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Nov 3, 2026
Scaling BFCM With Intent Data
Scaling BFCM With Intent Data
00:00
49:53
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Transcript
0:00
That the email you might send to your customers, the week's campaign, the new product you wanna introduce or promote so often has nothing to do with what people actually click and buy when they get an email.
0:12
I think one of the biggest mistakes that e-commerce sites make is, um, they're drawing people, especially during this time of year, with discounts And try and be very deliberate about listening to what shoppers are already telling you as part of your experience, whether it's, you know, on your website, whether it's your app, whether it's any of your channels.
0:30
accomplish these kinds of experiences with much less sophistication, and yet the right tools connected in the right ways. Automation makes all these things much more possible.
0:42
You're listening to the Frankly Ecommerce Show, candid conversations about business with host Patrick Scott Pittman.
0:50
As each passing week gets closer to the big Black Friday peak season, website owners are finding ways to improve, optimize, tweak, thinking through the offers, and there's no shortage of op- optimization opportunities.
1:05
But a useful way of prioritizing what you should improve about your web store is to think about the different types of shoppers and how they have different motivations, fears, priorities.
1:18
We're gonna talk about that today on the Frankly Ecommerce Show with two of the people that the best people I know to think about optimizing for your ecommerce conversion rate optimization.
1:27
Today, I have Brian Massey c- from Conversion Sciences, and he's been optimizing ecommerce stores for decades. There's a lot of understanding about those types of shoppers. We're gonna talk about that.
1:38
I also have Arvind Krishman, who's bringing a new understanding of in signals that can be sent by those website visitors.
1:45
We'll talk about what those signals are and how we can use them to h- activate people from the passive waiting might buy to the buy now phase.
1:54
It's a perfect time of year to be thinking about these kinds of improvements, and welcome both to the Frankly Ecommerce Show. Very, very happy to be here. This is gonna be an interesting conversation. Yeah.
2:05
Th- thanks, Patrick. The pleasure is all mine. Yeah.
2:10
Well, I'm happy to talk with the two of you combined because I think it has an opportunity to bring together the synergy that can come when we start to really understand what motivates people with ways of really listening, and I think that's what's interesting about what Arvind's building.
2:25
As we get intro- introduce ourselves, Arvind, tell us where you're coming from. Tell us what Swim is and how it's giving some new abilities for store owners to listen to their, their website shoppers before they buy.
2:38
Yeah. Sure thing.
2:39
So, um, Swim, we're a customer engagement platform that, um, focuses on helping brands, you know, capture shopper intent, uh, in as granular a fashion as possible, making sense of that intent and then leveraging that to drive personalization, to drive a tailored experience.
2:54
Um, we started out with, um, you know, a simple wishlist feature. This was, you know, a little over ten years ago on, on Shopify.
3:01
Um, and since then, a number of adjacencies have slowly, um, allowed us to expand the platform scope to any form of intent, explicit, implicit, that, you know, shoppers manifest either o- on the web storefront, on the mobile app, uh, in a physical store.
3:16
Um, regardless, just making it easy for brands to capture that and, and then use that to power a lot of their marketing automation, a lot of their personalization.
3:23
And, you know, obviously the goal is to, you know, move them forward in that purchase journey and, uh, with as minimal friction as possible, get them to that point of purchase.
3:31
'Cause most shoppers aren't ready to pull the trigger on the first visit, like you said, Patrick.
3:35
And, and so our aim is to try and see how painless can we make it to allow them to get to that point when that intent is there. Um, so that's who we are.
3:43
Yeah, and I love the framing of intent and also, also describing it as listening for signals. And we had a chance to get to know each other 'cause we were at the Ecom Elevate Conference- Mm-hmm...
3:54
in Salt Lake City put on by Matthew Holman.
3:57
And I got a better understanding that there's much more than just a wishlist, and the applications go broadly for stores that might have things like project lists, um, buying, you know, home repair lists, and even more so than that.
4:12
So I think there's a lot of opportunities to, for someone to think more broadly about how they can capture and save that intent. It starts to look like a heart on a webpage. I'm gonna heart that, right?
4:24
Um, and other ways of expressing that. But these are all things that we, we think about, um, a visitor coming and wanting to get that confidence.
4:33
But Brian, tell us if you would, I know you developed a framework for how stores can be optimized, but you've also done it in a way that groups people by their motivations or where they are hesitant.
4:45
Give us a sense of who those people are broadly. What, what are the types- Mm-hmm... of shoppers that you classify? Well, there are, there are two frameworks that we use. Um, one kind of, kind of more conceptually.
4:57
Um, and this is work done by, um, the Wizard Academy, which is this very interesting business school here near Austin. Um, predates Harry Potter, so, uh...
5:10
But if you can imagine, and broadly speaking, there are two kinds of tr- buyers. There's transactional buyers, and there's relational buyers.
5:18
Transactional buyers, their greatest fear is spending a dollar more than they could have spent, and they see shopping as part of the fun.
5:25
Um, they are typically not very brand loyal, but they respond to things like discounts and discount codes and things like that. The relational shopper's greatest fear is making the wrong decision.
5:37
They see shopping as part of the expense of acquiring something, and they're, you know, looking for experts to help them make that right decision.
5:44
During, um, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we're expecting more of those transactional buyers. Um, so, you know, they're responding to the discounts. They're buying for more than themselves.
5:56
Um, like this is the Super Bowl for those transactional buyers And since they're not brand loyal, it's really, really important that we find ways to get them to interact with the, uh, with the brand.
6:10
So things like wish lists are exactly the sort of thing that, that they want. They wanna, um, tag a brand, tag a product, and then they wanna go look for a better deal.
6:20
So you wanna make sure that they're in the loop on that, and email and SMS are, um, very effective ways to stay in touch with them.
6:29
Um, after Black Friday, what you have is built a list of people that normally, uh, aren't gonna come back if you're not, um, enticing them with deals.
6:38
So you have that channel to bring them back and, you know, hopefully turn them into repeat buyers, long-term buyers.
6:44
In general, the, you know, the, the decision as to whether you're gonna discount for Black Friday comes down to is your long-term value for a client, in other words, the amount that they will spend over a year or more, um, is that significantly higher than the average order value?
7:00
Um, if it's not, then you have a business where it's typically one-time purchases, so the discounts are gonna hit hard. It's gonna eat into your profit. Um, and you're not exactly storing value, future value with that.
7:13
Flip side of that is, um, of all the e-commerce businesses we work with, um, none of them is doing well until they figured out email, um, and SMS is coming on as people gain trust in, in that area.
7:26
Um, so that, um, uh, you know, I think that model kinda helps us focus on making sure we're getting the most out of the, the traffic we're buying with both our, our ad spend and the discounts that we're offering during this, this holiday season.
7:42
Yeah. Well, I think there's-- Tell us about this white lab coat. I think that's what you're wearing. [laughs] You, you take a methodical approach to this as a way of introduction.
7:50
Tell us more why you're wearing that and, and what you've been doing all these years.
7:54
Um, so, uh, the lab coat is a choice that I made early on and, uh, you know, when people first see me, they're like, "Oh, my gosh, a lab coat." But I do it because science told me to.
8:04
So they've, like, they've s- they've, there's an area of, of study called enclosed cognition, and it's the systematic study of the effect of clothing on the wearer and those around them.
8:15
Uh, they've tested the lab coat, and they found that if you put a lab coat on a group of people and give them a cognitive test, they're gonna score about seventeen percent higher than the similar group of people wearing street clothes.
8:26
So when I put the lab coat on, I actually think I'm smarter than I really am.
8:31
They've also studied the effect of uniforms like the lab coat, and if you're wearing a lab coat, people tend to trust what you say, follow your directions, put more weight on what you're-- on your message.
8:42
So not only do I think I'm smarter than I really am, but the audience thinks I'm smarter than I really am, and that's really what we're trying to do. We're using science to get an unfair advantage.
8:53
Um, and, and this is clearly a win-win for me. Well, I hope you wear the white lab coat on this coming Friday in Austin where we'll have a workshop- Oh, yes, I will... digging into all of these things.
9:05
Now, we're having a series of workshops over the month of October in Austin, and the last week focused on the Black Friday deal itself, the offer to be made.
9:15
And it was remarkable that Dan Hansfeld, who led it, brought us through a scenario planning spreadsheet where we were able to observe sometimes you can make more money by sitting out the holiday and not doing a big offer.
9:31
Mm-hmm. A lot of it has to do with how much your average order value is, how much profit, and all the calculations that can go into that.
9:37
So that was a, a great buildup to what we're gonna be talking about next with you guys.
9:43
And Swim, you'll also be represented at that workshop where we can get into and really score the stores based on this idea of intent. Tell us what that scoring is and how you imagine that working.
9:54
What is it that Swim does for a store when they go through and analyze the opportunity? Uh, it was actually, um,
10:03
uh, you know, when we first launched the wish list, it w- it was more, you know, shopper-facing in terms of the persona that we were thinking about was it's, it's a convenience thing.
10:12
It makes it easy for, uh, the site to remember what I want, so the next time I come, um, it's easy for me to pick up where I left off.
10:19
But what we found was, while shoppers who had real intent, you know, they had a greater affinity for going and bookmarking these items, most of us just forget.
10:29
Like, the attention span's, you know, s- so fractured that I don't think about what I had bookmarked. And so I don't end up coming back until much, much, much later.
10:38
Um, and so the whole marketing automation started to flow from that where brands wanted a way to reach these shoppers and bring them back.
10:45
And as we started to look at that more, I, I think this notion of how do we quantify the value, how do we, you know, allow brands to essentially measure how well they're doing on this notion of understanding intent and then putting that to good use and, and, you know, um,
11:02
Google PageSpeed was a model we looked at and said, you know, "If, if you're trying to measure the performance for your site, here's a great way to, you know, quantify that and, and look at opportunities that allow you to improve that score or, or SEO for that matter, matter," right?
11:14
Like, and, uh, what we felt was this is such a, you know, massive amount of money that's being left on the table because you pay all this money to bring traffic to your site, and that traffic has intent.
11:27
You know, not all hundred percent of shoppers, but a very meaningful percentage of shoppers have intent.
11:32
But when they bounce off that first visit, there, there's almost no clue that they leave behind that allows you to go re-engage and bring them back.
11:40
And, and so to give brands a way to look at that more than just looking at the conversion rate of two percent, three percent, whatever, how do you get a little more granular in understanding the different aspects that go into, you know, what we think of as intent?
11:52
Because not all shoppers are the same. Some will click on that heart button, like you said, Patrick, and they'll, they'll add it to their wish list. A lot of them use the cart as a wish list, you know.
12:00
They, uh, they add to cart even though they have no intention of buying on that one session. They are saving it for later, and so they let it sit in the cart. Of course, it doesn't sit there forever.
12:08
Um, depending on the platform you're on, the, the cart, you know, get, becomes stale at some point and, and the items get aged out.
12:14
But every one of these actions, even something as simple as just browsing a product page multiple times or dwelling on a product page beyond a certain length of time, these are all manifestations of intent.
12:23
And, and there really isn't a way to Consolidate all of that and say, "Okay, how good a job are you doing of capturing that intent?"
12:29
And then putting that to use to bring them back such that the traffic that you originally paid for, you can get it to be more productive. And so that's how, you know, we, we call it intent yield.
12:38
It's, um, something we've, um, we're patenting at this point, but it's basically a, a way to score a site based on all of the different capabilities that we see that allow them to capture intent across any of these dimensions.
12:52
And not only present that score to them, but also highlight, you know, when we benchmark you against other merchants, other brands in your category, what are best practices that they follow, that they employ?
13:04
And, and so, you know, when you compare yourself to them, where are you doing well and where are you falling short, and what are things you can do? And then actually making it actionable for you to go do those things.
13:14
E- like, whether if you use our platform, great, but even if you don't, just giving them a way to make that actionable and say, "How do I bridge those gaps such that I can put all of that traffic and the intent that comes with that traffic to much better use?"
13:27
That was the idea. A- and so you can... Like, it's, it's, uh, available for free on our website. You can go run it. Um, you know, stick your brand URL in there, and it'll generate a, a report for you.
13:36
But the idea is to have that be the starting point in the conversation of, let me measure how well I'm doing and where the opportunities are, and if I had to put a plan together to say, how do I go attack these?
13:46
That was, that was the thinking behind it.
13:49
Yeah, and it's a great time of year to be having these kind of scoring and then just prioritizing, 'cause there's, can be a sense of overwhelm of all the things you might wanna possibly do.
13:57
But I love the way of kind of narrowing this down. I'm curious, Brian, have you had a chance to look at this at all? To look at the s- to look at Swim or? The scoring, yeah. The intent sort of scoring. Oh, yeah.
14:09
I ran a report, I ran a report on one of our customers as a matter of fact. Absolutely. What did you, what did you notice about that when you saw the report? Um, you know, it is a s- it's a set of...
14:20
So, uh, to be honest, it's a set of hypotheses that, um, uh, I, I did some research and we find that people don't click very much on those hearts.
14:32
The flip side of that is that those people that are clicking on those hearts, um, and, you know, in the usual implementation that requires, uh, uh, at least an email address, typically a name and an email address.
14:43
Uh, you want those people on your list. So, you know, in one situation we had 200 clicks out of something like 70,000 visits. And, uh, I'll take those 200 people. I mean, I, I paid to bring them.
14:56
So it really opened my eyes that in our e-commerce playbook, we have kind of pushed aside something that, um, uh, on, on looking at it again, we should really be looking at that.
15:10
I mean, it's, um, probably not even something that we need to, to test. So we have, for instance, tested renaming the wish list to a save list. So it's, you know, you're saving a list.
15:23
Um, that's particularly helpful in, in, in B2B e-commerce where, um, you know, you're procuring things and you need to share the list and, and generate POs and things like that.
15:34
Um, but even changing the icon, um, uh, um, uh, in that space, uh, makes it feel more like a feature and less like, um, something you see on every site, which means there's probably some blindness to that.
15:47
So I think there's a lot of opportunity to change with the U- change the UX.
15:51
Do you put, um, "Save this item to my wishlist" down near the add cart as a, a secondary call to action for those people that aren't just, they're still shopping and they're not ready to buy? Uh, fantastic.
16:02
Um, you're adding them to the list. Um, the other thing that, uh, was particularly, um, eye-opening is how important persistent carts are.
16:12
Um, and during, during this time with those transactional buyers, not only saving what's in their list, but save their discount codes that they have dutiful- dutifully collected.
16:23
Um, so, you know, they're gonna raise the bar for you, um, with those persistent carts.
16:30
Um, one thing that I, I think I would add is something that has worked well for us is, uh, what we call exit intent popups in the cart and in checkout.
16:40
So a lot of times people will go all the way into checkout to find out what the final number is, shipping, um, taxing, taxes, um, and just how they feel about the size of the number that, that the cart ultimately delivers.
16:53
Um, and they can be saved often with some of these features by, as they s- you know, start to leave, um, popping something up, offering to save the cart, offering to add to wish list, you know, those sorts of features, um, particularly interesting.
17:09
And then the, the final thing, and, um, Arvind, I wanna get some data on this, but the, uh, auto save feature, I think it's your wishlist plus feature, where it anticipates somebody's lingering on a product and so it says, "Hey, well, you know what?
17:23
We save this to your wishlist for you." Um, I'd be interested to get some data on how the retargeting ads, uh, for that sort of a feature are working. Yeah, no, that's a great point, um, Brian. And I think the, um,
17:39
uh, stating the obvious here, but it, it does depend on the brand, um, and the quality of traffic that the brand gets because that's a, that's a good indicator of, you know, uh, you know, how much intent does that traffic really have.
17:50
What we've seen and, you know, when we first, um, launched that feature, it was to address exactly what you brought up, which is, hey, not everybody that has an intention to bookmark this item is actually gonna click on the heart.
18:02
How do we make it just automatic for them? And, and so we look for specific patterns. You know, you visited the page N number of times, you spent so much time on the page, et cetera.
18:10
And, and those are configurable settings. But when those conditions are met, then the platform just automatically saves those items.
18:17
Um, and, uh, you know, we initially made that a default feature because we said, hey, like everybody would want this information because they're, they're going to want to know, you know, which shoppers do I retarget and how.
18:30
Um, but it wasn't, it wasn't universal, where it didn't, it didn't necessarily perform as well for everybody.
18:36
Um, especially, you know, given, uh, certain regions of the world where, like, our platform's global, so we have traffic, um, you know, both merchant sites and traffic that's coming from all over.
18:47
And so depending on those, some of those patterns, some of those factors, the signal strength was, was very varied.
18:53
And so we started looking at, you know, is there enough purchase activity flowing from something that was auto-saved versus something that was explicitly saved, and how do those compare? Um, and it's really a mix.
19:04
Like, there are brands where the, the audience is very loyal, like, there is a lot of affinity for the brand. And in those cases it is a convenience thing because it removes friction.
19:12
It's that I don't have to, you know, click, do that extra click to save this item, but my intent is just so strong and so I'm likely to convert. But there's a lot of instances where that isn't necessarily the case.
19:23
And maybe it's even heavy bot traffic where it, you know, incorrectly saves something when it shouldn't.
19:28
And so now we've made it configurable and, and we look at the conversion signals downstream to see is this something that's actually adding value to the brand. And if so, we would recommend that you go turn that on.
19:38
But if you don't want to, then it's, it-- you can turn it off.
19:41
Um, so I'm not, I'm not quite answering your question directly with a specific metric because it is, it is hard to, you know, provide that level of specificity.
19:48
But i-in general, that's the pattern we're seeing is if the wishlist performs well, auto-save is also likely to perform well.
19:55
But if the wishlist is, you know, um, a little soft in terms of, like, a retargeting mechanism, then the auto-save is, is even more likely to be so. And it's the same in our business.
20:08
Sometimes the answer is, "It depends." Yeah. Depends on the business, depends on the traffic. Yep.
20:13
Hey, a break for a moment just to make the observation about how much effort we spend to bring visitors to our e-commerce websites.
20:21
And if we just knew a little bit more about them, we could do so much more with the tools, the apps we've already layered into our tech stack if we could just be more personal.
20:33
So I've asked Wunderkind to help be a sponsor of this season of Frankly E-Commerce.
20:38
And what they're basically able to do is tell you who's visiting your website, and that accelerates all the things you're already trying to do. I love the way they've broken this out in this quick grid.
20:50
Let me share what that looks like. Identify more shoppers. Capture their intent. There's signals, actions to be noticed. There's a flexibility around how the rules are made. The personalization's there.
21:07
The supercharging of your existing stack. These are all things that are worth a closer look. And Wunderkind came and visited us.
21:15
Kanye Malawan came to join the workshop on October ninth that Dan Hansfeld put together on developing profitable Black Friday offers.
21:24
Had a great conversation with the brands that are in the room on how they can think about this being a way to, again, accelerate what you're already doing.
21:32
So check out Wunderkind, and thanks for being a sponsor of the Frankly E-Commerce show.
21:37
Some brands do a pretty good job of aiding discovery because not all shoppers are aware of the fact that these features exist and why they exist and, and how they make shopping easier.
21:45
Especially on, like, a smaller form factor like a mobile phone, which is where everybody is today. It's, it's easy to miss out, you know, on these features because there's so much happening on that page.
21:55
And so the more you educate your audience, especially your repeat visitors, especially your, you know, prior buyers with whom you have a relationship or members of your loyalty program, et cetera,
22:06
they, they tend to lean in a lot more. And, and so it's, it's a very nuanced approach to how do you think about those different cohorts of customers and, and what are you doing in each instance? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
22:17
And I think you can make the, the, you know, the, the save list or the wishlists more a part of the expected shopping behavior. Um, you know, putting, you know, links in the, um,
22:30
uh, the main navigation that say, like, "Here's, here's where you'll be managing your lists when you, when you finally build them." You know, gift lists, personal shopping lists.
22:39
Um, and as agentic shopping comes on, I'm thinking, uh, style guides for my agent. Like, uh, I'm gonna point my agent at this because this, this represents what I like. Yeah.
22:56
One of the things I've, I've observed about how to take that wishlist preference or intent signal is we've come to work recently in the work I do at eBusiness Pros in a project with Klaviyo to help surface those wishlists saved preferences into the outgoing emails that are sent.
23:14
So something that we did recently was to be able to say, for someone receiving a campaign, you know, it's the news that you're gonna send that week.
23:22
We can then go dynamically look what's in swim, grab the product they've saved to the wishlist, and dynamically populate it in the section of that campaign saying, "Hey, you have this saved in your wishlist."
23:33
And that's personal to the individual who receives that email. It's different for every person. And that brings a visibility to something that wasn't there before. Totally.
23:43
I, I think the, in general, the, you know, what we try to recommend to brands is if you focus on the shopper experience and, and try to make that experience as seamless, as delightful as possible and ensure that you're minimizing or eliminating friction as much as you can, it tends to work out well, right?
24:00
Like, so don't necessarily have to focus so much on the conversion aspect.
24:04
If you instead focus on the experience and make sure that that experience is more and more in line with exactly what, you know, they're expecting, odds are pretty good that, you know, they're gonna convert a lot more.
24:13
And so you, you end up achieving what you wanna achieve anyway, but you're getting there because you, you created a better, more engaging experience and, and that's what led to, you know, those metrics looking as good as they do.
24:25
Yeah.
24:26
I've, I've also been-- It's remarkable how of all the campaigns that are sent, I've, I've done a lot of work with Zach Shimer when he was at Cricket Shirts, and he's an extraordinarily diligent tester and tracker of the performance of different sections of emails.
24:40
And he's observed to me over and again that the email you might- Send to your customers the week's campaign, the new product you wanna introduce or promote so often has nothing to do with what people actually click and buy when they get an email.
24:55
Mm.
24:55
And so if you can pull back a little more personalized, that's the product they saved three months ago, that has a more likelihood of being the one they actually buy than the product you care about launching this week.
25:07
Totally. And I think it- There's a lot more- We, we also... Sorry, go ahead. No, you. I was just gonna say that the,
25:16
you know, brands have come forward with so many different interesting variances of, like, how we had thought about, like, the traditional flow, um, back in stock.
25:26
Uh, you know, stuff sitting in your wishlist, but it's now back in stock.
25:29
Just creating some urgency around the fact that it's now available again before it sells out, you might wanna come back and buy, is not one that I had logically thought about when, when we first came up with the whole marketing automation flows.
25:39
But that tends to be really strong for some brands. But then some others, especially ones that deal with multiple brands, um, like s- you know, Sneakers is a great example.
25:49
Let's say I wishlist a pair of, you know, Nikes.
25:53
Brands wanna capture the fact that, okay, there is a strong brand preference for Nike, and so any time there's a new Nike collection that gets rolled out, this particular shopper is in that segment that's likely to be interested.
26:03
And so how do we pull that signal out and then target them with those campaigns? So it's sort of, it's along the lines of what you're describing, Patrick, but very specifically from a brand affinity perspective.
26:13
And, and I think, you know, it, it, it's safe to say that intent data as, in general is very underutilized in terms of how much personalization it can drive in, in ways that are very, uh, not necessarily obvious to how a shopper had first interacted to, to provide that signal.
26:30
But then it, it signifies something deeper that you are able to unearth and say, "Okay, how do I, how do I put that to good use and send out a campaign that you're likely to engage with?"
26:39
And then you might end up buying something from that campaign or, like you said, might be something completely different, but the idea is that y- you are continuing to engage that shopper with something that they care about.
26:50
Yeah. So we hear about personalization all the time, but you've gotta be listening to capture that, that intent from the beginning.
26:56
And there's other ways of doing that besides just the email and the SMS that I spend a lot of my time in. What, what's possible with some of the Shopify integrations or the Shopify Flow potential of the Swim platform?
27:08
What's available there, Arvind?
27:11
Um, so the Flow really, you know, the way we think about it is it's, it's automation infrastructure that, you know, allows that intent data to flow based on specific rules that you set to understand patterns that, you know, matter.
27:22
Maybe like your merchandising team, like I was saying earlier, right? Like, let's say there is a, uh, an item that gets wishlisted in large numbers.
27:30
You could define Flow rules that say, once, you know, an item crosses over X number of likes within a certain period of time, I wanna be notified because then when I am making my buying decisions, I have a sense for what's the demand like, assuming that, you know, wishlisting is a proxy for eventual purchase demand.
27:47
How much of which items should I go reorder? Um, another, you know, very popular use case is loyalty.
27:53
So i- if I, um, either to reward people based on, you know, them expressing some of this intent because the intent is useful to you, or to actually nudge them to a purchase based on the fact that they're on the cusp of, like, a, like, a reward, and you have something of interest to them based on you understanding their intent, that you're able to use that cue to push them over the line and, and get them to make that, you know, purchase commitment.
28:20
That, again, is, is something that, you know, lends itself to a lot of open-ended scenarios, and Flow is something that makes that possible because we push the event to Flow, and then the loyalty platform will support the receiving of that event and saying, like, what is the follow-through action?
28:33
So it's a, it's a very open-ended, uh, you know, set of extensions that become possible because of how powerful Flow is.
28:40
The other integration from a Shopify perspective that I'm a big fan of is Shopify Point of Sale, where just extending that, you know, storefront experience into the physical store or the other way around, creating that seamless experience is, is a dream for, you know, any omni-channel brand, and it's not, it's not easy to do at all, especially from an intent data perspective.
28:58
And so what we put a lot of emphasis on is saying, "How do we take that customer, that shopper context, make it available on any of those mediums?"
29:06
So o- one of our brands in New Zealand, um, i- is one of my favorite use cases, the way they treat back in stock in the store.
29:14
So they actually want a lot of their customers coming in the store because they value that relationship, they value that in-person interaction.
29:21
And so the way they use our platform in store is if you come in and let's say the item i- is not available in your favorite color or your size, they allow you to sign up for that alert, but then they don't necessarily send you an email when that item comes back in stock.
29:36
Instead, the store associate gets notified, and the store associate then texts the customer because they have a direct relationship with them and invites them back to the store because they, they actually want them coming in the store and, and making the purchase in the store because it allows them to continue building that relationship.
29:52
So I think what Shopify has done and, you know, by virtue of, like, extending the platform in so many powerful ways, is make it easy to have this data, you know, percolate all these boundaries and, and become available to any of those personas that are closest to the customer, and then use that to e- essentially drive a better experience, a better, you know, tailored experience for that customer in, in ways that are specific to the brand, that are interesting to the brand.
30:18
Previously, it, it was a lot of effort to make any of this possible, right? And, and so the, what the integrations has done I think is just greatly reduce the complexity and make these possible.
30:27
And it makes it possible for a smaller brand to be able to accomplish the kinds of integrations that you might only see at a really big company. Mm. And the scenario you describe, it reminds me of the past weekend.
30:37
For my wife, I was buying her a pair of shoes. I bought it through REI's website.
30:43
REI has an in-person store experience as well, and I had this sort of thing what you're describing there, going in the store, ordering online, returning, you know, having a follow-up order, out of stock issues.
30:54
All these things are pretty sophisticated for a pretty big company to accomplish and do it well, but you're bringing that kind of power-... more into the smaller brand.
31:04
I think you're also, I just see it in example directly of my wife, she has, I would say, a transactional kind of orientation, Brian.
31:13
She likes to s- she likes to kinda get the best deals, a little bit of a, you know, she's kind of driven by, by savings. And yet this was an example of buying this shoe that now she's bought that shoe three times.
31:27
Mm-hmm. And I can see that... I kinda witnessed it.
31:30
And of course she wouldn't know what was happening, but, you know, here we are saying we, we, I'm witnessing her make the transition to be more of a relational shopper, both to the brand of the shoe, as well as to REI as a, a, a, a retailer.
31:45
And just the overall experience I see she's shifting. I think at her core, maybe her psychology type might be more transactional, but there's a moment where she's becoming a loyal customer. Mm-hmm.
31:56
And so Brian, what, you know, you, you, you classify people as being of certain types, but is it possible for a brand to essentially convert someone from transaction to relational, and, and what does that look like?
32:10
How do you, how do you encourage that? I think we want more of that, don't we? Yeah. You know, um, in a brick-and-mortar store, the sales associate's job is to keep the person in the store for longer.
32:23
And really what we're talking about on the digital side is getting more time with these customers that we wouldn't normally have, because we're able to continue the conversation through email, SMS, um,
32:33
persistent carts when they come back, that sort of thing. Um, so, uh,
32:39
if we can, if, you know, in a brick-and-mortar store, if we can run around, try different sizes, well then, you know, we don't have that in your size, but did you see this sort of thing, you're building a level of trust that is going to transcend the transactional relational relationship.
32:56
And, and so I think you'll see people who are coming in because of the sale, um, you know, feeling, uh, what we call reciprocity.
33:04
Someone's spending a lot of time helping us out, making sure that I, you know, see all the options, and suddenly I feel beholden to buy something- Yeah... right? Um, um, that's kind of an extreme point of view.
33:15
But the, in general, the view of the brand is going to be much higher if you're doing things that serve their evaluation and their shopping and, and heaven forbid you find this amazing thing that they didn't know about, and thank God, I'm gonna, you know, buy three more pairs over the course of the next year.
33:36
Um, that's, that's gold. Um, and that's just human, regardless of whether you come in transactionally or relationally.
33:45
How do you characterize or how would you encourage a brand who does not have a retail presence but wants to make that bridge from the transactional shopper to the relational longer term loyalty kind of buyer?
33:57
What are the, what are the things that you help advise brands to do for their website digital experience? Get them on a list. Um, if, if, if you can't, if they're not ready to buy it at that time, get them on the list.
34:09
So exactly what we're talking about. Um, they're interested in shopping and maybe they wanna save, uh, some of their products, get them on a list.
34:19
Uh, if, uh, you know, if they're a relational buyer and you've got look books for certain brands, if you're, you know, a catalog apparel site, um, give them a look book in exchange for their email address.
34:30
Get them on a list. 'Cause that allows you to continue to add value to them through these, um, post-visit channels. Uh, you know, that is... And it's, it's, it's really overlooked. Um,
34:44
you know, can they get on a free loyalty program, uh, that gives them discounts on their first purchases or something like that? Get some on the list.
34:52
That's how you get more time digitally with someone, um, regardless of whether you have bricks and mortar.
34:58
Well, thinking back to the, the workshops we're gonna have about conversion optimization, the one after yours, Brian, will be all about getting on a list with the retention of that visitor, whether they've bought before or not.
35:11
Gabrielly at eBusiness Pro is gonna lead that. Zach Shimer will also be there. Brands who wanna get people and make that list,
35:20
make that experience and relationship extend beyond the Black Friday sales window of time, um, help build up that lifetime value of the customer over a longer period into the holidays and beyond in the next year.
35:31
That's where we'll, um, look at that in Austin in the latter part of October. Mm-hmm. The 23rd for that workshop.
35:37
Well, as you think about all these things, Brian, what would you encourage in the time we have left thinking about for someone who's not gonna be at your workshop on Friday, if there's some things they could take, whether they have a tool like Swim installed.
35:50
And before I ask that, Arvind, how many Swim installations are there on Shopify Plus? Are we talking as a percentage? It's a, it's a pretty big penetration of the Shopify market, isn't it? Yeah.
36:00
So at this point, um, I think we're in about 47,000 stores. Um, and, and they span the spectrum. We have like the, you know, small s- shops that take advantage of the fact that the platforms democratize value.
36:12
And then on the high end we also have really large brands whose use cases tend to be very, very sophisticated. But it's a... You're right, it's a pretty broad spectrum and, uh, the numbers are now substantial. Yeah.
36:23
I mean, it's not just like, you know, a new Shopify app that shows up. I mean, I, I host the Austin Shopify meetup and I meet new app developers every week, and it's like, "Hey, look what I've built."
36:31
But you guys have been working on this a while, haven't you? Yeah. And like I said, when we first got started, I think the wishlist was meant to be a make it easy for me to remember, like, what I came looking for.
36:42
Um, and I, like I, even in our wildest, you know, uh, dreams, I don't think we had it mapped to where it's gone today.
36:49
Um, and a lot of it's really on the back of, you know, input and feedback from brands on here is how we want the extensions working.
36:55
Here are, um, you know, scenarios that make sense in terms of creating that more engaging customer experience. And, uh, so now it's evolved to where it's a lot more than just that hard button.
37:05
And, uh, intent here was really just a, a very natural byproduct of that. Yeah.
37:10
So for someone, Brian, who's not able to spend the time with a workshop, how would you encourage them in the weeks that remain going into Oc- you know, end of October, November timeframe?
37:23
Is there a way of them prioritizing? Maybe they do the swim intents or yield, um- Mm-hmm... but what, what else can they do to help prioritize where they give their time and attention?
37:33
So I, I think one of the biggest mistakes that e-commerce sites make is, um, they're drawing people, especially during this time of year, with discounts.
37:42
But, um, in addition to the discount, they need to establish their value proposition, their unique position. So do they have the widest selection? Do they have the highest quality? Do they have the lowest prices?
37:54
Um, you know, are they luxury oriented? Um, all of these things.
38:01
The person that leaves without taking advantage of, um, one of these, you know, getting on a list or without purchasing, needs to leave with an understanding of how this business is different.
38:13
And, um, you know, competitive buyers that become brand loyal, but their first question is, "What's in it for me?" They need to understand that.
38:23
Um, so, um, on your, um, category pages and, and even in your, um, product pages, you should have some clues as to why you're unique and why you're different other than just another site that has men's, women's, kids'.
38:40
Um, and that's, uh, that can be done with the navigation. You put things in there that are specific to what you do. It's like, um, um, long-lasting men's, uh, things like that, uh, more specific to the products.
38:57
Um, and at the tops of those pages, make sure that people know you have, if it's free shipping that is your differentiator, or if it's that you've got a
39:06
90-day return policy, or I think it was Apple's famously had the one-year return policy that was such a differentiator back in the day that it, it's really what they built that business on.
39:16
It was otherwise just a, you know, a shoe e-commerce site. Um, so
39:21
get really clear about what your value proposition is and make sure that it's showing up in those places, uh, that, that people can, can see it, so that if they leave, they at least remember, like, oh yeah, those are...
39:33
It's like, uh, that's the guy in the lab coat, which is really what the lab coat does, is they forget what I say, but they remember. He seemed to know what he was talking about in the white lab coat. Uh- Mm-hmm...
39:43
e-commerce sites should do the same thing. One of the things I've enjoyed in our, in our last conversation was how you identified different types of shoppers who are motivated by information.
39:53
Like someone may be more motivated by social proof than someone else. Someone may be more technical specification, diligent to the details. Where other people are like, "Well, who else likes this brand?
40:04
Who else has already praised it on socials?" Mm-hmm. And that's I think, a useful way of also helping prioritize, isn't it? Yeah, I can expand on that.
40:12
So this is, this is some work that Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg did in their book, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark.
40:17
It was back in 2009, and we use it to make sure that our messaging and value proposition is addressing the, the needs of different kinds of visitors. Um, so you have the competitive types I talked about.
40:28
Their first question is, "What's in it for me?" They wanna, they wanna be better.
40:32
That, you know, they become brand loyal when, you know, they get the best ski equipment from this particular brand, or they're willing to pay, pay a premium for that.
40:41
The methodicals, you talked a little bit about the, uh, beginning of this show. Uh, they need to know the details.
40:47
If you make a claim like it's better, it's stronger, it's cheaper, their first question is, "Okay, how do you do that? Prove it." Um, the spontaneous comes in, and they're just looking for action.
41:00
And so a visitor may come in very methodically doing initial research, but when they decide to, to buy from you, they just need to find the product. So findability becomes really important.
41:11
I wanna find that product, I wanna buy it, and I wanna get out. Um, and then the humanists, they wanna know, uh, how they're gonna feel if they buy your product.
41:20
Uh, so they wanna, they're the ones that read your About page. Um, they spend a lot of time on, on ratings and reviews. Uh, they are, um, kind of, um, networking with your brand.
41:33
It becomes, uh, you know, a part of their community and someone, something they're gonna talk about. So you think about Patagonia, which really taps into people who care about the environment.
41:43
That's a very humanist, uh, example. So a person can come in different research modes, but you wanna make sure that you're presenting the, that value proposition that addresses those that are coming to your site.
41:59
Do you have... You're probably, like in an e-commerce world, you're gonna have those competitives come in, you know, kind of skeptical at first. Um, but do you have a lot of methodicals?
42:08
Um, are you, um, cause-oriented so that you're gonna be drawing those humanists? And then always make sure you've got the findability tools in place for those spontaneous people to get the product, buy it, and get out.
42:21
Yeah. I appreciate those different types of shoppers giving us a way of making some just, you know, I guess prioritization on the ways we could improve a product detail page.
42:32
I think it's useful to frame that in terms of, well, what kind of person would value and appreciate this information higher up, below the fold, above the fold, and so forth. Exactly.
42:41
These are all very sort of tactical and kinda close up or zoomed in considerations, but I, I, you know, in the minute or two we have left, I wonder if we might zoom out because I think it's safe to say that combined among us, we've been doing this a while in the e-commerce space.
42:58
We've got a longer term perspective. I think about my own experience.
43:02
You know, there's sometimes there's some signals this year that seems a little reminiscent to me of 2007, 2008, sort of from a consumer shopper standpoint.
43:12
There are some bigger forces at play that makes the consumer shopper very- Um, careful about where they spend their money this holiday season.
43:23
Would you have any perspective that you might wanna share with, um, any of the people running these stores as they think about how to navigate an environment like this, a little bit more zoomed out from the particular conversion optimization concerns?
43:38
Um, any perspective you'd wanna say or as you think about the bigger opportunity for brands online this year? I would, I would say this. So, um, ad costs are constantly going up.
43:49
It's just, it's kind of like the, the stock market over time. It just always goes up. Um, and, uh, it is getting more and more difficult to bring that organic traffic. Um, we're,
44:01
we're seeing that people who are, you know, doing things that they've always done, they're getting less and less of that traffic. And, you know, Meta Muse just came out s- several weeks as the number one app.
44:13
Are people gonna start using agents to make their deci- initial decisions for them and then all becoming, you know, the purchase in that spontaneous mode, or even having their agents do that for them?
44:25
So there's downward pressure on the traffic. That means we need to be very jealous of the traffic that we're bringing. So I think e-commerce companies are gonna have to double down on that list-building approach.
44:36
They're gonna have to find ways to provide content information value in the shopping process that helps with the evaluation, um, and, and decision to buy your product or somebody else's. Um, I think,
44:54
y- you know, that's going to really require us to double down on these sorts of features and, and getting good at email and SMS.
45:02
Well, I think you've underlined then the importance of helping visitors get on a list of one kind or another. I think I have. [laughs] Yeah. Uh, we always love to get a second shot at a conversion. Yeah.
45:13
Arvind, what would you add to that, that get on a list mandate? Is there other things that are important, or would you underline that as well?
45:20
No, I, I think that's a, it's an absolutely, um, you know, stellar point to keep in mind. I think the truth is shoppers are constantly telling us what they want, right?
45:30
If only we're willing to listen and, and look for those cues and then make sense of those cues, uh, eventually they should end up on a list, but it should be the right list.
45:38
That list should have the right context to be able to, you know, add value to their experience. But a lot of times i- the data just is, it...
45:45
We let it go through and, and because we don't have that context, we're not able to make the most of it.
45:51
So if there's one bit of, um, you know, um, recommendation, best practice that I would underline, it's try and, try and be very deliberate about listening to what shoppers are already telling you as part of your experience, whether it's, you know, on your website, whether it's your app, whether it's any of your channels really, like even your emails.
46:10
You know, people are engaging with those emails, and so how much are you, um, leveraging that insight to essentially personalize follow on campaigns with them?
46:20
Or your customer service channels, what kind of questions are they asking? Um, I think a lot of that data just sits in separate silos today.
46:27
And so to the extent that you're able to pull that together to say, you know, to Brian's point, the audience has a ton of value, but that value really gets unlocked only when you get good at understanding exactly, you know, what intent is captured within those different cohorts.
46:42
And so, um, the more brands are able to do that, I think the more successful they're gonna be. So absolutely agree with what he's saying. Well, thank you, Arvind. Thank you, Brian.
46:49
I think what I'm taking from the conversation is that underlining the importance of finding a certain attunement to the audience that comes to your site, and you can do that by anticipating who's gonna come and sort of laying out the feast for them to walk past.
47:04
But also once they get there, to really carefully observe, and you can call that listen. You can call those signals.
47:10
And I think what I also am excited about is as tools like Swim and others come to be, um, available in the Shopify ecosystem for relatively low effort compared to what it was.
47:22
I mean, if any of us here were building websites 25, 30 years ago, we know how hard this was at that time. The tools are so accessible, the automation's become possible to even the smaller brands.
47:34
We talked about REI- Mm-hmm... and their sort of in-store and online k- customer service experience being pretty powerful.
47:41
But you can accomplish these kinds of experiences with much less sophistication, and yet the right tools connected in the right ways, automation makes all these things much more possible. Yeah.
47:52
I think underlie that, understand people, and know that as much as the tools we talk about, really just talking about human trust and building confidence.
48:01
So if you're not lucky enough to be in Austin, come to Brian's workshop. Um, come back for the following weeks on retention and SMS.
48:08
And otherwise, I'd encourage us to, uh, check out the Swim scoring of that intent and see where might that may go. So with that, thank you guys both for being here. I've enjoyed the conversation.
48:19
And come back again to the Frankly Ecommerce show. Thanks, Patrick. Appreciate it. Was a pleasure. Thanks, Brian. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Frankly Ecommerce with host, Patrick Scott Pittman.
48:33
Read episode notes and get links to learn more at franklyecommerce.com. Next time you're in Austin, check out the Austin Shopify Meetup. It's open to all.
48:45
There's a good chance you'll meet just the right person, as it's one of the longest running meetups with 2,600 participants going on 15 years.
48:55
If you'd like to get more involved beyond the meetup, then Frankly Ecommerce pass holders participate in workshops and special invitation-only events. Subscribe to our newsletter at franklyecommerce.com to learn more.
49:09
This episode is sponsored in part by the friendly team at eBusiness PROS, a marketing firm in Austin, Texas. If you're a brand seeking to connect with an enthusiast audience and hold their attention,
49:22
if you want less discounting and more story, if you're curious about what we might mean by attuned marketing as contrast to behavioral trickery, then contact us at ebusinesspros.com. Ask for Abigail. That's me.
49:36
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