-
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez.
Juliana Jackson: Yeah. And I just think brands need more support right now. I think a lot of brands want to do good by their customers. It’s just that I think they’re very suffocated with bad advice at the moment. It’s not because I’m the source of it. I don’t think of myself like that. But I think there’s so many people that they can reach out to, to get a great consultation and great… I don’t know. Guidance into what they have to do instead of just listening to the people that have the biggest following on LinkedIn or on Twitter. It’s ridiculous, in my opinion.
Kurt Elster: It is. Yeah, it is silly. I don’t know. Follower counts, I’m over it. I’m through the looking glass where now that I have an audience, I realized like a lot of it is just you were in the right place at the right time. And not necessarily an indicator of like, “Oh, this person, their advice is better, or they’re more authentic,” or whatever it is. And sometimes the follower counts are just flat out fake. So no, it’s not a good metric for where you should get your advice.
Juliana Jackson: At all.
Kurt Elster: Let’s do a lightning round. What book belongs on everyone’s bookshelf?
Juliana Jackson: Oh, God. It’s Play Bigger in my opinion by Al Ramadan.
Kurt Elster: Play Bigger?
Juliana Jackson: Yes. That’s my favorite book. That’s my favorite book. Mostly because I’m trying to build a category too, and I met Christopher Lochhead, and he’s a very nice guy. I met him on LinkedIn. He’s a very nice guy. Answered a lot of my questions and I feel like that book changed my whole mentality on how to approach markets in general. And I think eCommerce brands that would read that book would benefit from understanding product market a little bit, which is very important in eCommerce. It’s not something that belongs only to SaaS.
So, I think you should read that book to understand more about how you can position, more about how you can create problem awareness, so you can be identified with a solution when the problem becomes sexy and hurtful. And yeah, that’s my favorite book, and my second book, sorry that you didn’t ask about, but it’s equally as important, is Demand-Side Sales 101 from Bob Moesta. And he talks about uncovering demand and he talks about how you can focus more on building customer relationships rather than just selling to them. And I really recommend that for an eCommerce owner or marketer that wants to understand better how they can go about understanding that why.
Kurt Elster: What talent do you most wish you had?
Juliana Jackson: I wish I had more patience.
Kurt Elster: I think we all wish we had more patience. And let’s see. So, you, you’re the chief evangelist at Omniconvert, and Omniconvert has a Shopify app. And I looked at it, it looks legitimately interesting. Tell me about it. Pitch me on this app. What’s it called? What’s it do? Why do I care?
Juliana Jackson: Okay, so this app is called Reveal, because it reveals things that you might not want to see, but you have to see. It’s an app that’s focused on customer lifetime value, of course. No surprise. And it’s not a CDP. A lot of people are confusing us with a customer data platform. We’re not a customer data platform. We’re very much focused on helping brands map their customer journey, do RFM segmentation. We’re actually one of the top 10 Klaviyo partners, so we’re gonna help you do better email marketing and better… help you communicate better with your customers.
So, it’s an analytics app, it’s a reports app, but it’s also actionable based on the integrations that we have. It’s funny, because I’m probably one of those few people that are selling a product, but I’m not selling the product. But it’s a cool app. It’s still free. It’s still free until the end of the month, and I think if you want to look at your customers and see exactly what are they doing from a transactional perspective and see what your customer lifetime value is, how it has decreased, understand your best cohorts, understand your best customers, you should check Reveal out.
Kurt Elster: Certainly, I will include that in the show notes. Finally, the hardest part of having a podcast is coming up with a title. I think this episode is called Unconventional Opinions on Optimizing Customer Journey with the CLV Lady.
Juliana Jackson: It’s funny. I like it. I like it.
Kurt Elster: We’ll go with that. It’s not… Maybe it could be a little pithier, but it’s good enough.
Juliana Jackson: Yeah, I’m sorry. I just… I was waiting on this podcast to say everything. I feel like this is my Jay Leno. Now I’m like if I got to your podcast, it’s like this is my Jay Leno. I’m probably gonna drop an album after this and that’s it.
Kurt Elster: Well, I will preorder your album. Juliana, where can people go to learn more about you?
Juliana Jackson: Clearly, they can find me on LinkedIn, because I pay real estate on LinkedIn, or they can find me on LinkedIn, Juliana Jackson, or The CLV Lady on Twitter, and everywhere else @TheCLVLady.
Kurt Elster: All right. I will include that in the show notes, and we will… Well, actually I connected with you on LinkedIn and there was a theme I noticed. You said, “Wow, eCommerce is a sausage fest.” That’s what I want to close out on. Tell me about that.
Juliana Jackson: I mean, clearly, eCommerce is a sausage fest in the sense that if you look at more podcasts… I was looking at podcasts and when I started my podcast, I was looking at… I was thinking like, “Damn, it’s the same dudes everywhere.” Saying mostly more or less the same thing, so I said it’s good, because a lot of these dudes I like, and I’m friends with, but at the same time, I don’t see that many females. And I was looking around in my circle of friends, and I know a lot of females that work in eCommerce that are really, really cool, and ambitious, and they’re creating impact, and then I was checking to see how many eCommerce podcasts have females, and the ratio was like 20 to 40% female, if they were.
So, I said, “Wow. Okay.” So, I went at the male counterparts of the industry and I said, “What are we gonna do about this?” And you know, I just ended up doing this podcast that I’m doing right now, eCommerce Growth Stories, and I only… I got a few of my dude friends on, but I booked until August only females. So, I’m like 78% female right now in my podcast, and yeah, there’s not a lot of people that give chances to women. Whatever. Even if you can create some sort of impact for brands or people that you work with, you don’t get a lot of chances as a woman. So, today is the International Women’s Day. I don’t know when you’re gonna publish this, but today when I’m talking to you it’s International Women’s Day, and I’m happy to be a woman, and I’m happy to be a minority, and I’m happy to be from Romania and to be on your podcast. I just said, “Fine. If no one is getting women on podcasts, I’ll get them on my podcast. You don’t have to be famous. You don’t have to be nothing. Like if you want, you can come on my podcast.”
So, I just ended up having all these cool women that I am just learning from, and it’s like it’s amazing to get all this feedback and to see how much they relate with this. And I think we just… We have to do a bit better. For all the podcast hosts that are probably listening to your podcast, and copying it, copy this part and get more women there in your podcast, and give more women a chance, because you’re gonna be very pleasantly surprised.
Kurt Elster: I agree. I think that is perfectly good advice. How do you solve the problem? Give opportunities to other people, to people who you may have otherwise passed on. You will be pleasantly surprised at how well that works out for you. Juliana, thank you.
Juliana Jackson: Thank you for having me. This was really, really fun. And thank you for the chance.