Drive and Convert

117_Holiday Prep and Tech Stack - full
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Announcer: [00:00:00] You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: All right, Ryan, it seems like we just did this a couple of weeks ago, but it must mean we're getting old. It's a holiday prep time again, right? Every year it hits so quick, and here we are on entering Q3, it's time to start thinking about this, and your team at LP, they're in the thick of it, I assume, right?

Ryan Garrow: Oh yeah, it feels like it almost doesn't end actually, because we're so quickly into the holiday prep. Meetings with platforms and clients and yeah,

Jon MacDonald: I know you had your; you called it a partner connect event last week, sadly, and I was super disappointed when I heard of the dates because I already had family travel scheduled.

So you got to give me the rundown. How was it? What were the highlights? Let me know.

Ryan Garrow: It was fun. I did miss [00:01:00] having you there. The value add on our stage is always good. So we missed that for sure. We've Always adjusted as we've done these things. This is, I think, our third one in this format. We've been doing kind of partner connect events since man, 2017, maybe, but we had a bunch of clients come in, we had some partners come in and we challenged our speakers this year, more so than in the past to really do more of a keynote, like thought leadership presentation.

And they were. Solid. We had, this person, Matt Dornfeld was on stage for feedonomics and he's good. That guy is a phenomenal speaker. I've seen him on stages around the country at Ecom events, and he's just, it was impressive. The one that he was willing to come out and do this for us, but also talk about the numbers around growth in marketplaces.

And it's crazy. He even had some data around TikTok and the growth there and how TikTok and Amazon are working together. And it is

Jon MacDonald: that seems lethal to have those two together.

Ryan Garrow: It does. And that's, we have the political thing playing out with tick tock. And so if they are forced to whenever that [00:02:00] deadline's coming, I forget when it is.

But if that deadline ever comes up, I foresee some type of thing with Amazon happening, since Amazon's driving so much of their off Amazon traffic from tick tock right now, if you're driving traffic to Amazon right now, and you're listening to this, make sure you're doing some stuff with tick tock because that integration is getting, slash awesome from a marketing standpoint.

Jon MacDonald: I love it.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. So

Jon MacDonald: speaking of very large corporations that might get split up, you had a day, you had a day at Google, right?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Yes.

Jon MacDonald: What are they saying about holidays that doom and gloom, or is it? Bigger and better. What should we be thinking about? Because the economy, depending on who you talk to, is either amazing or in a hole.

And I can't figure out which one it is right now.

Ryan Garrow: I can't either. It feels like there's issues, but then you read a lot of the data and business publications, and it doesn't seem that bad. I think it's been over 15 years with Google that I've been working with them. I have yet for them to ever say this period is going to be smaller.

Like it never in a holiday period is it ever Oh yeah, it's going to be [00:03:00] smaller. So prepare for that. It's always going to be bigger whether it is or not. Google's going to tell us it's going to be that way. So they're painting very rosy pictures and helping the strategy, which is good. But our day at Google was pretty good.

They are really jumping in all in on YouTube. And they have been for a while. I've talked about this before, but every earnings call, they it's always YouTube is not doing great from a numbers perspective from the analysts. They're just always upset about YouTube numbers. But. They are really doing a lot.

We talked about vertical videos before. There's a lot of really phenomenal things they're doing to help improve tracking on YouTube and push people from the top of the funnel through. So make sure you're doing video period. And we did see some cool data though. So 2023 holiday with Google, it was up 17 percent ad spend was up 17 percent year over year, which is a lot considering the growth of e com and online sales and even retail sales was only up I want to say 5%.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And so you could infer that has maintained what people were [00:04:00] spending over COVID has maintained if it was up 17%.

Ryan Garrow: Yes. And that's basically CPC increases. So what will, Google's world, they're going to be up, even if search volume is down and sales volume is down because CPCs are going up and there's.

Some, tinfoil hat people that believe that Google's manipulating CPCs, which, maybe in this, it is in their benefit to do so it is, so there's probably some of that. Google's estimating that CPC is going to be up 5 to 15 percent this year. So if we have flat search volume, You can see where the 10 to 15 percent growth in ads.

Don't they

Jon MacDonald: control that dial? They know the number that they're going to aim for, right?

Ryan Garrow: What we are seeing is as the pie is maintaining or shrinking, you have other advertisers coming in or advertisers need to get more aggressive to hit their growth goals. And so if the pie isn't up 10 percent in size, You're going to have to get more aggressive with your ROAS targets, your bidding algorithm, like you've got to push harder.

And those that push harder will get the customer [00:05:00] because if you don't show, you've got no shot. So you're going to need to be aggressive just like every other holiday season. But I would say if you look at Google trends, which is a cool site, if you haven't been there, go play around on that. We are seeing less search volume in a lot of our clients industries.

So if you're seeing that. And you want to grow, you have to get a larger piece of the pie. So get aggressive. And then this year, I mentally wasn't prepared for this. I should have been, but Cyber Monday's in December this year. So we have, it's actually working out to five less shopping days this year in the calendar of holiday, like Thanksgiving to Christmas.

So that's a problem for a lot of companies. You're going to much more condensed. Pay

Jon MacDonald: more and have less time to, to spend.

Ryan Garrow: I'm guessing very high. Volume sales day. So that'll probably be the message that comes out of all the people like adobe and all the people watching Revenue online, but we say oh we have the biggest sales days ever yes, because we're in such a condensed period of time people are going to be buying more often during this [00:06:00] condensed time period So it means your opportunity to recover from mistakes Like if you miss on this tuesday a revenue target or sales because you weren't pushing hard enough You're not gonna have a lot of time to make that up So you're going to need to be watching very closely on your data.

The bigger you are from a spend standpoint, the more often your teams are gonna need to be meeting and connecting. So slack's gonna be important. We have some clients that meet, 7:00 AM and then they're gonna meet again at 11:00 AM and then there's probably gonna be a post day meeting, late east coast to say, Hey what do we need to pivot for tomorrow?

And if you're spending six figures a day or higher. We have some clients spending seven figures a day during holiday, that's going to be important. And smaller spenders, maybe you're meeting daily with your team. So just be aware. It's also an election year. Yay. While that won't impact holiday search shopping stuff, the lot of the lead up to holiday is building those lists and capturing people that are going to be, for example, Amazon prime day in October will have an impact and people will be [00:07:00] buying holiday gifts there.

And we saw that. election year, we went back to 2020, a lot of that mid to upper funnel is going to be impacted a lot. And so because those impressions on meta, YouTube, display networks, the DSPs, if you're on the trade desk, things like that, a lot of inventory is going to be going to election ads. So even if you're not competing directly in the election space, that ad can't on meta can go to a candidate or it can go to you.

And the candidates have a lot of money to spend in a very condensed period of time. Local politics ads are usually Two to three weeks out where they get aggressive, we'll see presidential campaigns, senators, those will probably be back in the late September, early October, when they start getting a little more aggressive, that's going to be something to be aware of and watch performance max campaigns in Google do use YouTube and display ads.

And there's a remarketing component. Those ad slots will likely get more expensive. So if you're using your performance max outside of just shopping, It's something to be aware of. You might have to adjust your target return on ad [00:08:00] spend because of the mid and upper funnel being more expensive.

Jon MacDonald: Knowing all of this, what do you think is going to happen this holiday season?

Ryan Garrow: If I say it, you can almost bet on it being different than what I say. So my motto is always plan and then pivot because I think something's going to happen and then it's going to be different. So

Jon MacDonald: well, look, you're just adding fodder for our recap episode 200, where we'll say like we did in episode 100 where we were wrong and go back and play the clips and then comment.

Oh, yeah. So

Ryan Garrow: I'm of the opinion that many brands are going to be slower this year than 23. And we're already seeing that happen, through Q3. I don't expect some magical search volume to come back in Q4 to save the day. The date on the platform is going to tell us that holiday sales grew like that happens every year, but then we see the individual.

Merchants seeing not that data some of it's going to be, inflation based like sales volume, you know They can adjust for inflation, but it's not always there I don't think click cost inflation on both meta google probably some tiktok increased in costs. They're going to be there So I think the [00:09:00] smart sellers are going to get aggressive in september And there's a real cool data point that google brought out that there are A large percentage of holiday buyers that have done all of their shopping before Thanksgiving and they start buying that 20%, I believe, start shopping in September.

I am the weird one in that none of my holiday shopping gets done before December. Like it's just December 23rd. Yeah, I am that guy on Christmas Eve or 23rd, like at the store. It's usually, generally speaking, a bunch of other men and we move quickly and are impulse buying. We probably all overspend. So just what I've seen over the years.

Yes, I am that guy. Start earlier to be successful. I think if you're planning all your spend to start on Thanksgiving, yeah, I think you're going to be in trouble and build lists and plan for sales. So you're going to need to have a few different sales periods. Likely, like there's going to be that prime day in October.

You're going to want to layer on Halloween is a big shopping day. Not all of it is Halloween based. So you might need some promotions around that. Companies that are effectively using SMS and email are going [00:10:00] to grow a lot more. We had attentive speak on stage at our event last week. It blew me away, their numbers.

It borderline thought they were lying. If they weren't actually pulling the data out of their system. They said that their advertisers The people using attentive email and SMS were up 58 percent year over year versus holiday 22. That's an astounding number. I think they have some good brands, which helps, but the simple fact that they are seeing that companies that are using their technology grow much more than average, the holiday was up, I think 5.

9 percent in revenue. And you have a group of, they're pretty large. So a very large group. We're up 58%. That's enough data to say something is working in email and SMS for companies. Pay attention to that.

Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers [00:11:00] and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering paper click management transcribed search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes.

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon MacDonald: And those are owned channels. They cost a lot less. To reach then that 17% rise at Google

Ryan Garrow: for sure. As we've taken on more email and SMS clients over the last few months, what we've seen is most of these brands some of them were managing internally. Some were working with another agency. They were.

Under emailing and under sending text messages. They didn't have a good cadence around it They didn't have enough granularity in their audiences There is some significant room for most brands to push harder and you're not gonna annoy you Hopefully you don't get to the annoyance level But you can be more consistent and probably get a little more aggressive in how often you spend, send those messages.

A cool thing that's come up more [00:12:00] recently, and I expect there's probably going to be some blowback, but a lot of companies are looking for that monthly reoccurring revenue that they can bank on. And so a lot of them are doing that with subscriptions, which is good. You've got to be looking at that. But a new one that I think has more value is paid memberships.

Kind of like that loyalty program, but. And you're paying for access to stuff

Jon MacDonald: like the Costco model.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And the, and you could, some companies do it for free. Like I've seen liquid Ivy has a free membership program that gives you benefits to certain things. And I think that, so it's like a loyalty program, but they're calling it a membership.

And there's another company I saw the name is escaping me, but they did a, maybe was it laundry sauce? Maybe I'll have to go back in my notes and look, but they did a paid membership where you're paying either monthly or annually, and you're getting access to special sales and promotions. They give you some free product, free, you're paying for it, but they're giving you something in return for that.

I think it was in this case, the one I saw today was a candle that they're giving you and really big. And one of the companies in that space, I dug into their tech [00:13:00] yesterday pretty heavily with one of the people in their company. And they're saying that of your database, they're going to get five to 6 percent of them to Take this membership and that's going to be a, a large percentage of, it's going to be a large profit number when you're charging 5 percent of your email SMS database that they're going to message this out to between 100 and 150 a year, they think it needs to be under 150, but Every company should probably test memberships.

I think that would be the punch line. I think there's a lot of opportunity. So I love that. Paid memberships.

Jon MacDonald: That's a great tip to take away. Continuing on this with the actionable stuff, I also have heard that you have assembled a recommendation for tech stack of apps for holiday success.

Ryan Garrow: I have. So I'm moving a little bit out of my lane here and going instead of talking just traffic, I'm like,

Jon MacDonald: You're really selling it, right?

Ryan Garrow: There's a group of companies that I think most e commerce brands need to be aware of and add into their tech stack before holiday, because I think it's really going to drive revenue. Some of [00:14:00] these won't drive necessarily traffic, but they're going to bring that traffic back or just help you do more.

Some of it will be conversion. But one of the coolest ones that most of you haven't heard of is a company called Vive Recover. This company seriously kicks ass. They have a great couple of founders, super smart. And what they have figured out is how to recover abandoned carts outside of the city. Email and SMS channels.

So email and SMS, you're going to send somebody a text. They have to be double opted in to an attentive or a Clavio or one of those systems email. They've got to be in your email list with permission to email. That's very few people coming to your site for the first time. It's a library cover actually has the ability and it's legal to text abandoned cart people.

Because you can manually text people one time without getting in trouble. And they recover an astounding amount of revenue. Like we had a client test it. The first month they added six figures of recovered revenue on one site. That's an insane amount of money [00:15:00] in a test. And so I highly recommend every company get this on there.

I've worked a deal. So if you reach out to me, all these companies, by the way, I'm talking about, I have a deal for. So just reach out to me because you can get a no setup, No contract. You only pay if you get sales from this company. Oh wow. It's phenomenal. They were Shopify only, but by the time this recording gets to you, they will have built out BigCommerce version for me, because we have a lot of clients on BigCommerce as well.

And then soon after will be coming Woo and Magento. So reach out to me if you're not on Shopify, but if you're on Shopify, reach out to me. Super simple as of when we're recording this. It's already done. It's just unbelievably easy. Second one would be Triple Whale. So we've talked about them before.

They're a great reporting system for those of us that are just disappointed in GA4. And they just released, I think it's called their 3. 0 version, but it got way better. So I liked it before, and now I love it because they've, what they've built into it is so awesome. And they're on BigCommerce and WooCommerce by the time this podcast released.

And so you've got the three biggest [00:16:00] platforms for e commerce out there that TripleWhale now works with. And they have this really cool, I'll highlight three things. They have an AI system built into it. It really helps you with analysis. And being able to find information so you can actually just type what you're looking for into the system and it'll help pull that data to you without having to go try to find a certain report because I always hate taking for reports.

They have a creative analysis so you can go into your system specifically good for meta. So if you're not advertising on meta you probably wouldn't use this much but you can see in this campaign here's the five ads I had here's the audience I'm targeting which one was winning. from an ad standpoint.

Okay. And then in the system, you can actually start iterating on it. We're saying, Hey, we like this one. Let's get rid of these four, put four more in a super, super cool what they've done there. And then they're allowing you to build custom reports, very similar to Looker. And so if you've done a lot of stuff in Looker, which we have a logical position, we'll see, we can take this report and basically build that in triple whale.

And have all these connections already built in. Anyway, if you're on Shopify or [00:17:00] BigCommerce or WooCommerce, we've got a discount for all of you. If you're small, sub 500, 000, and revenue, last 12 months, we've got you for 99, and that takes you to a million. That's a super discount when you're doing stuff like that.

I think it's only 67 percent off or something. And if you can't

Jon MacDonald: spend a hundred dollars to not be flying blind, I don't know what you're doing in business. So please do, you gotta have some of these numbers and triple well, I agree deal, no deal, whatever. They've been around forever have known them from very early days when I met the founder and he was literally just building it.

There were a couple of guys that built it together, but, and they started out of Columbus, Ohio where I grew up. So there we

Ryan Garrow: go. Hey. Something good. A couple of things good coming out of Ohio now, Jon MacDonald and Triple Whale.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah we'll see if Ohio says that about me.

Ryan Garrow: I can say it for Ohio. Yes, you have to have Triple Whale.

I think you're crazy if you don't have it. There's a company called No Commerce. It's, I can't even say they're flying out of the radar now. Like they only, they have very few employees. They've done a ton. They punch way out of their weight class as far as what they're able to impact.

Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: They do post purchase surveys and post purchase surveys are so [00:18:00] simple.

But they just work. It helps you understand where's traffic's coming from. You can't see in triple well as easily because there's a lot of impression things that happen that you're not going to be aware of, especially with all of these influencers on meta, tiktok, all these things happening. And so it works on almost every platform.

It's now free forever. Like they have a free system. That will give you two questions forever. If you start on TikTok and you like create an ad account there, it's really simple. Just click a button and get it and it integrates with triple whale and integrates with your platform, integrates with attentive play, all the things.

Jon MacDonald: And I always love these because as a consumer, I almost always just click the button and answer the question. Part of that is I'm sympathetic to their ROAS and to try and help them understand where they're getting the best money. But I would also say I love the. data because the analytics can tell you where people came from, probably that last touch attribution, but no comments is going to tell us what people remembered the first touch was.

And that's really so important as a [00:19:00] brand. If you're going to dump your marketing dollars somewhere, you might as well dump it where people remember they learned about you, whether or not that was actually the first touch or not. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't really matter to me. It matters. What touch does the consumer remember?

Because that's where I should be spending the money.

Ryan Garrow: And I think, as we know, like people are getting touched all over the place for brands to make it work. You can't just be one channel, one channel company. You have to go all over and no commerce makes it so easy to just get the data. And so reach out to me.

I'll make sure you get it for free. The final one is Shopify only. So this is why it's at the end, because it doesn't apply to all of you out there in e commerce world, but there's probably things if you can't get this system, then you need to be thinking about how you do it for your system. But a company called wonderment, they handle post purchase stuff.

So they'll build, they'll easily let you build a post purchase landing page for tracking shipments. giving information. So what they do is they proactively communicate dates that things are going to happen. Hey, we got your order. Hey, we shipped your order. Hey, it's going to arrive tomorrow. Hey, it arrived.

That [00:20:00] proactive things that you've talked about often around just allowing people to have the expectations that are right. Wonderment makes it very visual and they allow easy cross sell upsells. So another thing you've talked about is the post purchase cross sell upsell being so important. This is somewhat of an easy button and you can start it for free.

And it's just super cool. It works on all the devices and just they, and they talk about an ROI. So they focus on the fact that you're going to eventually you're going to pay for this system, but we're going to let you do it for free to test it. And once you're paying for it, it's like a guaranteed ROI, like I love

Jon MacDonald: this because yeah, this is great.

I love this because as I said, in behind the click, too many brands forget that post purchase optimization opportunity. They just neglect to do anything at all, or maybe just send one or two emails that are asking for reviews. That are ill timed, et cetera. So this is a great way to stay in front of consumers once they've clicked, check out them.

Very high

Ryan Garrow: open rate. They're going to [00:21:00] send the emails through your provider, Klaviyo, attentive, whatever it happens to be, because people have bought. So they've given you money and permission to communicate about that order. So it's just, there's no reason you wouldn't. No.

Jon MacDonald: It's such a good opportunity.

Yeah. It's going to be for

Ryan Garrow: you, even if you don't get more traffic because it's slower this year. So do it.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: All right. It's not hard to find me. Find me on LinkedIn. Email me at garrow at growwithgarrow. com or find me on Slack if you're on Slack mates. I'm not hard to find.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Ryan's easy to find. So all right, buddy.

This has been awesome. Thank you. Thanks for catching me up on partner day. I can't wait to get back in the saddle and participate on that next year. Next

Ryan Garrow: year it's going to be bigger and better than ever.

Jon MacDonald: I heard the number 2, 000 being thrown around. Yeah. We're hoping to get a

Ryan Garrow: few thousand people to Portland.

Jon MacDonald: If you can do that, I will happily grace the stage and share anything and everything. So let's do it. I look forward to that. And thanks for sharing about that. Telling us where we need to be for holiday and getting us get the engines revving for that because we're in [00:22:00] as we're recording this in mid August and you need to start thinking about it now.

Yeah,

It's very timely, whether it seems like it or not,

Ryan Garrow: if you're listening to this and you haven't started your holiday prep, you're way behind because you should already have some ads. in September when this is coming out. Yeah. Preparing and your plan is already in place and you're going to pivot when it's wrong.

Jon MacDonald: I was trying to not be so dire, but I agree. The situation is dire. If you have not started your holiday planning, please do this is a great place to start. So thank you for that, Ryan. I appreciate it.

Ryan Garrow: Thanks, Jon.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com