The Customer Journey Is Key To LTV Growth transcript

within like 2 months of moving to a 3pl that could really consistently ship cold products get them delivered very very fast from the warehouse to the customer they sped out the shipping time which made it so that it reduced problematic deliveries where the product didn't come right they saw their returning customer Revenue drastically increased like to the tune of like 80% within a couple of [Music] months that's not the only thing they did they did a lot of other stuff as well um but it made a huge difference now it was a huge job like like my my client was stressed out for like a month and a half and it's maybe still kind of stressed out about it um to do that but it clearly made a gigantic difference to the customers's experience and so they like they like dug really deeply into it because this was core to the way the customer interacted with the product it was core to the way that the customer um uh the product the brand delivered on its promise to the customer made the experience better for everyone and what happened customers came back more often suddenly the return and customer rate goes up Suddenly your whole business is more profitable because now you're generating Revenue apart from ad spend every customer you get is worth more money and you are now much better set up to to um approach and and produce a larger scale okay that's what you've got to think about you've got to think about this in your business and you've got to care about it a lot and and look to those places now some of you may not have as big of wins or whatever in that particular spot but like if you're an apparel brand understand where and how your customers are wearing your products right like understand it deeply no are they wearing it to work are they wearing it around the house are they wear whatever um I I once worked with another brand that um really loved this one particular product of theirs and yet it wasn't really clear to me that the customer cared that much about it and so there was this mismatch between the thing that the brand cared about and thought was great and what the customer cared about and thought was great and and there's all of these different so you know that's normal in one respect right you go to market with an idea in your mind and you think to yourself this is going to be great for the customer you have an idea but maybe the customer doesn't care about it the way that you do and so you have to retool and reshape and and rethink along the way becoming obsessed with that and watching how to um do this will make it so that you in delivering more on your promise more easily to your customer is going to make every channel you advertise on work better it's going to make every channel you sell in work better it's going to make every customer or every uh uh member of your team who touches anything be more effective because at the end of the day customers are having a great experience with your brand and this gets us to the concept of brand right I saw Sean Frank tweet this the other day something the effect of on Day Zero he said brand is your ability to deliver on your promise to your customer and on D Day Zero therefore it is worth nothing on day 1,000 it's worth a lot and I think that's totally right for how d2c Brands as they're growing in their seven and early figure stages of their businesses need to think about the concept of brand for themselves right it is this ability to deliver on your promise at scale to your customer so that your customer has a great experience with you loves it talks about it um you know leaves positive reviews all those those things and that's what you've got to dig into for nearly every one of my clients our Facebook ads pixel is installed with Billy not with the Shopify native integration not with any other third party tool out there and that's because Billy is the best meta ads pixel tool in the world of which I'm aware it's also the most affordable the way I know that is because I've run tests with Billy against the native Shopify integration I've run it against other third party tools and over and over and over again Billy reports the most complete picture of my actual roas my actual performance because it tracks the most information the best and also uh it gives me the highest event match quality score scores of anything that I've seen so is objectively the case that's why I use it and I love it you can get started for $1 today there's all kinds of other great things about it go check it out right now b. a go use Billy today brand is not a pretty picture on your website it's not beautiful photography that may be helpful in building a brand but it's not really the main thing um it is actually this ability to do this over time and that's how you establish something that people really care about resonate with that can actually grow all right having said all that there is another element of this that is easy to lose sight of which is the marketing side because once you can deliver on that promise now you have a challenge okay which is to actually communicate about that promise that you were delivering okay once once the customer is going to have a great experience with the product now you have to tell them that because a customer who's new to your brand doesn't know that they don't know that you've worked really really hard to solve all these problems what they instead uh think probably is the same thing they think about every other brand in your category they don't really understand why you're differentiated and they don't really understand how you've made a point of making it easier for them Etc so you have to go and dig into that a little bit more and that this is another thing I've watched really clearly with brands of uh brands that I'm working with where the brands that I'm working with that are really successful one of the things that marks them is that they like they care so much that when the customer goes from the ad to the website it's a great experience almost all of them are putting real money and real time and real effort into thinking through more how do I do this one client of mine recently uh uh was building using sort of a custom they had a they had an element of their product that included a custom custom like box that you could build right with a bunch of different products all at once um and so you could select them all all in one page um you know and select a bunch of different products put them all in one Box Etc and the Builder that they used for that like sort of custom build your own product thing in their telling was pretty crappy it it was not a good Builder it was limited in what its capacity was um and so they were frustrated and yet that Builder was a really good way for customer to experience their product so they had this problem which is that the the the custom builder is a good idea because for the customer um building a a build your own sort of box uh approach was really useful on the other hand um the actual software for that box wasn't very good so what did he do he couldn't find a developer who was willing to work work on it very well so he just went and learned figured out how to code it himself and I don't know that he has like a super deep coding background like or anything like that but he just decided this matters too much for the customer experience for me to just let this sit here and be a crappy experience I am going to knock down whatever problems I need to knock down if there are barrier walls in the way of me delivering uh value to the customer like this I it's it's a problem because if the customer can check out easier if the customer can build their box easier it's going to make a big difference to their experience that's going to generate value for the customer and make it easier for them to get the things they want which is in turn going to generate value for my business and so they solve the problem they they wouldn't let it just sit there and deal with it this is another thing I I watch happen all the time there's this inertia with your website brands have their website and they go like like uh well it's just like just kind of is what it is and and that's that's the best experience we can have and you know and and or or just sort of nobody updates things or whatever and that's a real problem like if you care about growing your business keep pressing in resist the urge to make sort of broader um broader adjustments to your website and think more about how you build really tight well- messaged funnels to customers that's going to make it easy for them to find the things that they need that's going to present an offer that makes sense this gets back to the thing I was mentioning earlier right um and become obsessed with driving that all the way through your business the again the brand brands that I see that do a really good job of this realize that those elements like communicating clearly on a landing page having an offer that makes sense making sure that all of the your creative is messaging down to people's really specific really direct experience I did also an episode recently about this idea that like you want to go deep if you want to as as a way of going wide know exactly how your customers are interacting with your brand speak to those situations know how they're interacting with other brands in the category speak to those situations and do it all the way through the funnel take do the hard work of building the Lander building the offer building the custom PDP like this is where this is where I think like um somebody like firmat who have taken as a sponsor recently is going to be a crucial player in this space for years to come because brands that are good and effective are going to use format which is the best tool I know for this um to build these extremely custom carefully designed experiences that speak really specifically to customers and to their experience with your brand and your product at scale um and and and that way they're going to um to make it easier for the customer to see the value that you're promising and then of course you turn around as a brand and deliver that value to them again if you think about this if you think about what I'm saying there's a way of approaching the total e-commerce game that goes something like this okay um to job number one to get to one or $2 million dollar in revenue is basic total is basic product Market fit okay um this is not about getting going deep with a subset of customers and order to go wide it's not about creating the massive amount of scale or whatever it's just about proving out that your idea works that's phase one of your business okay but phase two lasts for a really long time okay and scaling up the operations to go reach more and more customers if you've reached a million or2 million dollars in sales in a year you probably have Baseline product Market fit it's very hard to sell a let's call it a million dollars worth of stuff in a year at any kind of anything close to profitable if you don't have product Market fit okay you you probably have that now how much scale you have who knows it depends on too many other factors I can't can't answer that in the aggregate but it means that you've done you've accomplished something and now the game becomes how do I scale the business there's Financial elements of that there's operational elements of that there's all these questions in there but in the midst of that I really think the journey from like 1 million to 50 million is really this simple number one get clarity to your p&l design and how you're going to generate profit along the way so you don't get fat so um with your business so that you are thinking carefully about how to make it so that your unit economics get better over time you're generating high margin all those things you know be on top of your cash flow there's some basic management stuff there that is really important for running your your DDC brand 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