Hosted By

Rabah Rahil
CMO at Triple Whale

Guests

Cody Plofker
Director of E-Commerce Jones Road Beauty
Ash Melwani
Co-Founder & CMO of MyObvi

How To Increase Customer Retention For DTC Brands

In this episode of adspend we go over how to increase customer retention and drive LTV per customer. #Adspend

Notes & Links

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- Rabah's Twitter: https://twitter.com/rabahrahil
- Cody's Twitter: https://twitter.com/codyplof
- Ash's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ashvinmelwani

Transcription

Ash Melwani (00:00):

You're part of this group that there's something active going on and you're still top of mind finding ways that you can organically reach your customer base. I mean, improves LTV in the long run, but then also limits the, that you have to spend.

Rabah Rahil (00:24):

All right, folks, we're back for number seven on April 7th. Coincidence. I think not Cody got his master's in. Tiger is doing well. Uh, he's back in it under, under par one, you said one stroke under yep.

Ash Melwani (00:38):

One, one under

Rabah Rahil (00:39):

Baby. It's beautiful. It sounds fantastic. Um, we're gonna go through a few things today. We're gonna go through kind of some retention strategies, just talking through attention. So we've really hammered home, uh, how to spend on TikTok, some TikTok strategies and really the, the acquisition vertical, if you will, or the acquisition portion of the marketing cycle. Um, so today we're gonna talk about how to keep these customers how to get Cody's favorite topic, more LTV out of these customers. Um, and then we'll close with, uh, basically just kind of, what's been working for all, all three of us. So obviously I'll be giving you guys a B2B SAS angle, which is not super applicable to everybody, but you, that's why we have Ash and Cody to give you guys the angles in terms of how to build a behemoth DTC business. So, um, how do you wanna jump into retention, Ash?

Ash Melwani (01:25):

Um, good question. Um, I, I don't mind talking

Rabah Rahil (01:29):

Loyalty programs.

Ash Melwani (01:29):

We've kinda, yeah, we could talk about loyalty. Um, at least for us, I'll, I'll kind of give you guys a synopsis of what we focus on for, for LTV outside of, you know, like email SS, like the, the pretty standard ways of getting retention. Right. Um, I think the biggest thing for us has always been the community, uh, 50,000 members on Facebook, uh, a rewards program and our app, which I talk about a lot on, uh, on Twitter. Um, can you tell me, you want me to kind,

Rabah Rahil (02:02):

I think I wanna dive into give me more of an actual use case or the life cycle. So now I've purchased from my Avi, you know, put aside the, the email and SMS stuff, but take me through kind of what that customer journey looks like. How do I get into the community? How do you incentivize people to stay active in the community? Why is this app a big deal? What is the loyalty program look like? That kind of thing.

Ash Melwani (02:26):

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is, you know, utilizing post purchase as a way to funnel all these new customers into our ecosystem, even more, which is our Facebook community, right? So as soon as you place an order, it says, thank you, here's your details, da, da, da, by the way, we have a community on Facebook, we wanna join, you know, CTA button drives em, straight to the group,

Rabah Rahil (02:50):

Right on post purchase,

Ash Melwani (02:51):

Right on post purchase that's and then also right in the post purchase email, right. Order confirmation email, there's also CTA, right? So my group is growing pretty quickly and you know, we're just shy 50,000. So like super excited to hit that milestone. But that in itself has been the core nucleus of the business. Right. Um, it's like instantaneous feedback from your consumers. Um, you know, when you're, when you're trying to plan out your product roadmap as well, they're the ones giving you the suggestions. Right. And I think after the first like year where we were like, okay, now we're at that 5,000 member mark and like go, you know, we're growing pretty quickly. We decided, you know, yeah. There are certain things that we wanna put out as a company, but like why, why aren't we listening to what these guys are saying right. In the group.

Ash Melwani (03:46):

So, you know, putting out surveys inside the group, um, you know, what flavors do you want, what products are you looking for? What do you expect from us? Like what are you buying elsewhere that you can't find at Avi? Right. So, you know, taking all that data and kind of putting it together, finding manufacturers for things that we can't produce at, you know, our current manufacturer, you know, um, R and D for things that just aren't there yet, you know? So that whole process, you know, takes a while. But what ends up happening is that, like, for example, last year we had 26 product launches. Um, whether that was new flavors, new products, everything, there's

Rabah Rahil (04:22):

52 weeks in a

Cody Plofker (04:22):

Year. I thought we, I thought we lost so lot. Geez.

Ash Melwani (04:26):

Yeah. It was two a month. And, and don't get me wrong. The majority of them were flavor expansions, but I would say, I would say maybe 30, 40% of it was new stuff. Um, which

Rabah Rahil (04:36):

Not to cut. Yeah. Yeah. Not to cut you off, but how many of those flavor expansions were informed by your community?

Ash Melwani (04:43):

I would say like 90% of them, honestly. That's cool. That's cool. I would, there's there's one, um, there's one little story that I love telling people. Um, so basically, uh, the biggest juice case for collagen is in coffee. Right? People love putting in their coffee as a good creamer. Um, and people are like, well, we want a coffee flavor. And on our end, we're like, okay, well, which flavor do you go in? Like, there's so many different types of co like peppermint, mocha, PSL, caramel macchiato, French vanilla, like there's endless. Right. You go to a Starbucks and people are just naming all things that I've never even heard of. Right. So we're like, yeah, I go

Cody Plofker (05:20):

PSL. Like it's obvious. That's the only coffee flavor.

Rabah Rahil (05:23):

Oh my hold on for asking for a friend. Cause I obviously know what this means. What is PSL

Cody Plofker (05:29):

By the way? I'm just kidding. I'm just gonna clarify that it's pumpkin spice latte, most basic

Rabah Rahil (05:36):

I'm.

Ash Melwani (05:41):

Um, but we, what we did was is like, listen as a community, you need to come together and give us the ideas. So what we did was we put out a survey, we said, list all the coffee flavors that you would ever possibly want. And we'll kind of consolidate it and pick the top like 12 or 16, whatever it was. So we came out with a list, top choices, and we did almost like a March madness type of bracket. Uh, so every week we did all right, well, French vanilla against caramel macchiato vote. Right? So people were like, you know, putting their votes in, they were feeling the love. They're like, oh, this is such an awesome opportunity. Um, finally got down to like the final two and myself and Ron, uh, CEO. We went live and we did this thing where if you comment it like cast a vote, right? Like on the screen. So it's like, comment this for caramel Vato, comment, this for French vanilla. And there's like 10,000 comments. Like it was insane. Oh, that's crazy. And there was a clear winner, Carolyn macchiato. And that was the first community voted flavor that we put out. And that flavor throughout last year sold out six times. Crazy was

Rabah Rahil (06:52):

Insane. No.

Ash Melwani (06:53):

Yeah. So

Cody Plofker (06:55):

Moral

Ash Melwani (06:56):

Sold

Cody Plofker (06:57):

Is listen to your customers.

Ash Melwani (06:59):

Yeah, exactly. Listen to your customers because you're literally giving it's a cheat code. It's the biggest cheat code in the world. You're literally giving them what they want. You're literally asking them, what are you gonna open up your wallet to pay for? And they're like, I want this. So give it to them. So I think community, I mean,

Cody Plofker (07:17):

It's pretty amazing that most people don't do it. Like even if you don't have the community that you guys have built, like everyone has an email list. Everyone can do a Typeform or a no survey. Like it's pretty crazy cuz it's literally the simplest thing to, to come out with, you know, your product roadmap or really any of your marketing strategies. Like why don't you think most people do enough of that? Or do you, do you think people are doing it enough?

Ash Melwani (07:41):

I don't know. Like I, I don't, I haven't seen many brands kind of do the amount of drops and I know Cody, you had a lot of product launches too. Right. So yeah. Was that determined? Like how, how do you, how do you determine those?

Cody Plofker (07:54):

And ours is a little bit different because like we have Bobby, so it's like her, her vision and her line. But obviously she, she definitely is, is very in tune to what women want, you know, but that's a little bit different, but yeah. I mean, totally we did, you know, for black Friday, right? We didn't wanna do a discount. And one, we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do. Love it. It was intensely based around customer demand and our best selling product is miracle bomb. And we, we have minis, but we never sell them. Usually we'll do, 'em like a kit and a bundle and stuff like that. And for the first time ever, we released a set of them. And I mean, we sold out in the first day. That was our, our best day ever. We sold out on the first day. I wish we had more to go around. So like, like that was all listening to our customers and, and yeah, pretty incredible

Rabah Rahil (08:36):

That TikTok you sent me, I don't even wear makeup obviously. Um, but I wanted some <laugh> it was going, I was like, geez, this is a miracle thing. You can use it for everything. Yeah. Just to push back a little bit and to be fair, I'm in a different vertical than you guys. But, um, one of the challenges I think with this strategy is, um, so I love flavor, expansions. I love like different, um, shades or stuff like that. Almost iterative products. The, for us like, everybody's like, we want Amazon, of course we want Amazon that's this's a three to six month lift. You know what I mean? It's not this thing where it's like, we can turn it around. So I think there is a, a give and take where asking the right question. Mm-hmm <affirmative> where you can close the loop is really important.

Rabah Rahil (09:16):

Not saying you can't leverage community. I think what Ash, Ashley is fantastic. And furthermore, the money you save on the economics of the product research, and it's better than getting a McKinsey or some nonsensical thing where they're gonna bring all this bullshit where it's like, just ask the people to your point, Ash, like, what are you gonna give us money for? Cool. We'll make that. So I think that's great. But I think to your point, quote, one of the reasons why some people don't quote unquote, leverage this as much is because kind of the Steve, one of the things of the Steve jobs thing, like you don't, people don't know what they want. You have to tell them. Um, we're again, that that's a little bit of wisdom in that, but I think the expansion stuff is really clever, but necessarily having people make a roadmap can be not necessarily the best thing cuz that's ultimately what the CEO's for. Like they should be driving the vision. They should be understanding like the GRE ski analogy, um, where the puck's going. And so a lot of people aren't gonna have that, but um, again, to circle back to urine Ashe's point, I think these expansive iterative stuff is fantastic. I think it's really, really smart.

Cody Plofker (10:16):

I think definitely. I think you're right. I think you're right about a lot of that though. Like I definitely think you're right about the whole Steve jobs thing. Like I think it's definitely different in SAS because obviously you've got obviously in, in direct consumer, yes, we have obviously R and D costs and stuff like that. But your, you, your cost for new features and new products are, are exponential to our, so I think you have to be very clear about it and you probably have to walk the fine line between what the customers are telling you. But also what you know is, is best interest for the company. I, I posted on Twitter one time I was like, the ultimate cheat code was talking to your customers. And a lot of people were like, yes, yes. And a lot of people were like, no, uh, and like the, the, what is it, Henry Ford quote. Like if, if I ask people what they wanted, they would've set their best before. Yeah. And, and then somebody, I don't remember who, but somebody had a really, really good comment. They were like, it's probably really good to ask your customers what kind of problems they're having.

Rabah Rahil (11:08):

That's

Cody Plofker (11:08):

Fair. It's up to you to figure out what is the best solution for them.

Rabah Rahil (11:11):

That's brilliant. I'll

Cody Plofker (11:12):

Put, and I, so I thought that was a good, a good way to put it. Sorry Ash. I know you were gonna say something just wanted get that out there. No,

Ash Melwani (11:17):

I, I agree with you. Guys' points where it's like, okay, well if they, these guys are like, okay, well we want a multivitamin, right? We're not just gonna go and get like a basic formula period for multivitamin. It's how do we also innovate too? Right. So what we ended up doing was we call this, uh, mermaid multi, which was one of the first collagen yeah. Collagen infused multivitamin. So it goes with the whole theme of the brand and everything. Um, and I think that's where it's like, you, you have like, yeah, you get the idea. Or like Cody said, right. You kind find how the problems that they're they're facing and, um, kind of of address that in a way that is specific for your brand and how it fits in the, the rest of your products ecosystem too. Um, but solid point for sure.

Cody Plofker (12:02):

You know what I love about your, sorry.

Ash Melwani (12:04):

No, go ahead, Cody.

Cody Plofker (12:06):

I was just gonna say, you know what I love about your community strategy? Like kind of like, like in involving the customers in it, like, do you, do you guys cook at all?

Ash Melwani (12:15):

You ever cook personally.

Cody Plofker (12:16):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You ever

Ash Melwani (12:17):

Cook? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cody Plofker (12:19):

You ever notice everything tastes better when you make it.

Ash Melwani (12:22):

Yeah.

Cody Plofker (12:22):

It just feels probably better cook the name. Yeah. <laugh> no, but like, even if you're not like, just have this, like you just have this like personal satisfaction, you're just like, man, this is like great. Right. I'm like exactly. If you went out like, so yeah. Right, exactly. And I, but I almost think you should be giving your customers that, that type of effect where it's like those VIP loyal customers and I've looked at it for our business and other businesses. If you look at, you know, businesses, like it's a 80 20 rule, right? Like a large part of your revenue is actually gonna come from a small chunk of your customers and you wanna make your customers feel like they're actually involved behind the scenes, building the business cuz then they're going to like it better. And so I think whether that's why you're doing it or not is just a genius strategy because those customers that you're asking for their feedback on new stuff. Like I bet if you looked at those cohorts, those are the people who are flooding to buy it when you launch it.

Ash Melwani (13:12):

Yeah. That's a fair point hundred percent. When we like announce when we announce a new flavor or new product, we go live in the community. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and it's crazy that out of 50,000 people, myself and Ron, we remember some of these names that are just constantly commenting and like just showing their support. So you're totally right. That it's like that core group who was just like ride or die, whatever you guys are putting out, I'm gonna be there at 12:00 AM with, you know, my credit card <laugh> um, but one thing to add on top of, you know, community, I know we don't, we don't want to get into paid. Right. But the biggest thing that Facebook groups have is that it's constantly freegan reach, right. So if somebody posts in the community, it gets engagement and it's hitting all those people. Right. Some days it's good, some days it's bad, but at least you're constantly being shown on the news feed. Um, if you're part of this group that there's something active going on and you're still top of mind. Um, so just finding ways that you can organically reach a customer base, I mean, improves LTV in the long run, but then also limits the amount that you have to spend on paid to, to reach everyone.

Cody Plofker (14:24):

It's also social proof. Cuz I would imagine most of the posts are probably not from the brand, but it's from other people in there.

Ash Melwani (14:30):

Yeah, exactly. Which

Cody Plofker (14:31):

Is huge. Uh, if you were doing it today, would you build that differently? Would, would you build that on Facebook again? Would you build that somewhere else? Do you have any concerns about not owning that audience and being on Facebook?

Ash Melwani (14:44):

Great question. Um, I, I think for our demo, a lot of these women hang out on Facebook. I don't know if there's anything out there for us where that demo would be like feel comfortable being, right. Yeah. So like for example, like, you know, um, the slack channel, right? Yeah. On slack. Right. Um, I don't, I don't know if there's other services out there that would make sense for us. I know there's some apps and stuff, but I think there's a little bit more technologically advanced for our customer base. Like they hang out on Facebook. Let's just keep it there. Um, for sure, for sure. If it was another product line that was certain to maybe in either younger demographic than maybe, um, I just, I personally, I don't know what is out there. Like we start yeah. For sure. It's rocking, like we're, you know, the goal is a hundred thousand members, you know, this and that. So like we're there trying to move everybody over to be such a pain, you know?

Cody Plofker (15:45):

Yeah, yeah. No for sure. But do you have any concerns, like obviously when people talk about building their businesses on Facebook ads and they talk about rented land, right? Like this is the same thing and I'm not trying to knock it cuz what you've built is phenomenal, but, but do you have any concerns of like Facebook, something happening to Facebook overnight or, or long term and like all of this effort that you put in, like you might not be able to bring them over to another place?

Ash Melwani (16:10):

Yeah. I mean, I, I think I'm not that may kind of segue us into our app that we have. Yeah. Um, again, it's not, it's not a, it's not a source of community where we can kind of constantly interact with people. But if people are downloading the app and we have a way to reach out to them, you know, like push notifications are free. Right. Um, I think building that community there and then maybe hopefully in the future we can build out something on the app, right. Where everything is kind of encompassed, then maybe that might be the way to do it. And I don't know, maybe the devs at tap core are listening. Maybe we need a social media feature, you know? Um, but no, I, I agree. I mean once if, if that goes away then like that, that our <inaudible> of the brand goes away, you know, mm-hmm <affirmative> so, um, definitely something to be concerned

Cody Plofker (17:00):

About. What do you look at when, when you're talking about LTV, what do you look at in terms of what, what I think this would be interesting for people? What metrics are you looking at? Are you looking at LTV? Are you looking at it during time different, you know, time periods? I know obviously you, you guys are bootstrap. Like we are like, what are your KPIs for retention?

Ash Melwani (17:17):

So I, I think it, it, it has to do with the way that we look at it is we'll look at a certain period of time. Like we're not gonna look at it from west L TV from like three months ago. We'll look at it from like a year ago. Right. To, I think Rob mentioned this either last pod or the pod before looking at out such a short range of time. It's so difficult because like for a product that at least for us, right. It's a 30 day supply. People might not actually use it for 60 days. Yeah. Um, and then also we have all these launches that come out that, and we've like kind of developed this collector mindset that people are just buying as much as they can. And like, maybe they're just never, they won't buy for a whole other year cause they're just stocked up. Right. So I think those factors have to come into play where you're measuring LTV because one we're only three years old. I, it, it's a very hard metric to define, but what we've noticed is that when we do have launches, they're very successful. Yeah. So for the time being that is good enough for us until we have enough data, if that makes

Cody Plofker (18:22):

Sense, what's like a normal split of like your new verse returning on a normal day versus a launch day.

Ash Melwani (18:29):

Uh, I mean launch day, it's like 80% returning

Cody Plofker (18:31):

80. Okay. That's solid. We're probably same. Yeah. That's a great, we're probably like, we're probably like 70% new normally. I mean, if that that's, if we're doing well.

Ash Melwani (18:40):

Yeah. We're the same.

Cody Plofker (18:42):

And then we're probably like 70% returning on any kind of launch day, something like that. Yeah.

Ash Melwani (18:50):

On honestly, I mean it's

Cody Plofker (18:51):

Yeah.

Rabah Rahil (18:53):

Yeah. I kind of wanna circle back to the owned and paid media though. Cause I think it's a really preciate point, Cody, um, where building on the challenge that I've found. So I can't remember, I think it's called circle or some bullshit like that. It's some sort of like, uh, networking thing that you can build your community here. Y Y yada, they all suck. They never work. Yeah. Yeah. Like it just never works. And so when I was thinking about how we're gonna build a church, cause I like to think of it almost in like religious terms, like where can you build a church for people to congregate and worship at and evangelize your product? Um, it was slack, it was discord and it was Facebook. Yeah. And what we found was that, so kind of just taking you through my DMAs, Slack's horrible to build a community on cuz of the economics. So we're pretty much gonna rock the free plan forever. Like, I mean, if we paid for the slack, like we're over 700 people in Nawa nation. Now, if we paid for the slack, it'd be $20,000 a month. Like,

Cody Plofker (19:45):

And you, you don't have, you don't have to upgrade. Like you can say

Rabah Rahil (19:48):

You, you can rock the free plan forever. Um, and then

Cody Plofker (19:52):

Why is there, why is there an upgraded plan? Like what do you get outta that?

Rabah Rahil (19:54):

You get all this fun stuff of like archives, you can go back farther. There's like all these upsells, but you can rock a F print forever. Um, and so yeah, so the economics and slack and building community in slack, especially a big one, horrible. So that was one of the reasons why I didn't wanna do it, but then there's a lot of, kind of hate for Facebook where some people just hate Facebook. And the other thing is kind of to, uh, ASHA's point, like almost all media buyers are in some sort of slack.

Cody Plofker (20:22):

Yeah. And a lot of them are not using Facebook at that age.

Rabah Rahil (20:25):

Exactly. Or they're just not they're in the ads manager or they're not on Facebook properly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so we were thinking, okay, cool. Like you can just literally a shortcut away and you can just jump into that. And not only that, like slack is kind of the equivalent to Ash is Slack's like our newsfeed where you see a little notification, then you'll just pop in, in our wall nation or Cody's corner, just put another post in. I'm gonna go see what Cody has to say. And so cuz the other thing was Facebook. We do have a free Facebook group there. So we are covering our bases there, but it's, you know, kind of like the, the lower level where anybody can join, people can get into it, but Nawa nation is really the premiere area to hang out. And then, um, we were thinking about discord, which was kind of the other thing that kept coming up.

Rabah Rahil (21:07):

So it was discord, Facebook group or slack, but discord, there was just a lot of learning curve for some people. Um, it doesn't really, it's not as easy kind of the asynchronously communicate. Um, there's a lot of kind of stuff where we just, it wasn't for us. Um, but I think it really, it's very interesting because I think own properties are really sought after they're just a pipe dream. Like you gotta go to, I totally agree. You are like, cause I've always wanted to do like, oh, build my own app or do this or do that. And it's like it, or for my experience, it just always dies, dude. Because like a network effect is a real thing. And like getting the first hundred people is really hard. So why don't you just go to somewhere where there's already a thousand people and you just basically like, oh, just come to this room versus, oh, I got like, uh, kind of analogy.

Rabah Rahil (21:54):

I had a friend that kind of became really wealthy and he, he bought this amazing house. Like there's a really nice, uh, lake in Austin. It's like 30, 45 minutes outta the city. And he bought this just incredible baller, like super proper house dude. He sold it a year and a half later, you know why nobody ever went out there? Like there was just no point. Like I don't wanna drive 30, 40 minutes to go see you, dude, even though you have the most baller set up, you have a boat on the lake. Like, and just, nobody went out there and they end up buying a penthouse in the city because he, he just couldn't like, again, you gotta remember there was social networks essentially. And so you gotta go where people are. So anyways, I won't ramble anymore, but I think it was a really good point that you made that. I think people always are like, you should wanna cultivate your own media. That's why email is so important. Like you own your email. Yeah. Um, but at the same time it can be challenging to build communities out in the sticks. Mm-hmm

Cody Plofker (22:45):

<affirmative> yeah. Yeah. For sure. So I'll say this, this is definitely stuff for us. Like thinking about like, we don't have one, but absolutely like bringing Eli on this is a big part of it and, and stuff we're, we're definitely talking about. And it's definitely kind of a lot of stuff that we're thinking through. Cause a hundred percent like there's no ideal channel and you know, place to build it on and exactly what you said. I mean, I think we will probably do some tokenized thing cuz that probably makes no sense. No, I think we probably will. If you guys have ever checked out novel commerce, I think they just went live and kind of to really funny, but they're doing like NFTs for Shopify. I think that's a really interesting use use case, but the ironic thing is right. If you talk about all of web three stuff and everyone in web three and crypto is like, oh yeah, you know, web two owns everything. It sucks. Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Twitter sucks. Like we, we need to own our own stuff. And then they all do all their communities on discord. I think it's like the most ironic thing.

Rabah Rahil (23:40):

It's the best shut out. Yeah. Elon Musk 9.2%. Get in a board seat.

Ash Melwani (23:44):

What a Savage, what

Cody Plofker (23:46):

A Savage. But yeah. I just think it's super ironic. Um, Ash, how much do you guys think about? And I, you know, I'd love to share a little bit kind of how, how we work, think about it, but how much do you guys think about like retention by product and like are you trying to, to acquire customers on certain products and then are you trying to upsell them and, and build kind of customer journeys around others?

Ash Melwani (24:07):

Yeah. So our, I might have mentioned this in the past, but um, our college of protein right. Has a pretty solid retention rate of like 40%, something like that. Right. Um, our weight loss supplement has a 20% retention. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, obviously the reason being is that, you know, weight loss, people are looking for like quick results. They don't see or feel anything within like two days or like obvious sucks. Right? Yeah. So I think, but the difference is is that the CPOs are lower on the weight loss product than they are on for sure. The collagen product. Right. For

Cody Plofker (24:41):

Sure. Um,

Ash Melwani (24:43):

So utilizing that information, right. We can literally just use the weight loss product as like a cash cow and just acquire fire and just make money on it. Um, and then try to, which we're trying to do is try to upsell them to the other products that do have higher retention. Right. So like, um, some newer efforts that we're doing is we're trying to be better with our inserts on the product, in the boxes, right? Yeah. That show up. Right. So we're doing one where it's like front and back is the top six products. One side is, um, top three products for beauty and on the back it's top three products for weight loss. Right. So at least, you know what we have available then on the other one it's if you're a first time customer you'll have that get one more product for X amount off and then on the back, it's like a thank you letter.

Ash Melwani (25:31):

Right. Um, but for retention, what we're doing is, and we haven't tested this yet, so I have no idea if it's gonna work, but I think it'll do well. Is that for recurring customers? The, the difference on the second part is that it'll say scan to see your reward balance. So when you kind of scan that or pull up your account and you'll be like, oh, well I got a hundred points. Lemme go see if I can use it on something. Right. So that's the idea if it, if it works and people are starting to utilize their points more often, cause there's, there's a specific group of people that just don't even realize we have rewards, right? Like they may not check their emails or they're not like, you know, constantly in the Facebook community where they see people talking about rewards and like there's only so much you can have on the website right.

Ash Melwani (26:14):

For them to view. So I think having something where they can get and hold right outta the package and be like, oh, well there's rewards program. Let me check how many points I have, what can I do to like get more points? Um, so I think those things are super important right now for us to kind of figure out the LTV, no matter which product we have. Right. So we're trying to increase those that 20% and that 40% and try to bump it up. But for sure, we're definitely, we're scaling more into the products that have higher retention.

Cody Plofker (26:45):

Yeah, totally, totally. So I, I, I wanna say one thing, but then I'll share kind of how we look at it. I think you, outside of retention, you make a really good point there, which is, I think we get bored of our messages a lot more than customers do. And I think sometimes people put a message in one place and they think their job is done. And yes, you could have just said, you know, you have rewards in an email and assume that you did your job or on a post purchase page. But I love that you're putting it everywhere cuz you know that having it in one place isn't enough cuz you know that not everyone's gonna see it there and they might miss it in email, but they might need it in the unboxing or anything like that. So I think that's like a really important thing.

Rabah Rahil (27:22):

Couple questions. One, are you doing QR codes or how are you getting people there?

Ash Melwani (27:27):

QR codes.

Rabah Rahil (27:28):

Yeah. QR codes. Love it. Are you doing any QR codes? Cody in the post

Cody Plofker (27:31):

Purchase cards, but we're, we, we definitely wanna beef up our uh, our retention. I mean the cool thing about, uh, QR codes that we've been talking about is like, you can change the link whenever. So if you put the, make the code a little bit more Ambu ambiguous, if you have a seasonal thing or whatever, you can always change that up.

Rabah Rahil (27:46):

Yeah. Here's a little pro tip for you guys too. So if you point it to say a website, like a URL for your website, like my avi.com/qr code, you can actually use some HTML on there where you can actually redirect them. So you don't have to cuz you're gonna get this printed on the it's. Exactly. Yeah. It's pro so, um, and then the second question is, do you guys mess around with direct mail at all?

Ash Melwani (28:09):

We just did a

Cody Plofker (28:11):

Campaign. Yeah. Weren't you guys doing it

Ash Melwani (28:13):

Just lost

Rabah Rahil (28:13):

Post pilot or what are you using

Ash Melwani (28:15):

Post? I think it was post pilot.

Rabah Rahil (28:16):

Post pilot. Yeah. You like, do

Cody Plofker (28:17):

You have any, any results yet?

Ash Melwani (28:20):

Uh, no, not yet. I've they

Rabah Rahil (28:23):

Crutch?

Ash Melwani (28:23):

Hopefully there's two, there's two things that we did. Right. It was like we wanted to hit, um, pro tip. I think Ron might hate me for revealing this, but <laugh> um, we got some data back, uh, from Amazon. I don't know how we got it. Um, but we got addresses of our customers on Amazon and those people we can't, we can't communicate to them. Right. Amazon holds that data. The only way we can really do anything is like maybe put a pure code on the like, like the top of like the bottle and then like they scan it or something. Um, but we got addresses and we're sending them, um, a postcard saying like, Hey, like come get a gift card or whatever it is. And that rebukes for our website put in your email, you got a code and then it also shows you, you know, join the community, download the app. So we're trying to get them into our ecosystem and so that we can own their data this way, that we can constantly remarket to them. Um, so that was one and then obviously a reactivation flow, which was anybody who hasn't bought after X amount of time.

Cody Plofker (29:25):

And do you have any, any data on yet or is that too early?

Ash Melwani (29:28):

Not yet. I think it's too early. I think they, they just sent them on Monday. So I,

Cody Plofker (29:32):

Yeah. So yeah. I'm, I'm curious. I've I've been hearing good things. I'm I'm definitely curious. I mean, it makes a ton of sense. Uh, so we're starting to talk about, but I think, I think that's interesting if you, you wanna chat about it a little bit, like I know you're, you know, you posted something on Twitter about like Facebook paid and I was kind of like, Hey, like I would hesitate to kind of pay. Um, yeah. I, I think, I think it's fine. I think there's places, but I do think you should get everything you can organically for free out of retention. Otherwise, cuz most of us are building these LTV models, right? Where we're understanding what, what, you know, we're increasing, you know, the lifetime value of a customer over 30, 60, 90 days. And we're essentially most boots, scrap businesses are trying to acquire at break even.

Cody Plofker (30:11):

And if we, I think there's two important things, but if then we're also repaying for that retention. I think we have to bake in those requisition costs into there really what we should be doing and I'm not doing this. We are not, if our Facebook CPA says one thing, right? We, and again, it's on platform. We are, I'd say about 30% of our acquisition from Facebook is actually reacquisition. So we should really be like discounting our CPA targets by like 30%. We're not doing that cuz I, I think it gets complicated and it gets muddled. But I do think like the more you are going to then repay for that, I think you just have to kind of bake that into your numbers. And I understand like Jess made the point, like nothing is free, but I, I, I don't think you can compare like a thousand dollars a month. Clayo subscription to like a $25 re acquisition cost for everybody.

Rabah Rahil (31:01):

Yeah, no I'm I'm with you. You're coming around. You're coming around.

Speaker 4 (31:04):

You're slowly. You'll slow. See it I'm you'll slowly see it

Cody Plofker (31:08):

Retargeting.

Speaker 4 (31:09):

You slowly see it.

Cody Plofker (31:10):

What? So like, like postcards, like I think the timing is important and I think you should probably like do everything that you can through email and then once somebody is again, like lost or something like that. Yeah. Or it's, you know, then, then probably postcards. It seems like a pretty cool strategy.

Ash Melwani (31:25):

There's so many apps on and I think you guys have it too, right? You just added to triple whale or I dunno if it's out yet, but it basically segments your customers into like, alright, these are like the whales. And then these are like your, your dead fish. Right. I don't even know what you guys are calling it, but those are the people we wanna send postcards too to like follow

Speaker 4 (31:43):

That's what we should call it if we're

Ash Melwani (31:44):

Not yeah. Pet, um, the guppies or something. Um, but yeah, I mean that, I think is the audience where like you should be uploading and like, if, and, and to your point, and this is what I wanted to kind of respond back to you yesterday, but it was too much for me to like kind of put down, but I was like, there's also that the idea of that revenue, just not being there, if you're not running that ad. Right. So like if there's a certain group of people that were never gonna buy, but if you ran another, they ran an initial ad towards them and they're like, okay, well now I'm gonna buy. I think there's, there's two ways to look at it. Like, is it, is it, is it bringing in incremental revenue? Great. If it is, if not, then I totally agree with you that you're just, you're paying more for, for acquisition at that point. And then you, I mean, at least us as a, in our model, we're looking at CAC and like NCPA. So then our numbers might be a little bit inflated because it's new customers divided by or total spend divided by new customers. Right? Yeah. So I, I see your point there. Um, all I, all I wanted to say is that as long as it's incremental that I, for sure, for sure. Reactivation probably ends up being worth it later down the line

Rabah Rahil (32:55):

Hundred percent. So when I used to run my old agency, we actually slayed with, uh, what we did. So Clavio has some pretty cool customer segments. And what we did was to your point, we'd find our best selling products. And so the people that bought this product once, but haven't bought for basically like 90 to 180 days. I can't remember what we did, but basically like we would consider that person churned. Like they, they would've used the, uh, the product by this point. Um, and then we found them. So we used that category, but also we cross-referenced, the people that Clavio said would have the highest predicted LTV. And then we took that chunk of people and then we sent the postcards and it absolutely slate. Absolutely slate.

Cody Plofker (33:36):

Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think as long as you're making sure it's incremental and I don't think most people

Rabah Rahil (33:41):

Have, oh, you're muted as

Ash Melwani (33:45):

Sorry. No, go ahead.

Cody Plofker (33:46):

I was just gonna say, as long as you're proving, it's incremental and I don't think most people have the tools or the experiments to actually measure, improve incrementality. But I think as long as you're sure of that, and you're not just wasted non incremental spend, then I think it definitely makes sense.

Rabah Rahil (34:00):

There's an easy way to do it. And again, it's not super clean, but you know, have a churn. And like if this person hasn't bought in 180 days, they're not gonna buy again. Like they're, they're churn, they're fine. And then, okay, take those people that have spent a lot of money, but haven't bought in 180 days, they're considered churn. And then that, I mean, all intents and purposes, it's, it's, that's incremental lift where these people are never gonna come back into the ecosystem. And then the other cool thing is because you're sending them a postcard, you can put on the QR code or even better. We used a discount code, which is the OG proxy. And then we could really have actual return on investment where it's like all the people that use this unique discount code actually repurchase. And then we could track the sales back to that. So I, I take your point though, Cody, I'm not trying to shit on you. I'm just saying that there, there are ways that you away

Cody Plofker (34:49):

Need to be perfect away. No, no, but you're alright. Also I think that's an important thing that again, like, I'm, I'm happy. This is why we do the podcast. Cause like Twitter is so, so not nuanced, but like I was just assuming it was like all customers 30 days. There's a huge difference between, you know, going after a churn hundred 80 day purchaser versus going after like all purchasers.

Rabah Rahil (35:08):

Well, and they had purchased previously again, so this isn't cold people. This is people that had used the product. Then we wanna it's a more of a reactivation or it was a reactivation play and it was a reactivation play to ashes point in a high LTV product. So if we knew this was, it was actually probiotics. So if we knew we got people back into the probiotics, usually people would take it and then they'd stay on 'em. And so the, there was just, there there's a lot of things going into it, but anyways, too long, didn't read if, if you do do the numbers, right, it can absolutely slay. And it's not what we did was chunk it up where it's like, we took the first, like the best hundred customers that we thought would be amazing. We sent it out to them. So it wasn't like this huge bet. And then we saw that bet paid off. And then we took the next like tranche of customers and the next tranche of customers. And so wind ended up sending like 500 postcards and absolutely sled and post pilots. Super easy peasy with Shopify.

Cody Plofker (35:57):

Yeah. I definitely wanna test that. Yeah. I definitely wanna test that. So ours is the same thing, right? So Ash, we, we acquire 75% of our customers on one product. That's at miracle bomb, which is great. And I, I think part of the reason it works so well, it's so differentiated. There's nothing on a market like it, right? However, it's actually one of our lower LTV products because it's huge. It takes a while to get through, which is a good thing for the customer. Interesting, but not great. Right? So we look at a few of our, of our other products, uh, that have much better LTV. Mascara has great LTV. Wait, we have the face pencils that have great, great LTV. However, it's nearly impossible to acquire customer profitably at scale on mascara because it's, it's, you know, if you guys follow like Russell Bruns and I everything, right?

Cody Plofker (36:37):

You wanna be a new, a new opportunity. You don't wanna be an improvement offer. And there's probably a lot of people have said the same thing, right? But every makeup brand on the planet has a mascara. What can we say? That's unique about ours, that they can't say almost nothing. Right? We can say it's better, but everyone of course is gonna say, it's better. Like why would anybody trust us in, in a cold audience, miracle bone. We can say very different things that nobody else can say. And I think that's why we have success there. So a few things that we do and we think about number one is all right, we know we're gonna acquire customers on miracle bone. There's a few different journeys we can take. We don't have the best post-purchase flows. The experience setup right now. That's, that's Eli and Joanna's job. And we're really working on figuring out what is that next product that we need to get somebody to buy. We're not considering somebody, a, a customer and we're not considering them. I, you know, I don't know if we always talked about this, there's probably some good quotes, but like, you haven't really acquired a customer if they purchase once you've gotten a sale, but we're really trying to get that second and third to actually get like a loyal customer. Is that you Raba? Is that Robin? Well,

Rabah Rahil (37:35):

I, I have a, uh, so in our product journeys, there's the three purchases. Yeah. And so the way I look at it is the first purchase is dating. The second purchase is engagement and the third purchase is marriage. You want people to marry as many products as possible,

Cody Plofker (37:47):

For sure. Totally. So one way we look at it is like, how can we reacquire them and get them on the second product? What should that second product be? And what do we need to say to them? And again, we don't wanna be salesy like, Hey, here's 20% off. Ours is very educational. It's, it's taking that first and zero party data of what they've already bought, why they've bought it and explaining how the goals that they've told us they want with the quiz or whatever are actually can be fulfilled by that product. Um, mascara, not only is it, you know, it's one of our best sellers, just not great for acquisition. It's also got a better replenishment cycle. You know, you go through it a lot faster. So, so that's one strategy. Number two is kidding, right? We've found that kits and sets, not only do they have high AOV, so higher allowable CPA, but a lot of times they have a much better LTV.

Cody Plofker (38:31):

My theory for this one is if somebody's buying a one product, they have a, a, a one in one shot of liking it. If they're buying four products, maybe they don't like product one, but they like product two and three. So that's something that we've seen successful. And then something I want to try that we haven't done yet is gift a purchase, right? We're making mini MAs errors. These won't be ready for a while, but doing a GWP on evergreen acquisition offer, all of our ads are about, you know, miracle bomb, but we're giving people away that gift will purchase should help conversion right in CPA a little bit. But then they're getting that product at like a $3 cost to us. And then they're, that's what they're gonna come back on. So that's kind of our plan and I'm, I'm super excited to test the, you know, that what was the gift again? What are you giving give will purchase? So we're gonna do a mini mascara because cheaper than a full size one, again, we're able to, I still think that'll help our CPA. Anytime you're given something away, you know, you do GWP and that they slay on acquisition, but also looking at kind of that LTV model. My theory Eli's theory is that that would actually help our retention quite a bit. Cuz again, people have another reason to come back. That's not that miracle bomb.

Rabah Rahil (39:35):

Yeah. I think something that you guys could slay with or it'd be really interesting cuz you guys don't have a heavy, um, subscription presence, but something like if you buy the miracle bomb and can get and get your, um, first, uh, mascara for free, but it has to be on subscription and then you get it for free and then you just kind of cause people like subscription, man. It can, it can absolutely paper over those valleys where those peaks and valleys and you just have this free money. Um, and especially too, if you, you time it out, right. Cuz I believe mascara the way you guys have it. Um, sized is on a nice monthly cadence. So cuz that's the problem where you'll run into with subscriptions is like you start to have piles of soap or something where you, you just like, dude, you know what I mean? The sales cycle's too long where I'm not, or what did you call it? The consumption site. You had a really good name for it. I've never heard it before. Was

Cody Plofker (40:25):

That mine? That it, yeah. You, you might be consumption. I don't, remember's probably, it probably got it from, for me. Eli.

Rabah Rahil (40:30):

There you go. Whatever you just said it it's, you basically it's it's like selling the leather wallet that never goes bad. It's like exactly, you you're gonna get an that's an AOV business. Like you're never gonna get any more money outta this person. So I think that you guys could get heavily into subscriptions. The other thing I could think for you guys, that would be interesting. And again, I'm not close enough to space, so I could be talking on my ass, but some sort of like, um, sending you new shades every month. Um, and I don't know if you guys have enough of that, but something like that where like, oh you tried out, but you're, it's basically, you're part of this. And you can build things into that where you're part of the community, you get, uh, a free kind of Bobby could run like a tutorial. That's only exclusive for people that are on subscriptions and you can build things that are outside of the product. That's what I try and tell people like

Cody Plofker (41:16):

That's what though.

Rabah Rahil (41:18):

Yeah. If you can't compete on the product, then you, and you need to build moats that other people can't compete on. Like maybe cuz I'm sure you're, mascara's fantastic. But to your point, like outside of miracle bomb and stuff like that, the miracle bomb is really the most differentiated product. But then there's other things like you do have Bobby, you do have these other cool creative things that you can build moats around your product that can then build an area of exclusivity. It can build an area of community. And then that can drive kind of the topic that we're talking about is more and more retention,

Cody Plofker (41:44):

A hundred percent agree. I mean that that's, that's what we're working on. That that's definitely what we're doing, but I think that's a great point. And when people talk about brand, I think brand is really one of the biggest aspects of retention. Obviously your, your product is extremely important. People have to like it, obviously the, the market you're in no matter how good your brand is, you're not gonna have good LTV on a mattress or, or, you know, whatever it is like that's important. But yeah, I mean, brand makes it makes a huge thing and you know, people are buying apple products cuz yes, the products are good, but also they, they love 'em. And if my phone died today, I wouldn't hesitate to drop a thousand dollars on an iPhone instead of a Samsung because of brand. So I think that's important. And again, brand encompasses everything. It's not your fonts and stuff like that. It's it's how, what the emotional connection people feel to, to, to your brand. And um, and again, like that's why you're, you're probably having the crazy, crazy high liquid death LTV just because you love it so much. Even though it's just sparkling water,

Rabah Rahil (42:36):

Dude, I buy more merch. I've spent more money on merch than I have the actual core product. That's crazy to think about. That's crazy to think about, but yeah, I, I, I won't get into the brand thing cuz that's a trigger word for me. But um, to your point, you, you backed out of it, which nicely I loved is that brand is for me a manifestation of all those touch points. And it's not like brand to me is like a lagging indicator where people like just kind of roll everything up in that. But anyways, let's, uh, we're pushing up against 42 minutes. Let's go through kind of what you guys what's working for you guys. And then we'll round out the seventh episode of ad spend.

Cody Plofker (43:09):

Go ahead Ash.

Ash Melwani (43:10):

Um, so I taken our budgets and reallocated, the whole allocation and everything. Um, Facebook, we were like 90% budget. TikTok was like 10%. We were now 75, 25, um,

Cody Plofker (43:28):

Hoping, okay. Scaling, scaling.

Rabah Rahil (43:30):

Let's go Ash.

Ash Melwani (43:32):

Um, I was, I was just telling Cody today, we're literally looking at the, the office space next door to turn into a studio where we could just film TikTok all day. Right. Brilliant. Um, uh, what was that? Yeah, so basically one of the things that I've noticed as soon as we started running TikTok, um, yes, the whole process is to be in place, right? You need to have testing always and you have to have your scaling campaigns. Right. Um, if you're not launching, like we're, we're, we're aiming to launch four creatives a week so that we can just continuously be running right. Without any issues. Um, what I have seen and I think a lot of people are talking about this is that with TikTok running, everything else seems to be doing better

Cody Plofker (44:15):

A hundred percent, a hundred percent.

Ash Melwani (44:17):

Yeah. Things are like less volatile. Our CPA day to day has very or less variance than it did before. Um, and again, it goes to like not putting all your eyes in one basket, but I think because of the, you know, when you're running ads on TikTok, you're not only just showing a video and people are clicking, but like people are people share on that platform more than anything else, people follow this and that. So like the organic side is growing while you're, you know, kind of focusing on paid and things just like, I mean, one of our ads is like 1.4 million views, which is like insane. Solid.

Cody Plofker (44:55):

And do you notice your Facebook efficiency getting better when you're scaling TikTok? Yeah. Yeah. See that isn't that correct? Cuz I don't think Facebook and I think, I think this was a mistake of mine. I think a lot of people think Facebook is top of funnel awareness. I actually don't think that's what it's best for. I think TikTok and you exactly TikTok and YouTube are. And I think the businesses that do well in bus, this is why I'm always so big on like brand and like how having a, a brand. Right. And just having people talk and know about you is actually the best thing you can do to have good Facebook ads. Because I actually don't think, and especially in these days, I don't think Facebook is great for awareness. So I think TikTok drives a ton. And I don't know if you can look at your stuff in GA or, or in triple, but I bet it drives a ton of your Facebook. Even your top of funnel, TikTok,

Ash Melwani (45:40):

Facebook. It has to be, I mean, dude, like right now I, I I think that it would even do better if we allocated that budget 50, 50, I'm just waiting on like we literally ran out of stock because like things started picking up,

Cody Plofker (45:53):

Um, come on, Ron

Ash Melwani (45:55):

<laugh>. Yeah. Right. Um, and the other thing is that, which was really cool. We actually got a text message today. Um, our sales guy, Albert he's kind of like visiting all the vitamin shops that are in the area, um, you know, building, you know, the connections and this and that. He was talking to a manager today and he said that a lot of the vs people were talking about obvi and we're just brand new to vs.

Cody Plofker (46:14):

Yeah.

Ash Melwani (46:15):

Yeah. They were saying like, they love our social presence. And what we've been doing is running ads on TikTok that go to our website, dude, but us picking up product at vitamin shop. So we're building awareness for vitamin shop, but also driving sales online. Um, so like,

Cody Plofker (46:31):

Dude, I, so we have a store. We, we have one it's our own store. It's here in Montclair. I go in there and I ask the reps there, where, where are people finding about us? It's TikTok, it's Facebook and TikTok a ton of it. Like that's one of those things you don't see if you're just an ads manager, you know, but it's, it's, it's healthy, heavy awareness.

Ash Melwani (46:51):

No, I mean the fact, I mean, again, not tubing our own horn, but like they, at least from what we've been hearing from our reps is that the biggest thing is paid. And how can brands supplement, you know, the retail shop. And they said like for a new brand that just launched, you guys are doing a lot better than most. And I, and I would like, I would love to say that it has to do with our TikTok efforts right now. And that's why I just wanna, I just wanna go 50 50 on the budget and like, really just let Facebook be Facebook and drive whatever it drives, but like TikTok where we can get creative and like really showcase where we are like vitamin chop. Um, even like some of the other stores like GNC or just showcasing, like everything that we possibly can, which is crazy because also when, when I've noticed the differences, as on TikTok and Facebook with Facebook, you get a variety of buyers. Right? So if the app is like a, a cinnamon cereal flavor, you'll still get orders for the other flavor on TikTok, the a it's driving. Like if it's showing like a cinnamon cereal, the top purchase item is that item in the video. Totally.

Cody Plofker (47:58):

Which is a hundred

Ash Melwani (47:59):

Percent biggest is the difference between Facebook. So like if one co

Cody Plofker (48:02):

And con I think there's pros and cons of that. Totally.

Ash Melwani (48:04):

Yeah. No, for sure. But like if Ron one day goes, we have too many, um, we have too much of marshmallow. We need to push marshmallow. Right. Well then let's make a TikTok with marshmallow and, and drive that. Right. So a lot of love it. I mean,

Cody Plofker (48:18):

Go sure. TikTok

Rabah Rahil (48:20):

Cody, what's working for you,

Cody Plofker (48:23):

Honestly, man, TikTok I'm, I'm not even gonna lie. I mean, a lot organic, right? Like I've talked about a lot, a lot of people know it's like, you know, viral

Rabah Rahil (48:30):

Holiday

Cody Plofker (48:32):

It's, it's how we've scaled. But, um, so, so definitely TikTok. I, I don't wanna say too much cuz we're actually trying to run some correlation studies on this mm-hmm <affirmative> just to actually see, but just anecdotally noticing really good growth and, and more importantly, Mer changes when TikTok is, is hitting. Um, makes sense. So we're, we're, we're scaling TikTok. Uh, you know, I talked about it in my newsletter this week, but you know, an interesting test that I did is, you know, we got these, uh, we're working with a, a higher end, you know, production, uh, agency, mostly for Facebook and I tested it on TikTok, not expecting too much. And it's just, it's just doing amazing. And not even with TikTok font, not even with TikTok, you know, captions, anything like that. And it's, I'll definitely test some on it, but it's just crushing it.

Cody Plofker (49:13):

And I think, you know, I talked about the newsletter, but the, the reason why is because it's a good ad and people talk about making TikTok, not ads, but I've worked with a lot of TikTok UGC people that I, that shot on iPhone and used TikTok captions. And they're like, oh, make TikTok, not ads. But the stuff was still an ad. There was no value. There was no entertainment. There was no inspiration. There was no ADA, it was all, you know, it was all a, it was all just like, here's the product, here's what it does. And, and this thing it's shot on a 4k camera, super high end polished, but it's not just, here's this product. It's, here's how to get this thing. Here's how to get this desire it's teaching. And I think that is much more congruent with actually what a tic TikTok is then low quality iPhone stuff. So that's kind of, what's working. It surprised me, but that's kind of my analysis of it. Um, so yeah, we're, we're going hard. I mean, we're trying to find creative people. If you are a videographer video editor, TikTok content creator hit me up cuz we're, we're going really hard on TikTok. And I truly believe it's the number one thing that causing our growth and that we're gonna be focusing on this year.

Rabah Rahil (50:15):

Love it. The one you sent me was not made for TikTok.

Cody Plofker (50:18):

No, that was, that was just a nine by 16.

Rabah Rahil (50:20):

The Facebook that's fantastic. Yeah. That's phenomenal.

Cody Plofker (50:23):

So we're gonna that with like, yeah. We're gonna test that now with like TikTok native font and stuff like that and see if there's any difference. But you saw it. It's not an iPhone video.

Rabah Rahil (50:32):

Yeah, no, it looks fantastic. Um, last question, I guess, did you ever, uh, find out if you re-add the captions, does it work or no,

Cody Plofker (50:42):

I was told by my rep and, and the rep is kind of high up at TikTok. I was told that's I figured that it, you know, they can only read on the TikTok font that you edit in there. And then somebody on Twitter who claims to know what they're talking about said that's not at all true. So I don't know the answer. I'll just say it at that.

Ash Melwani (51:03):

So I'll, I'll tell you one thing, I don't know if I could be totally wrong. Right. But we did this TikTok hack right. Where we created the video and the editor and then before publishing, we actually screen recorded it and then published that so that we can go back to the original draft and make changes in iterations. And those videos still perform and they have the text on it. So I don't know. I,

Cody Plofker (51:26):

It could be, I'm not saying they don't perform. I'm not saying

Ash Melwani (51:28):

Like, yeah, I've

Cody Plofker (51:29):

Done. I've done a ton of tick

Ash Melwani (51:30):

TikTok. It's gotta be tough to really prove like that. That's the thing.

Rabah Rahil (51:35):

I love it, but we'll see all, all right, boys, seven in the books, Ash, tell the people where to follow you where it can get my, a tell 'em to go visit a vitamin shop, let the people know.

Ash Melwani (51:45):

Yes. Please visit your local vitamin shop. Nationwide 600 stores. Take a picture. You don't even have to buy it. Take a picture, send it to me on Twitter. Um, you can find me on Twitter, Ashley Melan. Um, yeah.

Rabah Rahil (52:00):

Beautiful. Cody. Tell me about the newsletters. Tell about what you doing. Tell him about your masterclass.

Cody Plofker (52:05):

Yeah, I'm on, I'm on Twitter, uh, Cody plus, and then I think by the time this comes out, if I can get my act together, I will have a website. So it'll be Cody plager.com. Check it out. You can see some past issues and subscribe to the newsletter there.

Rabah Rahil (52:19):

Beautiful. And both of you savages as well as Ron will be joining me in Miami. Right. And Eli.

Cody Plofker (52:25):

Yep. Let's go. Yep.

Rabah Rahil (52:27):

So geek out. I think there's still a few tickets, uh, for Miami geek out, I'll be presenting and these gentlemen will be on a panel with me. Um, it'll be a bunch of fun and this one's actually gonna be really unique because there is more experiences. So, uh, geek out events, forget what the website is. I should know this. It is geek out events.io. You can get your tickets there. Um, definitely go. It's one of the best DTC conferences out there. If you it's a little pricey so that make sure you have the economics for it, but it's definitely definitely worthwhile. Um, and that's episode seven in the books. We do have a newsletter as well. Whale mail goes out every Tuesday, Thursday, Alex Pease, actually writing the Tuesday issue now. And it is straight heat. I love her. She's just one of the biggest brains in marketing.

Rabah Rahil (53:08):

Um, and then we are outta here. If you wanna get involved with triple or tri triple wild.com, sorry for the God mode over here, it's getting, uh, sunny in Texas, but we're actually moving to a big fancy office. So when you guys come out, um, for the whales, um, we'll, we'll, we'll put you up and have some fun. And then, um, we're actually doing, you'll like this Cody. So, uh, you guys are, you guys are kind of old, but you're not old. Like me, MTV used to have the cool awards with the spaceman, the MTV awards. You guys remember with the popcorn. So we're gonna do that with the whale, but now, well now even better, we're actually gonna do whale NFTs and then the award is gonna be your, uh, NFT.

Cody Plofker (53:42):

It's gonna that's dope.

Rabah Rahil (53:43):

Yeah. I figured you'd like a crypto max anyways. Awesome. Thanks so much for you guys, Cody, thank you for taking your time away from the masters. I know that that is a, a big, big, uh, deal to you. So we appreciate that and the community appreciates that and we always appreciate the love on Twitter. It's been so heartwarming and heartfelt. Um, there's just been some really, really cool to, yeah,

Cody Plofker (54:02):

It's been dope. Seeing a lot of that. I, I really appreciate everyone who's listened and leaving good feedback.

Rabah Rahil (54:07):

Same really appreciate that. And uh, also let us know if there is more feedback where it might not be something that you like. We're always trying to improve this and make more value for everybody. But Ash, Cody, it's always a pleasure. My friends we'll talk soon. That's seven in the books. Everybody

Cody Plofker (54:20):

PO.

Podcast

How To Increase Customer Retention For DTC Brands

March 18, 2024

54:37

Hosted By

Rabah Rahil
CMO at Triple Whale

Guests

Cody Plofker
Director of E-Commerce Jones Road Beauty
Ash Melwani
Co-Founder & CMO of MyObvi

Episode Description

In this episode of adspend we go over how to increase customer retention and drive LTV per customer. #Adspend

Notes & Links

📧Subscribe to Whale Mail for exclusive industry insights and in-depth marketing breakdowns: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/tripl...🐦

Follow us on Twitter for Industry insights: https://twitter.com/triplewhale

Follow the people featured in this episode here:

- Rabah's Twitter: https://twitter.com/rabahrahil
- Cody's Twitter: https://twitter.com/codyplof
- Ash's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ashvinmelwani

Transcription

Ash Melwani (00:00):

You're part of this group that there's something active going on and you're still top of mind finding ways that you can organically reach your customer base. I mean, improves LTV in the long run, but then also limits the, that you have to spend.

Rabah Rahil (00:24):

All right, folks, we're back for number seven on April 7th. Coincidence. I think not Cody got his master's in. Tiger is doing well. Uh, he's back in it under, under par one, you said one stroke under yep.

Ash Melwani (00:38):

One, one under

Rabah Rahil (00:39):

Baby. It's beautiful. It sounds fantastic. Um, we're gonna go through a few things today. We're gonna go through kind of some retention strategies, just talking through attention. So we've really hammered home, uh, how to spend on TikTok, some TikTok strategies and really the, the acquisition vertical, if you will, or the acquisition portion of the marketing cycle. Um, so today we're gonna talk about how to keep these customers how to get Cody's favorite topic, more LTV out of these customers. Um, and then we'll close with, uh, basically just kind of, what's been working for all, all three of us. So obviously I'll be giving you guys a B2B SAS angle, which is not super applicable to everybody, but you, that's why we have Ash and Cody to give you guys the angles in terms of how to build a behemoth DTC business. So, um, how do you wanna jump into retention, Ash?

Ash Melwani (01:25):

Um, good question. Um, I, I don't mind talking

Rabah Rahil (01:29):

Loyalty programs.

Ash Melwani (01:29):

We've kinda, yeah, we could talk about loyalty. Um, at least for us, I'll, I'll kind of give you guys a synopsis of what we focus on for, for LTV outside of, you know, like email SS, like the, the pretty standard ways of getting retention. Right. Um, I think the biggest thing for us has always been the community, uh, 50,000 members on Facebook, uh, a rewards program and our app, which I talk about a lot on, uh, on Twitter. Um, can you tell me, you want me to kind,

Rabah Rahil (02:02):

I think I wanna dive into give me more of an actual use case or the life cycle. So now I've purchased from my Avi, you know, put aside the, the email and SMS stuff, but take me through kind of what that customer journey looks like. How do I get into the community? How do you incentivize people to stay active in the community? Why is this app a big deal? What is the loyalty program look like? That kind of thing.

Ash Melwani (02:26):

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is, you know, utilizing post purchase as a way to funnel all these new customers into our ecosystem, even more, which is our Facebook community, right? So as soon as you place an order, it says, thank you, here's your details, da, da, da, by the way, we have a community on Facebook, we wanna join, you know, CTA button drives em, straight to the group,

Rabah Rahil (02:50):

Right on post purchase,

Ash Melwani (02:51):

Right on post purchase that's and then also right in the post purchase email, right. Order confirmation email, there's also CTA, right? So my group is growing pretty quickly and you know, we're just shy 50,000. So like super excited to hit that milestone. But that in itself has been the core nucleus of the business. Right. Um, it's like instantaneous feedback from your consumers. Um, you know, when you're, when you're trying to plan out your product roadmap as well, they're the ones giving you the suggestions. Right. And I think after the first like year where we were like, okay, now we're at that 5,000 member mark and like go, you know, we're growing pretty quickly. We decided, you know, yeah. There are certain things that we wanna put out as a company, but like why, why aren't we listening to what these guys are saying right. In the group.

Ash Melwani (03:46):

So, you know, putting out surveys inside the group, um, you know, what flavors do you want, what products are you looking for? What do you expect from us? Like what are you buying elsewhere that you can't find at Avi? Right. So, you know, taking all that data and kind of putting it together, finding manufacturers for things that we can't produce at, you know, our current manufacturer, you know, um, R and D for things that just aren't there yet, you know? So that whole process, you know, takes a while. But what ends up happening is that, like, for example, last year we had 26 product launches. Um, whether that was new flavors, new products, everything, there's

Rabah Rahil (04:22):

52 weeks in a

Cody Plofker (04:22):

Year. I thought we, I thought we lost so lot. Geez.

Ash Melwani (04:26):

Yeah. It was two a month. And, and don't get me wrong. The majority of them were flavor expansions, but I would say, I would say maybe 30, 40% of it was new stuff. Um, which

Rabah Rahil (04:36):

Not to cut. Yeah. Yeah. Not to cut you off, but how many of those flavor expansions were informed by your community?

Ash Melwani (04:43):

I would say like 90% of them, honestly. That's cool. That's cool. I would, there's there's one, um, there's one little story that I love telling people. Um, so basically, uh, the biggest juice case for collagen is in coffee. Right? People love putting in their coffee as a good creamer. Um, and people are like, well, we want a coffee flavor. And on our end, we're like, okay, well, which flavor do you go in? Like, there's so many different types of co like peppermint, mocha, PSL, caramel macchiato, French vanilla, like there's endless. Right. You go to a Starbucks and people are just naming all things that I've never even heard of. Right. So we're like, yeah, I go

Cody Plofker (05:20):

PSL. Like it's obvious. That's the only coffee flavor.

Rabah Rahil (05:23):

Oh my hold on for asking for a friend. Cause I obviously know what this means. What is PSL

Cody Plofker (05:29):

By the way? I'm just kidding. I'm just gonna clarify that it's pumpkin spice latte, most basic

Rabah Rahil (05:36):

I'm.

Ash Melwani (05:41):

Um, but we, what we did was is like, listen as a community, you need to come together and give us the ideas. So what we did was we put out a survey, we said, list all the coffee flavors that you would ever possibly want. And we'll kind of consolidate it and pick the top like 12 or 16, whatever it was. So we came out with a list, top choices, and we did almost like a March madness type of bracket. Uh, so every week we did all right, well, French vanilla against caramel macchiato vote. Right? So people were like, you know, putting their votes in, they were feeling the love. They're like, oh, this is such an awesome opportunity. Um, finally got down to like the final two and myself and Ron, uh, CEO. We went live and we did this thing where if you comment it like cast a vote, right? Like on the screen. So it's like, comment this for caramel Vato, comment, this for French vanilla. And there's like 10,000 comments. Like it was insane. Oh, that's crazy. And there was a clear winner, Carolyn macchiato. And that was the first community voted flavor that we put out. And that flavor throughout last year sold out six times. Crazy was

Rabah Rahil (06:52):

Insane. No.

Ash Melwani (06:53):

Yeah. So

Cody Plofker (06:55):

Moral

Ash Melwani (06:56):

Sold

Cody Plofker (06:57):

Is listen to your customers.

Ash Melwani (06:59):

Yeah, exactly. Listen to your customers because you're literally giving it's a cheat code. It's the biggest cheat code in the world. You're literally giving them what they want. You're literally asking them, what are you gonna open up your wallet to pay for? And they're like, I want this. So give it to them. So I think community, I mean,

Cody Plofker (07:17):

It's pretty amazing that most people don't do it. Like even if you don't have the community that you guys have built, like everyone has an email list. Everyone can do a Typeform or a no survey. Like it's pretty crazy cuz it's literally the simplest thing to, to come out with, you know, your product roadmap or really any of your marketing strategies. Like why don't you think most people do enough of that? Or do you, do you think people are doing it enough?

Ash Melwani (07:41):

I don't know. Like I, I don't, I haven't seen many brands kind of do the amount of drops and I know Cody, you had a lot of product launches too. Right. So yeah. Was that determined? Like how, how do you, how do you determine those?

Cody Plofker (07:54):

And ours is a little bit different because like we have Bobby, so it's like her, her vision and her line. But obviously she, she definitely is, is very in tune to what women want, you know, but that's a little bit different, but yeah. I mean, totally we did, you know, for black Friday, right? We didn't wanna do a discount. And one, we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do. Love it. It was intensely based around customer demand and our best selling product is miracle bomb. And we, we have minis, but we never sell them. Usually we'll do, 'em like a kit and a bundle and stuff like that. And for the first time ever, we released a set of them. And I mean, we sold out in the first day. That was our, our best day ever. We sold out on the first day. I wish we had more to go around. So like, like that was all listening to our customers and, and yeah, pretty incredible

Rabah Rahil (08:36):

That TikTok you sent me, I don't even wear makeup obviously. Um, but I wanted some <laugh> it was going, I was like, geez, this is a miracle thing. You can use it for everything. Yeah. Just to push back a little bit and to be fair, I'm in a different vertical than you guys. But, um, one of the challenges I think with this strategy is, um, so I love flavor, expansions. I love like different, um, shades or stuff like that. Almost iterative products. The, for us like, everybody's like, we want Amazon, of course we want Amazon that's this's a three to six month lift. You know what I mean? It's not this thing where it's like, we can turn it around. So I think there is a, a give and take where asking the right question. Mm-hmm <affirmative> where you can close the loop is really important.

Rabah Rahil (09:16):

Not saying you can't leverage community. I think what Ash, Ashley is fantastic. And furthermore, the money you save on the economics of the product research, and it's better than getting a McKinsey or some nonsensical thing where they're gonna bring all this bullshit where it's like, just ask the people to your point, Ash, like, what are you gonna give us money for? Cool. We'll make that. So I think that's great. But I think to your point, quote, one of the reasons why some people don't quote unquote, leverage this as much is because kind of the Steve, one of the things of the Steve jobs thing, like you don't, people don't know what they want. You have to tell them. Um, we're again, that that's a little bit of wisdom in that, but I think the expansion stuff is really clever, but necessarily having people make a roadmap can be not necessarily the best thing cuz that's ultimately what the CEO's for. Like they should be driving the vision. They should be understanding like the GRE ski analogy, um, where the puck's going. And so a lot of people aren't gonna have that, but um, again, to circle back to urine Ashe's point, I think these expansive iterative stuff is fantastic. I think it's really, really smart.

Cody Plofker (10:16):

I think definitely. I think you're right. I think you're right about a lot of that though. Like I definitely think you're right about the whole Steve jobs thing. Like I think it's definitely different in SAS because obviously you've got obviously in, in direct consumer, yes, we have obviously R and D costs and stuff like that. But your, you, your cost for new features and new products are, are exponential to our, so I think you have to be very clear about it and you probably have to walk the fine line between what the customers are telling you. But also what you know is, is best interest for the company. I, I posted on Twitter one time I was like, the ultimate cheat code was talking to your customers. And a lot of people were like, yes, yes. And a lot of people were like, no, uh, and like the, the, what is it, Henry Ford quote. Like if, if I ask people what they wanted, they would've set their best before. Yeah. And, and then somebody, I don't remember who, but somebody had a really, really good comment. They were like, it's probably really good to ask your customers what kind of problems they're having.

Rabah Rahil (11:08):

That's

Cody Plofker (11:08):

Fair. It's up to you to figure out what is the best solution for them.

Rabah Rahil (11:11):

That's brilliant. I'll

Cody Plofker (11:12):

Put, and I, so I thought that was a good, a good way to put it. Sorry Ash. I know you were gonna say something just wanted get that out there. No,

Ash Melwani (11:17):

I, I agree with you. Guys' points where it's like, okay, well if they, these guys are like, okay, well we want a multivitamin, right? We're not just gonna go and get like a basic formula period for multivitamin. It's how do we also innovate too? Right. So what we ended up doing was we call this, uh, mermaid multi, which was one of the first collagen yeah. Collagen infused multivitamin. So it goes with the whole theme of the brand and everything. Um, and I think that's where it's like, you, you have like, yeah, you get the idea. Or like Cody said, right. You kind find how the problems that they're they're facing and, um, kind of of address that in a way that is specific for your brand and how it fits in the, the rest of your products ecosystem too. Um, but solid point for sure.

Cody Plofker (12:02):

You know what I love about your, sorry.

Ash Melwani (12:04):

No, go ahead, Cody.

Cody Plofker (12:06):

I was just gonna say, you know what I love about your community strategy? Like kind of like, like in involving the customers in it, like, do you, do you guys cook at all?

Ash Melwani (12:15):

You ever cook personally.

Cody Plofker (12:16):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You ever

Ash Melwani (12:17):

Cook? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cody Plofker (12:19):

You ever notice everything tastes better when you make it.

Ash Melwani (12:22):

Yeah.

Cody Plofker (12:22):

It just feels probably better cook the name. Yeah. <laugh> no, but like, even if you're not like, just have this, like you just have this like personal satisfaction, you're just like, man, this is like great. Right. I'm like exactly. If you went out like, so yeah. Right, exactly. And I, but I almost think you should be giving your customers that, that type of effect where it's like those VIP loyal customers and I've looked at it for our business and other businesses. If you look at, you know, businesses, like it's a 80 20 rule, right? Like a large part of your revenue is actually gonna come from a small chunk of your customers and you wanna make your customers feel like they're actually involved behind the scenes, building the business cuz then they're going to like it better. And so I think whether that's why you're doing it or not is just a genius strategy because those customers that you're asking for their feedback on new stuff. Like I bet if you looked at those cohorts, those are the people who are flooding to buy it when you launch it.

Ash Melwani (13:12):

Yeah. That's a fair point hundred percent. When we like announce when we announce a new flavor or new product, we go live in the community. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and it's crazy that out of 50,000 people, myself and Ron, we remember some of these names that are just constantly commenting and like just showing their support. So you're totally right. That it's like that core group who was just like ride or die, whatever you guys are putting out, I'm gonna be there at 12:00 AM with, you know, my credit card <laugh> um, but one thing to add on top of, you know, community, I know we don't, we don't want to get into paid. Right. But the biggest thing that Facebook groups have is that it's constantly freegan reach, right. So if somebody posts in the community, it gets engagement and it's hitting all those people. Right. Some days it's good, some days it's bad, but at least you're constantly being shown on the news feed. Um, if you're part of this group that there's something active going on and you're still top of mind. Um, so just finding ways that you can organically reach a customer base, I mean, improves LTV in the long run, but then also limits the amount that you have to spend on paid to, to reach everyone.

Cody Plofker (14:24):

It's also social proof. Cuz I would imagine most of the posts are probably not from the brand, but it's from other people in there.

Ash Melwani (14:30):

Yeah, exactly. Which

Cody Plofker (14:31):

Is huge. Uh, if you were doing it today, would you build that differently? Would, would you build that on Facebook again? Would you build that somewhere else? Do you have any concerns about not owning that audience and being on Facebook?

Ash Melwani (14:44):

Great question. Um, I, I think for our demo, a lot of these women hang out on Facebook. I don't know if there's anything out there for us where that demo would be like feel comfortable being, right. Yeah. So like for example, like, you know, um, the slack channel, right? Yeah. On slack. Right. Um, I don't, I don't know if there's other services out there that would make sense for us. I know there's some apps and stuff, but I think there's a little bit more technologically advanced for our customer base. Like they hang out on Facebook. Let's just keep it there. Um, for sure, for sure. If it was another product line that was certain to maybe in either younger demographic than maybe, um, I just, I personally, I don't know what is out there. Like we start yeah. For sure. It's rocking, like we're, you know, the goal is a hundred thousand members, you know, this and that. So like we're there trying to move everybody over to be such a pain, you know?

Cody Plofker (15:45):

Yeah, yeah. No for sure. But do you have any concerns, like obviously when people talk about building their businesses on Facebook ads and they talk about rented land, right? Like this is the same thing and I'm not trying to knock it cuz what you've built is phenomenal, but, but do you have any concerns of like Facebook, something happening to Facebook overnight or, or long term and like all of this effort that you put in, like you might not be able to bring them over to another place?

Ash Melwani (16:10):

Yeah. I mean, I, I think I'm not that may kind of segue us into our app that we have. Yeah. Um, again, it's not, it's not a, it's not a source of community where we can kind of constantly interact with people. But if people are downloading the app and we have a way to reach out to them, you know, like push notifications are free. Right. Um, I think building that community there and then maybe hopefully in the future we can build out something on the app, right. Where everything is kind of encompassed, then maybe that might be the way to do it. And I don't know, maybe the devs at tap core are listening. Maybe we need a social media feature, you know? Um, but no, I, I agree. I mean once if, if that goes away then like that, that our <inaudible> of the brand goes away, you know, mm-hmm <affirmative> so, um, definitely something to be concerned

Cody Plofker (17:00):

About. What do you look at when, when you're talking about LTV, what do you look at in terms of what, what I think this would be interesting for people? What metrics are you looking at? Are you looking at LTV? Are you looking at it during time different, you know, time periods? I know obviously you, you guys are bootstrap. Like we are like, what are your KPIs for retention?

Ash Melwani (17:17):

So I, I think it, it, it has to do with the way that we look at it is we'll look at a certain period of time. Like we're not gonna look at it from west L TV from like three months ago. We'll look at it from like a year ago. Right. To, I think Rob mentioned this either last pod or the pod before looking at out such a short range of time. It's so difficult because like for a product that at least for us, right. It's a 30 day supply. People might not actually use it for 60 days. Yeah. Um, and then also we have all these launches that come out that, and we've like kind of developed this collector mindset that people are just buying as much as they can. And like, maybe they're just never, they won't buy for a whole other year cause they're just stocked up. Right. So I think those factors have to come into play where you're measuring LTV because one we're only three years old. I, it, it's a very hard metric to define, but what we've noticed is that when we do have launches, they're very successful. Yeah. So for the time being that is good enough for us until we have enough data, if that makes

Cody Plofker (18:22):

Sense, what's like a normal split of like your new verse returning on a normal day versus a launch day.

Ash Melwani (18:29):

Uh, I mean launch day, it's like 80% returning

Cody Plofker (18:31):

80. Okay. That's solid. We're probably same. Yeah. That's a great, we're probably like, we're probably like 70% new normally. I mean, if that that's, if we're doing well.

Ash Melwani (18:40):

Yeah. We're the same.

Cody Plofker (18:42):

And then we're probably like 70% returning on any kind of launch day, something like that. Yeah.

Ash Melwani (18:50):

On honestly, I mean it's

Cody Plofker (18:51):

Yeah.

Rabah Rahil (18:53):

Yeah. I kind of wanna circle back to the owned and paid media though. Cause I think it's a really preciate point, Cody, um, where building on the challenge that I've found. So I can't remember, I think it's called circle or some bullshit like that. It's some sort of like, uh, networking thing that you can build your community here. Y Y yada, they all suck. They never work. Yeah. Yeah. Like it just never works. And so when I was thinking about how we're gonna build a church, cause I like to think of it almost in like religious terms, like where can you build a church for people to congregate and worship at and evangelize your product? Um, it was slack, it was discord and it was Facebook. Yeah. And what we found was that, so kind of just taking you through my DMAs, Slack's horrible to build a community on cuz of the economics. So we're pretty much gonna rock the free plan forever. Like, I mean, if we paid for the slack, like we're over 700 people in Nawa nation. Now, if we paid for the slack, it'd be $20,000 a month. Like,

Cody Plofker (19:45):

And you, you don't have, you don't have to upgrade. Like you can say

Rabah Rahil (19:48):

You, you can rock the free plan forever. Um, and then

Cody Plofker (19:52):

Why is there, why is there an upgraded plan? Like what do you get outta that?

Rabah Rahil (19:54):

You get all this fun stuff of like archives, you can go back farther. There's like all these upsells, but you can rock a F print forever. Um, and so yeah, so the economics and slack and building community in slack, especially a big one, horrible. So that was one of the reasons why I didn't wanna do it, but then there's a lot of, kind of hate for Facebook where some people just hate Facebook. And the other thing is kind of to, uh, ASHA's point, like almost all media buyers are in some sort of slack.

Cody Plofker (20:22):

Yeah. And a lot of them are not using Facebook at that age.

Rabah Rahil (20:25):

Exactly. Or they're just not they're in the ads manager or they're not on Facebook properly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so we were thinking, okay, cool. Like you can just literally a shortcut away and you can just jump into that. And not only that, like slack is kind of the equivalent to Ash is Slack's like our newsfeed where you see a little notification, then you'll just pop in, in our wall nation or Cody's corner, just put another post in. I'm gonna go see what Cody has to say. And so cuz the other thing was Facebook. We do have a free Facebook group there. So we are covering our bases there, but it's, you know, kind of like the, the lower level where anybody can join, people can get into it, but Nawa nation is really the premiere area to hang out. And then, um, we were thinking about discord, which was kind of the other thing that kept coming up.

Rabah Rahil (21:07):

So it was discord, Facebook group or slack, but discord, there was just a lot of learning curve for some people. Um, it doesn't really, it's not as easy kind of the asynchronously communicate. Um, there's a lot of kind of stuff where we just, it wasn't for us. Um, but I think it really, it's very interesting because I think own properties are really sought after they're just a pipe dream. Like you gotta go to, I totally agree. You are like, cause I've always wanted to do like, oh, build my own app or do this or do that. And it's like it, or for my experience, it just always dies, dude. Because like a network effect is a real thing. And like getting the first hundred people is really hard. So why don't you just go to somewhere where there's already a thousand people and you just basically like, oh, just come to this room versus, oh, I got like, uh, kind of analogy.

Rabah Rahil (21:54):

I had a friend that kind of became really wealthy and he, he bought this amazing house. Like there's a really nice, uh, lake in Austin. It's like 30, 45 minutes outta the city. And he bought this just incredible baller, like super proper house dude. He sold it a year and a half later, you know why nobody ever went out there? Like there was just no point. Like I don't wanna drive 30, 40 minutes to go see you, dude, even though you have the most baller set up, you have a boat on the lake. Like, and just, nobody went out there and they end up buying a penthouse in the city because he, he just couldn't like, again, you gotta remember there was social networks essentially. And so you gotta go where people are. So anyways, I won't ramble anymore, but I think it was a really good point that you made that. I think people always are like, you should wanna cultivate your own media. That's why email is so important. Like you own your email. Yeah. Um, but at the same time it can be challenging to build communities out in the sticks. Mm-hmm

Cody Plofker (22:45):

<affirmative> yeah. Yeah. For sure. So I'll say this, this is definitely stuff for us. Like thinking about like, we don't have one, but absolutely like bringing Eli on this is a big part of it and, and stuff we're, we're definitely talking about. And it's definitely kind of a lot of stuff that we're thinking through. Cause a hundred percent like there's no ideal channel and you know, place to build it on and exactly what you said. I mean, I think we will probably do some tokenized thing cuz that probably makes no sense. No, I think we probably will. If you guys have ever checked out novel commerce, I think they just went live and kind of to really funny, but they're doing like NFTs for Shopify. I think that's a really interesting use use case, but the ironic thing is right. If you talk about all of web three stuff and everyone in web three and crypto is like, oh yeah, you know, web two owns everything. It sucks. Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Twitter sucks. Like we, we need to own our own stuff. And then they all do all their communities on discord. I think it's like the most ironic thing.

Rabah Rahil (23:40):

It's the best shut out. Yeah. Elon Musk 9.2%. Get in a board seat.

Ash Melwani (23:44):

What a Savage, what

Cody Plofker (23:46):

A Savage. But yeah. I just think it's super ironic. Um, Ash, how much do you guys think about? And I, you know, I'd love to share a little bit kind of how, how we work, think about it, but how much do you guys think about like retention by product and like are you trying to, to acquire customers on certain products and then are you trying to upsell them and, and build kind of customer journeys around others?

Ash Melwani (24:07):

Yeah. So our, I might have mentioned this in the past, but um, our college of protein right. Has a pretty solid retention rate of like 40%, something like that. Right. Um, our weight loss supplement has a 20% retention. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, obviously the reason being is that, you know, weight loss, people are looking for like quick results. They don't see or feel anything within like two days or like obvious sucks. Right? Yeah. So I think, but the difference is is that the CPOs are lower on the weight loss product than they are on for sure. The collagen product. Right. For

Cody Plofker (24:41):

Sure. Um,

Ash Melwani (24:43):

So utilizing that information, right. We can literally just use the weight loss product as like a cash cow and just acquire fire and just make money on it. Um, and then try to, which we're trying to do is try to upsell them to the other products that do have higher retention. Right. So like, um, some newer efforts that we're doing is we're trying to be better with our inserts on the product, in the boxes, right? Yeah. That show up. Right. So we're doing one where it's like front and back is the top six products. One side is, um, top three products for beauty and on the back it's top three products for weight loss. Right. So at least, you know what we have available then on the other one it's if you're a first time customer you'll have that get one more product for X amount off and then on the back, it's like a thank you letter.

Ash Melwani (25:31):

Right. Um, but for retention, what we're doing is, and we haven't tested this yet, so I have no idea if it's gonna work, but I think it'll do well. Is that for recurring customers? The, the difference on the second part is that it'll say scan to see your reward balance. So when you kind of scan that or pull up your account and you'll be like, oh, well I got a hundred points. Lemme go see if I can use it on something. Right. So that's the idea if it, if it works and people are starting to utilize their points more often, cause there's, there's a specific group of people that just don't even realize we have rewards, right? Like they may not check their emails or they're not like, you know, constantly in the Facebook community where they see people talking about rewards and like there's only so much you can have on the website right.

Ash Melwani (26:14):

For them to view. So I think having something where they can get and hold right outta the package and be like, oh, well there's rewards program. Let me check how many points I have, what can I do to like get more points? Um, so I think those things are super important right now for us to kind of figure out the LTV, no matter which product we have. Right. So we're trying to increase those that 20% and that 40% and try to bump it up. But for sure, we're definitely, we're scaling more into the products that have higher retention.

Cody Plofker (26:45):

Yeah, totally, totally. So I, I, I wanna say one thing, but then I'll share kind of how we look at it. I think you, outside of retention, you make a really good point there, which is, I think we get bored of our messages a lot more than customers do. And I think sometimes people put a message in one place and they think their job is done. And yes, you could have just said, you know, you have rewards in an email and assume that you did your job or on a post purchase page. But I love that you're putting it everywhere cuz you know that having it in one place isn't enough cuz you know that not everyone's gonna see it there and they might miss it in email, but they might need it in the unboxing or anything like that. So I think that's like a really important thing.

Rabah Rahil (27:22):

Couple questions. One, are you doing QR codes or how are you getting people there?

Ash Melwani (27:27):

QR codes.

Rabah Rahil (27:28):

Yeah. QR codes. Love it. Are you doing any QR codes? Cody in the post

Cody Plofker (27:31):

Purchase cards, but we're, we, we definitely wanna beef up our uh, our retention. I mean the cool thing about, uh, QR codes that we've been talking about is like, you can change the link whenever. So if you put the, make the code a little bit more Ambu ambiguous, if you have a seasonal thing or whatever, you can always change that up.

Rabah Rahil (27:46):

Yeah. Here's a little pro tip for you guys too. So if you point it to say a website, like a URL for your website, like my avi.com/qr code, you can actually use some HTML on there where you can actually redirect them. So you don't have to cuz you're gonna get this printed on the it's. Exactly. Yeah. It's pro so, um, and then the second question is, do you guys mess around with direct mail at all?

Ash Melwani (28:09):

We just did a

Cody Plofker (28:11):

Campaign. Yeah. Weren't you guys doing it

Ash Melwani (28:13):

Just lost

Rabah Rahil (28:13):

Post pilot or what are you using

Ash Melwani (28:15):

Post? I think it was post pilot.

Rabah Rahil (28:16):

Post pilot. Yeah. You like, do

Cody Plofker (28:17):

You have any, any results yet?

Ash Melwani (28:20):

Uh, no, not yet. I've they

Rabah Rahil (28:23):

Crutch?

Ash Melwani (28:23):

Hopefully there's two, there's two things that we did. Right. It was like we wanted to hit, um, pro tip. I think Ron might hate me for revealing this, but <laugh> um, we got some data back, uh, from Amazon. I don't know how we got it. Um, but we got addresses of our customers on Amazon and those people we can't, we can't communicate to them. Right. Amazon holds that data. The only way we can really do anything is like maybe put a pure code on the like, like the top of like the bottle and then like they scan it or something. Um, but we got addresses and we're sending them, um, a postcard saying like, Hey, like come get a gift card or whatever it is. And that rebukes for our website put in your email, you got a code and then it also shows you, you know, join the community, download the app. So we're trying to get them into our ecosystem and so that we can own their data this way, that we can constantly remarket to them. Um, so that was one and then obviously a reactivation flow, which was anybody who hasn't bought after X amount of time.

Cody Plofker (29:25):

And do you have any, any data on yet or is that too early?

Ash Melwani (29:28):

Not yet. I think it's too early. I think they, they just sent them on Monday. So I,

Cody Plofker (29:32):

Yeah. So yeah. I'm, I'm curious. I've I've been hearing good things. I'm I'm definitely curious. I mean, it makes a ton of sense. Uh, so we're starting to talk about, but I think, I think that's interesting if you, you wanna chat about it a little bit, like I know you're, you know, you posted something on Twitter about like Facebook paid and I was kind of like, Hey, like I would hesitate to kind of pay. Um, yeah. I, I think, I think it's fine. I think there's places, but I do think you should get everything you can organically for free out of retention. Otherwise, cuz most of us are building these LTV models, right? Where we're understanding what, what, you know, we're increasing, you know, the lifetime value of a customer over 30, 60, 90 days. And we're essentially most boots, scrap businesses are trying to acquire at break even.

Cody Plofker (30:11):

And if we, I think there's two important things, but if then we're also repaying for that retention. I think we have to bake in those requisition costs into there really what we should be doing and I'm not doing this. We are not, if our Facebook CPA says one thing, right? We, and again, it's on platform. We are, I'd say about 30% of our acquisition from Facebook is actually reacquisition. So we should really be like discounting our CPA targets by like 30%. We're not doing that cuz I, I think it gets complicated and it gets muddled. But I do think like the more you are going to then repay for that, I think you just have to kind of bake that into your numbers. And I understand like Jess made the point, like nothing is free, but I, I, I don't think you can compare like a thousand dollars a month. Clayo subscription to like a $25 re acquisition cost for everybody.

Rabah Rahil (31:01):

Yeah, no I'm I'm with you. You're coming around. You're coming around.

Speaker 4 (31:04):

You're slowly. You'll slow. See it I'm you'll slowly see it

Cody Plofker (31:08):

Retargeting.

Speaker 4 (31:09):

You slowly see it.

Cody Plofker (31:10):

What? So like, like postcards, like I think the timing is important and I think you should probably like do everything that you can through email and then once somebody is again, like lost or something like that. Yeah. Or it's, you know, then, then probably postcards. It seems like a pretty cool strategy.

Ash Melwani (31:25):

There's so many apps on and I think you guys have it too, right? You just added to triple whale or I dunno if it's out yet, but it basically segments your customers into like, alright, these are like the whales. And then these are like your, your dead fish. Right. I don't even know what you guys are calling it, but those are the people we wanna send postcards too to like follow

Speaker 4 (31:43):

That's what we should call it if we're

Ash Melwani (31:44):

Not yeah. Pet, um, the guppies or something. Um, but yeah, I mean that, I think is the audience where like you should be uploading and like, if, and, and to your point, and this is what I wanted to kind of respond back to you yesterday, but it was too much for me to like kind of put down, but I was like, there's also that the idea of that revenue, just not being there, if you're not running that ad. Right. So like if there's a certain group of people that were never gonna buy, but if you ran another, they ran an initial ad towards them and they're like, okay, well now I'm gonna buy. I think there's, there's two ways to look at it. Like, is it, is it, is it bringing in incremental revenue? Great. If it is, if not, then I totally agree with you that you're just, you're paying more for, for acquisition at that point. And then you, I mean, at least us as a, in our model, we're looking at CAC and like NCPA. So then our numbers might be a little bit inflated because it's new customers divided by or total spend divided by new customers. Right? Yeah. So I, I see your point there. Um, all I, all I wanted to say is that as long as it's incremental that I, for sure, for sure. Reactivation probably ends up being worth it later down the line

Rabah Rahil (32:55):

Hundred percent. So when I used to run my old agency, we actually slayed with, uh, what we did. So Clavio has some pretty cool customer segments. And what we did was to your point, we'd find our best selling products. And so the people that bought this product once, but haven't bought for basically like 90 to 180 days. I can't remember what we did, but basically like we would consider that person churned. Like they, they would've used the, uh, the product by this point. Um, and then we found them. So we used that category, but also we cross-referenced, the people that Clavio said would have the highest predicted LTV. And then we took that chunk of people and then we sent the postcards and it absolutely slate. Absolutely slate.

Cody Plofker (33:36):

Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think as long as you're making sure it's incremental and I don't think most people

Rabah Rahil (33:41):

Have, oh, you're muted as

Ash Melwani (33:45):

Sorry. No, go ahead.

Cody Plofker (33:46):

I was just gonna say, as long as you're proving, it's incremental and I don't think most people have the tools or the experiments to actually measure, improve incrementality. But I think as long as you're sure of that, and you're not just wasted non incremental spend, then I think it definitely makes sense.

Rabah Rahil (34:00):

There's an easy way to do it. And again, it's not super clean, but you know, have a churn. And like if this person hasn't bought in 180 days, they're not gonna buy again. Like they're, they're churn, they're fine. And then, okay, take those people that have spent a lot of money, but haven't bought in 180 days, they're considered churn. And then that, I mean, all intents and purposes, it's, it's, that's incremental lift where these people are never gonna come back into the ecosystem. And then the other cool thing is because you're sending them a postcard, you can put on the QR code or even better. We used a discount code, which is the OG proxy. And then we could really have actual return on investment where it's like all the people that use this unique discount code actually repurchase. And then we could track the sales back to that. So I, I take your point though, Cody, I'm not trying to shit on you. I'm just saying that there, there are ways that you away

Cody Plofker (34:49):

Need to be perfect away. No, no, but you're alright. Also I think that's an important thing that again, like, I'm, I'm happy. This is why we do the podcast. Cause like Twitter is so, so not nuanced, but like I was just assuming it was like all customers 30 days. There's a huge difference between, you know, going after a churn hundred 80 day purchaser versus going after like all purchasers.

Rabah Rahil (35:08):

Well, and they had purchased previously again, so this isn't cold people. This is people that had used the product. Then we wanna it's a more of a reactivation or it was a reactivation play and it was a reactivation play to ashes point in a high LTV product. So if we knew this was, it was actually probiotics. So if we knew we got people back into the probiotics, usually people would take it and then they'd stay on 'em. And so the, there was just, there there's a lot of things going into it, but anyways, too long, didn't read if, if you do do the numbers, right, it can absolutely slay. And it's not what we did was chunk it up where it's like, we took the first, like the best hundred customers that we thought would be amazing. We sent it out to them. So it wasn't like this huge bet. And then we saw that bet paid off. And then we took the next like tranche of customers and the next tranche of customers. And so wind ended up sending like 500 postcards and absolutely sled and post pilots. Super easy peasy with Shopify.

Cody Plofker (35:57):

Yeah. I definitely wanna test that. Yeah. I definitely wanna test that. So ours is the same thing, right? So Ash, we, we acquire 75% of our customers on one product. That's at miracle bomb, which is great. And I, I think part of the reason it works so well, it's so differentiated. There's nothing on a market like it, right? However, it's actually one of our lower LTV products because it's huge. It takes a while to get through, which is a good thing for the customer. Interesting, but not great. Right? So we look at a few of our, of our other products, uh, that have much better LTV. Mascara has great LTV. Wait, we have the face pencils that have great, great LTV. However, it's nearly impossible to acquire customer profitably at scale on mascara because it's, it's, you know, if you guys follow like Russell Bruns and I everything, right?

Cody Plofker (36:37):

You wanna be a new, a new opportunity. You don't wanna be an improvement offer. And there's probably a lot of people have said the same thing, right? But every makeup brand on the planet has a mascara. What can we say? That's unique about ours, that they can't say almost nothing. Right? We can say it's better, but everyone of course is gonna say, it's better. Like why would anybody trust us in, in a cold audience, miracle bone. We can say very different things that nobody else can say. And I think that's why we have success there. So a few things that we do and we think about number one is all right, we know we're gonna acquire customers on miracle bone. There's a few different journeys we can take. We don't have the best post-purchase flows. The experience setup right now. That's, that's Eli and Joanna's job. And we're really working on figuring out what is that next product that we need to get somebody to buy. We're not considering somebody, a, a customer and we're not considering them. I, you know, I don't know if we always talked about this, there's probably some good quotes, but like, you haven't really acquired a customer if they purchase once you've gotten a sale, but we're really trying to get that second and third to actually get like a loyal customer. Is that you Raba? Is that Robin? Well,

Rabah Rahil (37:35):

I, I have a, uh, so in our product journeys, there's the three purchases. Yeah. And so the way I look at it is the first purchase is dating. The second purchase is engagement and the third purchase is marriage. You want people to marry as many products as possible,

Cody Plofker (37:47):

For sure. Totally. So one way we look at it is like, how can we reacquire them and get them on the second product? What should that second product be? And what do we need to say to them? And again, we don't wanna be salesy like, Hey, here's 20% off. Ours is very educational. It's, it's taking that first and zero party data of what they've already bought, why they've bought it and explaining how the goals that they've told us they want with the quiz or whatever are actually can be fulfilled by that product. Um, mascara, not only is it, you know, it's one of our best sellers, just not great for acquisition. It's also got a better replenishment cycle. You know, you go through it a lot faster. So, so that's one strategy. Number two is kidding, right? We've found that kits and sets, not only do they have high AOV, so higher allowable CPA, but a lot of times they have a much better LTV.

Cody Plofker (38:31):

My theory for this one is if somebody's buying a one product, they have a, a, a one in one shot of liking it. If they're buying four products, maybe they don't like product one, but they like product two and three. So that's something that we've seen successful. And then something I want to try that we haven't done yet is gift a purchase, right? We're making mini MAs errors. These won't be ready for a while, but doing a GWP on evergreen acquisition offer, all of our ads are about, you know, miracle bomb, but we're giving people away that gift will purchase should help conversion right in CPA a little bit. But then they're getting that product at like a $3 cost to us. And then they're, that's what they're gonna come back on. So that's kind of our plan and I'm, I'm super excited to test the, you know, that what was the gift again? What are you giving give will purchase? So we're gonna do a mini mascara because cheaper than a full size one, again, we're able to, I still think that'll help our CPA. Anytime you're given something away, you know, you do GWP and that they slay on acquisition, but also looking at kind of that LTV model. My theory Eli's theory is that that would actually help our retention quite a bit. Cuz again, people have another reason to come back. That's not that miracle bomb.

Rabah Rahil (39:35):

Yeah. I think something that you guys could slay with or it'd be really interesting cuz you guys don't have a heavy, um, subscription presence, but something like if you buy the miracle bomb and can get and get your, um, first, uh, mascara for free, but it has to be on subscription and then you get it for free and then you just kind of cause people like subscription, man. It can, it can absolutely paper over those valleys where those peaks and valleys and you just have this free money. Um, and especially too, if you, you time it out, right. Cuz I believe mascara the way you guys have it. Um, sized is on a nice monthly cadence. So cuz that's the problem where you'll run into with subscriptions is like you start to have piles of soap or something where you, you just like, dude, you know what I mean? The sales cycle's too long where I'm not, or what did you call it? The consumption site. You had a really good name for it. I've never heard it before. Was

Cody Plofker (40:25):

That mine? That it, yeah. You, you might be consumption. I don't, remember's probably, it probably got it from, for me. Eli.

Rabah Rahil (40:30):

There you go. Whatever you just said it it's, you basically it's it's like selling the leather wallet that never goes bad. It's like exactly, you you're gonna get an that's an AOV business. Like you're never gonna get any more money outta this person. So I think that you guys could get heavily into subscriptions. The other thing I could think for you guys, that would be interesting. And again, I'm not close enough to space, so I could be talking on my ass, but some sort of like, um, sending you new shades every month. Um, and I don't know if you guys have enough of that, but something like that where like, oh you tried out, but you're, it's basically, you're part of this. And you can build things into that where you're part of the community, you get, uh, a free kind of Bobby could run like a tutorial. That's only exclusive for people that are on subscriptions and you can build things that are outside of the product. That's what I try and tell people like

Cody Plofker (41:16):

That's what though.

Rabah Rahil (41:18):

Yeah. If you can't compete on the product, then you, and you need to build moats that other people can't compete on. Like maybe cuz I'm sure you're, mascara's fantastic. But to your point, like outside of miracle bomb and stuff like that, the miracle bomb is really the most differentiated product. But then there's other things like you do have Bobby, you do have these other cool creative things that you can build moats around your product that can then build an area of exclusivity. It can build an area of community. And then that can drive kind of the topic that we're talking about is more and more retention,

Cody Plofker (41:44):

A hundred percent agree. I mean that that's, that's what we're working on. That that's definitely what we're doing, but I think that's a great point. And when people talk about brand, I think brand is really one of the biggest aspects of retention. Obviously your, your product is extremely important. People have to like it, obviously the, the market you're in no matter how good your brand is, you're not gonna have good LTV on a mattress or, or, you know, whatever it is like that's important. But yeah, I mean, brand makes it makes a huge thing and you know, people are buying apple products cuz yes, the products are good, but also they, they love 'em. And if my phone died today, I wouldn't hesitate to drop a thousand dollars on an iPhone instead of a Samsung because of brand. So I think that's important. And again, brand encompasses everything. It's not your fonts and stuff like that. It's it's how, what the emotional connection people feel to, to, to your brand. And um, and again, like that's why you're, you're probably having the crazy, crazy high liquid death LTV just because you love it so much. Even though it's just sparkling water,

Rabah Rahil (42:36):

Dude, I buy more merch. I've spent more money on merch than I have the actual core product. That's crazy to think about. That's crazy to think about, but yeah, I, I, I won't get into the brand thing cuz that's a trigger word for me. But um, to your point, you, you backed out of it, which nicely I loved is that brand is for me a manifestation of all those touch points. And it's not like brand to me is like a lagging indicator where people like just kind of roll everything up in that. But anyways, let's, uh, we're pushing up against 42 minutes. Let's go through kind of what you guys what's working for you guys. And then we'll round out the seventh episode of ad spend.

Cody Plofker (43:09):

Go ahead Ash.

Ash Melwani (43:10):

Um, so I taken our budgets and reallocated, the whole allocation and everything. Um, Facebook, we were like 90% budget. TikTok was like 10%. We were now 75, 25, um,

Cody Plofker (43:28):

Hoping, okay. Scaling, scaling.

Rabah Rahil (43:30):

Let's go Ash.

Ash Melwani (43:32):

Um, I was, I was just telling Cody today, we're literally looking at the, the office space next door to turn into a studio where we could just film TikTok all day. Right. Brilliant. Um, uh, what was that? Yeah, so basically one of the things that I've noticed as soon as we started running TikTok, um, yes, the whole process is to be in place, right? You need to have testing always and you have to have your scaling campaigns. Right. Um, if you're not launching, like we're, we're, we're aiming to launch four creatives a week so that we can just continuously be running right. Without any issues. Um, what I have seen and I think a lot of people are talking about this is that with TikTok running, everything else seems to be doing better

Cody Plofker (44:15):

A hundred percent, a hundred percent.

Ash Melwani (44:17):

Yeah. Things are like less volatile. Our CPA day to day has very or less variance than it did before. Um, and again, it goes to like not putting all your eyes in one basket, but I think because of the, you know, when you're running ads on TikTok, you're not only just showing a video and people are clicking, but like people are people share on that platform more than anything else, people follow this and that. So like the organic side is growing while you're, you know, kind of focusing on paid and things just like, I mean, one of our ads is like 1.4 million views, which is like insane. Solid.

Cody Plofker (44:55):

And do you notice your Facebook efficiency getting better when you're scaling TikTok? Yeah. Yeah. See that isn't that correct? Cuz I don't think Facebook and I think, I think this was a mistake of mine. I think a lot of people think Facebook is top of funnel awareness. I actually don't think that's what it's best for. I think TikTok and you exactly TikTok and YouTube are. And I think the businesses that do well in bus, this is why I'm always so big on like brand and like how having a, a brand. Right. And just having people talk and know about you is actually the best thing you can do to have good Facebook ads. Because I actually don't think, and especially in these days, I don't think Facebook is great for awareness. So I think TikTok drives a ton. And I don't know if you can look at your stuff in GA or, or in triple, but I bet it drives a ton of your Facebook. Even your top of funnel, TikTok,

Ash Melwani (45:40):

Facebook. It has to be, I mean, dude, like right now I, I I think that it would even do better if we allocated that budget 50, 50, I'm just waiting on like we literally ran out of stock because like things started picking up,

Cody Plofker (45:53):

Um, come on, Ron

Ash Melwani (45:55):

<laugh>. Yeah. Right. Um, and the other thing is that, which was really cool. We actually got a text message today. Um, our sales guy, Albert he's kind of like visiting all the vitamin shops that are in the area, um, you know, building, you know, the connections and this and that. He was talking to a manager today and he said that a lot of the vs people were talking about obvi and we're just brand new to vs.

Cody Plofker (46:14):

Yeah.

Ash Melwani (46:15):

Yeah. They were saying like, they love our social presence. And what we've been doing is running ads on TikTok that go to our website, dude, but us picking up product at vitamin shop. So we're building awareness for vitamin shop, but also driving sales online. Um, so like,

Cody Plofker (46:31):

Dude, I, so we have a store. We, we have one it's our own store. It's here in Montclair. I go in there and I ask the reps there, where, where are people finding about us? It's TikTok, it's Facebook and TikTok a ton of it. Like that's one of those things you don't see if you're just an ads manager, you know, but it's, it's, it's healthy, heavy awareness.

Ash Melwani (46:51):

No, I mean the fact, I mean, again, not tubing our own horn, but like they, at least from what we've been hearing from our reps is that the biggest thing is paid. And how can brands supplement, you know, the retail shop. And they said like for a new brand that just launched, you guys are doing a lot better than most. And I, and I would like, I would love to say that it has to do with our TikTok efforts right now. And that's why I just wanna, I just wanna go 50 50 on the budget and like, really just let Facebook be Facebook and drive whatever it drives, but like TikTok where we can get creative and like really showcase where we are like vitamin chop. Um, even like some of the other stores like GNC or just showcasing, like everything that we possibly can, which is crazy because also when, when I've noticed the differences, as on TikTok and Facebook with Facebook, you get a variety of buyers. Right? So if the app is like a, a cinnamon cereal flavor, you'll still get orders for the other flavor on TikTok, the a it's driving. Like if it's showing like a cinnamon cereal, the top purchase item is that item in the video. Totally.

Cody Plofker (47:58):

Which is a hundred

Ash Melwani (47:59):

Percent biggest is the difference between Facebook. So like if one co

Cody Plofker (48:02):

And con I think there's pros and cons of that. Totally.

Ash Melwani (48:04):

Yeah. No, for sure. But like if Ron one day goes, we have too many, um, we have too much of marshmallow. We need to push marshmallow. Right. Well then let's make a TikTok with marshmallow and, and drive that. Right. So a lot of love it. I mean,

Cody Plofker (48:18):

Go sure. TikTok

Rabah Rahil (48:20):

Cody, what's working for you,

Cody Plofker (48:23):

Honestly, man, TikTok I'm, I'm not even gonna lie. I mean, a lot organic, right? Like I've talked about a lot, a lot of people know it's like, you know, viral

Rabah Rahil (48:30):

Holiday

Cody Plofker (48:32):

It's, it's how we've scaled. But, um, so, so definitely TikTok. I, I don't wanna say too much cuz we're actually trying to run some correlation studies on this mm-hmm <affirmative> just to actually see, but just anecdotally noticing really good growth and, and more importantly, Mer changes when TikTok is, is hitting. Um, makes sense. So we're, we're, we're scaling TikTok. Uh, you know, I talked about it in my newsletter this week, but you know, an interesting test that I did is, you know, we got these, uh, we're working with a, a higher end, you know, production, uh, agency, mostly for Facebook and I tested it on TikTok, not expecting too much. And it's just, it's just doing amazing. And not even with TikTok font, not even with TikTok, you know, captions, anything like that. And it's, I'll definitely test some on it, but it's just crushing it.

Cody Plofker (49:13):

And I think, you know, I talked about the newsletter, but the, the reason why is because it's a good ad and people talk about making TikTok, not ads, but I've worked with a lot of TikTok UGC people that I, that shot on iPhone and used TikTok captions. And they're like, oh, make TikTok, not ads. But the stuff was still an ad. There was no value. There was no entertainment. There was no inspiration. There was no ADA, it was all, you know, it was all a, it was all just like, here's the product, here's what it does. And, and this thing it's shot on a 4k camera, super high end polished, but it's not just, here's this product. It's, here's how to get this thing. Here's how to get this desire it's teaching. And I think that is much more congruent with actually what a tic TikTok is then low quality iPhone stuff. So that's kind of, what's working. It surprised me, but that's kind of my analysis of it. Um, so yeah, we're, we're going hard. I mean, we're trying to find creative people. If you are a videographer video editor, TikTok content creator hit me up cuz we're, we're going really hard on TikTok. And I truly believe it's the number one thing that causing our growth and that we're gonna be focusing on this year.

Rabah Rahil (50:15):

Love it. The one you sent me was not made for TikTok.

Cody Plofker (50:18):

No, that was, that was just a nine by 16.

Rabah Rahil (50:20):

The Facebook that's fantastic. Yeah. That's phenomenal.

Cody Plofker (50:23):

So we're gonna that with like, yeah. We're gonna test that now with like TikTok native font and stuff like that and see if there's any difference. But you saw it. It's not an iPhone video.

Rabah Rahil (50:32):

Yeah, no, it looks fantastic. Um, last question, I guess, did you ever, uh, find out if you re-add the captions, does it work or no,

Cody Plofker (50:42):

I was told by my rep and, and the rep is kind of high up at TikTok. I was told that's I figured that it, you know, they can only read on the TikTok font that you edit in there. And then somebody on Twitter who claims to know what they're talking about said that's not at all true. So I don't know the answer. I'll just say it at that.

Ash Melwani (51:03):

So I'll, I'll tell you one thing, I don't know if I could be totally wrong. Right. But we did this TikTok hack right. Where we created the video and the editor and then before publishing, we actually screen recorded it and then published that so that we can go back to the original draft and make changes in iterations. And those videos still perform and they have the text on it. So I don't know. I,

Cody Plofker (51:26):

It could be, I'm not saying they don't perform. I'm not saying

Ash Melwani (51:28):

Like, yeah, I've

Cody Plofker (51:29):

Done. I've done a ton of tick

Ash Melwani (51:30):

TikTok. It's gotta be tough to really prove like that. That's the thing.

Rabah Rahil (51:35):

I love it, but we'll see all, all right, boys, seven in the books, Ash, tell the people where to follow you where it can get my, a tell 'em to go visit a vitamin shop, let the people know.

Ash Melwani (51:45):

Yes. Please visit your local vitamin shop. Nationwide 600 stores. Take a picture. You don't even have to buy it. Take a picture, send it to me on Twitter. Um, you can find me on Twitter, Ashley Melan. Um, yeah.

Rabah Rahil (52:00):

Beautiful. Cody. Tell me about the newsletters. Tell about what you doing. Tell him about your masterclass.

Cody Plofker (52:05):

Yeah, I'm on, I'm on Twitter, uh, Cody plus, and then I think by the time this comes out, if I can get my act together, I will have a website. So it'll be Cody plager.com. Check it out. You can see some past issues and subscribe to the newsletter there.

Rabah Rahil (52:19):

Beautiful. And both of you savages as well as Ron will be joining me in Miami. Right. And Eli.

Cody Plofker (52:25):

Yep. Let's go. Yep.

Rabah Rahil (52:27):

So geek out. I think there's still a few tickets, uh, for Miami geek out, I'll be presenting and these gentlemen will be on a panel with me. Um, it'll be a bunch of fun and this one's actually gonna be really unique because there is more experiences. So, uh, geek out events, forget what the website is. I should know this. It is geek out events.io. You can get your tickets there. Um, definitely go. It's one of the best DTC conferences out there. If you it's a little pricey so that make sure you have the economics for it, but it's definitely definitely worthwhile. Um, and that's episode seven in the books. We do have a newsletter as well. Whale mail goes out every Tuesday, Thursday, Alex Pease, actually writing the Tuesday issue now. And it is straight heat. I love her. She's just one of the biggest brains in marketing.

Rabah Rahil (53:08):

Um, and then we are outta here. If you wanna get involved with triple or tri triple wild.com, sorry for the God mode over here, it's getting, uh, sunny in Texas, but we're actually moving to a big fancy office. So when you guys come out, um, for the whales, um, we'll, we'll, we'll put you up and have some fun. And then, um, we're actually doing, you'll like this Cody. So, uh, you guys are, you guys are kind of old, but you're not old. Like me, MTV used to have the cool awards with the spaceman, the MTV awards. You guys remember with the popcorn. So we're gonna do that with the whale, but now, well now even better, we're actually gonna do whale NFTs and then the award is gonna be your, uh, NFT.

Cody Plofker (53:42):

It's gonna that's dope.

Rabah Rahil (53:43):

Yeah. I figured you'd like a crypto max anyways. Awesome. Thanks so much for you guys, Cody, thank you for taking your time away from the masters. I know that that is a, a big, big, uh, deal to you. So we appreciate that and the community appreciates that and we always appreciate the love on Twitter. It's been so heartwarming and heartfelt. Um, there's just been some really, really cool to, yeah,

Cody Plofker (54:02):

It's been dope. Seeing a lot of that. I, I really appreciate everyone who's listened and leaving good feedback.

Rabah Rahil (54:07):

Same really appreciate that. And uh, also let us know if there is more feedback where it might not be something that you like. We're always trying to improve this and make more value for everybody. But Ash, Cody, it's always a pleasure. My friends we'll talk soon. That's seven in the books. Everybody

Cody Plofker (54:20):

PO.

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